Category Archives: Sustainability

Con­cerns of nat­ural and social sci­en­tists, pol­i­cy­mak­ers and lay peo­ple about whether the Earth can con­tinue to sup­port human pop­u­la­tion growth as well as eco­nomic pros­per­ity has led to the devel­op­ment of the field of sus­tain­abil­ity sci­ence and world jam­borees such as The United Nations Con­fer­ence on Sus­tain­able Devel­op­ment (Rio+20). Largely miss­ing from sus­tain­abil­ity sci­ence and the dis­cus­sions in Rio de Janeiro are the key eco­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples that gov­ern life on Earth, argue researchers at UNM and the Santa Fe Institute.

Sus­tain­abil­ity sci­ence is an emerg­ing field of research that takes into account the inter­ac­tions between nat­ural and human sys­tems. These inter­ac­tions are cen­tral to the goal of sus­tain­abil­ity: to meet the needs of present and future gen­er­a­tions while reduc­ing poverty and con­serv­ing the planet’s life sup­port systems.

Twenty years ago world lead­ers met at the United Nations Earth Sum­mit in Rio de Janeiro to dis­cuss con­cerns over ris­ing income inequal­ity, envi­ron­men­tal destruc­tion, and unchecked human pop­u­la­tion growth. They called for a rad­i­cal shift in how nations approach eco­nomic devel­op­ment. Now, world lead­ers con­verge once again in Rio de Janeiro to assess progress toward sus­tain­able development.

About 20 years ago, the field of Macro­e­col­ogy also began to emerge with a pub­li­ca­tion in Sci­ence by James H. Brown, Dis­tin­guished Pro­fes­sor of Biol­ogy at the Uni­ver­sity of New Mex­ico, and Brian A. Mau­rer, cur­rently a Pro­fes­sor at Michi­gan State Uni­ver­sity. Macro­e­col­ogy exam­ines rela­tion­ships between organ­isms and their envi­ron­ments at large spa­tial scales to char­ac­ter­ize and explain eco­log­i­cal pat­terns of abun­dance, dis­tri­b­u­tion and diver­sity. Now, Brown and col­leagues are apply­ing this approach to under­stand the past, present and future of human civ­i­liza­tion and the impli­ca­tions for sustainability.

In con­junc­tion with Rio+20, the open-access jour­nal PLoS Biol­ogy is pub­lish­ing three arti­cles by lead­ers in ecol­ogy and con­ser­va­tion sci­ence. These papers raise, once again, impor­tant con­cerns about bio­phys­i­cal lim­its to human pop­u­la­tion and econ­omy that should be a major topic at the conference—but appar­ently will get lit­tle atten­tion. One of the arti­cles, by the Human Macro­e­col­ogy Group—a col­lab­o­ra­tion among sci­en­tists from sev­eral insti­tu­tions in north­ern New Mexico—is titled, “The Macro­e­col­ogy of Sustainability”.

Has Earth reached a tip­ping point? Credit — Art by Cheng (Lily) Li.

The team of researchers argue that “a macro­e­co­log­i­cal approach to sus­tain­abil­ity aims to under­stand how humans are inte­grated into and con­strained by the Earth’s sys­tems at mul­ti­ple spa­tial and tem­po­ral scales,” and that “any efforts to develop a sci­ence of sus­tain­abil­ity or imple­ment pol­icy solu­tions are nec­es­sar­ily incom­plete and will ulti­mately fail with­out con­sid­er­ing the core eco­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples that gov­ern all of life.”

“Human macro­e­col­ogy is the study of the inter­ac­tions between humans and their phys­i­cal, bio­log­i­cal and social envi­ron­ments at mul­ti­ple spa­tial and tem­po­ral scales,” said Rob­bie Burger, a PIBBS Fel­low in the UNM Depart­ment of Biol­ogy and lead author of the paper. “From this per­spec­tive, humans are no dif­fer­ent than any other species. We are con­strained by the same phys­i­cal laws and gov­erned by the same bio­log­i­cal prin­ci­ples that reg­u­late the mil­lions of pop­u­la­tions of other plants, ani­mals, and microbes on the planet.”

The researchers high­light three prin­ci­ples that should be cen­tral to sus­tain­abil­ity sci­ence includ­ing: phys­i­cal con­ser­va­tion laws gov­ern the flows of energy and mate­ri­als between human sys­tems and the envi­ron­ment; smaller sys­tems are con­nected by these flows to larger sys­tems in which they are embed­ded; and global con­straints ulti­mately limit flows at smaller scales.

Burger, Brown and col­leagues use a series of case stud­ies to illus­trate the how processes at larger scales impact of what appear to be locally ‘sus­tain­able’ sys­tems. They show how decreas­ing per-capita con­sump­tion of petro­leum, fresh water, arable land, met­als, phos­phate, fish and wood at the global scale indi­cates that the grow­ing human pop­u­la­tion and econ­omy have sur­passed the Earth’s capac­ity to sup­port even cur­rent lev­els of pop­u­la­tion and socioe­co­nomic activ­ity, let alone future trajectories.

“Our analy­ses and reports by other lead­ing sci­en­tists demon­strate that we are near or have sur­passed peak pro­duc­tion of many essen­tial resources,” empha­sized Burger, “it’s going to become more and more dif­fi­cult for human inge­nu­ity to pro­vide solu­tions to these prob­lems now that we are push­ing the lim­its of the biosphere.”

“If you get the best data avail­able and do the math it becomes clear that our tra­jec­to­ries are unsus­tain­able,” added Brown, “we’ve cre­ated a huge bub­ble of pop­u­la­tion and econ­omy. It has to be deflated or it’s going to burst.”

Media con­tact: Steve Carr, (505) 277‑1821; email: scarr@unm.edu