Ecological Economics 36 (2001) 361 – 364
NEWS AND VIEWS
The 2000 Kenneth Boulding Memorial Award
David J. Rapport
1Faculty of En6ironmental Design and Rural Planning,Uni6ersity of Guelph,Guelph,Ontario,Canada Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry,The Uni6ersity of Western Ontario London,Ontario,Canada
www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon
1. The Establishment of the Kenneth E. Boulding Memorial Award
In 1994, the International Society for Ecologi-cal Economics established the Kenneth Boulding Memorial Award as a tribute to our esteemed colleague, who was a founding member of ISEE. Professor Boulding made seminal contributions to economics, sustainable development, ecological economics and a host of other fields. This Award is presented, biennially, to an individual (or indi-viduals) who has contributed original and seminal approaches that have furthered our understanding of the interfaces between the social, ecological, ethical, economic, and political dimensions of our world. In the past this award has been given primarily in recognition of achievements within the domain of ecological economics. Our previous Award holders are Robert Goodland and Herman Daly (1994), Ann-Mari Jansson (1996) and Robert Costanza (1998).
Beginning with the 2000 Award, we are looking further afield than strictly ecological economics. However, the main criteria remains the same: this
distinction is to be awarded to scholars, who by their endeavors, have enriched our understanding of complex systems, particularly those aspects that integrate across the great divide between the social and natural sciences. This was, after-all, the hallmark of Kenneth Boulding’s writings. Ken-neth is best described as a highly imaginative original thinker and a ‘Renaissance Man’ who delved deeply into the domains of the social, natural and spiritual aspects of life; and as one who had a deep respect for the knowledge of the past, a grasp of the present frontiers and an eye to the future.
2. The Breadth of Boulding’s Scholarly Interests
I have commented previously on Kenneth’s per-sonal qualities, faith, and commitment to human betterment (Rapport, 1996). Here I discuss more of the scholarly nature of his work, drawing from his own article entitled: A bibliographical autobi-ography (Boulding, 1989) — a ‘must read’ for those who are interested in the diversity of Ken-neth’s intellectual quests. Those within ISEE who are familiar with Boulding’s writings on economy and ecology might be surprised to learn that these topics comprised but a mere 4% of his total
1David J. Rapport is the Chair of the Kenneth Boulding
Memorial Committee. Other Committee members for 2000 are Richard Norgaard and John Proops.
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output — or by Boulding’s own 1989 tabulation, these offerings consisted of only 43 items out of a total publication list of 1019 items (Boulding 1989). His bibliography represents six decades of scholarly contribution and comprises some 31-topic areas. Kenneth’s earliest writings date from when he was only 22, and lie in the field of price theory. His interests however expanded and con-tinued to expand throughout his lifetime to cover ever-wider domains. Boulding’s writing include essays on religion (Quakerism) (47 contributions), futurist studies, (147 contributions), Peace and conflict issues (152 contributions), General sys-tems (56 contributions), knowledge, information and education (112 contributions), and human betterment (44 contributions) — as well as several volumes of poetry. The extraordinary scope of Boulding’s scholarship can be gleaned from the title of just a small sampling of his writings: Boulding (1945, 1956, 1962, 1970, 1978a,b, 1985). To give but one of many examples of Bould-ing’s capacity to ‘think outside the box’, consider the measure he proposed to describe what he termed ‘integrative power’ as opposed to ‘threat power’ or ‘economic power’. Integrative power — the glue that holds society together, involves such aspects as respect, affection, love, etc. For Bould-ing ‘integrative power’, is the dominant form of power — more important than threat power and economic power. But how was it to be measured? That question led Kenneth to an investigation of the Grants economy, which had sprung up in the 1960s. He reasoned that a measure of integra-tive power could be obtained by elucidating the grants matrix — that is who gave what to whom and for what purpose. The details of his findings are in his book by the intriguing title:The Econ
-omy of Lo6e and Fear: A preface to Grants Eco
-nomics(Boulding, 1973).
Even attacking conventional subjects, Boulding had an uncanny capacity to show how many particulars are but reflections of more general principles. For example in considering ‘space’ as a factor of production (1980, reprinted in Boulding, 1992), he comments — that production underlies the existence of all objects, be they ourselves, human artifacts, other species, rivers, mountains, oceans, etc. All production processes, Boulding
suggests start out with the equivalent of ‘a genetic factor’ — which he terms ‘know-how’ (whether in the genes, or in blueprints). It is know-how, com-bined with energy for transport of selected materi-als to the place where production occurs, temperatures at which the process can occur, and energy for the transport of information or instruc-tions that allows things to come into existence.
