The idea of public ecology has recently emerged in response to increasing disparities over political, social, and environmental concerns.
The processes society engages in to negotiate the meaning of these goods, upon which decisions and actions are based, reside within the public domain.
“The challenge today is how to develop a truly public ecology with new organizations, institutions, and ideas whose material articulation can balance the insights of scientific experts, the concerns of private property holders, the worries about social inequity, and the need for ecological sustainability to support human and nonhuman life in the 21st century.” (Luke 2005) “Public ecology is distinctive in that it explicitly and critically embraces its own normativity and uncertainty while striving to create a more democratic body of knowledge that will help us to understand the environment as a complex and dynamic biocultural system, one that can be interpreted from a variety of perspectives and points of view.
Public ecology not only exists at the interface of science and policy but functions as a joint product of these generally disparate realms.
The language of public ecology facilitates the flow of ideas and information form one side to the other and back again.” (Robertson and Hull 2001)