TOWARDS UNIFICATION OF THE SOCIO‐ECOLOGICAL SCIENCES: THE VALUE OF COUPLED MODELS

The major environmental problems of the twenty‐first century, including climate change, water scarcity, pollution and resource exhaustion, represent a new category of crisis and highlight the desperate need for an integrated science of socio‐ecological phenomena. To help establish the foundations of such a science, we explore three traditions of mathematical theory: the Lotka–Volterra interactions of ecological theory, niche construction models of population genetics, and theory from the gene–culture coevolution tradition. We review the theoretical tools of each of these traditions in explaining cultural articulation with the environment. Although the theoretical core of the science we propose does not exist, cultural evolutionary theory supplies useful tools to analyse endogenous culture, cultural dynamics, and deeply rooted behavioural links to the environment. We also present a coupled model for demonstration, and suggest that coupled socio‐ecological models can provide a formal theory to help address the emergent socio‐ecological problems of the future.     

“Hungry for Knowledge”: Towards a Meso‐History of the Environmental Sciences

In recent years, cultural studies and cultural theory have experienced a new wave of ecological thought. Despite the engagement with the Anthropocene the history of ecology and the environmental sciences has remained somewhat of a puzzle. This goes especially for the 20^th century, a period when the sciences of the environment came to matter on a broader scale. Why do we actually know so little about the environmental sciences in the 20^th century? And what could a history of the environmental sciences in that period look like? This article answers these questions with two interrelated arguments. First, by reflecting on different approaches to write the history of ecology since the 1970s, it uncovers crucial entanglements between the history of science and ecological thought that created blind spots regarding the environmental sciences in the 20^th century. Second, it argues for a shift in scales of analysis—towards meso‐scales. With a more regional approach historians can engage with the often‐neglected aspects of the political and economic history of the environmental sciences in the 20th century and thereby also reveal their fundamental infrastructural dimension. Because at its core, the article claims, the environmental sciences were and are essentially infrastructural sciences.     

Unpacking “Accumulation By Dispossession”, “Fictitious Commodification”, and “Fictitious Capital Formation”: Tracing the Dynamics of Bahrain's Land Reclamation

We explore the interrelationships between the concepts of fictitious commodities, fictitious capital and accumulation by dispossession. We do so through a detailed examination of the dynamics of land reclamation in the Kingdom of Bahrain during the years 2001–2014. Particularly, we dissect in‐depth the ensemble of social relations and chain of events involved in two specific real estate projects, Norana and Bahrain Financial Harbour, that have come to symbolize Bahrain's neoliberal era. Reclamation was a unique process in which land was explicitly produced as a commodity for market purposes. Primary material of land deeds, company registration documents, and news articles were used to map out the social relations across the state–finance–real estate nexus. We emphasize that our understanding of accumulation by dispossession involving land is greatly enhanced if we view it as a process of reconfiguring the ensemble of social relations using fictitious commodification and fictitious capital formation.     

Rethinking Justice: Struggles For Environmental Commons and the Notion of Socio‐Ecological Justice

This article introduces a notion of socio‐ecological justice based on theoretically informed empirical research on community struggles against run‐of‐river hydropower plants in Turkey. Framing this particular case as representative of a broader movement for environmental commons, and adopting an action‐theoretical perspective, it translates the emergent justice claims produced by grassroots environmental movements to the conceptual vocabulary of the theory of justice. Using Fraser's tripartite model as a starting point, it explores possibilities of expanding the borders of justice as a concept. Maintaining the intrinsic relationship between social and ecological phenomena, it calls for rethinking “sociality” and “social justice” in the light of a relational ontology of human and non‐human worlds. The notion of socio‐ecological justice, thus, extends the community of justice, framing the relational existence of human and non‐human ecologies as a matter of justice.     

