INTRODUCTION

A full account of human ecology should have a clear beginning. However, according to Gerald Young - a leading scholar of the domain - “the actual origins of human ecology are lost in the mists of time, with the Neanderthal and in the Neolithic, or even further back…” (^{Young, 1983}). The emergence of humans in the living world was a gradual, multi-species unfolding, and a profoundly world-changing process.

Thenceforth, there have been two worlds - a distinction highlighted by the anthropologist Loren Eiseley. The ‘first world’ (of nature), as he put it, exists in the ever-present moment of biological evolution and ecology. In contrast, the ‘second world’ (of humans) involves additional ‘time-binding’ capabilities for recalling the past and conceiving the future through conscious thought, language, and planned action. This fundamental distinction opens the door to the juxtaposition of natural ecology and human ecology.

Human ecology may be an unfamiliar phrase to some individuals. But for many, it has become an unambiguous and unifying expression for the intersection between the two most important realms in the living world. Its mandate is unequivocally interdisciplinary and integrative. Its subject matter cannot be subdivided according to academic traditions. The scope of its domain is boundless - from the emergence of humans on earth, to the immediate experience of each of us here and now, and from there into the furthest reaches of imagination about the future. Despite all complexities, a salient challenge persists at the center. In the words of Paul Shepard: “Perhaps the central problem of human ecology may be characterized as the relationship of the mind to nature” (^{Shepard, 1967}).

The aim of this paper is to explore and represent the domain of human ecology. At the outset, I need to thank the editors for allowing an interpretation that maintains the contours of how this knowledge came to me. Human ecology has been a central preoccupation of my academic life. But how I first discovered human ecology - and its enlargement along the way - was mostly the indirect result of happenstance and personal encounters.

My university studies led me into psychology, where I received baccalaureate and doctoral degrees. Psychology embraces a variety of knowledge processes, from philosophical inquiry and social science methods to humanistic and therapeutic approaches. So, in that sense, I was comfortable with interdisciplinarity. The years in which I was completing these studies also coincided with the rise of the environmental movement and the first Earth Day. Rather than pursuing the straightforward career in the mental world of psychology - for which I was prepared, I began to feel an intuitive need to know more about the environmental workings of the natural world. This led me to post-doctoral studies in animal behavior and ecological science at the Ohio State University, one of the largest research institutions in the U.S. An opportunity to combine these backgrounds came a few years later, when I was invited to join the faculty at Purdue, another major university, in the early development of environmental psychology.

Environmental psychology, at the time, was composed of two subfields. One approach took an outside-inside orientation, focused on environmental impacts (e.g., the built environment, noise, pollution, crowding, etc.) on human behavior and health. The other had a more inside-outside emphasis, looking at the intra-psychic origins and influence of ecological knowledge and attitudes on environmentally responsible behavior. This fit more closely with my interests. I was especially drawn to the ways that scientific ecology might provide opportunities for psychological insights into human-nature relationships.

I began by searching for individuals with significant levels of ecological knowledge, a strong sense of environmental concern, and earnest commitments to environmentally responsible actions - and to discern how these knowledge-attitude-behavior dimensions were related. My efforts to find subjects for research led to discovery of a new, higher education institution that had recently opened in Bar Harbor, Maine: College of the Atlantic. The college had a completely non-departmentalized, interdisciplinary faculty whose collective aim was to support individualized, self-directed studies leading to the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Human Ecology. That was the first time I heard the phrase. Nonetheless, I had an immediate sense that this was the overarching framework I was intuitively seeking. I promptly wrote to them and proposed that I might visit and conduct psychological and lifestyle research on their faculty and student body. The reply was hearty and welcoming, which led to multiple visits with my small team of research assistants.

The founding president, Edward Kaelber, was a former dean at Harvard University. ^{Kaelber (1970)} wrote the initial Announcement of College of the Atlantic, describing the ideas and ideals that would be the basis for a new kind of college. “The strength of the college” he proposed, “will lie not in an attempt to cover the breadth available in the well-known liberal arts colleges” … but… “in setting the standard of excellence in the interdisciplinary study of human ecology “… and … “allow students to prepare themselves to do something about the world in a rigorous, understanding and compassionate manner”.

