Introduction: Linking Ecology and Ethics for an Interregional and Intercultural Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 3

conservation biologists, and other professionals, decision makers, and citizens
interested in the combination of environmental, economic, and social sustainability.
This topic contributes to advancing the Stewardship Initiative toward a planetary
scale. What is happening today in the Amazon depends partly on environmental
policies in North America, Asia, and other continents. What happens to the climate
in North America, Asia, and other continents depends in part on the conservation of
forests in the Amazon. Therefore, today, inter-hemispheric, intercultural, and
transdisciplinary collaborations for Earth Stewardship are an imperative. The call
for socio-environmental stewardship at a planetary scale faces, however, two core
limitations that need to be addressed:
(i) geographical gaps in the coverage of long-term ecological and socio-ecological
research (LTER and LTSER) across the planet;
(ii) philosophical gaps in the coverage of epistemological, political and ethical
dimensions in LTSER (Rozzi et al. 2012 ) .
Geographical gaps exist because more than 90 % of LTER or LTSER sites are
located in the Northern Hemisphere. As Li et al. (Chap. 13 ) discuss in this volume,
the International Long-Term Ecological Research network (ILTER) offers an ideal
research, information, and infrastructural platform for the Earth Stewardship initia-
tive; however, it presents a marked Northern Hemisphere bias, with more than 90 %
of the ILTER publications generated by researchers from the Northern Hemisphere.
Furthermore, within this hemisphere 89 % of ILTER publications are generated by
researchers associated with LTER networks in temperate regions, and only 1 % are
in equatorial regions. Consequently, the distribution of ILTER sites is more associ-
ated with political and economic resources than with the geographic distribution of
biodiversity.
Regarding philosophical gaps, until now the social component considered in
socio-ecological studies worldwide has been primarily economic (Rozzi et al.
2012 ). 2 Furthermore, as documented by Li et al. (Chap. 13 ), social research is still
incipient in long-term socio-ecological research programs. For example, <0.5 % of
ILTER publications are included in social sciences databases. Noticeably, however,
2 ESA's Earth Stewardship call gives special “consideration to both ecological and socioeconomic”
(Chapin et al. 2011a ). Similarly, the European LTSER platform was designed “as a research infra-
structure to support integrated socioeconomic and ecological research and monitoring of the long-
term development of society-nature interaction within the context of global environmental change”
(Haberl et al. 2009 , p. 1798). These quotes show that socio-ecological is subsumed by “socio-
economic” in foundational documents of Earth Stewardship and LTSER (see also Parr et al. 2002 ;
Redman et al. 2004 ; Lui et al. 2007 ; Ohl et al. 2007 ). It is also striking that in socio-ecological
research, the fi elds of philosophy, including ethics, are most often absent. For example, in a recent
comprehensive review of the state of the art in long-term socio-ecological research in the US and
Europe by Singh et al. ( 2013 ), philosophy is not included, and the word ethics is not used. The
integration of socioeconomic research into the LTSER framework during the last decades repre-
sents a signifi cant step forward for the inclusion of the human component in LTER (See Redman
and Miller in this volume [Chap. 17 ] ). Our topic complements these approaches by incorporating
philosophy and ethics as disciplines into the theory and practice of LTSER and Earth Stewardship.