Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire 31 Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire

EMERGY SYNTHESIS 2: Theory and Applications of the Emergy Methodology Proceedings from the Second Biennial Emergy Analysis Research Conference, Gainesville, Florida, September, 2001. Edited by Mark T. Brown University of Florida Gainesville, Florida Associate Editors Howard T. Odum University of Florida Gainesville, Florida David Tilley University of Maryland College Park, Maryland Sergio Ulgiati University of Siena Siena, Italy December 2003 The Center for Environmental Policy Department of Environmental Engineering Sciences University of Florida Gainesville, FL The Center for Environmental Policy P.O. Box 116450 vi Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire 31 Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire Thomas Abel ABSTRACT Emergy analysis was used to evaluate the impacts of recent ecotourism development on the island of Bonaire, N.A. One portion of that research focused on transformations in social structure. This paper will discuss the methods applied to this emergy analysis of socials structure. Comparison and contrast is made to more conventional models of “culture” in systems ecology. Results suggest that political-ecological considerations should be incorporated into the modeling of human systems by emergy researchers. This will result in researchers asking questions in different ways, and making significantly different policy recommendations. INTRODUCTION Energy Hierarchy and Sociocultural Self-Organization It can be argued that human-ecosystem relationships co-evolve through the mutual development of self-organizing autocatalytic processes that maximize empower in the system as a whole. In human prehistory, the self-organization of human population, rudimentary technologies, social structural differ- entiation, language and cultural models resulted in the capture of additional ecosystem energies for human groups. Human hierarchies of power and specialization long ago first emerged atop ecosystem food webs, transforming them in the process. Archaic state societies used military power and new technologies to manipulate stone, metal and water to reshape landscapes and to challenge large carnivores and herbivores for old and new ecosystem energies. Humans literally reshaped the food webs that supported themselves, and added new energies never before available to them. More recently, with the emergence of fossil fuel use by modern states and world systems (Waller- stein 1974), humans have added vast storages of additional energy to the biosphere. Additional energies, as state above, do not simply build new human structure atop natural ecosystems, but simultaneously transform natural systems in fundamental ways. For the small island of Bonaire in the south Caribbean Sea, extensive fossil fuel use has arrived in only the last half century. With widespread fuel use accompanying ecotourism development has come the emergence of new political-ecological specialization and hierarchy. This paper will briefly describe research that was conducted in the vein of systems ecology, ad- dressed to the event of ecotourism development on the island of Bonaire (Abel 2000). There were four spatial scales of analysis in the dissertation: the multinational scale (or world system scale, following Wallerstein (1974)), the island scale, the inter-island economic scale, and the household-farm scale. The focus of this paper is inter-island economic production and accompanying structural self-organization. It will not address the transformations in island, multinational or household economic scales that accom- panied ecotourism development. That analysis can be found in Abel (2000, 2001, 2002a, 2002b). The paper will conclude with a discussion of some unique features of the energy systems diagrams used in this paper, and with comparison to more traditional energy systems diagrams of social structure. -421- Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire Bonaire Sociocultural System The earth biosphere is an open thermodynamic system that is maintained ultimately by the sun, earth deep-heat, and lunar gravity. Over evolutionary time, sociocultural systems have self-organized with environmental systems in the biosphere. Sun, wind, rain, fuels, goods, services, etc., are emergy sources that drive human-ecosystems and sociocultural systems on Bonaire and elsewhere. Figure 1 is a highly aggregated context diagram of Bonaire’s sociocultural system. While its focus is the human system, it is essential to identify the driving energies from other spatial-temporal scales that make that system possible. The Bonaire sociocultural system is dependent upon environmental production, geologic processes, ocean currents, imported fossil fuels, other goods and services, financial aid, loans, and other sources. These are identified in the context diagram and were evaluated in the island-international scale analysis (Abel 2000, 2002b). Figure 2 is a detailed view of Bonaire’s sociocultural system. The term “sociocultural system” was chosen over “culture” because the later is often conceived as human symbolic behavior alone. The term sociocultural system more precisely conveys the fact that humans have co-evolved an integrated repertoire of symbolic behavior plus material assets, technologies, and social structure, each within a language context. In Figure 2, these components are identified with separate storage symbols. They are assembled from left to right, suggesting differences in turnover time. They are joined by a single interaction symbol, indicating that no component is “prior,” each is potentially limiting, and all may amplify production with autocatalytic feedback. In systems terms, they are co-products of humanity. The storage of symbolic “culture” is here labeled “cultural models” to avoid confusion with the Figure 1. Bonaire Sociocultural System and Support -422- Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire Figure 2. Sociocultural System prior imprecise term, to accentuate the fact that symbolizing behavior is only one component within the larger sociocultural system, and to draw our attention to recent social scientists’ contentions (Holland and Quinn 1987) that symbolic culture is composed of countless cultural models that interact, sharing themes or postulates, that are constantly evolving or being re-negotiated, and that constitute their own system, one that profoundly and fundamentally shapes the ways we see the world. The prime focus of this paper is another of the storages in Figure 2, the storage of “social structure”. Social structure is a broad term that may refer to the political-economy, division of labor, or, in a term of growing popularity, the political-ecology of a society. In ecosystem terms it is equivalent to structural diversity. Diversity, division of labor, structure, these terms imply division between units. What are the units? The researcher’s answer to this question fundamentally shapes the social science that they will perform. For the current research, that answer is given below. It is a principle of systems science that systems self-organize into energy transformation hierarchies. Figure 3 depicts a hierarchy from five different perspectives. Figure 3b shows a typical hierarchy that could be an ecosystem with plant producers on the left and animal consumers on the right, concentrating food in a food web that is capped by one or several top carnivores. The energy that moves through that web is highlighted in the Figure 3d bar graph, with energy amounts shrinking as they move up the web. Figure 3e shows the emergy amounts, which by definition are equal at all levels in the web. On Bonaire, human subsistence production is manifest in a web of market and non-market production subsystems that form an energy transformation hierarchy as in Figure 3. Bonaire does not possess every conceivable economic production subsystem. Figure 4 provides a way to depict the production subsystems that do exist on Bonaire, and how they are related to one another. The features of this drawing (compare to Figure 3b) depict the unique nature of the Bonaire web of political-ecological production subsystems. Figure 4 is an unusual systems diagram. Systems diagramming is normally used to simplify a complex network of interactions, in order to identify determinant flows and processes. Figure 4 is intended instead to be thematic, to depict a pattern of flow and process. As a model of a sociocultural system, Figure 4 has a number of other unique features. The indi- -423- Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire Figure 3. Energy Transformation Hierarchy. Adapted from (Odum 1996:23). (a) Spatial view of units and territories, (b) Energy network including transformation and feedback, (c) Aggregation of energy networks into an energy chain, (d) Bar graph of energy flows for the levels in an energy hierarchy, (e) Bar graph of emergy flows for the levels in the same hierarchy. The emergy flow is the same at each pathway, but the energy flow decreases at each step. -424- Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire Figure 4. Bonaire’s Web of Political-Ecological Production vidual units are household types. Each household contains the storages of a sociocultural system, assets (including the house itself), people, a small division of labor, cultural models (specialized by education and experience), and language (negotiated and reproduced by each household in interaction with others). In a recursive or fractal sense, households

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