A Brief History of Sustainability

A Brief History of Sustainability

Dann Sklarew, Co-DirectorMason Sustainability Studies Minor Program

What is sustainability?Last Week: Your definition?Our sustainable past?Our Common Future…

Key Sustainability NeedsReduce Ecological Footprints:

[Natural] Resource ManagementWaste Management/RecyclingMitigate Human-Induced Climate Change

Raise Consci[enti]ousnessAwarenessMindfulnessPersonal ResponsibilityEducation

[Manage] “Population Growth”

Is our generation meeting your sustainability needs?

Wikipedia?

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability

UNESCO? “How can the needs of current and

future generations be met in a world where the aspirations of many people far exceed their needs and the life chances of the many more are acutely limited by poverty and environmental decline?

“The task of creating social, economic and political systems that meet our needs and aspirations, that are based on sound ecological principles, and that are democratic and fair to current and future generations, is a deeply challenging one. “

Source: http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/index.htm ;

http://www.unesco.org/education/tlsf/TLSF/theme_a/mod04/img/fig_puzz02.jpg

Conceptual History"In every deliberation, we must consider the impact

on the seventh generation... even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”—Great Law of the Iroquois (per wikipedia)

“Now this is the Law of the Jungle -- as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back --For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”--Rudyard Kipling

Most Sustainable Beings?

“Methuseleh” – 4,800 bristlecone pine in California

Quaking Aspen Stand (80,000 yo - 1 Myo) in Utah

“Immortal” bacterial colonies (40-240 Myo spores)

Ecological Succession= Temporal variation in community structure in one place.

o The initial or early successional species, often referred to as pioneer species, are usually characterized by high growth rates, smaller size, high degree of dispersal, and high rates of population growth (r-selected species).

o In contrast, late successional species generally have lower rates of dispersal and colonization, slower growth rates, and are larger and longer-lived (K-selected species).

Ecological BasisSupply and DemandInter-species Interactions (we’re one of the

species)Even ecological succession….

o The concept of succession was introduced by Henry Cowles in 1899 and expanded by Frederick Clements.

They viewed succession as a predictable, directional, inevitable process driven by the action of plants on their environment (termed facilitation)

that concluded with a stable end point determined by the prevailing climate (the climatic climax community).

o The climax represented a community at some equilibrium or STEADY STATE with the physical and biotic environment that continued to reproduce itself in the absence of disturbance.

Clements further recognized only one climax for a region whose characteristics were determined solely by climate.

Successional processes and modifications of the environment overcome the effects of differences in topography, soil parent material, and other factors.

According to this perspective, over time all communities within a region would converge to and stabilize at a single climax.

 As the biological and physical structure of vegetation changes during the process of succession, animal life associated with those stages also changes.

• Animals are influenced more by structural characteristics of vegetation than by species composition.

Therefore, successional stages of animals may not correspond to the successional stages of plants.

• Therefore, the key to diversity of wildlife in a given area is the maintenance of a heterogeneous landscape with habitat patches of various successional stages and of adequate sizes and connectiveness to meet the animals needs and promote gene exchange and dispersal.

Views of communities and succession

The Clements vs Gleason views of communities and succession:

o F. E. Clements (1916) developed a descriptive theory of succession based on his view of the community as an association or superorganism. The logic was that if clusters or groups of species repeatedly associated together, that is evidence for either positive or neutral interactions among them, favoring the view of communities as integrated units.

o Based on this logic, Clements developed the organismal concept of communities. He viewed species in an association as having similar environmental requirements and therefore similar distributional limits along important environmental gradients. The boundaries between adjacent associations are narrow, with very few species in common.

o This view suggests a common evolutionary history and similar fundamental responses and tolerances for the component species.

F.E. Clements (continued)o Mutualism and coevolution play an important role in the

evolution of species making up the association.

The community developed as an integrated whole which Clements considered as a superorganism, theultimate expression of which was the climax.

o The climax was an assemblage of vegetation that belonged to the highest type of vegetation community possible under the prevailing climate.

This climax can, according to Clements, reproduce itself,repeating with essential fidelity the stages of its development.”

(i.e. the climax is the ‘mature adult’ association, able to sustainits essence over time.)

H. A. Gleason (1917, 1926) regarded the community as consisting of individual species that respond independently to environmental conditions: “the vegetation of an area is merely the resultant of two factors, the fluctuation and fortuitous immigration of plants and an equally fluctuating and variable environment.” He emphasized species rather than communities as the essential unit.

o Succession results from the individual responses of different species to the prevailing environmental conditions.

