Some thoughts about human ecology
Abstract
Human societies and ecosystems Sociétés humaines et écosystèmesSome thoughts about human ecology SAGE Publications, Inc.1979DOI: 10.1177/053901847901800610 Gilles Sautter The word "ecology", along with its derivatives, is quite the thing nowadays. A profusion of scientific or so-called scientific works lay claim to it. Naturalist ecology, that of botanists and zoologists, is perfecting its methods, enriching its points of view and revising certain of its basic concepts. But, for the general public, this discipline has been relegated to the background by the enormous mass of literature which places man and societies in ecological settings. We shall leave aside all that is ecological in name only and simply uses a word that has proven so successful, and all that presents results of quite another kind (e.g. sociology, geography, urban planning) by means of a simple ecological montage. Behind all this sham, however, there is a meaningful, multiform tentative to imagine man and society in nature and with nature, a tentative marked, in the history of research, by a new convergence of the most diversified scientific horizons. This phenomenon would not be of such magnitude were it not for the myths that act as a resonance chamber for it: the myth of