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History and Environmental Messes: A Nonequilibrium Systems View

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Public canonical key

doi:10.2307/3984387

Authors

D. Scott

Reported year

1989

Reported language

en · eng

Source type

Article

First detected

2026-11-09T19:10:34.554513+00:00

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2026-11-09T19:10:34.554513+00:00

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Documentary abstract — original language

There is increasing support for viewing scientific knowledge not as a representation of nature but as a "socially constructed interpretation with an already socially constructed naturaltechnical object of inquiry".' This is difficult to accept for those who believe, if not in the objectivity of science, at least in there being an objective world which science seeks to describe. But if science is taken to be simply the effort to describe and understand the world around us, then a sociological conception of its role and nature is especially useful for understanding and managing complex environmental problems with strong socio-economic and perceptual dimensions. The problems that are the focus of this paper involve interactions between native people, environmental protection efforts, forestry, fishing, and mining activity, and several levels of govermnent. These problems have a regional scale and context, and a history. Such problems are "messy." They are often characterized by uncertainty, spatial and temporal scale issues, complexity and the like.2 They are problems which can be seen as emerging in and from sociobiophysical systems (see Figure 1): systems whose overall shape, character and evolution are determined by complex, often nonlinear interactions among social, biological, and physical subsystems. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is constrained by its history, yet is unpredictable on the basis of its component parts alone.3 In this paper I introduce an approach to messy problems based on nonequilibrium systems theories, briefly discuss some analytic examples of histories of messy problems, and explore a few implications of nonequilibrium systems approaches to describing, understanding, and managing environmental messes. The goal is to

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DOI

10.2307/3984387

OPENAIRE

doi_dedup___::38c9507d72e892360cb5d5ee1a10d782

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Article

Entity mentions are not evidence of legal recognition. Jurisdiction studied is separate from author affiliation country.

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OpenAIRE · Record 1

• DOI · https://doi.org/10.2307/3984387

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