Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
It remains to be seen whether and how collaboration and integration can be
achieved, both practically and theoretically. There are growing numbers of
interdisciplinary research projects and funding opportunities aimed at the social-
ecological interface, such as the National Science Foundation's Coupled Natural
and Human Systems programme, in which scale fi gures prominently. Vogt et al.
(2002, p. 168) point out a more theoretical challenge:
To assist in the integration of social and natural sciences for natural resource manage-
ment, researchers will need to explicitly recognize and address issues of scale differently
from their traditional, disciplinary approaches. Instead of emphasizing the need for
scale-dependent information that may be associated with their respective disciplines,
it may be more important to determine what is the most appropriate scale(s) to
address various natural resource issues. Integrating the social and natural sciences
will require improving our understanding of how space is currently perceived by each
discipline.
Beyond this, of course, lie still deeper philosophical questions. Bruce Rhoads (2006,
p. 14) has argued convincingly that geomorphology should embrace a process-
philosophical metaphysics, in which 'the nature of reality, including geomorphologi-
cal phenomena, is fundamentally processual'. This is also where Erik Swyngedouw
(1997, p. 140) starts: 'I insist that social life is process-based, that is, in a state of
perpetual change, transformation, and reconfi guration'. Obviously, the geomorpho-
logical and the social processes in question are likely to unfold on temporal scales
that differ by several orders of magnitude - such is the challenge and the potential
of the problem of scale. It will also require, as Church (1996, p. 166f.) has argued,
a general recognition that 'the scales of enquiry determine the most appropriate
mode of explanation', and that some process-scale combinations may not yield to
mechanistic, quantitative, or predictive methods.
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