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
podcasthttp://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
Macehttp://www3.imperial.ac.uk/people/g.mace,
one of our Editorial Board
membershttp://www.plosbiology.org/static/edboard.actionand 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.1001345submitted
by Robbie Burger https://sites.google.com/site/josephrobertburger/, Jim
Brown, http://biology.unm.edu/jhbrown/index.shtmlCraig
Allenhttp://www.fort.usgs.gov/staff/staffprofile.asp?StaffID=109and
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
alhttp://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
Boltzhttp://www.conservation.org/FMG/Articles/Pages/conservation_in_action_fred_boltz.aspxfrom
Conservation
International http://www.conservation.org/Pages/default.aspx to provide
their more optimistic
perspectivehttp://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/
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*Direct links
*Georgina Mace’s overview: *The Limits to Sustainability Science:
Ecological Constraints or Endless Innovation?
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