Hi Erik

These are all big questions.

You ask "And what theories underlie such societal changes?"

There is a huge literature on the environmental Kuznets curve that seems to be one large scale generalization. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

Another theory of general interest is the "forest transition". See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_transition.

There has been quite a lot of research over the last decade to clarify how wealth (change or local variation) relates to dependence on, benefits from, and impact on, natural resources. The PEN work of CIFOR would be a good place to track some of that down. see http://www.cifor.org/pen

Key of course is "our" ability to modify and influence the process and outcomes.

The resilience alliance also has a lot of good stuff on "transformation and change". See http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/e__s_special_feature

What I think is really fascinating is the cultural differences and how these are manifested. Some parts of the world are much more tolerant and respectful of wild nature than others (parts of India and Thailand, parts of Ethiopia etc being positive). Valuing and nurturing such tolerance is something that those of us with conservation aims need to spend a lot more energy on ...

Some of the best work in fisheries in recent years has been to reintroduce more traditional controls and safeguards. See e.g. Johannes, R. E. 2002. The renaissance of community-based marine resource management in Oceania. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 33:317–340.

This requires a much more local and less uniform approach ... but I think the really big question is whether increased democracy (a good thing) will also be good for the environment! It depends ...

Hi Erik

These are all big questions.

You ask "And what theories underlie such societal changes?"

There is a huge literature on the environmental Kuznets curve that seems to be one large scale generalization. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuznets_curve

Another theory of general interest is the "forest transition". See

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forest_transition.

There has been quite a lot of research over the last decade to clarify how wealth (change or local variation) relates to dependence on, benefits from, and impact on, natural resources. The PEN work of CIFOR would be a good place to track some of that down. see http://www.cifor.org/pen

Key of course is "our" ability to modify and influence the process and outcomes.

The resilience alliance also has a lot of good stuff on "transformation and change". See http://www.resalliance.org/index.php/e__s_special_feature

What I think is really fascinating is the cultural differences and how these are manifested. Some parts of the world are much more tolerant and respectful of wild nature than others (parts of India and Thailand, parts of Ethiopia etc being positive). Valuing and nurturing such tolerance is something that those of us with conservation aims need to spend a lot more energy on ...

Some of the best work in fisheries in recent years has been to reintroduce more traditional controls and safeguards. See e.g. Johannes, R. E. 2002. The renaissance of community-based marine resource management in Oceania. Annu. Rev. Ecol. Syst. 33:317–340.

This requires a much more local and less uniform approach ... but I think the really big question is whether increased democracy (a good thing) will also be good for the environment! It depends ...

Thanks Fabian,

Indeed not a straightforward question. Fabian's suggestion to look at chemicals is indeed a good start. Stuff we used to do quite happily a few decades (just dump it) now seems completely wrong, at least in the world's richer economies.

Interesting point also about gradual and abrupt change and how this depends on time scales. Any change would likely start with an "abrupt" leap of imagination by someone, followed slowly by those who could see the benefits of the new thinking and who didn't consider the visionary barking mad. But when viewed from a (temporal) distance, even those societal changes could appear rapid and based on significant paradigm shift, rather than the relatively slow change that actually occurred. In that respect, Steven Pinker has some really interesting stuff to say about societal changes with regard to violence, which has so much decreased over long time really through fundamental change in how we think and feel, but through our limited temporal looking glass the world looks as violent as ever.

More to think about...

Hi Doug,

Thanks for the useful links. The cultural differences are indeed interesting. Have there been any global or regional studies on how these cultural attitudes to "nature" or "wilderness" and wildlife vary? It would be very interesting to see if somehow these attitudes could be objectively mapped and whether these patterns somehow coincide with measures of conservation success, such as deforestation rates (where it concerns naturally forested countries) or changes in Red List status of the countries threatened species. I guess it won't be easy to objectively capture people's environmental attitudes. Such studies could potentially also address questions about drivers of transformative social change. What role does science play? How important are cultural pre-conceptions about environmental values? Are certain societies more likely to group together and support a certain movement for change (which countries still do mass protests?). Understanding how change happens, and what the most likely drivers are in particular parts of the world, would be really beneficial in trying to steer or stimulate this process.

