Social Ecological Systems Then and Now: Chicago example

With a population of 2.7 million, Chicago is the largest city in the US Midwest and the third largest in the United States. The greater Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) to which Chicago belongs has a population of almost 9.5 million. The radical and rapid transformation of the landscape that has occurred over the past century and a half in order to accommodate a burgeoning population might suggest that Chicago is not a promising place to undertake large-scale conservation efforts. However, the region supports conservation programs that have received widespread local, national and international recognition.  That significant biodiversity protection occurs in Chicago is, in part, a consequence of the region’s climate and its evolutionary and ecological history. It is also the result of decisions made by people both before and after the settlement of the region by European and other non-indigenous populations (hereafter referred to as the “settlement” period).  These decisions resulted in land protected from development and/or maintained to preserve the characteristic biodiversity of the area.

When the contemporary situation in Chicago is compared against the description of the natural heritage of the region immediately prior to European settlement the differences are stark and from a conservation perspective seem somewhat discouraging.  One can barely walk for a mile across tallgrass prairie in Illinois compared to the possibility of a one hundred and fifty mile trek along the Grand Prairie back in 19th Century.  That being said, the landscapes of both eras each represent social-ecological systems – in the pre-settlement case the human agents involved being primarily indigenous Native American populations, more recently high populous and diverse urban population dominate.  Thus, both then and now human decision-making played a role in shaping natural components of the region. 

Journalist Charles Mann in his assessment of the impact of Native American peoples on the America found in 1491:New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus concluded: "Native Americans ran the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same.”  Now, we might quibble with the rather enormous license that this offers, nevertheless, the statement underscores the role of human agency in shaping ecological landscapes (second nature, in William Cronon's terms), both before and after the emergence of the great urban centers.  The emergence of a conservation ethic, one that contrasts with the more cavalier attitude of early settler population in the Chicago region, and one that informs the work of present day biodiversity conservationists and that inspires the work of Chicago Wilderness should be seem as a remarkably positive development.  Though we may not recoup the losses of species, communities and ecological processes that have largely been lost from the region, nonetheless it may be that we develop quite new social ecological systems  - in some cases, with highly cyborgian landscape emerging, mixtures of technology and forces beyond the immediate ken of humans – that are hopeful, biodiverse, and resilient in the face of ongoing anthropogenic disturbances.  We may be betting our lives on it. 

The Butterfly of Doom: Everything connected?

It is a banality of the ecological sciences to state that everything is connected. That ebullient Scot, and eventual stalwart of the American wilderness movement, John Muir, claimed, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." And if such statements are employed to sponsor a notion that individual organisms cannot be regarded in isolation from those that they consume, and those that can consume them, or furthermore, that as a consequence of the deep intersections of the living and the never-alive, that there can been unforeseen consequences flowing from species additions or removals from ecosystems, then few may argue with this. However, just as the ripples of a stone dropped in a still pond propagate successfully only to its edges (though they may entrain delightful patterns in the finest of its marginal sands), not every ecological event has intolerably large costs to exact. True, if the dominoes line-up and the circumstances are just so, a butterfly’s wing beat over the Pacific may hurl a typhoon against its shores, but more often than not such lepidopterous catastrophes do not come to pass. Ecosystems, energized so that matter cycles and conjoins the living with the dead, have their lines of demarcation, borders defined by their internal interactions being more powerful than their external ones.  They are therefore buffered against many potentially contagious disasters.  This, of course, is the essence of resilience - the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance without disruption to habitual structure and function.  Ecology is as much the science investigating the limits of connections as it is the thought that everything is connected.

