Posting has slowed as those of us in the northern hemisphere go on vacation. For those still looking for resilience science. Below are links to our five most popular posts of 2010.
I’ve published several links to global maps of coastal hypoxia. Now, NASA has produced a new map of global hypoxic zones, based on Diaz and Rosenberg’s . Spreading Dead Zones and Consequences for Marine Ecosystems. in Science, 321(5891), 926-929. NASA’s EOS Image of the Day writes on Aquatic Dead Zones.
Red circles on this map show the location and size of many of our planet’s dead zones. Black dots show where dead zones have been observed, but their size is unknown.
It’s no coincidence that dead zones occur downriver of places where human population density is high (darkest brown). Some of the fertilizer we apply to crops is washed into streams and rivers. Fertilizer-laden runoff triggers explosive planktonic algae growth in coastal areas. The algae die and rain down into deep waters, where their remains are like fertilizer for microbes. The microbes decompose the organic matter, using up the oxygen. Mass killing of fish and other sea life often results.
Memory is an important part of resilience. Alexander Rose writes about various ideas of creating a Manual for Civilization from the The Long Now Blog:
Today we received another email about creating a record of humanity and technology that would help restart civilization. …
My bet is that the reality of watching your civilization (and population) collapse is likely one of the worst things anyone could experience. I am also not so sure the problem is just knowing how to remake a technology. For instance after the fall of the great Egyptian, Mayan, and Roman empires we had evidence and examples of their engineering achievements all around us. But aqueducts or senate buildings are worthless without a society around them to maintain, contextualize and protect them. …
In any case I thought I would create this blog post which I will try and keep updated as these proposals and efforts come to me (and hopefully come to fruition). I will also list some of the resources that I usually refer to when I get these inquiries. Please note these resources are extremely biased toward the English language, the United States and Western culture. Also note that one of the first things that comes up when creating any compendium style work is the issue of copyright. It might sound ridiculous that you might worry about copyright in a doomsday manual, but if you want to publish it and get it into peoples hands before the apocalypse, you are going to have to deal with it in some way. Please feel free to use the comments field to make suggestions and pointers and I will integrate them here as well.
Projects that are attempts in this direction:
- The Rosetta Project: A multi-millennial micro-etched disk with a record of thousands of the worlds languages.
- Westinghouse Time Capsules: Two time capsules (they actually coined the term for this project) by Westinghouse buried at Worlds Fair sites, one in 01939 and the other 01965 to be recovered in 5000 years. They also did the very smart thing of making a “Book of Record” and an above ground duplicate of the contents on display.
- The Human Document Project: A German project to create a record of humanity that will last one million years.
- Crypt of Civilization: A airtight chamber located at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, Georgia. The crypt consists of preserved artifacts scheduled to be opened in the year 8113 AD.
- The Voyager Record: The Voyager Golden Record are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or far future humans, who may find them.
- Georgia Guidestones: The four granite Guidestones are covered in inscriptions written in 8 major languages that describe the tenets of their imagined Age of Reason.
- (added) Doomsday Chests by Noah Raford
- (added) The Forever Book an idea by Kevin Kelly
1) FAO is granting free and open access to its central data repository, FAOSTAT, the world’s largest and most comprehensive statistical database on food, agriculture, and hunger.
2) FAO statistics on production of crops, fruits, livestock, oil crops, and others can be analyzed in Gapminder.
3) How many plants feed the world on Agricultural Biodiversity weblog. They write:
Instead, they worked with national level Food Balance Sheets from FAO, and looked at the question in four ways to determine just how many species make up 90% of the total intake of food weight, calories, protein and fat in each country.
The result is “85 species commodities and 28 general commodities contribute 90% of national per capita supplies of food plants.” After a bit of tinkering, they come up with this final statement: “the total number of species commodities is 82. These consist of 103 species. Fifty-six of the species commodities, consisting of 75 species, account for 5% or more of the national supply of a nutritional category in at least one country.”
4) International Development Statistics is an online database of the volume, origin and types of aid and resource flows to over 150 developing countries. The data are collected from official statistical reports submitted to the OECD by members of its Development Assistance Committee and include figures on official development assistance, other official flows and private funding.
