Natrual Resources: Going Beyond Panaceas

Sat, 03 May 2008 18:37:01 GMT

clipped by: kmcolo
clipper's remarks: Many scholars have mapped Hardin's ideas onto a range of human–environment systems and have predicted dire consequences for their long-term viability unless his first solution, government ownership, is imposed. Even though >100,000 areas around the world are formally protected, and the effectiveness of many of these areas is unknown, some advocates still call for further efforts to create protected areas as the only way to protect biodiversity (11, 12). Others argue that "the only way to avoid the tragedy of the commons in natural resources and wildlife is ... by creating a system of private property rights" (ref. 13, p. 467). Marketable permits continue to be presented as the optimal method for solving free-rider problems and for providing effective common-pool resource management (14–16).** Furthermore, collaborative approaches involving community participation are frequently "portrayed as a cure-all," to the distress of researchers who work in the field (ref. 26, p. 382).

Clip Source: www.pnas.org

In the context of governance of human–environment interactions,a panacea refers to a blueprint for a single type of governancesystem (e.g., government ownership, privatization, communityproperty) that is applied to all environmental problems.

Theaim of this special feature is to provide theoretical analysisand empirical evidence to caution against the tendency, whenconfronted with pervasive uncertainty, to believe that scholarscan generate simple models of linked social–ecologicalsystems and deduce general solutions to the overuse of resources.

Scholarly journals are peppered with works predicting ecologicaldisasters unless some preferred cure-all is adopted

The best known is Hardin's (10) article "The Tragedy of theCommons."

Tags: science, resources, environment, ecology

Ecosystems: Ag modifications of hydrology create surprise

Sat, 03 May 2008 18:02:00 GMT

clipped by: kmcolo

Clip Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Agricultural expansion and intensification have altered the quantity and quality of global water flows. Research suggests that these changes have increased the risk of catastrophic ecosystem regime shifts. We identify and review evidence for agriculture-related regime shifts in three parts of the hydrological cycle: interactions between agriculture and aquatic systems, agriculture and soil, and agriculture and the atmosphere. We describe the processes that shape these regime shifts and the scales at which they operate. As global demands for agriculture and water continue to grow, it is increasingly urgent for ecologists to develop new ways of anticipating, analyzing and managing nonlinear changes across scales in human-dominated landscapes.

Tags: science, ecosystems, non-linear systems, complexity, water, agriculture

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Natrual Resources: Going Beyond Panaceas

Ecosystems: Ag modifications of hydrology create surprise