Grounded in notions of network analysis, social-ecological systems are predicated upon the idea that all locations of arrival are derivative of the interactions of socio-environmental actors across scales and nested within contexts. Indeed, it can be argued that separations of people and nature are less points of departure, than they are points of arrival; SESs speak to this. By refusing to make an a priori demarcation between the social and the ecological, Cumming allows for the actors (or vertices, or nodes) to speak for themselves the only way they know how, through their relationships (or connections, or edges or articulations) with one another. In so situating himself Cumming is approaching complex issues of the natural sciences from a more dialectical point of view than is often taken. Though the work does delve into the foundations of how entities from which these systems emerge, are composed, an extrapolation of his work leads the reader to posit an inter-related world, one where components of analysis can never be understood, much less conserved, in isolation. Though he brushes upon system identity, one cannot help but wonder if Cumming would be willing to extend the emergent nature of his complex systems to the individual?
