All posts by Garry Peterson

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

Stockholm University looking for Professor of Environmental Social Science

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For all our great social science colleagues, if you are interested in coming to Stockholm, the Faculty of Social Science at Stockholm University is looking for  a Professor in Environmental Social Science.   You can’t be appointed in Stockholm Resilience Centre, as we aren’t in the Faculty of Social Science but the social and natural scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Centre would be interested in collaborating with whoever gets the position.

The application deadline is 15 February 2012.

The job ad states:

The possible contribution of social science to the understanding of current processes of environmental change covers a wide range of issues. Which aspects of human action and of the human-built environment affect the climate? How do climate and environmental change influence the conditions for a well-functioning society? How are such changes reflected in, for example, the areas of health and economy? How do individuals and societies adapt, at various levels of organization and action, to climatic and environmental change? Which notions of continuity and change in the climate and environment are prevalent in different social contexts? Which are the processes of knowledge and value formation that create such notions? Can one identify tensions between different interpretations?

Job Description
The position entails conducting research and teaching, primarily at the graduate and postgraduate levels. It also entails working with the development and implementation of faculty wide research initiatives and educational partnerships within the area of environmental social science. Furthermore, the position includes networking within the faculty as well as nationally and internationally, in order to strengthen research on climate and environmental issues at the Faculty of Social Science.

The development of environmental social science requires open and non-normative research on all of these questions and presupposes that local as well as global aspects are covered.

The purpose of the announced position as professor is to stimulate the growth of the research area as a whole. Processes that can be related to the core issues of social science as well as to actual human impact on the environment and climate (or vice versa) should be in focus. The starting point should be a solid basis of theoretical and methodological traditions from social science.

General

New Masters in Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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The new resilience science oriented masters programme at the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University is accepting applications for the second cohort of students starting in the fall of 2012.

The new two year Master’s programme will enhance students’ ability to understand and analyze of the complex interactions between ecological and social dynamics across scales; particularly ecosystem management in the context of change and uncertainty.  Students are introduced to multiple research approaches and methods for studying coupled social and ecological systems.

The programme admits 15 students each year and includes one year of courses and a traineeship, and one year spent doing a Master’s thesis.

The four mandatory courses are taken the first year are designed to define the challenges we face today and reflect on how resilience thinking can be applied to social-ecological systems to solve real-life problems.  Students gain experience in trans-disciplinary research methods by working in groups on real world problems, and during this time develop and refine their thesis research topic and plan.

After finishing courses, students spend the following year researching and writing their theses under the supervision of a centre researcher.  We encourage students to work with the ongoing research projects at the centre, and develop their research one or more papers for peer reviewed journals.

Application deadline for Autumn 2012 programme start is 15 January 2012 for non EU students and 15 April 2012 for EU students.

For more information see the SRC website.

General

Eric Idle on “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” : The New Yorker

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In the New Yorker, former Python, Eric Idle writes “Who Wrote Shakespeare?”. He explains:

While it is perfectly obvious to everyone that Ben Jonson wrote all of Shakespeare’s plays, it is less known that Ben Jonson’s plays were written by a teen-age girl in Sunderland, who mysteriously disappeared, leaving no trace of her existence, which is clear proof that she wrote them. The plays of Marlowe were actually written by a chambermaid named Marlene, who faked her own orgasm, and then her own death in a Deptford tavern brawl. Queen Elizabeth, who was obviously a man, conspired to have Shakespeare named as the author of his plays, because how could a man who had only a grammar-school education and spoke Latin and a little Greek possibly have written something as bad as “All’s Well That Ends Well”? It makes no sense. It was obviously an upper-class twit who wished to disguise his identity so that Vanessa Redgrave could get a job in her old age.

…

Mere lack of evidence, of course, is no reason to denounce a theory. Look at intelligent design. The fact that it is bollocks hasn’t stopped a good many people from believing in it. Darwinism itself is only supported by tons of evidence, which is a clear indication that Darwin didn’t write his books himself. They were most likely written by Jack the Ripper, who was probably King Edward VII, since all evidence concerning this has been destroyed.

Paranoia? Of course not. It’s alternative scholarship. What’s wrong with teaching alternative theories in our schools? What are liberals so afraid of? Can’t children make up their own minds about things like killing and carrying automatic weapons on the playground? Bush was right: no child left unarmed. Why this dictatorial approach to learning, anyway? What gives teachers the right to say what things are? Who’s to say that flat-earthers are wrong? Or that the Church wasn’t right to silence Galileo, with his absurd theory (actually written by his proctologist) that the earth moves around the sun. Citing “evidence” is so snobbish and élitist. I think we all know what lawyers can do with evidence. Look at Shakespeare. Poor bloke. Wrote thirty-seven plays, none of them his.

