Ecological Futures, the final book in Sing C. Chew's trilogy on world ecological degradation, proposes that our own era exhibits ecological conditions similar to those of the past. The climate changes, environmental crises, mass population migrations, and socioeconomic disorganization we find in our globalized world also characterized the Late Bronze Age and the period following the fall of the Roman Empire. Given such historical parallels, can history tell us what to expect? Analyzing past trends, Chew identifies a set of long-term structural changes common to previous systemic crises and suggests possible outcomes. These "possible futures" include the collapse of systems, territories, informational technologies, and communities in an era of scarce resources, political reorganization, and globalization.
Ecological Futures, the final book in Sing C. Chew's trilogy on world ecological degradation, proposes that our own era exhibits ecological conditions similar to those of the past. The climate changes, environmental crises, mass population migrations, and socioeconomic disorganization we find in our globalized world also characterized the Late Bronze Age and the period following the fall of the Roman Empire. Given such historical parallels, can history tell us what to expect? Analyzing past trends, Chew identifies a set of long-term structural changes common to previous systemic crises and suggests possible outcomes. These 'possible futures' include the collapse of systems, territories, informational technologies, and communities in an era of scarce resources, political reorganization, and globalization.
Ecological economics can help create the future that most people want – a future that is prosperous, just, equitable and sustainable. This forward-thinking book lays out an alternative approach that places the sustainable wellbeing of humans and the rest of nature as the overarching goal. Each of the book’s chapters, written by a diverse collection of scholars and practitioners, outlines a research and action agenda for how this future can look and possible actions for its realisation.
Concerns about the exploitation of limited resources, optimum development trajectories, and climate change draw attention to the temporal horizons of our environment - Environmental Futures is a curated collection of essays that explores different ways of knowing the future and how these futures shape contemporary social worlds. Includes a range of detailed case studies, from ice melting in Antarctica to coal mining in Bangladesh, flooding in Colombia to climate modelling in Egypt Approaches prognosis as a cultural, political, and material process Reveals the ways in which authority and expertise may be reinforced, circumscribed, or contested in the process of making a prediction and its aftermath Offers novel insights on how and why futures come to be significant in the present
Predicting Future Oceans: Sustainability of Ocean and Human Systems Amidst Global Environmental Change provides a synthesis of our knowledge of the future state of the oceans. The editors undertake the challenge of integrating diverse perspectives—from oceanography to anthropology—to exhibit the changes in ecological conditions and their socioeconomic implications. Each contributing author provides a novel perspective, with the book as a whole collating scholarly understandings of future oceans and coastal communities across the world. The diverse perspectives, syntheses and state-of-the-art natural and social sciences contributions are led by past and current research fellows and principal investigators of the Nereus Program network. This includes members at 17 leading research institutes, addressing themes such as oceanography, biodiversity, fisheries, mariculture production, economics, pollution, public health and marine policy. This book is a comprehensive resource for senior undergraduate and postgraduate readers studying social and natural science, as well as practitioners working in the field of natural resources management and marine conservation. - Provides a synthesis of our knowledge on the future state of the oceans - Includes recommendations on how to move forwards - Highlights key social aspects linked to ocean ecosystems, including health, equity and sovereignty
Radical ecology typically brings to mind media images of ecological activists standing before loggers' saws, staging anti-nuclear marches, and confronting polluters on the high seas. Yet for more than twenty years, the activities of organizations such as the Greens and Earth First! have been influenced by a diverse, less-publicized group of radical ecological philosophers. It is their work—the philosophical underpinnings of the radical ecological movement—that is the subject of Contesting Earth's Future. The book offers a much-needed, balanced appraisal of radical ecology's principles, goals, and limitations. Michael Zimmerman critically examines the movement's three major branches—deep ecology, social ecology, and ecofeminism. He also situates radical ecology within the complex cultural and political terrain of the late twentieth century, showing its relation to Martin Heidegger's anti-technological thought, 1960s counterculturalism, and contemporary theories of poststructuralism and postmodernity. An early and influential ecological thinker, Zimmerman is uniquely qualified to provide a broad overview of radical environmentalism and delineate its various schools of thought. He clearly describes their defining arguments and internecine disputes, among them the charge that deep ecology is an anti-modern, proto-fascist ideology. Reflecting both the movement's promise and its dangers, this book is essential reading for all those concerned with the worldwide ecological crisis.
