Ecological Integrity
eBook - ePub

Ecological Integrity

Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health

David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss, David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss

Share book
  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Ecological Integrity

Integrating Environment, Conservation, and Health

David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss, David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Global Integrity Project has brought together leading scientists and thinkers from around the world to examine the combined problems of threatened and unequal human well-being, degradation of the ecosphere, and unsustainable economies. Based on the proposition that healthy, functioning ecosystems are a necessary prerequisite for both economic security and social justice, the project is built around the concept of ecological integrity and its practical implications for policy and management.

Ecological Integrity presents a synthesis and findings of the project. Contributors -- including Robert Goodland, James Karr, Orie Loucks, Jack Manno, William Rees, Mark Sagoff, Robert Ulanowicz, Philippe Crabbe, Laura Westra, David Pimentel, Reed Noss, and others -- examine the key elements of ecological integrity and consider what happens when integrity is lost or compromised. The book:

  • examines historical and philosophical foundations of the concept of ecological integrity
  • explores how integrity can be measured
  • examines the relationships among ecological integrity, human health, and food production
  • looks at economic and ethical issues that need to be considered in protecting ecological integrity
  • offers concrete recommendations for reversing ecological degradation while promoting social and economic justice and welfare

.

Contributors argue that there is an urgent need for rapid and fundamental change in the ecologically destructive patterns of collective human behavior if society is to survive and thrive in coming decades.

Ecological Integrity is a groundbreaking book that integrates environmental science, economics, law, and ethics in problem analysis, synthesis, and solution, and is a vital contribution for anyone concerned with interactions between human and planetary health.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Ecological Integrity an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Ecological Integrity by David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss, David Pimentel, Laura Westra, Reed F. Noss in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicina & Salud general. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Island Press
Year
2013
ISBN
9781610910637
Topic
Medicina
Subtopic
Salud general

PART I

Introduction and Outline of the Integrity Concept

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Peter Miller and William E. Rees


The Easter Islanders, aware that they were almost completely isolated from the rest of the world, must surely have realized that their very existence depended on the limited resources of a small island. After all, it was small enough for them to walk round the entire island in a day or so and see for themselves what was happening to the forests. Yet they were unable to devise a system that allowed them to find the right balance with their environment.
Clive Ponting, A Green History of the World


