Has Ecology Erased Humanity? A Problem or a Mistake?

For decades, ecology has spoken of forests, rivers, species, biotopes, habitats, climate, and biodiversity. It has talked about everything... except us. The human being, however, has become the most powerful force shaping the biosphere. Today, there is no square centimeter of the planet that is not affected, directly or indirectly, by human activity. And yet, ecology often continues to think of nature as if humanity were outside the system it studies. In fact, it is part of it. The so-called "living" planet is the medium of all mediums, in which humans are part and actors of these environments.

This contradiction is at the heart of the current ecological crisis.

A science born to understand the living... but not the human

Ecology was born in the 19th century in the wake of Darwin and Haeckel. Its ambition was simple and immense: to understand how living beings interact with their environment, how they adapt, how they evolve. But very quickly, something got stuck. When biologists applied these ideas to human beings, they found themselves caught in an explosive confusion: should human societies be explained as animal species, or as cultural constructions? The answers often drifted towards dangerous theories: hierarchies of peoples, biological "progress," pseudo-scientific justifications of dominations, etc.

To protect itself from these drifts, scientific ecology then made a strategic choice: it put humanity in parentheses. It focused on "natural" ecosystems, wild species, supposedly virgin environments. But the real world has changed.

We no longer live in nature. We live in the humanized biosphere.

Today, the entire planet has become our living environment. Oceans, soils, climate, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur, or water cycles are reshaped by agriculture, industry, energy, and transport. We are no longer a species among others. We have become a geological, ecological, and evolutionary factor.

And yet, ecology often continues to operate as if humanity were an external disruptor, an accident, a pollution. This is where reasoning turns against itself.

" Ecology often continues to operate as if humanity were an external disruptor,

an accident, a pollution."

The true human singularity is not biological. It is technical.

What profoundly distinguishes humans from other species is not just their brain or bipedalism, consequences of an original technicality that begins with the australopithecines. It is their ability to transform their environment through technique. From the first stone tools to nitrogen fertilizers, agricultural machines, fossil energy, or biotechnologies, humanity has continually expanded its "ecological niche." It does not inhabit an ecosystem: it modifies environments, it creates them.

Agriculture is the most spectacular example of this. Every field, every farm, every irrigation is an ecosystem created, maintained, transformed by human societies. Ignoring this makes ecology an incomplete science.

The fundamental error of contemporary ecology

By separating "nature" on one side and "society" on the other, ecology has trapped itself. On one side, it produces numbers, models, alerts. On the other, decisions are made by the economy and politics, which treat the biosphere as a resource to be managed and only listen to science when it suits them.

The result: ecology is asked to provide technical solutions to problems that are actually societal problems. How to produce? For whom? With what risks? With what inequalities? These questions are at the heart of the ecological crisis, but they escape the current framework of ecology, which sees humanity only as a disruptor.

" By separating "nature" on one side and "society" on the other, ecology has trapped itself."

Why is agriculture at the heart of the problem?

Agriculture concentrates everything: biodiversity, climate, soils, water, food, technology, economy. It is the direct point of contact between humanity and the living. Talking about "agroecology" without rethinking the place of humanity in the biosphere is to put a green word on a black contradiction: we continue to produce, transform, extract, without a global framework.

Towards a truly human ecology

What we need is not a "greener" ecology, but a human ecology. An ecology that integrates into a single analysis, however complex it may be:

1. technique,
2. production,
3. demography,
4. economy,
5. energy,
6. crops,
7. anthropology,
8. and so-called "natural" environments.

We are not outside the planet. We are one of its main systems. And as long as ecology refuses to think of humanity as an integral part of the biosphere, it will remain condemned to chase after a crisis it cannot truly understand and which it will attribute to "capitalism," the rich, human demography, politicians who refuse to listen, already disoriented citizens, inequalities, etc.

A human ecology is necessarily transdisciplinary and must lead to the integration of human sciences (of which economics is a part), life sciences, and even material sciences.

It is an immense task that urgently needs to be tackled. Mission impossible?

" What we need is not a "greener" ecology, but a human ecology."

To go further

To understand the Anthropocene and the place of humanity

1. The Anthropocene, Paul Crutzen & Eugene Stoermer (2000). The foundational text that posits the idea that humanity has become a major geological and ecological force.
2. The Biosphere, Wladimir Vernadsky (1926). A pioneering vision of Earth as a living system integrating human activities.

To link ecology, technique, and society

1. Kidnapped Ecology Georges Guille-Escuret (2014). A major critique of the transformation of ecology into ideological and technical discourse.
2. The Human in Becoming. In the Beginning Was the Technique, Michel J.-F. Dubois (2020). Technique is constitutive of humanity and its ecological niche.

To overcome the nature/culture separation

1. The Ecology of Others (2016), Philippe Descola. How to think about human/non-human relationships without the modern opposition of nature/culture.
2. Politics of Making Worlds (2025), Philippe Descola. Why is anthropology a revolutionary science?
3. We Have Never Been Modern (2006), Bruno Latour. Why the separation between nature and society is a historical construction.

To think of the biosphere as a whole

1. Gaia, James Lovelock (1972). Earth as a self-regulating system, of which humanity is an integral part.
2. Microcosmos, Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan (1986). Life as a network of biological interdependencies.

To train designers, engineers, scientists, decision-makers

Caring for Environments - A Technological Design Manual, Mathieu Triclot (ed.) (2024). How to (re)design technical activity in the environment of environments that is planet Earth?