The article by Adger connects ecological and social resilience. In one page, summarize the most significant take-aways of his article and what is the thing you strongly agree with and mention one thing you completely disagree with. In your 2nd page –in conjunction with Adger’s article + the UN report– if our existence and well-being is very connected to the ecosystem where do you think the main challenge is in resolving the environmental problems the world is facing.
In addition to the two pages, please add 3 lines summarizing your take on the video we watched about “Saving endangered species / saving the planet”
#Env_Plan
Urban & Environmental Studies 
In the article Ecological and Social Resilience, W. Neil Adger writes of the interdependence of society and ecosystems, and the role that resiliency of this socio-ecological system plays in sustainable development. He first explains ecological resilience as how well an ecosystem functions. The functionality of ecosystems is affected by periodic shifts caused by external perturbations. He makes a distinction between natural and human made perturbations, where periodic natural disturbances can actually help increase an ecosystem’s resilience. This is because a functional ecosystem will be able to adapt to periodic changes, for example if a different species is able to take on the role a another specie that was wiped out by a natural disturbance. This helps build the ecosystem’s diversity and resilience. On the other hand, human activities, such as over fishing, agricultural pollution and nutrient loading cause chronic stress to ecosystems. These human induced perturbations may at first only affect a specific population within an ecosystem (the fish population in the case of overfishing) but overtime it can cause an imbalance in the ecosystem’s diversity, making that ecosystem less stable and resilient.
Adger goes on to explain the social dimensions of resilience, arguing that humans are highly dependent on ecosystems’ resiliency. He explains that social and economic wellbeing is negatively impacted by loss of ecological resilience because it limits the productivity of ecosystems and options for their future use. Additionally, it creates uncertainties about the function and desirability of ecosystems. Human dependability on ecosystems means we must ensure its sustainability by considering the demands we place on resources and our ability to cope with changes. This is influenced by how resources are governed which necessitates collective action to ensure strategies for risk assessment, adaptation and resource management rules are fairly considered.
Finally, Adger focuses on the need for effective community engagement in resource management to promote sustainability. He highlights that the knowledge and experience of communities in areas that are highly dependent on their ecosystems can be beneficial in developing management and adaptation strategies. Throughout history, humans have been using adaptive management of resources to ensure their ecosystem’s resiliency. Adger seems to imply that this local knowledge of adaptation has not been included in previous decisions about resource management by those institutions charged with ensuring ecosystem resiliency and sustainability. He argues therefore for the inclusion of knowledge and experience through different scales (local, regional, national, and international) to encourage learning opportunities and adaptive management. Adaptive management at the local level for example, can influence formal institutional arrangements, which may in turn contribute to ecosystem resilience. In other words, allowing local communities to participate in decision-making processes is necessary to ensure that institutions are investing in adaptation strategies that promote sustainability and decrease human vulnerability.
I strongly agree with the inclusion of local communities in the decision-making processes to developing adaptive resource management strategies. Local knowledge can help develop more efficient adaptation strategies. Also a more equal distribution of resource management, can not only given local communities more agency but can reduce the burden on government and formal institutions to garner the knowledge and resources to maintain ecosystems. However, I think Adger doesn’t give enough consideration to the power dynamics that exists in resource management, which ultimately undermines community voices in any decision making process. This is actually what I think is the biggest challenge we have to solving environmental problems.
Corporations often exert tremendous power in the public domain. As we learned in the UN report, manufacturing industry’s global water demand is expected to increase by 400 percent by 2050. Additionally, water quality is expected to deteriorate in the coming decades and manufacturing is a large contributor to water pollution. When companies are faced with staggering statistics of water resource depletion, their adaptation strategy is not often to decrease water usage but to find different water sources. These immediate solutions don’t consider long-term impacts, of course. Furthermore, the impunity that corporations enjoy when they are found guilty of being the main contributors to water pollution is what ultimately undermines the trust of local communities in decision making processes. This impunity is best explained by the ongoing damage that large corporations have caused to waterways in the US, which have largely gone unpunished. In 2009 the New York Times reported that 1 of 10 people in the US have been exposed to contaminated water. The Times reported that in 4 years, 23,000 companies had violated the Clean Water Act, but less than 3 percent of the violators were punished by either state officials or the E.P.A.