Is humankind fatally flawed, doomed—even in full knowledge—to repeat history on ever greater spatial scales until the brilliant light of civilization is forever snuffed out in one great final crash? After all, the human story is replete with bright beginnings, glorious middles, and tragic ends. In recent millennia advanced civilizations on virtually every continent have collapsed as a result of the destructive overexploitation of their supportive ecosystems. In many cases the descent was marked by famine, disease, and the decline of civil society, ultimately leading to war, social chaos, and cannibalism (e.g., the Maoris in New Zealand and Easter Islanders).
All this we know—and yet industrial civilization willfully imposes a greater burden on the environment than any previous culture. The degradation of natural systems appears in the loss of biodiversity and functionality in aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems; the decline of significant biological populations, including most of the world’s wild fisheries; new disease vectors; ozone depletion; global warming; soil loss, salinization, and desertification; and freshwater and groundwater depletion and pollution. Economies that have supported precarious progress for some are unsustainable because aggregate demand exceeds the capacities of natural systems for productivity and waste absorption (Goodland 1992; Karr and Chu 1995; Wackernagel and Rees 1996; following chapters in the present volume). To paraphrase Ponting (1991, p. 7), we are aware that Earth is completely isolated from the rest of the universe and we realize that our very existence depends on the limited resources of this one small planet. After all, it is small enough for us to fly around in a day or so and see for ourselves what is happening to the forests (and plains and waters). Yet we seem unable to devise a system that allows us to find the right balance with the ecosphere.
Ironically, the very things that define our industrial culture dull the average citizen’s sense of vulnerability even as they sweep humanity ever closer to the edge of danger. People are temporarily shielded from the destruction of local ecosystems that have long sustained them. Newfoundland fishers survive the collapse of the cod stocks on transfer payments from the rest of Canada (and we can always import fish from elsewhere); famine in the Sahel is suspended by international relief organizations; and people everywhere are spared the consequences of deteriorating soils by artificial fertilizers that help maintain food production.
A central premise of this book is that such contemporary social and technological buffers merely delay and deepen the ultimate collapse of industrial society. True, trade and technology create the illusion of increasing local carrying capacity. But the reality is that, by enabling continued population and material growth and by dispersing the ecological impacts, the trappings of modernity actually increase the total human load on the ecosphere while simultaneously reducing global carrying capacity (Rees 1996). This ensures that the entire human enterprise will reach critical limits of biophysical integrity at the same time. (Concern over ozone depletion and climate change are thus but early ripples in the sea of contemporary complacency.)
To some readers, this apocalyptic vision will seem excessively pessimistic. Looking back on the past century (and millennium), we who live in North America, Europe, and other high-income countries see our history as a story of progress. In terms of material well-being—the endless parade of globally sourced goods that stock our markets and plentiful supplies of cheap energy—and in terms of the trappings of civilized existence—access to culture, entertainment, travel, education, health care, information, and comfortable homes with clean running water and piped sewage—the material comfort and health of ordinary citizens of the high-income countries today vastly exceeds that of even royalty in previous ages. We are, on average, simply better off by any economic measure than our predecessors. Little wonder our culture has until recently brimmed with confidence in our individual and collective capacity to continue to improve our lot. The late professor Julian Simon perhaps best personified this optimistic spirit. His career was a celebration of human inventiveness and ingenuity, which he deemed “the ultimate resource” (Simon 1981). Simon decried environmental concerns as wastefully groundless, arguing recently that “technology exists now to produce in virtually inexhaustible quantities just about all the products made by nature” (Simon 1995).
Despite such technological hubris, there is justification for the growing unease that much of the progress we have made is precarious and that our present development path is unsustainable. A moment’s reflection reminds us that our economic gains, particularly on the global scale, have been mixed, ill-distributed, and costly. While some are as wealthy as Croesus, far more live out their lives in extreme poverty, suffering from malnourishment and disease. Indeed, according to the World Health Organization, we now have the largest number and proportion of malnourished ever in history—3 billion persons (WHO 1996). How are we to provide for these billions (and the billions more to come) while maintaining ecological integrity if enriching the presently well-off has all but cost the Earth?
The problem is both exacerbated and simplified by a singular global ecological phenomenon—the world is in the midst of the greatest human migration of all time (Rees and Wackernagel 1996) . Tens of millions of people are leaving (or being driven from) the countryside every year to eke out a better living in hundreds of ill-prepared, already crowded, smog-bound cities throughout the developing world. The world’s urban population is expected to grow by about 50 percent in the 1990s to almost 3 billion. It will increase by another 70 percent to about 5.1 billion people by 2025 (UN 1994). This means that by 2025, the urban population alone is expected to grow by the equivalent of the entire human population in 1930. As early as 2015, there will be 27 mega-cities of 10 million people, 23 of them in less developed countries.
The bad news is that, expectations notwithstanding, life will remain wretched for many of these new urbanites. Millions will be un- or under employed and will suffer from chronic ill-health and malnutrition. Most will lack basic amenities that we in the so-called First World take for granted. Already, 600 million urban dwellers lack adequate sanitation, 450 million have no safe drinking water, and deaths from infectious diseases are rising (NRTEE 1998; Pimentel et al. 1998). The good news is that the concentration of population and consumption in cities creates economies of scale and agglomeration economies that in the best of scenarios could result in considerable energy and material savings in the quest for sustainability (Mitlin and Satterthwaite 1994; Rees and Wackernagel 1996).
In any event, the human animal is psychosocially ill-equipped for a life of crowded deprivation, whether in a disease-ridden city or in the emerging global village. Even without the unprecedented population and environmental pressures to come, political tensions in the twentieth century spawned two world wars, and we seem congenitally condemned to carry on genocidal regional conflicts all over the planet. What is the prognosis for civil society and global peace if material growth falters from resource scarcity or accelerating global ecological change?
On first reading, one might simply say that progress in improving human welfare globally is incomplete; we have a moral duty to extend the benefits of liberal-democratic, free-market, knowledge-based societies to impoverished people everywhere. Indeed, we are morally compelled to do so. But this mainstream interpretation, however compelling in its humanitarian urgency, is itself incomplete. It ignores the crumbling biophysical stage upon which the human drama is being played out. Certainly concerns for human well-being, justice, and equity remain, but these are too often abstracted from the deteriorating state of the planet. Rather late in the play, we are beginning to recognize that a necessary prerequisite for both economic security and social justice is ecological stability. We have no choice but to ensure that economic growth does not further imperil the structural integrity and functional health of the ecosphere.
Herein lies the fundamental challenge to postindustrial civilization. How can progress be decoupled from planetary destruction? Do we have sufficient ingenuity (and generosity) to ensure that Earth’s remaining resources and waste assimilation capacity are adequate to sustain the anticipated increase in human numbers—to say nothing of rising material expectations—into the twenty-first century while simultaneously maintaining the basic life support functions of the ecosphere? Can the objectives of enlightened humanism be achieved while preserving the exuberant diversity of nature’s garden? Or will the product of 4 billion years of evolution be sacrificed to the brief flowering of humanity?

