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 differentiation, 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, addressed 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.

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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

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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-

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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.

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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 are thought to be imbedded within a larger sociocultural system. The units in this diagram represent household types and not individual households, of which there are approximately 3,300 on Bonaire. Data for households and companies was collected during the 14-month fieldwork through interviews and published sources. Two household surveys were conducted by the author. Informal interviews were conducted with part-time farmers and a model was constructed of farming on Bonaire. Formal interviews with owners and managers of companies were conducted. Over 30 emergy analyses were performed. From those analyses the arrangement of households with companies are placed on Figure 4. Households with lower emergy flows are placed further on the left, while those with large flows are placed on the right. This is analogous to ecosystem webs, in which species that converge greater amounts of emergy are placed on the right, while species with more individuals but less emergy converged per individual are placed on the left. Figure 5 is an aggregated diagram of figure 4. This more conventional diagram groups processes by energy flow into “trophic” levels. This highly simplified diagram makes visible the natural plant and animal production that in part supports the Bonaire system. Notice that the Bonaire sociocultural system has been broken into three lumps. This arrangement is based on emergy analyses in Abel (2000). Figure 6 is a detailed look at the concept of political-ecological hierarchy produced by the ownership or control of asset storages. As is depicted in this diagram, labor households control very modest storages of assets. Owner/manager households, by contrast, control large asset storages that can be used to feedback and amplify production to themselves. This simple strategy, it is argued (Abel 2000), has co- evolved with human populations through millennia, resulting in the emergence of sociocultural hierarchy

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Figure 5. Aggregated Political-Ecological System. This more conventional diagram groups processes by energy flow into “trophic” levels. The arrangement of three sociocultural levels is based on emergy analyses in Abel (2000).

in chiefdoms, archaic states, modern states, and world systems. In Figure 6, owner/manager households are depicted that control vast storages of assets, which range from machines and factories to the legal deeds and police/military apparatus that guarantee their private ownership. Money (dotted lines) moves in counter-current to emergy flows. It should be re-emphasized that there is an “informational” component included among the asset storages of any household. By definition, “specialization” implies that individual laborers in state econo- mies are specialized in their knowledge and skills. Those cultural models that compose that special training are the informational component that helps to construct and maintain the web of social structure. For contrast and comparison, a more conventional system diagram is presented in Figure 7. Systems diagramming from Odum (1983) is a very flexible diagramming tool. Utilizing a handful of fundamental objects, complex systems of many forms can be represented. Theory of hierarchy, scale, convergence, and self-organization are embodied in a limited set of diagramming conventions that model- ers apply across systems. While no conventions, per se, exist for fragmenting human activity into named system objects, a review of several volumes by their pioneer (Odum 1983, 1996, Odum and Odum 2002) yields some often repeated designs. A number of these informal conventions are here addressed and can be found in Figure 7. The theory of social organization in this type of diagram is significantly different from the approach outlined in this paper. These differences are not simply differences of aggregation, but encode a distinctively different model of sociocultural causality. Applications of one model or the other to real-world problems will result in different explanations (and thus different recommendations to policy makers, etc.). It is therefore essential that the underlying, implicit models be made explicit and analyzed. This is not a novel recommendation. Social science has undergone a “post-modern” revolution

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Figure 6. Political-Ecological Structure of Households and Storages. This diagram uses symbols to represent the hierarchy of households. Labor households on the left possess simple households and few additional assets like personal automobiles. Owner/manager households own or control larger household assets, plus company assets, which they use to feed-back and control other scales in the hierarchy. Dotted lines are money flows, which move in counter-current to emergy flows.

