Puget Sound Institute

New on the PSI blog: environmental social science — the study of how people and ecosystems shape each other — has quietly built out major infrastructure in Puget Sound over the past decade-plus, from the Human Wellbeing Vital Signs to a Social Sciences Advisory Committee running since 2010. A new introduction to a special issue of Coastal Management, co-authored by PSI's Rob Anderson and Allison Morgan along with twelve others, argues the field has outgrown its "helpful but secondary" reputation and makes the case for treating it as essential to ecosystem recovery. As Anderson puts it, most environmental issues are as much about people and politics as they are about nature itself.