from the sun is astounding: 8,000 times what they need to power the global economy. Energy that drives ecosystems comes almost entirely from the sun, a fraction of its rays (about 7%) being captured by green plants for growth via the process of photosynthesis and sustaining human life. But ecosystems’ energy is governed by a law of entropia: It can neither be created or destroyed (first law of thermodynamics) and its usage produces waste heat that humans cannot use again (second law of thermodynamics).
Economies are exactly like organisms: They need not only energy but nutrients to function.10 Material resources abundant on Earth and useful for humans are comprised of the biomass (wood and crops for food, energy, and plant-based materials), fossil fuels (coal, gas, and oil), metals (such as iron, aluminum, and copper) and non-metallic minerals (including sand, gravel, and limestone), all of which feed the economy. In fact, at a time when the digital revolution is supposed to make economies immaterial, humans today extract close to 90 billion tonnes of material resources; more than three times the amount they needed fifty years ago.11
Social and natural systems, standing and collapsing together
Since its emergence in the 1980s, ecological economics has focused on the joint study of natural and human systems. It goes beyond both conventional environmental economics, which reduces the application of the standard neo-classical model to ecological issues, and ecology, narrowly understood as the science of the natural world. The causes and consequences of climate change render obvious this need to think in social-ecological terms. The difficulty is to think about these issues in a truly integrated way, not by juxtaposing natural sciences (physical and natural) and social sciences, but by intermingling them, combining them, articulating them. What is more, this joint study should be dynamic, since on both sides systems evolve and even co-evolve; that is to say, evolve together dynamically.
In its broadest sense, the theory of co-evolution postulates that ecosystems reflect the characteristics of social systems (state of knowledge and techniques, values, social organization) and that social systems in return reflect the characteristics of natural systems (species, productivity, temporal and spatial differentiation, resilience). An essential assumption here is therefore the notion of co-dependence, biological and dynamic, between human systems and natural systems in a “socio-ecological system,” or “social-ecological system,” or “coupled human-environment system.”
Another important concept in this respect is that of resilience. The notion of resilience, nowadays widespread in many disciplines, was born in the field of psychology. It was introduced by Holling in 1978 in the ecological literature and broadly defined as the ability of a system to tolerate shocks without changing its nature (i.e. retaining core ecological functionings). It is clear that ecological resilience should be combined with social resilience in the event of an ecological shock. We can illustrate this point with the role played by mangroves in Asian coastal areas.
Mangroves are aquatic forests that provide coastal human communities with forest and fisheries resources. They also protect shorelines from erosion and ocean hazards such as tsunamis (they also have the ability to store carbon). The destruction of mangroves to develop shrimp fishing along the Asian coasts has significantly increased the vulnerability of coastal populations that were severely hit by the Asian tsunami of December 2004. A 2005 study showed both that human activities reduced the area of mangroves by 26% in the five countries most affected by the tsunami, and that remaining mangroves had significantly reduced the destruction caused by the tsunami.12
Elinor Ostrom (2009) has sought to systematically understand what she calls “complex social-ecological systems” such as those. Such systems do not lend themselves to simplistic typologies and indeed suppose a certain complexity of analysis. They can be broken down into four essential elements: resource systems, resource units, users, and governance systems. Ostrom takes the example of a protected park where there are forests, animal and plant species, and water resources. These include: resource systems (the park contains wooded areas, fauna and flora, water systems); resource units (for example, trees, shrubs, plants in the park, different types of wildlife, volume and flow of water), users (who use park resources for recreational purposes, subsistence, or commercial); and finally governance systems (a national government, NGOs involved in park management, rules of use and exploitation of resources).
Each of these four subsystems is itself composed of several second-level variables (for example, the size of a resource system, the growth of a resource unit, the degree of user cooperation, or the level of governance). Ostrom then defines two additional notions: Interactions between users (information sharing, deliberation process, and so on) and their results (economic and ecological outcomes). This complex social-ecological analysis must also take into account the social, economic and political context upstream and the effect on other social-ecological systems, in other words add to the four internal systems already described two external systems. From this dynamic and complex framework, Ostrom has managed to derive novel ways to govern the commons.
Notes
1 For more on the identification of the Anthropocene, see Chapter 11. 2 Ernst Haeckel went as far as, like Darwin before him, talking about the economy of nature. 3 “Anthropos” is Greek for human and “kainos” means recent. 4 Vitousek et al. (1997). 5 Ecosystems are “natural units that include living and non-living parts interacting to produce a stable system in which the exchange of materials between the living and non-living parts follows circular paths,” Odum (1953). 6 Ellis et al. (2010). 7 Not just plants but also animals. For instance, bears enter dormant state when food is scarce (hibernation), which is of tremendous value for medicine to investigate and possibly find a cure to osteoporosis and type-2 diabetes (see Chivian and Bernstein, 2008). 8 See Hamilton (1964) and (1970) and Bourke (2011). 9 There is a fundamental difference between the human species and the others in the capacity we have not only to reproduce cooperative behaviors observed among our elders, but to build sustainable and flexible institutions that allow cooperation of every human with every other, beyond the bonds of blood. The lionesses teach their offspring very early, through play, to hunt in packs. But it’s still the same way that lion cubs learn and that, becoming lions, they will hunt. And they will never hunt with strangers. Humans can change the rules of the social game for each generation.10 Domestic material consumption (DMC) represents the total amount of materials directly used by an economy (the annual quantity of raw materials extracted from the domestic territory, plus all physical imports minus all physical exports) and metabolic rates of the economy stands for the amount of natural resources consumed per capita per year (or DMC per capita). See Chapter 7 for additional considerations and data on material flow accounting.11 IRP (2017).12 Kathiresan and Rajendran (2005).
3 Governing the commons fairly
Deprived of the rich diversity of life, which is as much a source of material well-being as a reservoir of knowledge, we would become biologically impoverished but we would also erode intellectually. Our dependence on the natural world is therefore very real and it is because we do not understand it that we are blindly attacking ourselves when we brutalize it. We thus have to find ways to govern the world of which we have become the stewards. This starts by understanding the long perspective of the mutual history of social and natural systems and then moving to the practical ways to build robust human institutions to enjoy natural resources in a sustainable way.
Environmental history: Social and natural systems in perspective
Environmental history, that can be traced back to the early 1970s, offers a bilateral approach, shedding light on how humans have been affected by their natural environment and how reciprocally they have affected their environment. The birth of environmental history is generally located in August 1972, with the publication of a special issue of the Pacific Historical Review and more specifically a seminal article by Roderick Nash.1 In it, Nash writes: “I never intended to teach