Simulation modeling is arguably the most versatile scientific tool for predicting the future environment. However, the reliability of model-based predictions is limited to the behavior domain defined by the historical data employed for conceptualizing and calibrating the model. Future changes in external inputs and internal structure tend to produce system behavior significantly different from prior predictions. To abate this seeming lack of credibility, it is now customary to qualify model predictions with uncertainty estimates. This dissertation explores the complementary approach of back-casting future scenarios. Centered on the analysis of uncertainty, a methodological framework is developed for the computational evaluation of environmental futures, driven by stakeholder participation as a means for establishing credibility in the model. The analysis reveals possible structural change between the observed past and speculated future scenarios by comparing the ranking of key sources of uncertainty in model outputs. Three sampling-based methods are employed: Regionalized Sensitivity Analysis (RSA), Tree-Structured Density Estimation (TSDE), and Uniform Covering by Probabilistic Rejection (UCPR). RSA and TSDE are tested for identifying and ranking the key factors that influence ecological behavior in Lake Oglethorpe, Georgia, and UCPR, for recovering parameters of a rainfall-runoff model of an experimental watershed near Loch Ard, Scotland. The framework is applied to an integrated assessment of ecological behavior in Lake Lanier, Georgia. Stakeholders' fears and desires for the future state of the reservoir are elicited and encoded for analysis. The results indicate: (i) that the desired future is more reachable, and accompanied by more significant structural change, than the feared future, and (ii) that sediment-water-nutrient interactions, secondary production, and microbial processes play a critical role in the future ecological behavior of the reservoir. Thus, it is possible to: (i) confirm or refute stakeholder concerns for the future environment, (ii) inform priorities for future environmental policy actions, (iii) identify critical gaps in current knowledge, in order to prioritize future scientific research, and (iv) promote adaptive community learning, through the continual mutual feedback between scenario-generation and systematic analysis. By bridging the gap between stakeholder imagination and scientific theory, through computational analysis, the framework provides a promising direction for integrated environmental assessment.
Timothy Morton argues that ecological awareness in the present Anthropocene era takes the form of a strange loop or Möbius strip, twisted to have only one side. Deckard travels this oedipal path in Blade Runner (1982) when he learns that he might be the enemy he has been ordered to pursue. Ecological awareness takes this shape because ecological phenomena have a loop form that is also fundamental to the structure of how things are. The logistics of agricultural society resulted in global warming and hardwired dangerous ideas about life-forms into the human mind. Dark ecology puts us in an uncanny position of radical self-knowledge, illuminating our place in the biosphere and our belonging to a species in a sense that is far less obvious than we like to think. Morton explores the logical foundations of the ecological crisis, which is suffused with the melancholy and negativity of coexistence yet evolving, as we explore its loop form, into something playful, anarchic, and comedic. His work is a skilled fusion of humanities and scientific scholarship, incorporating the theories and findings of philosophy, anthropology, literature, ecology, biology, and physics. Morton hopes to reestablish our ties to nonhuman beings and to help us rediscover the playfulness and joy that can brighten the dark, strange loop we traverse.
Ecological resilience provides a theoretical foundation for understanding how complex systems adapt to and recover from localized disturbances like hurricanes, fires, pest outbreaks, and floods, as well as large-scale perturbations such as climate change. Ecologists have developed resilience theory over the past three decades in an effort to explain surprising and nonlinear dynamics of complex adaptive systems. Resilience theory is especially important to environmental scientists for its role in underpinning adaptive management approaches to ecosystem and resource management. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is a collection of the most important articles on the subject of ecological resilience—those writings that have defined and developed basic concepts in the field and help explain its importance and meaning for scientists and researchers. The book’s three sections cover articles that have shaped or defined the concepts and theories of resilience, including key papers that broke new conceptual ground and contributed novel ideas to the field; examples that demonstrate ecological resilience in a range of ecosystems; and articles that present practical methods for understanding and managing nonlinear ecosystem dynamics. Foundations of Ecological Resilience is an important contribution to our collective understanding of resilience and an invaluable resource for students and scholars in ecology, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, sustainability, environmental science, public policy, and related fields.
