**3. The new challenge**

But today again we live in a troubled time, in various ways reminiscent of those 1930s. Erosion of optimism today has deeper ecological roots than sociologists have been inclined to consider. The lack of vital ecological insights, both among the public (and their elected representatives in government) and among most sociologists is proving tragic. Principles of ecology as developed in the biological sciences suggest that this twenty-first century will most probably be seen in retrospect as "the bottleneck century." Human societies will have had to pass through a period of monumental hazards, resource insufficiencies, hostile interactions, and inequitably distributed hardships. Human numbers will have ceased growing; in many parts of the world, population will have actually declined. Standards of living will have fallen.

Sociological attempts to explain these conditions and calamities will be constricted by lack of ecological understanding. Sociological predictions will likely founder in misconception of our true ecological condition, misconceptions enabled by our anthropocentric restriction of the scope of "human ecology" (Freese, 1997).

Public recognition of, and adequate adaptation to, the deteriorating ecological context of human life has been impeded by conventional preoccupations. Short-term concerns tend to blind people at all societal levels to omens of a fundamentally altered future. To elude such preoccupations, sociologists must at last abandon the notion that "human ecology" is only a minor subdiscipline of sociology, of marginal relevance to "the big issues." That is a notion prevalent since "the Chicago School" of sociologists early in the 20th century imported into the sociological vocabulary a few ecological terms and applied them principally to the study of *urban* life.

Certain crucial ambiguities in pioneer writings about the sociological applicability of ecological principles had enabled derailment of recognition that humans are inextricably involved along with other species in ecosystem patterns and principles. This necessary understanding was lost in treatment of human ecology as *merely analogous* to bio-ecology (Catton 1992).
