Ecology

Abstract

Although the term ecology was picked up in sociology in the late nineteenth century it became a concept recognizing human societies as part of their natural and built environments during the 1920s and 1930s in the Chicago School of sociology. By the 1950s sociological (human) ecology mainly focused on the spatial distribution of human phenomena in urban areas. Only in the 1970s, with the new field of environmental sociology, did a focus on the ecosystem dependence of societies again become a topic in sociology. Today different notions of ecology help sociology to conceptualize relations between material and nonmaterial entities that shape sociological thinking and its relation to other social and natural science disciplines.