The new college’s board of trustees was composed of local community supporters and several nationally recognized academic and environmental leaders. Among them was Rene Dubos, whose book Only One Earth set the tone for the first U. N. Conference on the Human Environment (^{Dubos & Ward, 1972}). His well-known maxim ‘Think globally and act locally”, was the slogan for the first Earth Day. Additional inspiration came from Ian McHarg - distinguished author of Design with Nature (^{McHarg, 1969}) - and founder of the University of Pennsylvania human ecology planning program. The initial faculty were soon hired; and the first class of students arrived in the fall of 1972.

My discovery of COA and subsequent visit came three years later. The faculty included several excellent ecologists, along with other scientists, social scientists, and a complement of professors from the humanities, policy studies, architecture, and the creative arts. It really was an interdisciplinary college - with faculty meetings and daily lunch discussions unlike anything I had ever seen before.

My research team had been doing studies of the psychological dimensions involved in ecological consciousness and cognitive mapping of attitude-behavior relations among high and low concern individuals. COA was a special opportunity to more deeply examine how personality, developmental and lifestyle characteristics of environmentally concerned and unconcerned individuals might differ. As our pool of computerized data grew, the differences between these extremes became increasingly evident (^{Borden, 1985}).

It was a terrific research experience. We did in-depth studies of the students using multi-dimensional personality assessments, attitude surveys, and lifestyle inventories. All students had a solid exposure to evolutionary theory and field-based ecology as part of their degree plans. Ecological ideas permeated the entire curriculum from which each student freely constructed an individualized course of study.

My professional decision to study ecological beliefs and behavior came at an opportune time. The research was met with enthusiastic responses from other psychologists as well as environmentally oriented researchers in sociology, education, and policy studies. Our research team presented the results at conferences and in academic publications. The findings also captured significant attention in the popular media. One of our studies was used for a two-part Sunday supplement ‘environmental lifestyle test’ that ran nation-wide in 1700 newspapers.

Amid this activity, I was invited to speak on the psychology of ecological concern at the 2nd International Conference on the Environmental Future, organized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The meeting’s co-chairs were Linus Pauling, two-time recipient of the Nobel Prize (for chemistry and for peace), and Nicholas Poulin - editor of IUCN’s premier journal Environmental Conservation. The event was held in Reykjavik, Iceland during the second week of June 1977. The conference included an extraordinary cadre of international scientists and environmental leaders. Many knew each other or were familiar with one another’s work. Most were decades older than me. I was scarcely thirty years old at the time. My contributions were well received; and I never felt out of place. Yet, overall, it was a profoundly transformative experience. I had arrived as a solitary environmental psychologist, and in a few short days had developed first-name conversational relations with some of the most distinguished world leaders on environmental issues.

After the meeting, I needed to decompress from the heady intellectual encounters of the preceding week. So, I decided to stay a while longer in Iceland and explore its intriguing landscape and culture. In Reykjavik I soon met some local University of Iceland folk-musicians - one of my favorite pastimes - who welcomed me to stay with them for a few days. During our exchange of greetings, someone asked why I was in Iceland. I explained that I had come for an environmental conference, which was now over. “And what do you do?” another asked. I said that I was a university professor doing research on psychology and human ecology. I believe it was the first time I ever spoke those words in a personal self-description. I expected, perhaps, a clarifying rejoinder along the lines of ‘what is human ecology?’ Instead, everyone nodded appreciatively. In further conversation, I learned that they knew faculty at the university who also used the term. I asked if I might meet with them - and soon heard of their awareness of other human ecologists elsewhere in Europe.

A LEAP OF FAITH

I returned to Purdue that fall. But it felt somehow different than before. I found myself reminiscing about the rich engagements with my summer ICEF colleagues. The unique, interdisciplinary nature of COA’s mission and community - and hints of other human ecology activities elsewhere in the world - were on my mind.