The transition network, which we have repeatedly covered on Resilience Science, had its fourth meeting recently in Devon, UK. About 300 people from the over 300 official Transition initiatives attended the meeting in Devon. Where they discussed peak oil, climate change, and financial crisis; but more importantly what they could do about.
Design guru and founder of sustainable design conference Doors of Perception, John Thackara discusses the meeting in Of apocalypse and forest gardens, on his site Doors of Perception. One of the categories on his site is transition and resilience. In his reflections he writes, among other things, about translating transition to France, and local money.
I was keen to discover if the Transition model was being, or could be, developed in France, where I live. …
It turned out that a number of early stage groups is active in France, and a francophone group in Montreal has built a comprehensive site
Exporting the Transition model in a box to France, or any other country, is not an option, we agreed. For one thing, the array of exiting sustainability and permaculture projects in France is extraordinarily rich. There are possibly more more websites, magazines and events about all things ‘developpement durable’ in France than in the UK.
On the ground, degrees of resilience already exist in parts of France without the existence of Transition initiatives. France has hundreds of thousands of active local associations; these are a form of social glue that Britain lacks.
The persistence of local food webs is another example. AMAPs (a French version of Community Supported Agriculture) are spreading fast. ‘Monnaie locale’ is being trialled in several places (see above). There is also a fast-growing debate about economic fundamentals in France in the ‘Decroisasance’ (De-Growth) movement.
So what are the gaps, that Transition-ness might fill?
What’s missing, we concluded, are three things:First, a perceptual framework, a story, that links together peak oil and energy, climate change, and the prospect of a massive financial discontinuity.
Second, France would benefit from a more explicit means to connect together and leverage the multitude of stand-alone projects that are already there.
And third, the Transition model brings with it a degree of inclusivity – of cultures, ages and backgrounds – that is uncommon in socially fragmented France.
A meeting of Transition France takes place in Trieves on 27 June.
…
I got back from the coppice in time to hear Peter North introduce his brand new book Local Money. Open Money is one of those subjects I’ve enthused about enthused about in print. But North has spent 14 years traveling the world – from Curitiba to Russia to Venezuela – to learn first-hand how different approaches actually work (or not).
North’s book describes in practical ways how people have coped with financial armegeddon in the past. Following economic collapse across the world, communities have often created their own forms of money. Local Money shows how people manage to make it through even when official money disappears.
There’s a database of local, open or complementary currencies here.
I pondered whether local money is necessarily hand-made and ultra-local? This being a Transition Towns gathering, I soon met a software designer, Matthew Slater, who is building customisable digital barter money platforms in Drupal. SELs (a European version of Local Economy Trading Scheme) are already being trialled in Belgium (5) France (2) Switzerland (2) and India.
Community Forge as the platform is called, is community currency trading software build on a social networking platform. This means thousands of software developers can set up similar sites, and many of them could easily modify the software. As a popular open source project, the code is very high quality and continually improving.
John Thackera also points to the transition network’s founder Rob Hopkins’ reflections on the meeting. Rob Hopkins writes:
One of my personal highlights was the response to my workshops about ‘Seeing Transition as a Pattern Language’ workshop, which introduced the work I have been doing for the past few months, exploring whether a pattern-based approach might be a more suitable way of explaining and modelling Transition. You can hear a recording of my first workshop here, as well as see some photos. It was great to get people’s thoughts, critiques, suggestions and input, which will be worked through over the next few months. Thank you so much to everyone who came, and who offered their input.
Another highlight (if that’s the right word) was the talk by Stoneleigh (see left), called ”Making Sense of the Financial Crisis in the Era of Peak Oil”, which you can hear in full here. Stoneleigh is one of two editors of the ‘Automatic Earth’ blog, and her talk was stark, stunning and very much strengthened the case that economics needs to become a third ‘leg’ of Transition alongside peak oil and climate change. Her talk affected people deeply, and people’s reaction to it went on to become one of the things that defined the rest of the conference. Her prognosis was that the world is on the cusp of an economic collapse on the scale of the Great Depression as the debt bubble bursts. Not much that would have been new to Transitioners, but the way she built her argument was very compelling. You can read Shaun Chamberlin’s reflections on her talk here, along with some insightful comments from other people.