Plants involved in succession are those that arrive first on the site and are able to establish themselves under prevailing environmental conditions.

o As time passes, plants modify the environment, and competition and other interactions among species determine the final outcome.

o His view became known as the individualistic continuum concept.

The continuum concept states that the relationship between coexisting species is a result of

similarities in their requirements and tolerances,

not a result of strong interactions or common evolutionary history, as viewed by Clements.

o Boundaries between communities are gradual and difficult to identify. What is referred to as a community is merely the group of species found to coexist under any particular set of environmental conditions.

Connell and Slatyer (1977) proposed a theoretical framework for understanding succession that included three different models:

1. Facilitation model - the organisms themselves bring about changes within the community, modifying the environment in such a way that they prepare the site for later successional species, thus facilitating their success.

This is a holistic and Clementsian model.

2. Inhibition model - species interactions are purely competitive and no species is competitively superior to another.

The site belongs to those species that become established first and are able to hold their positions against all invaders.

They make the site less suitable for both early and late successional species through consumption of resources and modification of the environment.

Although early successional species may suppress their growth for a long time, ultimately, species that are long-lived come to dominate.

Such succession is not orderly and is less predictable than that observed under the facilitation model. This is a reductionist (Gleason) approach with competition driving vegetational change.

3. Tolerance model - involves the interaction of competition and life history traits. It suggests that later successional species are neither inhibited nor aided by species of earlier stages.

• Later-stage species can invade a site, become established, and grow to maturity in the presence of those preceding them, because they have a greater tolerance for the lower level of resources created by earlier species.

• As time progresses, the early successional species decline in abundance and the community is dominated by the tolerant species.

• This model suggests that early stages of succession are driven by competition, whereas later stages are dominated by species that can invade and tolerate lower resource regimes than previously existing species on the site.

o All three models share the same view of community dynamics:

o community dynamics are influenced by the characteristics of individual species; and

(2) species adapted to a particular environment share a complex of characteristics.

BUT - the difficulty with this framework is that most successional sequences cannot be categorized into any one of the models.

Plants, the environment & community dynamics

There are two components of organisms’ response to the environment that are critical for understanding community dynamics.

One is the response of the individual to the prevailing environment, such as light, nutrients, and moisture.

The other is how the individuals modify the environment = autogenic environmental change.

It is the combination of these two organisms’ responses to the environment that give rise to the dynamics of communities across the landscape.

What does this have to do with sustainability?

Consider the primordial anaerobes upset by the first tiny plants that created our modern atmosphere’s oxygen…

Humanity has been considering

succession and sustainability

for a long time…

Who wrote this? When?“There have been, and will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes; the greatest have been brought about by the agencies of fire and water, and other lesser ones by innumerable other causes.“A great conflagration of things upon the earth […] recurs after long intervals; at such times those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the seashore.“When, on the other hand, […] the earth [is purged] with a deluge of water, the survivors […] are herdsmen and shepherds who dwell on the mountains, but those who, like you, live in cities are carried by the rivers into the sea. “The fact is, that wherever the extremity of winter frost or of summer does not prevent, mankind exist, sometimes in greater, sometimes in lesser numbers.”

From TimaeusBy Plato

in 360 BCin his prelude to the 1st recorded reference to

Atlantis.

Sustainability in Antiquity Plato: Story of Atlantis Chinese:

Weather and Water Measurement Records over CENTURIES Old Testament

Noah Tower of Babel Joseph & Pharaoh's Dream Commandments (Jubilee, Kosher Laws, etc.)

Ancient Persian Story: Leila and Majnun St. Francis d’Azizi Other examples from your backgrounds?

Thomas Jefferson “The Earth belongs in usufruct to the living.”

19th-20th CenturyMalthusHaber Process & Green RevolutionClub of Rome & Neo-MalthusiansWhat else?

21st C. What does sustainability mean here

and now?

Iron Law of Failure (Ormead 205)

“From biological species to companies to government policies, there appears to be an Iron Law of Failure, which is extremely difficult to break”

E.g.:99.9% of all species ever are now extinct.10% of US companies fail each year.“Large and small… they fail.”

How?Exogenous extinction

Floods, volcanoes, tsunamies, etc.Endogenous extiction

E.g., Over-competition, insufficient cooperation

BEST PROTECTION: UNDERSTANDING (and acting on it…) in a changing world.

And what about “the singularity?”

“The ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, … gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”

Stanislaw Ulam (1958), recalling conversation with John von Neumann*

Can “we” be sustained through such a technological singularity?

PS What if it arrives in our lifetime?

* Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity