21st century challenges ranging from global warming to pollution of the earth's ecosystems all have one thing in common:  a linkage of social and natural ecological systems with human activity creating ecosystem complexity by linking social and natural systems.  The Sugar Creek Project, in which Ben Stinner participated, is an attempt to find new principles to integrate the ecological, social and economic aspects of agricultural systems.   The research is based on a reconsideration of the position of the researcher so that synergy between farmers and researchers occurs in such a way that farmers and researchers can work together to link hierarchical scales of analysis at the field, farm, community, and watershed levels.  One of the most significant findings was that the moral values of stewardship and social responsibility of the farmers led the researchers into a new methodology, namely to use a year-round high density sampling approach to examine the water quality of headwater streams.  Comparing the headwater streams of Amish and German descent residents, we found fragmented landscapes resulting from an interaction of social organization, ethnicity, and belief systems.  An unexpected result was a measurable increase in social capital and social complexity related to social self-organization as biodiversity increased.  The integration of social organization with belief systems mediated the ability of the system to self-organize.  The heterogeneous landscape patterns, land use, and land tenure based on abstract rules to appropriate reality, affected levels of biodiversity at different hierarchical scales and contributed to the relative degree of the system to be resilient and buffer system perturbations.