Social Ecology in the Digital Age

Solving Complex Problems in a Globalized World

Daniel Stokols

• Publisher: Academic Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128031148
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicología aplicada

Social Ecology in the Digital Age: Solving Complex Problems in a Globalized World provides a comprehensive overview of social ecological theory, research, and practice. Written by renowned expert Daniel Stokols, the book distills key principles from diverse strands of ecological science, offering a robust framework for transdisciplinary research and societal problem-solving. The existential challenges of the 21st Century - global climate change and climate-change denial, environmental pollution, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, disease pandemics, inter-ethnic violence and the threat of nuclear war, cybercrime, the Digital Divide, and extreme poverty and income inequality confronting billions each day - cannot be understood and managed adequately from narrow disciplinary or political perspectives.

Social Ecology in the Digital Age is grounded in scientific research but written in a personal and informal style from the vantage point of a former student, current teacher and scholar who has contributed over four decades to the field of social ecology. The book will be of interest to scholars, students, educators, government leaders and community practitioners working in several fields including social and human ecology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, criminology, law, education, biology, medicine, public health, earth system and sustainability science, geography, environmental design, urban planning, informatics, public policy and global governance.

Winner of the 2018 Gerald L. Young Book Award from The Society for Human Ecology "Exemplifying the highest standards of scholarly work in the field of human ecology." https://societyforhumanecology.org/human-ecology-homepage/awards/gerald-l-young-book-award-in-human-ecology/

• The book traces historical origins and conceptual foundations of biological, human, and social ecology
• Offers a new conceptual framework that brings together earlier approaches to social ecology and extends them in novel directions
• Highlights the interrelations between four distinct but closely intertwined spheres of human environments: our natural, built, sociocultural, and virtual (cyber-based) surroundings
• Spans local to global scales and individual, organizational, community, regional, and global levels of analysis
• Applies core principles of social ecology to identify multi-level strategies for promoting personal and public health, resolving complex social problems, managing global environmental change, and creating resilient and sustainable communities
• Underscores social ecology's vital importance for understanding and managing the environmental and political upheavals of the 21st Century
• Highlights descriptive, analytic, and transformative (or moral) concerns of social ecology
• Presents strategies for educating the next generation of social ecologists emphasizing transdisciplinary, team-based, translational, and transcultural approaches

1

Discovering Social Ecology

A Personal Journey

Abstract

This chapter explains how I came to write the book. I recount personal experiences that stimulated my interest in social ecology over the course of my career and describe the major purpose of the book: to offer a new conception of social ecology that builds on and extends earlier analyses of social and human ecology. Social ecology is presented as an analytic framework organized around certain core principles (i.e., multidimensional structure of environments; systems thinking; multiscale contextual analysis of people–environment relationships; transdisciplinary and translational research) that can be used to understand and manage health, social, and environmental problems. Whereas previous conceptions of social ecology examine the joint influence of natural, built, and sociocultural environments on behavior and well-being, I introduce a fourth environmental realm, the cybersphere, which is intertwined with our natural, built, and sociocultural surroundings. I also describe how the book is organized: Chapters 1–3 address historical, conceptual, and methodological foundations of social ecology as a multidisciplinary field. Chapter 4 examines the rise of the Internet and its pervasive influence on human–environment interactions and global sustainability. Chapters 5–8 apply core principles of social ecology to the analysis of contemporary health, social, and environmental problems. Chapter 9 considers strategies for educating the next generation of social ecologists. Chapter 10 recaps major themes covered in the book and explores emerging directions of social ecological research and community practice.

Keywords

Multilevel contextual analysis; Natural, built, sociocultural, virtual dimensions of human environments; Personal journey; Systems thinking; Transdisciplinary and translational research

In retrospect, it was a risky decision. I had been on the academic job market while completing my PhD in social psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) during Spring 1973 and was offered an assistant professor position in psychology at a major university. I was about to accept that offer when I received an unexpected call from Ralph (Ray) Catalano, a faculty member at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). I had not applied for a faculty position at Irvine so I was surprised to hear from Catalano that I was among their short-list candidates for a possible job there. Throughout our phone conversation, Ray exuded tremendous enthusiasm about the new interdisciplinary program he was helping to develop at UCI. Catalano, who struck me immediately as bright, energetic, and personable, explained that after earning his PhD in Public Administration the previous year, he was recruited from Syracuse University to Irvine as an assistant professor by Arnold Binder, a mathematical psychologist who had founded the Program in Social Ecology at UCI in 1970. He also mentioned that he recently had read my article on the psychology of human crowding in the Journal of the American Institute of Planners [1] and later suggested to Binder that I might be a good fit for their new Program. I asked Catalano, and my faculty mentors at North Carolina later asked me, “What exactly is social ecology?”

My advisors at UNC wondered why I would ever consider joining a fledgling interdisciplinary program with an offbeat name at a relatively young campus (UC Irvine had just opened in 1965), rather than accept the offer I had in hand from a more established psychology department and university. One of my fellow graduate students inquired whether social ecology was “…some kind of hippie academic outpost in the heart of ultra-conservative Orange County [California].” Another asked “where is ‘Irv-veen’ anyway?…I can’t seem to locate that ‘city’ on any map of California.” Needless to say, I thought long and hard about those pointed questions after my phone call with Catalano; and I must admit that initially I shared my advisors’ skepticism about joining a nontraditional academic unit. But after mulling things over for a few days, I decided to find out more about Irvine’s intriguing Program in Social Ecology and accepted Binder and Catalano’s invitation to come to UCI for a job interview. I booked my flight from Raleigh–Durham to Los Angeles and decided to hold off on accepting the faculty appointment in psychology I had been offered until after my visit to Irvine. If nothing else, what harm could come from a few days in Southern California?

