OOS 50 - Influences of Historical Perspectives in Current Socio-Environmental Research

Organizer(s)

• MA

  Meghan Avolio

  Assistant Professor
  Johns Hopkins University
  Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Research in ecology is increasingly interdisciplinary because it is necessary to consider human-nature feedbacks in order fully understand environmental problems and outcomes. Human-nature feedbacks, also termed socio-environmental feedbacks, have been considered for centuries, and there are many theories and ideas upon which current research is built. A motivation for this session is a book, Foundations of Socio-Environmental Research: Legacy Readings with Commentaries, which will be published this fall. As my colleagues and I worked on this book, we were struck by the deep history of conceptualizing human-nature feedbacks and similar emerging themes across a range of disciplines. These themes include human population and limited resources, sustainable management of common-pool resources, and reciprocal connections between society and land. Each theme has been viewed through the lens of anthropology, economics, ecology, and sociology to just name a few disciplines. Many ecologists working on socio-environmental problems are either highly interdisciplinary themselves or work with collaborators in different academic silos. Bringing scholars together to examine shared historical framings should strengthen connections between ecologists asking socio-environmental questions.
In this session, speakers will take a take a historical approach to how framing of human-nature interactions inform their current research. The first speaker will review these and other historical themes and how they connect to present day research. This will be followed by 5 research talks by scientists doing socio-environmental research. Speakers’ research areas are chosen to highlight areas of ecological research with strong socio-environmental framing: fishery science, conservation, urban forestry, rangeland management, and pastoral landscapes. Each speaker has been asked to reflect on historical underpinnings of their interdisciplinary research and highlight how it influences how they approach their socio-environmental research questions.

Presentations:

• 8:00 AM – 8:15 AM PDT

  Look deep and broad: The socio-environmental legacy behind today's ecology
  

  Presenting Author: William R. Burnside – Independent scholar
• 8:15 AM – 8:30 AM PDT

  Beyond Tragedies: pastoral resource governance across ecological gradients
  

  Presenting Author: Ginger Allington – Cornell University
• 8:30 AM – 8:45 AM PDT

  Human-Nature relations like Life depends on them: Using rangelands to reimagine who we are to one another
  

  Presenting Author: Hailey Wilmer – USDA-Agricultural Research Service
• 8:45 AM – 9:00 AM PDT

  Reckoning with history and equity in fisheries and marine conservation.
  

  Presenting Author: Dan Okamoto, PhD – Florida State University
• 9:00 AM – 9:15 AM PDT

  Shifts toward understanding and managing aquatic food systems from a social-ecological perspective
  

  Presenting Author: Jessica Gephart – American University
• 9:15 AM – 9:30 AM PDT

  Using a historical lens to understand environmental justice and equity issues in urban forestry.
  

  Presenting Author: Charity Nyelele – University of Virginia