Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance

Please note that this website is being developed and should be fully working over the next few weeks [May 2010].

The Global Human Ecodynamics Alliance (GHEA) is an organization of social scientists, natural scientists, historians, educators, students, policy makers, and others interested in promoting cutting-edge research, education, and application of the socioecological dynamics of coupled human and natural systems across scales of space and time. GHEA membership is free and open for participation to anyone who registers and agrees to follow the rules of engagement.

GHEA sees the expansion, integration, and augmentation of cutting edge human ecodynamics basic research, education, and science-based policy as critical to the development of a more sustainable approach to human-environment engagement in the future. This research must include the integration of a temporal perspective in short medium and deep time scales. We believe that as a result of focused efforts, by 2020 society can be better equipped to utilize the results of this research for practical problem solving.

GHEA’s mission is to facilitate the growth in effective human-ecodynamics research by:

  1. bringing professional and student members of the GHEA community together to explore cutting edge questions of theory, method and case studies in Human Ecodynamics in the past and present
  2. producing academic articles and books as well as popular texts and media synthesizing the results of these focused intellectual engagements
  3. providing a forum for interdisciplinary community building and research collaborations
  4. fostering the growth of the GHEA research community though student outreach and education
  5. pursuing policy changes where GHEA science supports such engagement

GHEA was formed out of an effort to connect arctic/polar ecodynamics to the broader global context. GHEA has embraced this “north-south” effort and expanded it to support and build truly global human ecodynamic knowledge through case study comparisons, shared methodological developments, and a building of an international community of researchers working potentially anywhere in the world. This organization was inspired by a workshop on Long Term Global Human Ecodynamics held in Eagle Hill, Maine, in October 2009. Participants at that meeting, consisting of archaeologists, sociocultural anthropologists, historians, environmental scientists, modelers, and others with a shared interest in interdisciplinary research, education, and policy engagement concerning the dynamics of human-natural systems and the lessons that can be learned from the past and present concerning vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability of socioecological relationships. A working group emerged from that meeting tasked with finding a mechanism for more sustained community engagement on these topics. GHEA emerged as an entity with this purpose in April 2010.

GHEA exists to facilitate greater communication, collaboration, and engagement in human-ecodynamic research, education and policy by operating as a “bottom-up”, community-driven entity. This web portal is set up to facilitate individual participation in GHEA. The effort will succeed only through the efforts of participants. Modeled after other successful, grass-roots movements, this web site has been created to allow users to define the directions and emphasis of GHEA identity, activities, and productivity.