Anthroecology theory combines ecosystem engineering, niche construction, cultural evolution, and social change (sociocultural niche construction) to understand the evolutionary dynamics that shape societies, ecosystems, communities, landscapes, biomes, and the biosphere over periods from many decades to millennia. Anthroecology theory holds that human societies gained the capacity to transform this planet through a runaway evolutionary process in which increasing intensities of sociocultural niche construction (the social and ecosystem engineering processes that enable more humans to be sustained on the same land area) were coupled with the scaling up of human societies through a system of positive feedbacks. This has resulted in ever larger-scale societies with ever larger populations shifting the Earth system towards a hotter, more polluted, less biodiverse and less wild state.
Is it possible for the environmental demands of human societies to shrink while populations continue to grow?
Results/Conclusions:
Larger scale societies are associated with more intensive niche construction processes and their more intensive environmental transformations, but this association cannot confirm whether these are mechanistically coupled through positive feedbacks. To test the bidirectional coupling of human societal scale and niche construction intensity and other hypotheses relating to long-term social-ecological change will require models capable of simulating long-term evolutionary changes in human societal scale and structure and their adaptations to and interactions with evolving populations, communities, and ecosystems, including environmental degradation, productivity enhancement, together with the complexities of environmental heterogeneity and stochasticity. While such models remain at an early stage of development, an agent-based virtual laboratory (ABVL) approach based on ‘growing’ human societies from the bottom-up together with evolving populations, communities and ecosystems shows great promise for developing and testing general theories on social–ecological interactions.
Can sociocultural evolutionary processes be guided towards better outcomes for both humanity and nonhuman nature? By developing virtual experimental approaches capable of testing hypotheses on the evolution of societies and the sociocultural niche construction regimes that sustain them, critical knowledge may be gained towards understanding and guiding societal interactions with the biosphere towards more desirable futures.