After Thoughts on Human Ecology

SINCE I first addressed you on Folklore and Human Ecology' it seems to me that the word Ecology is used with increasing frequency by the popular Press as well as in the serious periodicals. Not always applied in the strict scientific sense its employment at least bears witness to a growing awareness of the significance of interrelationships. There has long been a recognition of the part environment plays in the behaviour of human beings whether the environment be the effect of conscious planning or natural growth. Our folklore which is part of our environment includes the surviving traditions of country life and custom. Too often these traditions or fragments of them are presented as exposing just a quaint idea or an absurd superstition or an unusual object. By themselves such recorded scraps do no more than faintly illumine part of our environment. Folklore can do much more than that if it aims at the study of a whole environment or total ecological system where human beings are viewed not as isolated entities but as partners with each other with their habitat and with the multiple organism which constitutes a community. In ecology this total picture calls for a wide-eyed comprehension and even so is difficult to interpret at first sight. The whole picture is the subject of folk-life study and I have drawn attention to the limitations of the information provided by the separate sciencedisciplines and to the vital need for overlapping observations and cross-references to give a truly scientific exposure. Regarded from the ecological standpoint any organic group attracts attention to its margins of give and take between the component parts. Study 1 Folklore, Vol. 76 (1965), Summer. F 81

Biology · Environmental ethics · Geography · Human ecology · Sociology · Anthropology · Ecology · Folklore, Mythology, and Literature Studies · History · Philosophy