Abstract
Moran, E.F. 2010, Environmental Social Science: Human-Environment Interactions and Sustainability. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.
Highlights
For non-specialists, the best part of the book is probably the ‘technical’ passage, where the perspective of spatial approaches to the study of humanenvironment interactions is presented
A spatial perspective can improve our knowledge in the study of ‘traditional’ sociological or anthropological themes, but it becomes crucial for issues related to sustainability
A spatial approach means more than adding a geographical dimension to individuals’ actions. It means understanding the meaning of landscape and other geographical features both as important factors affecting agents’ behaviour and as the ultimate target of their actions
Summary
Moran’s book represents a nice attempt to furnish the reader with a basic understanding of the core ideas underlying both the natural and the social sciences. This task seems easier to accomplish for the natural sciences since these are deeply grounded in evolutionary theory and in a widely shared understanding of system ecology. The most important part of the book is devoted to a tentative sketch of what could be a true sustainability science. This is a challenging enterprise, going beyond the simple problem of merging knowledge coming from different disciplines and dealing with issues of complexity and multi-scale/multi-temporal analyses. One major merit of Moran’s work is probably that it highlights some of the main research priorities of the new field, e.g. the relationship between social institutions and the dynamics of natural resources, the evaluation of ecosystem goods and services, and a better understanding of how current urbanisation processes affect sustainability
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