All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
General

SEI looking for deputy director

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Stockholm Environment Insitute (SEI) is looking for someone to fill a combined leadership position as Centre Director for the Stockholm Centre and Deputy Director Operations Stockholm Environment Institute.  SEI is one of the partners of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, so there is the potential for this person to do a lot of resilience research.  The application is due May 19th.

The job ad is below:

The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) is an international research institute founded in 1989 by the Swedish Government on integrated research and knowledge generation for policy and decision support on sustainable development. It has research centres in Stockholm, Boston, York, Oxford, Tallinn, Bangkok and Dar-es-Salaam with about 180 staff. A significant part of SEI’s work is carried out in developing countries and the Institute applies an active diversity policy and operates in a global multicultural environment. The Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) invites applications for a full-time combined position as Centre Director for the Stockholm Centre and Deputy Director Operations for the Institute. The position is located at the SEI Headquarters in Stockholm.

Features and responsibilities of the position as
The Centre Director is responsible for the operations of the SEI Stockholm Centre, by providing strategic and intellectual leadership, carrying out and supporting fund raising, and ensuring the long-term operational and financial viability of the Stockholm Centre including general administration, management and development of Centre staff.

Works as a Senior Research Fellow who formulates, develops, leads, manages and implements one or more externally funded research programmes/projects.

Features and responsibilities of the position as The Deputy Director for operations:

  • Supports the ED on operational issues across the SEI organisation, related to institutional and centre developments and management related tasks
  • Supports the ED in strategic fund raising and external representation
  • Serves on the SEI Executive Team and as such is part of the overall leadership of the Institute.

In an international organization with six research centers around the world, the position requires an experienced and dedicated individual with passion for sustainable development and strong cross-cultural communication skills.

General

Native language endangerment in BC

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Aboriginal languages in Canada are struggling to survive.  This is part of a global pattern.  About 3,000 of the world’s 6,000-7,000 languages are viewed to be endangered.  95% of languages are spoken by only 6% of the world’s people – 25% have less than 1000 speakers.

The First Peoples’ Heritage Language and Culture Council (FPHLCC), a British Columbia crown corporation to assist B.C. First Nations in their efforts to revitalize their languages, arts and cultures, has a produced a report (pdf) on the Status of B.C. First Nations Languages, which finds native languages in BC (map of languages) are seriously endangered.

Gitsenimx is the language with the most speakers  (1,219), all other have less than a thousand speakers, and only Tsilhqot’in and Dakelh have more than 500.

The report states:

  • Fluent First Nations language speakers make up a small and shrinking minority of the B.C. First Nations population
  • Eight languages are severely endangered and twenty two are nearly extinct
  • Most fluent speakers are over 65
  • The majority of classroom teaching is insufficient to create enough new fluent speakers to revitalize languages.

In the press release for the report Dr. Lorna Williams, Chair of the Board at the First Peoples’ Council and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Knowledge and Learning at the University of Victoria explains:

British Columbia is home to 60% of the indigenous languages in Canada as well as distinct language families not found anywhere else in the world. The cultural and linguistic diversity of B.C. is a priceless treasure for all of humanity and this report shows that more must be done to protect it. With this report, we now have concrete evidence of what we have known for some time: all First Nations languages in B.C. are in a critical state.

I am encouraged by the many fantastic community-based language programs detailed in the report, but unfortunately, they are not enough to stem the loss. I sincerely hope this report is recognized as a call-to-action to save our languages before it is too late.

General

Books: Social demoncratic thought, peer review, and genetic engineering

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1) Henry Farrell on Crooked Timber asks for suggestion for The New New Left Book Club that considers “which books are useful for understanding where the ‘left’ are now.  He suggests:

  • Thomas Geoghegan – Which Side Are You On? Trying To Be For Labor When It’s Flat On Its Back
  • Rick Perlstein’s Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
  • Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart
  • Mark Blyth, Great Transformations: Economic Ideas and Institutional Change in the Twentieth Century
  • Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

I’ve only read one of the books that he suggests, Tom Slee’s No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart. I thought Slee’s book was insightful and clear.  I adapted a number of examples of it for my adaptive management class at McGill.

