Agriculture in the anthropocene: Examining social ecological feedbacks, regimes and transformations at multiple scales

Background/Question/Methods

We are now all living in the Anthropocene, a time when human activities and engineering have shaped and continue to reshape the biosphere.   Myriad unintended consequences of human action combine with purposeful ecological engineering to produce today’s Accidental Anthropocene.  To build an Anthropocene that people actually want to live in requires conceptual and methodological innovation in how we analyze and understand local, regional, and global social ecological interactions.  Agriculture provides an excellent arena to develop such tools. Agriculture is one of the main activities transforming the planet, but now agriculture is not only a social-ecological system, it is also embedded within and interacts with other social-ecological systems. 

Results/Conclusions

I present three social-ecological lenses: social-ecological feedbacks, regimes, and transformation to analyze agriculture.  I apply these lenses to understand persistence and change in case studies ranging from small-scale farmers, to agricultural landscapes, to the globe.  At the small-scale I show how analysis of social-ecological feedbacks can be used to analyze poverty and development.  At the landscape level, I look at how regimes can be used to understand landscape heterogeneity and dynamics, and at the global scale present an analysis of social-ecological regimes.  I synthesize across these case studies to discuss ways of conceptualizing cross-scale interactions in social-ecological systems and conclude by presenting a set of challenges and opportunities for social-ecological analysis.