In the Anthropocene, human activities have interfered with Planet Earth to an unprecedented degree having caused dramatic changes in the relationships between humans and their environment. Since the Industrial and Green Revolutions, technological innovations have left strong imprints across all global biomes from drylands to the tropics. More recently the global economic, social, cultural and political interconnectedness has added to the transformation to an increasingly globalized world. Local livelihoods and agro-industries thrive from the abundant use of natural resources, putting unparalleled pressure on ecosystems. Livestock production in drylands and violin-bow production from tropical pau-Brasil (Caesalpinia echinata Lam.) wood are two examples where the increasing connectedness from local to global scales has undermined the regenerative capacity of these systems. Hence, what socioeconomic and biophysical drivers explain the current status of these important production systems? To understand the dynamics and complex behavior of the two social-ecological systems (SES), we applied Holling’s adaptive cycle framework. We analyzed archived multi-decadal records and collected in situ information on key natural, social, economic and political variables considering both livestock production in communal drylands of Mexico and pau-brazil wood extraction in the Mata Altanica forest in Brazil to identify stable system states, trends, thresholds and regime shifts.
Results/Conclusions
In Mexico’s drylands, local farming SES have continuously adapted to changing social, political and economic conditions for 450 years; presumably because livelihood development was directly coupled to the delivery of local ecosystem goods and services. Recent shifts in the global economy, and neoliberal policies together have become a dominant cross-scale directional force in the development of communal livelihoods, which now narrowed down to livestock production at the cost of natural and cultural capital and an increasingly dysfunctional landscape. Pau-Brasil is the only raw material for high quality violin bows. Centuries of overexploitation and illegal trading have endangered this species; in 2007 it was added to Appendix 2 of CITES. This permitted strictly controlled international Pau-Brasil trading, yet only with wood grown on plantations considering Brazilian legislation. High quality Pau-Brasil wood is not guaranteed from plantations. Emerging global markets of in-expensive fiber-glass bows and inconsistent legislation at local, regional and global scales have pushed the pau-Brasil SES for violin bows towards a critical threshold. We showed that increasing connectedness between local SES to global scales may jeopardize their potential to either feeding meat to a growing sector of global human population or conserving the long-standing cultural tradition of classical string instruments.