in recent decades, in which all researchers have been challenged to critically examine their theoretical assumptions, and the political-economic context of science more generally. Power, ethnicity, gender, class—these issues were mostly absent from the “functional” social theory that emerged in the 1950s- 1960s, which often viewed society as a superorganism of cooperating components. With this anatomist’s or engineer’s model of society, parts are “functions” with names such as “industry” or “education”. Parts may be criticized as functioning well or ill. There is no explanation for the appearance and persistence of parts other than to provide their assigned function. People have a limited role in this model beyond fine tuning these functions and consuming the many goods and services produced (as in Figure 7). This analytic model has been largely abandoned today by sociologists and anthropologists, though it persists in neoclassical economic theory whenever society is divided into economic “sectors”, and arguably remains a dominant cultural model in American society. In the political-ecological model described here, society is not a machine or an organism. It is instead a system constructed of countless nearly identical parts. These parts are households of people. How does a sociocultural system produce the distinctive functions in a production hierarchy from identical parts? In state societies, people are differentiated by specialized training, assets, race, gender, class, power, ethnicity, and other features (Hawley 1988). The differentiation of people and households can have a horizontal dimension, distinguished by function or identity, and a vertical dimension, distinguished by power and class. In state societies, coercive power is exercised by state elites through their monopoly of punitive and judicial assets. Other forms of power are produced in the market, such as the economic power exerted by employers over employees. This characterization of social structure is a political- economic model. If the functionalist’s focus on economic production is adapted to a political-economic model, the result is a political-ecological theory. In this political-ecological model described in this paper, households are organized in a hierarchy of convergence, in which natural resources, goods, and services are converged into storages controlled by fewer individuals. In this model, punitive assets (courts, weapons,

-427- Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire prisons) and production assets (mines, refineries, shipping and others) are concentrated in the hands of few elites,. All assets in this model will function in a manifest sense to produce goods and services. In a latent sense, furthermore, these assets feed-back for the maintenance or dynamic reproduction of the household hierarchy that constitutes the system. To be clear, political-ecological hierarchies in this model are argued to “function” ultimately in the same sense as “functionalist” social models, to maximize empower. In other words, it is contended that political-ecological models result in food being produced, services provided, goods manufactured, wars fought, children educated, and so on. The difference is that those functions are provided (in state societies) by the emergence of political-ecological production hierarchies. The result of either model is the world we find around us. Recommendations to policy makers, etc., however, may be very different. While one approach might argue for greater efficiency in industry, transportation, or security, another would seek solutions in global social justice, or international trade equity. Consider the US automobile dilemma, for example. The functionalist approach might argue that buying luxury automobiles is wasteful behavior (Odum and Odum 2002:176). Recommendations would be to legislate for smaller automobiles. If those recommendations go unheeded it can be claimed that the political process is “irrational” or worse. In contrast, from a political-ecological perspective, it can be argued that luxury automobiles contribute to the maintenance of the owner’s position in the existing political-ecological hierarchy. Second, at a societal scale, growth in the US auto industry amplifies production nation-wide, assuring the position of economic elites and politicians within the political-ecological hierarchy. This approach, therefore, allows us to understand the behavior of consumers and politicians as rational. It also leads us to very different recommendations for action. Conspicuous spending, it would appear, is ultimately the (rational) result of the continued political-military-financial hegemony of the US over its many peripheries. A system with financial instruments that depend on growth, that demand growth, must at a minimum, maintain a “region” of growth even as global production plateaus. The US

Figure 7 . A Regional System. Adapted from Odum (1983:537).

-428- Chapter 31. Social Structure and Ecotourism Development on Bonaire appears to be using its superpower status to isolate itself and other core nations and to maintain growth at a sub-global scale. However, if global production is indeed plateauing due to diminishing returns from finite oil supplies (Odum and Odum 2002), this sub-global growth can only be achieved to the detriment of other nations. This is a precarious path to say the least. Global social injustice can only breed resentment, which will surely be expressed violently by those affected nations. The global scale, it is argued by the political-ecological model, is the scale at which to address solutions. Achieve global economic equity, and the automobile dilemma, for instance, will take care of itself because regional and isolated growth will be replaced by a global production slowdown. To indicate the distance between the functionalist model and the political-ecological approach proposed in this paper, Figure 8 superimposes the functionalist model on the Bonaire political-ecological model. Labor from households located anywhere in the household web may contribute to the education sector, the government sector, the religion sector, etc. Therefore, in this design, “education” has no clear position in the Bonaire production hierarchy, nor does “government”, “religion”, transport”, “mining”, “health” or any other function. To summarize, Figure 9 depicts the general differences between the functionalist and political- ecological perspectives. The major points are highlighted here:

