As ecology has advanced as a science over the past century, theory has played a critical role in fostering hypothesis generation and providing a basis for generalizations to arise from field and experimental observations. Concurrently, ecology has moved away from an early emphasis on pristine systems to acknowledge the importance of inclusion of human activities on natural systems. These two factors have both impacted the development of ecology but have not been highly integrated. Classic ecological theory largely ignores human factors, emphasizing biotic interactions without either including human actors or accounting for human impacts on the interactions of other species, or else focusing on abiotic factors without explicit consideration of how human actions modify the abiotic environment. Exceptions to this include human-driven harvesting and conservation interventions, impacts of anthropogenic climate change, and accounting for economic valuation of resource extraction and ecological services as these affect biological system sustainability. This Symposium will offer perspectives on methods to more directly incorporate human actions in general ecological theory, suggest areas that could fruitfully benefit from this inclusion, and illustrate cases in which incorporation of human actions and behaviors has modified ecological insight. Historically, ecology has been framed in the context of graphical, numerical, or mathematical analysis of continuous equations which abstracted the dynamics of interacting organisms/populations. Social science methods to model human behavior utilize a very similar set of quantitative modeling approaches as those used in ecological theory, considering similar questions such as how macro-scale properties of the components of a system arise from the interactions of many separate entities. Modern social science techniques include a growing collection of quantitative approaches to analyze human behavior from that of individuals, to social networks, and to broad-scale societies. Parallel current developments in ecology have also broadened the available toolkit to now also include computational approaches (not based on continuous mathematics) that provide the capability to explicitly account for the multiple spatial, temporal and organismal scales at which natural systems operate. Concurrent with this expansion of approaches has been development of statistical methods to evaluate alternative models and connect theory to data. A tenet of this Symposium is that it is now appropriate to develop a more interconnected body of ecological theory that incorporates human behaviors and goes beyond the mostly static approach to human impacts on natural systems that has characterized the limited interconnected models developed to date.