Ecology, environment and society: basic concepts (SOC)

- Speaker A introduces the module of MA Sociology, Ecology, Environment and Society, to EPG Patchala. The module aims to learn about the changing human environment relationship and introduces key concepts. - The term ecology was coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in the year 1866. It is the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment. It concerns itself with learning about life processes, explaining interactions and adaptations, etc. - Ecologists have highlighted the idea of ecological equilibrium or balance of nature. Studies on evolution have helped us understand the process of differentiation and elaboration in natural environment. The changing human and environmental relationship is something that we should be talking about now. - By understanding the shifting nature of a society, we can gain important insights about the changing society environment relationships. For example, Roberts and Crosby discuss the history of European expansion and the nature and scale of human impact on the environment. - Speaker A thinks we are already witnessing an ecological crisis due to the unprecedented rates of human activity and resultant strain on natural environment. - Some of the schools of thought have expanded our knowledge on nature of ecological and environmental issues and about community and institutional responses to them. So what is the concept called risk and vulnerability?

Hello, welcome to EPG Patchala. This is a module within the course MA Sociology and the paper is called Ecology and Society. This module is titled as Ecology, Environment and Society. Some basic Concepts this module talks about ecology and environment. Then we would attempt to learn about the changing human environment relationship. It will talk about risk and vulnerability. We will also talk about resilience and sustainability. What is the relationship between nature and society? In what different ways scholars have attempted to examine and theorize environment society relations? If and how has this relationship changed over the time and in what ways? What caused this change? Are these changes driven by human activity or ecological or environmental limits? What about the implications of a changing human environment relationship? How have we responded to these changes? To respond to these questions which are at the core of the discourse on ecology, environment and society, we require a basic familiarity with certain key concepts that can help us identify the coupled the dynamic nature of human and ecological or environmental system systems. The following sections undertake precisely this task by introducing the key concepts whilst also unpacking the connections and complexities to some extent. The term ecology was coined by German scientist Ernst Haeckel in the year 1866, who described it as scientific study of interactions with between living organisms and their environment. But its foundation was laid possibly Much earlier, in 1789, when British scholar Gilbert White, in his book the Natural History of Sauel Brown, regarded plants and animals not as independent individuals but as parts of a community of living organisms that interacted with each other and that interacted with humans and environment. However, unlike natural history, ecology is the study of life and not merely organisms. It concerns itself with learning about life processes, explaining interactions and adaptations, the flow of energy and materials through living communities, the successional development of ecosystems, and the distribution and abundance of biodiversity. In context of the environment. These interactions could be of several different kinds, ranging from simple to highly complex, one organism and another, between one or more organism and their physical environment, etc. Ranging from those among simple organisms like bacteria to those between multifarious plants, animals, birds and human beings. In a forested area, for instance, food webs are networks depicting complex and multiscaler prey, predator or consumer resource relationships. With such intricate networks existing between different organisms and their environment, it is not surprising that impacts of these interactions have implications for the entire ecosystems. By ecosystems we refer to the web of relations among organisms, including human beings, at different levels of organizations. Therefore, ecology is also defined as the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, the economics of the earth and its totality of life forms. However, environment as such refers to the surrounding of an organism, including other organisms and the physical world, and is known to have two types of components. Biotic, that includes living factors with biological origins such as genes, cells, organisms of same or different species, and the abiotic that includes non living factors like inorganic materials and physical aspects such as oxygen, carbon dioxide, temperature, light, climate, rainfall, etc. However, it is understood that both biotic and abiotic components of environment interact and impact each other. Non living factors can affect the living ones. For instance, lack of rainfall leads to poor vegetation, which in turn affects the wildlife dependent on it for food and habitat. Or consider how leaves crumble and fall on the ground in too harsh a climate, eventually decomposing and becoming part of the soil. That is to say, change in one ecological environmental factor can impact the dynamic state of the whole ecosystem. If ecologists highlighted the environment as consisting of webs of interconnecting