The Ecology of Knowledge: Ecological Resilience and the Structure of Scientific Revolutions

As students of science we have all, no doubt, absorbed the lessons from the history of our disciplines that changes in thinking tend not to be meted out incrementally. The Darwinian and Wallacean account of evolutionary change through natural selection did not merely supplement alternative, often supernatural, accounts of organic change through time. The idea was a revolutionary one – it turned the orthodoxies of the time on their heads and did so tumultuously and irrevocably (at least for those 40% or so of us who seem to accept evolutionary accounts). A revolution is rapid, and in the revolutionary moment one set of conceptual structures is replaced with another. After the revolution, the new structures may persist for a time – a period of “normal science” – even though, almost invariably, the data accumulated through the lens of new theories may not always be fully supportive of those newly ascendant theories. And as those cracks begin to show the Darwins and Wallaces of the world set to work and a whiff of revolution is in the air again

Familiar stuff all of this, I’m sure. Thomas Kuhn, the philosopher and historian of science, coined the term “paradigm” for those "universally recognized scientific achievements that, for a time, provide model problems and solutions for a community of researchers" and professors have employed that term tirelessly when words like “model” or “pattern” or “program” just seem too darned plain. In contrast with the “mop-up” work that is the business of “normal science” operating within a given scientific paradigm (and who wouldn’t get excited about mop-up jobs) Kuhn identified the manner in which rapid change in science is compressed into its major revolutionary events.

For now my interest is not merely in the ways in which Kuhnian analysis can be applied to ecology. Rather, I am curious about how Kuhn’s model of paradigms and revolutions not only assists in developing our explicit expectations of what revolutionary ecology makes possible, but also in how ecological thought can double back and influence the way in which we might think about the history of science in general. The revolution I have especially in mind, as I will elaborate below, is that associated with a resurgence of interest in ecological dynamics: ideas about the structure, function of ecological systems and the way these systems respond to disturbance. Ecologists are developing these conceptions at a level of generality that makes their models epistemologically relevant to phenomena as diverse as lakes, financial markets, and the history of science itself. So a paradigmatic shift relating to theories of change in ecology allows ecology to reflect on the nature of all paradigmatic shifts including its own ones. In this sense there is an ecology of knowledge, and ecologists therefore can benefit from collaboration with, and insight from, non-traditional partners in the humanities, in particular, with those that reflect on stability and change in systems not typically of interest to ecologists.  Kuhn is just one such anomalous partner.  In return, ecology may return the favor by exporting insights gleaned from the study of nature, making them available for the behavior of other complex systems. 

*** 

Reversing the Flow - a New Way of thinking about Restoration Management

Since this term "reversing the flow" is catching on in our research group I thought it might be useful for me to post the first time I used this term.  It was in a 2008 white paper written as part of the process leading to our successful Coupled-Natural-Human-Systems proposal (we now call this project RESTORE - Rethinking Ecological and Social Theories of Restoration Ecology).

The Central Metaphor

In 1900 the flow of the Chicago River was reversed in one of the most dramatic engineering projects in the region’s history.  The project was a solution to a problem that otherwise compromised the human and ecological health of Chicago (Lake Michigan was unsustainably both a source of water and ultimately a sink for waste).  A little more than a century later, we should attempt to solve another significant challenge: how can we enhance the management of protected terrestrial ecological systems - areas that are typically swamped by influences from the vaster unmanaged metropolitan lands that surround them - in a way that simultaneously enriches both the human and ecological health of the region?  We need to investigate if ecological systems designed and managed with resilience in mind (arguably the current best management practices for restoration do not produce resilience results, and quickly revert to a ‘degraded’ condition) can exert a stronger influence on the landscape on a larger scale (which includes these large unmanaged areas) than is currently the case.  In this way we can arguably “reverse the flow” of restoration influence or more precisely modify the fluxes, of influence between managed and unmanaged preserved systems. 

A human as terrifying as a volcano – a scribbled note on resilience thinking

Environmental inquiry as scientific and philosophical subdisciplines benefits and suffers from its overlap with popular conceptions of the workings of nature.  On the one hand even relatively arcane observations from environmental scholars can be of interest to a lay public and can influence public policy.  On the other hand, persistent and popular misconceptions may conflict with emerging research perspectives in a manner that can be confusing and frustrating for environmental practitioners.  For example, although the term Balance of Nature means very little to researchers the notion is persistent among a broader public and can serve as a faulty map to environmental practice.

