Resilience Lost: Intersecting Land Use and Landscape Dynamics in the Prehistoric Southwestern United States (original) (raw)
Related papers
Migration is arguably one of the most important processes that link ecological and social systems across scales. Humans (and other organisms) tend to move in pursuit of better resources (both social and environmental). Such mobility may serve as a coping mechanism for short-term local-scale dilemmas and as a means of distributing organisms in relation to resources. Movement also may be viewed as a shift to a larger scale; that is, while it may solve short-term local problems, it may simultaneously have longer term and larger scale consequences. We conduct a quantitative analysis using dynamic modeling motivated by an archaeological case study to explore the dynamics that arise when population movement serves as a link between spatial scales. We use the model to characterize how ecological and social factors can lead to spatial variation in resource exploitation, and to investigate the circumstances under which migration may enhance or reduce the capacity of the system to absorb shocks at different scales.
1992
Native inhabitants of the Southeastern United States traditionally practiced land management strategies, including burning and clearing, that created ‘anthropogenic landscapes’. From the viewpoint of landscape ecology, analysis of historic documents including drawings and deerskin maps from the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries depicted the Native Southeastern landscape as a series of circular patches surrounded by buffer areas. This character contrasted sharply with early European coastal settlements which were more typically rectangular in shape. Differences between Native American and European land use patterns and implied perceptions of the landscape reflect distinct differences in their respective cultural models and intentionality.
2012
Events during the last several years—such as Hurricane Katrina, the earthquake in Haiti, the Southeast Asian tsunami, and continuing droughts in Africa—vividly illustrate the vulnerability of human society to environmental disturbances. That vulnerability lies in both the nature and magnitude of hazards in the environment and in the configurations (institutions, policies, practices) of human societies. We unintentionally play an essential role in creating our vulnerabilities. The concepts of resilience and vulnerability in coupled socialecological systems have proved increasingly important for analyzing the human dimensions of environmental disturbance and change ( Janssen and Ostrom 2006)—in the sense of this book, how people experience “hazards.” For example, strong earthquakes in some regions of the world result in limited human suffering and infrastructure costs, while in others they are massively devastating in human life and property loss. The same can be said for disease, hur...