Browsing by Author "Low, Bobbi S."

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Behavioral Ecology of Conservation in Traditional Societies
(1994) Low, Bobbi S.
"Today, as we face increasingly complex environmental problems, of ever-enlarging scale, we are faced by a dilemma: our ideas about what we should do to solve these problems are based on conventional wisdoms about our conservation ethics, and our willingness to trust and cooperate with others. One 'wisdom' is our perception that people in pre-industrial ('traditional') societies, being more directly and immediately dependent on the ecology of the natural systems around them, were more conserving and respectful of those resources than we. Another is that, perhaps because traditional people typically lived in small groups (often among kin), they were likelier to be willing to sacrifice personal benefit for the good of the group, when conditions demanded it. "We feel we have, in important ways, 'lost touch' with ecological constraints as we have developed technological insulation against ecological scarcity and fluctuations -- and thus that we may have drifted away from ecological concern and from cooperativeness. Thus, we find ourselves thinking that if only we could recapture the reverence and cooperativeness of traditional societies, and expand it, we could solve our problems. These conventional wisdoms generate normative prescriptions: that in addition to more information about the impact of our actions on ecological balances, we need to become more reverent, to move closer to the ideal we hold of traditional peoples' patterns."
The Behavioral Ecology of Trust and Cooperation
(1993) Low, Bobbi S.
"Scholars in apparently disparate fields--e.g., economics, biology, political science --are currently converging in interest on the problem of cooperation. Competition among individuals over resources is virtually universal; cooperation among individuals (often in precisely the same context of resource competition) is rarer. The form of the resource is important: whether an individual or group can exclude competing individuals ('private goods,' Ostrom and Ostrom 1977; examples in biology are territorially, or the immediate consumption of small patches of resources); or whether the resource constitutes a commons. Bleak forecasts of over-exploitation due to individually-rational, group destructive behaviors are common. Yet there are two encouraging trends. First, there is some evidence that evolved selfishness can, perhaps, be harnessed in cooperatively useful ways. Second, cooperation does exist, and can be a powerful force. Recent work begins to delineate the conditions under which we expect more, rather than less, cooperative behavior in resource acquisition, and the conditions under which we predict longer-term (less discounting, less extractive) strategies of resource use. The problems are still complex, and exist at a variety of levels, from small communities to international. My purpose here is to step back from complex situations, and examine cooperation in non-human species and in pre-industrial human societies, seeking commonalities which perhaps can then be used in teasing apart more complex examples."
An Evolutionary Perspective on War
(1992) Low, Bobbi S.
"Conflict is as old as life. In fact, if evolutionary and behavioral ecological theory are correct, conflicts of interest, if not open aggression, are universal among living things. While some authors (e.g. Ferrill 1985) suggest that the origins of war are simply prehistoric, an evolutionary or behavioral ecologist would argue that by any functional definition, war--lethal conflict-- is older than humanity itself. From an evolutionary perspective, two considerations have profound consequences: the reproductive impacts for individuals of fighting and killing (including formal war), and the potential conflicts of interest among different individuals involved in conflict. To examine the evolution of war, I will begin not with complex and formal international military conflicts, but with much simpler conflict in non-human species, asking: Over evolutionary time, what has been the ecological context of conflict and killing in hominids and other mammals? Under what ecological circumstances are these likely to occur, and what are the costs and benefits to the individuals involved? The functional nature of conflict may become clearer in these simpler cases; then more complex cases may be amenable to approach."
Framework for Modeling the Linkages between Ecosystems and Human Systems
(1996) Cleveland, Cutler; Costanza, Robert; Eggertsson, Thráinn; Fortmann, Louise; Low, Bobbi S.; McKean, Margaret A.; Ostrom, Elinor; Wilson, James; Young, Oran R.
"We hypothesize that sustainability requires human systems that are concordant at appropriate scales with the ecosystems to which they are related, given the limits of human information processing. Many current governance and management systems are at a scale which is either too large or too small for the ecosystems to which they are related, leading to unsustainable policies for these systems. Problems often occur when human systems developed and sustainable at one scale or for one ecosystem or for one part of an ecosystem are transferred without adequate modification to other scales and ecosystems or to the whole system. In this paper we develop an analytical framework for treating human systems, ecosystems, and their interactions simultaneously. We developed and initial dynamic, multiscale, spatial model that illustrates some of the core concepts of the framework. We are in the process of developing multiscale conceptual and mathematical models and empirical data bases, including a range of ecosystem and human system characteristics, aimed at testing our hypothesis and providing guidance for designing sustainable human systems within sustainable ecosystems."