Hi Erik

you ask "Have there been any global or regional studies on how these cultural attitudes to "nature" or "wilderness" and wildlife vary? It would be very interesting to see if somehow these attitudes could be objectively mapped and whether these patterns somehow coincide with measures of conservation success, such as deforestation rates (where it concerns naturally forested countries) or changes in Red List status of the countries threatened species."

I am not aware of any large-scale systematic attempts to do this, but there have been plenty of case studies and even more anecdotal accounts.

There are some publications, I made a brief summary in this paper with Sonja to show the options, see table 1 and refs:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262269985_Partnerships_for_tropical_conservation?ev=prf_pub

A challenge for any uniform approach is the potentially diverse nature of the factors and motivations involved. Another would be simply being aware of the values and principles involved in any location (for example in Europe we are used to the idea that church yards and grave-yards maintain some trees and wild flowers, but we may not "see" the Punan grave-sites, or sacred sites that we walk past in the Borneo forests (these have been often destroyed by logging operations due to their invisibility, obvious enough why the Punan would get upset about that even though the companies always claim ignorance)). Being aware enough to ask what matters seems a useful starting point and was the intention of our CIFOR MLA work. See http://www.cifor.org/mla/

If you know what matters you can better take it into account. But uniformity can only take you so far. Local concerns require local attention and local solutions.

I'll leave the other big questions for now (and think more about them). A good answer to each would be a book (not a web post)!

Article Partnership for tropical conservation

Hello Erik,

You've posed a set of questions that could lead to lines of inquiry spreading in so many different directions!

I agree with you that Fabian's suggestion of looking at practices and legislation relating to chemicals would provide a beachhead in starting to grapple with the questions you've introduced. A couple of examples that come to mind would be the banning of DDT, first in the late 1960s, with a complete ban on agricultural use in 1972 here in North America; broader internationally banning of DDT was included under the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. The benefits of this to wildlife, particularly bird species (especially predatory species), and their rebounding in numbers subsequent to the ban being implemented, have been well-documented. Similarly, the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer has had a fairly rapid impact on the production and use of chlorofluorocarbons, changing human behavior and human interaction with the environment in the process.

Your comment on Stephen Pinker's recent work on violence and how in the present-day we are actually in a relatively peaceful time compared to the levels of violence at earlier times in human history is interesting. In that respect, human warfare would have both direct and indirect effects on the environment, as well as leading to technological changes that themselves impose impacts on both human society and the environment. A clear example of this sort of feedback would be the decision by Phillip II of Spain to build the Spanish Armada, which not only put pressure on Spanish forests for the wood to construct the galleons, but also for charcoal to fuel the foundries that were constructing the cannons to arm the galleons and all the cannonballs for the galleon armaments. An interesting paper to look at this sort of regional change is: Valbuena-Carabana et al. (2010). "Historical and recent changes in Spanish forests: A socio-economic process." Review of Paleobotany and Palynology 162: 492-506 (a copy of this paper is available at: https://www.academia.edu/716397/Historical_and_recent_changes_in_the_Spanish_forests_A_socio-economic_process ).

From the few posts thus far, this is already looking like an undertaking of mammoth proportions!

Hi Erik,

Interesting and relevant questions, you ask! On the question on how cultural differences on attitudes and values on nature vary and can be mapped, I can recommend you two of my papers on cultural perspectives on biodiversity conservation and on global scenarios in relation to biodiversity conservation (both broader than conservation alone). The mapping framework we use in those papers is based on Cultural Theory (see Michael Thompson, Astrid Offermans, MAry Douglas, and/or Marco Verwey), which is more widely used on maping perspectives on water management, mobility or climate change. The links to my papers:

Beumer and Martens (2010) Noah’s Ark or World Wild Web? Cultural Perspectives in Global Scenario Studies and Their Function for Biodiversity Conservation in a Changing World: http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/10/3211

Beumer and Martens (2013) IUCN and perspectives on biodiversity conservation in a changing world: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10531-013-0573-6#page-1

I hope you like them!