Perhaps Kenneth’s most ambitious integration is embodied in two ‘laws’. The first he himself has referred to as ‘Boulding’s First Law’. It states that anything that exists must be possible; the second law, he refers to as D’Arcy Thompson’s Law. It states simply that everything is what it is because it got that way. From these two laws, Boulding derives two important corollaries: (1) Not every-thing that is possible exists, and (2) Everyevery-thing that is, did not have to be that way. Throughout his writings Boulding reveals himself to be strongly sympathetic to the concept of indeter-minism — as the corollaries suggest. Kenneth suggests that outcomes are often very much deter-mined by random events. He has often taken great delight in tracing particularly significant events in his own life that were determined by chance occurrences.
3. C.S. Holling’s Seminal Contributions to Understanding Complex Systems
In awarding the 2000 Kenneth Boulding Memorial Award to C.S. Holling, better known as ‘Buzz’, we are honoring an individual who has both contributed to scholarship of the highest order. Like Boulding, Holling demonstrated not only leadership within his discipline but a capacity to tackle problems of great complexity in many domains that defy simple classification.
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sects to food availability, work that still stands as linchpins to the formulation of modern predator-prey theory (Holling, 1965, 1966).
He soon moved on from a description of, rela-tively speaking, simple systems of predator-prey interaction, to models of complex dynamic of ecological – social interactions (Holling, 1969). In the early 1970s he was one of the pioneers of an approach to environmental management that has now become ‘mainstream’ but at the time was a giant leap forward. Termed ‘adaptive manage-ment’ the approach developed by Buzz and his University of British Columbia colleagues (includ-ing importantly Carl Walters) was well ahead of its time when first proposed in the 1970s (Holling and Chambers, 1973). The approach relies heavily on bringing stakeholders together in a sophisti-cated but ‘user friendly’ modeling environment so they are able to explore the consequences of vari-ous policy options for environmental management objectives. Early ‘field tests’ were carried out in the Gulf Islands (in the Straits of Georgia, be-tween Vancouver and Vancouver Island). Land use policies in that region (which protected the fragile habitats from overexploitation) have been heavily influenced by this approach to under-standing the complex dynamic of social/ecological interactions.
Holling also contributed substantively to a number of other social and ecological challenges. In particular, he contributed much to the quest for understanding the property of resilience in ecosystems. His 1973 paper on resilience of non-linear ecological systems stands as a major bench-mark in this area (Holling, 1973). He found a ready field application for this work — in exam-ining the perplexing temporal and spatial dynam-ics of Spruce Budworm infestations that are a major feature of the natural dynamics of the Canadian Eastern Boreal Forest (Holling, 1986). These cycles which reoccurred on roughly a 3 decade time scale, have historically periodically ravaged the Boreal forests of eastern Canada and as a consequence have prompted forest managers to advocate an aggressive pesticide spraying pro-gram. By understanding the complex dynamic of the boreal forest, and understanding the basis for its long-term resilience to repeated
spruce-bud-worm cycles, Holling’s work helped to demon-strate that efforts to control Spruce Budworm in eastern Canada through pesticide spraying pro-grams were counterproductive. Rather than restoring forest health, such interventions trans-formed episodic and natural perturbations of spruce budworm and host trees into chronic outbreaks.
Buzz is probably best known for his famous ‘figure 8 diagram’, which shows a natural process of ecological degradation and recovery, and the various influences (pressures) that drive the sys-tem and allow the syssys-tem to evolve and adapt (Holling, 1978). While Buzz was formulating these ideas in the early 70s, Rene´ Thom was developing his Theory of Catastrophes. Buzz was aware of Thom’s work and also the work of Joseph Schumpeter who had sketched some of the longer term dynamics in the macro economy. Ultimately Buzz’s conceptualizations appear to have been driven more by his own deep understanding of natural history and systems dynamics than by the abstractions of Rene´ Thom. Schumpeter’s ideas, however, undoubtedly influenced, at least obliquely, Holling’s formulation of the underlying dynamics for his ‘figure 8’. Coincidentally, Joseph Schumpeter also had an influence on the work of Kenneth Boulding and Kenneth went to Harvard in the fall of 1933 to work with him for several months.
