The term ecological design was coined in a 1996 book by Sim van der Ryn and Stewart Cowan, in which the authors argued for a seamless integration of human activities with natural processes to minimize destructive environmental impact. Following their cautionary statements, William McDonough and Michael Braungart published in 2002 their manifesto book From Cradle to Cradle, which proposed a circular political economy to replace the linear logic of “cradle to grave.” These books have been foundational in architecture and design discussions on sustainability and establishing the technical dimension, as well as the logic, of efficiency, optimization, and evolutionary competition in environmental debates. From Cradle to Cradle evolved into a production model implemented by a number of companies, organizations, and governments around the world, and it also has become a registered trademark and a product certification.
Popularized recently, these developments imply a very short history for the growing field of ecological design. However, their accounts hark as far back as Ernst Haeckel’s definition of the field of ecology in 1866 as an integral link between living organisms and their surroundings (Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 1866); and Henry David Thoreau’s famous 1854 manual for self-reliance and living in proximity with natural surroundings, in the cabin that he built at Walden Pond, Massachusetts (Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854).
Since World War II, contrary to the position of ecological design as a call to fit harmoniously within the natural world, there has been a growing interest in a form of synthetic naturalism, (Closed Worlds; The Rise and Fall of Dirty Physiology, 2015), where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities, buildings, and objects. With the rising awareness of what John McHale called disturbances in the planetary reservoir (The Future of the Future, 1969), the field of ecological design has signified not only the integration of the designed object or space in the natural world, but also the reproduction of the natural world in design principles and tools through technological mediation. This idea of architecture and design producing nature paralleled what Buckminster Fuller, John McHale, and Ian McHarg, among others, referred to as world planning; that is, to understand ecological design as the design of the planet itself as much as the design of an object, building, or territory. Unlike van der Ryn and Cowan’s argumentation, which focused on a deep appreciation for nature’s equilibrium, ecological design might commence with the synthetic replication of natural systems.
These conflicting positions reflect only a small fraction of the ubiquitous terms used to describe the field of ecological design, including green, sustain, alternative, resilient, self-sufficient, organic, and biotechnical. In the context of this study, this paper will argue that ecological design starts with the reconceptualization of the world as a complex system of flows rather than a discrete compilation of objects, which visual artist and theorist György Kepes has described as one of the fundamental reorientations of the 20th century (Art and Ecological Consciousness, 1972).
12
Article
History of Ecological Design
Lydia Kallipoliti
Article
History and Assessment of the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
Céline Granjou and Isabelle Arpin
The recent implementation of the IPBES is a major cornerstone in the transformation of the international environmental governance in the early 21st century. Often presented as “the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for biodiversity,” the IPBES aims to produce regular expert assessments of the state and evolution of biodiversity and ecosystems at the local, regional, and global levels. Its creation was promoted in the 1990s by biodiversity scientists and NGOs who increasingly came to view the failure of achieving effective conservation of nature as the consequence of the gap between science and policy, rather than of a lack of knowledge. The new institution embodies an approach to nature and nature conservation that results from the progressive evolution of international environmental governance, marked by the notion of ecosystem services (i.e., the idea that nature provides benefits to people and that nature conservation and human development should be thought of as mutually constitutive). The IPBES creation was entrusted to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Social environmental studies accounted for the genesis and organization of the IPBES and paid special attention to the strong emphasis put by IPBES participants on principles of openness and inclusivity and on the need to consider scientific knowledge and other forms of knowledge (e.g. traditional ecological knowledge) on an equal footing. Overall the IPBES can be considered an innovative platform characterized by organizations and practices that foster inclusiveness and openness both to academic science and indigenous knowledge as well as to diverse values and visions of nature and its relationship to society. However, the extent to which it succeeded in putting different biodiversity values and knowledge on an equal footing in practice has varied and remains diversely appreciated by the literature.
