Bridging the GAPS between ecology and human security - Environmental and Human Security in the Arctic - page 135

capacity for factoring in notions of human choice, values and politics into the
equation (Cohen 1995; Lutz et al . 2001; Stokstad 2005; Harte 2007; Ehrlich
and Ehrlich 2009).
There has clearly been mobilization of the main ecological concepts
(Box 8.1) outside of the immediate field by non-ecologists (e.g. Barlow and
Clarke 2002). The seminal document that has driven the notion of ecological
limits in the policy arena is Our Common Future , the Report of the Brundtland
Commission of the World Commission on Environment and Development
(WCED 1987). It introduced the concepts of sustainability and sustain-
able development, which form the cornerstones of many United Nations
programmes, as outlined in various documents to be found at the United
Nations Environment Programme Sustainability webpage (UNEP 2013). The
Ecological Footprint Analysis (Wackernagel and Rees 1996) further mobi-
lized ecology theory and allowed for the notion of sustainability to be defined
in concrete terms: in short, it estimates the land and water area required to
produce the resources consumed, and to absorb the wastes produced, by a
human population using available technology. The footprint approach has
been implemented by WWF International since 2000 in its Living Planet
Reports (WWF International 2000).
Nevertheless, given that rates of resource consumption continue to out-
strip supply rates, it is worth briefly examining three possibilities that may
shed light on the ongoing communication gap about basic ecological theory
between the ecological research community and other communities:
Possibility 1: Ecologists are generally confined to science ghettos of their
own making, speaking mainly to each other, and, consequently, their les-
sons are not being broadly communicated rapidly enough.
Possibility 2: No matter how clearly the key, uncomfortable messages of
ecology are communicated (Krebs 1988; Box 8.1) , the majority of people
are predisposed to ignore them.
Possibility 3: Even if the messages of ecology are communicated and under-
stood, for whatever reason most members of the global human population,
like the members of the civilizations described in Diamond (2005), are
unable to change either their individual behaviours or their society's col-
lective behaviour, and are simply doomed to reach environmental limits
that will result in 'crashing' populations. The recent Franny Armstrong
(2010) film The Age of Stupid explored this idea and posed the question:
'If we could see so many signs of climate change, for so long, why didn't
we act?'
Are ecologists mainly talking to themselves?
The notion that most academic ecologists are guilty of preaching to the con-
verted is a charge that has been levelled at environmentalists (Shellenberger