relations of dependency and reciprocity between the people and for the diverse other living creatures and vegetation, sociologists have described environment as the context which provides the condition for the existence to them. In addition to this conceptualizations, sociologists have also extended the definition of environment to include built environment of human manufacture, such as a city or a slum or a national park. These connote human made surroundings acting as an interrelated whole interacting with human activities over time. Although built for human purposes, these mediate the overall environment with results that affect the environmental context. From this perspective, the natural world, the human built world and the social world of human relations are all considered environment. The concept of environment thus extends from physical or natural environment to also include cultural environments of human societies. While ecologists have highlighted the idea of ecological equilibrium or balance of nature to describe the self restoring tendency of ecological systems, where ecological systems tend to maintain stability by returning to some stable point after each disturbance through self correcting mechanism. This idea of nature striving always for permanent stability as long as left alone is currently considered obsolete. Given many proofs of variations in nature with and without human interventions, however, the balance of nature is not a status quo. It is fluid, ever shifting in a constant state of adjustment. Man too is part of this balance. Sometimes the balance is in his favor. Sometimes and all too often through his own activities, it is shifted to his disadvantage. As Rachel Carson pointed out over five decades ago, Examining human environmental interactions therefore becomes necessary to understand conditions of survival and how we might be impacting them. This includes human ability to unleash ecological destruction and as well as human stability for creation and restoration. The changing human and environmental relationship is something that we should be talking about now. Ecologists have eliminated our understanding about life as a manifestation of complex web of interactions between different organisms and their physical environment, including the complex interdependence between people and environment. Studies on evolution, particularly Charles Darwin's work on Origin of Species and Herbert Spencer's concept of survival of the fittest, have helped us understand the process of differentiation and elaboration in natural environment. The history of human society is also well known to show similar process of specialization, organization and expansion. See for example, Durkheim's work on division of labor in society. Human species is not external to the nature, it thrives within it. Therefore, examining the nature of human environment interactions and their impacts become crucial. Both human society and environment can be studied as systems where systems refer to a group of interacting or independent parts which maintains its existence and functions as a whole through the interactions of its parts. Books and others define ecological systems as self regulating community of organisms that interact with one another and with their environment. Social systems deal with human led governance, that is Access to resources and property rights, with human knowledge, ethics and world views defining use of natural resources and human nature relationship. Finally, social ecological systems too refer to the integrated concept of human in nature, expressing interlinked nature of social systems and ecosystems. Both ecosystems as well as social systems are dynamic systems with interactions that change over time. There are practically no ecosystems untouched by people and no people who don't need or benefit from ecosystems. When society itself has changed, can human nature relations remain the same? By understanding shifting nature of a society, we can gain important insights about the changing society environment relationships. For instance, Roberts in his work in 1998 described how over the course of around 10,000 years in Europe, humans, once entirely dependent on natural environment through agricultural subsistence, advanced from hunter gatherer to a technological and industrial society. During this process, he argued, the relationship of humans with their environment became intrinsically asymmetric unequal. Initially, humans depended upon the environment being part of it, but with the growth of agriculture they started controlling it to some extent, and as demands of natural resources increased, their exploitation of their own environment increased too. Similarly, Crosby in his work in 1986 provided a historical explanation of European expansion since the late 15th century by incorporating the role and treatment of natural world and examining the associated ecological destruction, a process he called ecological imperialism. In fact, over past 300 years, as human societies progressed from foraging communities to agriculture and then to modern societies, the nature and scale of human impact on environment too has changed from local to global changes from causing visible changes to Earth's surface to resources and resources to also affecting its flow of material and energy, even as environmental changes also occurs naturally. There is hardly any doubt now about the significant role played by the human agency in driving it. Human population has increased in both size and scale of its ambition. During early 1800, the entire human population was nearly 1 billion. By 2050 it is expected