... us that the activities of all organisms are constrained by the environment, humans not excepted. As ecologist Eugene Odum remarks, the science of ecology is the study of how living things "and the nonliving environment function together as an ecological system or ecosystem. A parallel term often used in German and Russian literature is biogeocoenosis, which translated means 'life and earth functioning together'" (1989, 27). The root of 'biogeocoenosis' comes from the ancient Greek 'koinosis,' which means "a sharing" (Liddell and Scott, 1968: 970). Ecological interconnectedness is the ontology of the biosphere (Keller and Golley, 2). These ontological bonds, perhaps unfortunately, put limits on economic activity. Yet societies that ignore ecological connections for economic expediency do so at their peril. As interdisciplinarian life scientist Jared Diamond has pointed out, history is rife with illustrations of civilizations whose economies were not ecologically sustainable: classic Maya civilization and Polynesian habitation on the ...

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