Ecological Matters Research Articles

How to understand giants?

PurposeThe paper is aimed at understanding and investigating Gregory Bateson's and Heinz von Foerster's peculiar relation to knowledge, the unknowable, and research. From this, the question of how to carry on their heritage is raised.Design/methodology/approachThe whole paper is designed as an epistemological experiment starting from reflections on Gregory Bateson's metalogues and adopting a methodological style of reasoning. A strong focus is laid on the combination of loose and strict thinking which is characteristic of both Heinz von Foerster and Gregory Bateson.FindingsIn order to preserve and further develop their heritage, it is necessary to deal with Bateson's and Foerster's view(s) on the relations between the unknowable and the meaning of research. This has to be done in a manner in which epistemology and research become a personal as well ecological matter in which the relationship between the single individual and its greater context becomes explicit.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper refuses to view science and cybernetics within predefined boundaries. It suggests that the form of science and its relations to the individual and the community should be viewed as processes of constant re‐generation.Originality/valueThe value of this paper lies in viewing the similarities of Bateson's and von Foerster's peculiar style as general guidelines for future research and an understanding of epistemology.

Ecology, politics and policy

Summary ‘The British Ecological Society aims to promote the science of ecology through research and to use the findings of such research to educate the public and influence policy decisions which involve ecological matters.’ Yet, how successful have we been in influencing UK and EU environmental policy? Many scientists hold to the ‘deficit model’ of turning science into policy, the view that if only politicians are told what the science reveals, ‘correct’ policies will automatically follow. Nothing could be further from the truth. Politicians have all kinds of reasons, some valid, some less valid, not to adopt what often seem to us to be common sense policies to protect the environment. Here, I explore some of the successes and failures of ecologists to influence UK and European environmental policy, using acid deposition, the collapse of global marine fisheries, GM crops and climate change, carbon dioxide and ocean acidification as examples. I briefly review the extensive literature (largely ignored by natural scientists) on what social scientists have to say about evidence‐based policy‐making (or the lack of it) and why it often appears to be so difficult to persuade politicians to adopt sound environmental policies. Synthesis and applications. Ecologists can, and do, influence government policy on the environment, but often via complex and iterative interactions that can be painfully slow, and may require fundamental changes in politicians’ belief systems, values and norms.

Ecology matters: sustainable development in Southeast Asia

Based on empirical evidence in Southeast Asia, this paper critically evaluates the concept of sustainable development based on four themes: population growth and distribution, the capitalistic system, ecological systems and the nature of development. It argues that the development of capitalism took place in both Europe and Asia and is thus culturally neutral. Capitalism, however, is associated with materialistic values and the growth of consumption, and hence is a major social process and structure in undermining ecosystems and biodiversity. While the concept of sustainable development has varied interpretations, this paper asserts the need to contextualize sustainable development with an ecosystem paradigm, whether qualified as cultural, human, political or cultural. Given that cities are likely to be the norm of living in the future, it is imperative that governments focus on sustainable urban development. Cities have two very different environmental contexts. The intra-urban area is a human engineered landscape that is confronted by ‘brown issues.’ These brown issues are exacerbated by the lower circuit of urban dwellers, the poor slum and squatter dwellers. The upper circuit of wealthy, urban residents contribute to the wider extra-urban ecological implications due to their high consumption patterns. They are the major contributors to the size of the ecological footprint. The paper concludes that though there are many prescriptions to curb environmental deterioration and ecological degradation, the long-term solutions will lie in changing consumption habits, lifestyle goals and value systems. These require an ecological prescription in political thinking, economic activities and educational systems.

How Does History Matter in Ecology?

Cuddington, Kim, and Beatrix E. Beisner, editors. 2005. Ecological paradigms lost: routes of theory change. Theoretical Ecology Series. Elsevier, Burlington, Massachusetts. xxiv + 435 p. $79.95, ISBN: 0-12-088459-3 (alk. paper).

