In 1988, Joseph Tainter published “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” in which he published a prescient and simple argument with far-reaching implications:
1) Social complexity is a problem-solving mechanism.
2) Complexity has costs in terms of energy.
3) Societies tend to add rather than subtract complexity when facing new problems.
4) Complexity often reaches a point of diminishing marginal returns in relation to its energy costs.
5) When societies reach this point of diminishing returns, they are vulnerable to collapse to a simpler level of social organization, which is an economizing reaction to problems that can no longer be solved by adding more complexity.
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Human ecology is the study of how humans are shaped by their environment. Would you say the premise of the classic 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy is an application of human-ecology?
I consider Human Ecology as the concepts of ecology (including energy, system feedbacks etc.) applied to human society and all that depends on - which is broader than your description. I recall the activities of CHE in Edinburgh in the 1990s. However there are diverse interpretations, also the word ecology has different nuance in different languages (e.g. is used more broadly in french).
Human ecology is the study of how humans are shaped by their environment. Would you say the premise of the classic 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy is an application of human-ecology?
I consider Human Ecology as the concepts of ecology (including energy, system feedbacks etc.) applied to human society and all that depends on - which is broader than your description. I recall the activities of CHE in Edinburgh in the 1990s. However there are diverse interpretations, also the word ecology has different nuance in different languages (e.g. is used more broadly in french).