ABSTRACT
The relationship between people and the natural world is, to say the least, complex. On the one hand, people depend for their very existence on a healthy natural support system. Nature provides us with a suite of goods and services which enable human survival. These include provisioning of food, water and materials, climate and water regulation, nutrient cycling, pollination, primary production, and aesthetic, spiritual and recreational benefits, amongst many others (De Groot et al. 2002). The value of these ecosystem services is indisputable, even if difficult to quantify, and contributes to fundamental constituents of human well-being, including security, basic material needed for a ‘good’ life, health, and good social relations (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 2005). Indeed in the overall balance of nature, man is far more dependent on other species than they are on us; as eloquently put by E. O. Wilson, ‘If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos’ (Wilson 1985 cited in Jarski 2007: 269). Notwithstanding, the power of the human species to alter its environment is undeniable. No
other living being has had as large an effect on the natural world. Sadly, much of that effect appears to have been negative. Homo sapiens sapiens was the first species to induce a wave of extinction (Ceballos et al. 2010); the previous five major extinction episodes were all the result of natural factors (primarily related to climate change, tectonics and cometary collisions). Even if precise extinction rates are hard to calculate – given that several millions of species remain unidentified and as a result of problems with extrapolation (He and Hubbell 2011) – there is little doubt that losses are highly significant. Perhaps this human propensity to impact heavily on other species has much to do with the way in which anthropogenic civilizations evolved. Early hunter-gatherer societies had no option but to work ‘with’ nature, adjusting their lives to the patterns of the seasons, and planning their movements in line with the availability of resources. With the advent of agriculture, people developed the capacity to settle in a single location, made possible by the ability to produce a steady supply (and even a surplus) of food (as opposed
to merely harvesting whatever was available). This in turn enabled populations to grow to unprecedented levels, and facilitated the development of conurbations. Whilst present-day cities have undoubtedly come a long way from the earliest riverine civilizations, the fundamental trends established then remain pertinent – people settle in a location, populations grow, and corresponding resource demands increase, with the result that people need to expand their spatial footprint – and so a vicious cycle ensues. Natural landscapes have historically been big casualties of this process, with resource exploitation coming at a heavy cost to the ecosystems that ultimately sustain us. Perhaps a significant underlying driving force of this unhealthy dynamic between people and
the natural world can be found in people’s environmental ethic (or lack thereof). One could argue that as our ability to control and exploit nature increased, so correspondingly did our respect for nature decline. The use of natural resources is nothing new; in keeping with the maxim of ‘survival of the fittest’, humans need to utilize other species to survive. However, contrast a modern-day commercial livestock breeding operation (including high-density intensive breeding of species, extensive use of antibiotics and pesticides, and eventual mass slaughter at an abbatoir), with the limited hunting kills of an indigenous culture, often accompanied by rituals to pay tribute to the animal which gave its life to sustain human survival. Our western lifestyle arguably perpetuates a conception of nature as a commodity, to be used and discarded at will, and lying beyond the remit of our moral concerns. As a result, we now have a gap between ‘people’ on the one hand, and ‘nature’ on the other, with the former depending on the latter but often failing to acknowledge the limited capacity of nature to provide resources and absorb waste. In this gap, lies perhaps the key constraint to (and challenge for) sustainability. Bridging the gap requires, first and foremost, acknowledging that humans and nature are not two separate entities, but exist together interdependently as elements of a wider Earth system. It is this conception of social-ecological systems that underpins the discipline of landscape ecology.
