Coupled Human and Natural Systems

Research in Coupled Human Natural Systems: approach, challenges and strategies

by Nick Reo

APPLICATION OF THE “TRIANGULAR ECO-KINEMATICS THEORY” (TEKT) (PART I) - THE PARADIGM OF ECOLOGY, PUBLIC HEALTH AND ECONOMY AS A SYNERGISTIC EFFECT UPON HUMAN RIGHTS

by Adrian Toader-Williams

Presented at the International Conference "Human Ecology: Health, Culture and Quality of Life, Oct. 26-27, 2011, Moscow, Russian Federation and Published in the "Herald of the International Academy of Science, Russian Section", 2011, Vol 1, ISSN 2221-7479 Full article [22 pages] in English with a Russian abstract and English abstract. Free download at http://www.heraldrsias.org/online/2011/1/203/
Upcoming updates on TEKT are on the way. Introductory presentation made during conference excerpts at http://youtu.be/kZkGKkbnGKE Comments and collaboration proposals are welcome. Thank you!

The laws governing natural economic flow are recommended to be used as model for a sustainable anthropogenic economy.... more The laws governing natural economic flow are recommended to be used as model for a sustainable anthropogenic economy. Life can't be monopolized. Biodiversity has a paramount importance to sustainable development. This article is intended to be the first in a series of applicative works based on the Triangular Eco-Kinematics Theory «TEKT» proposed here as foundation for global cooperation mechanisms. It is an urgent call for global anthropogenic economic reforms. Planet Earth can sustain a maximum population load if it's properly managed. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights needs to be revised. A Life Equivalent Etalon [LEE] as currency reference is proposed. Key words: natural rights, Life Equivalent Etalon, LEE, gold, energy, protein, organization equilibrium theory, monetary system, entropy, antientropy, negentropy, syntropy, UNESCO, intangible commodities, economics, religion, protein, amino acids, seed germination, carbon dioxide, oxigen, dinitrogen, nitrogen, air, global warming, occupy wall street, occupy movement, evolution, macroeconomics.
Introduction.
Ecological issues should not be separated from economic issues or from public health concerns as they correlate. The global crises have their beginnings back in the history of mankind. Lately they are acutely identified and discussed as our natural resources are depleting visibly. Furthermore, the strong polarization of wealth, abusive exploitation of natural resources and excessive material accumulation do not just hinder the free economic flow, but are also unethical. It conducts to social segregation and conflicts; the expanding “occupy movement” is just one of the latest examples. With this paper, I am also calling for an urgent and closer look at Human Rights principles. Human Rights need to be a section of a future Universal Declaration of Natural Rights.
This paper (as part 1) is an attempt to address several interconnected issues in a fashion such as an overture to an upcoming series of work (work is in progress) with the belief that readers have a fairly strong natural inducement to co-operate [20] with the author in order to build and consolidate the proposed model, the presently included applications and the upcoming ones as well.
Fighting Nature is a historical human endeavor for which we just recently started to see the beginning of its outcome. Public health, ecological systems and global economics, being intimately interconnected, undergo a cycle of crises that I take the freedom to call “The Bermuda Triangle of Human Endeavors”. Planet Earth offers us as Humanity the means to support our very material existence. Health and ecology together are the primary life supporting elements that form the structures of a sustainable social and economic development.
Deprivation of proper living conditions represents an acute denial of Human Rights. No one has the right to deprive others from the inherited Natural Rights, the rights to exist. The economic principles need to be brought up to date and restructured such as to observe the non-monetary values going beyond Human Rights. For the economic system to be sustainable it needs to use a currency that has a sustainable etalon as reference. Life Equivalent Etalons (LEE) can assure economic and international stability as they are fixed and indispensable.
Each one of us is responsible for the global economy as it is an expression of human endeavor and its dynamics, more so in the context of globalization. I’ll tailor my work in a way to make it accessible to most people. It does not matter how good are whatever ideas one may have if they are not well understood by the intended audience, in this particular case, Humanity at large.The M.A.Sholokhov Moscow State University of Humanities is a great place to present this paper addressing ecological issues; such subjects are only about Humanity and concerns Humanity at large. What can be more human than human activity and its overall outcome?
Primary conclusions – Life’s properties and limitations
1) Acute and severely disastrous possible outcomes are due, a total collapse of the system is expected if one living entity is lowering its entropy (increasing anti-entropy) and comes too close to exhausting its own life support, regardless of the energy that may be available. Outgrowing life’s support capacity induces the destruction of the entire system, its entire collapse to decay possibly into lifeless while keeping the energy tightly locked into a stinky slime form of existence.
2) If our planet was to be populated only by forests and plants, cyanobacteria and green algae, Earth could have exhausted its life support and its destiny would have been limited to a continuous energy and structural accumulation up to the point when a total decay would have follow, perhaps a slimy world. Strange as it may appear my statement, we’ve seen in the above experimental example that as long as there are living entities consuming oxygen, ready synthesized sugars and proteins, having CO2 as waste on which the plants can feed on, the cycle of life can continue as long as the relative organizational equilibrium is being kept to a sustainable level or why not a sustainable rapport as represented by TEKT.
3) Based on the above, the biological classifications are forming two major groups:
a) The self-sustaining, food independent living entities (i.e. cyanobacteria, plantae),
b) The by-sustaining, food dependent living entities (i.e. animalia, etc.)
4) Thermodynamically, utilization of energy is not a mere “emerging property” of life, it is Life itself. Utilization of energy by living forms of existence is a self organizing and a conducting mechanism that “knows” to use energy efficiently. It knows when and how to accumulate the dissipated free energy, to “pump it” in the re-assembled structures. It concentrates energy reserves; it creates protective resistant ergonomic structures. The Life forms of material existence have as main property (as opposed to emerging property) the thermo-dynamical ability to act as heat energy pumps; Life forms of material existence are structures of concentrated energy ready to be used. A small seed has the ability to act as a heat energy pump concentrating dissipated free energy into a chemical structure with energy ready to use (i.e. burning wood producing heat).
5) The minerals and vitamins play a key roll in the kinematics of the Life phenomena, the energy, the dynamics of it, but the mother of all dynamics is the mystery of Life, the low entropy or high anti-entropy of information encoded in the DNA folds confers the ability to use and further concentrate more energy into a structural body, into the high anti-entropy of the newly grown living entity, the plants, the trees with their fruits and byproducts holding enormous incorporated energy as well. The high anti-entropy of information has the ability to concentrate low negentropy (high entropy) into high anti-entropy, ready to use concentrated forms of energy, a real gift of Life.
The ability to self-acquiring, holding, using and transmitting information we can also identify it as being a main property of Life.
---------
See the full article [ free PDF DOWNLOAD ] from
http://www.heraldrsias.org/online/2011/1/203/
Comments and contributions are welcome.

