ABSTRACT
There has been an upsurge in interest in recent years among ecologists and social scientists in the concept of coupled human and natural systems (Turner et al. 2003; Pickett et al. 2005; McPeak et al. 2006; Farber et al. 2006; Liu et al. 2007). Much recent literature emphasizes the trade-offs in managed ecological systems and the need to integrate our understanding of the ecological, physical, economic, and social effects of management, oftentimes with an emphasis on sustainability (Gunderson and Holling 2002; Tallis and Kareiva 2006; Bennett and Balvanera 2007; Kareiva et al 2007). Although it is tempting to view the current emphasis on integrating the natural and social science as progressive and new, such ideas actually have a long history in ecology (Hanson 1939; Kingsland 2005). Now subsumed under a larger effort among ecologists to understand coupled human-environment systems, agroecology was one of the first fields within ecology to explicitly focus on human-dominated systems and the application of ecological principles to management of these systems (Altieri 1995; Gliessman 2007). More than 20 years ago, Ben Stinner and his colleagues grappled with the idea of viewing agroecosystems primarily as natural or social systems (Lowrance et al. 1984; Stinner, Chapter 2). This conundrum remains largely unresolved, but reflects that agroecosystems cannot be understood or managed ecologically without including perspectives from both the ecological and social sciences (Rickerl and Francis 2004; Boody et al. 2005).
