Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 7
Scale
Nathan F. Sayre
Introduction: The Many Meanings of Scale
In his Robert H. MacArthur Award lecture in 1989, Princeton ecologist Simon
Levin declared: 'The problem of relating phenomena across scales is the central
problem in biology and in all of science' (Levin, 1992, p. 1961). Levin is not alone:
inside and outside the academy, there is an effective consensus that scale is of
the utmost importance to matters of humans and the environment. Consider
these assertions: 'The history of human cultural evolution has been the story of
cross-scale subsidies', from a paper on the resilience of social-ecological systems
(Carpenter et al., 2001, p. 767); and 'Scale is a nonreductionist unifying concept
in ecology', by two other prominent theorists (Peterson and Parker, 1998, p. 521).
Scale is discussed with comparable gravity and still greater rhetorical fl ourish in
more popular venues. Science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, for example, opens her
topic on climate change,
Field Notes from a Catastrophe
, with the claim that: 'For
better or (mostly) for worse, global warming is all about scale' (Kolbert, 2006, p.
3). Pulitzer prize-winning columnist and neoliberal enthusiast Thomas Friedman
puts it this way: 'Hey, the more energy-saving bulbs Wal-Mart sells, the more
innovation it triggers, the more prices go down. That's how you get scale. And
scale is everything if you want to change the world' (
New York Times
, 22 December
2006, p. A31). For many people, scale is the fundamental conceptual challenge in
the human and natural sciences, critical to progress in understanding and amelio-
rating human-environment interactions.
It remains remarkably unclear exactly what scale means and how to use it,
however, and within geography the confusion is particularly acute. Biophysical
geographers understand and employ scale much as ecologists do (where it is also
much debated), but cartographers, Geographic Information Scientists, and espe-
cially human geographers have various other ideas of scale and its theoretical and
methodological implications. The editors of a recent volume on the subject
conclude
that 'conceptions of geographic scale range across a spectrum of almost intimidating
diversity' (Sheppard and McMaster, 2004, p. 256). Marston et al. (2005, p. 416),