Before long, a plan developed for me to spend a semester at COA as a visiting faculty member the following year. My initial thoughts were about further research on interdisciplinary ecological mindedness. Shortly after I arrived, a possibility emerged to join the college’s permanent faculty. The offer was made; and I accepted. The gap between a ‘big-10’ university and a tiny, new, experimental college was a vast leap. But in the fall of 1979, I did it with unhesitating enthusiasm.

Teaching in a student-centered, interdisciplinary curriculum was entirely different from the highly structured background of both my education and previous professorial customs. My COA colleagues were all from entirely different academic fields. Team-teaching with them was enormously challenging. It was also great fun. A further surprise, during my second year, was an invitation from President Kaelber to serve as chairperson for coordination of the academic curriculum. Over the next two years, I worked closely with his administrative team to align a non-departmentalized faculty around a rigorous and relevant undergraduate curriculum in human ecology. With this, my role changed from weaving psychology into a human ecology curriculum to having to ‘think like a college’ and as he advised ‘to arrange affairs so that people would work together”.

COA grew five-fold in its first decade. In 1980, President Kaelber announced his plan for retirement. This coincided with the end of my third year at the college. In anticipation of the transition, there were many discussions about innovative education, the meaning of human ecology, and how to shape the curriculum. Following an intensive, three-day retreat with faculty and staff, Kaelber wrote a memorandum sharing his view of the institution’s founding and future mission (personal communication, July 10, 1980). It started with this: “Human ecology is not a discipline” … (not another field of study to be taught alongside other subjects). “Human Ecology is a perspective … or a point of view … for finding effective ways of interrelating disciplines, and of relating thought to practice”. I’ve always liked Kaelber’s framing of COA’s educational philosophy. It was my guide for the next two decades as academic dean. It still is.

NETWORKING HUMAN ECOLOGY WORLDWIDE

Oversight of COA’s academic program carried multiple responsibilities. One of them was the need for an effective response to the question: “what is human ecology”? I encountered this query endlessly: from prospective students and their parents; from new faculty, staff, and trustees; from colleagues at other institutions; from everywhere. The commonly accepted short answer was: “human ecology is the interdisciplinary study of the relationships between humans and their natural, cultural and built environments”. It was a good start; but seldom enough. To learn more, I began to look outside the college for other human ecology ideas and colleagues elsewhere.

A pleasant discovery came when one of my students arrived in my office carrying the 1974 volume of Advances in Ecological Research. The lead article was a 105-page survey of a half-century of academic human ecology: “Human Ecology as an Interdisciplinary Concept - A Critical Inquiry” by Gerald Young of Washington State University (^{Young, 1974}). It was a magnificent piece of scholarly work. Young’s painstaking research had recovered a vast, uncoordinated, and nearly lost history of human ecological thought. It was a powerful validation of the many ways ecology had been a source of cross-disciplinary inspiration. How his review could have gone unnoticed for nearly a decade - sitting all the while on a library shelf unbeknownst to everyone at the college - was a mystery.

Young’s review began with an historical overview of biological ecology. He then traced how ecological concepts had been adopted in myriad ways across the academic landscape. The paper had more than 500 references pertaining to human ecology. Some approaches within sociology, anthropology, geography, and psychology were quite developed; other, smaller inceptions had also arisen independently in planning, conservation, engineering, health, architecture, and numerous other academic fields.

The far-reaching roots of human ecology, it seems, are a peculiar history. Most fields of study have a relatively clear historical starting point - either in the form of a founding personality or a seminal problem that stimulated further elaboration. Human ecology appears to be quite the opposite. Instead of beginning in one place and spreading, it has hatched independently in a multitude of places, drawing in various ways on ecological concepts - albeit rarely with an awareness of interests developing elsewhere - yet still naming itself ‘human ecology’. Young’s closing appraisal focused on ecological science’s contribution to its disciplinary neighbors, along with the prospects for the future integration and synthesis of human ecology. His conclusion was forthright: “The present situation in human ecology is, then, best described simply: it is a fragmented field, far from interdisciplinary … though many of the concepts are shared … most human ecologists are strongly discipline-oriented” (^{Young, 1974}).

