The initial edition of "Toward a Unified Ecology "was a provocative call to rescue Ecology from sterile reductionism. In this second edition, the authors present new intellectual approaches to evaluating communities, organisms, populations, biomes, models, and management. The book now places greater emphasis on post-normal critiques of science, cognizant of ever-present observer values in the system. The core problem the authors address is how ecologists can work holistically on complex things that cannot be defined, and they continue to build an approach to the problem of scaling in ecosystems. Provoked by complexity theory, the authors add a whole new chapter on the central role of narratives in science and how models improve them. The book takes data and modeling seriously, incorporating a sophisticated philosophy of science into modern Ecology.