Exploring Environmental Change Using an Integrative Method

✍ Scribed by Mark Lemon

• Publisher: CRC Press
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 258
• Series: Environmental Problems & Social Dynamics
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The traditional approach for diagnosing and managing environmental change has been to reduce complexity in an attempt to identify simple relationships. Such a view presupposes that a problem setting can be clearly bounded and dealt with through appropriate remedial action. It tends to reject the complex real world as a diagnostic force because of its inherent unpredictability. This text argues that an acceptance of this uncertainty should be the starting point for environmental diagnostics and will draw upon ''complex systems'' thinking to introduce a policy-relevant integrative method. This conveys how existing intellectual resources can be exploited to explore environmental decision issues without resorting to such devices as ''meta-methods'' or ''meta-disciplines''. A number of techniques are introduced from different disciplines such as social science, agricultural and environmental studies, systems thinking and modeling, which have been drawn together in an integrated method. This is primarily rel

✦ Table of Contents

Book Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Contents......Page 5
PREFACE......Page 8
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS......Page 10
Policy Relevant Research: The Nature of the Problem......Page 12
Towards an Integrative Method......Page 28
Background to Agriculture and Degradation in the Argolid Valley......Page 38
Social Enquiry and Natural Phenomena......Page 50
Complexity, Systems and Models......Page 82
Agricultural Production and Change......Page 94
Technology and Agricultural Production in the Argolid......Page 130
Structural Weaknesses and the Argolid?......Page 150
Perceived Uncertainty and Farming: Establishing a Framework for Crop Choice......Page 172
Policy Relevant Modelling in the Argolid: From Sociological Investigation to Crop Choice Model......Page 182
Towards a Strategic Complex Systems Model of the Water/Salt System......Page 200
The Strategic Model of Water Flow......Page 214
Development of an Enhanced Integrated Dynamic Model......Page 226
Where to From Here?......Page 242
REFERENCES......Page 252