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Issue 1.2 Abstracts

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"What Should We Do?" Human Ecology and Collective Decision Making

By Thomas Dietz

Collective decision-making requires both descriptive and prescriptive knowledge. Prescriptive, or normative, understanding must rest upon a theory of human action, including decision-making. The Rational Actor Model (RAM) is the dominant model of human action in the social sciences, but is being challenged by an evolutionary linguistic model (ELM) that takes the rational actor model as a special case appropriate to self-interested behavior in markets but not to other contexts. Welfare economics and benefit-cost analysis are prescriptive techniques that follow from the RAM, and can be criticized for unrealistic assumptions about human decision-making. Contingent valuation has been suggested as a method to correct some limitations in benefit-cost analysis, but it is grounded on the same unrealistic assumptions about human decision-making. The ELM implies that collective decision-making should be based on discursive methods, that have been implemented experimentally in a number of contexts. While the RAM and its prescriptive derivatives are based on an extensive literature, the ELM and discursive analysis is a relatively new approach. Much more work will be required before its strengths and weaknesses are fully understood.

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Human Ecology in Practice: Trends in Environmental Consulting

By Jeremy Pratt, Booker Holton and Penelope Starr

As environmental problems grow increasingly complex, environmental consultants are challenged to offer services that respond to these demands in the marketplace. While "human ecology" is not generally recognized as a term of art in the field of environmental consulting, the dimensions of sound environmental solutions are often those of human ecology. As our clients have become increasingly confronted with complex resource and ecosystem problems, environmental consultants have been compelled to advance the state of the art in applied human ecology. We describe an applied example of human ecology in consulting practice, focusing on integrated resource planning for water. Large-scale resource tradeoff and development decisions such as these require consideration of many dimensions and the integration of information from a number of disciplines. Because the costs of "studying everything" are infeasible and "trading off" cost for quality in decision-making is a poor solution, environmental consultants are searching for innovative means to secure the necessary "quality" of perspective and information within reasonable budgets. We discuss some of the drivers and resulting trends that we see emerging in environmental consulting in response to these needs.

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Human Ecology: The European Perspective

By Luc Hens and Demitri Devuyst

This paper reviews the actual status of human ecology in Western Europe. The issue is introduced with a description of the Master's Program in Human Ecology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The relationship of this program to the European Certificate in human Ecology is described. This European Certificate is a network of nine European universities which all nm postgraduate courses in human ecology. This network was expanded with the founding of the European Association for Human Ecology (EAHE) in 1990. The EAHE provides a forum for discussion for all members of European institutes, departments, other associations and program which are active in human ecology. The paper also reviews the current status of the Norwegian, the Danish, the German and the Italian Societies for Human Ecology.

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Group and Individual Selection in the Human Social Environment: From Behavioral Ecology to Social Institions

By Heidi D. Fain, Thomas J. Burns and Mindy Sartor

We examine distinct components of selection: 1) competition among members of one's own species; 2) the degree to which an individual is adapted to his/her given environment; and 3) ways in which different types of resource utilization affect competitive behavior. While these components vary dramatically in human as well as non-human groups, the relative importance of these is quite different for humans when comparing them with no n-human species. Given these considerations, we examine theoretical problems arising from the different ways in which the concepts of "individual" and "group" are used in the respective disciplines of biology and sociology. We suggest that the linkages between evolutionary ecology and sociology typically have been mis-specified, and we offer suggestions for more accurate re-specifications.

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