Typologies of Advantage and Disadvantage: Socio‐economic Outcomes in Australian Metropolitan Cities

Australia's metropolitan cities have undergone significant social, economic and demographic change over the past several decades. In terms of socio‐economic advantage and disadvantage these changes, which are often associated with globalisation, wider economic and technological restructuring, the changing demographics of the population and shifts in public policy are not evenly dispersed across cities, but represent a range of often contrasting outcomes. The current paper develops a typology of socio‐economic advantage and disadvantage for locations across Australian metropolitan cities. More specifically, the paper takes a range of Australian Bureau of Statistics data and uses a model‐based approach with clustering of data represented by a parameterised Gaussian mixture model and discriminant analysis utilised to consider the differences between the clusters. These clusters form the basis of a typology representing the range of socio‐economic and demographic outcomes at the local community level.     

THE “ROUTINE‐SCAPE” AND SOCIAL STRUCTURALIZATION IN THE FORMATION OF JAPANESE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETIES

Recent archaeo‐botanical research has suggested that the introduction of farming did not immediately cause a sufficient shift in subsistence strategy to form an agrarian society but that the process took as long as hundreds of years. It is therefore suggested that it was not the farming technique in itself but the establishment of routinized day‐to‐day activity patterns and world views associated with farming that eventually led to the formation of a new social structure. The holistic concept of a dynamic day‐today routine and its associated physical and conceptual landscape is termed routine‐scape through which the process of agrarian society formation in Japan is examined around 1000–500 bce when paddy rice farming was introduced from China to Japan. A new crop storage system of a raised‐floor granary was also adopted as a part of the rice‐farming routine, which resulted in changing the Japanese routine‐scape. The community leaders increasingly associated the granary with both symbolic and practical significance; alongside controlling the storage‐related routine they finally gained centralized power. This paper indicates that agriculture brought along a new range of routine activities and their dynamic interactions with landscape produced new social structures.     

“Much in Blood and Money”: Necropolitical Ecology on the Margins of the Uganda Protectorate

Increasingly, political ecologists invoke the concept of “green grabbing” to refer to the ways in which processes of accumulation by dispossession articulate with various imperatives for environmental protection. This paper traces these contemporary processes to their roots in the colonial era, focusing on how dispossession in the name of environmental protection intersects with complex historical geographies of state formation and internal territorialisation. Drawing upon the case of Mount Elgon in Britain's Uganda Protectorate, in particular, we reconstruct the ways in which the interrelated “birth” of both conservation and transcontinental agrarian markets were intimately connected to the emergence and normalisation of the colonial state itself. In doing so, we propose the term necropolitical ecology as a framework to encompass the ways in which contemporary “green grabs” partially emerge from racialised modes of colonial appropriation, the violence of which often still lingers in agencies and institutions of environmental governance in the contemporary postcolony.     

Prospects for,and Challenges of,Research Design and Training in Cross‐Disciplinary Environmental Management Research

Research in coupled human and natural systems can be quite a cross‐disciplinary endeavour, requiring the combination of diverse concepts, methods, and approaches. While there is a wide recognition of the importance of incorporating different viewpoints, perspectives, and disciplines in achieving positive environmental and social outcomes, the methods through which such research is designed, specifically the processes engaged in, are largely absent from the literature. This presents challenges in research training for students in the field. This paper uses the example of a recent student project examining the management of Temperate Highland Peat Swamps on Sandstone to consider how research training might address project design, conceptual challenges, and methodological choices. The goal of this project was to build improved understanding of the role of context in the adaptive management of these endangered ecological communities from Commonwealth to micro‐local scales. The paper explores the complexities of integrating approaches and methods drawn from both social sciences and environmental sciences. Rather than providing a definitive ‘how to guide’ for conducting integrative cross‐disciplinary research, it offers food for thought on the processes involved in creating a research project which transcends boundaries between social science and environmental science that are easily entrenched in research training that is compartmentalised along discipline lines.     

