Table of Contents
It is well known that human activities are endangering the stability and sustainability of many fragile ecosystems to such an extent that their future is in doubt. At the same time, these ecosystems are inherently challenging to manage successfully because of the complexity and uncertainty associated with their ongoing evolution. Much of this complexity and uncertainty may be attributed to the human dimension. Thus it is imperative that we deepen our understanding of how and why people choose to interact with one another and how this interactive behaviour affects these ecosystems as time passes. This book is a small contribution in this direction. It examines ways in which the collective behaviour of human beings can vary, and how this behaviour may affect the natural ecosystems which humans enjoy.
Fortunately, a new kind of science is helping us deepen our understanding of how human ecosystems might grow and change over time. Beyond a mere collation of various reflections and applications, the chapters in this book aim to convince the reader that this new kind of science is worthy of our attention. It is a science that fully embraces the complexity of our surrounding world. It is also a science that addresses the frontiers of interactions between human behaviour and environmental responses. Furthermore, it is a science that challenges our limited understanding and treatment of uncertainty. And, finally, because it is socially embedded, it is a science that can generate partnerships with local communities in a constructive manner.
The computational science we describe and discuss in this book is sufficiently different to normative science that we may call it a new kind of science. Observation and experimentation are still alive and well, but they have been joined by an entirely new breed of computational science: simulation. However, it should be recognised that science—old or new—is not a process for finding absolute truths or universal laws. As Roger Bradbury argues persuasively in the next chapter, science is not just a process, but is really a system—a complex adaptive system.
The complex adaptive system known as science consists of the scientists or agents and the knowledge system that they accumulate by way of an interactive and ongoing exchange of ideas. As Bradbury notes, the former is essentially a social system, whereas the latter is a playground of memes—with the interaction strongly mediated by the recipe. Science is a dialogue between humankind and nature, the results of which have been—and will continue to be—unpredictable (Prigogine 1996: 153). Like science, a human ecosystem is a complex adaptive system involving people, other living entities, an environment, information exchange and the co-evolution of all of these things over time. Although a human ecosystem’s future state has always been unpredictable, the critical players (agents) on this adaptive stage today are the human participants. Thus it is imperative that we begin to understand human reasoning and its idiosyncrasies.