[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Human Behavior in Systems of Different Sizes
The Ecosystems perspective as a conceptual framework
Human beings and the natural environment are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about Ecosystems perspective regards human behavior as a central agent. A case could be made that the whole planet is a human behavior, in that all earth ecosystems have been influenced by humans.
Ecosystems perspective views ecosystems as complex adaptive systems, which possess features like pulsing or chaotic behavior, resilience, nonlinearity, determinism plus indeterminism, surprise, self-organization, development, irreversibility, evolution, history, hierarchy, scale, dissipative structures, directionality, and others.
Furthermore, of all the sub disciplines of ecology, ecosystems research is the approach that most explicitly investigates the flows and storages of natural resources, such as forest timber, fresh water, oil, coal, food crops, topsoil, minerals, animal populations, fish stocks, plant and animal diversity, and human population size, all in relationship to each other. Around the world today, the finite limits of these natural renewable and nonrenewable resources are affecting human-ecosystem relationships and human-human relationships in manifold ways. The ecosystem approach offers research tools to represent and understand these dynamic and complex interrelationships that deeply affect us all.
Finally, ecosystems ecology persists because it offers a conceptual framework that can easily move through and across spatial and temporal scales. Ecosystems ecology does not privilege bottom-up over top-down, and causal-chains over perhaps multiple-scaled and nonlinear causal systems....................
