During the last hundred years an enormous amount has been written, under various guises and for differing purposes, on what might be described as human ecology. It is not the aim of this work to reproduce it. Nor do I intend to present broad programmatic statements or make any claims for the possibility of developing some integrated subject-area and approach stemming from biology, as proposed by some writers. Such claims are theoretically naive and call for impossible programmes of empirical research. Instead, my aim is to tackle certain ecological issues which have a bearing on ethnographic description and analysis, contemporary social theory and the general anthropology of environmental relations.

This area of interests cannot be isolated satisfactorily in either a substantive or a formal sense. To do so would either give the impression that all analyses of culture and social relations dissolve into an all-embracing ecology, or that this area represents an autonomous sub-discipline. Both extremes are mistaken. Without necessarily elevating the ecology of human subsistence to the status of theory, domain or discipline, the area can be taken to represent a field – a problematic – that historically has acquired some degree of autonomy, but which contributes only partially (though critically) to a more general anthropology. It is ecological in the sense that it is broadly concerned with the interplay between human population behaviour and environmental variables, in terms of spatial and temporal relations involving the exchange of energy, material and information.