Some of those to whom I have attached the labels of environmentalism, possibilism and cultural ecology may have been inspired in their work by biological parallels. However, their Aristotelian assertion of the uniqueness of human culture, its dominance as an organizing concept, and its total analytical independence was certainly not conducive to an explicitly ecological approach to ethnographic analysis. Much of the early work was based on broad natural historical and evolutionary notions and was either indifferent to, or ignorant of, the rapidly developing disciplines of animal and plant ecology.

BIOLOGICAL AND HUMAN ECOLOGY

From the eighteenth century onwards ‘normal’ natural science had become increasingly non-Aristotelian in its organic view of the relationships between entities. This view was dramatically re-affirmed in Darwinism through the concepts of the interconnectedness of living matter and the ‘struggle for existence’. The former became the basic meta-concept of a science of ecology (Glacken 1967:422), giving rise to a new definition of environment which included all factors external to the organism and provided for a highly complex set of conditions and adaptations. It was concerned with life as a system of dynamic interdependences, every organism being in a constant state of adjustment and readjustment to its external environment (topography, climate, other organisms and their activities). In short, it was concerned with what Haeckel saw as the universal life triad of environment, function and organism, and it was Haeckel who also appears to have been the first to use the term ‘ecology’ (Ökologie) (Haeckel 1911(1868):793–4).