Article
History of Wildlife Tracking Technologies
Kristoffer Whitney
Technologies for wildlife tracking in a systematic way by scientists and other naturalists have their origins in the mid-19th century. Tagging and banding systems for fish and birds are exemplary of this: Both were used by late-19th- and early 20th-century biologists to gather data on the populations and migrations of a wide variety of species considered commercially useful or scientifically interesting. These tracking systems were deployed by networks of professional and amateur naturalists, working with a number of institutions integral to natural history work at the time: government agencies, birding and hunting groups, zoos, museums, and universities. By the mid- to late 20th century, wildlife tracking had expanded to include a wider array of species for a number of reasons. Technologically, electronic surveillance equipment from early radio telemetry to modern satellite tracking allowed for more animals to be tracked in ever more precise ways. Culturally and politically, the environmental movement and endangered species programs brought more attention to the plight of nongame or non-commercially valuable species. In the process, traditional biological disciplines were reshaped, and new subfields such as movement and acoustic ecology have emerged. And although the plethora of knowledge generated about wildlife in the past century and a half may prove to be a key component in environmental conservation in the face of climate change and biodiversity loss, there are a number of ethical issues emerging from the history of wildlife tracking technologies to be addressed as well.
Article
Human-Environmental Interrelationships and the Origins of Agriculture in Egypt and Sudan
Simon Holdaway and Rebecca Phillipps
Northeast Africa forms an interesting case study for investigating the relationship between changes in environment and agriculture. Major climatic changes in the early Holocene led to dramatic changes in the environment of the eastern Sahara and to the habitation of previously uninhabitable regions. Research programs in the eastern Sahara have uncovered a wealth of archaeological evidence for sustained occupation during the African Humid Period, from about 11,000 years ago. Initial studies of faunal remains seemed to indicate early shifts in economic practice toward cattle pastoralism. Although this interpretation was much debated when it was first proposed, the possibility of early pastoralism stimulated discussion concerning the relationships between people and animals in particular environmental contexts, and ultimately led to questions concerning the role of agriculture imported from elsewhere in contrast to local developments. Did agriculture, or indeed cultivation and domestication more generally (sensu Fuller & Hildebrand, 2013), develop in North Africa, or were the concepts and species imported from Southwest Asia? And if agriculture did spread from elsewhere, were just the plants and animals involved, or was the shift part of a full socioeconomic suite that included new subsistence strategies, settlement patterns, technologies, and an agricultural “culture”? And finally, was this shift, wherever and however it originated, related to changes in the environment during the early to mid-Holocene?
These questions refer to the “big ideas” that archaeologists explore, but before answers can be formed it is important to consider the nature of the material evidence on which they are based. Archaeologists must consider not only what they discover but also what might be missing. Materials from the past are preserved only in certain places, and of course some materials can be preserved better than others. In addition, people left behind the material remains of their activities, but in doing so they did not intend these remains to be an accurate historical record of their actions. Archaeologists need to consider how the remains found in one place may inform us about a range of activities that occurred elsewhere for which the evidence may be less abundant or missing. This is particularly true for Northeast Africa where environmental shifts and consequent changes in resource abundance often resulted in considerable mobility. This article considers the origins of agriculture in the region covering modern-day Egypt and Sudan, paying particular attention to the nature of the evidence from which inferences about past socioeconomies may be drawn.
Article
Indigenous Polynesian Agriculture in Hawaiʻi
Noa Kekuewa Lincoln and Peter Vitousek
Agriculture in Hawaiʻi was developed in response to the high spatial heterogeneity of climate and landscape of the archipelago, resulting in a broad range of agricultural strategies. Over time, highly intensive irrigated and rainfed systems emerged, supplemented by extensive use of more marginal lands that supported considerable populations. Due to the late colonization of the islands, the pathways of development are fairly well reconstructed in Hawaiʻi. The earliest agricultural developments took advantage of highly fertile areas with abundant freshwater, utilizing relatively simple techniques such as gardening and shifting cultivation. Over time, investments into land-based infrastructure led to the emergence of irrigated pondfield agriculture found elsewhere in Polynesia. This agricultural form was confined by climatic and geomorphological parameters, and typically occurred in wetter, older landscapes that had developed deep river valleys and alluvial plains. Once initiated, these wetland systems saw regular, continuous development and redevelopment. As populations expanded into areas unable to support irrigated agriculture, highly diverse rainfed agricultural systems emerged that were adapted to local environmental and climatic variables. Development of simple infrastructure over vast areas created intensive rainfed agricultural systems that were unique in Polynesia. Intensification of rainfed agriculture was confined to areas of naturally occurring soil fertility that typically occurred in drier and younger landscapes in the southern end of the archipelago. Both irrigated and rainfed agricultural areas applied supplementary agricultural strategies in surrounding areas such as agroforestry, home gardens, and built soils. Differences in yield, labor, surplus, and resilience of agricultural forms helped shape differentiated political economies, hierarchies, and motivations that played a key role in the development of sociopolitical complexity in the islands.