to cross 9 billion. This is a tremendous growth, but one that relied heavily on ecosystems and and the services they provide to meet the rapidly growing demands of a rapidly growing human population. These have put considerable strain on Earth's carrying capacity which refers to the maximum number of organisms that Earth can support with its existing resources without exhausting them. However, population growth is not the only factor adding ecological footprint, a term coined by William race in 1992 which conveys the human demand on environment and resources often compared with ecological capacity to regenerate. There are a range of other factors that shape human behavior towards environment. These factors are rooted in the society itself. For instance, within technological and industrializing societies one sees growing consumption and materialism, increasing individualism and competition, rising inequality and marginalization, disparity in terms of access to technological resources and capital resources and growing collective impact of human activities on nature. Consequently, the nature of human environment relationship is becoming increasingly skewed and confrontational. What will be the implication of human impact on nature? A range of environmental problems are arising due to the overall interconnection of the components of the global natural environment. Human impact on natural systems like interference in natural systems or a loss of a habitat or destruction of a species or organism e.g. overfishing or threats to Sundarban's forests and Majuli Islands. Both biodiversity hotspot or impact of human health and well being due to human induced changes in natural conditions e.g. increasing respiratory problems due to increased toxic of air in Delhi or human impact on natural landscape. That is considered problematic in the more developed countries which value the natural areas which are still untouched and pristine. In fact, due to the unprecedented rates of human activity and resultant strain on natural environment, we we are already witnessing an ecological crisis. This involves issues of fast degrading ecosystems. According to UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005, 60% of Earth's ecosystems are nearly degraded. Now the global warming and climate change is expected to soon become irreversible. It is already known that if environmental conditions change too much, ecosystems can undergo regime shifts that is they may suddenly change to another regime that is Alternative state which might no longer provide ecosystem services, that is Benefits essential for human well being. These are also resilient. So the loss of Ecosystem functions caused by the regime shift is irreversible. For instance, a shift from dry land to savannas in Africa due to bush encroachment and with implications for cattle ranching. Other examples include lakes, coral reefs, coastal ecosystems and even polar regions of Atlantics. How do we respond to such alarming impacts on social ecological systems? Malthus, in his essay that he wrote in 1789, had warned against impacts of unchecked population growth fairly early for humankind to take note of imminent crisis. 1960 onwards, when human population had already increased massively, resources were showing signs of fatigue, environmental changes were being recorded. A series of proposals came. These include emphasis on human ingenuity to find scientific and technical solutions. For example, you can look up the work by Bozru in 1965 and 1976, but to also avert exhaustion of common resources due to indiscriminate human use, referred commonly as tragedy of commons by rethinking natural resource management and regulating access and control that is described in the work by Garrett Hardin in 1968. The critic of private resource regime found effective examples of collective management of commons in the work of Eleanor Ostrom in 1990, leading to a framework of socio ecological systems developed by Ostrom in 2009 that considered social ecological problems as manifestations of complex and different human nature interactions. The unprecedented impact of human activity was on natural environment, which remained at the center of human ecology. Also triggered diverse ideas on how one can examine and respond to environmental problems given the interacting nature of human and ecological systems. For example, deep ecology. Deep ecology proposed the idea that nature is sacrosanct and should not be seen as a resource for human exploitation, only keeping nature free from any form of human activity due to deep empathy for other life forms. In contrast, socio ecological approach countered them vehemently, highlighting the intricate relationship between nature and human society and the fact that all ecological or environmental problems are ultimately and fundamentally social in nature caused due to deep seated problems of society and not merely human activity or overpopulation only. Resolving environmental problems therefore requires a fundamental shift in society that is within people, their actions and their attitudes. Yet others took to cultural ecology which examined role and impact of culture in unfolding environmental problems and the solutions including human adaptations to different and shifting environment. Further, political ecology unpacked the politics and economic roots of environmental problems, for instance land degradation in less developed countries as a product of their political economy. Yet others combine culture and political ecology to investigate the intersecting domains of culture, knowledge, power and nature, thus articulating environmental issues not