Commentary: Eco-System Modelling and the Social Sciences

Abstract

Ever since man’s appearance on earth and especially since the emergence of agriculture, much of nature must be seen as a human creation. While physical forces have always constrained activities, so too have people modified landscape and climate through culturally defined technologies, social institutions, and individual strategies. To examine the human dimensions of global environmental change or the social dimensions of resource use is thus to ask both how political, economic and cultural factors mediate natural processes and how forces of nature shape certain institutional arrangements. In this commentary we contribute some complementary ideas to those laid out by Colin Prentice.