To understand sustainability, it is important to look at one of the most transformative ecological times in the United States: colonialism.
The map below uses the ball and basin model to show the environmental changes that occurred during colonialism in New England. The Native American actions were more sustainable, therefore they are in a deep basin far from crossing ecological thresholds. An ecological threshold is where a small disturbance in environmental conditions causes a large change in an ecosystem. With the European values of commodification, colonists imposed an unsustainable structure that hurt New England’s diverse patchwork. Colonists were constantly crossing thresholds. This model emphasizes how the colonists arriving made deep basins become shallow.
Panarchy (the infinity symbol) uses the stages: growth (r), conservation (K), release (Ω), and reorganization (⍺). It is used to show adaptive cycles occurring, which is a part of Walker and Salt’s “resilience” concept; the ability of people and an ecosystem to respond to a disturbance. Colonists attempt to remain in the K phase which ultimately creates a non-resilient institution and causes the diverse land to become grazing land for livestock. The natives are able to maintain the diverse patchwork through adapting to the environment in different stages, creating a resilient institution.
It is important to emphasize how at the top of the map above, the colonists’ values lead to the positive feedback loop of ecological degradation. To understand more about the different values and uses of the land by natives versus colonists, look at the map below.
While natives value usufruct rights, colonists value commodification, which leads to the tragedy of the commons: in a shared-resource system where individual users act independently according to their own self-interest, rather than for the good of the whole.
Sources: (Cronon, 2011) ; (Walker and Salt, 2006) ; (Howarth, 2011); (Mainelli and Harris, 2014)