What History Teaches Us About Sustainability: Applications To Common Property Resources

Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Seeley Mudd Hall, Morrison Room

In a sense, resource management systems evolve through a form of natural selection. This presentation will focus on how common property resource systems, including forests, fisheries, wildlife, pastures, and water, have evolved over the past several thousand years.  What are the lessons that history can teach to the current generation, which has very different relationships with natural resources, different technologies, different demographics, and different ways of thinking.  It will suggest that interdisciplinary approaches to resource management are likely to be essential to ensuring that these systems are able to adapt to the increasing pressures that are being placed upon them by modern civilization.