Résumé
Sustainability, resilience and related concepts imply continued functioning over time. Evaluating the sustainability and resilience of human/nature interactions, including their impact on biodiversity, thus requires data that permit a long-term perspective. Three approaches to accomplish this can be distinguished. Local knowledge, to the extent that it results from long-term successful interaction of a society with nature, implies temporal depth. Two other approaches strive to go deeper in time. Historical ecology seeks to relate the present state of environments to their past use by humans. Environmental archaeology provides even greater temporal depth, offering examples of ‘completed experiments’ in human/nature interactions. Some of these ‘experiments’ support ‘collapse’ scenarios, while others suggest human use of environments in ways that were sustainable—at least until they were not. This talk will explore the opportunities for tying these three approaches together by comparing present and past social-ecological systems in similar environments. We show how a synthesis of these approaches can contribute to make local knowledge usable for assessing and managing biodiversity and ecosystem services today.