Revitalizing Human Communities and Reclaiming Biological Communities

This chapter demonstrates how the Human Ecosystem Model (HEM) offers a unity of understanding with shared concepts, a framework, and a model for resolving complex human ecosystem problems. With it, decision-makers from different organizations—public and private—may coordinate their work with that of local citizens. The emphasis is on the whole system, which combines issues such as trends in crime, housing, education, health, natural resources, and community stability into an integrated network. The chapter illustrates how the framework and model was applied in a major city in the United States: Baltimore, Maryland. The Baltimore story emphasizes that certain universal problems and solutions confront all human societies. The universality of problems and the search for integrated solutions required a framework like the HEM to identify, apply, and store learning.

The Roots of Human Ecology

This chapter looks at how the roots of human ecology lie primarily in general ecology, sociology, geography, and anthropology, as documented by numerous literature reviews. The idea for the application of general ecological principles to human activity was sparked by sociologists at the University of Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. Sociologists Robert E. Park and Ernest W. Burgess drew analogies between human and nonhuman communities, describing society’s symbiotic and competitive relationships as an organic web. Biological concepts such as competition, commensalism, succession, and equilibrium were freely borrowed, mirroring the biologists’ use of social science concepts. Borrowing from contemporary plant ecologists and their focus on plant community zones, early human ecologists moved from classrooms to city streets to map “natural areas” or zones of the urban metropolis.

Lessons and Legacies

This chapter discusses how the Human Ecosystem Model (HEM) consolidates and restructures some of the systematic thought and action on human–nature transactions. Specifically, it outlines a framework for decisions that are effective, efficient, and equitable in sustaining human and biophysical ecology. Not surprisingly, professionals and concerned citizens have generated many differing perspectives on the nature of the problems, the theories about cause and consequence, and the methods for resolving the perceived issues. The HEM seeks to fit this scientific and experiential information into a more manageable and cumulative organizational frame. This frame reduces much of the information “noise” to some key variables and relations that guide crucial questions about patterns and processes of the human ecosystem.

The Ecosystem Concept in Biology

This chapter analyzes the genealogy of the Human Ecosystem Model (HEM), which includes portions of ecosystem biology and the roots of human ecology. The initial and repeated efforts at taxonomy (identification of component parts) were followed by efforts to understand processes (identification and measurement of flows) as well as issues of agency, efficacy, and evolutionary change. All are foundations for understanding the structure and dynamics of human ecosystems. Studies of the patterns and processes in ecosystems emphasize the diversity and complexity of the elements affecting these systems. This complexity has generally enabled biologists to exclude human behavior from their models and social scientists to remain largely at the level of metaphor when applying ecological concepts to human behavior.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter talks about how the complexity of combining human and nonhuman elements presents an obvious challenge to one’s understanding and management of ecosystems. The usual solution for understanding such complexity is to concentrate observations on the co-variation between a limited set of variables within a limited time–space setting. Important as that approach is, the need to unify these findings and practices may be of even greater importance for meeting future challenges to human ecosystems. The chapter shares some of the lessons learned in trying to develop and apply a more unifying approach to the study of human ecosystems. It offers a template of concepts that helps in reducing information overload by not attending to all the possible and actual connections in a given system.

Extending the Capability of the Model

This chapter explains the significance of building better capability in forecasting the likely consequences of natural resource and environmental decisions. The goal here is not just to know what is connected but also to identify which connections are most critical in balancing risk and benefit. At the core of this analysis are the hierarchical variables of territory, status, and power, along with the identity variables of age, gender, and class, all of which come from the social order component. The chapter connects these to the population variable from the socioeconomic resource component. Meanwhile, the biophysical resources component provides a shifting set of variables such as land, energy, air, water, and flora and fauna, as do the individual and institutional cycles of change and the flows of individuals (immigration and emigration).

Toward a More Perfect Civic Order

This chapter focuses on the general awakening of conservation organizations throughout the world. In this transition, organizations are learning that if they hope to sustain biophysical systems, they need to pay more attention to how their actions affect the health and interests of local human communities. This transition is still a work in progress as new professional educational curricula are put in place, as changes in the recruitment of professionals are made, and as changes in the cultures of the organizations are established. Furthermore, resource professionals accustomed to working in the lightly populated corners of the world can gain necessary lessons emerging from urban places on what works and what does not as they try to integrate human realities into their policies, planning, and management practices.

Key Components and Variables for Analyzing Human Ecosystems

This chapter draws on lessons learned from prior application of the HEM and includes those lessons in a modest revision of the early work. It details each component and variable by providing a general definition and description, suggesting ways that the variable can be measured, and giving selected examples of how a variable may influence other variables of the human ecosystem. The passage of time and the application of the model in many situations have left most of those early components and variables intact, with only a few key additions and deletions. The chapter aims to provide the HEM user with an integrated set of social, economic, and ecological measures that can be collected over time.

An Overview of the Model

This chapter examines the Human Ecosystem Model (HEM), which began as a seedling in the late 1960s and has grown and developed into a middle-aged forest today. Human ecosystem is defined as a coherent system of biophysical and social factors capable of adaptation and sustainability over time. Coherence is relative and varying within human ecosystems. There can be “tight coherence” between available energy flows and economic activity, as when a scarcity of petroleum reduces industrial production and raises costs. There can also be “loose coherence,” such as the relationship between available water supplies and the performance of educational institutions. The chapter also elaborates on some of the other key words from the given definition of human ecosystem, such as capability, adaptation, and sustainability.

Introduction

This introductory chapter discusses how environmental scientists, managers, and other professionals need to intensify their search for cross-cultural models of resource systems that include the forces driving human desires. Socio-cultural variables as both cause and consequence of system change will need to be joined to the traditional biophysical concerns of the ecologist, forester, conservationist, range manager, park superintendent, and rural agriculturalist. Worldwide, disparate indicators of ecosystem stress abound. Some of these challenges include geochemical flux due to pollution, the accumulating inventory of toxic chemicals, a collapsing world fishery, biotic mixing, accelerating loss of coral reefs, desertification, and more. The chapter then introduces the Human Ecosystem Model (HEM) as a possible solution to these problems.