merely as socio political issues, but also as matters of justice. These various and growing schools of thoughts have have expanded our knowledge on nature of ecological and environmental issues and about community and institutional responses to them. By combining ecological sciences with social sciences in their analysis, these have also questioned and exposed what makes our society and environment weak by examining the risks facing socio ecological systems and their vulnerability and resilience. So what is the concept called risk and vulnerability? By risk we mean a potential threat or activity that can cause harm or damage. For instance, a natural disaster like recent earthquake in Nepal in April 2015 caused damage to both human lives and their surrounding environments. Similarly, Chernobyl nuclear disaster caused both immediate as well as lasting damages to human and environmental health. Vulnerability, on the other hand, is the susceptibility to risk. It indicates the extent to which an individual organism or environment or ecosystem is likely to be caused harm by risk. The concept of risk and vulnerability thus apply to both ecosystems as well as human systems. Sociologist Anthony Giddens categorized risks into two kinds, external risks and manufactured risks. External risks are known humans such as earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, volcanoes etc. Which always presented a risk to human society. Manufactured risks are creations of humans themselves, such as nuclear reactors, big dams, chemicals like pesticides and diseases like silicosis. These are products of the the process of modernization of human society resulting from increased human role in the production as well as mitigation of these risks. An ecosystem's vulnerability represents its sensitivity towards stresses that can disturb its ecological equilibrium. It can be induced by natural stress. For instance, within an intertidal wetland, salinity and tidal movements denote major natural stress causing damage to plants, mangroves, etc. Or it could be human induced stress such as the changes witnessed in nutrient cycle resulting into eutrophication of lakes, damaging water quality. The interconnected biophysical components within ecosystems increase its vulnerability further, also making it difficult to identify whether an environmental change was caused by human or natural processes. In terms of social systems, Paling described vulnerability to be physical vulnerability which is related to the built environment. Social vulnerability on the other hand, is experienced by people and the social, economic and political systems and human vulnerability is resulting from physical and social vulnerability. How do we interpret vulnerability in the context of dynamic interacting natural and social systems with naturally constituted and embedded societies and destructive agents as unfolding processes over time? Hillhorse Tend Bancoff explained vulnerability as a condition of deep seated social reform relations and processes. It is not merely the occurrence, frequency and intensity of environmental events, rather it also being a condition arising from historical and structural factors due to the historical consequence of political, economic and social processes. Some populations might be more vulnerable than others. For instance, population in Sahel suffered famine which resulted from conditions of dependency created by colonialism and cash cropping along with climate change. Vulnerability is about the timing of the event, location of the people and other social specificities such as gender, age, poverty, power, etc. It is also about public perception and knowledge as they shape human behavior. It is the product of past factors but also present conditions that changes a hazard into a disaster and determines whether people can cope with effects or succumb to its consequences. For example, consider the case of the 1984 Popal Ghaz disaster. It was a result of several factors acting together including technological failure etc. At the carbide pesticide plant, greedy and careless management and poor location of the factory next to a densely populated but poor and largely illiterate neighborhood. The water contamination spreading from the factory to neighborhood in Bhopal provides another example of how a known risk could become a disaster affecting the already affected. Due to the continued vulnerability of people and continued failure of government to hold the polluter accountable. In context of unequal world polity, with processes of social transformation, continued expansion of human activities and consequent impacts on nature, along with ongoing naturally occurring environmental change, the nature of risks and vulnerability of people are changed too. Elaborating upon this, Ulrich Beck in his work in 1992 stressed that we are faced with a risk society, a vastly transformed version of pre modernization society. Globalizing world has connected not just people but also risks and hazards. Risks are no longer local in nature now and vulnerabilities are difficult to anticipate. Hence the growing difficulty in predicting or preventing disasters. Disaster causing human and environmental loss and are a function of both hazard events and changing vulnerability and resilience. These are found to both shape and are shaped by development. In next section we will talk about resilient thinking. Steps towards Sustainability to protect and rebuild communities and institutions on an increasingly coupled human environmental systems, one needs to embrace ideas of resilience and and sustainability concepts resulting from the realization that