Party commitment,vote switching and liberal decline in Australia∗

Electoral outcomes are determined in part by voters who switch their political allegiance between elections. Though the subject of extensive study in other countries, this floating vote has received comparatively little attention in Australia. This paper uses 1967 and 1979 survey data to analyse vote switching in Australian elections. We argue, firstly, that turnover tables based on recalled voting are, as research in other countries has shown, inaccurate reflections of the election result. As an alternative, we propose a measure of ‘potential’ vote switching based on the concept of lifetime voting. Secondly, using this concept of lifetime voting to derive a measure of party commitment allows the construction of a three‐fold typology of Australian voters — partisans, marginals and switchers. Finally, a longitudinal analysis of the voting patterns of these three groups indicates a gradual erosion of electoral commitment to the Liberal party, whereas Labor has largely retained its partisan base.     

Radical Environmentalism and “Commoning”: Synergies Between Ecosystem Regeneration and Social Governance at Tamera Ecovillage,Portugal

This article explores the scope and limitations of Radical Environmentalism as a source of practices of “commoning”. The application of the radical environmental “Healing Biotope” model in Tamera, an ecovillage located in southern Portugal, further expands the understanding of “commoning” as a social process, as well as of Radical Environmentalism as a cognitive framework. This article distinguishes between the technical and political dimensions of “commoning”. It also identifies two structuring dimensions of Radical Environmentalism, hereby called integrative rationality and the experiential action research and learning methodology. These dimensions support the technical aspect of “commoning” in Tamera by promoting epistemic and methodological coherence between social and environmental technologies. Despite their contested scientific validity, they contribute to the sustainability of the project by promoting synergies between ecological regeneration and social governance. However, they have limited capacity to address the political dimension of “commoning”, related with rank and socio‐economic inequalities among members.     

Elefanten im Mond,Der prekäre Status des wissenschaftlichen Instruments

The article focuses on a 17th century satire by Samuel Butler, which depicts scientists investigating the moon with a telescope and making fraudulent reports of the phenomena seen. This text is part of the Restauration discussion about the right uses of instruments and the right habits of knowledge production. I show that Butler and other critics of experimental science relied on a concept of evidence that was opposed to the practice already being followed by the Royal Society. Contrary to the belief of their denouncers, artificial devices like the telescope, the microscope and the barometer allowed scientists to constitute phenomena which could not be falsified by an appeal to everyday experience.     

A Socio‐Geographic Perspective on Human Activities in Social Media

Location‐based social media make it possible to understand social and geographic aspects of human activities. However, previous studies have mostly examined these two aspects separately without looking at how they are linked. The study aims to connect two aspects by investigating whether there is any correlation between social connections and users' check‐in locations from a socio‐geographic perspective. We constructed three types of networks: a people–people network, a location–location network, and a city–city network from former location‐based social media Brightkite and Gowalla in the U.S., based on users' check‐in locations and their friendships. We adopted some complexity science methods such as power‐law detection and head/tail breaks classification method for analysis and visualization. Head/tail breaks recursively partitions data into a few large things in the head and many small things in the tail. By analyzing check‐in locations, we found that users' check‐in patterns are heterogeneous at both the individual and collective levels. We also discovered that users' first or most frequent check‐in locations can be the representatives of users' spatial information. The constructed networks based on these locations are very heterogeneous, as indicated by the high ht‐index. Most importantly, the node degree of the networks correlates highly with the population at locations (mostly with R² being 0.7) or cities (above 0.9). This correlation indicates that the geographic distributions of the social media users relate highly to their online social connections.     

BERNARD GROETHUYSEN's WAY OF COPING WITH THE “PROBLEM OF HISTORICISM”

This article argues that Groethuysen's creation of a new historiographical genre—the anonymous history of the formation of worldviews—was a response to the “problem of historicism” conceived of as a task of working out a concept of historicity beyond the relativism–objectivism dilemma. In scrutinizing Groethuysen's implementation of phenomenology to study how basic historical phenomena have been experienced, the article draws a parallel with Heidegger's response to historical relativism. In the main argument, Groethuysen's combination of a new approach to the history of ideas and a historicized philosophical anthropology reveals the possibility of avoiding the depressing dilemma between metahistorical objectivism and historicist relativism by means of a double hermeneutics. In this regard, special attention is paid to Groethuysen's phenomenological conception of narrative time.     

