Social–ecological memory in urban gardens—Retaining the capacity for management of ecosystem services

Abstract

Many ecosystem services are in decline. Local ecological knowledge and associated practice are essential to sustain and enhance ecosystem services on the ground. Here, we focus on social or collective memory in relation to management practice that sustains ecosystem services, and investigate where and how ecological practices, knowledge and experience are retained and transmitted. We analyze such social–ecological memory of allotment gardens in the Stockholm urban area, Sweden. Allotment gardens support ecosystem services such as pollination, seed dispersal and pest regulation in the broader urban landscape. Surveys and interviews were preformed over a four-year period with several hundreds of gardeners. We found that the allotment gardens function as communities-of-practice, where participation and reification interact and social–ecological memory is a shared source of resilience of the community by being both emergent and persistent. Ecological practices and knowledge in allotment gardens are retained and transmitted by imitation of practices, oral communication and collective rituals and habits, as well as by the physical gardens, artifacts, metaphors and rules-in-use (institutions). Finally, a wider social context provides external support through various forms of media, markets, social networks, collaborative organizations, and legal structures. We exemplify the role of urban gardens in generating ecosystem services in times of crisis and change and conclude that stewards of urban green areas and the social memory that they carry may help counteract further decline of critical ecosystem services.

Introduction

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that many ecosystems services are degrading (MA, 2005, Carpenter and Folke, 2006), reflected, for example, in the worldwide crisis in the pollinator service for agriculture and biodiversity (Buchmann and Nabhan, 1996, Steffan-Dewenter et al., 2005, Klein et al., 2007). How can we sustain and enhance the capacity of social–ecological systems to improve the management of essential ecosystem services, like pollination of crops and other plants? In urban areas, gardening forms part of the urban landscape mosaic and seems to play a significant role in pollination (Kearns et al., 1998, Biesmeijer et al., 2006), as well as for other ecosystem services that spill over to the rest of the landscape, like seed dispersal and pest regulation (Andersson et al., 2007). In this sense, urban gardening constitutes a source of resilience for ecosystem services in the broader landscape (Colding et al., 2006). The services are the result of a cultural landscape shaped by a diversity of management practice, some explicit, some tacit (Berkes and Folke, 1998). Where and how in communities are ecological practices that support ecosystem services, and the knowledge for their regeneration retained and revived? Is there a memory in societies that carries essential experiences of ecosystem management?

Memory above the individual level that stores experiences of living pasts and influence behavior of societies and groups is often referred to as collective memory (Halbwachs, 1926, Middleton and Edwards, 1990, Coser, 1992, Gongaware, 2003, Rothstein, 2005). This line of thoughts originates from Halbwachs who was a disciple of Durkhiem. The work of Durkheim around the end of 1890s included concepts about “collective excitement” as the fertile ground for cultural creativity (Coser, 1992). Halbwachs’ work showed how these lessons where kept alive through transmission between creative periods (Coser, 1992). He argued that even though it is only individuals that remember, individual memory processes derived from social interaction, and is facilitated through supra individual means shared with others, such as language, symbols, events, and cultural contexts (see also Misztal, 2003). Accordingly, social groups construct their own images of the world through agreed upon versions of the past-versions constructed through negotiation, not private remembrance. It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory (Coser, 1992), and it is the verbal conventions that constitute the most stable social framework for it (Halbwachs, 1926, Middleton and Edwards, 1990, Misztal, 2003). Anthropologists, archeologists, ecologists and other scholars, often use the concept of social memory (Mcintosh, 2000, Climo and Cattell, 2002, Folke et al., 2003), or cultural memory (Nazarea, 1998, Misztal, 2003).

The social memory of communities constitutes the variety of forms through which behaviors of people are shaped by the past, and it functions as collectively shared mental maps for dealing with a complex world (Olick and Robbins, 1998, Crumley, 2002, Misztal, 2003, Gongaware, 2003, Rothstein, 2005, North, 2005). Many scholars argue that memories not always represent documentaries of events, but rather constitute interpretations used in narrative constructions, tightly connected to emotions (Misztal, 2003). Memories of everyday experience are therefore frequently distorted. However, traumatic memories, or so called ‘light bulb’ memories, such as of environmental crises are likely to preserve details (Schacter, 1995, Misztal, 2003). In general the ingredients of social memory are neither a purely social construction, nor historical facts established once and for all, but rather along the line between those two poles (Rothstein, 2005).

