An excerpt from the PLoS Biology editor-in-chief's overview: One of the reasons we publish more accessible magazine-like articles in the front section of *PLoS Biology* <http://www.plosbiology.org/home.action> is to raise awareness about issues that are important both to practicing scientists and to the wider public. As an open access journal, we can reach communities and organisations that don’t have access to the pay-walled literature, and they in turn can redistribute and reuse these articles without permission from us or the authors. The articles we published yesterday in our front section provide a case in point. In Rio de Janeiro last week, world leaders met for the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development <http://www.uncsd2012.org/> to ”shape how we can reduce poverty, advance social equity and ensure environmental protection”. We’re featuring three articles and an accompanying podcast<http://blogs.plos.org/plospodcasts/>from leading ecologists and conservation scientists that raise absolutely fundamental concerns about the physical limits on resource use that should be considered at the conference—but almost certainly won’t be, because sustainability has focused primarily on the social and economic sciences and developed largely independently of the key ecological principles that govern life.
Burger et al argue that resources on earth are finite and ultimately we are constrained by the same hard biophyisical laws that regulate every other species and population on the planet. Famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometers. (Photo: NASA) The inspiration for this article collection came from Georgina Mace<http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/g.mace>, one of our Editorial Board members<http://www.plosbiology.org/static/edboard.action>and Professor of Conservation Science and Director of the NERC Centre for Population Biology <http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/cpb>. It started with an essay <http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001345>submitted by Robbie Burger <https://sites.google.com/site/josephrobertburger/>, Jim Brown, <http://biology.unm.edu/jhbrown/index.shtml>Craig Allen<http://www.fort.usgs.gov/staff/staffprofile.asp?StaffID=109>and others from Jim Brown’s lab <http://biology.unm.edu/jhbrown/labmembers.shtml>, in which they argue that the field of sustainability science does not sufficiently take account of human ecology and in particular the larger view offered by human macroecology, which aims to understand what governs and limits human distribution. The very strong – and seemingly obvious – point they make is that ultimately we are constrained by the same hard biophyisical laws that regulate every other species and population on the planet — and we have already surpassed the Earth’s capacity to sustain even current levels of human population and socioeconomic activity, let alone future trajectories of growth. And while we often applaud ourselves for doing something apparently sustainable at a local level, we ignore the fact that we displace the consequences of using up resources either temporally or spatially at larger regional or global scales. These authors provide a powerful set of examples that show the wider detrimental impacts of locally ‘sustainable’ systems, including that of Portland, Oregon – which ‘is hailed by the media as “the most sustainable city in America”’, and the Bristol Bay Salmon Fishery, also cited as a success story. (Burger et al’s point here echoes a call for more ecosystem-based management of fisheries made recently in another recent *PLoS Biology* article by Levi et al<http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001303> ). During the editorial process, it became clear that while there was agreement that human ecology is a key factor for understanding sustainable resource use , not everyone agreed with the pessimistic and seemingly static outlook presented by Burger et al. We therefore commissioned John Matthews <http://climatechangewater.org/page2/page2.html> and Fred Boltz<http://www.conservation.org/FMG/Articles/Pages/conservation_in_action_fred_boltz.aspx>from Conservation International <http://www.conservation.org/Pages/default.aspx> to provide their more optimistic perspective<http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001344>. They argue that the world is a much more dynamic place than that set out by Burger et al and that human ingenuity and adaptability (both human and planetary) may provide creative solutions that will allow human societies to overcome resource limitation and continue to grow. *rest of the story here: ** http://blogs.plos.org/biologue/2012/06/20/rio20-why-sustainability-must-include-ecology/ * * * * * * * *Direct links *Georgina Mace’s overview: *The Limits to Sustainability Science: Ecological Constraints or Endless Innovation? ** http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001343 * Her podcast: * http://blogs.plos.org/plospodcasts/2012/06/19/plos-biology-podcast-episode-05-flirting-with-disaster/ * The Burger et al. piece: *The Macroecology of Sustainability ** http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001345 * Matthews & Boltz: *The Shifting Boundaries of Sustainability Science: Are We Doomed Yet? ** http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001344 *