环境营造:中国历史上人类活动对全球变化的贡献

在古代-近现代中国,历时数千年人类活动展开所具有的时空条件、土地面积和经营方式、人口规模和质量、社会组织形式、社会形态延续条件等基本内容,在世界各国中是难有其比的。国外许多科学家将加大力度利用丰富的历史文献(中文为主),用于研究和解释人类活动对地球环境变化可能具有的作用和影响份额的希望,寄托在中国科学家和历史学家身上,是有充足理由的。本文认为,发挥国情和历史地理专业优势,现阶段可以视为全球变化研究框架中的重要内容是(1)土地利用与土地覆盖格局的变化;(2)流域生命-文化环境的构成及其成长;(3)河湖海系统的演变;(4)制度和政策因素怎样调节人类的社会经济行为;(5)提取和整理对地球环境有重大影响的自然、人文事件。为了对人类活动引起环境变化的影响和作用作出较为准确的判断,研究中需要做好的事项有(1)排查文献资料中的人为主观撰述因素;(2)核实人类活动可以影响的范围或方面;(3)分析人类活动本身包含的复杂性因素;(4)充分估计自然本身的力量;(5)尊重和学习其它专业的研究方法及其实验结果。时至今日,科学事业发展的形势,已经将历史学加入自然科学研究计划的工作提到了研究时间表上。     

Scaling Post‐Industrial Forestry: The Complex Implementation of National Forestry Regimes in the Southern Valleys of Wales

Abstract: Recent years have witnessed increased geographical interest in the changing nature of forestry in the UK. Critical attention has been given to a transition from a previously dominant regime of industrial forestry, primarily concerned with the mass production of timber, to a post‐industrial regime, within which timber production sits alongside a broader range of social, economic and environmental objectives. Investigations of this transition, however, have been largely restricted to analyses of national policy discourse, with relatively little attention given to the implementation of post‐industrial forestry in regional and local spaces. In this paper, we argue that the emergence of this new forestry regime has been associated with a great deal of spatial complexity. Drawing on findings from recent research in the southern valleys of Wales, we highlight the complex geographies bound up with the implementation of national regimes of forestry in the UK, and the significant roles played by the local socio‐natural context in facilitating and resisting the implementation of new forestry regimes in particular spaces.     

Public technology: nuclear energy in Europe

ABSTRACT

The concept of ‘public science’ has been fruitfully used to indicate the intricate interrelatedness of science and society. In studies of knowledge and its publics, however, technology has been routinely subsumed under science and the distinctive nature of technical knowledge neglected. We are aiming in this article at conceptualizing the public nature of technologies. First, we start with surveying the literature on public science. Second, we scrutinize various conceptual approaches to better understand the social and cultural factors embedded in technologies. In so doing, we reflect upon the twentieth-century history of technologies as public things. Third, we focus on nuclear energy in Europe as an exemplary case of a large-scale technology which has been shaped as part of public culture. We suggest that the specificities of the nuclear as a publicly shaped societal entity can be understood as an example of the wider category we propose to call ‘public technologies’.     

From environmentalism to sustainability

Abstract

Environmentalism is giving way to sustainability in a process that is aided by complementary shifts in economic, social and political arenas. Environmentalism was always a necessary first step. The shift towards sustainability is beginning to take place because the mood of the times is now ready to promote its early stages. However, as we contemplate more fully the fuller significance of sustainability, the very ethos of livelihood and lifestyle enters the frame of enquiry. Livelihood and lifestyle are part of the same set of phenomena defining personal and social identity, and economic well-being. But we can stillask two complementary questions. Are we seriously prepared to metamorphose into a sustainable life style? Can we devise ways to cope by drawing on multiple livelihoods? This will be one of the key issues for human geographers to examine in the coming decade.     