Sustainable models for multidisciplinary cancer care

Complexity and multi-disciplinary represent the challenge that the design and construction of sustainable buildings have to face. The nature and quantity of information needed are further considerations which lead to re-thinking the whole design process. The architect alone cannot have all the skills required, so he/she should be able to rely on other specialized professionals. In some European countries, environmental consultancy—which deals with ecology matters—is becoming more and more crucial for the design of a successful building. Taking into account two British consultancy companies—investigated as case studies—this paper looks at the way the design process related to complex projects is managed, and at the effects on the architectural sector.

Embracing Uncertainty, Complexity and Change: An Eco-Pragmatic Reinvention of a First Generation Environmental Law

Recent scientific reports demonstrate that despite more than thirty years of environmental regulation, we are experiencing unprecedented declines in bird and wildlife species, as well as ecosystem services. Pesticides are at least in part to blame for these profound declines. U.S. pesticide law has failed to carryout its mission. Moreover, a number of lawsuits have been filed recently asserting that the registration of certain pesticides is in violation of the federal endangered species act. One of the great ironies of environmental law is that the ecological consequences of pesticide use, such as the devastating impacts DDT had on predatory bird populations, which fueled the environmental movement of the late 1960's and early 1970's, largely have been ignored for the past 30 years. Only very recently has there been renewed interest in the ecological (as opposed to human health) risks posed by pesticides. Moreover, the explosion of pesticidal genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture has raised concerns regarding the novel risks to biodiversity posed by these new pesticides. Surprisingly, however, the primary federal statute governing pesticides, the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), has not changed significantly with regard to ecological matters since 1972 and remains primarily a consumer protection statute not well suited for ecological protection. Moreover, the manner in which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has implemented FIFRA has not kept pace with developments in our understanding of the uncertainty, complexity, and changing nature of ecological systems. This Article breaks new ground by being the first to use the new legal discipline of to analyze, and then reinvent, U.S. pesticide law to better protect ecological resources. For years, environmental legal scholars have sought a middle ground between absolutist risk-based approaches to environmental regulation and cost/benefit analysis approaches. In the past several years, scholars have begun exploring the emerging field of eco-pragmatism - a dramatic new framework for environmental decision-making developed by Professor Daniel Farber - as a way to achieve a workable middle ground. Although a number of prominent legal scholars have analyzed eco-pragmatism in a general sense, none have attempted to apply an eco-pragmatic framework to any environmental pollution control law. This Article is the first to do so. This Article builds on Farber's work and the works of a number of other prominent legal scholars by first bolstering eco-pragmatism through consciously incorporating into it principles of ecological science, and then applying the strengthened eco-pragmatism to a long overlooked area - pesticide law. As the first attempt to actually apply eco-pragmatism to a field of environmental pollution control law, this Article represents an important step in the development of this area of legal theory. By analyzing current pesticide law as well as EPA's implementation of such law through an eco-pragmatic lens, this Article identifies areas of the law that are in need of revision and proposes revisions based on eco-pragmatic principles, which if implemented would greatly enhance our ability to protect critical ecological resources.

Cultural ecology: placing households in human-environment studies - the cases of tropical forest transitions and agrobiodiversity change

