Introduction

This chapter examines the methods employed in research exploring the relationships between systems of human relations, or social networks, and people’s interactions with various elements of natural ecosystems. Social networks are fundamental to understanding cultural systems of resource sharing; cooperation in hunting, fishing, and agricultural production; the diffusion of technological innovations; the sharing and distribution of ecological and environmental knowl­edge; and in human adaptive responses to changes at various scales from acute ecological disruptions, such as hurricanes, to major environmental shifts, such as global climate change. In addition, human behavioral and ecological networks are interconnected in ways that can foster change through direct and indirect network effects and through system cascades. Thus, factors contributing to changes in ecosystem structure and function at one level (e.g., climate change) can influence the structure of human behavioral systems and, conversely, factors affecting changes in the structure of human behavioral systems (e.g., shifts in fishing effort due to prices or regulation) can ultimately impact elements of ecosystem function (e.g., top-down trophic cascades).

Several interesting social network theoretical principles may be at play in the linking of human and natural systems and in understanding and modeling human environmental and ecological behavior. These include such things as homophily (e.g., “birds of a feather flock together”), preferential attachment (e.g., “the rich get richer”), and various topological motifs or features of both ecological and social networks (e.g., small worlds, clustering, transitivity, cohesion). In addition, social capital, a recent social scientific interest, is usually conceptualized in social network terms (Burt 1992; Lin 2002).