If you have any questions, feel free to contact!

Best,

Carijn

Hi Eric and fellow discussants;

“What examples exist of transformative social change resulting in substantially altered interactions between humans and their environments?”

Interesting questions, some dimensions of which have concerned me for a while. Allow me please to offer some additional perspectives to those that have already been presented. There is a set of short answers, medium ones and longer ones. Here are some of the short and medium. Longer ones need red wine!

1) A broad question to be sure and perhaps one that can be fine-tuned a little to facilitate what I hope might be an easier pathway to resolution?

a. What is transformative social change? When is a society different? Why does it have to be transformative social change and not just nudges? It is my suggestion that to find answers we look to that body of research that has focused for over 200 years on social change – social science has a deep and remarkably rich body of theory on social change. My personal favourite is Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach [1] (alas she is hard going to read) but there are many others, Giddens being perhaps the most well-known contemporary but Marx is also in there.

b. I suspect that in looking for sweeping or transformative change we may miss what is really there: slow and incremental shifts in the structure and culture of society that underpin relationships with just about everything. I suspect transformative change (in the sense of fundamental shifts in the factors that structure society) is so rare, if in fact it ever occurs, as to warrant only scant attention. Even when it does happen, through revolution for example (I am thinking here of Mozambique, Zimbabwe that I know reasonably well) much of the social infrastructure that acts as a template for the emerging new society is intact and may in fact just reproduce that which was overthrown.

c. In looking for “substantially altered interactions between humans and their environments” I worry that in framing your search in this way you may exclude from consideration those regions of the solution space that may in fact contain what you are after. There are two elements to my concern: the first relates to what the term environment means and the second relates to how common usage of the term in this sense creates an unnecessary and ultimately destructive polarisation. Firstly then what do you mean by environment? Well I do not know but I can try and present what environment means for me which may then enable you to contrast your sense of the term and how you are using it. I tend to think of the world as comprising social objects (any real or imaginary entity that people can name, assign attributes to and discuss [2]). Social objects are the representations that people hold of everything in their worlds and it is these representations that people interact with: I for example have a representation of polar bears which forms the basis of my beliefs, acts and conversations in relation to polar bears despite never having seen one; we all talk about climate change and take actions in relation to climate change despite it being so abstract; and from the few words you present in this discussion stream environment appears to be somehow separate from people. In my representation of the world “environment” is that which contains all of the social objects in the world with which I interact. So people are social objects, government is a social object, trees, my garden. Everything. There are only social objects. We can only interact with the social construction of objects, not their true form, whatever that might be. If I buy organic sweet corn in the supermarket it looks no different to inorganic sweetcorn. I am interacting with the social object organic sweetcorn and act accordingly by paying more for it. So for me all of these social objects are in my “environment”. Not just “natural” things which is the sense I get of your use of the term. This leads to my second concern. The clear separation between people and environment which pervades much western thinking is for me part of the problem and in fact suggests both an example of what you may be looking for and one possible pathway towards a partial solution. In the social psychology literature of prejudice (racial or gender prejudice or any of a host of others) people develop concepts of “us” and “them” (so certain groups living in the USA may have social objects called for example “Americans” and “terrorists”). People like “us” are good and people like “them” are bad. I fear that in separating “us” from “environment” we facilitate the same sort of alienating processes that allow people to do things to social objects that you may think of as being part of “environment” that they might not do if they saw themselves as having close and connected relationships with the social objects that you might be bundling in “environment”. People routinely do to “them” what they would not dream of doing to “us”. This separation of “us” from “environment” is an example of a major change in western societal relationships to “environment”. I do not think it is as pervasive in many developing country contexts.

