摘要
When I was being trained as an ecologist at the Duke University,urban ecology was a rare and somewhat obscure field.There were few courses on urban ecology or sustainability offered at any major university,and few textbooks on the subject.Indeed,urban ecology was seen almost as an oxymoron.Ecology was understood primarily as the study of the structure and function of more pristine ecosystems.From this point of view,stud-ying the urban world and its interactions seemed somewhat perverse,like trying to infer the population biology of wild animals by watching the mating habitats of populations of animals in a zoo-you might learn some-thing,but it certainly did not seem the most efficient way to knowledge of the“natural”world.To be an urban ecologist just a few decades ago implied a willingness to challenge one of the fundamental assumptions of ecology.
