Although contentious, the concept of resilience is common in sustainability research. Critique of the concept have often focused on the content of the concept. In this paper we focus on another feature of concepts, namely how they are defined. We distinguish between concepts that are ostensively defined, that aim to point to some phenomena, and stipulatively defined concepts, where the content of the concept is given in the definition itself. We argue that although definitions themselves are similar across many different (...) disciplines where resilience is used?most notably psychology and ecology?they differ in how. This has interesting consequences for how different disciplines can be connected and integrated. Notably, integration on basis of ostensively defined concepts turn on sharing the extension of the concept, but not necessarily the intension, whereas integration on basis of stipulatively defined concepts work in the opposite way. (shrink)

In sustainability research and elsewhere, the notion of resilience is attracting growing interest and causing heated debate. Those focusing on resilience often emphasize its potential to bridge, integrate, and unify disciplines. This article attempts to evaluate these claims. Resilience is investigated as it appears in several fields, including materials science, psychology, ecology, and sustainability science. It is argued that two different concepts of resilience are in play: one local, the other global. The former refers to the ability to return to (...) some reference state after a disturbance, the latter the maintenance of some property during a disturbance. An implication of this analysis is that the various uses of the resilience concept are more closely related than has been previously been suggested. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a preference towards using highly abstract versions of the concept. This explains the apparent context insensitivity of the concept, but presents a problem for those.. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article presents a philosophy of science for ecology – deep naturalism – based on Roy Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. It includes a model of the emergence of ecosystems, analogous to...

The ecosystem services argument is a highly publicised instrumental argument for protecting biodiversity. I develop a new objection to this argument based on the lack of a causal connection from global species losses to local ecosystem changes. I survey some alternative formulations of services arguments, including ones incorporating option value or a precautionary principle, and show that they do not fare much better than the standard version. I conclude that environmental thinkers should rely less on ecosystem services as a means (...) to defend biodiversity, and that attention should be focused on additional types of value which might be attributed to global biodiversity. (shrink)

The world’s leading environmental advisory institutions look to ecological theory and research as an objective guide for policy and resource management decision-making. In addition to various theoretical merits of doing so, it is therefore crucially important to clear up confusions about ecology’s conceptual foundations and to make plain the basic workings of inferential methods used in the science. Through discussion of key moments in the genesis of the theoretical branch of ecology, this essay elucidates a general heuristic role of teleological (...) metaphor in ecological research and defuses certain enduring confusions and misguided criticisms of current work in ecology. (shrink)

Microbiologists are transitioning from the study and characterization of individual strains or species to the profiling of whole microbiomes and microbial ecology. Equipped with high-throughput methods for studying the taxonomic and functional characteristics of diverse samples, they are just beginning to encounter the conceptual, theoretical, and experimental problems of comparing taxonomy to function, and extracting useful measures from such comparisons. Although still unresolved, these problems are well studied in macro-ecology and are reiterated here as an historical precautionary for microbial ecologists. (...) Beyond expected and unresolved terminological vagueness, we argue that assessments and comparisons of taxonomic and functional profiles in micro-ecology suffer from theoretically unresolvable arbitrariness and ambiguities. We divide these into problems of scale, individuation, and commensurability. We argue that there is no technically/theoretically “correct” scale, individuation, or comparison of taxonomy and function, but there are nonetheless better and worse methodologies for profiling. (shrink)

This paper explores interactions between ecological science and conservation values in the biodiversity-ecosystem function debate of the 1990–2000s. The scientific debate concerned the interpretation of observed correlations between species richness and ecosystem properties like primary productivity in experimental ecosystems. The debate over the causal or explanatory role of species richness was presumed to have implications for conservation policy, and the use of such research to support policy recommendations generated hostility between rival groups of ecologists. I argue that the debate was (...) due in part to the adoption of a broad conception of biodiversity as a goal and value in conservation politics and ethical debates, and the ecologists who questioned the causal efficacy of species richness were also suggesting problems with this goal. I characterize what I call the “uneasy consensus” established by BEF researchers in the late 2000s, discuss roles for values in BEF research, and suggest that this episode shows that ecological science can itself be an important site for ethical debates about conservation values. (shrink)

This paper reinforces the current consensus against the applicability of the selected effect theory of function in ecology. It does so by presenting an argument which, in contrast with the usual argument invoked in support of this consensus, is not based on claims about whether ecosystems are customary units of natural selection. Instead, the argument developed here is based on observations about the use of the function concept in functional ecology, and more specifically, research into the relationship between biodiversity and (...) ecosystem functioning. It is argued that a selected effect account of ecological functions is made implausible by the fact that it would conflict with important aspects of the understanding of function and ecosystem functional organization which underpins functional ecology’s research program. Specifically, it would conflict with (1) Functional ecology’s adoption of a context-based understanding of function and its aim to study the functional equivalence between phylogenetically-divergent organisms; (2) Functional ecology’s attribution to ecosystems of a lower degree of part-whole integration than the one found in paradigm individual organisms; and (3) Functional ecology’s adoption of a physiological or metabolic perspective on ecosystems rather than an evolutionary one. (shrink)

We argue that ecology in general and biodiversity and ecosystem function research in particular need an understanding of functions which is both ahistorical and evolutionarily grounded. A natural candidate in this context is Bigelow and Pargetter’s evolutionary forward-looking account which, like the causal role account, assigns functions to parts of integrated systems regardless of their past history, but supplements this with an evolutionary dimension that relates functions to their bearers’ ability to thrive and perpetuate themselves. While Bigelow and Pargetter’s account (...) focused on functional organization at the level of organisms, we argue that such an account can be extended to functional organization at the community and ecosystem levels in a way that broadens the scope of the reconciliation between ecosystem ecology and evolutionary biology envisioned by many BEF researchers. By linking an evolutionary forward-looking account of functions to the persistence-based understanding of evolution defended by Bouchard and others, and to the theoretical research on complex adaptive systems, we argue that ecosystems, by forming more or less resilient assemblages, can evolve even while they do not reproduce and form lineages. We thus propose a Persistence Enhancing Propensity account of role functions in ecology to account for this overlap of evolutionary and ecological processes. (shrink)