My next big impetus came later that year, with the publication of Origins of Human Ecology, also by Young. The volume (^{Young, 1983}) contained twenty-four of the key, founding papers of academic human ecology across its scattered history, along with Young’s editorial assessments. The preface also included a surprising (to me) acknowledgment of COA and mention of an emerging effort to establish an interdisciplinary Society for Human Ecology. Without hesitation, I telephoned him in his office. We had a long conversation about COA, human ecology activities elsewhere, and the newly formed professional society. He encouraged me to join and shared his phone list of the founding members, with whom I soon made contact.

By then, the Society for Human Ecology (SHE) was an officially incorporated, not-for-profit educational and research organization, had adopted a set of bylaws, and elected a first slate of officers. Wolfgang Preiser from the University of New Mexico was president, Guido Francescato from the University of Maryland’s College of Human Ecology was executive director. Preiser and Francescato were both architects. Gerald Young, of course, was a biological ecologist. Other founding members were from a variety of established human ecology academic programs, governmental agencies, and service organizations. Though small, the group was representative of a broad range of backgrounds. The overarching goal was to extend the integrating framework of ecology to create a fuller understanding of the place of humans in nature - and to do this under the name of human ecology.

SHE’s first order of business was to fashion a professional network of people interested in human ecology. A two-pronged approach was adopted. On the one hand, we began by contacting established human ecology programs around the U.S., and other interested colleagues to develop a referral list of individuals and institutions to build a membership pool. At the same time, we searched for people and programs in other countries working under the name of human ecology. For this part, I was appointed to SHE’s vice-president position. (Note: This was long before the advent of the worldwide web or google search tools - and relied instead on a mix of extant personal/professional connections, letter writing, and word-of-mouth networking.).

By the spring of 1984, we produced a first-edition publication of a Directory of Human Ecologists, containing the brief biographies of several hundred scholars, researchers, and applied professionals in the U.S. and abroad (^{Borden & Jacobs, 1984}). Support from several small foundation grants allowed me to travel to Europe later that summer and visit a dozen human ecology centers in England, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and France.

Young’s reviews of human ecology focused primarily on American ecological and human ecological approaches. My trip to Europe was an occasion to examine human ecology in a more comparative, international way. As I traveled from place to place, I found genuine enthusiasm for human ecology at each stop, but rather limited awareness of the overall situation. In some cases, when I was given knowledge about other places, it was frequently conditioned with: “but their human ecology is different from ours”.

I soon realized that the European roots of human ecology were as disparate as Young had observed in the U.S. One noteworthy distinction was between where human ecology should be considered a science versus being viewed as a perspective. Given my COA background, I suppose I leaned toward the latter. However, I was unaware of how important this question had been in shaping things of which I was already a part.

It turned out that in the mid-1970s several well-attended conferences were arranged by the International Organization of Human Ecology (IOHE), based in Vienna. SHE’s co-founders - Preiser and Francescato - were early members. But as architects, they were uncomfortable with the strictly scientific orientation of IOHE’s leadership; this, I came to realize, is what brought about the creation of SHE’s more broadly multidisciplinary attitude. I heard similar stories of spin-offs from IOHE elsewhere during my travels - and later too - from Italian, German, and Nordic colleagues. Each of these would form their own regional human ecology associations. A quite different model was developed by the London-based Commonwealth Human Ecology Council (CHEC), founded in the 1960s to coordinate human ecology programs throughout the commonwealth network of the UK, Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and elsewhere. On the continent, another European inter-institutional model was formed among universities in France, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium under the auspices of the European Association for Human Ecology (EAHE). The International Union of Anthropology and Ethnographic Sciences (IUAES) became home to a Commission on Human Ecology that held multiple meetings and coordinated programs under the leadership of Napolean Wolanski from the Polish Academy of Sciences. Like IOHE, this group also held the firm position of human ecology as a science that should follow clear methods of investigation.

