Community or one component of an ecosystem

When talking about the survival of societies an important concept is community since local communities are the basic socially self-sufficient unit of a society, families are a further division and they are the building blocks of communities. But the concept itself and as used in common speech is quite vague and imprecise, often used confusingly or without an exact meaning. So here I’ll do a basic examination of the word from a its scientific meaning and relate it to human societies.

One of the classes I took for VCE is environmental science and there was a specific term for what a community was. It was the living components of an ecosystem, or biotic, with the environment forming the non-living, abiotic, component. From this point we can get several conclusions; first that the community of an urban environment also includes the vermin, pets and various plants or microbes that live there as well as humans, second that it is only one part of a greater whole and must work with the non-living components of the ecosystem its embedded in, thirdly that a human community in its most basic definition just accounts for who lives in a set area wether or not they interact much. When we talk about community we normally only mean relationships between humans and often restrict them to personal/social relationships but this ignores the vast amount of life living there, domesticated plants and animals are only some of them, that humans have formed intricate bonds with over the time we have been on the earth and the vast variation of inter-human relationships that exist. The communities we live in are far more than the people who live in them.