these systems are inherently dynamic and interlinked. In 1987, Brundtland Commission stressed on the concept of sustainability which denotes the ability of a process or human activity to meet the needs of the present generation while also protecting the environment and its resources for future generations. Therefore, sustainable activities are those that do not deplete or damage natural environment or natural resources. Sustainable development strives to meet people's immediate interests without compromising interests of future generations. High resilience and low vulnerability are measures of Sustainability vulnerability emerges when resilience is lost. Resilience refers to the ability of an organization to resist or recover from adverse conditions, as well as to the ability of an ecosystem to absorb shocks or disturbance while still retaining its basic elements or relationships and returning to its usual state after being disturbed. Stability is a measure of the speed with which a system returns to equilibrium or a state of balance after absorbing disturbances. Systems with high resilience but low stability may undergo deep and frequent changes but still continue to function, while systems with high stability but low resilience may show little change during disturbances but then collapse suddenly. However, system recovery, not the speed of recovery, is more important. Over the time, humans have, especially after industrial revolution, reduced the capacity of ecosystems to cope with change through a combination of factors, removal of functional groups of of species and their response diversity, such as the loss of whole, graphic whole trophic levels, top down effects impact on ecosystems via emissions of waste and pollutants, I.e. bottom up effects and climate change and alteration of the magnitude, frequency and duration of disturbance regimes to which the biota is adapted. This human induced loss of resilience increases the vulnerability of the entire ecosystem. Resilience is understood in several terms. Physical resilience refers to hazard resistant or adaptive systems which when disturbed maintain their structural their structure and processes. Ecological resilience, on the other hand, is understood as the amount of change an ecosystem can undergo and remain in the same regime retaining the same structure, the same function and feedbacks. According to Shakes us and Bugs, the resilience of an ecosystem is its capacity to absorb disturbances while maintaining its behavioral processes and structure. It can be defined as the capacity to buffer perturbations, to self organize and to learn and adapt. Broadly, resilience of a system is understood as its ability to resist and endure turbulences, its capacity to restore original conditions and its ability to adapt in changing contexts. These definitions can be extended to social systems to conceptualize social resilience. According to Edgar, social resilience is defined at the community level rather than individuals. It is related to the social capital of societies and communities, is institutionally determined and can be examined through indicators like institutional changes and economic structure and through demographic change and by observing positive and negative aspects of social exclusion, marginalization and social capital. One example of social resilience could be found in the commons dependent pastoral and nomadic communities during the colonial times. These communities and their practices were perceived with the social evolutionary lens and they were referred to as vanishing tribes. However, these communities have shown remarkable ability to adapt in changing circumstances and absorb ecological stress. The Linkages between social and ecological resilience are quite visible in resource dependent communities, that is Communities who rely majorly on their physical environment, physical environment and resources for the livelihood. These resource dependent communities are exposed to external stress and shocks both in the form of environmental changes and social, economic and political changes or disturbances. For instance, Indian agriculture is reported to show different vulnerabilities in different regions corresponding to climate change and economic globalization. Overall, given the interlinked nature of socio ecological systems, it would be useful to examine measures that can reduce their vulnerability and increase resilience. Burkes and others explain four measures 1 learning to live with change and uncertainty 2nd nurturing diversity for recognization and renewal nurturing ecological memory, sustaining social memory third combining different types of knowledge for learning and fourth creating opportunities for self organization that is Matching scales of ecosystems and governance dealing with cross scale dynamics. Also, Folke considers resilience as processes of adaptation, learning and innovation that in turn improve sustainability of social and ecological systems. Indeed, understanding resilience as a capacity to learn from change, a capacity for renewal and reformation and role of individuals and institutions for it needs to be examined further as an essential step towards sustainable development. This brings one to re evaluate efforts towards sustainability given that social ecological systems have only certain mechanisms that allow it to persist but which remain vulnerable to human impact and and environmental change. How to ensure sustainable development, which is already noted to be a contradiction in terms without straining the limits of the human adaptive capacities and the resilience of nature remains an open question.