My meetings on that trip were fascinating. The highlight, perhaps, came at Gothenburg University in Sweden, where I spent some very productive time with Emin Tengstrom, a founding professor of human ecology and senior administrator at the university. Tengstrom shared my passion for networking and desire to uncover the history of human ecology. He too had a substantial (and equally fragmented) collection of source materials - including knowledge on even more places around the world - across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. We happily shared our materials. Later that year he wrote a useful synthesis of these materials under the title: Human Ecology - A New Discipline?: A short, tentative description of the institutional and intellectual history of human ecology (^{Tengstrom, 1985}).

Human ecology’s history, in Tengstrom’s view, might be seen best as a progressive unfolding of three more or less distinct stages. The first phase (from the 1920s-1960s) was mainly monodisciplinary. Its distinctive feature was creation of discipline-based ‘schools’ of human ecology “borrowing their theoretical pattern from ecology”. A second, multidisciplinary stage began to surface in the sixties. This was characterized by multi-authored anthologies and calls for action-oriented contributions of specialists - but with little actual exchange of ideas among them. Tengstrom (unlike Young) did envision the promising development of a third interdisciplinary stage. This version of human ecology explicitly called upon an integrative strategy “with the principle aim to restructure knowledge already gained” and production of “fundamentally new and specific human ecology knowledge”. The best way to achieve such integration, for Tengstrom, was within a permanent institutionalized framework - as seen in the founding design of his and my own institutions, as well as elsewhere. Since then, a further transdisciplinary distinction seems to have appeared. Before going there, however, we should return for now to the original timeline of the current review.

A GATHERING OF PERSPECTIVES

Based on the growing U.S. network and encouragement of European colleagues, the Society made plans for a First International Conference of the Society for Human Ecology in April 1985, hosted by the University of Maryland. The event was a success. Participants came from as far as Europe and Australia to debate a wide range of programmatic and conceptual issues. At the end-of-conference business meeting, I was elected SHE’s next president.

Energized by the meeting’s success and participants’ enthusiasm, a second conference was planned for October 1986 at College of the Atlantic. By then, our networking yielded attendees from over twenty countries. Keynote presentations were made by leading human ecologists from the U.S., Canada, and Europe - as well as India, Japan, and Latin America. Informal conversations often revolved around a basic question: “And what do you mean by human ecology?” These were invaluable opportunities to share perspectives - from which everyone learned about the common and distinctive aspects of their respective views.

An especially poignant lecture was delivered by COA’s poet/novelist William Carpenter: “Human Ecology: The Possibility of an Aesthetic Science” (^{Carpenter, 1988}). It began with this anecdotal image:

My father is a landscape painter, and as a child I used to go with him on watercolor expeditions on the Cape Cod sand dunes where we spent our summers. One morning, he sat down to paint a scene with two or three simple shore cottages and a large tree. As he began the work, I was horrified to see that he had moved one of the cottages in the picture so that it stood on the other side of the tree from where it really was. It shook my view of reality to the roots. Before I went out painting with him again I bought a Brownie Hawkeye camera, and from then on, I photographed every scene he painted so there would at least be some record of the truth.

Carpenter followed with a compelling exploration of the necessary inclusion of both scientific (truth) values and creative (aesthetic) values within a broader perspective. Further openings for additional values (and aims) - e.g., social (love), political (power), economic (utility), and even religious (unity) - would subsequently be enlarged by other colleagues in the direction of an unbounded interdisciplinary foundation for human ecology.

Since its founding, SHE has organized 25 international conferences and co-sponsored dozens of activities with partner organizations. Here are a few of the highlights and turning points for me. In the summer of 1987, I attended the 9^th Commonwealth Conference on Development and Human Ecology in Edinburgh. At the close of the meeting, I shared a brief conversation with Dr. Rusong Wang from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. Shortly thereafter a manuscript by him, “Human Ecology in China: Its Past, Present and Prospect”, arrived in my mailbox. His opening statement held a stimulating insight: “Though the age of human ecology as a discipline in China is only one or two decades old …. thoughts of human ecology as a system approach to human-environment relationship …. date back to 3000 years ago” (^{Wang & Qi, 1987}). I promptly wrote a letter urging him to come for a visit to COA, which he did. The roots of Chinese ecological thought move through a remarkable weaving of ancient principles from Taoism, Confucianism, dynamic harmony, yin-yang balance, and Wuxing (five element) theory - on which traditional holistic medicine is based. Rusong later invited me to teach in the CAS summer program with him. It was a wonderful experience of cross-mapping eastern and western perspectives of science, intellectual history, and ecological applications (^{Borden, 1994}).

