Human Geography and the “New Ecology”: The Prospect and Promise of Integration

Ecologists are in a period of retrenchment, soul searching, ‘extraordinary introspection’,… This follows on nearly three decades of heady belief on the part of some ecologists… that communities are structured in an orderly predictable manner, and of others that information theory, systems analysis, and mathematical models would transform ecology into a ‘hard’ science. (Robert Mcln- I think that in this vast empirical stew [social life and the empirical reality surrounding it], if you'll pardon the expression, where disorder reigns, are scattered small islands of organization. (Claude Levi-Strauss and Didier Eribon 1991:102).