In addition to offering a means of closing C. P. Snow´s famous ‘gap´ between the biophysical sciences and the social sciences/humanities, the practice of historical ecology unites academic knowledge with ‘common sense,´ the empirical observation of the world that for millennia has enabled our species to accommodate change.

In contrast with a flurry of recent literature examining societal collapse, historical ecology offers the tools to search for viable solutions to recurrent problems of resource scarcity and degradation.

Many historic and contemporary examples of wise resource management offer lessons and fresh ideas to meet today´s challenges.

We are particularly interested in historical and contemporary agro-pastoral and forestry management practices. In Burgundy (France), this has enabled us to link farreaching and homogenous agricultural policies to regional environmental change and to their specific effects on family farms.

This detailed narrative of linked human activity, climate change, and environmental impacts over the longue durée offers an unparalleled resource — a "worked example"— for the shaping of policy and the implementation of sustainable management strategies well beyond the region we study.

About Carole L. Crumley
Carole L. Crumley is Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (USA).

She is active in IGBP, having served on the PAGES SSC (2000-2006), and is currently a member of the SSCs of AIMES and IHOPE.

Among her books are Regional Dynamics (1987), Historical Ecology (1994), Heterarchy and the Analysis of Complex Societies (1995), New Directions in Anthropology and Environment (2001) and, as editor with Alf Hornborg, The World System and the Earth System (2007).

Her interests combine archaeology, ethnohistory and ethnography, geology, historical and contemporary climatology, and complex systems science.