Do the studies reviewed in Chapter Three mean that law and government policy cannot contribute to stopping population growth? In order to answer this question, I must take a detour. I return to the question later in Chapter Four.

4.1 Ecology and sociology

The biology-based discipline of ecology focuses on the connections that exist among living organisms and between these organisms and their physical surroundings. Being a branch of biological science, ecology does not concentrate on human societies and the social forces that determine the character of human societies. Instead, the social sciences, particularly the discipline of sociology, have the responsibility for studying how human societies are structured and how they work. Simply put, ecologists and sociologists follow very different paths, and each group is unfamiliar with the key ideas of the other. Even the field known as human ecology, which has had footholds in both ecology and sociology and possesses the ability to bring these disciplines together, has been unable to meld the two disciplines since its founding in the first half of the twentieth century.

Of course, the placement of ecology and sociology in distinct fields of scientific endeavor is not without a logical foundation, but the separation of ecology from sociology must also be seen as an artifact of history. The phenomena that a scientific discipline investigates are not prepackaged and neatly presorted. Rather, the disciplines of science and their boundaries are human constructs; the phenomena on which each discipline focuses have been assigned by scientists. Unfortunately, however, the allocation of ecology and sociology to different, indeed distant, spheres is not just unnecessary; it may also be harmful. In terms of population– biosphere connections, the allocation is likely to be dissuading ecologists and sociologists from collaborating with one another (as well as with social scientists who are not sociologists) in efforts to understand the effects of human societies on the biosphere and the effects of the biosphere on human societies. More ecology-sociology interaction would be beneficial because sociology has tools to offer that can improve studies of the biological-physical aspects of the planet that is home to Homo sapiens.