There is no agreement on the father of ecology, though many cite Darwin (however, according to McIntosh, just as many cite others including poets like Thoreau – for the term, ecology, at least). The name ecology was given by Haeckel in 1866 (23). “All definitions of ecology agree that it has to do with the interrelationships of organisms and environment” (289). Scientists “have since the earliest days of ecology wrestled with problems of the relationship of humans to, and their effects on, their environment” (289). Even though ecologists have argued that humans affect the environment and vice versa since the late 1800s, this view had not made it way into many government policies as of the writing of this book. This is partially because ecology is not viewed as a hard science and partially because ecology and social science have not combined forces. First, “the social sciences have largely ignored the fact that human societies depend upon the biophysical environment for their survival” (318). Second, the social sciences and ecologists view community differently: “Social scientists and humanists commonly think of the human population as a community by virtue of the diversity of roles (niches) of individuals. Ecologists think of a community as comprised of several species, each species having its own role or niche as a member of the community” (317).
In the beginning of ecology, people struggled with determining ecology’s position in relation to biology, physiology, and natural history. Ecology was criticized for not being a “hard” science because it is based on qualitative and holistic methods and does not have mathematical formulas for predictable outcomes. The hardest part of identifying theories in ecology is that “ecologists commonly referred to their ideas as concepts or principles and infrequently as theories” (256). “Ecologists of the early 20th century had found the search for generalities frustrating” (247). The mathematical and predicative ecological theories began in the 1920s. “Theoretical mathematical ecology began in the 1920s as (1) a consequence of interest in economic problems of fisheries, fur trade, and pest control; and (2) an interest in developing an abstract theory modeled on physics and applicable to evolution and biology at large” (277). Robert MacArthur is “frequently lauded as the doyen of theoretical ecologists” (245) because he “provided ‘leadership and protection’ to a resurgent school of theoretical mathematical ecologists in the 1950s and 1960s” (243). Theoretically, ecologists have used inductive, deductive, and hypothetico-deductive (“based on ‘generating hypothesis and disproving them in controlled experiments’” (248)) methods. There is also a discussion about whether ecologists are holists or reductionist. Reductionists break the ecology down into individual parts. Holists believe “that the whole has emergent properties distinctive to itself and that the whole is more than the sum of its parts” (254). There is another theory called dialectical materialism, which states the “it is not that a whole is more than the sum of its parts but that the parts themselves are re-defined and re-created in the process of their interaction” (255). Finally, in the 1960s and 1070s, discussions started about using mathematical models, as “traditional ecology was rife with verbal and graphic models” (282).