Regenerating Scholarly Ecologies: Thoughts on Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Abstract

Qin and colleagues’ paper “Seeing the Forest for the Trees: A Bibliometric Analysis of Environmental and Resource Sociology” revives a thought-provoking conversation about relationships between environmental and natural resource sociologies. In this commentary, I ask whether we might learn more by looking beyond the forest and trees to other ecosystems and organisms in our “scholarly ecology.” We might benefit from thinking further about the many foci and connections in our polycentric field, in the interest of building institutional habitats for both those who concentrate in disciplinary cores and those who rove across academic ecotones.