According to Wenger (1998) participation in communities over time becomes invested in a shared history (McKenna et al., 2008), and in tools, artifacts and concepts, which tend to outlive the repertoires of practices that first shaped them. Such communities-of-practice (Wenger, 1998), involves a continuous learning process (Armitage et al., 2008), with reflexivity and credibility as significant features of interpersonal meaning–making (Lawrence, 2009). Because the world is in constant flux and conditions always change, any practice must be revived and reinvented, even as it remains ‘the same practice’. The social memory available to constitute a practice is thus both emergent and persistent, a shared source of resilience of the community in question (Wenger, 1998, Folke et al., 2003).

Here, we choose to use the term social–ecological memory since we exclusively address memory of groups that engage in ecosystem management. We use allotment gardens in the Stockholm urban landscape, Sweden as a case study to explore the means by which knowledge, experience and practice about how to manage a local ecosystem and its services is retained in a community, and modified, revived and transmitted through time. Metaphorically one may view social–ecological memory as a library (building, people, organisation), in which ecological knowledge and practical advice for management are reflected in how it is built, structured and organized by the people engaged with the library, and in the contents of the books, with new books continuously added. We believe that such memory is a critical subset of any social–ecological system, providing sources of resilience to deal with change (Folke et al., 2003). Social–ecological memory would be part of any community, whether a traditional ecological knowledge system or a contemporary community-based resource management system (Hanna et al., 1996, Berkes and Folke, 1998). For example, elders in traditional societies often serve as stewards of ecological knowledge intermingled with practice and beliefs, including knowledge of long-term and large-scale changes transmitted over generations (Berkes and Folke, 2002). Ceremonies and rituals in both traditional and contemporary societies, which carry ecological practices, represent features of social–ecological memory (Lansing, 1991, Alcorn and Toledo, 1998). Social–ecological memory extends beyond the merely extractive collection of ecological information to a deeply integrated connection between observation and meaning among groups of people (Lawrence, 2009) and their institutions (Olsson and Folke, 2001). There are few studies that focus on social–ecological memory in relation to ecosystem management (but see e.g. Mcintosh et al., 2000), and considerably less related to household gardening. A prominent exception is the studies on social memory conducted by Crumley, 1994, Crumley, 2000 on the vernacular (vegetable) gardens in the Burgundy region of France.

The primary objective of this article is to explore social–ecological memory by analyzing how and where knowledge and practice linked to the production of ecosystem services are socially retained and temporarily transmitted. The findings draw on a four-year fieldwork inventory in allotment gardens in urban Stockholm. Allotment gardens can broadly be described as representing ‘legacies’ of traditional household gardening practices where the users’ knowledge of gardening has been passed on and socially retained for considerable time, often over several generations (Nolin, 2003). Hence, in this sense allotment gardens represent social arenas for present-day household gardening in urban landscapes. We have previously investigated the link between ecosystem services and management practices of allotment gardens (Andersson et al., 2007), where evaluation of local ecological knowledge and practices was made by analyzing the respondent's answers to questions regarding site specific environmental conditions, interplay between organisms and the local environment, and the behavioral characteristics of organisms, including migration, foraging, nesting, and mating. The knowledge revealed by the respondents was compared with the knowledge that the scientific community holds regarding ecosystem dynamics. Here, the focus is on the dynamic ‘library’, the social–ecological memory that carries the ecological experiences and revises them over time and between people, and its role in supporting the generation of ecosystem services.

The article is organized as follows; the next part begins by providing a background on urban allotment gardening with a focus on Stockholm, Sweden. Part 3 describes the methods used for the four years of fieldwork on allotment gardening in Stockholm. Part 4 presents the results of the fieldwork, where we portray both internal features for the community and external features of social–ecological memory. Part 5 begins with a discussion of the fieldwork results and the role of this novel concept for management of ecosystem services such as pollination and pest regulation, followed by a discussion on its role for governance of ecological resilience. We end this article by synthesizing the major insights generated in this paper in the hope it will stimulate further inquiry into the role of social–ecological memory for carrying ecological knowledge and sustainable management practices of ecosystem services.