And of course there is that great competitor to the theory of gravity – the theory of intelligent falling.

General

Green art – from collapse to resilience?

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In the Economist, Robert Butler writes that GOING GREEN is about artistic change as much as technological change, and that green art is moving away from themes of doom and collapse and towards themes of resilience, survival, adaptation and improvisation.  He writes:

Every big scientific moment is also a cultural one. The Lisbon earthquake that killed an estimated 30,000 people in 1755 gave birth to the science of seismology. It also inspired writings by Kant, Rousseau and, most famously, Voltaire, who describes the earthquake in “Candide”, and the impact it had on the notion that there was a benevolent God watching over “the best of all possible worlds”. A century later, the ideas in Darwin’s “Origin of Species” would be played out, absorbed and contested in the novels of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Fifty years after that, Einstein’s Theory of Relativity paved the way for modernism in all the arts. …

This may be the moment, in my last Going Green column, to spell out this column’s idea of going green. It is not first and foremost about changing to low-energy lightbulbs, driving a Prius, cutting back on flights, insulating your loft or growing vegetables on your roof. All these are worth doing, so long as you remember the words of the British government’s chief scientific adviser, David Mackay—“If everyone does a little, we’ll achieve only a little.” Going green is more about absorbing the scientific consensus that has emerged over the last 50 years: resources are finite, the planet is fragile, our activities are having a dangerous impact on the atmosphere. To take this on board is to change the way you see the world. Even people who resent the sanctimonious tendencies of the greens can see that a great cultural shift has taken place; one that, in the opinion of Tim Smit, who founded the Eden Project in Cornwall, may turn out to be as far-reaching as the Renaissance or the Reformation.

Does that mean that art-lovers and theatre-goers are in for many more gloomy, doom-laden paintings and plays? Perhaps not. The response from artists is moving rapidly away from the clichés of collapsing icesheets and polar bears perched on lonely icebergs. More and more, playwrights, directors and artists talk about approaching this subject through ideas of resilience, survival, adaptation and improvisation. They want to move audiences through stories of hope, endurance and resourcefulness. And that takes us back to the beginnings of narrative art, to Homer and his hero, Odysseus the Cunning.

General

Mapping China and India’s diasporas

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The Economist maps the largest twenty countries of China and India’s diasporas.

More Chinese people live outside mainland China than French people live in France, with some to be found in almost every country. Some 22m ethnic Indians are scattered across every continent. Diasporas have been a part of the world for millennia. But today their size (if migrants were a nation, they would be the world’s fifth-largest) and the ease of staying in touch with those at home are making them matter much more.

Adaptation, Vulnerability

Resilience and Euro – diversity

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On MacroEconomic Resilience ex-banker Ashwin Parameswaran draws upon Holling’s pathology of natural resource management and the work of Hyman Minsky (a connection I’ve mentioned previously and Ashwin has explored extensively – see here and here) to write about The Resilience Stability Tradeoff: Drawing Analogies between River Flood Management and Macroeconomic Management.

Ashwin Parameswaran insightfully writes:

In complex adaptive systems, stability does not equate to resilience. In fact, stability tends to breed loss of resilience and fragility or as Minsky put it, “stability is destabilising”. Although Minsky’s work has been somewhat neglected in economics, the principle of the resilience-stability tradeoff is common knowledge in ecology, especially since Buzz Holling’s pioneering work on the subject. If stability leads to fragility, then it follows that stabilisation too leads to increased system fragility. As Holling and Meffe put it in another landmark paper on the subject titled ‘Command and Control and the Pathology of Natural Resource Management’, “when the range of natural variation in a system is reduced, the system loses resilience.” Often, the goal of increased stability is synonymous with a goal of increased efficiency but “the goal of producing a maximum sustained yield may result in a more stable system of reduced resilience”.

The entire long arc of post-WW2 macroeconomic policy in the developed world can be described as a flawed exercise in macroeconomic stabilisation. But there is no better example of this principle than the Euro currency project as the below graph (from Pictet via FT Alphaville) illustrates.

Instead of a moderately volatile mix of different currencies and interest rates, we now have a mostly stable currency union prone to the occasional risk of systemic collapse. If this was all there is to it, then it is not clear that the Euro is such a bad idea. After all, simply shifting the volatility out to the tails is not by itself a bad outcome. But the resilience-stability tradeoff is more than just a simple transformation in distribution. Economic agents adapt to a prolonged period of stability in such a manner that the system cannot “withstand even modest adverse shocks”. “Normal” disturbances that were easily absorbed prior to the period of stabilisation are now sufficient to cause a catastrophic transition. Izabella Kaminska laments the fact that sovereign spreads for many Eurozone countries (vs 10Y Bunds) now exceed pre-Euro levels. But the real problem isn’t so much that spreads have blown out but that they have blown out after a prolonged period of stability.