Cultural ecology is today at a place of rapidly expanding interconnections with the growing number of human-environment approaches in geography and other fields. Productive interconnections are evidenced, for example, in the extensive debate and discussion within geography that surround the varied relations (e.g., theory, methods, roles of science and representation, scale and subject matter) of cultural ecology to political ecology, since the latter is regarded as a chief cognate approach. Sufficient similarities evident in that dialogue led to the renaming of the specialty group within the Association of American Geographers as Cultural and Political Ecology (CAPE). This broadly based cultural ecology is currently counted as one of the most active and popular of the specialty groups within the organization, and it is the largest of the groups that are focused on human-environment interaction. Reaching this position has occurred though a process of incremental growth over the course of the period since 1960 in a range of distinct subfields, such as cultural-historical ecology, human ecology, systems ecology and adaptive-dynamics ecology. Cultural ecology thus conveys the sense of an umbrella approach, which continues to serve as the integrator for a considerable variety of subfields. While broad in scope, the approach of cultural ecology is also sharing new interconnections with the expanding suite of other human-environment approaches. For example, the ‘human dimensions of global change’ appears to share a defining emphasis on the interaction of global environmental processes with local actors and institutions that is common to much of cultural ecology. The interconnections of cultural ecology with political ecology and with ‘human dimensions’ is typically dialogic, often to a high degree, in that most studies associated with one field are actively informed by and engaged with the others. This dialogic tendency in cultural ecology is found also in relation to various other distinctly framed approaches toward human-environment interaction (in geography as well as anthropology, sociology and environmental studies). Several intersecting points

Ecology of Humic Substances in Freshwaters

Christian E.W. Steinberg (Editor), 2003, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Germany, 429 p. (Hardcover, US $109.00) ISBN: 3-540-43922-6. The Ecology of Humic Substances in Freshwaters is a comprehensive book describing how dead organic matter (i.e., humic substances—HS) affects abiotic and biotic processes in freshwaters. The editor and author, Christian E. W. Steinberg, writes in the Introduction that “the link of ecology and dead may look like a strange alliance, since most limnological studies involve living organisms, and their interaction with the surrounding environment”, and, consequently, not the opposite. However, after reading the book, the link between ecology and dead organic matter seems very reasonable and not at all strange. The ecological role of dissolved humic substances in ecosystems is extensive. It involves several processes, such as: determining and changing water chemistry; reducing the bioconcentration and toxicity of xenobiotics and metals; effects on the bioavailability of inorganic nutrients, which have consequences on food-web dynamics and total energy production in lakes; and mineralization of HS by heterotrophic bacteria and by light, which promotes inorganic carbon gas production and, for the latter, production of reactive oxygen species. The aims of the book are to cover these processes, as well as several additional processes, and to illustrate known and further discuss unknown properties of HS in aquatic freshwater ecosystems. The book is 440 pages long and consists of 10 chapters (outlined below), all of which are written by the editor, Christian E. W. Steinberg. The text has a wide range of approaches, and starts from the chemical building and origin of HS and ends up with the ecological significance of HS in aquatic ecosystems. The book is very well written and organized in a clear and consistent manner, with nicely illustrated and easily read figures and tables. Each chapter ends with a graphical summary, illustrating a lake, …

Experimental floods in the River Sp�l, Swiss National Park: Framework, objectives and design

Between 2000 to 2002, 11 experimental floods were released from 2 reservoirs separating different regulated segments of the Spol River in the Swiss National Park. The riverbed of the Spol had been altered substantially by regulated flows since energy production started in 1970. This 3-year experiment aimed to test whether an annual flood regime could restore riverine dynamics to this regulated river and, if so, how the floods must be managed in respect to a minimal but regular flow disturbance required to maintain riverine dynamics in a near natural state. This article outlines the framework, objectives and design of the experimental flood program on the River Spol. The study involved a number of institutions controlling operational, economical, legal and ecological matters related to the floods, and was planned under the constraint that the floods would result in no increase in total water release during each year and no loss in total energy production. Concomitant cross-disciplinary environmental studies monitored the diverse impacts of each flood on the respective regulated segments. The various results, as shown in the accompanying reports, suggest that one or two annual high flows may be sufficient to enhance and sustain the ecological integrity of the Spol over the long term.

