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INSTITUTIONS, ECOSYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY: A BOOK REVIEW
Citation:
Campbell, D E. INSTITUTIONS, ECOSYSTEMS AND SUSTAINABILITY: A BOOK REVIEW. ECOSYSTEM HEALTH 7(1):178-180, (2001).
Description:
For human systems, the idea of sustainability refers to the development of behavioral patterns and organizations (institutions) that can maintain or prolong a relationship between a socioeconomic system and the ecosystem functions and resources that support it. The functional integrity or health of such systems should be of primary concern to us if we want to maintain or improve the present state of our society. This book presents a practical method to investigate the interface between ecosystems and economic activity and illustrates its use with models and case studies covering a broad spectrum of spatiotemporal scales and degrees of model aggregation.
The discussion of topics leading up to the presentation of the framework is excellent, especially the insight that the failure to manage resources in a sustainable manner can often be attributed, first to missing or failed institutions and, second, to scale mismatches among institutions. This is one of the major themes of the book that plays through several of the models and case studies.