Humans living within social-ecological systems often enhance or degrade its resilience through the ways in which they care for, manage, and depend upon the system for ecosystem services and the fulfillment of basic needs. In Nepal’s mid-hills social-ecological system, smallholder communities of the past relied upon a substantial biocultural heritage to facilitate farming, hunting, and foraging practices which served to meet their needs and enhance resilience to disturbances such as flooding or drought. In the present day, these communities are faced with a variety of social and environmental pressures, and striving to balance the aspiration for modernization and global citizenship with the desire to maintain their biocultural heritage. In this project ecological identity is proposed as a potential social mechanism of resilience, which could assist mid-hills communities in Nepal and elsewhere in preserving biological and cultural diversity, enhancing system resilience, and enabling agency in climate change adaptation.
Committed to engaged scholarship and determining research questions which resonate with both the academic community and the world at large, Jessie Hughes works within Keith Tidball’s lab to explore how the theoretical foundations and social mechanisms of social-ecological systems resilience could translate into real life ecosystem management practices which enhance or degrade resilience overall.
Researcher
Jessie Hughes is a social sciences researcher and human ecologist fascinated by human relationships with the environment. Her M.S. research frames ecological identity as a social mechanism of resilience, and examines the role of humans in enhancing resilience within social-ecological systems undergoing rapid change.