Article
The Industrialization of Commercial Fishing, 1930–2016
Carmel Finley
Nations rapidly industrialized after World War II, sharply increasing the extraction of resources from the natural world. Colonial empires broke up on land after the war, but they were re-created in the oceans. The United States, Japan, and the Soviet Union, as well as the British, Germans, and Spanish, industrialized their fisheries, replacing fleets of small-scale, independent artisanal fishermen with fewer but much larger government-subsidized ships. Nations like South Korea and China, as well as the Eastern Bloc countries of Poland and Bulgaria, also began fishing on an almost unimaginable scale. Countries raced to find new stocks of fish to exploit. As the Cold War deepened, nations sought to negotiate fishery agreements with Third World nations. The conflict over territorial claims led to the development of the Law of the Sea process, starting in 1958, and to the adoption of 200-mile exclusive economic zones (EEZ) in the 1970s.
Fishing expanded with the understanding that fish stocks were robust and could withstand high harvest rates. The adoption of maximum sustained yield (MSY) after 1954 as the goal of postwar fishery negotiations assumed that fish had surplus and that scientists could determine how many fish could safely be caught. As fish stocks faltered under the onslaught of industrial fisheries, scientists re-assessed their assumptions about how many fish could be caught, but MSY, although modified, continues to be at the heart of modern fisheries management.
Article
Lay Expertise, Botanical Science, and Botanic Gardens as “Contact Zones”
Katja Neves
Botanic gardens came into existence in the late 1500s to document, study, and preserve plants originating from all over the world. The scientific field of botany was a direct outcome of these developments. From the 1600s onward, botanic gardens also paid key roles in acclimatizing plants across distinct ecosystems and respective climate zones. This often entailed the appropriation of Indigenous systems of plant expertise that were then used without recognition within the parameters of scientific botanical expertise. As such, botanic gardens operated as contact zones of unequal power dynamics between European and Indigenous knowledge systems. Botanic gardens were intimately embroiled with the global expansion of European colonialism and processes of empire building. They helped facilitate the establishment of cash-crop systems around the world, which effectively amounted to the extractive systems of plant wealth accumulation that characterize the modern European colonial enterprise. In the mid-20th century, botanic gardens began to take on leading roles in the conservation of plant biodiversity while also attending to issues of social equity and sustainable development. Relationships between lay expertise and scientific knowledge acquired renewed significance in this context, as did discussions of the knowledge politics that these interactions entailed. As a consequence of these transformations, former colonial exchanges within the botanical garden world between Indigenous knowledge practices and their appropriation by science came under scrutiny in the final decades of the 20th century. Efforts to decolonize botanic gardens and their knowledge practices emerged in the second decade of the 20th century.
Article
Philosophy of the Anthropocene
Sébastien Dutreuil and Pierre Charbonnier
The Anthropocene was proposed in 2000 as the name of a new geological epoch, succeeding to the Holocene, and marked by the influence of humanity as a biological species on its geological environment. It has resonated differently in three major epistemological domains, where the configurations of the debate has varied. For Earth system science, within which the term emerged, the Anthropocene was a keyword encompassing and stimulating large research programs which stimulated original and new scientific investigations and synthesis. The term had a more specific and evidential meaning for the geological community, which seized it after 2008. Documenting empirically the Anthropocene meant different things for these two scientific communities: tracking down every single impact humanity has on the environment on which humanity depends upon to survive for the former; analyzing how this influence can be documented in Earth’s strata for the latter. These two different epistemological regimes are intertwined with two different normative registers. Earth system science assumed from the very start a normative position: international experts elaborate normative concepts and produce scientific synthesis meant to define the conceptual space, quantitatively delimited, within which political decisions related to global environmental issues ought to be taken. By contrast, geologists were more cautious, and for some, reluctant, to engage in normative issues; but political issues unavoidably emerged when the starting date was discussed. This politicization of the debate was accompanied by human and social sciences, seizing up the debate at the same time as geologists and lay public did, toward the end of the 2000s.
