The Forest and the Trees

by Allan Johnson

  Human Ecology

  Social life revolves around people, social systems, and the relationships among them. But those are not the only relations that matter, for people and social systems exist in relation to physical environments. Human ecology is the study of those relationships, and it figures in social life at every level.1

  In the colonial period of U.S. history, for example, the typical home was arranged around a single fireplace, which was the only source of heat. This naturally drew family members to one room during the winter months, which encouraged conversation, storytelling, and other ways of being together. With the invention of central heating, every room in the house was equally warm, which removed a major reason for people to spend time together on a regular basis.

  In similar ways, physical arrangements shape every social interaction. Office cubicles that lack doors and walls reaching to the ceiling, for example, make privacy impossible and signal a corresponding lack of autonomy, status, and power in an organization. In families, men are more likely than women to have rooms of their own (if there’s a study or a workshop, it’s more likely to be his than hers). As the late British novelist Virginia Woolf argues in her classic book A Room of One’s Own, without a protected space in which to work, women writers could not develop their art, which is one reason why, historically, so few women emerged as prominent writers.2

  Every social situation has an ecological angle. Typical classrooms, for example, are arranged to reinforce the teacher’s authority by facing students’ chairs toward the front so that it’s harder for students to interact with one another than with the teacher. In courtrooms and churches, judges and clergy are typically elevated above everyone else in a physical arrangement that underscores and reinforces differences in power and status. Both houses of the U.S. Congress are arranged much like large college lecture halls, with leaders at the front on elevated platforms, an arrangement that both bows to the idea of hierarchy and makes spirited debate all but impossible. In the British House of Commons, by contrast, opposing parties are seated across from one another in a relatively small and confined space, which makes face-to-face debate almost unavoidable.3

  Ecology also figures in the arrangement of larger settings, such as neighborhoods and communities. In comparison with cities in Europe and Latin America, for example, the United States has relatively few public spaces, such as parks, squares, and sidewalk cafes, where people can greet and socialize with one another outside their homes. Without such spaces, it becomes harder to sustain a sense of community, a sense of common ground on which to meet and feel the presence of other members of the community.

  Residential segregation by race, class, and ethnicity is another ecological arrangement that profoundly affects social life, especially in perpetuating privilege and oppression.4 Physical separation makes it easier to maintain stereotypes; leads to an unequal distribution of community services, such as schools and police protection; and gives a physical dimension to the unequal distribution of opportunities by separating working- and lower-class people from better jobs, which are often located away from the central city. Segregation also shapes patterns of behavior, such as criminal victimization. Most violent crime in the United States, for example, is intraracial, because opportunities for physical contact are far more common within races than between them. Similar dynamics help explain why such a large percentage of violence happens within families and other intimate relationships rather than between strangers.

  Every social system, then, includes a sense of place and space (including cyberspace), and this shapes how we perceive and behave toward one another. The Internet, for example, allows people to interact from a position of anonymity, presenting themselves—their gender, race, age, and name, for example—however they want. This, in turn, makes it easier for people to say things they would not say to someone face-to-face, and online harassment and bullying have become increasingly common as a result.

  Social systems also exist in relation to the Earth and the species that inhabit it. To look at those relationships, ecologists use the concept of an ‘ecosystem,’ which is defined by a given space and its inhabitants. That space can be defined in just about any way we want. We could think of a drop of pond water as an ecosystem, for example, or a chunk of soil in a field, the city of Toronto, or the entire universe. Where we draw the line depends primarily on what we want to know about. Sociologically, what is most important to see is how human populations live in relation to one another and their physical surroundings, the consequences this produces, and for whom or what.

  Ecologically, we are just like any other life-form. We reproduce, we live by using and consuming what is around us, and we die. Like many species, we move about and build things. Just as caribou migrate with the seasons, people migrate to escape wars or natural disasters or to find employment or get married. Birds build nests, and people build houses. We stand out in our ability to transform the Earth and our place in it in ways that are much more profound and drastic than other species. In addition to being the only species that cultivates its own food, for example, we may be one of the few that systematically tries to kill off all its competitors.

  Humans also use technology to get around the natural conditions that otherwise limit population growth. For every other species, when there is too little food to go around, populations get smaller through higher death rates and lower birth rates. But human dominance of the Earth has promoted cultural values and beliefs that make this unacceptable, so humans have continued to reproduce and exploit natural resources as if there were no natural limit to what we might do or how many of us there might be. Global warming promises to impose just such a limit, the consequences of which are already beginning to be felt, especially in colder regions of the Earth.5 Meanwhile, other species cannot respond and adapt to the changes caused by our use of complex technology and are left to survive as best they can, which, to judge by the accelerating rate at which they are becoming extinct, is none too good.