2) Michèle Lamont’s book How Professors Think : Inside the Curious World of Academic Judgment examines how social scientists review each others proposed research:

Judging quality isn’t robotically rational; it’s emotional, cognitive, and social, too. Yet most academics’ self-respect is rooted in their ability to analyze complexity and recognize quality, in order to come to the fairest decisions about that elusive god, “excellence.” In How Professors Think, Lamont aims to illuminate the confidential process of evaluation and to push the gatekeepers to both better understand and perform their role.

3) The US National Academy has published its assessment of Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the United States.  Their bottom line:

Many U.S. farmers who grow genetically engineered (GE) crops are realizing economic and environmental benefits — such as lower production costs, improved pest control, reduced use of pesticides, and better yields — compared with conventional crops, says a new report from the National Research Council. However, GE crops could lose their effectiveness unless farmers use other proven weed and insect management practices.

But they also state their is a lack of research on social impacts of GE crops, and along with improving social research they recommend:

  • Stakeholder group needed to document emerging weed-resistance problems and develop cost-effect practices to increase longevity of herbicide-resistant crop technology
  • Infrastructure needed on the water quality effects of GE crops
  • Public and private research institutions improve monitoring and assessment capacity to ensure GE technologies contribute to sustainable agriculture
  • Increased support for the development of ‘public goods’ traits through collaborative approaches to genetic engineering technology
General

Burning and Looting

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What caused the financial crisis?

Was the it the models, the expectations, correlated risks, non-transparency, dangerous financial innovation, or weak regulations?

It was probably all of the above, but recently it has become clear that the banks caused it as well.

While people have long observed that mismatched incentives, poor models, and lax regulation allowed and encouraged the banks to make mistakes, it has only recently become clear that some banks (+ hedge funds, etc) helped create the crisis by stimulating investment that fed the housing bubble so they could bet on it bursting.  Specifically, those who were betting on a housing bust enhanced the bubble by creating Collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) they wanted to bet against.  By continually creating and buying these CDOs they almost certainly enhanced the bubble, causing a bigger burst and made more money on the bust.  The extent to which this actually promoted the bubble has only recently become clear.

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Ecological Management, Ecosystem services

Agriculture – breeding, biodiversity and biomass

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1) Lack of research to improve yields in non-industrial agriculture. The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog comments on What are breeders selecting for?:

A new paper by H.E. Jones and colleagues compares cultivars of different ages under organic and non-organic systems, and concludes that modern varieties simply aren’t suited to organic systems.

2) The environmentalism of the poor. The poor want biomass not biodiversity is the unsurprising result on a new literature review from the Nature Conservancy reports SciDev.net.

“People just don’t care about biodiversity,” said Craig Leisher of the US-based Nature Conservancy, at the meeting, ‘Linking biodiversity conservation and poverty reduction: what, why and how?’ held at the UK’s Zoological Society of London.Leisher, who conducted the research with Neil Larsen, also from the Nature Conservancy, gave the example of a poor fisherman, for whom the route out of poverty is to catch more fish — not more kinds of fish. …

But Matt Walpole, head of the UN Environment Programme’s Ecosystem Assessment Programme, and an author of the Science study, warned that the finding that biomass was more important than biodiversity was context-specific.

“If one thinks in terms of consumptive use then amount is important,” he said. But in agriculture, for example, biodiversity is important.

“Variability allows adaptability to variations in the ecosystem … if you’ve got variation then you are more resistant to shocks.”

3) Agriculture vs. Fish. On Nature’s Climate Feedback blog Olive Heffernan reports on PISCES Conference:

Jake Rice and … economist Serge Garcia, are concerned that measures to conserve marine biodiversity are in contradiction with policies to protect food security, with the likely upshot that both will fail to address their respective goals.

The conundrum is straightforward: by mid-century, there’ll be an additional 2 billion people on earth, each of whom will need to eat. In total, they’ll require an extra 3.65*108 of dietary protein. Forecasts suggest that we’ll need an 11% increase in irrigation for grain production just to keep pace with human population growth, not withstanding the impacts of climate change on crops and water availability. Right now, one-third of the world’s population relies on fish and fisheries products for at least one-fifth of their annual protein intake; if that continues to be the case, we’ll need around 70 million metric tonnes more fish protein by 2050, says Rice.