Networks

Resilience and the Euro – networks

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The New Scientist recently had an article by Debora MacKenzie on resilience and the Euro.  She writes:

… The diversity of a network’s components and the density and strength of its connections – called its connectivity – affect the system’s resilience, or resistance to change. More connections make a system more resilient: if one component fails others can fill in. But only up to a point. Go past a certain threshold and more connectivity makes the system less resilient because a single failure can cascade to every other component.

The trick is to get the balance right. “Cascades of failure may be controlled by changing the nature and strength of the links between various parts of the networks,” says Fisher. Much current research in complex systems focuses on assessing connectivity correctly to enable that. Other work aims to detect behaviour that indicates an imminent collapse.

So turning 17 separate currencies into one eurozone was a cascading failure waiting to happen?

Yes. That is why Greek debt is a crisis, even though Greece accounts for only 2.5 per cent of the eurozone’s GDP. News of its debts caused the trust that markets placed in Greek government bonds to plummet. Its creditors are mainly in the eurozone, so a Greek default is causing markets to lose confidence in other members, such as Italy – which is too big to bail out.

Debt crises can have far-reaching consequences not just for governments and financial institutions but also for individual borrowers. When faced with overwhelming debt, individuals may feel helpless and trapped, unsure of how to move forward. This is where debt clearing services such as moorcroft debt recovery help can be beneficial. These services can provide guidance and support to help individuals manage their debts and work towards becoming debt-free. By taking control of their finances and working with debt recovery experts, individuals can avoid the negative consequences of debt, such as legal action from creditors and damage to their credit scores.

Could the crisis have been avoided?

Complexity theory shows what went wrong. Yaneer Bar-Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says his still-unpublished studies show that investors profited by driving down the value of Greek government bonds, triggering the crisis. And, he suspects, they have now moved on to Italy. If instead of national bonds issued by sometimes weak economies, the eurozone had one common bond backed by powerhouses such as Germany, such an attack could not have happened.

Germany rejects eurobonds. But, says Bar-Yam, complex systems such as multicellular organisms show that “if you are going to accept common risk, you have to invest in defences that extend to the weakest member”. Either that or make sure an attack on a weak member cannot spread, a technique that ant colonies have perfected: the death of a single ant has little effect on the colony as a whole. “Biology has solved this problem several ways,” says Bar-Yam.

Scenarios

Scenarios have to be plausible, but reality is under no such constraints

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Following up on my comments on William Gibson‘s discuss of his science fiction where I wrote that “Scenarios have to be plausible, but reality is under no such constraints”

Futurist, scenario planner, and co-founder of WorldChanging, Jamais Cascio writes on his weblog Open the Future about Living in a Scenario:

There’s something of a rule-of-thumb among professional futurey-types: scenario elements that sound plausible are almost certainly wrong, while scenario elements that sound utterly implausible are very likely on-target. That’s generally true, although it applies more to the disruptive aspects of a scenario than to the everyday aspects. (That said, a scenario that said “most people in the West continue to live quiet lives, using their barely-sufficient income to pay for disposable commodity goods and overly-processed food,” while both plausible and very likely on-target for the next decade or three, is more depressing than illuminating.) Good scenario disruption points should be things that, in the here-and-now, would make you say “oh, crap” if you heard them in the news.

Oh, crap.

Nanotechnology researchers in Mexico, France, Spain, and Chile have been targeted by a terror group calling itself “Individuals Tending Towards Savagery,” and claiming to be inspired by the Unabomber.

Unabomber-copycat terror cell hits nanotech researchers in the developing world and Europe — I’m not sure anything could sound more like a headline from a scenario exercise.

Adaptation

Reinventing social-ecological memory

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Nuu-chah-nulth Canoe Steaming video from Tofino, British Columbia shows the reinvention of historic canoe making, both as political symbol and for cultural tourism.

Nuu-chah-nulth Canoe Steaming, by Jacqueline Windh a Tofino based writer and photographer.  She made the video of master Nuu-chah-nulth canoe carvers Joe and Carl Martin steam a dugout canoe on Chestermans Beach, Tofino, Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

For more on the canoe see a travel article written by Jacqueline Windh.

I’d like to know the story of how a group of German apprentices (the folks in black/white clothes + hats) ended up helping out, and whether it represents a collaboration.