ERL" href="http://images.iop.org/objects/erw/news/12/8/15/erlaa68a5f1_hr.jpg">Human–nature connectedness
Trading has been a mainstay of the human race for thousands of years. Even as far back as the Stone Age, people traded precious stones for animal skins and minerals. But it was during the Industrial Revolution that trade boomed.
Fossil-fuelled steam power enabled the mass trade of bulky materials over large distances and the mechanized production of vast mounds of stuff. People living in industrialized countries quickly became detached from their regional environment and consumption of resources shot up. At the same time, living standards improved as people gained access to this seemingly infinite source of resources, all year round at low prices. Local crop failure was no longer a death sentence as imports could buffer the loss, and communities became more resilient.
But there have been downsides too. Without necessarily realizing, some of us have been consuming far more than our fair share of resources, while others have gone short. Meanwhile, some of those resources – such as fossil fuels – have been disappearing at a rate far faster than nature can replace them, and the waste products from this consumption (greenhouse gases, for example) have a highly negative impact on our environment.
Some argue that we should pin our hopes on the efficiency of industrial technology, and continue to increase our distance from nature. Others say reconnecting is the only way we can reduce the pressure on ecosystems. With that in mind, Christian Dorninger from Leuphana University, Germany, and colleagues proposed a framework to analyse human connectedness to the environment, to help understand the sustainability challenges that different regions face.
HANPP (Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production) is an indicator that measures the "human domination of ecosystems". It evaluates the trophic energy – the products of photosynthesis – that humans harvest directly and indirectly (via by-flows, conversion losses and land-use conversion) from the terrestrial biosphere.
"The benefit of using HANPP as the baseline indicator is that it shows how much trophic energy remains in the ecosystems after harvest for the availability of other species," said Dorninger, whose findings are published in Environmental Research Letters (ERL).
Currently the most disconnected regions of the world tend to be some of the most wealthy and urbanized areas, including cities in Western Europe, the US, Japan and South Korea. Significant changes would have to occur to enable these populations to reconnect with their environment, but Dorninger argues that this needn't be a backwards step.
"It doesn't require a 'back to the caves' societal transformation," he said. "It is rather about realizing the energy and resource demand of certain, currently heavily used, technologies in general." In particular, these disconnected regions of the world would have to find new ways of interacting with their local environment, including more diverse, small-structured land-use systems, more organic and permaculture farming, and most likely more people working on the land.
But Dorninger and colleagues believe that if people realize how disconnected their lives are from their local environment, they are more likely to be motivated to reconnect themselves. "People who are confronted with natural limits biophysically are more likely to feel the urge for change," he said.
Related links
- Assessing sustainable biophysical human-nature connectedness at regional scales, Christian Dorninger et al 2017 Environ. Res. Lett. 12 055001
- ERL Focus on Cross-scale Feedbacks in Sustainable Land Management
- Christian Dorninger