A large number of Americans are dependent on large corporations for our daily goods and services and therefore make less of a connection between the function and sustainability of our ecosystems to meet our daily needs. Consequently, local communities only pay attention to the over extraction and contamination of natural resources when they are immediately impacted; like when a community notices higher rates of cancer and other illnesses. Many times, when these communities seek recourse, their concerns are trampled by corporate power. Until corporations are held responsible for the damage they make, community participation in resources management strategies will likely be superfluous. I think that George Carlin’s perspective on the environment is similar to the one that large corporations have. That we should use the resources available to us for economic growth because while the earth the power to restore itself, humans will die off, so we should enjoy our resources while we can. What is important to consider however, who are the main beneficiaries of these resources. The damage that human actions cause to the environment can be ignored if you have the means to dodge their negative impact.
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Well articulate, deep reflections on the readings, and logical thread of thoughts.
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Ecological and social resilience are intertwined and mirror each other. Ecological and social systems must have three main qualities to be resilient: the ability to absorb disturbances, to self-organize, and to build capacity for learning/adaptation. It was interesting that Adgar makes a point to note that periodic natural disasters do assist in helping to build more diversity and increase the strength of a system, but that these natural occurrences are not the same as what we are currently experiencing with climate change. Climate change is happening so quickly causing systems to not have time to learn or adapt to the new conditions. It was also notable his explanation to deal with climate change is that social groups need to collectively respond to the situation by displaying resilience.
I strongly agree with Adgar that we need to present the benefits of resilience in economic terms to better demonstrate to the opposition that thinking of systems holistically is beneficial on all levels. Adgar notes that without flexibility within systems there is the loss productivity, reduces the options for future use, and increases direct costs through uncertainties. The case study example of fishing villages in Vietnam illustrates that social and environmental systems were able to recover more quickly when they were intertwined with the structures and systems that had strength and unity.
It was interesting that Adgar attempted to distance sustainability from resilience. Sustainable as a concept and catch phrase has been worn thin, but I think it is important to recognize that the two concepts are related and one cannot be cast aside for the other. Just as I have noted in other responses we need to lean away from separating these concepts and instead embrace them.
There seem to be numerous challenges that we face to steer the world in a more environmentally friendly direction. Just as the problem is multidimensional the solution therefore is multipronged. Lack of education, corporate influence, greed and capitalism all contribute to our current systems of destroying nature.
Coherent, real-life education is greatly needed in our public schools in the United States and across the world. The disconnect from nature and the systems that rule our world is no longer acceptable. Educating both young children and continually educating adults throughout life is important which the UN attempts to do through W.A.S.H and similar programs to educate people about watery and hygiene. . The general population is denied the information required to understand and solve environmental issues. Adgar talks about resiliency as the ability to “build capacity for learning/adaptation”. A task that is hard to achieve when most people are no knowledge of the issues at hand.
Adgar emphasizes that resilience is an ethical issue that needs to be taken seriously. Now more than ever we need regulations that restrict industry and corporations from destructive business practices. The world needs morally strong ethical leaders to support collective understanding and responses to environmental issues, a key element of a socially resilient system.
It is also important to note that the UN’s estimate on water consumption for 2050 shows manufacturing demand for water will increase 400%. A number that is frightening and unacceptable. We need to use collective social resilience to resists the status quo of consumerism and capitalism. There is a way that we can provide access and regulation to necessary resources without the using the current economic systems. It will take a complex view of the issue to generate and implement multidimensional solutions.
What was most disturbing about this video is not George Carlin’s half-witted take on environmentalism, but the raucous applause from the crowd. On a spiritual and ethical level I cannot condone the negativity, harm and death that humans cause purely for their own survival. We as a species are smarter than that, but often stoop to low levels for immediate gratification and material wealth.
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Good analysis/reflections and smooth thread of ideas. I truly wish we can get such ideas and voices out to the world.
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For those who asked about the link of this controversial talk by George Carlin. Here is the link:
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In the article, Adger talks about how resilience is linked with social and ecological systems, and how these systems and resilience are in turn a component of sustainable development. He first explains how the resilience of ecosystems is directly related to its functioning, rather than its population. Shift in such ecosystems could be caused by single events or long-term events. But periodic natural disturbances could increase diversity and resilience, as in the case of coral reefs, but resilience is reduced because of human interference. The graph explains how an eco-system is challenged by casual mechanisms and triggers to fall into low resilience states. The resilience of such ecosystems is also reduced through inappropriate management.
