During the 1920s-30s, Julian Steward studied the Shoshone, Paiute, and other Native Americans in terms their interactions with their tribal environments, and in the 1950s-60s, he developed an ideational framework described as cultural ecology for studying communities and their natural resources. Steward recognized that there were multiple pathways for human groups to adapt to the same ecosystem over time, a process he called multilinear evolution.  This involved identifying the natural resources that they depend on for subsistence, the technology and organization of labour used to extract and process the resources, and how these factors in turn influence other aspects of culture.  In all of these issues cultural ecology was a branch of applied ecology with the emphasis on conservation management.

During the 1950s-1960s, Brent Berlin, Harold Conklin, and Charles Frake, compared the rich and detailed indigenous knowledge systems throughout the world that allow humans to subsist. Their work helped promote the ethnocentric view that indigenous knowledge is just as rigorous as "western" scientific knowledge, with a stronger spiritual connection between people and how they manage nature. Indigenous and western ways of knowing the natural world are different. The study of these differences was described by Harold Conklin in 1954 as ethnoecology.

Cultural ecology has now been accepted as the body of knowledge which defines principles of the two-way interactions of culture and environment, and ethnoecology is the study of how people perceive and manipulate their environments between cultures.

Because of the complex and varied cultural interactions of communities with the local environment there can never be an authoritative syllabus for studing cultural ecology.  Currently COSMOS is developing and testing a variety of templates for assembling and navigating important concepts depending on the initial point of view .  Five of these mindmaps, listed below, may be accessed online.

Cultural ecology: people ecology and place

Cultural ecology: environmental citizenship.

Cultural ecology: ecology as Earth