In 2009, an American political economist Elinor Ostrom became the first woman to ever win a Nobel Prize in her category to date. Her winning presentation revealed her organization and care associated with economic governance and the social interactions with common people such as fisherman and farmers. She examined on how people worked and asked them anthropologic questions of their behaviors. She studied the management of natural resources and nature’s environments and habitats with the support and partnership alongside government and outside organizations to help her studies. Her work emphasized on the play of public choice on decisions influencing the production of goods and services and that evolved into her recent study of how human beings interact with the eco-systems to maintain long-term sustainability for both the environment and the people themselves.
In Ostrom’s presentation, she explains that societies develop diverse and various ways to manage natural resources and environments by avoiding the imbalance of the ecosystem which in some cases the obstacles are scarcity of resources and her work presents the idea of human interaction with the ecosystem to solve for long-term sustainability. Her general idea is identifying ten subsystem variables impacting the likely possibility to achieve sustainability within an environment with predictions of human being interactions and behaviors towards ecosystems as they harvest or work.
Why is this important?
Everyday there is an increase of higher demand for natural resources and less supply of resources available. With long-sustainability resolutions, human beings can work to maintain a growing amount of natural resources and healthy ecosystems to maintain natural life.
