Carole L. Crumley

The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship

Over the past century, the total material wealth of humanity has been enhanced. However, in the twenty-first century, we face scarcity in critical resources, the degradation of ecosystem services, and the erosion of the planet’s capability to absorb our wastes. Equity issues remain stubbornly difficult to solve. This situation is novel in its speed, its global scale and its threat to the resilience of the Earth System. The advent of the Anthropence, the time interval in which human activities now rival global geophysical processes, suggests that we need to fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit. Many approaches could be adopted, ranging from geo-engineering solutions that purposefully manipulate parts of the Earth System to becoming active stewards of our own life support system. The Anthropocene is a reminder that the Holocene, during which complex human societies have developed, has been a stable, accommodating environment and is the only state of the Earth System that we know for sure can support contemporary society. The need to achieve effective planetary stewardship is urgent. As we go further into the Anthropocene, we risk driving the Earth System onto a trajectory toward more hostile states from which we cannot easily return.

Sustainability or Collapse: What Can We Learn from Integrating the History of Humans and the Rest of Nature?

Abstract Understanding the history of how humans have interacted with the rest of nature can help clarify the options for managing our increasingly interconnected global system. Simple, deterministic relationships between environmental stress and social change are inadequate. Extreme drought, for instance, triggered both social collapse and ingenious management of water through irrigation. Human responses to change, in turn, feed into climate and ecological systems, producing a complex web of multidirectional connections in time and space. Integrated records of the co-evolving human-environment system over millennia are needed to provide a basis for a deeper understanding of the present and for forecasting the future. This requires the major task of assembling and integrating regional and global historical, archaeological, and paleoenvironmental records. Humans cannot predict the future. But, if we can adequately understand the past, we can use that understanding to influence our decisions and to create a better, more sustainable and desirable future.

The Development of Social Stratification in Bronze Age Europe [and Comments and Reply]

The emergence of a hereditary elite class in Bronze Age Europe is now widely interpreted in terms of the redistributive activities of a managerial ruling class. This fuctionalist account of elite origins goes against a uniformitarian understanding of what ruling classes do in complex societies. It also is poorly suited to the concrete evidence for Bronze Age cultures in Europe. The rise of hereditary, superordinate social strata in prehistoric Europe is better understood as a consequence of the development of capital-intensive subsistence techniques. Plow agriculture, Mediterranean polyculture, irrigation, and offshore fishing limited the possibility of group fission and thereby gave leaders the opportunity to exploit basic producers over the long term. The observations that capital-intensification preceded elite emergence and that areas with greater intensification exhibited greater social inequalities confirm this nonfuctionalist account of the development of stratification in later prehistoric Europe.

Planetary Stewardship in an Urbanizing World: Beyond City Limits

Cities are rapidly increasing in importance as a major factor shaping the Earth system, and therefore, must take corresponding responsibility. With currently over half the world’s population, cities are supported by resources originating from primarily rural regions often located around the world far distant from the urban loci of use. The sustainability of a city can no longer be considered in isolation from the sustainability of human and natural resources it uses from proximal or distant regions, or the combined resource use and impacts of cities globally. The world’s multiple and complex environmental and social challenges require interconnected solutions and coordinated governance approaches to planetary stewardship. We suggest that a key component of planetary stewardship is a global system of cities that develop sustainable processes and policies in concert with its non-urban areas. The potential for cities to cooperate as a system and with rural connectivity could increase their capacity to effect change and foster stewardship at the planetary scale and also increase their resource security.

