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In-Depth Information
Climate Research Programme) (ESSP, 2001). It has focused, among other things,
on supporting research into the impacts of climate change and adaptations to them
(Leary et al., 2007). The Amsterdam declaration itself states explicitly that 'The
Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical,
chemical, biological and human components' (Moore et al., 2001), which resonates
strongly the wording of the Gaia hypothesis, although Lovelock (2006, p. 25) has
argued that this is just paying 'lip service' to Gaia. The Amsterdam wording also
runs counter to the
non-necessity
of stable self-regulation as discussed above. Earlier
attempts were also made to integrate aspects of ESS and social change by the IGBP
(Malone, 1995).
Other changes brought by ESS have been in the fi eld of academic publications.
Examples of textbooks have already been given, but there have been a range of new
journals. The European Geophysical Society (now Union) established
Hydrology
and Earth Systems Sciences
in 1997 and then somewhat schizophrenically
Natural
Hazards and Earth System Sciences
in 2001. It is often diffi cult to see how the
contents of either justify the 'and ESS' component of their titles. In 2005, the
Pro-
ceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences (Earth and Planetary Sciences)
was
renamed the
Journal of Earth System Science
and there is also an electronic
Journal
of Earth System Science Education
(JESSE: http://jesse.usra.edu/) as well as a pro-
jected journal
Earth System Science Data and Methods
.
The Ends of Earth-System Science?
When asked to write this chapter, my response to the editors was that I would only
do so if I did not have to profess a belief in ESS. Happily, they agreed. While this
perspective may apparently make it diffi cult to write
about
ESS, it refl ected a per-
spective that is still commonly found among colleagues: that most people seem
rather unsure about what ESS actually
is
. To some extent, this problem arises
because ESS is something of a chimera; every time you ask for a defi nition, you
seem to get a different answer. To some, ESS is (actually, unhelpfully), the study of
everything, while to others it is (equally unhelpfully) the study of nothing (scientifi c,
at least). Unfortunately, the success of the core idea in attracting funding has prob-
ably compounded this issue by encouraging those seeking a greater share of those
funds to redefi ne ESS in ways more closely aligned to what they are doing. Calls
for 'paradigm change' from some quarters of the ESS literature should be seen with
a dose of scepticism, even cynicism. There is nothing inherently paradigmatic about
ESS in the Kuhnian sense at least. Attempts to standardise undergraduate training
in ESS have been criticised as placing constraints on the development of the subject.
Such standardisation is not unusual in disciplines such as geology or engineering
(or indeed medicine), but is seen as going against the 'free spirit' of geography as a
discipline. Church (2005) pointed out that this freewheeling approach has tended
to produce geographers who are insuffi ciently trained to undertake ESS research.
However, it is also diffi cult to see how one could standardise such a (trans-)disci-
pline, given the lack of general agreement on its defi nition.
One of the central problems in developing such an agreement is that ESS critics
often fail to specify which version of ESS they are criticising. There are at least six:
what I have termed the ESS blueprint of Bretherton (1985) and the ESS Committee
(1986); the post-oil reformulation of the discipline of geology; a general (but
implicitly restrictive) interdisciplinary science in the mould of Lawton (2001); a