The 1990s were filled with other bridge-building activities. One, in partnership with the 5^th International Congress of Ecology (INTECOL) in Yokahama, Japan, was an invitational symposium that brought together a dozen leading human ecologists from around the world, who described activities in their region. Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB) published the papers with the title Human Ecology - Coming of Age: An International Overview and the joint sponsorship by SHE, the Japanese Society of Health and Human Ecology, and the European Association of Human Ecology (^{Suzuki et al., 1991}).

The following July, in Sweden, Gothenburg University hosted the V^th International Conference of SHE. It was a six-day meeting entitled “Human Responsibility and Global Change”, with participants from over forty countries. The leadership from the various human ecology associations held a special international forum to discuss membership issues and future coordination. By this time, most of them knew one another. Merging into a single umbrella organization, given their respective histories, was seen to be unnecessary. Instead, a published directory - describing the mission, structure, and membership of each organization - was proposed. Eva Ekehorn, the forum’s moderator, and president-elect of SHE, was appointed to edit the directory that was published jointly by SHE and the Nordic Society for Human Ecology (^{Ekehorn, 1992}).

The scope of SHE’s activities expanded beyond conferences with the launch of Human Ecology Review in 1993. The peer-reviewed journal has become a respected forum for research, theory, project reports and book reviews. Its contents - like meeting agendas and member profiles - offers an ongoing operational definition of the shape and growth of human ecological ideas. HER’s current editor, Robert Dyball - convenor of Australia National University’s human ecology program - has moved the publication to open-access status, greatly amplifying its readership and citation indexing.

There have been some setbacks along the way. Surely, the most sobering was the airplane hijackings and deaths of September 11, 2001. In the aftermath of the event, it was impossible to host international meetings in the U.S., due to severe travel restrictions. SHE did have a few small, regional get-togethers; but it took four years to re-establish our next international meeting - held in Cozumel - thanks to our Mexican colleagues.

An especially enriching event was the 2007 EcoSummit in Beijing. The conference chair was Rusong Wang - then president of the Ecological Society of China - who brought together 1400 leading environmental scientists and planners from over 70 countries. During our conversations with the Ecological Society of America delegation in Bejing, SHE was invited to create a human ecology division within ESA. The new section was chartered the following year, with strong backing from ESA’s leadership. Successful human ecology sessions have been held at all annual meetings since then.

In 2014, as part of ESA’s 100^th anniversary, Rob Dyball and I prepared a day-long symposium: “Human Ecology - A Gathering of Perspectives: Portraits from the Past - Prospects for the Future”. The session included biographical portraits of eight significant pioneers of human ecological thought across the past century and was published as a special issue of Human Ecology Review (^{Borden & Dyball, 2017}). ESA’s human ecology membership is steadily accelerating. It has been extremely gratifying - at long last - to bring human ecology back to its nominal birthplace and home.

ECOLOGY AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF KNOWLEDGE

The roots of modern ecology lie in the deep traditions of natural history. Ecology - the word itself - was coined by the German naturalist Ernst Haeckel¹. Originally ökologie, a compound of Greek words for ‘household’ (oikos) and ‘study of’ (logos), first appeared in his Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (^{Haeckel, 1866}). The term was meant to designate the comprehensive science of in-situ relationships among organisms and their environment, i.e., “we mean the body of knowledge concerning … the total relations of the … inorganic and organic environment”.