Article
Politics of Water Flows: Water Supply, Sanitation, and Drainage
Tatiana Acevedo Guerrero
Since the late 20th century, water and sanitation management has been deeply influenced by ideas from economics, specifically by the doctrine of neoliberalism. The resulting set of policy trends are usually referred to as market environmentalism, which in broad terms encourages specific types of water reforms aiming to employ markets as allocation mechanisms, establish private-property rights and full-cost pricing, reduce (or remove) subsidies, and promote private sector management to reduce government interference and avoid the politicization of water and sanitation management. Market environmentalism sees water as a resource that should be efficiently managed through economic reforms.
Instead of seeing water as an external resource to be managed, alternative approaches like political ecology see water as a socio-nature. This means that water is studied as a historical-geographical process in which society and nature are inseparable, mutually produced, and transformable. Political ecological analyses understand processes of environmental change as deeply interrelated to socioeconomic dynamics. They also emphasize the impact of environmental dynamics on social relations and take seriously the question of how the physical properties of water may be sources of unpredictability, unruliness, and resistance from human intentions. As an alternative to the hydrologic cycle, political ecology proposes the concept of hydrosocial cycle, which emphasizes that water is deeply political and social. An analysis of the politics of water flows, drawing from political ecology explores the different relationships and histories reflected in access to (and exclusion from) water supply, sanitation, and drainage. It portrays how power inequalities are at the heart of differentiated levels of access to infrastructure.
Article
Quaternary Science
Kenneth Addison
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science. Please check back later for the full article.
The Quaternary period of Earth history, which commenced ca. 2.6 Ma ago, is noted for a series of dramatic shifts in global climate between long, cool (“icehouse”) and short, temperate (“greenhouse”) stages. This also coincides with the extinction of later Australopithecine hominins and evolution of modern Homo sapiens.
Wide recognition of a fourth, Quaternary, order of geologic time emerged in Europe between ca. 1760–1830 and became closely identified with the concept of an ice age. This most recent episode in Earth history is also the best preserved in stratigraphic and landscape records. Indeed, much of its character and processes continue in present time, which prompted early geologists’ recognition of the concept of uniformitarianism—the present is the key to the past.
Quaternary time was quickly divided into a dominant Pleistocene (“most recent”) epoch, characterized by cyclical growth and decay of major continental ice sheets and peripheral permafrost. Disappearance of most of these ice sheets, except in Antarctica and Greenland today, ushered in the Holocene (“wholly modern”) epoch, once thought to terminate the Ice Age but now seen as the current interglacial or temperate stage, commencing ca. 11.7 ka ago. Covering 30–50% of Earth’s land surface at their maxima, ice sheets and permafrost squeezed remaining biomes into a narrower circum-equatorial zone, where research indicated the former occurrence of pluvial and desiccation events. Early efforts to correlate them with mid-high latitude glacials and interglacials revealed the complex and often asynchronous Pleistocene record.
Nineteenth-century recognition of just four glaciations reflected a reliance on geomorphology and short terrestrial stratigraphic records, concentrated in northern hemisphere mid- and high-latitudes, until the 1970s. Correlation of δ16-18 O isotope signals from seafloor sediments (from ocean drilling programs after the 1960s) with polar ice core signals from the 1980s onward has revolutionized our understanding of the Quaternary, facilitating a sophisticated, time-constrained record of events and environmental reconstructions from regional to global scales. Records from oceans and ice sheets, some spanning 105–106 years, are augmented by similar long records from loess, lake sediments, and speleothems (cave sediments). Their collective value is enhanced by innovative analytical and dating tools.
Over 100 Marine Isotope Stages (MIS) are now recognized in the Quaternary, with dramatic climate shifts at decadal and centennial timescales—with the magnitude of 22 MIS in the past 900,000 years considered to reflect significant ice sheet accumulation and decay. Each cycle between temperate and cool conditions (odd- and even-numbered MIS respectively) is time-asymmetric, with progressive cooling over 80,000 to 100,000 years, followed by an abrupt termination then rapid return to temperate conditions for a few thousand years.
