About Reinmar Seidler
Reinmar Seidler is Research Assistant Professor in Environmental Biology at the University of Massachusetts-Boston, where he teaches evolutionary biology, conservation biology, and sustainability science. He has published widely on aspects of environmental management, with a particular focus on South Asia. Most recently, he edited and coauthored P. S. Ashton’s On the Forests of Tropical Asia, a comprehensive study of the ecology, biogeography, evolutionary history, and human history of Asian tropical forests (2015). With K. S. Bawa, he is currently preparing a volume of essays on the past, present, and future of climate change in the Himalayas.
Since the nineteenth century, ecology has been defined as the study of the functional interrelationships of living organisms, played out on the stage of their inanimate surroundings. Ecology has developed through an ongoing dialogue between two distinct ways of seeing the world. We might call these “synthetic” and “analytic” tendencies. Throughout the history of ecology, they have competed for attention, at times replacing one another sequentially, at others coexisting uneasily.