Cultural Ecology is one division of Human Ecology, that is defined as,"The science concerned with the relations of human beings with their physical, biological and social environment." (biologyonline.com). It is a recent field in science as it is a little over a hundred years old (nacce.org).
The reason scientist are interested in, and study Cultural Ecology is to observe how different groups of people change throughout time. This is important because it is a big factor in how and why certain aspects of culture and the environments societies live in evolve.
Human behavior and cultural responses to change in the environment happen every second, they are happening right now. But it is important not that we just know things are changing, but that we know how they are changing and why they are changing. Reason being, with an all time high of 6.9737 billion people on this earth (google/publicdata.com) a change in an environment and culture in one place could end up affecting the culture and environment in another place. And it would be irresponsible and ignorant of us to not care about how our culture affects the world around us. Because after all, how do you think our culture got to be the way it is?
References
World Development Indicators and Global Development Finance-Google Public Data Explorer. (n.d.). Google.
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nacce. (n.d.). nacce. Retrieved October 8, 2012, from http://nacce.org/cultural-ecology-anthropology /http://
vacohee. (n.d.). Human ecology - definition from Biology-Online.org. Life Science Reference - Biology Online. Retrieved October 8, 2012, from
http://www.biology-online.org/dictionary/Human_ecology
