Complexity

Over the last few decades, the concept of the sustainability of modern society has been widely discussed by policy makers, scholars, and scientists around the world. They have been investigating whether human’s ability to maintain short-term resilience and long-term sustainability of this fragile planet has been scaled down by series of environmental and societal stresses those are beyond human’s control (Espinosa and Walker 2011). As humans are the most complex living thing on Earth, with elite brains, complex evolutionary history and our societies are complex system. With such complexity surrounded, humans have to explain the world as a more contesting level as it was in the past.  The old models are failing to investigate human-environment relationships because they usually discount complexity, disregard individual-level information, or fail to integrate multi-scale or interdisciplinary. Therefore, these approaches will result in a great loss and inaccurate in predictive or explanatory power (Kyke 1993). This paper will discuss fascinating opportunities offered by understandings of complexity, system and scale to assist the evaluation of sustainability issue via the case study of Easter Island.

The word complexity was coined base on two Latin words “com” (together), and “plectere” (entwine) (Kyke 1993). Sanders (2003) states that complexity is a science that helps to analyse a growing body with interdisciplinary information about its organization, and behaviour, in which components are strongly interconnected, self-organise, and dynamic. To have a complex, there must be two or more separate parts those have to be connected in a way they cannot be detached. Therefore, when analysing a complex, it is necessary to use an approach that sustains the parts and the connectivity of the parts (Heylighen et. al 2007). Furthermore, dynamic of changes in an explicit component would result in a complex adaptive system. Elements in complex adaptive system are not only interact and respond to the environment but also have complex interactions with others in order to fulfil the purpose of the system. Examples of complex adaptive system are widespread and appear in both natural and human environment, such as rain forests, immune system, stock market, and economy. Dare and Dodder (2000, p 8) define complexity as ‘complex and patterned output arises from simple, fundamental principles, but requires many actors and multiple interactions over time to produce the emergent complexity.’ From Sanders and Dare and Doddder’s definitions, it is obvious that none of the definitions give mutually exclusive idea. However, these two definitions can result in ambiguity and a tendency to understand systems as complex in a slightly chaotic manner.

Complexity is quite a new approach that has become popular for the last 25 years. As high speed computing, computer graphics, remote sensing, and nanotechnology have been developed rapidly, humans need a new approach to understand this complex world. Complexity has been introduced as a new approach which has replaced the opposite approach “reductionism” that was a very popular philosophy of science during the 1950s (Kyke 1993) (analyse a system by only looking at individual elements, interactions are ignored). The story of Easter Island in the 17^th century is a model for societal collapse when natural resources are exploited. Hunt (2006) debates that Easter Island’s story is much more complex than normal discussion of collapse. When take the island and its people to analyse a more complex set of problems, we can start by looking at the island and its people as components of a system.

The concept of system has been understood as ‘an entity that maintains its existence through the mutual interaction of its parts’ (von Bertanlanffy 1968). System is a collection of interconnected components with a purpose that operate together to generate a coherent whole. Systems have emergent properties means the behaviour of the system is different from the properties of each individual components (Moore 2011). Tracing back to Easter Island where it is a small island in a group of Polynesia Islands, there are a lot of components to the island and its societies, hence if an individual part of a culture fails, other parts do not disappear. However, if a social or ecological threshold is passed, the system will operate differently where some parts of the original system will become extinct and the interaction between components of the new system will be different. As there were a lot of interactions between parts or components on Easter Island, this story becomes complex where there are numerous of variables in operation (Bender et. al 2011). For example, rats and smallpox were introduced by European when they came for trading goods, or slave trading ships that scaled down the population of Easter Island by sending Rapa Nui people overseas as slaves (Munro 1997). Drawing a boundary around a system can also assist us to understand what are in a complex system. When evaluating sustainability of Easter Island, there is numerous ways to draw the boundary, for example we can draw a boundary around Rapa Nui society, or around the whole island. As Bender et. al (2011) argues that the boundary is moveable, so it is critical to pinpoint and consider the boundary wisely. It is not enough to evaluate the sustainability of Easter Island by just using reductionism approach to understand Easter Island because we just focus on a single aspect. Sustainability in complex system cannot be obtained if we just focus on achieving sustainability for each individual element. This is because sustainability in a complex system is something that is conditioned to co-evolute with its sub-systems. Therefore, it is very misleading to state that overwhelming deforestation is the reason for Easter Island societal collapse.

As mentioned, boundary is moveable and there is a spatial and temporal element that affects the identification of system’s boundary. Therefore, it is important to understand whether Easter Island would collapse or cultivate if all that was sustained was the palm forest. Sneddon et. al (2002) states ‘The importance of thinking about scale in the study of human-environment relations cannot be overstated; it is one of the central problems of ecology … and of the most vexing concepts in social theory ….’ Furthering this statement, when study human-environment relationship (which is important to support the idea of sustainability), it is important to consider scale because it is one of the most critical and problematic concepts in ecological and social studies. Choosing different scales are like adjusting the focal length of a camera in which we can observe a problem in a macro and micro point of view as we cannot understand a problem when we cannot see it. Therefore, scale can open fascinating opportunities to discover new characteristics of a system, hence new and innovative solutions can be found to achieve sustainability. When consider Easter Island as a system (complex), we need to evaluate how this island could be nourished physically and spiritually. As we change the focal length of the camera to look at the palm forest from which the Rapa Nui constructed their built environment. It is questionable that how these systems and their components become sustainable. For instance, what was the sustainable way to nourish the palm forest on Easter Island and how sustainable was the palm forest. Spatial and ecological scale can be used to analyse these question. In the book “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed” Diamond (2005) discusses how ancient civilisations around the world collapsed by using spatial scale. For example, the Mayan had their forest burned down to cultivate maize, hence serious erosion occurred. As a result, the Maya destroyed the civilisation themselves in which we know as societal collapse. Same story might happen to the Viking on Greenland and it seems to be the same reason that caused Rapa Nui became a barren island. However, the situation on Easter Island is much more complex than the Maya’s or Viking’s. The palm on Easter Island belongs to Jubea Chilensis species - the palm species with the lowest growth rate in the world. Each palm tree needs 40 to 60 years to mature (while other palm tree such as Coconut Palm just needs 7 to 10 years) which were not capable of adapting the needs of Rapa Nui. Therefore, the sustainability issue on Easter Island is not only about deforestation but also the ecological diversity on the island. It is also important to analyse a sustainability issue by looking at temporal scale where we observe how actions in the past can influence the present and future. It is absolutely inadequate when analyse a complex system by looking at the present only because we narrow the temporal boundaries of the system, hence we cannot evaluate how present actions can affect the future (Moore and McLennan 2011). However, applying temporal and spatial scale to Easter Island story is quite struggling because Rapa Nui did not have chances to interact with different civilisations (as they lived in a very remote place) to accumulate experiences. It’s obvious that sustainability is a quality that may appear in any system, however, this term is usually used to mention a very large scale system which incorporates both physical and natural systems.

Stephen Hawking (2000) used to say ‘I think the next century will be the century of complexity’ and it has come to be true where the modern human society are faced with multiple crises and reductionism approach fail to analyse sustainability thoroughly. Therefore, a new approach is needed where it is based on a new prototype, an innovative way of perceiving, and investigating the world. By integrate complexity, scale and system , it is possible to regard individual-level information and multi-scale system. At a result, humans will accumulate a great amount of accurate information in predictive or explanatory power. By using complexity in assist the evaluation of sustainability of Easter Island, it is clear that deforestation is not the only factor that results in societal collapse but also a lot of unexpected issues such as rats and ecological diversity.

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