Adger adds that abrupt climatic changes are difficult for societies to adapt to, making it a concern for social-ecological resilience. He explains how humans are dependent on the resilience on the ecology, locking technologies and societies into inflexible patterns of resource usage. The ecosystems, in turn, are tied to their human use sometimes. With traditional societies like hunters and gatherers dependent on the ecosystem for a livelihood, have a positive tendency to be sustainable and resilient. On the other hand, complete dependency on natural resources increases stress on an ecosystem and renders it unsustainable. He tries to establish a relationship between positive human intervention in making social-ecological systems resilient by stating that resilient communities should rely on their inclusivity and degree of trust as a source of efficiency, as in the example of fishing communities who could build resilience through promoting diversity in livelihoods or migrating with fish stocks.
I agree with Adger that resiliency is directly dependent on the recognition of community engagement in resource management. I know of fishing communities in coastal India who are entirely dependent on the ocean for their livelihood but respect the sea that they never over-exploit the resource available to them. For the months when fishing is not done, they tend to depend on the use and sale of dried fish which were in excess during earlier days. And such societies have adopted new technologies or methods to be resilient, over time and with climatic changes. The fisheries management institutes of India make sure that they teach, promote and guard such communities at times of concern, increasing their resiliency. The Indian Coastal Guard also prevents over-fishing in such times to prevent major/sudden changes to the existing eco-system.
The UN’s report on World’s Water Development is an interesting take on how water will be made accessible to more people, how health and sanitation will be an equitable concern and how water demands in urbanizing areas will be met in the coming years. But it fails to realize that how a non-renewable resource(?) such as water which is a basic necessity should be well managed to avoid a global water crisis in the future. I believe that resource management starts at the personal level, and is often important at every stage, including community level, government level, and institutional level with each level playing a role to suit the larger cause. Water is a global commodity which should be equally conserved by every individual irrespective of what country or government they fall under.
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Good points and glad you brought the fishing example of local Indian villages. It shows how indigenous populations were actually way more sustainable e even before the term “sustainability” was found.
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Adger talks about how resilience links with sustainable development and how to define the resilience of the interaction between human and nature. The author emphasizes that the resilience of social-ecological systems is a central objective of sustainability. The purpose of sustainable development is to meet the present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. The resilience of the ecological system is reliant with diversity and slowly changing environmental variables. Ecological changes are often natural, but the chronic stresses are human. Climate change can bring many unknowable and irreversible phase shifts in ecological, physical, and human systems. In economic terms, ecological resilience itself is essential for human welfare for several reasons. The social resilience is a function of resource dependency. The resilience of social system depends on the diversity of the ecosystem and the institutional rules that govern the social-ecological system. Promoting resilience is directly related to the community engagement in resource management that balances out resource use and conservation. For adaptive management, having local-level institutions for direct management is crucial. Therefore, the resilience of social and ecological is vital for the sustainability of development, resource use, and human well-being.
Adger’s point that stood out to me the most was that what works for a single location will not work for whole eco-region (p. 80). A local scale such as air, water, and soil pollution are the earliest environmental problems caused by people who are local in that area. In local level, an environmental issue may be unsustainable if people use a local nonrenewable resource or a local renewable resource faster than it can be restored. For example, the Gori nuclear power plant in South Korea will be physically removed with significant financial costs starting 2022 for the next 15 years. Other local nuclear power plant sites around the world either remove or quarantine the contaminated area, stop the power plant, and move people who live near the site. The causes of regional scale environmental problems are the same as local problems. For example, Fukushima nuclear power plant explosion caused both local and regional sustainable level problem that spread contamination over a large geographic area. The global scale environmental problems need full understanding at local and regional levels and beyond.
I disagree with his argument that change in an ecosystem is not gradual but rather is triggered by external perturbations and is episodic. Many impacts of human and ecosystem are slow to become apparent. Sometimes, people manage ecosystem to increase the short-term benefits over the long-term costs. Different ecosystem tends to change over different time scales. For example, supporting and regulating services tend to change over a longer period than provisioning service do. Sometimes the overharvest of particular species rather have short lag times and quickly reduce or stop the impact. But climate change has much longer lag times and the effects that last longer. For certain species, this process can be rapid, but for the others such as trees may take centuries. Reducing the rate of habitat loss may have a small impact on extinction rates over the next several years. Therefore, I think most changes in ecosystems are rather gradual and incremental.
