Social-Ecological Resilience and Behavioural Responses

This chapter aims to understand social contexts underlying behavioural responses to environmental issues and environmental change. The co-evolutionary character reflects the fact that social-ecological systems can change qualitatively to generate and implement innovations that are truly creative, in the sense of opportunities for novel cooperation and feedback management. Ecological resilience contributes in time and space with the network of species, their dynamic interactions between each other and the environment, and the combination of structures that make reorganization after disturbance possible. Social constructs that disconnect society and nature and that treat the environment as a separate sector have led to regional development pathologies and caused vulnerability. Short-term successes of increasing yield in homogenized environments seem to reinforce a social perception of humanity as superior to and independent of nature. The life-supporting environment is transformed into an economic sector for production of social value.