Social Ecology in the Digital Age

At a time of increasing interest in transdisciplinarity, social ecology is an exemplary model of an overarching perspective for framing scientific and societal problems that also fosters innovative solutions requiring expertise from multiple disciplines, fields, and scales of analysis. Dan Stokols also illustrates the link between an ecological approach to problems in context with action-oriented translational research that integrates academic and extra-academic perspectives, while documenting the growing role of team-based research and need to foster a transdisciplinary orientation in students.

The definitive treatise on social ecology in the digital age. I read with great interest about the history and development of social ecology, the way social ecology can be used to understand some of todays’ most pressing environmental and societal problems, and, most interestingly to me, approaches to education that use principles of social ecology to train a new generation to address these problems.

I love the systems-thinking approach that Dan Stokols takes on people and the environment in this new book, which uses principles of social ecology to provide a new framework for environmental problem-solving in the digital age.  The engaging writing and clear logical thinking make it a must-read for anyone interested in the state of the planet and its interaction with human societies!

Every life should yield Stokols’ breadth of wisdom and depth of compassion. But these gifts come late to most of us, if at all. So read this book. Stokols’ brilliant synthesis, delivered via engaging narrative, provides lessons ignored at our own peril.

A great book, long needed, for linking biological, human and social ecology--a milestone for guiding social and psychological sciences on approaching people environment transactions, within social ecological systems, from place based to global and virtual space.

"What is social ecology?" If you haven’t yet sought an answer to this question, you can successfully do so now with Social Ecology in the Digital Age. Few people have done more than Daniel Stokols to advance the social ecological perspective as a coherent intellectual perspective. In his scholarship, in his teaching, and as an institution builder, he has helped generations of researchers, students and practitioners work across levels of analysis and across disciplinary and professional boundaries, knowing that this is what must be done to address the complex, pressing problems that societies face today. His book presents the historical origins and basic principles of social ecology, as well as tools for understanding how and under what conditions people and their environments go through transformations. The culmination of more than four decades of patient study, the book weaves intellectual autobiography together with clear exposition and illuminating examples to make the reading not only intellectually rewarding but also enjoyable. Among its distinctive features is the interest taken in the cybersphere as a domain of pervasive environmental influence in everyday life. At this fraught historical moment, Daniel Stokols here offers a calm voice of reason, pushing back against distractions thrown up by proponents of regressive ideologies and calling attention back to the urgent matters at hand. This is a beautiful book, well worth the reading.

This book about Social Ecology was overdue. It opens a viable way to a mutual understanding within a still heterogenous field of research, scattered across the globe and coined for instance as Human or Social Ecology, Research on Sustainability and Global Change. By working out well-founded core principles, Dan Stokols identifies common assumptions and distinctive features between seemingly incompatible approaches. The elaborated relationship between Digital Age and the idea of the Anthropocene provide an integrative agenda for research and political action in the 21th Century.

In his new book, Daniel Stokols successfully makes the much-needed attempt to lead social ecology into the digital age. He convincingly demonstrates how sound science and action-oriented, transformative research can and must go hand in hand in order to meet the great challenges of our times. A leading scholar in the field, Stokols masterfully intertwines well-informed analysis with insightful storytelling. ‘Social Ecology in the Digital Age’ is a must-read for anyone concerned with the field and an inspiration for committed young scientists.

Based on heaps of data, scientists now characterize planet Earth as experiencing a "great acceleration", i.e. the speeding-up of alarming processes such as rising global temperatures, growing numbers of climate extremes or the galloping loss of biodiversity. Social Ecology is an emerging inter- and transdisciplinary field of scholarship aimed at improving our understanding of the underlying human – that is, psychological, social, economic, institutional and cultural – dimensions of this process, as well as their interactions with the ongoing biophysical changes. With this well-informed, readable and, despite its dire subject matter, quite enjoyable book, Daniel Stokols summarizes his perspective on this field to which he has contributed so much over the past decades. Dan draws our attention to the huge importance of the rapidly ongoing digitalization process for socio-ecological systems dynamics. Along the way, the book serves as an excellent introduction to the field and presents much of the history and current state of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine, one of the important global players in this field. A must-read for everyone interested in interdisciplinary environmental and sustainability studies.

Ecology, as a study of how organisms interact with each other and with their environment has developed over the years as a sub-field of many disciplines, including biology, sociology, and psychology. Social ecology, on the other hand, is a body of knowledge devoted to transdisciplinary approaches to understanding and solving societal and global problems based on ecological principles.  Stokols' book provides a comprehensive and clear summary of that field that can't be found anywhere else.　　

Daniel Stokols is a major figure in the development of the Social Ecology paradigm, to better understand and cope with the social and physical contexts in which health, welfare, and well-being are shaped. He brings together in this book individual and aggregate level phenomena, the physical and the social, and objective and subjective perspectives. He shows the need to go beyond the limits of disciplinary purview, merging the various ecologies (e.g. biological, urban) into an inclusive paradigm shown to foster improved understanding and practice in a variety of contemporary applications.

Embedded in pleasant personal recollections, Dan Stokols, a pioneer of Social Ecology as an academic field, guides the reader through the interdisciplinary thicket of contextual analysis of human behavior: Natural contexts, such as humans’ health risks or the climate, man-made built contexts such as settlements and cities, and sociocultural contexts such as the cybersphere. His guidance relies less upon throwing at the reader facts and figures, but more upon narratives and verbal explanations from a wide range of excellently referenced literature.