ABSTRACT
Twenty-first century environmental problems ranging from global warming to pollution of the Earth’s ecosystems all have one thing in common: a necessary linkage of social and natural ecological systems involving human mismanagement of ecosystem complexity. The Sugar Creek Project is an attempt to find new principles to integrate and bring balance back to the physical, biological, social, and economic aspects of agricultural systems. The research is based on a reconfiguration of the position of the researcher so that farmers and researchers can work together to link hierarchical scales of analysis at the field, farm, community, and watershed levels. This chapter examines four components of the Sugar Creek Method that integrate the social and natural sciences. The first is a clear definition of the values of stewardship and social responsibility of the farmers as they relate to the values of the researchers and how this affects the scientific method. In the Sugar Creek case, this led to a new approach to water quality sampling methodology, namely, use of a year-round high density sampling approach to examine the water quality of headwater streams. The second is to categorize modes of intensification within the same watershed. We found different modes of intensification in different subwatersheds of Sugar Creek relating to ethnic differences as well as different farming strategies. Positive and negative feedback loops within environmental biocomplexity were identified and led to an analysis locating leverage points to start to correct environmental degradation. Third, we examined fragmented landscapes and people’s social organization and ideas about the landscape along three streams. Heterogeneous landscape patterns, land use, and land tenure are based on abstract cultural rules which affect levels of biodiversity at different hierarchical scales and contribute to the relative degree of the system to be resilient and buffer system perturbations. The fourth principle of integration was to create new social and economic value through connecting social and natural systems.
