Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Historical and policy context
- 3 Natural resource degradation: a resistant problem of the twentieth century
- 4 The epistemology of natural resource management of the twentieth century
- 5 A contemporary epistemology and framework for natural resource management of the twenty-first century
- 6 Model conceptualisation of the Western Australian agricultural region. Part 1: resilience analysis
- 7 Model conceptualisation of the Western Australian agricultural region. Part 2: system dynamics
- 8 Synthesis
- Epilogue
- Glossary
- References
- Index
1 - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Historical and policy context
- 3 Natural resource degradation: a resistant problem of the twentieth century
- 4 The epistemology of natural resource management of the twentieth century
- 5 A contemporary epistemology and framework for natural resource management of the twenty-first century
- 6 Model conceptualisation of the Western Australian agricultural region. Part 1: resilience analysis
- 7 Model conceptualisation of the Western Australian agricultural region. Part 2: system dynamics
- 8 Synthesis
- Epilogue
- Glossary
- References
- Index
Summary
A common perspective until recently was that our problem-solving abilities have been improving over the years. In the area of resource and environmental management, for example, there was a great deal of faith in our growing scientific understanding of ecosystems, our bag of increasingly sophisticated tools and technologies, and the application of market mechanisms to problems such as air pollution control and fishery management through individually allocated quotas. However, the experience over the last few decades does not support such optimism. A gap has developed between environmental problems and our lagging ability to solve them.
Fikret Berkes, Johan Colding and Carl Folke, 2003Introduction and motivation
Despite some impressive progress over the past 30 years, protecting the natural environment is still one of today's top global issues and sustainable use is a widely accepted goal for the management of renewable resources (Rosenberg et al., 1993). The global scale of the negative impacts on the environment from human use are now well documented (Daily, 1997; ESRC Global Environmental Change Programme, 2000; McNeill, 2000). It is believed that these changes are so vast, pervasive, intractable and yet so important that they require our immediate attention (Jasanoff et al., 1997; Lubchenco, 1998). However, global problems are the product of human actions across spatial scales, from the local through the regional and national scales to the global scale, and across temporal scales, in which time delays between cause and effect contribute to fluctuations and instability in the system.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Science and Policy in Natural Resource ManagementUnderstanding System Complexity, pp. 1 - 11Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2006