The search for causes of Quaternary climate and environmental change embraces all strands of Earth System Science. Strong correlation between orbital forcing and major climate changes (summarized as the Milankovitch mechanism) is displacing earlier emphasis on radiative (direct solar) forcing, but uncertainty remains over how the orbital signal is amplified or modulated. Tectonic forcing (ocean-continent distributions, tectonic uplift, and volcanic outgassing), atmosphere-biogeochemical and greenhouse gas exchange, ocean-land surface albedo and deep- and surface-ocean circulation are all contenders and important agents in their own right.
Modern understanding of Quaternary environments and processes feeds an exponential growth of multidisciplinary research, numerical modeling, and applications. Climate modeling exploits mutual benefits to science and society of “hindcasting,” using paleoclimate data to aid understanding of the past and increasing confidence in modeling forecasts. Pursuit of more detailed and sophisticated understanding of ocean-atmosphere-cryosphere-biosphere interaction proceeds apace.
The Quaternary is also the stage on which human evolution plays. And the essential distinction between natural climate variability and human forcing is now recognized as designating, in present time, a potential new Anthropocene epoch. Quaternary past and present are major keys to its future.
Article
Radiation and the Environment
E. Jerry Jessee
The “Atomic Age” has long been recognized as a signal moment in modern history. In popular memory, images of mushroom clouds from atmospheric nuclear weapons tests recall a period when militaries and highly secretive atomic energy agencies poisoned the global environment and threatened human health. Historical scholarship has painted a more complicated picture of this era by showing how nuclear technologies and radioactive releases transformed the environment sciences and helped set the stage for the scientific construction of the very idea of the “global environment.”
Radioactivity presented scientists with a double-edged sword almost as soon as scientists explained how certain unstable chemical elements emit energic particles and rays in the process of radioactive decay at the turn of the 20th century. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, scientists hailed radioactivity as a transformative discovery that promised to transform atomic theory and biomedicine by using radioisotopes—radioactive versions of stable chemical elements—which were used to tag and trace physiological processes in living systems. At the same time, the perils of overexposure to radioactivity were becoming more apparent as researchers and industrial workers laboring in new radium-laced luminescent paint industries began suffering from radiation-induced illnesses.
The advent of a second “Atomic Age” in wake of the bombing of Japan was characterized by increased access to radiotracer technologies for science and widespread anxiety about the health effects of radioactive fallout in the environment. Powerful new atomic agencies and military institutions created new research opportunities for scientists to study the atmospheric, oceanic, and ecological pathways through which bomb test radiation could make their way to human bodies. Although these studies were driven by concerns about health effects, the presence of energy-emitting radioactivity in the environment also meant that researchers could utilize it as a tracer to visualize basic environmental processes. Throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as a result, ecologists pioneered the use of radiotracers to investigate energy flows and the metabolism of ecosystem units. Oceanographers similarly used bomb blast radiation to trace the physical processes in oceans and the uptake of radioactivity in aquatic food chains. Meteorologists meanwhile tracked bomb debris as high as the stratosphere to predict fallout patterns and trace large-scale atmospheric phenomenon. By the early 1960s, these studies documented how radioactive fallout produced by distant nuclear tests spread across the globe and infiltrated the entire planet’s air, water, biosphere, and human bodies.
In 1963, the major nuclear powers agreed to end above-ground nuclear testing with the Limited Test Ban Treaty, the first international treaty to recognize a global environmental hazard of planetary proportions. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1980s, research on the global effects of nuclear weapons continued to shape global environmental thinking and concern as debates about nuclear winter directed professional and public attention toward humanity’s ability to alter the climate.
Article
Soils, Science, Society, and the Environment
Colin R. Robins
Soils are the complex, dynamic, spatially diverse, living, and environmentally sensitive foundations of terrestrial ecosystems as well as human civilizations. The modern, environmental study of soil is a truly young scientific discipline that emerged only in the late 19th century from foundations in agricultural chemistry, land resource mapping, and geology. Today, little more than a century later, soil science is a rigorously interdisciplinary field with a wide range of exciting applications in agronomy, ecology, environmental policy, geology, public health, and many other environmentally relevant disciplines. Soils form slowly, in response to five inter-related factors: climate, organisms, topography, parent material, and time. Consequently, many soils are chemically, biologically, and/or geologically unique. The profound importance of soil, combined with the threats of erosion, urban development, pollution, climate change, and other factors, are now prompting soil scientists to consider the application of endangered species concepts to rare or threatened soil around the world.
