Umwelt theory is an expression of von Uexküll’s subjective biology and as such usually applied in analysis of individual animals, yet it is fundamentally relational and therefore also suitable for analysis of more complex wholes. Since the birth of the modern environmental movement in the 1960s, there has been growing scientific and political acknowledgement of there being a global environmental crisis, which today manifests itself as a climate change and biodiversity crisis. This calls for a multi-scale ecosemiotic approach to analysis of human ecology at various levels and scales. In this article I explore to what extent ecosemiotic methodology, drawing on Umwelt theory and its consistently subjective perspective, can be applied in analysis of human ecology at different geographical and ecological scales ranging from the global to the local. The article incorporates a case study of human–animal relations in Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve in the Central Amazon. This is a seasonal floodplain forest area surrounded by rivers. I investigate aspects of the living conditions and ecology of the reserve, with a main focus on indigenous communities and the circumstances of two primate species, namely the red howler monkey (Alouatta seniculus) and the black-headed squirrel monkey (Saimiri vanzolinii). I outline matrixes of levels of study in ecosemiotics, and scales in human ecology, and apply two scales to the Mamirauá case. These take an individual animal’s and an individual human being’s subjective experience as their respectively starting points. This allows for multi-scale studies of human ecology from complementary angles.

中文翻译：

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亚马逊及其以外地区当前的人类生态学：一种多尺度生态符号学方法

Umwelt理论是vonUexküll的主观生物学表达，通常用于分析单个动物，但它从根本上是相关的，因此也适合分析更复杂的整体。自从20世纪60年代的现代环保运动的诞生，出现了有一个被越来越多的科学和政治的确认全球环境危机，今天表现为气候变化和生物多样性危机。这就要求采用多尺度的生态符号方法来分析各个层次和规模的人类生态。在本文中，我将基于Umwelt理论及其始终如一的主观视角，探索生态符号方法在多大程度上可以应用于从全球到本地的不同地理和生态规模的人类生态学分析。本文结合了中亚马逊地区Mamirauá可持续发展保护区中人与动物关系的案例研究。这是河流环绕的季节性泛滥森林地区。我研究保护区的生活条件和生态方面，主要关注土著社区和两种灵长类物种的情况，Alouatta seniculus）和黑头松鼠猴（Saimiri vanzolinii）。我概述了生态符号学的研究水平矩阵和人类生态学的规模，并对Mamirauá案应用了两个规模。这些将个体动物和个体人类的主观经验作为各自的出发点。这允许从互补的角度对人类生态学进行多尺度研究。