Ecologists Are Not Reactionary Sentimentalists.
Humans have tried many techniques to figure out why some stories work to explain the weather, or illness, or the health of crops. Planetary alignments, incantations, and prophesies are examples. Most recently, people have relied upon on the scientific method. The development of the scientific method is often proclaimed as a ‘break-through’ event in human history. As a tool of logic, the scientific method has constructed many reliable stories about manifold phenomena. However, it also initiated the ‘break-down’ of unified perceptions that prevail in pre-modern cultures. This is because the scientific method stipulates that phenomena must be reduced to manageable units, the relevant components must be isolated, and the affecting variables limited in order to control the processes and outcomes being studied. Sanitized and climate-controlled settings of laboratories are a far remove from normal conditions of variability and complexity.
Applied to animals, this approach to research became zoology. Applied to the earth’s surface, it became geology. ‘Ologies’ proliferated, splitting the natural sciences into ever more specialized scientific disciplines. A web site entitled ‘List of Ologies’ contains 197 entries in alphabetical order. It concludes with Xyology, the study of wood and Zymology, the study of fermentation.
The discipline of ecology is reversing this ‘divide to conquer’ scientific approach.
However, re-uniting areas of study that are currently represented by specialized disciplines does not suggest that ecological studies are merely refrains of old natural science methodologies. Ecology’s newness lies in the fact that the enormous computing capacity of new technologies now makes it possible to manage the multiplicity, complexity, and variability of combined specialized disciplines.
Such conceptual inclusiveness is often referred to as ‘holism,’ a revolutionary alternative to the separatist tactics of modern science. In one sense, ecology is holistic because it reunites scientific specialties. But ecology is also holistic because it examines the environment as one complete system, emphasizing connections between macro and micro scales in both biotic and abiotic realms of occurrence. Ecologists are not reactionary sentimentalists. They are rejoining the branches of science into the integrated, functional wholes necessary for gleaning accurate assessments of behaviors that, in the absence of human interventions, are inherently complex.