The natural sciences now had two broadly complementary approaches. Darwinian evolution emphasized long-term (diachronic) changes over time. Ecology - as Haeckel proposed - brought about a different (synchronic) orientation, emphasizing the identification of structures and interactions within a given place and time. The rise of ecology was a gradual dawning. The ideas were first adopted in Europe, where they fit with the established traditions of plant physiology and biogeography. These fields did not exist in North America in the mid-nineteenth century, where naturalists were preoccupied with numerous government-sponsored expeditions throughout the westward territories.

It took until the close of the 19^th century for American ecology to become established. The best opportunities appeared in the newly founded public research universities. These state (land-grant) universities were putting an increased emphasis on making biology more scientific. The attraction of physiology, and thereby chemistry and physics, was seen as a way of blending the biological and physical sciences. By then, however, the necessary subfields required to conduct ecological research had become departmentalized, often in separate buildings. It was a necessary requirement for ecology to become interdisciplinary. However, since its pioneers also shared a strong and common scientific orientation, they were able to do so. Before long, professional ecological societies would follow. One of the first was the British Ecological Society (BES), founded in 1913. They were followed shortly thereafter by the Ecological Society of America (ESA) in 1915. Science, as a way of knowing, was the unifying force within natural ecology’s interdisciplinary emergence. For human ecology, the situation would be more complex, where bridges into and between the subfields of human studies were often problematic and piecemeal. To understand those problems, it can be helpful to review the background of higher education.

THE RISE OF UNIVERSITIES

Higher education has a long history. Its origins go back to the 12^th century when European monasteries were the center of intellectual life. In time, the curriculum was standardized around the liberal arts, i.e., the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and logic) and the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music). Satisfactory completion of study of these subjects entitled the student, if they qualified, to continue to one of the higher branches of learning - law, medicine, or theology.

The 19th century would bring two world-changing transformations: one in Europe, the other in America. The former was spear-headed by the Prussian minister of education Wilhelm von Humboldt, who was also founder of the University of Berlin in 1810. The ‘Humboldtian’ university was unlike anything in the past. It revolutionized the centuries-old medieval curriculum. Humboldt did this by elevating the ‘lower’ liberal arts curriculum in the direction of a ‘higher’ (more departmentalized) professional faculty structure. This would open the door to advanced study and research throughout the arts and sciences. The institution was transformed as a whole - into ‘the research university’ - no longer merely a place for the transmission of knowledge. The new German university was committed to the discovery and advancement of knowledge, where doctoral level studies and certification were now available in every department.

On a separate - though parallel - path, Thomas Jefferson (third president of the U.S.) was busy founding University of Virginia, which opened in 1825. It was the first American public university to begin with high standards - and the first institution to allow specializations in such diverse fields as botany, astronomy, architecture, and political science. Jefferson designed the whole institution. He drew the architectural plans for the buildings and landscape and oversaw construction. His original handiwork, of separate buildings for different disciplines, remains at the center of the university - and has been the inspiration for American campus design and higher education architecture.

Many of the pioneers of the new American universities received graduate training in Germany. (There was hardly anywhere else to go.). On their return, they brought back not only advanced degrees, but also the ideals of the research university itself. The growth of American higher education is difficult to envision. At the beginning of the 19^th century, barely two-dozen colleges existed in the country. A century later, there were almost 800. Nearly all were tiny; most failed. But big changes would follow the civil war, as each state stablished its own land-grant university. Some grew at a staggering pace. The Ohio State University opened for classes in 1878 with 24 students. By 1905, enrollment was at 2000 students. In the 1970s, when I was there, enrollment was well beyond 60,000 students. A wonderful landscape for disciplinary specialization: but much less favorable for interdisciplinary colleagues, separated across a sprawling campus - sometimes miles apart.

Ecology, at the outset, was primarily an exploratory and descriptive science. Development of theoretical concepts soon followed. Despite the architectural compartmentalization and specialization of its sub-disciplines, natural ecologists were able to build bridges and weave a rich variety of interdisciplinary approaches. Some ecologists, especially in the beginning, argued for the straightforward scientific study of nature qua nature. For others, the vision would become an ever-increasing conviction that humans are an integral part of the living world. Ecological knowledge, interdisciplinary planning, and responsible management are at the core of agroecology, environmental conservation, climatology, and many other applied approaches - as well as countless domains of human affairs and everyday life. Institutions of higher education are still highly discipline-oriented and siloed. Nonetheless, I have seen a multitude of instances in which natural and human ecology inspire wider points of view that bring people together - as equal partners, with contributions from every field of knowledge. There is still much more to be done. That is the aim of human ecology.