Catalano and his wife, June, met me and my wife, Jeanne, at Los Angeles International Airport. Jeanne and I had gotten married during our third year of graduate school and we both were finishing up our dissertations in 1973. Jeanne was exploring clinical psychology positions in the same geographic areas where I had applied for a faculty appointment. She joined me on the trip to Irvine since neither of us had spent much time in California previously and we both wanted to gain a better sense of UCI and its surrounding area. After a one-hour drive south of the airport on the 405 Freeway, Ray turned onto Laguna Canyon Road and we proceeded to wind our way through moon-lit hills toward the Pacific Coast and our destination that evening, the Vacation Village Hotel in Laguna Beach. This rustic lodge fronted a beautiful, boulder studded beach and featured scenic vistas of the coastline and relaxing sounds of the waves about 50 yards from our hotel room balcony. Jeanne and I agreed that Laguna Beach would be a beautiful place to live if we ever decided to move to California. We were, of course, oblivious at the time to the precipitous gap between our postgraduate school earning potential and the astronomical housing prices in Laguna Beach. We both remained skeptical though that the job possibility at UCI would work out as I was still leaning toward joining a more traditional psychology department. But after spending some time on the beach prior to my job interview the next day, I found myself becoming more open-minded about the prospects of moving to Southern California.

Irvine is about a 15-minute drive inland and to the north of Laguna Beach. On our way to campus the next morning, Catalano gave Jeanne and me a brief tour of the orange groves that were a prominent feature of the Irvine countryside. Irvine was still largely an agricultural area and had been incorporated as a city just two years earlier. It also had the distinction of being the largest “new town” or fully planned community in the United States [2,3]. Like other new towns such as Columbia, Maryland and Reston, Virginia, Irvine was still transitioning from a largely undeveloped region of sprawling citrus groves and wilderness areas toward a full-fledged suburban community with multiple residential neighborhoods, a unified school system, and a bustling commercial sector. Further brightening Irvine’s prospects of becoming a cohesive, vibrant community was the Irvine Company’s (the major land owner and urban development firm in the region) gift of 1000 acres of prime real estate to the University of California on which to build a brand new campus [4]. The newly established UC Irvine Campus was heralded as a “jewel” in the City of Irvine’s “crown”—a major educational, research and development asset that would anchor and enrich the city’s future development.

When I first stepped onto the UCI Campus, the place seemed oddly proportioned with large modernist buildings grouped in a circle around a spacious central park and surrounded by rolling hills dotted with cows grazing in the distance. This moonscape of a place, with its oversized buildings, fresh landscaping, and relatively small number of students, was nothing like the bustling, rectangular quads bordered by traditional red brick buildings on the UNC campus in Chapel Hill—the oldest state university in the United States founded in 1789. UCI felt like a new academic frontier by comparison. Throughout my visit, I was struck by the pioneering spirit of the 12 or so founding faculty members (comprised mostly of young assistant professors and a few senior scholars) who had joined with Professor Binder to establish an innovative degree-granting program at the University of California, embracing ecological approaches to research, teaching, and community practice. The faculty’s commitment to interdisciplinary, policy-oriented research on environmental and social problems (e.g., overcrowding, poverty, urban sprawl) was rather unusual for a University of California campus in the 1970s. In those days, the “coin of the realm” was discipline-based scholarship pursued by individual faculty members more interested in answering basic science questions than teaming up with colleagues across different fields to translate academic research into strategies for community problem-solving.

I remember sitting in a small seminar room surrounded by the Social Ecology faculty as I gave my job talk. They were a dynamic and gregarious bunch—exemplified by the charismatic leadership of Arnie Binder, founder of the Program; the wry sense of humor of Gilbert Geis; the unbridled energy and intellect of John Monahan and Ray Catalano who each spoke a mile a minute, offering incisive comments along the way; and the soft-spoken elegance of Carol Whalen whose thoughtful presence and unassuming style provided a kind of centered grounding for this energetic and stimulating group of faculty. I was also struck by the unusual diversity of their educational backgrounds, spanning the fields of psychology, sociology, law, criminology, urban planning, public policy, microbiology, and public health.

By the end of my recruitment visit to Irvine, I realized that I had been deeply touched by the enthusiasm, camaraderie, and interdisciplinary commitment of the Social Ecology faculty. As I pondered my dilemma in choosing between an established psychology department or the iconoclastic Program at UCI—if they extended a job offer to me—I knew that my impressions of the Social Ecology faculty as a diverse, dedicated band of academic risk-takers, and my sense of UCI as a place that offered wide-open opportunities to pursue novel directions in my future research and teaching, would be the main factors in my decision.

On the plane back to North Carolina, I decided that UCI was where I wanted to begin my academic career if I was fortunate enough to receive a job offer from Social Ecology. The week after I returned from Irvine, an envelope arrived in the mail. I opened it and found, to my excitement, an offer for an appointment as an assistant professor of Social Ecology. Starting salary: $12,500 a year. I was thrilled to accept that offer, much to the amazement of some of my advisors and fellow graduate students i...

Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Preface
• 1. Discovering Social Ecology: A Personal Journey
• 2. Historical Origins and Conceptual Foundations of Social Ecology
• 3. Deriving Core Principles of Social Ecology
• 4. Rise of the Internet—Navigating Our Online and Place-Based Ecologies
• 5. Promoting Personal and Public Health
• 6. Confronting Complex Social Problems
• 7. Managing Global Environmental Change
• 8. Designing Resilient and Sustainable Communities
• 9. Educating the Next Generation of Social Ecologists
• 10. Epilogue
• Author Index
• Subject Index