Cultural ecosystem services: Concept in question, concept in discussion

Background/Question/Methods

The multiple and diversified links between cultures and ecosystems are inseparable and intrinsically dependent. Since human-nature relationships are influenced by factors such as ownership, ethics, religion, organization, economics and political decisions, these links vary enormously across societies, evolving in different directions in both space and time. How then is a particular environment shaped? It would entirely depend on how nature is perceived, experienced, used, and valued by a society. Similar habitats will be transformed differently by diverse societies, depending on their cultural background, the way societies have shaped their environment during the course of their development, and their political and economic framework. Culture has been a difficult concept to define, as it depends on multiple perspectives by different sociological and anthropological schools. For the traditional ones, culture consists of not only the social organization, often with religion playing a central role, but also the economic ways of transforming nature. Historically, culture has been defined as the social inheritance, defined as how humans adapt to the environment and collective life. Structurally, culture is a complex of ideas and learnt habits that distinguished societies. Symbolically, culture consists of ideas, symbols, and behaviors continuously interrelated. It has been defined as a network of meanings and values shared by societies, the norms that are practiced” and the material goods that they produce.

Results/Conclusions

Cultural Ecosystem Services have been approached only as the non-material benefits that people consider, appreciate, value, use and experience from their ecosystems to maintain their own culture and society. But a richer approach that better reflects the complexity of culture would be to consider cultural ES not only as these non-material benefits, but also the tangible benefits and intangible values associated with material benefits that people obtain from ecosystems and that form part of a historical network of meanings and values. In this sense, cultural ecosystem services narrowly conceived reduce the scope of the importance of culture in ecosystem services. In this presentation, I will propose a new conceptual schema of culture and ecosystem services that explains the interrelationships of multiple transformations between culture, ecosystem services and environment.