Building stewardship by re-linking social-ecological systems through a sense of place

Background/Question/Methods

Building earth stewardship is an ambitious project, especially in an age of globalization when local connections of people to places are being severed and market forces are driving resource exploitation in distant places. Here I seek ecological theories that help think through stewardship, along with the “sense of place” notion and other interdisciplinary ideas. Resilience theory uses the term, social-ecological system, the complex adaptive system that includes social (human) and ecological (biophysical) subsystems in a two-way feedback relationship (F.S. Chapin et al., Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship). Using the social-ecological system as the unit of analysis reminds us that the delineation between social and ecological systems is artificial and arbitrary. Rather, the two subsystems function as a coupled, interdependent and co-evolutionary system.  Consistent with hierarchy theory, both ecological systems and social systems are multi-level and function at several different scales from local to global.

Results/Conclusions

A number of propositions emerge from these considerations. First, building earth stewardship requires attention to the multi-level nature of social-ecological systems. Stewardship cannot be built solely at the global level but rather has to be built, step by step, from local to global. Second, the local level is the logical starting point because feedback loops are tighter and quicker than those at higher levels, as S. A. Levin points out in Fragile Dominion. Third, strengthening the feedbacks between the human and the biophysical subsystems of the social-ecological system, or restoring the links as needed, is an effective strategy for building and maintaining stewardship. Finally, sense of place notion provides a way to help conceptualize how stewardship can be brought about in a social-ecological system. Sense of place is about embedded relationships of people with places. These places encapsulate local ecosystems and their goods and services. At the same time, they provide individual and group identities, and anchor social and cultural values. Sense of place implies an intimate, reciprocal relationship with a place, with repeated opportunities for learning and interaction over multiple generations, shaping environmental knowledge and practice.