The human ecosystem concept is one of the most common tools
used in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study LTER.
Adopted from a team of social ecologists and sociologists who were
involved in community forestry in the Himalayas, the application of such
approaches to underserved areas in American cities, and the conservation and
management of US National Parks, the concept is remarkably broad and
adaptive. The human ecosystem is not
necessarily tuned to emphasizing the intellectual flavor of the week or most
current headline issue for cities, urbanization, sustainability, or development. However, its inclusiveness, nested hierarchical
nature, and adaptability makes it well suited to dealing with shifting or even
new emphases in social-ecological systems research and application (Figure 1).
Figure 1. The Human Ecosystem Framework (Adapted from Machlis et al. 1997) |
What are some of the hot topics that might seem to be missed
in our discussions or presentations, but which in fact have a home in the human
ecosystem framework?
Political ecology.
This is at once a scholarly area and a
subject of activist attention. As a
scholarly field, it examines the relationships of politics, economics, and
environment. As a social movement, it
focuses on the inequitable distribution of benefits and costs of environmental
decisions. The social movement can be
seen as a part of a larger social or environmental justice agenda.
The multidimensional relationships with which political
economy is concerned exercise several components of the human ecosystem
framework. Among the bioecological features,
catalogued in the “ecosystems pattern and process foundations” component of the
framework, many are relevant, including the distribution of energy, water,
nutrient, and biomass resources, the kinds and levels of contaminants and
pollution of air, water, and soil, and the heterogeneous or mosaic distribution
of all of these factors. Heterogeneity
is important because control of access to resources, exposure to hazards, or
distribution of benefits is subject to social – that is power and political –
control. Not all persons, groups, or institutions
may be uniformly represented across a spatial mosaic. The social control of access, exposure, and
benefit engages many of the components of the human ecosystem framework. The social ordering by factors of identity, rank
hierarchies, and norms are key to the differential power relationships in human
ecosystems. Social rank hierarchy can further be
broken down into ranks based on wealth, control of territory, social status,
knowledge as a kind of capital, and, tellingly, power. Among the social and cultural foundations,
the distribution of populations, including by race, class, gender, or
ethnicity, and the distribution of information by various institutions may
reflect power relationships. Of course
the access to or participation in the institutions of sustenance, health,
justice, education, etc. are also dependent on power relationships. Other aspects of the human ecosystem
framework (Figure 1) can also be used to investigate and explain, and therefore
intervene in, power relationships in the urban social-ecological systems.
Technology.
Recently, our colleague N.B. Grimm has
emphasized the fact that social-ecological systems have significant
technological content. Grimm at the 2013
Congress of Urban Ecology, the first such international meeting of the Society
of Urban Ecology (SURE), introduced the term Social-Ecological Technical
System, or SETS to emphasize the role of technology in how people think about
urban ecosystems.
This healthy reminder and highlight does no violence to the
human ecosystem framework. A classical
representation of the significance of technology in human environment
relationships is the POET model. Under
this general model, environmental change is said to be a function of human
population, the way that humans are organized, and the technology
available. Explicit recognition of the
role of technology in urban systems appears in the classical work of Borchert (1967),
who notes that urban form in the United States shifted with the
introduction of new technologies.
Emphasizing transportation technology, Borchert proposed five epochs of
American urban change: 1) sail and wagon (1790-1830), 2) steam powered ships
and initial rail roads (1830-1870), 3) national steam rail network (1870-1920),
4) interstates and propeller air transport, and finally 5) satellites and jet propulsion. American urban transformation continues, with
other epochs hypothesized to represent the “slow growth” proposed in the 1970s
of the oil embargo (Phillips and Brun 1978), or perhaps an epoch defined by the
technology integrating global finance, manufacturing, and consumption. In any event, the significance of
technological innovation, change, and even retrenchment are clearly major
components and drivers of urban change. These latter technologies have a great deal to do with the current global teleconnections of urban systems with each other and with more rural and wild lands (Boone et al 2014).
Baltimore is a prime example of the role of shifting
technologies. For instance, the urban
fabric of Baltimore, as described in Hayward and Belfoure (1999), shifted markedly
with each transition -- from the walking city, through the city of horsedrawn
trolleys, through the electric commuter rail, through the automobile era. The industrial power of Baltimore similarly
reflects major technological shifts, from the water power of the “fall line”
through wood fueled steam, through coal powered manufacturing and steel
production. Other overlapping shifts,
such as the opening up of the American South and Southwest with the
availability of air conditioning technology there, and government policy for
the location of defense industries away from the vulnerability of the east
coast so feared during World War II, played a role in Baltimore’s
post-industrial shift to a joint service, tourism, and knowledge footing.
In the Human Ecosystem Framework, technology appears
foundationally in such things as the source of energy (e.g. water power, vs.
wood, vs. coal), or the path of water flow (the location at the fall line
between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain).
Technology also is reflected in the amassing and deployment of labor, as
in the contrast between slavery and voluntary immigration as sources, and the
shift in capital investment in water-mill industry and canals versus the
creation of America’s first long haul railroad – the Baltimore and Ohio.
