Reconnecting to the Biosphere

Abstract

Humanity has emerged as a major force in the operation of the biosphere, with a significant imprint on the Earth System, challenging social-ecological resilience. This new situation calls for a fundamental shift in perspectives, world views, and institutions. Human development and progress must be reconnected to the capacity of the biosphere and essential ecosystem services to be sustained. Governance challenges include a highly interconnected and faster world, cascading social-ecological interactions and planetary boundaries that create vulnerabilities but also opportunities for social-ecological change and transformation. Tipping points and thresholds highlight the importance of understanding and managing resilience. New modes of flexible governance are emerging. A central challenge is to reconnect these efforts to the changing preconditions for societal development as active stewards of the Earth System. We suggest that the Millennium Development Goals need to be reframed in such a planetary stewardship context combined with a call for a new social contract on global sustainability. The ongoing mind shift in human relations with Earth and its boundaries provides exciting opportunities for societal development in collaboration with the biosphere-a global sustainability agenda for humanity.

Tipping Toward Sustainability: Emerging Pathways of Transformation

“…The Antagonism Between the Organization of Technology and the Organization of the Biosphere As argued by Folke et al (2011), the conceptual and institutional separation of social and ecological systems has contributed and continues to contribute to a misfit between ecosystems and governance systems. This separation is a strong contributor to the path dependence that makes it is so hard to shift to sustainable trajectories.…”

“…We define resilience as ''the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks'' (Walker et al 2004;Folke et al 2010) and transformability as the capacity to create untried beginnings from which to evolve a fundamentally new way of living when existing ecological, economic, and social conditions make the current system untenable (Walker et al 2004;Chapin et al 2010;Folke et al 2010Folke et al , 2011. We argue that a complex system perspective that recognizes the dynamic links between the social, ecological, and technological subsystems is needed to understand what we see as the paradox of innovation: innovation is both a contributing cause for our current unsustainable trajectory and our hope for tipping in new more resilient directions.…”

The farmer as a landscape steward: Comparing local understandings of landscape stewardship, landscape values, and land management actions

“…In the context of social-ecological systems, stewardship is expressed as actively shaping trajectories of systems in order to enhance ecological resilience and support human well-being through the provision of ecosystem services (Kofinas and Chapin 2009;Chapin et al 2011). It emphasizes an understanding of cross-scale interactions (Folke et al 2011) and constructive ways of creating synergies across knowledge systems (Tengö et al 2014). Landscape stewardship has also been used as a way to brand policies and incentive schemes that encourage sustainable production.…”

History of Urbanization and the Missing Ecology

“…McGranahan et al 2005 ;Grimm et al 2008 ;Pickett et al 2011 ;McDonald and Marcotullio 2011 ;Folke et al 2011 ;Anderson and Elmqvist 2012 ;Wu 2013 ). Urbanization affects ecosystems both within and outside of urban areas, and as stated in Chaps.…”