The term biodiversity, now familiar to those not trained in the biological sciences, is a way to evaluate the health of living systems. We are now comfortable with the idea that the presence of many versions of living things is a benefit. Biodiversity is usually explored at three levels: genetic diversity, species diversity and ecosystem diversity. These three levels work together to create the complex system of life on Earth.
But how does this work? How many kinds of biting insects should attend a picnic? How can their strength in numbers be beneficial? The answer for ecosystems, species, and humanity is that redundancy is a sort of insurance that things will continue to work as they should, even during and after enormous changes. Millions of organisms with diverse genetics aid our digestion; others contribute to vegetable gardens and oceans. Redundancy (the bounteous many) and efficiency (a svelte minimalism) mark the difference between systems that can rebound after a shock and those that cannot.
Our human ancestors have been involved with biodiversity for several million years, to the general advantage of both. Unfortunately, the global turn that began several centuries ago toward maximum low-cost efficiency in agriculture, forestry, and other productive systems, has resulted in enormous biodiversity loss. It has become clear that to restore biodiversity at every scale, there must be new ways to live in greater harmony with the millions of organisms on the planet we share.
Biocultural refugias
Biocultural diversity, defined by Luisa Maffi as ”the diversity of life in all its manifestations: biological, cultural, and linguistic — which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system.” This neologism is meant to unite the non-human living world with human activities, in which change is reciprocal. Biocultural refers to the integration of cultural forms with biological and environmental factors.
The rich biodiversity of many cultural landscapes co-evolved, maintained as much through management practices as lucky locales. Termed biocultural refugia, they offer living and proven solutions to changing conditions and can contribute to the analysis of issues at different scales, ranging from DNA to garden plots to the communities that manage them. These systems are laboratories, learning sites for sustainable development. Biophysical and social features can be combined: genotypes, artifacts, written accounts, embodied rituals, art, oral traditions and self-organized systems of rules.
Historical ecology
Extensive and ubiquitous industrialization of the planet is rapidly eroding such practices and the biodiversity associated with them, treating them as antiquated and imposing an ongoing generational amnesia. Entire habitats, wild species, and landraces—local varieties of domesticated animals or plants adapted to their natural and cultural environment—have been lost or are on extinction trajectories.
Fortunately, there is a practical framework for the study of not just these special still-extant places, but landscapes everywhere and through time. Historical ecology combines the biological, physical, and social sciences and the humanities, and works with indigenous and local practitioners. Drawing on this broad spectrum of concepts and methods, historical ecology guides the construction of an evidence-validated, multiplex narrative of landscape evolution and treats the totality as a complex system.
While historical ecology may be applied to spatial and temporal frames at any resolution, it finds particularly rich sources of data at the landscape scale — where human activity and cognition interact with biophysical systems, and where archaeological, historical, ethnographic, environmental and other records are plentiful.
This trans-disciplinary research environment supports collaboration among differently trained researchers and enhances the value of both scientific evidence and traditional/local environmental knowledge. Cultural landscapes are inherently political: soils retain evidence of their use, people remember management decisions, tax records show changed ownership, and integrated evidence records climate change. Thus, the combined study of biogeophysical processes with the history of political and social change can expose the range of forces active in their formation and allow more complete understanding of decisions and outcomes.
The analysis of completed cycles broadens the forensic study of change across time and space and offers lessons and ideas for the future. For example, completed experiments in regional water management, begun and ended far in the past, can be studied for their effectiveness, durability, cost, and social and political characteristics. Historical ecology’s comprehensive approach offers place-based solutions to contemporary problems.
The term sustainability has become so familiar and ill-defined that it has lost practical application. The term fails because it often has the connotation of “able to be continued indefinitely” and does not connote a dynamic system that endures diverse challenges. To apply lessons from the past to today’s issues, we must keep in mind that all social systems—ancient and contemporary—have been impacted by climate change, population growth, resource depletion, pestilence, and greed.
Durability, in contrast with sustainability, is the positive outcome of practices and strategies that were utilized over a period of time. Durability introduces the idea that things will not last forever and must be maintained, but also that old ways are not always adaptable to changed conditions. Two important factors in making the right decisions are diversity and flexibility. For long-term societal survival, the archaeological record shows us that diversity is key. A recurring strategy found in durable systems includes the flexibility that diversity provides. These reinforce one another: while diversity (of resources, strategies, and perspectives) is the basis for wider choices, flexibility is the ability to alter management and governance to better fit the situation.
Biocultural diversity is the basis for flexible social, political, economic, and other strategies. Diverse and flexible strategies within a socio-ecological system that has some slack— where each key variable need not be “just right” for the system to function— offer risk management that provides vital latitude in the face of external or internal changes.
Read the article in Swedish: Historisk ekologi – en oumbärlig nyckel till framtiden – Biodiverse
Text: Carole Crumley, professor in archeology, University of North Carolina, guest professor at CBM
READ MORE:
Murphy, J. T. & Crumley, C. L. (red) (2022). If the Past Teaches, what does the Future Learn? Ancient Urban Regions and the Durable Future. Delft School of Architecture. (Open Access).
Barthel, S., Crumley, C. L., Svedin, U. (2013). Bio-Cultural Refugia: Safeguarding Diversity of Practices for Food Security and Biodiversity. Global Environmental Change 23(5):1142- 1152.
Barthel, S., Crumley, C. L., Svedin, U. (2013). Bio-cultural refugia: combating the erosion of diversity in landscapes of food production. Ecology and Society, 18(4):71.
Crumley, C. L., Lennartsson, T., Westin, A. (red) (2018) Issues and Concepts in Historical Ecology: The Past and Future of Landscapes and Regions. Cambridge University Press.
United Nations Environment Programme (2022). Spreading like Wildfire – The Rising Threat of Extraordinary Landscape Fires. UNEP Rapid Response. Assessment. Nairobi.