Humans as a Component of the Lake Titicaca Ecosystem: A Model System for the Study of Environmental Deterioration

Abstract

A deep understanding of the processes involved in anthropogenic environmental deterioration will require more than just the study of contemporary human environmental effects, as important as such studies are. There is much to be learned from comparative human ecology. Over the past few millennia, human societies have been typified by “cycles” of growth and decay (Turner and Meyer, Chapter 4, this volume). Ecosystems have been subjected to repeated episodes of high and low anthropogenic stress, giving rise to the replication that is required to extract dependable knowledge from the noisy world. The role of environmental deterioration in the cycles of civilized societies is also of considerable interest in it own right. There are a series of exciting problems in the area of environmental deterioration/societal collapse that would especially repay relatively large-scale interdisciplinary investigations by ecologists and social scientists. The purpose of this paper is to outline the problems that such a project might address, and how they might be tackled. My argument is illustrated by a specific system, Lake Titicaca, that might have suffered from subtle effects of anthropogenic environmental deterioration and also recorded effects on adjacent systems in its sediments. It provides an example of the kind of natural laboratory where the role of environmental deterioration by and on human societies can be explored in a broad and comparative perspective.