In our class discussion, we talked about which scale (i.e., local, regional, national, or global) has the most impact on resolving the world environmental problems. Among these four levels, I think national scale policy formulation and allocation of resources to project is most challenging. The current U.S. president promised vast changes to science and environmental policy. For instance, the new administration disbanded a federal advisory panel for the National Climate Assessment. Mister President has signed executive order revoking federal flood-risk standards that incorporated rising sea levels predicted by climate science. The new administration claims to improve federal infrastructure decision be quickening and streaming the environmental review process. These national scale changes can make the environmental problems more challenging. For another example, the new South Korean President Moon directed Department of Environment, for the first time, to inspect the Four Major Rivers Project. This project was intended to secure water resources, implement flood control measures, and improve water quality. During and after this project, environmental rivers suffered from pollution declining fish stocks, but until recently this project did not involve any environmental department or organization.
The United Nations report talks about water sustainability and problems as a local, regional, national and global issue. The population growth, urbanization, food, and energy security policies, and climate change primarily influence water demand at all levels. The author(s) emphasize that investing in improved water management and series can help solve water problems and these changes are usually directed from a national scale and affect local and regional level. This report makes an important point that adoption of ‘ecosystem-based management’ is a key to ensuring long-term water sustainability which resonates with Adger’s chapter. Interconnecting between water and sustainable development reach far beyond social, economic and environmental dimensions. Policies and actions are a core of sustainable development can be strengthened through water or any other natural resources. The author(s) state(s) that many of the pressures that impact water sustainability occur at local and national levels, and rules and processes are influenced and established at those levels.
Water sustainability involves other disciplinary such as energy, food, climate change, etc. Interdisciplinary study is an important aspect of solving water and other environmental problems by individuals that integrates information, data, tools, concepts, and theories from two or more disciplines of specialized knowledge to advance fundamental understanding and to solve problems. For example, I currently work on the water-energy-climate nexus research project which I synthesize characteristics from multidiscipline. It helps to think across boundaries to solve problems and propose solutions that are beyond the scope of a single discipline.
The environment will heal itself to a certain point, but not in a way humans would like it to, so we should worry how. We are the ones causing climate change, extreme weather, desertification, deforestation, species extinction, sea level rise. Unless humans extinct, we need to take responsibility for our actions.
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I appreciated that Adger acknowledges that humans and ecosystems do not exist in isolation, and because they exist in the same system, compromising the resiliency of the natural ecosystem compromises the resiliency of humans. Humans and natural systems currently exist in a dichotomy. Human interaction with natural systems focuses on extracting resources from natural systems. Currently most humans on Earth are engaged in a capitalistic, consumer system that is rooted in infinite economic growth. This system conflicts with the finite capabilities of the natural ecosystem. Adger provides fossil fuel dependence as being neither sustainable or resilient. Fossil fuel reliance is neither sustainable or resilient because its combustion causes global temperatures to rise, adding stress to the environment that supports humans, and its eventual scarcity could cause negative economic and therefore social impacts.
In principle, I agree that adaptive management is necessary for people to be resilient. I did appreciate the examples of the Inuvialuit people of the Canadian Artic and that of coastal district in Vietnam. It is reasonable to plan for resiliency at these scales to manage local issues. However, I also see the long-term futility of being resilient at this scale due to the global effects of globalization and climate change. How far can the Inuvialuit moderate their hunting due to warming temperatures before they can no longer sustain themselves in this manner. What is the purpose of managing the restoration of coastal mangroves if see levels rise due to global greenhouse gas emissions? Adger points out that resilience relates to the properties of ecosystems at different scales, and I therefore I adaptive management must also exist at different scales to be effective.
Fundamentally, I believe the main hurdle towards resolving environmental issues is consumerism. Humans are consuming more resources per person than ever before in history. Additionally, a smaller proportion of the world’s population consumes a majority of the world’s resources. As more of the world’s population become more advanced, overall consumption will increase, exasperating environmental issues.
I am not suggesting that people should not be able to improve their quality of life by buying things. It is specifically the level of consumption that is alarming. Western ideals of wealth are excessive and unnecessary to healthy and fulfilling lifestyles, but are being adopted around the world. Specifics include automobile ownership, single family homes, high energy usage, eating for pleasure, and frequent long distance traveling for recreation.
Advanced countries like the United States should be setting a better example to the rest of the world in terms of sustainable life styles. It is ironic to think that developing nations like China (where bicycling was the dominant mode of transportation in many cities) aspire to live “modern” lifestyles, and are adopting cars and other amenities, only to incur the same environmental dilemmas that we are facing in the United States.
