"If
there are favourable habitats and favorable forms of association for animals
and plants, as ecology demonstrates, why not for men? If each particular
natural environment has has its own balance; is there not perhaps an equivalent
of this in culture?" (Lewis Mumford, "The Culture of Cities",
1938)
"That
land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be
loved and respected is an extension of ethics." (Aldo Leopold, "A
Sand County Almanac", 1949)
"In
calling society an ecological system we are not merely using an analogy;
society is an example of the general concept of an 'ecosystem' that is, an
ecological system of which biological systems - forests, fields, swamps - are
other examples." (Kenneth E Boulding, "A Reconstruction of
Economics", 1950)
"Can any of
us fix anything? No. None of us can do that. We're specialized. Each one of us
has his own line, his own work. I understand my work, you understand yours. The
tendency in evolution is toward greater and greater specialization. Man's
society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it. Continued complexity makes
it impossible for us to know anything outside our own personal field — I can't
follow the work of the man sitting at the next desk over from me. Too much
knowledge has piled up in each field. And there are too many fields. (Philip K.
Dick, "The Variable Man", 1952)
"If we have
been slow to develop the general concepts of ecology and conservation, we have
been even more tardy in recognizing the facts of the ecology and conservation
of man himself. We may hope that this will be the next major phase in the
development of biology. Here and there awareness is growing that man, far from
being the overlord of all creation, is himself part of nature, subject to the
same cosmic forces that control all other life. Man's future welfare and
probably even his survival depend upon his learning to live in harmony, rather
than in combat, with these forces. (Rachel Carson, "Essay on the
Biological Sciences" in Good Reading, 1958)
"For
some years now the activity of the artist in our society has been trending more
toward the function of the ecologist: one who deals with environmental
relationships. Ecology is defined as the totality or pattern of relations
between organisms and their environment. Thus the act of creation for the new
artist is not so much the invention of new objects as the revelation of
previously unrecognized relation- ships between existing phenomena, both
physical and metaphysical. So we find that ecology is art in the most
fundamental and pragmatic sense, expanding our apprehension of reality."
(Gene Youngblood, "Expanded Cinema", 1970)
"To do
science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts, and
to do the science of geographical ecology is to search for patterns of plants
and animal life that can be put on a map." (Robert H. MacArthur,
"Geographical Ecology", 1972)
"It is
the intertwined and interacting mechanisms of evolution and ecology, each of
which is at the same time a product and a process, that are responsible for
life as we see it, and as it has been." (James W. Valentine,
"Evolutionary Paleoecology of the Marine Biosphere", 1973)
"This
paper introduces a concept of organizational ecology. This refers to the
organizational field created by a number of organizations, whose interrelations
compose a system at the level of the field as a whole. The overall field
becomes the object of inquiry, not the single organization as related to its
organization-set. The emergence of organizational ecology from earlier
organization theory is traced and illustrated from empirical studies. Its
relevance to the task of institution-building, in a world in which the
environment has become exceedingly complex and more interdependent, is
argued." (Eric Trist , "A concept of organizational eecolog",
Australian journal of management 2 (2), 1977)
"We argue that in order to deal with the various inertial pressures the adaptation perspective must be supplemented with a selection orientation. We consider first two broad issues that are preliminary to ecological modelling. The first concerns appropriate units of analysis. Typical analyses of the relation of organizations to environments take the point of view of a single organization facing an environment." (Michael T Hannan, "The Population Ecology of Organizations", 1977)
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