TRANSDISCIPLINARITY: WISDOM BEYOND THE WALLS

My initial reaction to the notion of transdisciplinarity was confusion - wondering if or how it was meaningfully different from interdisciplinarity. An understanding was facilitated by the Chilean economist Manfred Max-Neef, who views it as the generally defined inclusion of non-academic knowledge and processes (^{Max-Neef, 2005}). Its utility has grown within the contexts of common property resources, wicked problems, community participation, collaborative planning, traditional ecological (TEK) and environmental justice. At its core is a sense that there is a world of valid knowledge that lies beyond the academic, institutionalized expertise from which interdisciplinarity is woven.

I have come to value this approach through conversations with human ecology colleagues in my own participatory work on community planning and decision-making, and throughout my teaching and everyday life experience. So here - at the end of this pathway through human ecology - are a few illustrations my students and I have explored and enjoyed together in classroom discussions from everyday life.

One is a short, student-produced video: The camera is following a student along a lunch line, selecting food for their tray. The focus zooms in on each food item, follows it back into the kitchen, to the delivery truck, to and through the processing plant, and back to the living animal or growing plant. It is not a perfect, technical production. But the idea comes through. The first time I saw it, it entirely changed my experience of my subsequent lunch - and many other meals, events, and moments since.

A somewhat similar version is borrowed from a botanical ecology colleague’s field trip to the grocery store. Each student, at the market, selects a common produce item: a tomato, potato, melon, onion, fruits, vegetables, or grain. Their item is the launching point for a taxonomic exploration of its evolutionary ancestry, geographic origins, species variations, and cultural history. Each story becomes a unique human ecological intermixing of evolutionary taxonomy, continental drift, human migration - and ethnic cuisine!

I often use Ray and Charles Eames classic, nine-minute documentary, Powers of Ten (^{Eames Office LLC, 1977}). The opening scene is a man reclining on a blanket in a one square meter frame. As the camera slowly zooms out, it pauses briefly at each power of ten, ever outward, above the earth, past the moon and sun, to the edge of the Milky Way galaxy, and ending at the power of 10²⁵ - the size of the known universe. The sequence then reverses and slowly returns to the opening one-meter square. It then goes through the negative powers of ten - to a 10-centimeter square of skin, to individual cells at 10^-3, the double helix of DNA at 10^-7, stopping at 10^-14 in a quark-level view within a single carbon nucleus. The Eames’ exponential ladder gives a recognizable framework to the multidimensionality of reality, each level inviting a unique awareness of spatial representation, while also posing powerful questions of how they interrelate.

An intriguing temporal comparison is the short film Still Life by the media-artist ^{Sam Taylor-Wood (2001)}. It opens with a 17^th century-style still life fruit bowl. Using time-lapse filming, the scene decays before your eyes, as nine weeks of decomposition are compressed into four minutes. By the end, only a mottled cake of indistinguishable detritus remains. The transformation of the living forms - from the familiar to the microbial - displaces our ordinary sense of concrete reality. Seeing it actually happen is genuinely insightful.

Finally, closer to home: A few years ago, our GIS lab acquired LIDAR (laser) mapping capabilities. It gives a precise ground-level view of Mount Desert Island - where I live. We clearly saw, for the first time, the annual “push-back lines’ - humps of soil and rock - from the retreating glacier that ended the last ice age ten thousand years ago. These rolling ridges appear on a digital map across the island, like annual rings of a tree. Finding them in the woodland is an ecological reminder that not long after they were made, the first herds of caribou would arrive - followed by the earliest humans in this part of the world. Here, like a uroboric circle, is one of human ecology’s bona fide starting points - in my backyard.