Evaluating the efficacy of zoning designations for protected area management

by Mao-Ning Tuanmu

Hull, V., Xu, W., Liu, W., Zhou, S., Viña, A., Zhang, J., Tuanmu, M.-N., Huang, J., Linderman, M., Chen, X., Huang, Y., Ouyang, Z., Zhang, H., Liu, J., (2011) Biological Conservation, 144, 3028-3037.

Protected areas worldwide are facing increasing pressures to co-manage human development and biodiversity... more Protected areas worldwide are facing increasing pressures to co-manage human development and biodiversity conservation. One strategy for managing multiple uses within and around protected areas is zoning, an approach in which spatial boundaries are drawn to distinguish areas with varying degrees of allowable human impacts. However, zoning designations are rarely evaluated for their efficacy using empirical data related to both human and biodiversity characteristics. To evaluate the effectiveness of zoning designations, we developed an integrated approach. The approach was calibrated empirically using data from Wolong Nature Reserve, a flagship protected area for the conservation of endangered giant pandas in China. We analyzed the spatial distribution of pandas, as well as human impacts (roads, houses, tourism infrastructure, livestock, and forest cover change) with respect to zoning designations in Wolong. Results show that the design of the zoning scheme could be improved to account for pandas and their habitat, considering the amount of suitable habitat outside of the core zone (area designated for biodiversity conservation). Zoning was largely successful in containing houses and roads to their designated experimental zone, but was less effective in containing livestock and was susceptible to boundary adjustments to allow for tourism development. We identified focus areas for potential zoning revision that could better protect the panda population without significantly compromising existing human settlements. Our findings highlight the need for evaluating the efficacy of zoning in other protected areas facing similar challenges with balancing human needs and conservation goals, not only in China but also around the world.

A Review of Ecosystem/Environmental Services

by Adam Hejnowicz

Mind, the gap in landscape‐evolution modelling

by James Millington

Wainwright, J. and Millington, J.D.A. (2010) Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 35(7) 842-855

