The Technosphere and Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 264

extraordinarily complex and that our current conceptual frameworks for perceiving,
analyzing, and managing the world around us have proven inadequate to address many
of the most important and urgent problems we face. Further, our ethical frameworks
are ill equipped to deal with choices that may require geographical, interspecies and
intergenerational trade-offs. The emerging call for earth stewardship in this volume
and elsewhere (Chapin et al. 2011 ; Rozzi et al. 2012 ) recognizes the need for new
ethical frameworks that account for the socio-ecological complexity and interde-
pendencies. While this development is promising, in this chapter we argue that there
are fundamental discontinuities in the way we come to understand and manage
social, ecological and technological issues. More specifi cally, we contend that those
concerned with sustainability and earth stewardship must more robustly account for
the centrality of technology in human-environment interactions, adjusting our con-
ceptual frameworks to explore socio-eco-technological systems (SETS).

17.1 Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Conceptual

Frameworks

Conceptual frameworks are necessary tools for dealing with the world around us
(i.e., Earth Stewardship). They provide us with a series of assumptions about how
the world works, they encode operating principles and drivers, and they suggest a
language of communication and a set of priorities for investigation. Yet one must
keep in mind that conceptual frameworks are simplifi cations that are structured by
how we, as individuals, think the world operates, what we think is important to
know about the world, and what constitutes knowledge. Much of this comes to us
from our academic disciplinary training and for the most part disciplinary frame-
works are effective at solving problems as they defi ne them. For at least 50 years it
has been recognized that, although effective by some defi nitions, discipline-based
conceptual frameworks have limits and might only resolve a part of the problem and
refl ect only a portion of reality. This has stimulated scientists from different disci-
plines to work together in increasingly popular interdisciplinary teams.
Many scientists have viewed the conjunction of social sciences and ecological
approaches to be the most effective in understanding and managing the world
around us. The two authors of this chapter and most of the authors in this volume
have spent much of their careers utilizing frameworks that attempt to merge these
two perspectives. In the literature, variants of this combination are often referred to
as social ecological systems (SES) as in Holling and Gunderson ( 2002 ) or coupled
human and natural systems (CHANS) as in Lui et al. ( 2007 ). This combination of
the many activities of humans with the resources and dynamics of the biophysical
environment, has become a compelling framework for most ecological scientists
who are also concerned with the impact of humans, as well as for many individuals
in social science and other disciplines, and forms the basis of countless academic
articles, environmental impact statements, and policy documents. The thrust of this