This paper addresses the stalemate on the question whether biodiversity has intrinsic value. I distinguish between a “weak” conception and two “strong” conceptions of intrinsic value in the environmental ethics literature. The strong conceptions of intrinsic value are connected, respectively, to moral standing and to a strongly objectivist account of value. Neither of these forms of value likely applies to biodiversity. However, the weak conception of intrinsic value is neutral about both moral standing and the nature of value and plausibly (...) applies to biodiversity. In addition, weak intrinsic value avoids common objections to the claim that biodiversity is intrinsically valuable. I develop a cumulative argument showing that environmentalists should presume that biodiversity has intrinsic value in the weak sense. (shrink)

Environmental ethics is the discipline in philosophy that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents. This entry covers: (1) the challenge of environmental ethics to the anthropocentrism (i.e., humancenteredness) embedded in traditional western ethical thinking; (2) the early development of the discipline in the 1960s and 1970s; (3) the connection of deep ecology, feminist environmental ethics, and social ecology to politics; (4) the attempt to apply (...) traditional ethical theories, including consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics, to support contemporary environmental concerns; and (5) the focus of environmental literature on wilderness, and possible future developments of the discipline. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the common claim that the ascription of ecological functions to organisms in functional ecology raises issues about levels of natural selection is ill-founded. This claim, I maintain, mistakenly assumes that the function concept as understood in functional ecology aligns with the selected effect theory of function advocated by many philosophers of biology (sometimes called “The Standard Line” on functions). After exploring the implications of Wilson and Sober’s defence of multilevel selection for the prospects of defending a (...) selected effect account of ecological functions, I identify three main ways in which functional ecology’s understanding of the function concept diverges from the selected effect theory. Specifically, I argue (1) that functional ecology conceives ecological functions as context-based rather than history-based properties of organisms; (2) that it attributes to the ecological function concept the aim of explaining ecosystem processes rather than with that of explaining the presence of organisms within ecosystems; and (3) that it conceives the ecological functions of organisms as use and service functions rather than design functions. I then discuss the extent to which the recently proposed causal role and organizational accounts of ecological functions better accord with the purposes for which the ecological concept is used in functional ecology. (shrink)

This is a thesis about interdisciplinarity, scientific integration, and problem solving in sustainability science. Sustainability science is an emerging and highly interdisciplinary field that seeks to integrate vastly differentiated bodies of knowledge in addressing the challenge of transitioning contemporary societies towards sustainability. Interdisciplinarity is paramount. Interdisciplinarity in general, and in the context of sustainability science in particular, has often been associated with solving particular problems and problem solving is one important theme in this thesis. A central idea that is developed (...) is that of problem-feeding. Sometimes problems arise within one discipline that can only be solved with the help of another. This concept, that has predecessors in e.g. the work of Lindley Darden and Nancy Maull, is explored considerably. It is argued that in interdisciplinary contexts—such as sustainability science—where collaboration is sought it is important to maintain cross-boundary problem stability. That is to say, as the problem is transferred from one discipline to another transformations will often be necessary. These transformations then, need to be acceptable to all involved parties to maintain an active interdisciplinary connection. Another topic that is discussed both in the introductory essay and some of the papers included is that of scientific imperialism. Scientific imperialism—the infringement of one discipline upon the domain of another—is here suggested to be primarily a threat to in-terdisciplinary collaborations. A distinction is introduced between imperialist failures of expansionism and failures of replacement. These are labelled type-I and type-II imperialism respectively. Particular attention is devoted to the latter form. Type-II imperialism concerns cases where imperialist infringements fail as the imperial- izing framework replaces viable, or compatible alternatives. Such an error of replacement does, importantly, not imply that the framework or theory should be disregarded completely. This type of imperialist error can both be quite subtle, and damaging. For one, if one directs the attention to specific contexts knowledge is actually lost in the process. This is particularly serious in fields such as sustainability science that are, to such an large extent, aimed at influencing concrete policy. Finally, interdisciplinarity is difficult to achieve and in many cases represents a grand challenge in itself. There are however many different ways in which interdisciplinarity may be accomplished and different forms are suitable in different contexts. In a field such as sustainability science where complexity is such a prevalent feature, an inclusive, pluralist, approach is likely to be appropriate. (shrink)

While many recognize that rigid historical and compositional goals are inadequate in a world where climate and other global systems are undergoing unprecedented changes, others contend that promoting ecosystem services and functions encourages practices that can ultimately lower the bar of ecological management. These worries are foregrounded in discussions about Novel Ecosystems (NEs); where some researchers and conservationists claim that NEs provide a license to trash nature as long as some ecosystem services are provided. This criticism arises from what we (...) call the " anything goes " problem created by the release of historical conditions. After explaining the notion of NE, we identify numerous substantive motivations for worrying about the anything-goes-problem and then go on to show the problem can be solved by correcting two mistaken assumptions. In short, we argue that the problem is a product of adopting an overly sparse functional perspective and one that assumes an unrealistically high degree of convergence in the trajectories of natural processes. Our analysis illuminates why such assumptions are unwarranted. Finally, we further argue that adopting an appropriate ethical framework is essential to overcoming the anything-goes-problem and suggest that a certain virtue ethics conception of ecological management provides useful resources for framing and resolving the problem. (shrink)