  In such ways, social systems profoundly affect ecosystems. But this also works in the other direction, as ecosystems shape the culture and structure of systems. Anthropologist Marvin Harris, for example, is a cultural materialist who argues that many aspects of human cultures come about in response to material conditions in the natural environment. They are practical adaptations to the natural world even when they may not seem so. Harris tries to identify, for example, an ecological basis for the Hindu religious prohibition against the eating of beef,6 a cultural practice that seems to many Westerners to be irrational in a country, such as India, whose people need all the food they can get.

  But Harris says that just the opposite is true. Historically, rice has been the primary food grown in India, and the cow played an important role in producing it. Rice grows in fields that are often under water, and the cow (unlike the horse) has a cloven hoof that doesn’t get stuck by suction in the mud of the fields. Cows also produce dung that can serve many purposes, from fuel to fertilizer to bricks for building.

  The cow, then, has been an extraordinarily useful animal in the history of India’s agricultural economy. But the ecological angle to the cow’s sacred status is more complicated, involving also India’s climate, which includes periodic droughts and equally devastating famines. During these times, farm families who would eat their cattle as a last resort would solve their food problem in the short run, but only by destroying what they would need to cultivate crops when the rains returned. What could be powerful enough to keep families from giving in to the temptation to eat their cows during such desperate times? Harris answers that India’s culture evolved to protect the cow—and, therefore, the long-term welfare of India’s people— by giving the cow a sacred status that no religious person would dare violate. From an ecological perspective, what Westerners might view as an irrational waste of animal protein may have been an adaptation to a difficult environment.

  We could apply similar reasoning to the heavy consumption of beef in the United State
s. Cultivating millions of acres to grow corn to feed beef cattle is a relatively inefficient use of land, because only a portion of the nutrition in the corn that cattle eat actually winds up as food for people. If that same land were used to cultivate crops that humans consumed directly (such as grains and beans), the result would be far more nutrition than beef provides. So far, the United States has been able to afford such levels of inefficiency because a favorable climate supports huge agricultural surpluses. India’s experience, however, suggests that with climate change, the day will come when that is no longer true.

  To a cultural materialist like Harris, every social system is shaped as it adapts to physical conditions in its environment. But as we’ve seen, this dynamic works both ways. Most species occupy very specialized places in the food chain. They eat only a few kinds of foods and alter the environment (such as by building nests) in relatively small ways. By comparison, human societies have the potential to affect the environment in ways both huge and complex. People eat all kinds of food and change the shape and composition of earth, air, and water in so many ways that it’s impossible to keep track of them, much less understand the consequences they produce. Technology enables us to not only irrigate fields, build cities, and pollute the air, water, and soil but also alter genetic structures.

  Some cultures regard these abilities as part of a human destiny to rule the Earth. The complexity of ecosystems, however, suggests that people have far less control than they might think. Humans have a much greater ability than other species to affect the environment, but we usually do not discover the consequences of what we’ve done until long after the fact. This lag means that we also have a much greater ability to do harm and damage and are the only ones in a position to prevent it. Only we can save us (and everyone else) from ourselves.

  Notice for a moment the language that is often used to talk about how societies affect the environment. Like all symbols, such words as ‘harm’ and ‘damage’ reflect a particular cultural view of reality—in this case, the reality of ‘nature’ and our relation to it. To say that the environment is being destroyed, for example, means that certain states of nature that are rated highly in cultural value systems are at risk. Those values, however, are inherent not in nature but in human cultures. Ecosystems do not value one condition over another, in that a lake full of fish is no less natural or desirable from the environment’s point of view than is a lake full of algae.

  For that matter, nature also does not value humanity over any other species of life. Life is life. If we look at the vast majority of the Earth’s 4.6 billion years of existence, ecosystems were dominated by what human cultures classify as lower life-forms. As far as we know, over the first 2.6 billion years of the Earth’s history there was no life at all, and for the next billion years nothing more than simple bacteria and algae. Single-celled protozoa appeared only 800 million years ago (after more than 80 percent of the Earth’s history had already gone by), and multicelled blue-green algae colonies developed only 600 million years ago. What we think of as plants are only about 500 million years old, and mammals only 200 million years old. In short, the Earth took the vast majority of its existence to go from a state of no life at all to what we would call a swamp. Only in its most recent past—a blink of an eye in relative terms—has the Earth started to look like what most of us think of as ‘nature.’

  If we take the long view, ecosystems cannot be damaged or destroyed. They can change their characteristics, including the mix of different forms of life they can support (which may or may not include human beings). They can change how those different forms relate to and affect one another, as in which forms eat which. But the idea of damage and destruction assumes some ideal state, which is primarily a cultural invention. When we forget this—even in trying to ‘save’ the environment—we make ourselves vulnerable to a kind of species arrogance that, ironically, is also at the root of the environmental damage that so many people (including me) are alarmed about. In other words, it is a kind of arrogance to assume the right to do with the Earth as we please. But it is also a kind of arrogance to assume the right to define what is or is not the ideal state of nature that should be preserved. In either case, we impose human values on a nonhuman world, usually without knowing it.