That’s something like 75-100% of current fish protein production. So how can we generate this and manage our fisheries? Rice outlines several possible options, each of which involves a conflict with environmental management. …

The problem, says Rice, is that these clearly conflicting policy goals aren’t being looked at by the same people at a high enough level. Now that the old problem of fisheries governance is being met with the newer problems of climate change and rapid population growth, we need a merger of these discussions, he says. He’d like to see the Convention on Biological Diversity pay more attention to the sustainable food dimension of their mandate and the Food and Agricultural Organization speaking with the CBD at a higher level. Eventually, says Rice, the UN General Assembly should be the forum to look at merging and prioritizing these policies.

General

Interesting New Professorship at McGill School of Environment

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The McGill School of Environment (MSE) (www.mcgill.ca/mse) invites applications for the Liber Ero1 Chair in Environment at McGill University in Montreal, Canada.  The appointment is expected to be at the rank of Full Professor.  The Chair holder will also be cross-appointed in department(s) in Faculties of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (www.mcgill.ca/macdonald), Arts (www.mcgill.ca/arts), Law (www.mcgill.ca/law) or Science (www.mcgill.ca/science), depending on areas of expertise.  This position is intended to have a transformative influence both on research and education within the MSE and McGill University, and on environmental challenges at the national and international levels.

The MSE was founded on the principle that the resolution of current and future environmental problems requires a highly integrated and interdisciplinary approach that is informed by both the natural and applied sciences and the social sciences and humanities.  The MSE uses this approach as we train the next generation of leaders through a set of novel, interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate programs, and through innovative interdisciplinary research in environment.

The Chair holder will have an internationally recognized record of environmental research at the intersection of the natural or applied sciences and the social sciences or humanities.  He/she will have demonstrated success in attracting research funding and strong graduate students as well as excellence in teaching at both the graduate and the undergraduate levels. In addition, the Chair holder should have experience in engaging colleagues across a wide spectrum of academic disciplines with those in the public and private sectors, in a research agenda that informs public policy responses to critical environmental problems such as biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and services, climate and energy, disease and environment, environmental ethics, food security, and water.

Applicants shall provide a letter of intent, a summary of research interests (including proposed research program), a complete curriculum vitae, copies of three representative publications, and the names of at least three references by September 15, 2010 to the Director of the McGill School of Environment, Professor Marilyn E.  Scott.

The full job advertisement is here.

General

Age of Wonder is a fascinating book

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I’m about halfway through Richard Holmes The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science.   Holmes uses the stories of an inter-related set of individual British scientists: the aristocratic botanist and administrator Joesph Banks, the German emigre astronomer William Hershel, and the romantic populist chemist and inventor Humphry Davy, and uses their stories to tie together social change, art, science and the personal lives of scientists in a vivid, rich way.  He writes that he is describing the ‘second scientific revolution, which swept through Britain at the end of the eighteenth century, and produced a new vision which has rightly been called romantic science.’   Its a fantastic book, which I highly recommend.

Below are some reviews

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Inequality, Visualization

Mapping segregation and integration

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On radicalcartography Bill Rankin has posted some interesting and pretty maps of urban segregation in The cartography of segregation.

Excerpt from CHICAGO BOUNDARIES Bill Rankin, 2009 (click on image to see full high resolution version)

He writes:

Nearly every U.S. city is radically (and disturbingly) segregated, with stark divides of race, ethnicity, and class. I’ve been playing with various ways to show these divisions, using graphics which are equally evocative, provocative, and rigorous. I’ve posted two new projects, showing two possibilities: one for Chicago, and another for New York.

In both projects I’m reacting in part against maps which show ethnic areas using solid homogeneous colors, often highlighting only the majority group — such as this Wikipedia map of Bosnia and Herzegovina, or this New York Times map of Pashtuns in the Sulaiman Mountains. Not only do these maps fail to show local diversity or ethnic overlaps, but they visually reinforce the all-or-nothing logic of national territorial statehood that made the conflicts in question so intractable in the first place. These cases are crying out for new forms of mapping — mapping which could directly provoke new ways of thinking. (In other words, radical cartography to the rescue!)