And on Transition Culture, reflections from Sophy Banks the conference organizer. She writes about both the planning and the dynamics of running a conference focussed on learning and change:
It felt important in the design of this year’s event to include the fact that Transition has been going for four years – and that the wider context around us has moved on since we started back in 2006. I wanted there to be a journey in the flow of the three days, so that as well as sharing information and meeting people, having fun and gathering inspiration, there would be an element of deepening together, a sense of building trust and engaging with something challenging.
This was reflected in a number of new elements.
People were invited to form “Home Groups” at the start of the conference – about 6 people who get to know each other at the start, and meet fixed times throughout the three days, as well as meeting informally if they want to at other times.
We scheduled a longer, 3 hour workshop session to give a chance to go deeper into topics.
We included a session where the whole conference came together in their “Home Groups” to explore thoughts and feelings of what is really coming in the next one, five and ten years into the future. This was not a “positive visioning” session such as we often do in transition, but a wider ranging naming of what we fear as well as hope for, what could be really dangerous or challenging as well as what might not change at all, and what might transform to something wonderful.…
In the afternoon we moved to another variation on previous conferences – workshops that lasted three hours, rather than the 1½ that we have had before. Several were specifically included to be places to continue to work with anything that had come up in the large group session, (though I think we could have done more to signpost them clearly).These included –
* Somewhere to express your own, and witness others’ feelings (a Work that Reconnects “Truth Mandala”),
* To explore more creatively Stories for Transition – using Storytelling as a way of working.
* Workshops on Diversity, on Community and Conflict, and on Inner Transition – all pieces of building the inner structures that can help a community cope with the fall out of shocks – whether they are economic, physical, or emotional.
* For those who wanted practical support for the Transition process we included sessions on Holding Good Meetings, the Energy Descent process.
* And for those wanting to get on with building the business, organisations and systems we will need to create there were sessions on Working with Business, Local Food, Social Entrepreneurship, Local currencies. There were also visits to projects in Totnes and Occombe farm to see some pieces of the resilient future already up and running.
Coral reef conservation scientist Helen Fox is seeking a post-doctoral social scientist to work with her and environmental social scientist Arun Agarwal at WWF. She writes:
We seek a highly motivated researcher early in his/her career to join our team. The successful applicant will have strong statistical skills, international field experience, and a passion for policy-relevant conservation science. (The official announcement is below and attached.)
The post-doc will join the science program at WWF here in Washington, DC. S/he will work with me, Helen Fox (WWF-US), Arun Agrawal (U. Michigan), and colleagues around the world to evaluate the ecological and social impacts of marine protected areas (MPAs) and other conservation interventions. This exciting portfolio is part of the emerging WWF Conservation Impact Initiative, which seeks to catalyze rigorous evaluation of conservation interventions and, thus, provide the scientific evidence for more effective conservation policy and practice.
The application deadline is August 13 for a fall start date. All applications should be submitted via the WWF website: www.worldwildlife.org/who/careers/jobs.html.
Three very different videos on fractals, capitalism, and bottled water.
1) A TED talk by the inventor of fractal Benoit Mandelbrot.
2) An animation of the prominent economic geographer David Harvey presenting his view of the global financial crisis.
3) An environmentalist animated story of bottled water from the story of stuff.
A postdoctoral position is available to examine urban greening as a key form of urban land use-land cover change in the greater metro region of Boston, MA. The project involves an interdisciplinary team of social-ecological system researchers at UMass Amherst and 7 other institutions, including Clark University and the Urban Ecology Institute. The successful candidate will be an integral member of this team and will conduct spatial analysis on the current state of green infrastructure and greening interventions in the Boston Metropolitan area.
Research involving the postdoc may include some or all of the following:
- current and historical patterns of land use and land cover
- urban food webs and invasive species
- analysis of river networks and water quality
- public health issues
- future scenarios for the Boston Metropolitan area
The successful applicant must be adept at working with multiple researchers with varying interests in urban ecology, including geographers, landscape and urban planners, ecologists, and environmental educators. Strong communication skills are also required for coordinating interviews and meetings. In addition to supporting the overall project, candidates will be encouraged to develop their own research agenda within the project scope.