Population, Resources, and Environment: Implications of Human Behavioral Ecology for Conservation
(1990) Low, Bobbi S.; Heinen, Joel T.
From p. 2: "Here we examine human resource use in a behavioral ecological context, generating testable predictions about resource use patterns, and making specific recommendations about strategies to promote wise resource use which should be adopted if a behavioral ecological, rather than the traditional view, is correct. As we explain in the next section, a behavioral ecological approach argues that humans, like all other living organisms, evolved to get resources in order to survive and reproduce, and that individual and familial well-being has always been central, while the good of the group has never been relevant. We argue that natural selection has shaped all living organisms to exploit resources effectively, in competition with each other, and that our problem is that through our cleverness,we have created a novel evolutionary circumstance--we have such technology that the very behaviors we evolved to perform are those likely to ruin us."
Reduncancy and Diversity in Governing and Managing Common-Pool Resources
(2000) Low, Bobbi S.; Ostrom, Elinor; Simon, Carl P.; Wilson, James
"In many fields, policymakers seem to have an increasing preference for simple, large, non- redundant systems of analysis and governance. To address this question, we examine several arenas in which scholars have studied the costs and benefits of different levels of redundancy, including: ecological resiliency, computer design, aircraft design, genetics and genetic algorithms, condercet jury theory, and regulatory regimes. Both empirical data and models suggest that a simple prescription is, at best, premature--bigger and less redundant may not always be 'better.' We find that several kinds of costs and benefits must be considered, and they do not co- vary uniformly with size and redundancy. We suggest that a better approach is to ask: For any system, what is the optimal level of redundancy?"
The Relationship between Ecosystems and Human Systems: Scale Challenges in Linking Property Rights Systems and Natural Resource Management
(1995) Cleveland, Cutler; Costanza, Robert; Eggertsson, Thráinn; Fortmann, Louise; Low, Bobbi S.; McKean, Margaret A.; Ostrom, Elinor; Wilson, James; Young, Oran R.
"We hypothesize that successful sustainability requires human social systems that are concordant with the ecosystem to which they are related at appropriate scales given the limits of human information processing. Many current governance and management systems are either too large or too small for the ecosystems to which they are related, leading to inappropriate policies for these systems. Problems often occur when human systems developed and sustainable at one scale or for one ecosystem or for one part of an ecosystem are transferred to other scales and ecosystems or to the whole system without adequate modification. In order to test this hypothesis, we are developing multiscale conceptual and mathematical models and data bases that include a range of ecosystem characteristics and human system characteristics."
Review of Five Student Papers
(1995) Low, Bobbi S.
Papers reviewed include: (1) Dulcey L. Simpkins, Land Trusts: Common Pool Resources Face A Capitalist Context; (2) Melinda L. Graham, The Farmers Market Of Ann Arbor, Michigan: A Contemporary Urban Common Property Regime; (3) Christopher E. Morrow and Rebecca Watts Hull, Cofyal: The Rise And Fall Of An Indigenous Forestry Cooperative; (4) Mary Mitsos, The Breakdown Of The Commons And The Loss Of Saami Culture; (5) William D. Leach, Applying Common Property Theory To Suburban Resource Systems.
Scale Misperceptions and the Spatial Dynamics of a Social-Ecological System
(1998) Wilson, James; Low, Bobbi S.; Costanza, Robert; Ostrom, Elinor
From pg. 4: "While answers to these questions are critical to the design of appropriate management regimes, it is almost impossible to get sufficient empirical data to test these hypotheses. One can, however, build models of panmictic and metapopulations to explore these questions. Consequently, here we explore a series of illustrative models in which local populations - modeled as either panmictic or metapopulation structures - are managed as if they comprised a single large population. These models are a dynamic version of the generic bioeconomic model of a single stock (Clark, Anderson) and are used to investigate the circumstances under which common regulatory procedures might lead to depletion of the fishery."