Article
Toward a Holistic Environmental Aesthetic
Nathalie Blanc
Environmental aesthetics encompasses aesthetic relationships to and in the environment, including an urban aesthetic and an aesthetic of nature—which emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries both from the sciences and from the distinction from the scientific in the aesthetic observations of nature. Environmental aesthetics notably comprises philosophical, artistic, and geographical work. Increasingly since the 1990s, the social and environmental crisis, and particularly climate change, is and has been causing shifts within this field of research and reflection. As of the 2020s, the admiration humans can bear toward nature is not without fear of its disappearance caused by their own activities. Ethics is more and more linked to aesthetics as humans are morally affected by this catastrophic environmental degradation. Thus, a certain anxiety quickly reveals itself in the face of planetary transformations. What can the geographer do? Since the 1990s, the discipline has been inviting thought about the environment from the aesthetic experience, challenging or interrogating the perception, understanding, and relationship to the natural surroundings. The geographer has been attempting to apprehend through creative research—such as “psychogeographical” situational walks (dérive, situation of inquiry, influence map), and, more generally, artistic works firmly rooted in the whole landscape question—the ways of redefining local situations and places. The need is to face three major challenges. First, there is the necessity to explore how planetary threats transform the perceptions of the environment. Anxieties reflect the difficulties of politics. Second, an aesthetic of the ordinary should be investigated as an ordinary environmentalism, meaning that which is related to the daily creation of environments. Third, the importance of research creation and ecoplastic forms of art needs to be highlighted (art and environment-making processes).
Article
Transcontinental Meteorology Infrastructures From Ancient Mesopotamia to the Early Modern Age
Robert-Jan Wille
The current global infrastructure of meteorology partly builds on older transcontinental structures of weather science and meteorological philosophy. For several millennia, the large belt stretching from East Asia, through mountains, silk roads, and the Indian Ocean, to the seas and river deltas where Western Eurasia and North Africa border on each other, has formed a key region. From Ancient Mesopotamia to the 16th century, a continuous and multi-site infrastructure emerged that was organized around meteorological texts, including not only scrolls, papyri, and manuscripts, but also ideas and concepts, as well as meteorological writers and readers traveling between institutions and storehouses.
Not considering the long history of orally transmitted pre-Mesopotamian weather knowledge, the first large-scale textual infrastructures were inseparable from astronomical tabulation and dynastical prognostication. In later millennia, in the city states and empires of Greece, Rome, China, and India, “meteorology” became a distinct subject, with its own language and concepts, even though it remained allied to agriculture and statecraft as knowledge practices. At the beginning of the Common Era, the first distinct meteorological instruments appeared, first in East Asia and later in the Near East and Greece.
In the 15th and 16th centuries, new regions were added to this knowledge infrastructure, with or without force, making it almost global: the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, their Eurasian and African shores, and the Americas. This changed the power dynamics, with European empires controlling the transatlantic infrastructures of knowledge and labor. Ideas that were transcontinental in origin now became part of a Western European program to conquer the globe.
Article
Where Is Equity in Integrated Approaches for Water Resources Management?
Jeremy Allouche
The challenges of integrated approaches and equity in water resources management have been well researched. However, a clear division exists between scholars working on equity and those working on integration, and there is remarkably little systematic analysis available that addresses their interlinkages. The divide between these two fields of inquiry has increased over time, and equity is assumed rather than explicitly considered in integrated approaches for water resources management. Historically, global debates on water resources management have focused on questions of distributional equity in canal irrigation systems and access to water. This limited focus on distributional equity was side-lined by neoliberal approaches and subsequent integrated approaches around water resources management tend to emphasize the synergistic aspects and ignore the political trade-offs between equity and efficiency. The interlinkages among equity, sustainability, and integration need deeper and broader interdisciplinary analysis and understanding, as well as new concepts, approaches, and agendas that are better suited to the intertwined complexity of resource degradation.
12