d. If then we adopt this social representational view of society then some pathways to answering your question emerge (for me at any rate) more clearly. Firstly, examples of changes in people’s relationships with social objects in their environment become ubiquitous. They are absolutely everywhere: urban development is an example of how people change their conception of and relationship to landscape, modes of living, what is natural etc; modern agriculture is an example; sources of and uses of energy – the list becomes very long. In each of these examples (and the many, many others) there are strongly associated changes in conceptualisation (the attributes of the social object and the values associated with these) and actions. The two are inseparable. These examples also point to some of the factors that facilitate and inhibit change: for example technology and infrastructure (both physical but also social). But perhaps you were after a more narrowly defined set of changes?

2) The environmental psychology literature has quite a number of examples of shifts that might interest you [3, 4]. But you may already be aware of this literature and this may not be what you are after.

3) Another challenge with framing this problem as an “us” and “them” or “people” and “environment” concern is that these polarisations tend to mask considerable heterogeneity, as I am sure you are fully aware. Societies are comprised of heterogeneous people and groupings of people. The environment comprises an equally heterogeneous set of objects. I suspect your questions would be much more precisely answered were they to be focused either on specifics (e.g. how have the conceptions of water among irrigated farming communities and urban dwellers in Jakarta changed over the past decade and what do these changes mean for how these groups interact among themselves or with others, how they interact with water and with how water related policies have unfolded?) or you sought to uncover much more deeply seated orientations to natural objects. You ask a bit about the latter – some early and very interesting work on this was done by Thompson [5] which I think underpins some of Buzz Holling's early thinking.

4) You ask about bodies of theory. I have mentioned a couple. Wagner’s book I have mentioned earlier is superb [2]. I recent book that really captures very well, but much more eloquently, much of what I have attempted to say here is Fligstein’s book on social field theory [6]. This is really rich and enlightening in that it deals not only with social change theory but also social movement theory. A while ago the British government released a report that you may not have seen which summarises much of the dominant thinkers on social change [7] this was also synthesised by the Australian public services commission and the synthesis is also useful [8]. There is a lot out there. I do think it wise for us to look for insights from the people who have been investigating these issues for a very long time.

5) Additionally I would suggest that we need to have a clear model of society and social change before we can meaningfully answer the questions you pose. Without having an explicit model or coherent understanding of society that can be debated, interrogated, challenged with data and improved, how can we judge when society has changed? How do we judge what factors we need to address to bring about changes? Some of the theory I am pointing you to moves us in that direction. But from just one corner of the social field.....

I do hope at least some of these reflections are useful

1. Archer, M., Realist social theory: the morphogenetic approach. 1995, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

2. Wagner, W. and N. Hayes, Everyday discourse and common sense. The theory of social representations. 2005, New York: Palgrave.

3. Osbaldiston, R. and J.P. Schott, Environmental Sustainability and Behavioral Science: Meta-Analysis of Proenvironmental Behavior Experiments. Environment and Behavior, 2011.

4. Bamberg, S. and G. Möser, Twenty years after Hines, Hungerford, and Tomera: A new meta-analysis of psycho-social determinants of pro-environmental behaviour. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2007. 27(1): p. 14-25.

5. Thompson, M., R. Ellis, and A. Wildavsky, Cultural theory. Political Cultures series. 1990, Boulder, Colorado, USA: Westview Press. 296.

6. Fligstein, N. and D. McAdam, A theory of fields. 2012, New York: Oxford University Press. xiv, 238 p.

7. Halpern, D., et al., Personal responsibility and changing behaviour: the state of knowledge and its implications for public policy. 2004, Cabinet Office, Prime minister's Strategy Unit: London, United Kingdon. p. 70.

8. APSC, A.P.S.C., The changing behaviour. A public policy perspective. 2007: Canberra. p. 37.

Hi Erik and all,

very interesting discussion, indeed.