Ridge, I. (ed) Plants

Ridge, I. (ed) Plants

The Theological Structure of Christian Faith and the Feasibility of a Global Ecological Ethic

Scientific evolutionary/ecological thinking is the basis for today's understanding that we are now in an ecological crisis. Religions, however, often resist reordering their thinking in light of scientific ideas, and this presents difficulties in trying to develop a viable global ecological ethic. In both the West and Asia religiomoral ecological concerns continue to be formulated largely in terms of traditional concepts rather than in more global terms, as scientific thinking about ecological matters might encourage them to do. The majority of this article is devoted to the kind of reformulation of Western Christian conceptions of God, humanity, and the relation between them that is necessary to address this problem. The question is then raised whether similar critical thinking about religiomoral issues raised by today's evolutionary/ecological scientific thinking is going on in Asian religions and whether it would be too presumptuous (in view of our colonial history) for us Westerners to ask for such rethinking. This leads to a final question: Without such transformations in religious traditions East and West, is the development of a truly global ecological ethic really feasible?

Latitude Does Matter in Behavioral Ecology

Latitude Does Matter in Behavioral Ecology

Latitude Does Matter in Behavioral Ecology

Latitude Does Matter in Behavioral Ecology

Environmental management of the design process. Managing multidisciplinary design: the role of environmental consultancy

Complexity and multi-disciplinary represent the challenge that the design and construction of sustainable buildings have to face. The nature and quantity of information needed are further considerations which lead to re-thinking the whole design process. The architect alone cannot have all the skills required, so he/she should be able to rely on other specialized professionals. In some European countries, environmental consultancy—which deals with ecology matters—is becoming more and more crucial for the design of a successful building. Taking into account two British consultancy companies—investigated as case studies—this paper looks at the way the design process related to complex projects is managed, and at the effects on the architectural sector.

Sustainable Agriculture: A Matter of Ecology, Equity, Economic Efficiency or Expedience?

ABSTRACT Sustainability is the paradigm of our time, yet its use as a guide to planning or decision making is clouded by its ambiguity and the multiplicity of definitions in use. In this paper we address the issue of how best to deal with the multi-faceted nature of sustainability. We outline each of the facets of sustainability that have been discussed in the literature, but suggest that most of them boil down to three basic concepts: environmental stability, intergenerational equity and economic efficiency. Nevertheless, it remains difficult to link the concept to practical actions and decisions. We argue that a multiple criteria decision making approach is the best solution to this problem. This is consistent with the use of “sustainability indicators,” but such indicators need to be selected carefully to be relevant to the essential elements of sustainability.

Ecosystems emerging: 1. conservation

This second paper in the series on Ecosystems Emerging treats some properties of ecosystems derivable from the single elementary principle of conservation. These go beyond the mere balancing out of the matter and forces of nature. A brief sketch of a conservationless world is given, followed by an elementary background review of energy, matter and information. The main conservative quantities are matter, energy, momentum and electric charge. The difference between sun and earth surface temperatures is the source of useful energy (exergy) and information to motivate matter. The earth acts as a photon multiplier in this process, and generates entropy radiated to the universe at large. Neither exergy, information, nor photons are conservative quantities. Four phases of matter are recognized: solid, liquid, gaseous and living. These contribute to five realms of the earth's ecosphere: lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrophere, biosphere and noosphere. An additional category, the semiosphere, represents informational aspects of the materialistic ecosphere. Information is related to Aristotle's four causes: formal, material, efficient and final. Information has a material basis; its physical carriers are conservative markers, or avatars. Information is always produced by bonding of masses to form higher-level systems; the energy to achieve bonding is released in degraded form (heat) and carried away by low-energy photons in entropy production. All systems owe their cohesion to bonding (interaction). System bonding may be by conservative substance exchange (transactions) or nonconservative information exchange (relations). In both cases, identity constraints of coupling mediate the bonds. A universal metamodel for system change is described under state-space determinism. Exogenous conditions (inputs), and endogenous conditions (states) are lawfully mapped into behavioral dynamics (outputs). There are two fundamentally different kinds of state-space systems: objects (nonliving, which respond reactively to physical inputs); and subjects (living, which can respond proactively based on phenomenal inputs, which are models of physical inputs). The ability to make models is conjectured as a new definition of life. In living processes, elements of the materialistic ecosphere and informational semiosphere are combined to produce the phenomenal noosphere. All three categories are mutually implicative. Arguments are made to consider space as locally conserved and time as conserved. The nature of transactional (materialistic) and relational (informational) bonding in the origin of systems, under state-space determinism, is described. The conservation principle underlies this because transactions are always the prior basis of relations. Environments arise under the same considerations as origin of systems; conservation is at the root. Input environment, output environment and indirect environment are described as elements of a general concept of environment. Indirect environments are bounded by the speed of light, and (closer in) by the boundaries of defined systems. The within-system portions of component-level environments are environs. Energy balance and photon multiplication in the ecosphere are described as a series of electromagnetic cascades. Charge-discharge cycles of energy and matter are mechanisms for progressively degrading solar photons to heat in coupled solar → trophic → biochemical interactions at different scales of hierarchical organization. The conservation principle underlies all these processes. A review of the broad phenomena, concepts and principles of ecology reveals that many of these have strong dependence on conservation of mass, energy, momentum and electric charge, as well as local space and time. Just as conservation laws are basic in the organization of reality, they are also rightly reflected in much of the subject matter of ecology.

