Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Fig. 3.8 Scheme of an object-oriented programme during execution state. The objects are using
pointers to access each other (see Chap. 12)
complexity. This became a very influential idea for interdisciplinary exchange
(Jantsch 1980; Prigogine and Stengers 1984). In parallel to ecology, the self-
organization discourse influenced biology as a whole, as well as the social sciences,
psychology, and other fields of science and philosophy. The Santa Fe Institute (New
Mexico, USA) developed the research agenda of Artificial life. Here, formal
descriptions of how living entities self-organize were used to study the potential
to simulate properties of living systems using physical substrates (Langton 1994).
Frequently, object structures were used, but also other approaches like Cellular
Automata (see Chap. 8), which had received relevant applications in physics, and
thermodynamics. Moreover, fractals were used (Mandelbrot 1982) and new devel-
opments in the theory of dynamic systems (Peitgen 1992), all of which had become
more widely recognized during the 1980s and 1990s.
3.5 Anything Goes: The Diversity of a Post-Modern Ecology
Where are we now? Ecological modelling is a well established discipline. It is
recognized that the understanding of complex phenomena requires modelling and
that formal approaches can to a considerable extent capture the quantitative and
qualitative understanding we have about biological systems and their environmen-
tal interactions. From model representations, we also know that marginal shifts can
