The sustainability transition - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 85

this is a matter of making deliberate choices regarding appropriate trade-offs
between tractability and complexity. In part, however, it has stimulated a
growing interest in new analytic procedures, such as computerized simula-
tions, in contrast to more traditional exercises in mathematical modelling.
Social systems
The preceding observations about the analysis of ecosystems apply almost
equally well to studies of social systems. Growing interdependencies mani-
fested in such processes as globalization and global social change give rise to
an unavoidable need for holistic perspectives. Even small-scale systems are
impacted routinely by global processes (e.g. worldwide markets for agricultural
products), a fact that makes it impossible to explain or predict developments
at the local level without paying careful attention to driving forces launched
in distant realms. Like ecosystems, social systems seldom revert to the status
quo ante following major disturbances or perturbations (e.g. wars, economic
cycles, electoral changes). What is particularly notable in this context is the
juxtaposition of periods of stasis with abrupt and fundamental changes. The
resultant processes of punctuated equilibrium regularly lead to regime shifts
that take most observers by surprise (Gunderson and Holling 2002).
It will come as no surprise, under the circumstances, that many familiar
models in the social sciences are of limited value to observers endeavouring to
understand patterns of change through time. This is not to say that there is no
place, for example, for equilibrium models of competitive markets and spatial
models of voting. But there is a clear need to transcend these familiar models
in efforts to grasp the dynamics of social systems in holistic terms. Among
the cutting-edge issues now arising in this context are matters of interplay or
the interaction of distinct social systems with one another and matters of scale
or the effort to generalize propositions about social dynamics across levels of
social organization (Young 2002a).
Coupled socio-ecological systems
Increasingly, ecosystems and social systems interact with one another. In
many realms, these interactions have produced human-dominated ecosystems
(Vitousek et al . 1997), moving us in the process into an era that many sci-
entists have begun to call the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000).
The evidence for these observations is easy to find (Schellnhuber and Held
2002). Humans have appropriated 50 per cent of available freshwater and
converted 30-50 per cent of the Earth's land surface for their own use. We
have increased emissions of sulphur dioxide 200 per cent over background
rates and raised concentrations of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere
well beyond anything that has occurred during the last 400,000 years. We
have caused species to go extinct at 1,000 to 10,000 times the normal rates.