A practice of conservation where ecological functions and evolutionary processes, which are thought to have existed in past ecosystems or before human influence, are deliberately restored or created..
Some fundamental questions and concepts
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Key Points
Mindset – see nature and humans as both unity and separate entities.
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What is nature and why?
Examples
Oostvaardersplassen (“Park O”)
Wilderness can be planned and engineered by humans.
The 15,000-acre Dutch nature park was carefully created in a densely populated region in Flevoland.
“Red deer roam the landscape, feral horses travel in herds, and an ecosystem of foxes and wild birds has arisen, including egrets and wild geese.”
Heck Cattle, the human-bred cousin of an extinct species, graze the landscape.
Species were carefully selected and introduced into the park.
Oostvaardersplassen (“Park O”)
Rewilding
Long-lost ecosystems are crafted by people from whole cloth, in order to reclaim – or create – landscape as they might have been before human influence.
A practice of conservation where ecological functions and evolutionary processes, which are thought to have existed in past ecosystems or before human influence, are deliberately restored or created.
Oostvaardersplassen (“Park O”)
Is this nature?
Anthropocene
A metaphoric term sometimes applied to our current era, when people exert enormous influence on environments all around the Earth, but where control of these environments and their enormously complex ecologies is inevitably elusive.
Key Points
Ecosystems: Concepts and Components
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Ecosystems
System
A network of interconnected and interdependent parts.
Ecosystem
The most basic unit of ecological analysis, which includes all the varieties and populations of living things that are interdependent in a given environment.
Environment: the biophysical existence.
Ecosystem: the “community” of things that live and interact.
Ecosystems
Organism
Any individual form of life, including plants and animals (e.g. a bird, a cat named Felix, you, and me).
Species
Individual organisms of the same kind (e.g. dolphins, oak trees, corn, humans).
Population
A collection of organisms of the same species living within a particular area.
Community
Populations of different organisms living and interacting in an area at a particular time (e.g. a fish pond in your community complex)
Ecosystems
Ecosystem
Communities and populations interacting with one another and with the chemical and physical factors making up the inorganic environment (e.g. the Amazon basin rainforest, the High Plains grasslands in the U.S.).
Biome
Large life and vegetation zones made of many smaller ecosystems (e.g. tropical grasslands or savannas).
Biosphere
The entire realm where life is found. It consists of the lower part of the atmosphere, the hydrosphere (all the bodies of water), and the lithosphere (the upper region of rocks and soil). Combined, the biosphere is a relatively thin, 20-km zone of life extending from the deepest ocean floor to the tops of the highest mountains.
Ecosystems
Cycles
Exchanges of energy, chemicals, and nutrients that bind the components of ecosystems and subsystems with the physical environment.
E.g. the carbon cycle.
Ecosystems
Food Chain
The transfer of food energy from its primary producer sources (green photosynthetic plants) through a series of consumer organisms where eating and being eaten is repeated a number of times.
Food chains incur loss of energy across the feeding ladder.
The more feeding levels, the less available cumulative energy.
Food pyramids: larger populations at lower trophic levels are needed to support smaller populations at higher trophic levels.
Ecosystems
Habitat
The location of an organism within an ecosystem.
Niche
The role of an organism in a community of organism that comprise an ecosystem.
Sometime niches overlap, but there is resource partitioning that makes it possible for different species to share the same habitat without much competition.
E.g. species inhabit and feed from different layers of rainforests: on the ground, short shrubs, understory, and high canopy.
Ecosystems
Carry Capacity
The largest population that an ecosystem can carry sustainably.
Clark’s analogy of bacteria in a petri dish.
David Klein’s study of reindeers on St. Matthews Island.
Key Points
Sociocultural Systems: Concepts and Components
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Sociocultural Systems
Like bees, gorillas, and dolphins, humans are social animals, and live in systems with interconnections and interdependences.
We can break down human social systems into structural units from small to large: individuals, families, communities, bureaucracies, societies, etc.
This is not very informative because it misses the most distinctive characteristic of homo sapiens: culture.
In sociocultural systems, human behavior (their interaction and communication) conform to cultural patterns.
Sociocultural Systems
Culture
The total learned way of life that people in groups share.
A product of nurture rather than nature.
Culture can be material or symbolic.
Examples of material culture: tools, factories, automobiles, weapons, computers.
Examples of symbolic culture: ideas, plans, beliefs.
Sociocultural Systems
Symbolic Culture
Worldviews, paradigms, ideologies, knowledge, beliefs, values, symbols, language.
Social structure
World-system, society, nation state, complex organizations (bureaucracies), social stratification systems, kinship systems.
Material infrastructure
Wealth, material culture, subsistence technologies.
Biophysical
Environment
Material
Infrastructure
Social
Structure
Symbolic
Culture
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Key Points
Contemplating human existence in nature
A thought experiment
Ways to decipher human-environment relations
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The Duality of Human Life
The cultural uniqueness of human beings has profound implications. It results in what can be seen as an existential dualism that underlies much of the debate about human-environment relationships.
On the one hand, humans and human systems are unarguably embedded in the broader webs of life in the biosphere. We are one species among many, both in terms of our biological makeup and our ultimate dependence for food and energy provided by the earth.
On the other hand, humans are the unique creators of technologies and sociocultural environments that have singular power to change, manipulate, destroy and sometimes transcend natural environmental limits.
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The Duality of Human Life
Biologists and ecologists usually emphasize the first part of this duality.
Social scientists typically place more emphasis on the second part.
The industrial revolution has leaned more people the to latter belief, hence we have the dominant social paradigm (DSP).
DSP is predicated on modern cultural beliefs that individualism, laissez-faire government, and private property rights are inherently good, and unlimited economic growth and progress is always possible.
The Duality of Human Life
Commonly agreed themes of the DSP.
Low evaluation of nature for its own sake.
Compassion mainly for those near and dear.
The assumption that maximizing wealth is important and risks are acceptable in doing so.
The assumption of no physical (“real”) limits to growth that cannot be overcome by technological inventiveness.
The assumption that modern society, culture, and politics are basically okay.
Key Points
Environmental Social Sciences
A thought experiment
Ways to decipher human-environment relations
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Environmental Social Sciences
Part 1: Approaches & Perspectives
Chapter 2: Population and Scarcity
Chapter 3: Markets and Commodities
Chapter 4: Institutions and “the Commons”
Chapter 5: Environmental Ethics
Chapter 6: Risks and Hazards
Chapter 7: Political Economy
Chapter 8: Social Construction of Nature
Part 2: Objects of Concern
Chapter 9: Carbon Dioxide
Chapter 10: Trees
Chapter 11: Wolves
Chapter 12: Uranium
Chapter 13: Tuna
Chapter 14: Lawns
Chapter 15: Bottled Water
Chapter 16: French Fries
Chapter 17: E-Waste
Demography, economics, institutions, social psychology, political economy
Environmental Social Sciences
Different approaches to environmental issues often disagree in their conclusions.
This helps examine different viewpoints in terms of their strengths and weaknesses.
Example: World Hunger
Too many people making demands on too limited natural resources.
Overregulation or market failures that make producing food unprofitable compared to other investments.
With sufficient food supply, hungry people are too poor to afford food and too powerless that governments do not respond to their needs.
Readings for Tuesday, September 3rd
Robbins book, Chapter 2.
Harper book, Chapter 5.
A practice of conservation where ecological functions and evolutionary processes, which are thought to have existed in past ecosystems or before human influence, are deliberately restored or created.
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