The preferred start date is January 2011, although there may be some flexibility. The primary location for the postdoc will be at UMass Amherst, but substantial time will need to be spent at other host institutions, and in the city of Boston. This is a one-year position, with the possible extension to two years. Applicants must have relevant Ph.D. experience in ecology, geography, landscape planning, or conservation biology, and be eager to work in an interdisciplinary team with the other scientists on the project. Prior experience with integrating socio-ecology into urban ecosystems is desirable. Candidates with expertise with GIS, modeling, and scenario building, are encouraged to apply.
Review of applicants will begin July 31, 2010, and continue until the position is filled. Applicants should submit (electronically) a cover letter that highlights the applicant’s skills and abilities in areas relevant to this project; curriculum vitae; a one or two page statement of experience as it relates to the stated project goals; a maximum of five sample reprints/preprints (electronic versions); and names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses of three references. A copy of the grant proposal supporting this project is available on request. Applications should be sent (e-mail preferred) to: Paige Warren (pswarren@nrc.umass.edu), Department of Natural Resources Conservation, Holdsworth Hall, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003.
The University provides an intellectual environment committed to providing academic excellence and diversity. The University is committed to increasing the diversity of the faculty, student body and the curriculum The University of Massachusetts is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. Women and members of minority groups are encouraged to apply.
Three different takes on thinking about people and nature:
1) A profile of our colleague Josh Cinner in Science (a conservation social scientist):
Now a senior research fellow at James Cook University (JCU) in Townsville, Australia, Cinner studies how coral reefs and people interact in a vast swath of the Southern Hemisphere. “People often have trouble understanding why a social scientist is involved because they think it’s the realm of the marine biologists,” he says. But it makes sense in the context of coral reefs, which are host to dozens of species of fish that provide food and income for nearby villages. “You don’t manage fish. Fish swim and they do their own thing. You manage people. Managing ecosystems is really about managing people and understanding what motivates them and their behaviors.”
…
Cinner and [Tim] McClanahan have found that different places felt different effects of coral bleaching based on how much people depended on fish and tourism for a living and how flexible the local people were. In Madagascar, rigid taboos govern when people can fish and what gear they can use. “This actually leads to a bit of rigidity and stifles how people are able to adapt,” Cinner says. In Kenya, some people are so desperately poor that when the reefs are in trouble, they just fish harder in the same places. But in the wealthier Seychelles, people have boats that can take them farther out, to target fish that don’t live on the reefs.
These observations have led to ideas about how to protect reefs, and the people who depend on them, during coral-bleaching events. For example, if coral die and algae take over, it’s much harder for coral to get reestablished. But if the reef hosts plenty of parrotfish — which graze on algae and keep the reef clean — the coral will be more likely to come back. Spearfishing particularly targets parrotfish, so one strategy might be to buy back spearfishing gear from Kenyan fishermen to protect parrotfish and make a reef more resilient to climate change, while leaving fishermen with other means to fish.
Cinner wants to extend this work to Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, looking for other ways to help people and coral reefs survive climate change. Working in so many cultures is challenging, he says. “I sometimes have to go through four different languages to remember the word. I might say it in Swahili, Portuguese, and Spanish, and then realize I’m trying to speak Malagasy or something.” He says it’s also tough being away from home so much of the time; last year, he was outside of Australia for about 150 days. But all that is outweighed by the excitement of his research. “You never know what’s going to happen when you step off a bus into a dusty place you’ve never been,” Cinner says. “That feeling never really goes away no matter how many times you do it. It’s almost always worked out for me.”
3) The anthropology blog Savage Minds mentions well-known anthropologist Anna Tsing’s discussion of the need for alternatives to Actor-Network Theory (which has been discussed on Resilience Science a few times). Savage Minds author Kerim Friedman writes:
Anna Tsing’s current research (or at least what she focused on in her talk) is about mushrooms, focusing on the ways in which mushroom cultivation reuses damaged (“blasted”) landscapes. Drawing on the work of Deborah Bird Rose, she emphasized the way in which these practices allow for a kind of “recuperation” for all the species inhabiting the landscape. She also talked about “multi-species anthropology” as an alternative to Actor-Network Theory. She argued that whereas ANT is useful for inanimate technologies which are animated by their interaction with humans, it is less useful for species which are already alive. Obviously, not all living organisms are relevant to every study, so once again the question of scale is important, and must be determined ethnographically. (See Juno’s Savage Minds review of When Species Meet.)
3) Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG writes about two books on New Jersey’s Meadowlands, a feral landscape within greater New York City. He writes:
“Just five miles west of New York City,” the back cover of Sullivan’s book reads, are the Meadowlands: “this vilified, half-developed, half-untamed, much dumped-on, and sometimes odiferous tract of swampland is home to rare birds and missing bodies, tranquil marshes and a major sports arena, burning garbage dumps and corporate headquarters, the remains of the original Penn Station, and maybe, just maybe, of the late Jimmy Hoffa.” It is “mysterious ground that is not yet guidebooked,” Sullivan writes inside, “where European landscape painters once set up their easels to paint the quiet tidal estuaries and old cedar swamps,” but where, now, “there are real hills in the Meadowlands and there are garbage hills. The real hills are outnumbered by the garbage hills.”
Lutz’s book describes the region as a “32-square-mile stretch of sweeping wilderness that evokes morbid fantasies of Mafia hits and buried remains.” As Lutz explained in a 2008 interview with Photoshelter, “When I first saw the Meadowlands I was completely blown away at this vast open space with the Manhattan skyline in the distance. It was this space that existed between spaces, somewhere between urban and suburban all the while made up of swamps, towns and intersecting highways. None of it made any sense to me, still doesn’t.”
All told, the area has become, Sullivan writes, “through negligence, through exploitation, and through its own chaotic persistence, explorable again.”
On the weblog Edible Geography Nicola Twilley presents a talk by and profile of Rachel Laudan, a historian of food, at Fueling Mexico City: A Grain Revolution:
All cities require fuel: oil, gas, electricity, and so on. What I want to talk about today is the energy that fuels the people in the cities—food. Without food energy, a city is nothing. A city is nothing without the people who work and play and enjoy or suffer through the city, and they require food.
I want to talk in four short bursts. The first is about what all cities need in the way of food. The second is the reason why Mexico City had a particularly hard time with food. The third describes a revolution in the food of Mexico City that has taken place in the twenty years since I first saw it. And the fourth is about the kind of trade-offs that had to be made to undergo that revolution in food.
On her own blog Rachel Laudan writes about why the Columbian exchange was a non-event in culinary history:
Ok, what do I mean by culinary history? Culinary (from the Latin culina, kitchen) history traces the history of the (guess) the kitchen or more generally, the techniques used to turn plants and animals into food.
Thesis. 1492 (or the Columbian Exchange) is a complete non-event in culinary history.
Why? Well, the kitchens and techniques that went from Old World to New were imposed on top of older Mesoamerican techniques. The result was a two-tier cuisine. The Spanish kitchen for those of Spanish ancestry, the Mexican kitchen for everyone else.
Or water mills, copper pots, bench stoves, bread ovens for the first lot, grindstones, pottery, three stones round the hearth to balance a griddle, for the latter. Result–a thin layer of Catholic European Cuisine spread over the local cuisines.
More important what about the kitchens and techniques that went from the New World to the Old. Zilch, nada. …
Consider three culinary techniques that the Old World could have picked up.
1. Treating maize with an alkali. The culinary advantage. You can make a flexible flatbread with this. Preferred by most people to the porridges and gruels that were the common way of eating maize in the Old World, maize not treated with alkali not lending itself to flat or raised bread preparations.
2. Making a vegetable puree sauce. Eventually the Old World figured out how to do this with tomatoes. But not with chiles, not as thickeners, and not with tomatillos which give a lovely acid taste and great thickening power. Very little use of rehydrated dried chile in this capacity. Where are the tomatillos in Europe? Where are the chiles used as the thickeners and flavorers of sauces (instead of simply as a piquant taste).
3. Turning cacti/agave into really useful foods. The paddle cactus is perfect as a green vegetable and grows in arid regions. The agave yields a drinkable liquid in arid regions and can be turned into a syrup or an alcohol without much trouble. Yet although these now grow all over the arid regions of Eurasia they are used at most as animal food.
But not a one. So far as I know, no cooks were brought over from the New World, no systematic exploitation of processing methods from that part of the world.