  This does not mean that we shouldn’t act on those values. As social beings, we have to act in relation to some values, whatever they may be. But it does mean that those on every side of environmental issues may have more in common with one another than they realize, and face similar challenges in understanding their underlying assumptions about what they’re doing. It is easy to forget that values are cultural and therefore human and not necessarily reflective of the rest of nature. And in such forgetting, we may speak and act with a sense of righteous authority—whether in defense of jobs and human superiority or the sanctity of ancient forests—that can make all sides sound disturbingly alike.

  Making a Living

  Every species of life occupies what ecologists call a ‘niche’ in an ecosystem. A niche is a position, analogous to a status people occupy in a social system. As such, a niche locates a species in relation to a physical environment, other species, and the ecosystem as a whole. Where a species is located in the food chain—what it eats and what eats it—is an important aspect of its ecological niche, as are other practices, such as burrowing holes in the Earth or building dams in streams.

  Through its niche, each species lives by using its environment in particular ways. This is as true for humans as for any other species. Hunter gatherer societies, for example, use minimal technology and produce none of their own food. Horticultural societies grow food in small gardens by using sticks to make holes in the ground for seeds. Agricultural societies use plows and draft animals to cultivate large fields. Industrial societies focus less on contact with raw materials—growing food, mining, lumbering— and more on manufacturing goods from them, especially through the use of machines. In postindustrial societies, providing such services as health care, insurance, banking, and entertainment outweighs producing goods.

  To understand human ways of making a living, we need to expand the concept of a niche to include the social relationships that organize productive work. In other words, we need to look at what Marx calls the mode of production. In hunter-gatherer societies, people produce goods in ways that require cooperation, communal effort, and sharing. Capitalist industrial societies, however, are highly competitive and wealth is distributed in very lopsided ways. In horticultural societies, people own the tools and other means of production they use to produce a living, but in industrial capitalist societies, the elite own most means of production but do not personally use them to produce anything. Production is done by workers who make goods in exchange for wages without owning or controlling any part of the process. Such relationships—among people and between people and the means of production—tell us a lot about how the mode of production is organized in a society and how this affects the people who participate in it.

  Since the results of production are wealth and what people need to live, how production is organized is especially important in shaping patterns of privilege and oppression. As we look at the historical progression from hunter-gatherer societies to horticulture, agriculture, and industrial capitalism, systematic inequality emerges and grows, beginning with male privilege and the subordination of women. Then come social classes and other patterns in the service of inequality of wealth and power: warfare, conquest, empire, the state, colonialism, institutionalized slavery and racism, and modern class systems and global inequality based on economic power.

  In the simplest sense, inequality becomes possible when people are able to produce a surplus that can support larger populations and that enables more and more people to do something other than grow, gather, or hunt for food.7 This also makes it possible for some to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of others and to defend their position with armies, police, servants, and such institutions as religion and t
he law, whose purpose almost always includes legitimizing the status quo and the interests of dominant groups.

  Historically, none of these patterns of inequality had to emerge as a result of increased production, but they could not happen without it. Hunter-gatherer societies, for example, have very low levels of inequality based only on prestige, with honor going to those who perform important jobs well. Inequality cannot be based on wealth in such societies, because they do not produce enough to accumulate and because survival requires a degree of sharing and cooperation that discourages competition and hoarding. They also have to move around so much in search of new food sources that it doesn’t make much sense to accumulate things they then have to bring along.

  Changes in the mode of production are important because they create conditions that make other social changes more or less likely to occur. The ability to produce a surplus makes rapid population growth, urbanization, and increasingly complex divisions of labor possible. These changes, in turn, make it easier for bureaucracy to emerge as a way to control the system. Historically, bureaucracy emerged in the West along with the capitalist Industrial Revolution, especially in the nineteenth century. But that isn’t the only way it came into being. China, for example, has only recently begun to industrialize, but its government has been heavily bureaucratic for centuries. And although the most urbanized societies are industrial, many nonindustrial societies, such as India, Mexico, and Egypt, have experienced an explosion of urban population growth.

  Birth, Death, Migration: Population and Social Life

  Since every social system happens only when people participate in it, to understand how social life works, we have to pay attention to how many people there are, how they get there, and how and when they leave. Birth and migration are the two ways people enter a society, a family, or a religion, for example, but migration is the only way to enter a workplace or a school (with few exceptions—such as kings and queens or the old Indian caste system or slavery in the United States—no one is born into a job). Too few people in a system can be just as much a problem as too many, as can having the wrong number in the wrong place at the wrong time (as anyone who has been laid off from a job knows).