In memoriam: On the death of the ‘market mechanism’

The concept of the market mechanism emerged in the 1940s as a central feature in the thinking of the economics profession in the United States. With improved knowledge of the scientific laws of the market, economists argued that society could use the instrument of the market to achieve a wide range of social goals with maximal efficiency and effectiveness. For example, many economists have argued that the reduction of poverty is best accomplished by manipulating the labor market through the 'negative income tax' or other technical devices. Health care, other economists have more recently argued, should be provided through various forms of 'managed competition', based on market incentives. The concept of the market mechanism has also been applied widely to ecological matters. Economists have proposed that, if a given reduction in pollution emissions is the goal, this reduction is efficiently achieved by allocating rights to pollute and then allowing market trading in these rights (Dales, 1968; Pearce et al., 1989). A carbon tax is often advocated as an effective way of using market forces to achieve a desired reduction in carbon dioxide emissions for global warming purposes (OECD, 1992). Other economists have argued that conservation of water supplies and thus avoidance of the need to build environmentally harmful dams and other water facilities is efficiently achieved by creating a system of water rights and then allowing market trading in these rights (Anderson, 1983). Many other types of environmental objectives could in principle be achieved by setting a target and then using the market mechanism to realize this goal (Tietenberg, 1993; Zylicz, 1991 ). Economists have typically also argued that the market mechanism, like other tools of professional economics, is a value-neutral device. Its efficiency and effectiveness rest on technical grounds alone, economists assert, that are independent of any particular cultural or broader value circumstances. However, as this paper will argue, the economic case for the market mechanism is actually grounded in the existence of a particular set of social values. If these values were, in fact, commonly rejected in society, markets would lose the efficiency advantages that mainstream economics claims for them. To be sure, the values on which market efficiency depends have, in fact, been broadly accepted in American life. That is why the market mechanism has been as widely proposed and in a number of cases sometimes involving the environment used successfully. To be specific, the particular value-system that has supported the functioning of the market mechanism in the United States has been the belief in economic progress. The market is an engine of great social dislocation as well as economic advance. American society has been willing to tolerate the major dislocations because it has believed that they

