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Ecological Novelty: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Ecological Change in the Anthropocene

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Grounding Global Climate Change

Abstract

This chapter presents a broad view of an ecological science in search of new paradigms for tackling the ecological challenges of the Anthropocene. In a first part, I introduce the concept of ‘ecological novelty’ to characterise ongoing environmental change. The environmental change that brings about ecological novelty can be characterised by at least six attributes: it is (1) man-made, (2) large, (3) very fast, (4) multi-dimensional, (5) variable, unknown and unpredictable and (6) of global extent and even affecting remote wilderness areas. In the second and third parts, I focus on two fundamental challenges that ecological novelty poses for ecological research: (i) distinguishing between nature and culture as separate realms of scientific investigation becomes obsolete; and (ii) understanding how ecological systems change requires embracing the complexities of ecosystems under real-world conditions (as opposed to controlled experimental settings) resulting from open system boundaries, contingencies and historicity. Ecology has long explored the transition zone between the natural and social sciences, and can significantly contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of societal adaptation, whether to climate or more generally to environmental change.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Deoxyribonucleic acid, a molecule containing genetic information.

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Acknowledgments

This article substantially profited from inspirations gained at the conference on “Understanding and managing ecological novelty” held at Monte Verita (Ticino, Switzerland) in September 2011, as well as the conference on “Climate change: global scenarios and local experiences” and the workshop entitled “Towards an interdisciplinary understanding of ecology novelty” that took place at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF, Universität Bielefeld, Germany) in October 2011 and August 2012, respectively. I would also like to thank Peter Edwards, Heike Greschke, Julia Tischler and Marc Hall for helpful comments on an earlier version of the article.

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    Christoph Kueffer

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  1. Institute of Sociology – Faculty of Social Sciences and Cultural Studies, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen, Hessen, Germany

    Heike Greschke

  2. International Research Center “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History”, Humboldt University, Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Julia Tischler

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Kueffer, C. (2015). Ecological Novelty: Towards an Interdisciplinary Understanding of Ecological Change in the Anthropocene. In: Greschke, H., Tischler, J. (eds) Grounding Global Climate Change. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9322-3_2

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