“Saving Endangered Species / Saving the Planet”
The comedian from this video is correct to suggest that if humans became extinct because of the amount of environmental damage we cause on the Earth, then the Earth would heal itself and be fine. However, he cites this to suggest that Environmentalism is pointless. He fails to realize that concern for the environment is driven greatly by the wish to alleviate as much human suffering as possible. His inability to understand this, exposes him as being a very arrogant and privileged member of society who doesn’t have to deal with the consequences of a damaged environment.
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In Adger’s Ecological and Social Resilience, he mentions three ways to measure the resilience of a system. First is the amount of disturbance a system can absorb while it can still maintain its current functions and structure for future users. Sustainability is based on the goal that current usage of resources will not compromise the resources that future uses can manage. The loss of resilience will cause irreversible changes with damage of ecological and social functions. Second is the ability of a system to self-organize. The last one is the capacity for learning and adaption. Resilience is an element of sustainable environment which is being currently understood by social and ecological sciences.
The resilience of an ecological system is more important to the functions of the system than the ability to maintain a steady ecological system. It is interesting that resilience is more like the ability that an ecological system can self-recover and maintain its functions after it has been affected by either natural disasters or human pressure. People cannot simply scale up the management solutions when the scales are increased. The charts on page 5 are inspiring enough for readers to see the relationship between resilience and the possibility to change under different stimuli. When ecosystems are influenced by human use which may be over-exploitation or pollution, the former steady state will be more easily to change. The resilience will go up but it is an illusion and more likely to change if negative human use continues. It will finally arrive at a certain lower point which means its resilience has been weakened, and the system is also stable now. This case indicates ironically that a dead ecosystem can also be resilient.
I strongly agree with Adger’s statement that the resilience of an ecosystem cannot be separated from human activities which can either exert inappropriate influence or help maintain the resilience. Periodic changes brought by economic development may cause the loss of productivity. Losing resilience is irreversible, impairing positive values attached to the environment. Loss of resilience may convert environment to an unfamiliar one which would add cost for management. The most common example in reality is desertification. Regardless of natural reasons such as climate change or volcanic eruption, the process is often caused by overgrazing, cutting trees and unsuitable farming techniques. When the original woods or grassland becomes desert, it is difficult for people to recover it to what it used to be. Adger not only mentions economic development, but also cultural context and the features of social organizations, like trust and network. Integrated conservation and collaborative resource management may help reduce the vulnerability and increases the resilience of ecosystem.
I object his opinion that changes in most ecosystems is not gradual but rather is triggered by external perturbations. It is a complicated issue which should not be asserted or not giving any precondition. In this sentence, the first contrast he makes is gradual and periodic. And the second is gradual and external perturbations. I do not see much connection between them.
It was astonished for me to see the statistics like that by 2050, global water demand is projected to increase by 55%. Poverty and social equity limited billions of people to obtain clean water for a family’s health, agriculture and family-run business. Personally speaking, unfair and extremely limited distribution of resources is the main challenge in dealing with environmental problems. This unfair distribution lies between developed and developing countries, rich and poor, men and women, and adult and children. People overexploit their local environment is mainly because of overpopulation and limited access to enough resource. It is worth mentioning that I do not advocate that fair distribution of resource should happen immediately. People should be well-educated and the social context should also be aware of sustainable development. Only in this situation can the fair distribution be efficient.
Carlin is right about that comparing to the long history of the earth, the history of human beings is like a second and one day in future human will definitely extinct on this planet. However, when he mocks the environmentalists, stating that earth can purify itself and we should let human extinct without stopping anything, he overvalues the self-purification ability of the earth and ignores environmentalists’ effort in building a more friendly and sustainable environment for human living. It indicates that being arrogant and ignorant, Carlin does not care the interests of other men of lower social class and the damaged environment.
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This article Ecological and Social Resilience by Edward Adger is a good primer on the idea that ecosystems do not exist in a steady state where their component populations stay at the same levels. The system remains intact or only changes over the long course of geological history, but the component populations may wax and wane. This is a common phenomenon in ecology with numerous examples available. Adger didn’t use the ecological jargon, but what he was referring to was diversity as the number of trophic levels in an ecosystem. The more trophic levels, the more diverse it is, and the more resilient because the system has lots of species filling niches and can withstand the loss of one or two. The simpler an ecosystem, the more vulnerable it is to the loss of species. A famous example of this is Isle Royale. Isle Royal is isolated but it has populations of moose and wolves that can’t easily leave the island. The wolf pack died off and the moose population swelled without the presence of the wolves hunting them. They quickly denuded the island of its vegetation and started starving to death. An intrepid pair of wolves swam to the island from the mainland and started hunting moose. The moose population declined, but stabilized, and the wolf population increased. With fewer moose the vegetation recovered. However, over time the wolf pack became inbred and started to decline again, starting the cycle over. If there were other predators in the system this wild vacillation may be less severe.