Power‐trading and the environment

It is not democracy, but politics that is the problem in arriving at sound common decisions in ecological matters, as in many others. Politics, democratic or not, is a matter of generalised power‐trading. Every political player has some say over many outcomes, only a few of which have a direct effect on his or her welfare. The political game consists largely in power‐trading, selling one's power in matters to which one is relatively indifferent in order to secure the exercise of power in one's favour in more ‘important’ contexts. In this game, ecological considerations inevitably fare badly in most cases. Even where there is agreement about the need to act, there is no agreement about who is to bear the costs. In ordinary discourse we usually call a decision ‘political’ to the extent that it is the result of power‐trading. The basic principle of sound democracy is that decisions on any matter should be made only by agents who are genuinely representative of those who are directly and materially affected by those decisions. This involves a functional decentralisation of power to specialised authorities, not necessarily local communities, but a network of communities of interest. One crucial question then is, how to represent the interests of those who cannot speak for themselves? Suggestions are offered about appropriate selection procedures. Another is, how to finance an ecologically and democratically sound system? The answer lies in charging heavily for the use of land and natural resources. Finally, the practical questions are always very specific ones. In order to act well we do not need to share the same ecological vision, much less to enforce it by massive political action, but only to empower those who bear the consequences of particular actions and failures to act.

Taxic evolutionary paleoecology and the ecological context of macroevolutionary change

A traditional focus of evolutionary paleoecology has been the reconstruction of the selective forces that have affected evolving lineages through time. If the history of those lineages is dominated by stasis and punctuation, however, this is at best an inadequate and at worst a misdirected research strategy for macroevolution, because long-term stasis implies that environmental factors may have less influence on evolving lineages than previously believed. Such reasoning has led some proponents of punctuated views to reject ecological interactions as predominant or even significant forces in evolution. This is not a necessary conclusion. It is possible to accept the empirical predominance of stasis in evolution and at the same time the importance of ecology in affecting the course of evolutionary trends within lineages. If stasis prevails, ecology matters in the evolution of lineages if either (1) stabilizing selection is an important cause of stasis or (2) ecological interactions play an important role in controlling the speciation process. Viewing allopatric speciation explicitly as a three-stage process (consisting of formation, persistence and differentiation of isolated populations) clarifies testing of the role of ecology in speciation and may redirect clade-specific evolutionary paleoecology towards more enlightening interaction with other areas of macroevolutionary study.

The Unbearable Lightness of Leaving

For the past fifteen years, I have been leading a double life. By day, I've served as Editor of this journal, which I founded in 1958, and I've also edited the line of film books published, like the journal, by the University of California Press. But by night and on weekends, I have been writing and lecturing in an entirely different field: ecology. Most people in the film world have no inkling that to another community I'm known as the author of the novel Ecotopia, which has sold about 600,000 copies in eight languages. And people concerned with ecology are astonished to learn that I also edit a respectable magazine of film criticism. There is actually one connection that has kept this double life from being truly schizoid: movies are about seeing, and Ecotopia is an attempt to see, in quite a literal way, what a world run on ecological rather than economic first principles might look like. (And yes, there is a script, and against all the usual odds it still might someday get produced.) But there has still been a severe strain involved, and when the University offered earlyretirement inducements to its staff and faculty I decided the time had come to concentrate my energies on ecological matters and turn both the filmbook line and Film Quarterly over to other hands. A book publisher's life is full of meetings, financial plans, and an endless chivying of projects through the complexities of large organizations. Film Quarterly, by contrast, was my own fief; it had to be, since there was no money to pay anybody else for editorial duties. The reward for the resulting arduousness was a rare kind of independence. Nonetheless, it's exhilarating to think that I will now be able to read whatever I feel like, without any nagging worries whether it's useful for editorial tasks. I will even be able to see movies without ulterior motives, as I loved to do in my first rush of youthful enthusiasm for the art. And as I travel on ecological errands, I will still count on dropping in at the cinematheques in Copenhagen or Vienna or Jakarta, where Film Quarterly has been welcomed warmly for so many decades. But I leave with great regrets. The editing of a journal, at least as I have tried to do it, is an enterprise involving deep attachments-not only to the art itself but just as much to the writers, board members, regional editors, and fellow friends of film (including some distributors and exhibitors) who have over these long, long years so devotedly contributed their talents and their concern to the journal. Despite my ruthless editorial pencil I am at heart a sentimental creature, and as I think back over the many people who have mattered in the little universe of Film Quarterly I am deeply touched by the solidarity of our tribe. May it long endure.