14 Facts About Cultural ecology

Cultural ecology is the study of human adaptations to social and physical environments.

Cultural ecology recognizes that ecological locale plays a significant role in shaping the cultures of a region.

Steward's concept of cultural ecology became widespread among anthropologists and archaeologists of the mid-20th century, though they would later be critiqued for their environmental determinism.

Cultural ecology was one of the central tenets and driving factors in the development of processual archaeology in the 1960s, as archaeologists understood cultural change through the framework of technology and its effects on environmental adaptation.

Cultural ecology as developed by Steward is a major subdiscipline of anthropology.

One 2000s-era conception of cultural ecology is as a general theory that regards ecology as a paradigm not only for the natural and human sciences, but for cultural studies as well.

Cultural ecology describes the various sections and subsystems of society as 'cultural ecosystems' with their own processes of production, consumption, and reduction of energy.

In geography, cultural ecology developed in response to the "landscape morphology" approach of Carl O Sauer.

Cultural ecology applied ideas from ecology and systems theory to understand the adaptation of humans to their environment.

Political ecologists charged that cultural ecology ignored the connections between the local-scale systems they studied and the global political economy.

Today few geographers self-identify as cultural ecologists, but ideas from cultural ecology have been adopted and built on by political ecology, land change science, and sustainability science.

Cultural ecology went on to point out some of the concepts underpinning human ecology towards the social problems facing his readers in the 1950s as well as the assertion that human nature cannot change, what this statement could mean, and whether it is true.

Cultural ecology justified his limited view, not because little importance was attached to what was left out, but because the omitted topics were so important that each needed a book of similar size even for a summary account.

Cultural ecology is in fact a conceptual arena that has, over the past six decades allowed sociologists, physicists, zoologists and geographers to enter common intellectual ground from the sidelines of their specialist subjects.