Adger creates an equivalency between ecological resilience and social resilience because, “ecosystems do not exist in isolation from the human world” (83). I believe this to be true. Social, economic, legal, and urban constructs are created with reference to the natural environment. People are dependent upon the environments that surround their habitations. Historically, if people overextended their environment they ended up starving and dying. This famously happened on Easter Island. I think we must consider things like disease (ie. flu, malaria, etc), famine, and war as a part of the ecological makeup of our species because these things regulate our numbers and keep us from overextending our natural environments.
Adger goes on to emphasize the necessity of community engagement in resource management, “particularly in areas where communities rely on ecosystem health for their own well-being or livelihoods.” As the UN Report reveals, our global water supplies are incredibly constrained and death by water-born illnesses is a major contributor to infant mortality in the developing world. In Abundance, the Future is Better than You Think by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, the authors contend that the high infant mortality rate is what keeps the birth rate high in developing countries because parents cannot be sure their children will survive to adulthood. Fixing our resource management issues may go hand in hand with overpopulation.
My one criticism of Adger is that he does not do a good job discussing how ecological resilience via ecological principles are reflected in human society. I don’t think it’s a pleasant conversation, but possibly one that has to happen. Are we willing to let people die off via starvation when there isn’t enough food, as in nature? Do we make them move to other, similarly resource constrained communities?
I think that’s a good segue into the video with George Carlin. Who are we saving the planet for? If we loose the characteristics of our humanity in the process of perpetuating our species then we are evolving into something different. Climate change must change us. Society is going through the stages of grief while it mourns the end of our current way of life.
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In the writing Ecological and Social Resilience. W. Neil Adger discusses the coupled social-ecological system. In his argument, the resilient of this system result from 3 elements: the degree of disorder it can intake, self-organization ability, and possibility of increasing the ability for learning/adaptation. He attends to connect the ecological to social system, sustainable development/resilient to welfare benefit/human-use, which helps us understand the sustainability from realistic perspective.
I strongly agree with linkage between sustainable development and human social needs. The author argues that sustainable development would meet the needs of human economic development better because sustainable social natural systems can adapt to external changes without hindering output. This ides abandons the conventional slogans such as ‘we have to keep sustainable development for earth’, bridging the environmental protection and sustainable development with our daily life. It also links macro objectives and personal benefits together, which helps the realization of macro slogan in the real world. In the PX environmental protection parade in Xiamen, China, for example, people participated in the environmental protection demonstration after they realized that the PX project had a direct detrimental impact on the local community.
I find that the author’s definition of Ecological Resilience is interesting. He used a relative definition instead of an absolute definition. Ecological Resilience is the good functioning of the system instead of the stability of the species. Based on this definition, Figure 5.1-4 is also a resilience system from micro perspective. However, when we judge this system from macro perspective, this system is not resilience because the functioning social-ecological system would be destroyed if all of the micro social-ecological systems have been transferred in this way. This example reminds us that the definition of sustainability is changeable from different perspective.
I think the author’s discussion of sustainability, Resilience and adaptive management is too macro. Social awakening and resource management is indeed necessary to sustainable of society-natural ecosystems. But in practice, how to promote social awareness and participant of local community is a big issue. The author did not provide any details. In a social-ecological system, each individuals hold different knowledge scopes and perspectives. Although we live in the same social natural ecosystem, the cognition of this system is different and limited. These limitations come from personal education, length of life and so on. How to overcome the limitations of cognition and achieve the same management objectives is a big problem that needs to be solved urgently in the fields of sustainable development and environmental protection.
The same problem has been showed in the UN report. For example, when water resources are scarce, the first action of large companies take is not how to terminate the water supply, but to find new sources of water, which will virtually exacerbate the scarcity of water resources. Such problems stem from company owners, who focus more on short-term interests and market competition. Their perception of the social-ecological system is limited to their short-term interests. Hence, they don’t care about the long-term development that is irrelevant to their personal short-term benefits. This is the biggest problem in environmental protection.
I think what the performers stands for in the video is illogical from the social-ecological. Although the earth will exist in anyway(good or bad). But the detrimental effects we human being have brought to the social-ecological system is already there. We have to face and fix them instead of ignore them.
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