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Ecological memory of Amazonian agriculture

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I just wrote this note on Faculty of 1000 on the paper (doi:10.1073/pnas.0908925107) I mentioned the other day:

Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia
McKey D, Rostain S, Iriarte J, Glaser B, Birk JJ, Holst I, Renard D
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2010 Apr 12  [related articles]

This fascinating study describes how ecological engineers (such as ants, termites, and earthworms) maintained a newly described pre-Columbian agricultural landscape. The authors describe sites along the Guianan coastal plain (in Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana) where pre-Columbian farmers constructed raised fields in flat, marshy locations.

The paper is particularly interesting because it combines new archaeological evidence in favour of the relatively new, and somewhat controversial, idea of a fairly densely settled pre-Columbian Amazonia with an ecological analysis of i) how spatial self-organization of ecosystems was likely used by pre-Columbian agriculturalists to enhance the yield and resilience of their agriculture system and ii) how these same processes have preserved aspects of the agricultural system during about five centuries of abandonment. This study is also interesting for its demonstration of how ecological memory can maintain patterns produced by past disturbance (whether natural or human), and in its hints of how different types of agriculture that work with biodiversity could possibly be reinvented today.

Some photos from the supplementary info of the paper:


Pre-Columbian raised fields in the Guianas. (A–D) Pre-Columbian raised fields in coastal French Guiana are located in flooded depressions, in flat savannas, along sandy ridges, or in talwegs. (A) Piliwa, on the left bank of the Mana River in extreme western French Guiana. (B) Corossony, on the left bank of the Sinnamary River. (C) K-VIII, west of the city of Kourou, near the Bois Diable site. (D) Maillard, between the town of Macouria and Cayenne Island.


(E) Map of raised-field complexes along coastal Amazonia from eastern Guyana to near Cayenne in French Guiana.

Ecological Management, Networks

Short Links: Networks, Amazonian historical ecology, and development data

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Two recent papers and comments + a new data site:

1) Tom Fiddaman on a new Nature paper (doi:10.1038/nature08932) from Eugene Stanley‘s lab on cascading failure in connected networks, that shows that feedbacks between connected networks can destabilize two stable networks.

2) Wired news article Lost Tribes Used Clever Tricks to Turn Amazon Wasteland to Farms by Brandon Keim, who is writing a book on ecological tipping points,describes recent research on  newly discovered remains on novel agricultural systems in the coastal Amazon.  Its based on a paper by  Doyle McKey and others in PNAS –  Pre-Columbian agricultural landscapes, ecosystem engineers, and self-organized patchiness in Amazonia (doi:10.1073/pnas.0908925107.  The paper is really cool, combing an exploration of ecological memory with historical ecology. From  the abstract:

… we show that pre-Columbian farmers of the Guianas coast constructed large raised-field complexes, growing on them crops including maize, manioc, and squash. Farmers created physical and biogeochemical heterogeneity in flat, marshy environments by constructing raised fields. When these fields were later abandoned, the mosaic of well-drained islands in the flooded matrix set in motion self-organizing processes driven by ecosystem engineers (ants, termites, earthworms, and woody plants) that occur preferentially on abandoned raised fields. Today, feedbacks generated by these ecosystem engineers maintain the human-initiated concentration of resources in these structures. Engineer organisms transport materials to abandoned raised fields and modify the structure and composition of their soils, reducing erodibility. The profound alteration of ecosystem functioning in these landscapes coconstructed by humans and nature has important implications for understanding Amazonian history and biodiversity. Furthermore, these landscapes show how sustainability of food-production systems can be enhanced by engineering into them fallows that maintain ecosystem services and biodiversity. Like anthropogenic dark earths in forested Amazonia, these self-organizing ecosystems illustrate the ecological complexity of the legacy of pre-Columbian land use.

3) The World Bank has launched a new web site: data.worldbank.org to provide free access to development data. Their data catalog provides access to over 2,000 indicators from World Bank data.