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Complexity and Resilience in the Social and Ecological Sciences pp 77–145Cite as

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Social-Ecological Resilience: Human Ecology as Theory of the Middle Range

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Abstract

This chapter focuses on questions of operationalisation and measurement, by identifying several points of compatibility between complexity theory and resilience-based human ecology. It argues that a resilience, as opposed to engineering approach, offers a means to bring questions of environment and ecology more clearly into the complexity programme, and to inform a systems-based social science of environment. Researchers operating under the rubric of resilience ecology have adapted many heuristics which greatly assist the task of operationalising the abstract theories of Chaps. 1 and 2, and this approach resolves much of the restrictive ‘optimal state’ assumptions associated with classical systems theory. The chapter considers several useful heuristics to assess system constitution and change, such as the concepts of adaptive cycles, panarchy, regime and identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Steiner and Nauser (1993) in their introduction to Human Ecology: Fragments of Anti-Fragmentary Views of the World provide a useful review of the various disciplines implicated in this mix; fragmentation is viewed as a necessary consequence of both the complexities of human-environmental relations and disciplinary specialisation (1993: 6). Its relative coherence is reflected in the establishment of the Society for Human Ecology, and various conferences such as the International Conference on Human Ecology.

  2. 2.

    The history of ‘ecology’ itself is decidedly more complex (see Schwarz and Jax 2011b). Although originating in 1866 in Ernst Haeckel’s Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, the term did not pass into common usage until some twenty years later. This apparent lag reflects the purpose of its initial specification; Haeckel intended it merely to define a sub-field of zoology which lacked a formal title. The concept, and its practice, thus experienced a prolonged period of formalization to ‘normal science’: ‘…in the 1960’s the concept broadened and ecology came to be described as a “super-science”. “Ecology” in this sense served to blur the boundaries between scientific, philosophical and political knowledge, and at the methodological level there was a merging of facts and values, the epistemic and the social’ (Schwarz and Jax 2011b: 147). See also Bergandi (2011: 36) for useful remarks on its early development.

  3. 3.

    Van Wey et al. (2005) single out the IPAT model, which serves as a useful illustration of deterministic modelling strategies. In this model, ‘…population in one form or another plays the role of the villain’ (Commoner 1972 and Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1991 cited in Van Wey et al. 2005: 26), and takes the form (I = P*A*T), where I = impact on environment, P = population , A = affluence (consumption, per capita GDP, level of living) and T = technologies employed. Many of these variables have been encountered previously in Chap. 1 in Miller’s Living Systems Theory, and Bailey’s Social Entropy Theory, neither of which suggest appropriate metrics.

  4. 4.

    It may, for now, be worth adopting the loose definition of sustainability employed by Costanza et al.; ‘A sustainable system is a renewable system that survives for some specified (non-infinite) time’ (Costanza et al. 2001a: 6).

  5. 5.

    Bergandi (2011) states that the result of Lindeman’s research was to ‘render dynamic’ Tansley’s concept due to the formers ‘energetic dynamics’ approach.

  6. 6.

    Bergandi (2011) suggests that a more precise re-casting of the ‘holism-reductionism’ debate would be the ‘emergentism-reductionism’ debate. The inclusion of the former term emphasises the naturalistic-materialist basis of the broader physical and human sciences, which maintains a fundamental reducibility of complexity to constituent units. This is a critical distinction for social scientists; our subject matter is defined by the acceptance of ‘emergent properties’ as a basis for a coherent research programme, and as such requires ‘...appropriate laws and theories that allow for an understanding of the specific properties of that particular level...reductionism denies the existence of emergent properties or else considers them an epiphenomenon strictly dependent on the state of our knowledge’ (Bergandi 2011: 32).

  7. 7.

    Work = force * distance. Energy, work, and heat are measured in joules, whereby 1 joule corresponds to the work done when 1 kg is moved by 1metre. One joule also corresponds to the heat required to raise 1 cubic centimetre of water by 0.239 degrees (Celsius).

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    Eoin Flaherty

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Flaherty, E. (2019). Social-Ecological Resilience: Human Ecology as Theory of the Middle Range. In: Complexity and Resilience in the Social and Ecological Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54978-5_3

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