Sustainable Economies—Local or Global?

Recreation as a Social-Ecological Complex Adaptive System

“…The combined emissions and subsequent environmental impacts in one period may yield political movement to tax or regulate those emissions in the next period that will influence future emission at the lower level. Uncertainty, non-linearity, and cross scale interactions are some of the other characteristics that have been found in both social and ecological systems [16,33]. The SECAS meta-framework describes this process.…”

“…Both social and ecological systems are dynamic and will co-evolve over time, exhibiting characteristics of complex adaptive systems [16]. Additionally, the concepts of CAS and adaptive management are used as interdisciplinary unifying principals for both social and ecological systems due to inherent uncertainty and system dynamics [16,23,33]. Finally, it is recognized that social actors are knowledgeable, can act with foresight and intent, be reflexive, can abstract from time and space, and can and do purposefully develop institutions to manage resources and therefore requires explanation through social theory [34][35][36].…”

Seeking urban sustainability on the world stage

“…For some sustainability thinkers, there are impossible contradictions in seeking sustainability in cities (Keiner, 2005;Rees, 1992), as well as contradictions between sustainability and the major processes of urbanization, such as globalization (Norberg-Hodge, 2006), development (AtKisson, 2006, and social justice (Marcuse, 1998;Portney, 2003). Some see further specification of the terms of sustainability towards consensus as the logical and necessary path (Parris, 2003).…”

Organized Oral Session 34. Disturbance Ecology, Biogeochemistry and Resilience: Three Decades of Inquiry

“…Bill Reiners (University of Wyoming) was charged with presenting the historical lens through which past and contemporary understanding of relationships between ecosystem dynamics and biogeochemistry could be viewed, and with suggesting a conceptual framework by which new understandings could be constructed. He began by reviewing early ecosystem dynamics as conceptualized 30 years ago, citing Odum (1968), Bormann and Likens (1979), West et al (1981), Pickett and White (1985), and concluding that, “Conceptualizations of system dynamics were primarily derived from our ideas of chronic or acute impacts on more or less steady state systems, and the subsequent recovery of these systems to the original state.” This contrasted, he recognized, with today's recognition of much more complicated dynamics under the rubrics of “catastrophe theory” (Holling 1981) and “complex adaptive systems” (Norberg and Cumming 2008). Reiners reviewed some of the iconic heuristics associated with these rubrics, including intuitive ball‐and‐cup (Gunderson 2000), cusp‐manifold (Scheffer 2009), and adaptive cycles (Holling and Gunderson 2002).…”