Due to climate change, the conditions of the planet are changing rapidly, rendering environmental management schemes, designed in another era, obsolete. Ecological reflexivity can provide new, more dynamic schemes.
The planet we inhabit today is not the same as the one our parents or grandparents knew. The climate is warmer, forests and jungles have given way to crop fields and pastures for livestock, and there are fewer insects, while entities that were previously non-existent in nature, such as plastics, are everywhere. Our planet has changed and this translates into new environmental problems and challenges. Ones, however, that we continue to face with old environmental management schemes, designed decades ago primarily to avoid the overexploitation of resources, ensure economic growth and provide social welfare – ignoring or making invisible the state and functioning of ecological systems.
Today, these cannot be our only concerns. In this new environment in which we live, politics and institutions must respond not only to human demands, but also to the requirements of non-human beings.
In their book The Politics of the Anthropocene (2019), John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering argue that current governance schemes, designed for the stable environment of the Holocene, are insufficient for the Anthropocene, where terrestrial dynamics are in more fluctuation. To this end, they propose ecological reflexivity as a fundamental framework to environmental management, which incorporates non-human dynamics as key variables in governance.
Ecological reflexivity is the ability of an entity (an agent, structure, or process) to recognize its impacts on socio-ecosystems and respond accordingly by understanding and managing the links between institutional change and the multi-species networks that make up socio-ecological systems. Ecological reflexivity consists of three parts: recognition, reflection, and response, which have to do with observing and understanding the effects of institutions on socio-ecological systems, anticipating future impacts, learning from past experiences, and adapting governance principles and practices to changes in the environment.
Thus, broadly speaking, we can say that ecological reflexivity translates into the possibility of seriously listening to signals from the non-human world and incorporating them into governance, developing institutional arrangements capable of transforming themselves according to the instability of the environment and the demands and needs of more than the humans.
How can we govern the unexpected?
Some recent, unexpected, and surprising environmental phenomena underscore the relevance of ecological reflexivity. One of them is algal blooms, that is, the enormous growth of algae in the seas, which are warmer and richer in nutrients, ideal conditions for thriving.
The algal blooms produce extensive masses of algae, tens of kilometers long, that, seasonally, flood the coasts of the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico, the Mediterranean, Brittany and Asia. The accumulation of algae on the beach causes multiple effects on coastal ecosystems, but it also has serious effects on tourism, fishing and human health.
Since 2014, the Mexican Caribbean, where the important tourist centers of Cancun and Quintana Roo are located, has received the arrival of millions of tons of the brown macroalgae known as sargassum (Sargassum fluitans, Sargassum natans). Sargassum sprays, at first considered a fortuitous phenomenon, have become a seasonal event and their volume has increased over the years. The accumulation of sargassum on the coast transforms the once typical Caribbean beaches, with white sand and turquoise blue sea, into unpleasant places where heaps of algae decompose in the sun, emitting a pungent and unpleasant smell and causing the seawater to become muddy and brown. For a region that is visited annually by more than 20 million tourists and generates just over 43% of national income derived from tourism, the arrival of sargassum is undoubtedly a challenge.
Attention to the sargassum crisis in Mexico has been focused, on the one hand, on maintaining beaches in suitable conditions for tourism and, on the other, on finding profitable uses to valorize sargassum and transform it into a natural resource. Both the Mexican government, at all levels, and the hoteliers in the area invest millions of dollars in cleaning the beaches, including the placement of barriers in the sea to prevent sargassum from reaching the beach; in machinery and personnel to collect the sargassum that landfalls; in the transport of sargassum to the final disposal sites, as well as in the screening procedure to recover the sand that is removed along with the sargassum and thus avoid the erosion of the beaches. It is estimated that the annual cost of cleaning a kilometer of beach is close to US$ 1.5 million.
However, even though beach cleanliness is essential, in the long-term attention to sargassum cannot be limited to it, as other problems such as the ecological integrity of coastal ecosystems are not addressed and the root causes of the bloom of sargassum in the tropical Atlantic and its arrival in the Caribbean are ignored.
Governance for collectives
The beaches of the Mexican Caribbean are part of an interconnected system of ecosystems that include coastal dunes, seagrass meadows, and coral reefs. These communities have not only been greatly affected by the arrival of sargassum, but also by the measures implemented to address this phenomenon. By removing sargassum from beaches with inadequate machinery, large amounts of sand are also removed, promoting erosion. The final deposit of sargassum in inappropriate places contaminates aquifers and seawater, with serious consequences for seagrasses and corals, which also suffer from reduced light due to the algae.
Concrete experience around the implementation of governance schemes inspired by ecological reflexivity is still limited, but perhaps the clearest example is found in the Seto Sea in Japan. In this region, the efforts of fishermen to contain sea pollution and restore the environment were highly benefited by their interaction with nori algae, a species commercially cultivated in the area. When the algae lost the dark black color that consumers appreciate due to poor water conditions, the fishermen drew on the experience of older fishermen, regained local knowledge about the sea and fishing, and closely observed the development of the algae. Dialogue between different generations of fishers on the medium of seaweed enabled fishers to adapt their livelihood practices and reframe their expectations and desires around living from and with the sea, resulting in more thoughtful governance processes. Addressing the problem of sargassum in Mexico through the lens of ecological reflexivity involves, much like the fishermen of the Seto Sea did, reviewing current actions and identifying their negative impacts on other entities, such as seagrasses and corals. By identifying these consequences and their causes, we will be able to reconsider how the cleaning, transfer, and final disposal of sargassum could be improved to not only keep beaches free of the algae but also to maintain water quality and balanced ecosystems. This requires not only new practices but also new values, which allow us to build a model of governance centered not on human beings but on collectives of humans and non-humans and on the links and relationships that sustain and shape the beautiful landscapes of the Mexican Caribbean.
