What can we learn from history?

Eco-economist Robert Costanza, of the Gund Institute, U of Vermont
discusses questions posed by Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed:

Our world is in crisis. We are facing not one, but a highly interconnected set of problems that threaten the quality and sustainability of our socioecological system. In many ways, this is a unique period in human and earth history, a ‘‘no-analog’’ period. But in other ways this has happened before. Many times. Just not at the global scale of today’s crisis. The history of
human-dominated socio-ecological systems is one of successive crises that were either successfully addressed, leading to sustainability, or not, leading to collapse....

Three key changes enable us to learn very new and different things from the study of history:

1. There is an enormous influx of new paleoenvironmental data being generated from sophisticated analyses of ice cores, tree rings, sediments and other records. This data can now be integrated with the massive and growing body of human historical records to create a more comprehensive picture of how humans have interacted with the rest of nature over multiple time and space scales;
2. our ability to visualize all of this information and share it over the internet has increased by orders of magnitude in recent years, allowing a much larger community of scholars to be involved;
3. our ability to use all this information to understand and model complex dynamic, co-evolutionary, systems of humans embedded in nature is rapidly improving.

...Creating a transdisciplinary synthesis of earth’s history will require a long-term, concerted effort among a broad range of researchers from across the humanities, and the social and natural sciences....

To develop this integrated, transdisciplinary, understanding, a project of the global change research community has been initiated IHOPE Integrated History and future of People On Earth, hosted by the SRC Stockholm Resilience Center. It is co-sponsored by the PAGES Past Global Changes project of the IGBP International Geosphere/Biosphere Programme, and the IHDP International Human Dimensions Programme.

The AIMES Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System project of the IGBP is the central node for the IHOPE initiative. It is anticipated that IHOPE will soon become a project of the entire ESSP Earth System Science Partnership.

(abridged from Costanza, R. 2007. The need for a transdisciplinary synthesis of history. Ambio 36:521)

The Ecological Economics of Robert Costanza

The 1992 edition is now being revised. Contents include renewable resource eco-accounting / management / conservation, sustainable agriculture, green technology, eco-economic modelling (local, regional and global), implications of thermodynamics, critiques of the basic assumptions of traditional economics and GNP, dangers of GMOs and gene pool privatization, alternative principles for valuing natural wealth, methods of governance, case studies of environmental conflict and resolution.

Costanza is a key mover in a number of other research projects:

IHOPE Integrated History of People on Earth. The final IHOPE research plan will be published in early 2008. Many details are explained in Costanza et al. Sustainability or Collapse: What Can We Learn from Integrating the History of Humans and the Rest of Nature? Ambio (2007) 36:522-527

PAGES (Past Global Changes) f. 1991 supports research aimed at understanding the Earth’s past environment in order to make predictions for the future. We encourage international and interdisciplinary collaborations and seek to involve scientists from developing countries in the worldwide paleo-community. PAGES' scope of interest includes the physical climate system, biogeochemical cycles, ecosystem processes, biodiversity, and human dimensions, on different time scales—Pleistocene, Holocene, last millennium and the recent past. PAGES is a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) and is funded by the U.S. and Swiss National Science Foundations, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

IGBP The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme is partially explained in Costanza et al, Biodiversity and ecosystem services: A multi-scale empirical study of the relationship between species richness and net primary production. Ecological Economics (2007) 61:478-491

IHDP International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. See the explanation in Costanza, Farley et al. An integrative approach to quality of life measurement, research, and policy. Surveys and Perspectives Integrating Environment and Society. (2007) 1:1-5.

ESSP Earth System Science Partnership

AIMES Analysis, Integration and Modeling of the Earth System: is the synthesis and integration project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme: http://www.aimes.ucar.edu/
It includes Global Emissions Inventory Activity
Integrated History and Future of People on Earth (passworded, but the IHOPE site above is not)
Coupled Carbon Cycle Climate Model Intercomparison Project

Earth Inc. A Shareholder's Report from Costanza's Gund Institute (to be published soon) and some sample pages

ESDA: Envisioning a Sustainable and Desirable America, a citizen participation process for an eco-America in the year 2100. Its online forum has been superseded by Costanza's Earth Forum blog/wiki.