Exploring ecosystem-change and society through a landscape lens: recent progress in European landscape research

Landscapes are closely linked to human well-being, but they are undergoing rapid and fundamental change. Understanding the societal transformation underlying these landscape changes, as well as the ecological and societal outcomes of landscape transformations across scales are prime areas for landscape research. We review and synthesize findings from six important areas of landscape research in Europe and discuss how these findings may advance the study of ecosystem change and society and its thematic key priorities. These six areas are: (1) linkages between people and the environment in landscapes, (2) landscape structure and land-use intensity, (3) long-term landscape history, (4) driving forces, processes, and actors of landscape change, (5) landscape values and meanings, and (6) landscape stewardship. We propose that these knowledge areas can contribute to the study of ecosystem change and society, considering nested multiscale dynamics of social-ecological systems; the stewardship of these systems and their ecosystem services; and the relationships between ecosystem services, human well-being, wealth, and poverty. Our synthesis highlights that knowledge about past and current landscape patterns, processes, and dynamics provides guidance for developing visions to support the sustainable stewardship of social-ecological systems under future conditions.

Biocultural Refugia: Combating the Erosion of Diversity in Landscapes of Food Production

There is urgent need to both reduce the rate of biodiversity loss caused by industrialized agriculture and feed more people. The aim of this paper is to highlight the role of places that harbor traditional ecological knowledge, artifacts, and methods when preserving biodiversity and ecosystem services in landscapes of food production. We use three examples in Europe of biocultural refugia, defined as the physical places that not only shelter farm biodiversity, but also carry knowledge and experiences about practical management of how to produce food while stewarding biodiversity and ecosystem services. Memory carriers include genotypes, landscape features, oral, and artistic traditions and self-organized systems of rules, and as such reflect a diverse portfolio of practices on how to deal with unpredictable change. We find that the rich biodiversity of many regionally distinct cultural landscapes has been maintained through different smallholder practices developed in relation to local environmental fluctuations and carried within biocultural refugia for as long as millennia. Places that transmit traditional ecological knowledge and practices hold important lessons for policy makers since they may provide genetic and cultural reservoirs — refugia — for the wide array of species that have co-evolved with humans in Europe for more than 6000 thousand yrs. Biodiversity restoration projects in domesticated landscapes can employ the biophysical elements and cultural practices embedded in biocultural refugia to create locally adapted small-scale mosaics of habitats that allow species to flourish and adapt to change. We conclude that such insights must be included in discussions of land-sparing vs. land-sharing when producing more food while combating loss of biodiversity. We found the latter strategy rational in domesticated landscapes with a long history of agriculture.

Anthropological contributions to historical ecology: 50 questions, infinite prospects

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural.

Analyzing Historic Ecotonal Shifts

Complex chains of mutual causation in human-environment relations may be analyzed by tracing past human interaction with the environment at the global, regional, and local scales. Historical analogues can be effectively employed to model the range of potential climate anywhere in the world. Their advantages include the use of actual regional airmass, hydrology, pedology, topography, and species distributional data, in addition to archaeology, documents, and ethnography. Of mediating importance are regions and landscapes, which manifest past and present human-environment relations and focus practical contemporary questions. The shifting position of ecotones is a convenient temporal and spatial marker of inclusive ecosystemic change. Ongoing research in Burgundy (France) is offered as an example.

Communication, Holism,and the Evolution of Sociopolitical Complexity

In the eighteenth century, Europeans embraced church doctrine that ranked all creatures: the Great Chain of Being offered a hierarchy of divine order that both upheld class distinctions at home and served as a pious rationale for colonialism. By the end of the nineteenth century the new sciences of society had replaced religious doctrine, but scientific thought, drawing on the idea of progress, upheld similar conclusions: society had evolved “naturally” toward increasing inequality and complexity.

A view from the past to the future: Concluding remarks on the ‘The Anthropocene in the Longue Durée’

The Special Issue provides a deep-time interdisciplinary perspective on the Anthropocene and signals the importance of the Anthropocene concept in past, present, and future human–environmental relationships. This concluding article recognizes that various approaches – scientific, postmodern, catastrophist, and ecomarxist – can contribute to understanding the Anthropocene as a process and that contributions have been made by several disciplines, including Anthropology, Archaeology, Geography, History, and Politics. The critical importance of weaving together social science perspectives with those of the natural sciences is emphasized.