The technologies available and the pursuits
different technologies make available have powerful influence on social
identity, demographic structure, community and neighborhood cohesion and the
like. For example Baltimore still
embraces a historical identity as a seafaring town. This is shown by the fact that a waterfront
neighborhood is still referred to as Canton, in honor of Baltimore’s fast
clipper ships that cemented trade between China and the U.S. East Coast. Or the fact that Fells Point, the location of
Baltimore’s first deep water port, still retains the ameities and reputation as a
freewheeling entertainment district reflecting its early tradition of hosting
sailors on leave. The coal-fired
industrial era is honored in the Middle Class Mythology of Baltimore and its
blue collar ethos. These things are all
features that find a home in the human ecosystem framework, for example in
cultural myths, social identity, and temporal cycles of change in demography
and institutional and organizational structures.
Infrastructure.
Another hot topic these days is
infrastructure. Strictly speaking,
infrastructure is what undergirds the various components of a system. Infra means below. It is the supporting structure, linkages,
flows in any system. The human ecosystem
may seem to be blind to the built and engineered components of urban
ecosystems. This is because the human
ecosystem framework assumes those physical foundations. In 1997, we worked to refine understanding of
the bioecological foundations of the human ecosystem. The original discussions by Machlis and
colleagues certainly included the bioecological and biophysical aspects of
human ecosystems in the “resource system” component. Perhaps because buildings, streets, supply
pipes, electrical wires, railroads, sewers, storm drains, and so on are such
conspicuous parts of urban ecosystems, we hardly felt the need to call
attention to them. Cities are so often
defined based on density of built structures and of human inhabitants that
pointing toward buildings and infrastructure could be tacitly assumed.
However, a later description of the human ecosystem as a
model template showing major kinds of components and their connections
attempted to make this assumption clear.
Cadenasso et al. (2006) is a good example of this integration of built –
and hence infrastructural – components into general interactive and
classificatory models of urban ecosystems (Figure 2).
There is nothing wrong with pointing to the various components of
systems as infrastructure, but in a sense, that seems redundant with saying
that an urban place is a human ecosystem comprising social, biotic, built, and
physical (e.g. soil, topography, climate) components. Infrastructure is just another word for
components, really. The big idea is that
cities, suburbs, and exurbs are systems that contain many specific features and
connections, and that those span and connect biology, physical environment,
buildings, social processes and the myriad feedbacks among components.
Figure 2. A process model template of the human ecosystem. |
A healthy outcome of the infrastructure label may be helping
people to remember the often invisible biological components of cities,
suburbs, and towns. Infrastructure is
now often spoken of as gray, blue, and green.
This division suggests that the complex system of the city or more
broadly, the urban region, depends on services and structures provided by
plants, animals, and microbes, and that these services emerge not only from
partly or (almost) entirely engineered features, but also from parks, yards,
street plantings, derelict field and lots, open streams, wetlands, and
freeflowing atmosphere. Planning,
design, management, policy, and education will be better served, and will
better serve the human population when the contributions of biological
infrastructures and their components are understood and effectively employed.
Conclusion
The message here is that the human ecosystem framework
(Figure 1), a hierarchical enumeration of the kinds of biophysical and social
structures, resources, processes, and outcomes that make up not only cities and
towns, but also wilderness and production landscapes, is adequate to include contemporary and important concerns of power, justice, technology, and infrastructure. The human ecosystem framework can be considered a causal hierarchy, in
which general causes or factors are broken down into more specific mechanisms
and interactions. Specific models of
human (in general) and urban (in particular) ecosystem structure, function, and
dynamics will draw upon several to many of the ideas and features included in
the human ecosystem framework.
The framework is complemented by a process model template
(Figure 2). This process model template
emphasizes that urban systems are composed of biological components and their
interactions, physical environments and their links, social structures and
interactions, and built components and the interactions among them. This model template emphasizes the
comprehensiveness of kinds of components of cities, suburbs, and exurbs, as
well as the interactions among the various components.
Thus, rather than neglecting important contemporary topics in
social, engineering, historical, and political realms, urban ecology has
frameworks and model templates that in fact can easily accommodate these
features. Technology is a part of the
built environment, Power is an aspect of the social structures, and
infrastructure is a way to group various built components, networks, and
interactions.
References
Boone, C. G., C. L. Redman, H. Blanco, D. Haase, J. Koch, S. Lwasa, H. Nagendra, S. Pauleit, S. T. A. Pickett, K. C. Seto, and M. Yokohari. 2014. Reconceptualizing land for sustainable urbanity. Pages 313–330 in K. C. Seto and A. Reenberg, editors. Rethinking urban land use in a global era. MIT Press, Cambridge.
Borchert, J. R. 1967. American metropolitan evolution.
Geographical Review 57:301-332.
Cadenasso, M. L., S. T. A. Pickett, and J. M. Grove. 2006.
Dimensions of ecosystem complexity: heterogeneity, connectivity, and history.
Ecological Complexity 3:1-12.
Hayward, M. E. and C. Belfoure. 1999. The Baltimore
rowhouse. Princeton Architectural Press, New York.
Machlis, G. E., J. E. Force, and W. R. Burch. 1997. The human ecosystem. 1. The human ecosystem as an organizing concept in ecosystem manageme
Phillips, P. D., and S. D. Brunn. 1978. Slow Growth: A New Epoch of American Metropolitan Evolution. Geographical Review 68:274–292.
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