Ecological Concepts and their Relevance to Human Nutrition

Abstract

It is with some hesitation that I give this introductory lecture to an international symposium on ‘Food chains and human nutrition’. As Director of the Natural Environment Research Council’s Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, I am, of course, much concerned with ecological concepts, but relatively little of the work of my Institute is, as yet, directly related to human nutrition. Indeed, in the organisation of ecological research in this country, as in many others, we seem to have been determined to erect barriers between the ecology of, say, wildlife conservation, and that of crop systems, whether for human nutrition or for the production of timber and wood fibre. It is only in recent years that the ecology of natural and semi-natural ecosystems has been drawn together with that of crop ecosystems. The concepts which we have been at pains to construct for natural and semi-natural systems now have to be expanded to include man as something more than an incidental disturbing agent.