Social Ecology in the Digital Age – Solving Complex Problems in a Globalized World

Social Ecology in the Digital Age
406 pages Pages
ISBN 9780128141885

Humanity is facing a perfect storm of existential threats from global climate change, pollution, and cybercrime to poverty, food insecurity, and the perils of nuclear war. Digital technologies have dramatically altered and added new complexities to people’s relationships with their environments. These challenges cannot be managed adequately from narrow disciplinary or political perspectives. At a time of growing nationalism and polarization, integrative collaborative approaches are needed more than ever. In a refreshingly personal narrative detailing his own four-decade academic journey, Stokols distills key principles of social ecology and offers a robust framework for transdisciplinary research and problem-solving. Informative and engaging, the book is essential reading for students, educators, government leaders and citizens working to meet the global challenges of the 21st Century.

• the book traces historical origins and conceptual foundations of biological, human, and social ecology

• offers a new conceptual framework that brings together earlier approaches to social ecology and extends them in novel directions

• highlights the interrelations between four distinct but closely intertwined spheres of human environments: our natural, built, sociocultural, and virtual (cyber-based) surroundings

• spans local to global scales and individual, organizational, community, regional, and global levels of analysis

• applies core principles of social ecology to identify multi-level strategies for promoting personal and public health, resolving complex social problems, managing global environmental change, and creating resilient and sustainable communities

• underscores social ecology’s vital importance for understanding and managing the environmental and political upheavals of the 21st Century

• highlights descriptive, analytic, and transformative (or moral) concerns of social ecology

• presents strategies for educating the next generation of social ecologists emphasizing trandisciplinary, team-based, translational, and transcultural approaches

Social Ecology in the Digital Age is grounded in scientific research but written in a personal and informal style from the vantage point of a former student, current teacher and scholar who has contributed over four decades to the field of social ecology. The book will be of interest to scholars, students, educators, government leaders and community practitioners working in several fields including social and human ecology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, criminology, law, education, biology, medicine, public health, earth system and sustainability science, geography, environmental design, urban planning, informatics, public policy and global governance.

Daniel Stokols

About Daniel Stokols (Miami, Florida Author)

Daniel Stokols

Daniel Stokols is Research Professor and Chancellor's Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. His research spans the fields of social ecology, environmental and ecological psychology, public health, and transdisciplinary team science.

He has served as a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, National Academies of Science, W.M. Keck Foundation, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and several community organizations. Stokols served as founding dean of UCI’s School of Social Ecology. He is author of Social Ecology in the Digital Age (2018) http://bit.ly/2uqjqlz and co-author of Behavior, Health, and Environmental Stress (1986), the National Academy of Sciences report on Enhancing the Effectiveness of Team Science (2015), and co-editor of the Handbook of Environmental Psychology (1987), Environmental Simulation (1993) and Promoting Human Wellness (2002).