Perceptual Impediments

Ironically, two of the disciplines that should be well positioned to address this challenge are both seriously misaligned. Economics studies those activities and relationships by which human beings acquire, process, and distribute the material necessities and wants of life, including the energy and material resources needed to power the industrial machine. It therefore subsumes that subset of activities by which humankind interacts with the rest of the ecosphere. However, there is a theoretical problem. Most economic analyses are money- and market-based and are thus thoroughly abstracted from nature. Conventional analyses ignore biophysical conditions and the behavioral dynamics of ecosystems. One egregious result in the present context is that economists place virtually zero marginal value on nonmarket species (and hence on maintaining biodiversity). Such analytic blindness creates a false sense of well-being even as economic growth threatens disastrous ecological consequences.
Ecology does little better. Ecologists do measure and analyze the flows of energy, material, and information between organisms and their ecosystems, and some try to understand ecosystems dynamics. However, ecologists focus almost exclusively on other species, expending little effort on humans as ecological entities in their own right. Even environmental science programs (themselves a response to ecological crises) focus mainly on environmental indicators and human impacts, not so much on humans as components of affected ecosystems.
In short, both economics and ecology are conceptually undermined by the Cartesian dualism that so cleanly severs humans from the rest of nature (and underpins our entire technical–scientific culture). In effect, economists do human ecology with empty theory that ignores natural processes; ecologists have promising theory but ignore the human species. With neither discipline properly focused, it is little wonder that we still have such a poor understanding of so many dimensions of sustainability and the integrity problem.
Our perceptual difficulties do not end there. The foundations for the neoclassical economics that dominates the world today were laid in the nineteenth century on principles borrowed explicitly from Newtonian analytic mechanics. This is the physics (and economics) of reductionist logic, linear cause and effect, simple deterministic law, and complete reversibility. Newton’s triumph had been partially to realize Descartes’s vision of a universe governed by knowable laws, describable in purely mathematical terms and thus, in theory, completely predictable and open to human manipulation and control.
The unprecedented success of the Newtonian paradigm in describing the simple mechanical world made it a model for others to follow. As noted, economists had already turned their discipline into “the mechanics of utility and self-interest” in the middle of the nineteenth century (W.S. Jevons, in Schenk 1998). Ecology, on the other hand, was just then emerging and initially carried a broader, more holistic perspective. But after a century of failed attempts to discover the kind of simple universal laws that would confer upon their discipline the respectability of Newtonian mechanism, ecologists began to abandon their classical roots. Like economics before it, ecology succumbed to “physics envy” in a mass capitulation to the norms of reductionist science. Holism and integration gave way to atomism and accident, balance and equilibrium to what some see as a “pointless hodgepodge” of fluctuation and change. Even the central concept of the ecosystem has come into question.
Ironically, the real problem here is not a problem with classical ecology but rather with classical physics. For all its inordinate success, analytic mechanics applies to a rather restricted range of simple, well, “mechanical,” phenomena. Trying to force the rest of reality to fit this model is simply bad science. Better to reform and extend our models than ignore what reality is telling us, and reality on the macro level seems to talk anything but mechanics.
Indeed, systems ecologists and other systems analysts now recognize that the behavior of most of the natural world is nonlinear, discontinuous, irreversible, and characterized by lags and thresholds. It therefore confounds the assumptions of “normal” predictive science. This does not mean that nature does not behave according to natural laws—it invariably does. However, in the past few decades our artificially stunted linear–mechanical paradigm has given way to a view of nature that, while still fundamentally deterministic, is “relentlessly nonlinear” at higher levels of organization (Stewart 1989). Such terms as “complex systems,” “deterministic chaos,” “nonlinear dynamics,” “autopoiesis,” and “Prigoginian self-organization” capture the flavor of the paradigm shift fairly well.
The interaction of the simple laws of physics and chemistry can produce systems behavior of extraordinary complexity and richness (Cohen and Stewart 1994). Perhaps most important, in the present context, is recognition that the interplay of even strictly deterministic rules can quickly generate patterns of systems behavior that are inherently unpredictable even with near-perfect knowledge of the initial state of the system. The internal dyna...

Table of contents