Ecology: A Very Short Introduction

Ecology is the science of how organisms interact with each other and their environment to form communities and ecosystems. Ecology: A Very Short Introduction explains the history of ecology, the principles of ecological thinking, how ecology affects our everyday lives, and how it guides environmental decisions, especially in the light of current and future environmental challenges. What are the factors behind ‘boom and bust’ cycles in species populations? How and why do two species cooperate? Do humans need so many species? The cultural significance of ecology is also explored, with examples of different schools of thought that envisage ecology as a science and a worldview.

The Environment Is Not A System

This paper considers some of the limitations and possibilities of computational models in the context of environmental inquiry, specifically exploring the modes of knowledge production that it mobilizes. Historic computational attempts to model, simulate and make predictions about environmental assemblages, both emerge from and reinforce a systems view on the world. The word eco-system itself stands as a reminder that the history of ecology is enmeshed with systems theory and presup-poses that species entanglements are operational or functional. More surreptitiously, a systematic view of the environment connotes it as bounded, knowable and made up of components operating in chains of cause and effect. This framing strongly invokes possibilities of manipulation and control and implicitly asks: what should an ecosystem be optimized for? This question is particularly relevant at a time of rapid climate change, mass extinction and, conveniently, an unprecedented surplus of computing.

New Cartographies of Variation

This concluding chapter summarizes the major points posited so far in this book, and contains the author's personal reflections on the need for new cartographies of study in the presence of these naturecultural paradigms. It emphasizes the need to replace insular and narrowly focused areas of study with communal histories and communal storytelling. Naturecultural visions show us that individual disciplines are each imbued with cultural norms and histories while being blind to those influences. Hence, the chapter also returns to the metaphor of ghosts in representing the silenced eugenic history of ecology and evolutionary biology and our consequent refusal to suitably acknowledge the horrors of eugenics.

SCOTT M. DEVRIES. A History of Ecology and Environmentalism in Spanish American Literature. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2013. 323 pp.

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