excerpt from An Ecological Approach to Sociology

Excerpts from essay entitled "An Ecological Approach to Sociology" published in American Journal of Sociology in 1930 explained very well about human and nature's relationship.

“This is a balance between the natural and the vegetable and the animal environment, including human, in which nature delights. It is maintained by chain of actions and interactions, which link man with the rest of his living realm, reaching up and down and all around as his invisible biological and social destiny. Such a balance assumes great significance in old countries like India and China. Here we can discern, especially in the mature, densely populated plains, every stage of the process by which the regional balance is kept stable and how it is upset both by natural fluctuations such as are caused by cycles of rainfall or changes of landscape and river, or by long continued human actions such as the destruction of forests, non-conservative agriculture, and artificial interference with natural drainage...

    Human, animal and plant communities are subject to similar rules, though shifting ones, which maintain a balance and rhythm of growth for all. Each community cannot appropriate more than its due place in the general ordering of life, from which nothing can be obtained without influencing everything else. Working symbiotically, they represent interwoven threads of a complex web of life. No one thread can be isolated. None can be snapped or removed without the whole garment of the life of nature and human society being disfigured. The warp and the woof of the garment have become increasingly coherent as organic evolution has advanced. The inter-linkages of a fig tree, an earthworm, a rat and a bird are many, but the threads make such more intricate patterns as we reach the social economy of man. Though man often tears asunder the fabric through ignorance or selfishness, social progress no doubt consists in consciously weaving the forces of nature and society into finer and finer patterns of correlation and solidarity. It is the knowledge of and respect for the intricacy of the web of life that will guide man to his highest destiny".