Ecology in the 20th Century had two central themes.  One theme concerned to identification of objects of ecological thought and enquired about the processes that sustained them long enough, at least, for us to examine them.  This perspective brought us populations, communities, ecosystems, Gaia and so forth, and employed cybernetics, systems thinking, hierarchy theory and other mechanistic tools to understand their persistence.  The other major theme in ecology stressed the dynamics of nature – how do the objects of nature change over time (for convenience we will call this “succession”.)  Now, though it does some injustice to the complexity of positions at any one time over the past hundred years, it is plausible to state that in the early years of the last century ecologists emphasized the progressive nature of ecological change, the stately development of communities from their creation (after a volcano, say) through a series of prescribed steps until the achieved their mature form (a “climax community”).  And this mature stage persisted as long as it is not disturbed (especially by humans).  By the late century such schemes were out of favor and ecological thought was more concerned with disturbance and disruption.  Though systems may develop, succession was no longer seen as quasi-ontogenetic.  In this scheme humans were not the only disruptive (or creative) forces influencing the behavior of ecological systems.  Although ecologists in the late 20th C had largely abandoned an understanding stressing the progressive development of steady state, close-to-equilibrium, climax communities, this view remains forceful in popular conceptions of ecology.

These historical developments are well enough known.  However, the recent interest in “resilience thinking”, a set of models that stem from the work of C S Holling and other, collectively attempt to explain the patterns of stability and change, that is, to reconcile accounts of stable-states and disruption have implications that are insufficiently examined.  The significance of resilience thinking for examining human activity derives from the fact that the inquiry places as much emphasis on the capacity of systems to absorb disturbance as it does upon the potential for catastrophic change when a system is pushed passed its limits: that is, resilience thinking can allow us to imagine ourselves as “well-behaved” systems components, as well as elements that tip the systems into brilliant and/or terrifying new states.  So resilience thinking is a framework that accommodates thinking about the disruption of ecological system behavior in response to hurricanes, forest fire, and human disruption, all with the same tools.  In resilience thinking humans look like nature.  Looking like nature expels neither the horror nor the joy from the human project.

The God of Disruption – Is Genesis an ecological fable?

In the beginning was the disturbance: God disrupted the pristine formlessness of the deep and created the heavens and the earth. Literally in a flash. With His utterance, the darkness was relegated to Night; the light He called Day. Waters were separated from waters by an expanse, and the expanse was called Heaven. Vegetation, and their seed, sprouted from the Earth and then, the Good Ecologist provisioned vegetation with light to distinguish day and night, to separate the seasons, and to mark the passage of time. God started on the largest imaginable scale, and then He attended to the ecological details. On the fifth day the earth pullulated with creatures: birds in the air and the great sea swarmed with life. On the sixth day God successfully propagated the terrestrial surface with creeping things, beasts, and livestock. And then He made man and in giving him dominion over the creatures, explained the ecological services that each could provide – for instance, the plants He told him make good eating. When He rested, His creation was stable. That which He created in a cataclysm persisted in the aftermath.

When He was adequately restored, He resumed His labor. His tasks were now ones of governance rather than creation. The largest entities of all were stably in place – the heavens and the earth, the stars in the firmament, the day separated from the night, the seasons, the seas and the land, the vegetation and the creeping beings, the livestock and mankind. The world that God created though it persisted was an imperfect one. His creature, Man, fell and God expelled Adan and Eve from his Garden. The children of the first man and women fought and Cain slew Abel. The descendents of Adam were numerous; the very old gave way to the young; but God saw the wickedness of man and was sorry that He made him. In surveying the earth God thought it corrupt and was determined to disrupt it by ending all flesh. He commanded Noah, a righteous man, to build an ark, and on that ark Noah brought his family: his wife, his sons, his sons’ wives, and seven pairs each of all clean animals, and a pair each of unclean animal, and seven pair of each species of bird. And then God unleashed his Disturbance in the form of a flood. The flood remained for 40 days and the water persisted for 150 days. All flesh upon the earth died – beast and man. The sacrifice that Noah made of some parts of the clean animals and the clean birds pleased him and God made a covenant with man and with the animals. He determined never again to destroy all flesh.