In more recent years, Buzz has focused on a range of current environmental challenges. These include approaches the restoration of damaged ecosystems (Holling, 1994), biodiversity loss (Holling et al., 1995a) and the many facets of achieving ecologically sustainable development (Holling, 1993, 1994; Holling et al., 1995b, 1998; Gunderson and Holling, 2001).
D.J.Rapport/Ecological Economics36 (2001) 361 – 364 364
and his pioneering efforts towards the integration of social and natural systems.
References
Boulding, K.E., 1945. The Economics of Peace. Prentice-Hall, New York, NY.
Boulding, K.E., 1956. The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI. Boulding, K.E., 1962. Conflict and Defense: A General
The-ory. Harper, New York, NY.
Boulding, K.E., 1970. A Primer on Social Dynamics: History as Dialectics and Development. Free Press, New York, NY.
Boulding, K.E., 1973. The Economy of Love and Fear: A Preface to Grants Economics. Wadsworth, Belmont, CA. Boulding, K.E., 1978a. Ecodynamics: A New Theory of
Soci-etal Evolution. Sage, Beverly Hills, CA.
Boulding, K.E., 1978b. Stable Peace. University of Texas Press, Austin, TX.
Boulding, K.E., 1985. Human Betterment. Sage, Beverley Hills, CA.
Boulding, K.E., 1989. A bibliographical autobiography, reprinted in: Boulding, K.E. Towards A New Economics; Critical Essays on Ecology, Distribution and Other Themes. Edward Elgar Publishing Co, Aldershot, UK, pp. 3 – 26.
Gunderson, L., Holling, C.S. (Eds.), 2001. Creating Sustain-able Futures: Towards an Integrative Theory of Adaptive Change. Island Press (in press).
Holling, C.S., 1965. The functional response of predators to prey density and its role in mimicry and population regula-tion. Memoirs of the Entomology Society of Canada 45, 1 – 60.
Holling, C.S., 1966. The functional response of invertebrate predators to prey density. Memoirs of the Entomology Society of Canada 48, 1 – 86.
Holling, C.S., 1969. Stability in ecological and social systems. In: Symposium vol. 22. Brookhaven Symposia in Biology: No. 22.
Holling, C.S., 1973. Resilience and stability of ecological sys-tems. Annual Review of Ecology and Systems 4, 1 – 23. Holling, C.S., Chambers, A.D., 1973. Resource science: the
nurture of an infant. BioScience 23, 13 – 20.
Holling, C.S. (Ed.), 1978. Adaptive Environmental Assessment and Management. John Wiley and Sons, London, UK, 377 pp.
Holling, C.S., 1986. The resilience of terrestrial ecosystems; local surprise and global change. In: Clark, W.C., Munn, R.E. (Eds.), Sustainable Development of the Biosphere. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 292 – 317.
Holling, C.S., 1993. Investing in research for sustainability. Ecological Applications 3, 552 – 555.
Holling, C.S., 1994. New science and new investments for a sustainable biosphere. In: Jansson, A.M., Hammer, M., Folke, C., Costanza, R. (Eds.), Investing in Natural Capi-tal: The Ecological Economics Approach to Sustainability. Island Press, Solomons, MD.
Holling, C.S., Berkes, F., Folke, C., 1995a. Science, sustain-ability and resource management in the context of complex social and ecological systems. In: Linking Social and Eco-logical Systems: Institutional Learning for Resilience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Holling, C.S., Schlindler, D.W., Walker, B.W., Roughgarden, J., 1995b. Biodiversity in the functioning of ecosystems: an ecological synthesis. In: Perrings, C., Maler, K.G., Folke, C., Jansson, B.O., Holling, C.S. (Eds.), Biodiversity Loss: Economic and Ecological Issues. Cambridge University Press, New York, pp. 44 – 83.
Holling, C.S., Berkes, F., Folke, C., 1998. Science, sustainabil-ity and resource management. In: Berkes, F., Folke, C. (Eds.), Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Manage-ment Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Re-silience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, pp. 342 – 362.
Rapport, D.J., 1996. In memory of Kenneth E. Boulding. Ecological Economics 17, 67 – 71.