Environmental history in the Mediterranean world: cross-disciplinary investigation of cause-and-effect for degradation and soil erosion

Environmental history is a multidisciplinary enterprise united by shared interests in ecological change and the complex interactions between people and the environment. Its practitioners include expertise in the natural sciences, in history or archaeology, or in political ecology and related social sciences; but there is no agreement on a common agenda and limited success in bridging methodological and epistemological divisions that impede integrative and interdisciplinary research. World-systems history and environmental history also have overlapping interests in long-term change and matters of sustainability. The Mediterranean world sustained agricultural lifeways across some 8000 years, yet its environment has repeatedly been described as degraded, suggesting conceptual confusion between transformation and destruction. This paper is didactic in purpose and uses landscape histories for the Peloponnese and eastern Spain to show that the impact of recurrent, excessive precipitation events and of reduced quality of land cover are difficult to unravel, because they commonly appear to work in tandem. As a result (a) environmental change cannot be assumed or “predicted”, but must be studied inductively by experts with science skills, and (b) cause-and-effect relationships demand an understanding of ecological behavior, for which humanistic insights are indispensable. Social science models highlight systemic relationships from socioeconomic and structural perspectives, but are less suited to deal with the complexity of environmental change or the contingencies exemplified by human resilience. Near Eastern, Greek and Roman agronomic writings offer elite “voices” that speak to cumulative technological change, scientific understanding, and the context of intensification. Rural voices can be heard through ethnography, and in eastern Spain are extended into the past by archaeology and archival research. In the absence of structural constraints, they reveal collective decision-making with respect to a shifting repertoire of agricultural strategies that take into account market opportunities, demographic growth, finite resources and environmental problems. Such adaptability spells resilience, and “good farming” is culturally embedded as a civic responsibility, both in the ethnographic present and in the older, elite agronomic writings. But if the “moral economy” erodes in the wake of food stress, tax extortion, instability, insecurity, or ideological oppression, there is little incentive to pursue long-term strategies, so that behavior focuses on short-term survival. The context for this dialectic of poor versus good ecological management may be structural, but cause-and-effect in the traditional Mediterranean world ultimately depended on ecological and human resilience. Long-term sustainability is similarly non-predictive. It depends on people, rather than social theory.     

邓小平绿色发展思想的历史考察

邓小平在人与自然关系的主体方面,主张控制人口,主要涉及绿色发展的人口与资源协调发展观;在人与自然关系的客体要素方面,倡行植树造林,内含了绿色发展的生态安全观、群众主体观和持续绿化观;在协调人与自然关系的支撑条件方面,强调科教对经济建设和环境建设的先导作用,突出立法建制对环保事业发展的保障作用,蕴含有绿色发展的科技观、教育观和法制观。总结和研究邓小平绿色发展思想,对于深入把握当代中国马克思主义绿色发展观的历史与理论逻辑,贯彻落实党的十八大以来关于生态文明建设的新认识、新设计、新规范,实现美丽中国梦具有重要意义。     

Eco-cultural niches of the Badegoulian: Unraveling links between cultural adaptation and ecology during the Last Glacial Maximum in France

This study details an application of eco-cultural niche modeling (ECNM) using two modeling architectures—a genetic algorithm (GARP) and maximum entropy (Maxent)—aimed at examining the ecological context of sites with archaeological remains attributed to the culture termed the Badegoulian (ca. 22–20 k cal BP), which dates to the middle part of the Last Glacial Maximum (ca. 23–19 k cal BP). We reconstructed the ecological niche of the Badegoulian and assessed whether eco-cultural niche variability existed within this technocomplex. We identified two broad but distinct spatial entities in the distribution of Badegoulian sites based on lithic raw material sources and circulation, and found that these spatial units share a similar ecological niche. We discuss the implications of territorial differentiation within this niche in light of research on land use by culturally affiliated groups within a broad cultural entity. We propose that Badegoulian circulation networks reflect distinct social territories associated with particular conditions within a single ecological niche. This study illustrates the utility of combining ecological niche reconstructions with archaeological data to identify and evaluate diachronic trends in cultural continuity for situations where such patterns may be missed when the focus of study is restricted solely to lithic technology and typology.