Toward an Integrated History to Guide the Future

Abstract

Many contemporary societal challenges manifest themselves in the domain of human–environment interactions. There is a growing recognition that responses to these challenges formulated within current disciplinary boundaries, in isolation from their wider contexts, cannot adequately address them. Here, we outline the need for an integrated, transdisciplinary synthesis that allows for a holistic approach, and, above all, a much longer time perspective. We outline both the need for and the fundamental characteristics of what we call “integrated history.” This approach promises to yield new understandings of the relationship between the past, present, and possible futures of our integrated human–environment system. We recommend a unique new focus of our historical efforts on the future, rather than the past, concentrated on learning about future possibilities from history. A growing worldwide community of transdisciplinary scholars is forming around building this Integrated History and future of People on Earth (IHOPE). Building integrated models of past human societies and their interactions with their environments yields new insights into those interactions and can help to create a more sustainable and desirable future. The activity has become a major focus within the global change community

Anticipating land surface change

“…A key challenge for sustainability science is how to project the significance of the spatial patterning of vegetation (5,6) into the past. This is an important goal because the past offers "completed experiments," where it is possible to determine what happened next in a long sequence of events, providing valuable insights to modern managers and policy makers (29,30).…”

Twenty-first century approaches to ancient problems: Climate and society

“…Challenges facing scientists today include not only understanding how environmental changes of climatic or anthropogenic origin affected the well-being of humanity over the longue durée, but also how our interactions with the environment create dependencies extending into the future (99). Computational, model-based approaches (100) to archaeology allow us to accommodate-in a structured way-knowledge of ancient climatic variability at everhigher temporal and spatial resolution by providing linkages between this variability and the resources on which humans relied.…”

Usages des modèles spatiaux pour la prospective

“…Néanmoins, les automates cellulaires, les modèles à base d'agents, intégrés ou non dans des plateformes de modélisation, constituent les méthodes et outils fondamentaux pour intégrer et simuler des dynamiques spatio-temporelles de façon spatialement explicite. Les projets internationaux LAND 1 , ainsi que son prédécesseur LUCC 2 , ont ainsi permis, riches des travaux de recherches et développements méthodologiques, de faire émerger la science du land change (Turner et al, 2007 ;Dearing et al, 2010 ;Van der Leeuw et al, 2011) ou encore la théorie du Land System (Kok et al, 2004) où « modèle, scénario et acteur » doivent être appréhendés de concert pour comprendre les changements passés et anticiper ceux à venir. Leur finalité vise toujours l'évaluation quantifiée des changements et de leurs impacts possibles au travers le prisme de la dimension spatiale (surfaces, localisation, etc.)…”