From my point of view Tim has focused on a very relevant aspect of the question: What is >>transformative

Dear

Erik

I suggest some readings which have to do with rural development, environmental history and agroecology:

SWAGEMAKERS, P.; WISKERKE, H.; VAN DER PLOEG, J. D. Linking birds, fields and farmers. Journal of environmental management, 2009, 90: S185-S192.

MORENO-PEÑARANDA, Raquel; KALLIS, Giorgos. A coevolutionary understanding of agroenvironmental change: a case-study of a rural community in Brazil. Ecological Economics, 2010, 69.4: 770-778.

RÍOS-NÚÑEZ, S. M.; COQ-HUELVA, D.; GARCÍA-TRUJILLO, R. The Spanish livestock model: a coevolutionary analysis. Ecological Economics, 2013, 93: 342-350.

Kind Regards

Geraldo Ceni Coelho

Hi Erik and all other participants in the forum My experience in Mexico told me two things: 1) when poverty is large, there is no way to change their habits of livelihood, unless the government inject large sums of money to provide infrastructure to that poor people, urban services, health, education and work. The problem is that when all this is completed, its natural environment is already transformed and lost much of its wild, beautiful and ecologically important state.

Mexico is a diverse country, is among the 5 countries with the highest biodiversity in the world, it is also the second country in the world's most culturally diverse. There are 62 well-recognized ethnic groups with their own language, for example. The problem is that the most conserved parts of Mexico are places inhabited by ethnic groups and that these groups have a large economic and social backwardness.

This is the paradox, how far should promote change in attitude among the indigenous people? if we acknowledge all their rights, should not we match them to people in the city? Of course to do this involves a large cost in what economists call loss of natural capital.

here I leave these questions to pursue the point where two of my experience working with indigenous groups in Mexico: We carry an inventory of their natural environment, we conducted a Diagnostic studies of the ecological status of the region, we work with them in participatory workshops on logical framework schemes, etc ... after a couple of years with these people, and understand them a little better , and them to us, we earn the reciprocal trust.

So begins our training to enhance human capital (again a term of the economy that I do not like but that nowaday has widespread. And can be discussed another time). People now have more job options (individual and collaborative), has increased the potential intangible of the community and began to productive activities to generate local wealth in a sustainable manner. THE process is slow and the changes should be gradual so as not to significantly alter the well-preserved nature of its environment. A quick change of attitude produces an abrupt change in the ecological functioning of the system. Well, here two things happen when we leave the region because we believe that our job is done, they stop doing the practices we teach, rather, we learned together, and return to their traditional production system that could call "bread for today and hunger for tomorrow." What happened? the despair of the process to improve their quality of life is slow without the support of my university and scarce resource of government, make them return to their comfort zone, I do what I want and as I can (especially when those people do not used much technology in the wise-use of their resources), thay say: that ultimately we are alone -again-. And the other aspect for which leave is because sustainable practices are much more laborious and will not generate immediate benefits. Few people have attitudes and behaviors sustainable behaviors when they represent more effort and dedication. If we do not return to the community at least once a year, they loss the change and in the end, everything is worse than before. The indigenous people feel abandoned once more. It's really very rewarding to work with these people, but it is very hard and universities have not resource for all communities and people to stay with them a lifetime.

You could compare industrialization in communist countries (transformative social change) and the west, specifically with regard to reactive and corrective environmental policy and legislation to address emerging problems, like chemicals/DDT. That covers a rich history over much of the 20th century. East Germany vs west Germany alone would occupy a person's time.

Your fine question, Erik, has prompted some fine answers.  I would certainly echo Ian Colquhoun's Montreal Protocol example.  But that was a very rare example of governments, industry and NGOs working in unison.  If only we could hope for as much from the Paris climate conference.

Recalling Margaret Mead's "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has", some folks aren't waiting for makers and shakers to rouse themselves.  Readers may want to look at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/22/science/english-village-becomes-climate-leader-by-quietly-cleaning-up-its-own-patch.html?_r=0 and be inspired.