Based on a belief that the search for sustainable relationships between humans and their global environment has become a matter of urgency, the ANU Human Ecology Program aims to help students develop a holistic approach to the study of the human environment.

Human Ecology focuses on the health and well-being of the environment using an ecosystems approach.

Economic and social goals, and strategies of resource use and ecosystem management form an integral part of this study. Because of the systemic nature of current problems facing society, information provided by specialist disciplines is balanced by an emphasis on whole systems.

To this end, the ecological strategies of other societies are considered. Data and analyses from different academic disciplines and other sources are used within an integrative framework to gain insight into sustainability. The problems and policies associated with the use of wilderness, forests, farmland and urban-industrial society are examined. Australian issues are central, but these are set in a global context. Research in Human Ecology centres on integrative approaches and sustainable systems.

In the often factionalist and competitive enviroment of academia, the Human Ecology Program offers a unique research and learning environment. Since its inception in 1973, Human Ecology existed as a program of study in both the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Arts, believing that a synergy of understanding between these two knowledge domains is crucial to improving the human situation in the biosphere. Scientific knowledge is a vital component of our understanding of how the world works and an essential component of good decision making. However, insights from the Social Sciences and the Humanities, including the Fine Arts, are vital to the fusion of that knowledge with meaning and emotion, such that appropriate choices, judgements and behaviour ensue. Central to students ‘getting’ Human Ecology is for them to find ways to achieve this knowledge integration and to develop the critical skills required to use the resulting expanded conceptual framework to analyse the behaviour of the systems in which they are embedded.

Human Ecology takes an integrative and explicitly transdisciplinary approach to environmental problems and their solution, including the study of cultural, economic and social goals and processes that determine strategies of resource use and ecosystem management. In essence, Human Ecology seeks to develop abilities related to holistic scholarship.

Research students in the Human Ecology Program engage with a diverse range of issues surrounding people and the environment, both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Some recent examples include:

• Dan McKinley’s research on distributed cognition and its implications for natural resource management, honours thesis published in wiki here
• Deb Cleland’s research on participatory modelling for coral reef management, based on research carried out with the Modelling and Decision Support Working Group in the Coral Reef Targeted Research Project (honours thesis posted here)
• Kim Williamson’s current honours research in opportunities for sustainable practice in international disaster response, based on fieldwork with the Humanitarian Bamboo project

The lecturers in the Human Ecology Program are Rob Dyball and David Dumaresq.

Links for studying Human Ecology at ANU

• Fenner School of Environment and Society
  
• Human Ecology degree fact sheet
• Undergraduate
• Research