1. Both depict social organization as an assemblage of units in an energy hierarchy. 2. In the political-ecology model (Figure 9b), units are households and the assets they control. In the functionalist model (9a), units are storages of people, “information”, and abstract

Figure 8. Institutions in Web Diagram

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functions, often labeled economic sectors or “corporate functions” (Hawley 1986). 3. In the political-ecology model, households are organized in a web of production specializa- tions, which distinguish them “functionally” (from top to bottom in a systems diagram). This is analogous to the self-organization of species within a trophic level. Species morphologies are analogous to the people and assets that compose a production specialization. 4. In the political-ecology model, households are organized in a power hierarchy (from left to right in the diagram) by the unequal or differential control of productive assets and resources by individuals or groups. This is analogous to the self-organization of trophic levels in an energy hierarchy. 5. In the functionalist model (9a), people are not differentiated horizontally or vertically, not by knowledge, assets, or power. Instead, abstracted functions are assembled in a hierarchy, capped by a single tank of people and the cultural “information” they produce. There is only a weak analogy here to ecosystem models because the latter are always assemblages of actual species (and not the functions they might perform in an ecosystem), and because “information” in ecosystems is usually represented by the ecosystem web itself.

CONCLUSIONS

The material nexus of sociocultural systems is ultimately anchored to individual persons or households. In state societies, households differentiate themselves by the alliances they form, the assets they control, and the technologies they command, all within an ecological and demographic context. We in state societies do not easily see the complex web of power that was woven over millennia to protect and defend the social inequality that constitutes the production hierarchy. We rarely perceive that the extant hierarchy of economic “sectors”, occupations, and class privilege that surrounds us is a human construction. However, unlike an ecosystem web, composed of disparate species, a human sociocultural hierarchy of production is composed only of people and the assets they control. Private ownership and control of those assets in state societies is defended by the power of professional militaries, a relatively recent cultural evolutionary phenomenon. A social hierarchy that is constructed from people and their assets encodes a social model different from the functionalist’s. Economic “functions” can still be represented, now as aggregations of like owners and assets. But in addition, important and determinant (at some scale) aggregations of ethnicity, gender, or class can be shown, with components organized within hierarchies maintained by power. From this perspective, the activities of government elite’s or their agencies that are sometimes labeled irrational or “pathological” (Holling et al. 1998) can become explicable. Agencies may in fact have many “functions,” some explicit, but perhaps most are less visible and aligned to the reproduction of political-ecological hierarchies. A desirable approach to understanding sociocultural dynamics could be one that incorporates at a theoretical level a model of ecosystems dynamics. Complex system theory applied to sociocultural systems should give equal weight to understanding the dynamics of matter and energy in addition to the “informational” components most commonly emphasized by social theorists or managers. Furthermore, not only must emphasis be placed on the use of material resources by humans, but complex, thermodynamic models of structure and function must be more broadly applied to theory of human social structure and organizational dynamics, observed at local, regional and world systems scales.

REFERENCES

Abel, T. 2000. Ecosystems, Sociocultural Systems, and Ecological-Economics for Understanding De- velopment: The Case of Ecotourism on the Island of Bonaire, N.A. Dissertation, University of Florida. Abel, T. 2001. “Evaluating Ecotourism with Ecological Economics: A Case Study from Bonaire,” in Vi-

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Figure 9. Functionalist vs. Political-Ecological Model

sions, Missions and Misconceptions of Caribbean Tourism. Edited by C. Jayawardena. Kingston: The University of the West Indies. Abel, T. 2002a. Ecotourism and Household Self-Organization on Bonaire. ms. Abel, T. 2002b. Systems Thinking Redux: The Case of Ecotourism on Bonaire. ms. Holland, D., and N. Quinn. 1987. Cultural Models in Language and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Odum, H. T. 1983. Systems Ecology. New York: John Wiley. Odum, H. T. 1996. Environmental Accounting: Emergy and Decision Making. New York: John Wiley.

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