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Educating through Case Studies

6 May, 2015 - 14:33

It is practically impossible to think about a single habitat that has not been modified by human culture, either by the deliberate dismantling of its food chains or by pollution at a distance. Even landscapes that from a far vantage point appear to be free of human interference, will probably be found , on closer inspection, to be the product of human activity of one kind or another. However, there is no doubting the power of landscapes as educational entry points to case histories of applied ecology. The study of disease transmission begins with a view of the dense network of duck farms scattered across drained marshes of South East Asia where people, domestic livestock and migratory birds live cheek by jowl; a wetland engineering project catches the eye of the speeding motorist passing by a linear stretch of reedbed devised to clean up the motorway runoff; an effort to breed and reintroduce rare species begins with a shot of cattle grazing on former rainforest. The point is that learning about applying ecological principles to repair or redress our ecological predicament is best done by studying real outcomes of conservation management in actual units of human occupation, whether they be farms, towns or the ‘nature sites’ we conceptualise from rare patches of geology and vegetation. Another important reason for educating through case histories is that environmental projects do not fall neatly into one or other of the nine sections of applied ecology, which have been summarised in the other modules. Case histories will therefore be presented in this module. They will have been chosen because they provide a cross-module perspective according to the practical ways in which the environment and its resources are utilised in the light of the human dimensions of global change. This means selecting exemplars that illustrate the establishment of new contractual relationships between human society and the environment that will not just be economically and ecologically sustainable, but morally sustainable as well.

The areas from which these examples should be drawn were broadly defined in the 1988 Tokyo International Symposium on the Human Dimensions of Global Change Programme as:

Nature conservation:
       To improve the scentific understanding and increase awareness of the complex dynamics governing human interactions with ecosystems.

Community development:
       To identify social strategies to prevent or mitigate undersirable impacts of global change or to adapt to changes that are already unavoidable.

Ecological economics:
       To explore new tools that can provide a replacement for GNP as a measure of human progress.

Industry:
       To assess attempts to restructure industries in developed countries in relation to the inevitablity of rapid industrial development elsewhere.