Ecosystems and Society: do they really need to be bridged?

✍ Scribed by A. Basset

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 72 KB
• Volume: 17
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1052-7613
• DOI: 10.1002/aqc.899

✦ Synopsis

Ecosystems have emergent properties that have deeply affected the development of human culture, history, population dispersion, demography and economy. We are now used to considering human society as a social and economic system apart from natural ecosystems. Bridging the gap between ecosystems and societies (Odum, 1997) is a significant change in the way of looking at ecosystems, in particular their function as providers of exploitable renewable, resources. However, the very idea of bridging accepts implicitly the discreteness of ecosystems from societies, an idea not supported by natural nor by human history.

A step backward in our history shows that the spatial distribution of successful past societies was not random, but rather the result of favourable ecosystem conditions, which, in turn, were determined by emergent properties at local and regional scales. For most of our history, there has been a coupling between the emergence of cultural traits } intrinsically related to demographic growth } and emergent properties of ecosystems. This coupling has determined forms of co-evolution between cultural developments and ecosystem structures, functions, goods and services.

From a historical perspective, in modern times, the Enlightenment laid the theoretical foundation for the attitude of domination developed by man over Nature, providing the context for the de-coupling of human society and ecosystem structures and dynamics, even though human history is actually punctuated by local decouplings long before this period.

From a mechanistic point of view, the industrial revolution, which arose from the Enlightenment, accelerated the exploitation of natural resources to a rate which proved unsustainable in terms of both renewal time and metabolism of the materials resulting locally from human activities. At different spatial and temporal scales, well documented pollution events are also recorded by Greek and Roman histories (Shaler, 1905; Hutchinson, 1970; Colinvaux, 1980).

So, the central issue for sustainable exploitation of natural resources consists in bringing back man to his role as a component of a single system. This appears a more advanced and realistic task than insisting on trying to 'bridge' diverging pathways and scales, a cultural temptation pervasive of most approaches to environmental problems, and based on the belief that a sort of mitigation of this present attitude could be sufficient to 'bridge' contrasting mechanisms, processes, and scales.