Bridging the Biophysical-Cultural Divide: The Role of Historical Ecology

Throughout the twentieth century, the need to reach scholarly consensus in characterizing the relationship between humans and the environment steadily grew more pressing. Assumptions at the beginning of the century favored a determining role for environment and biology; this was then countered by social scientists, who convincingly demonstrated the enormous role of culture in explaining behavior. Contemporary research assumes both that humans have altered the environment and that environmental change has shaped the human species and revised human activity. The beginning of the twenty-fi rst century fi nds humanity with greatly expanded powers to bring about both benefi cial and detrimental changes in the global system, but also facing enormous dangers – many, although not all, the result of previous human activity. The quality and quantity of evidence documenting change in the global ecosystem have never been greater but, as understanding of a dynamic Earth system that includes humans increases, discipline-based research frameworks still treat only portions of the system. The enormous complexity of the human/environment interaction poses an urgent new set of questions: Which human activities impact the global system? How are those impacts manifested? How do global changes threaten human activity? Where are the thresholds beyond which the harm done to human populations and to their environments cannot be repaired? Can human activity that is in accord with the global environment be identifi ed and fostered? In the search for answers, a major challenge is how established scholarly disciplines can collaborate. In the middle decades of the last century, the complexity involved in answering various aspects of these questions necessitated greater specialization in every fi eld of study. Today, the resultant discipline-based structure of educational and funding institutions has made it immensely more diffi cult to foster research that untangles circumstances in which both human activity and the global system are in fl ux. If answers to the new questions are to be found, some basic changes must be made. Disciplines and institutions long accustomed to setting unitary research goals must learn to formulate and carry out collaborative projects, and individual researchers must be rewarded, not punished, when they expand their understanding (if not their expertise) beyond their own training. What is needed is a fl exible framework that integrates biological, physical, and social scientifi c information with insights from the humanities. Such a framework would focus on spatial and temporal scales that permit the dynamic effects of both human activity and environmental change to be monitored and their links tested. Because values and perceptions motivate human activity, an integrated framework must also include evidence that is diffi cult to quantify but critical to policy making (Dunlap 1992, 1993; Gore 1994; Kempton et al. 1995; Olsen et al. 1992).