In 1958, the movie mogul Harry Cohn died. Seeing the huge crowds that turned out for the funeral, one actor expressed his bewilderment: “But everyone in Hollywood hated Harry!” he exclaimed. “Why are all these people here?” In 1981, after a conference in Toronto and the publication of a proceedings volume, a no-less-surprising throng began to gather, in books, journals and conferences, for the scholarly funeral of a dateable Beowulf. We have no record of anyone exclaiming in surprise: “But the evidence for an early date of Beowulf is relatively consistent, convincing and well-established! Why would people be happy to replace it with speculation and uncertainty?” But the words of the comedian Red Skelton, who had worked for Cohn, explain both seeming paradoxes: “Give the people what they want and they'll turn out for it.”

Even when I was a graduate student at my first significant Anglo-Saxon conference, ISAS 1995 at Stanford, I heard the rumors about that Toronto conference. Sometimes they were sotto voce, sometimes louder (especially when there was an open bar), but always they said a version of the same thing: the famous Dating of Beowulf conference at Toronto and the subsequent proceedings volume were not entirely on the level.

In this chapter, we explore the challenges that Earth system researchers face in addressing human-induced global environmental changes and the societal consequences of global change within their research toolkit. We focus on areas of research that have particular resonance with today’s social and political demands.

The Earth system and the ‘problematic human’

The state of play and our position

The great scientific challenge faced by today’s global change scientists is to understand the Earth system. Part of this is knowing that we ourselves, as human beings, are an influential component of that system and that the understanding we develop shapes our responses to the environmental changes we see around us. In scientific terms, most of the fundamental workings of our planet, including the processes that change climate and landscapes on short and long timescales, were already well understood by the end of the twentieth century. Earth system science is the field of study that has brought these areas of knowledge together. It has not just provided insight into the phenomena of global environmental change, but also explained the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ behind them, bringing insights into the future prospects for our planet. The enormity of the challenge lies in the realization that we are seeking to understand and predict the properties of a complex adaptive system of which we are a part, recognizing that our choices and our agency as human beings are important controls on its workings. More than that, our ability to deploy our knowledge and make choices about our actions is an important facet, perhaps even a characterizing trait, of our existence.

Introduction

This book has examined adapting institutions, adaptive governance and complexity from the perspective of social–ecological resilience. As stated in the introduction, we have been interested in exploring and understanding social–ecological features involved in adaptations that may help societies move towards sustainability, across a range of scales from local to global. These scales are interdependent. We have in particular looked at adapting institutions and sources of social–ecological resilience to features of change, such as shocks and surprises, through a set of case studies to assess what adaptations have emerged at local, state and global levels.

We have combined resilience thinking with research on adapting institutions and governance challenges. Through the case studies the content is rooted in reality, complemented with conceptual contributions and the move in ideas towards adapting institutions with new pathways of development for dealing with complexity and sustainability (Folke et al. 2010, Olsson et al. 2010).

People shape the planet and at the same time depend on its functioning. Global environmental change is currently occurring at a rate faster than humans have ever experienced and may result in potentially devastating consequences at the planetary scale (Rockström et al. 2009). The well-being of people on the planet faces two dominant global environmental crises: climate change and the loss of the world’s ecosystem services. Following the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 the global community also faces turbulent times in terms of economic development. These crises are complex and all are interlinked (Young et al. 2006, Walker et al. 2009a). Human actions are having serious consequences on the earth’s climate system and on the capacity of landscapes and seascapes to generate important ecosystem services upon which societal development rests (Daily 1997).

We take guidance from those who argue that economic systems are not separate from ecological systems (e.g. Jansson et al. 1994). We draw on the understanding that all of the materiality of societies is inherently based on the availability of renewable resources and the capacity of the biosphere to generate and sustain those. The environment is not just an externality, but our societies are part of the biosphere, ultimately dependent on its functioning and at the same time shaping it. Such interdependence of social and ecological systems has been illustrated in many ways, from community-based and multi-level resource management (e.g. Berkes et al. 2003) to political shocks triggering shifts towards ecosystem stewardship (e.g. Gelcich et al. 2010). We acknowledge that markets cannot be decoupled from social–ecological systems, and in fact these are deeply nested concepts (Harvey 2006).