Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
interdisciplinary, and some of the major fi gures in the fi eld, such as R. Kates, R.
Kasperson and B. L. Turner, are geographers. Although young, sustainability
science has been recognised by some of the top scientifi c journals, including
Science
and
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
, which in 2007 started a
'sustainability science' section. This new prominence - which clearly not all fi elds
have been able to achieve - means that both the interdisciplinary, human-
environment approach and questions to which it addresses itself are being recog-
nised as legitimate and important. This sort of prominence also gives the fi eld the
imprimatur of science (as its name, too, claims), such that the fi eld is seen as the
best way to produce rigorous and useful knowledge regarding coupled human-
environment systems.
While rising visibility and legitimacy for this kind of integrative approach is to
be applauded, one concern is that integration is fairly superfi cial; the fi eld looks at
both social and environmental issues, but does so in ways that do not carefully link
them. One example is a pair of synthetic articles by Kates and Parris. The fi rst lists
and briefl y describes 26 trends related to sustainability (e.g., 'slowing and differen-
tial population growth' and 'modifi cation of grasslands and pasturelands') (Kates
and Parris, 2003). These are based on trends identifi ed in the NRC report on sus-
tainability, for which Kates was co-chair of the board (National Research Council
1999). The second focuses on the status of four goals (reducing hunger, promoting
literacy, stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations, and maintaining freshwater
availability) (Parris and Kates, 2003). The trends and goals they address do include
those that are social and those that are environmental, yet there is no effort to link
them; little in the discussion of each target or goal is actually integrative. Most
telling, they themselves say 'two of the goals . . . are selected from the consensus on
meeting human needs, and the other two...are selected from the consensus on
preserving life-support systems' (Parris and Kates, 2003, p. 8068). 'Human needs'
and 'life-support systems' may both be important, but they are not treated as inter-
connected, either materially or analytically.
A troubling outcome of superfi cial integration is that researchers rarely attend to
complexity of the socio-environmental processes they claim to be examining. Much
of the research in sustainability science fails, in particular, to properly identify key
social factors, such that not only the analyses but the problems themselves are
treated as fairly technical. Parris and Kates fail to address key structural issues that
lead to chronic hunger; as a result they advocate kinds of international aid policies
that others suggest contribute to the problem in the fi rst place (cf. Lappe et al.,
1998). In a project quantifying water needs associated with adequately feeding
everyone in the world, the researchers treat the challenge as the need to grow more
food, and hence use more water (Rockstrom et al., 2007). They never address how
water needs might change if developing countries stopped producing luxury foods
(such as coffee) for elite consumers (cf. Lappe et al., 1998). This is a perfect example
of the need to ask what it is we are trying to sustain! In a project on socio-
environmental tradeoffs related to agroforestry in Indonesia, the researchers claim
that in addition to examining local market forces they also address 'rarely con-
sidered cultural factors' (Steffan-Dewenter et al., 2007, p. 4973). Instead they treat
in-migration to the study region as an apolitical process of cultural exchange (i.e.
learning how to be market-oriented from these outsiders). This fails to analyse
changes due to migration as complex political ecologies in which issues of ethnicity,
access to resources, control of markets, access to government offi cials, and the like