Despite an increasing recognition that human activity is currently the dominant force modifying landscapes, and that... more Despite an increasing recognition that human activity is currently the dominant force modifying landscapes, and that this activity has been increasing through the Holocene, there has been little integrative work to evaluate human interactions with geomorphic processes. We argue that agent-based models (ABMs) are a useful tool for overcoming the limitations of existing, highly empirical approaches. In particular, they allow the integration of decision-making into process-based models and provide a heuristic way of evaluating the compatibility of knowledge gained from a wide range of sources, both within and outwith the discipline of geomorphology. The application of ABMs to geomorphology is demonstrated from two different perspectives. The SPASIMv1 (Special Protection Area SIMulator version 1) model is used to evaluate the potential impacts of land-use change – particularly in relation to wildfire and subsequent soil conditions, runoff and erosion – over a decadal timescale from the present day to the mid-twenty-first century. It focuses on the representation of farmers with traditional versus commercial perspectives in central Spain, and highlights the importance of land-tenure structure and historical contingencies of individuals' decision-making. CYBEROSION, however, considers changes in erosion and deposition over the scale of at least centuries. It represents both wild and domesticated animals and humans as model agents, and investigates the interactions of them in the context of early agriculturalists in southern France in a prehistoric context. We evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the ABM approach, and consider some of the major challenges. These challenges include potential process-scale mismatches, differences in perspective between investigators from different disciplines, and issues regarding model evaluation, analysis and interpretation. If the challenges can be overcome, this fully integrated approach will provide geomorphology a means to conceptualize soundly the study of human–landscape interactions by bridging the gap between social and physical approaches.

Understanding the impact of nonlinear dynamics on the processes of human systems

by J. B. (Jack) Owens

Submitted: 20 September 2010
Published: January 2011
This paper was written as a response to the U.S. National Science Foundation’s “SBE 2020: Future Research in the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences” program. All of the abstracts and most of the papers, including this one, are available for download. There is also a full explanation of the program and the way that the SBE Directorate hopes to shape future research in these fields.
http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/index.cfm

The global economic collapse of the fall of 2008 underlined in a powerful way the degree to which nonlinear dynamics... more The global economic collapse of the fall of 2008 underlined in a powerful way the degree to which nonlinear dynamics influence processes in human systems. As a way of understanding these influences, this paper proposes Geographically-Integrated History (GIH) as an interdisciplinary research strategy. GIH asserts that (1) the understanding of historical processes requires an integration of the natural, social, and cultural environments on the basis of place, space, and time and (2) accomplishing this integration poses a challenge that can be met with modern computational tools, especially dynamic forms of geographic information systems and social network analysis, and visualization techniques. The paper explains how GIH demands the integration of a broad range of disciplinary approaches and provides opportunities for generating truly new, transformative scientific ideas.

Towards an improved understanding of farmers' behaviour: The integrative agent-centred (IAC) framework

by Giuseppe Feola

with C.R. Binder, in Ecological Economics 69(12):2323-2333, also available in pre-print version here: http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/23997/

An effective approach to research on farmers' behaviour is based on: i) an explicit and well-motivated behavioural... more An effective approach to research on farmers' behaviour is based on: i) an explicit and well-motivated behavioural theory; ii) an integrative approach; and iii) understanding feedback processes and dynamics. While current approaches may effectively tackle some of them, they often fail to combine them together. The paper presents the integrative agent-centred (IAC) framework, which aims at filling this gap. It functions in accordance with these three pillars and provides a conceptual structure to understand farmers' behaviour in agricultural systems. The IAC framework is agent-centred and supports the understanding of farmers' behavior consistently with the perspective of agricultural systems as complex social–ecological systems. It combines different behavioural drivers, bridges between micro and macro levels, and depicts a potentially varied model of human agency. The use of the framework in practice is illustrated through two studies on pesticide use among smallholders in Colombia. The examples show how the framework can be implemented to derive policy implications to foster a transition towards more sustainable agricultural practices. The paper finally suggests that the framework can support different research designs for the study of agents' behaviour in agricultural and social–ecological systems.

Ecosystem Services, Natural Capital and Uplands

by Adam Hejnowicz

El hombre y El Toro

by Adam Hejnowicz

Poem

Heritage and Hermeneutics: Towards a Broader Interpretation of Interpretation

by Phillip Ablett

Co-authored with Prof. Pam Dyer and Published in Current Issues in Tourism. Vol. 12, No. 3, May 2009, 209–233

This article re-examines the theoretical basis for environmental and heritage interpretation in tourist settings in... more This article re-examines the theoretical basis for environmental and heritage interpretation in tourist settings in the light of hermeneutic philosophy. It notes that the pioneering vision of heritage interpretation formulated by Freeman Tilden envisaged a broadly educational, ethically informed and transformative art. By contrast, current cognitive psychological attempts to reduce interpretation to the monological transmission of information, targeting universal but individuated cognitive structures, are found to be wanting. Despite growing signs of diversity, this information processing approach to interpretation remains dominant. The article then presents the alternative paradigm of hermeneutics through the works of Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger and Gadamer, to provide a broader interpretation of interpretation. This not only captures the essence of Tilden's definition but construes heritage interpretation as a more inclusive, culturally situated, critically reflexive and dialogical practice.

Keywords: environmental interpretation; heritage tourism; hermeneutics; Gadamer;
Heidegger; Tilden