All posts by Garry Peterson

Prof. of Environmental science at Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University in Sweden.
Design, Ideas, Scenarios, Visualization

Bruce Mau @ McGill

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Bruce Mau, a Canadian designer, recently gave the McGill School of the Environment‘s annual Environment Public Lecture at McGill University, on the ‘Future of Environmental Design,’ based upon the Massive Change exhibit developed for the Vancouver Art Gallery. The show was at the Art Gallery on Ontario in 2005, and will be at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in the fall of 2006.

The Massive Change project takes an optimistic, design oriented look at global social and environmental problems and suggests there are many existing resources and abilities that can be mobilized to improve the global human well-being, in areas such as transportation, cities, and manufacturing. My favourite part of the Massive Change exhibit was the visualization room – which filled the walls and floor of a room:

Visual Room VAG

The room is set up like a three-dimensional electromagnetic spectrum. The images made from low frequency waves (radio waves) are near the entrance, images made with visible light (red, orange, yellow…) are in the middle of the room, and images made using high frequency waves (gamma waves) are near the exit of the room.

Massive Change is oriented towards market based technological solutions to environmental problems and therefore in the language of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, it fits withthe TechnoGarden scenario, and indeed addresses many of the same issues, such as bus-rapid transit systems.

The exhbit/book/radio show/website were developed by Bruce Mau and a group of design students.

After hearing from Bruce Mau about the what the students did in these project I was inspired to try and build on our project courses in the McGill School of the Environment.
I think it would be great if we could run a similar type of workshop course here at McGill. That is a course that would encourage a team of students (somewhere between 7-25) to imagine what a sustainable McGill or Montreal could look like, and how we could get there over the next (5 – 25 years) and make there visions/proposal/syntheses into a series of public products such as an exhibit (ideally on the streets of Montreal), lecture series, a book, and website. I think they could build upon lots of work in synthesis and communication done by Massive Change, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, WorldChanging, and many others, to develop practical proposals for McGill and Montreal.

It is also interesting to think about what type of resilience oriented course with a larger international vision could be developed as a Resilience Alliance project. In either case, there are many details of time, money, and credit to work. But I think, there is a lot of potential for learning and innovation in real world, positive, synthetic courses.
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Some other articles on Bruce Mau and Massive Change:
From architecture/design magazine MetropolisMag.com – At the Parsons Table with Bruce Mau, and from the business magazine Fast Company, Making a Map to a New World.

General, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Perspective on the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

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From Vancouver’s Tyee.ca article World Might Yet Be Saved:

While it may not be a verifiable fact that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) is the world’s most underappreciated eco-study, it’s definitely the most unevenly appreciated one. When the huge report first emerged last spring after four years, $24 million and the efforts of more than 1,300 scientists in 95 countries, it made headlines elsewhere. In December, it was awarded a Zayed Prize, something like an environmentalist Nobel. Here in North America, though, the media barely registered its existence.

What a dirty shame. The U.N.-backed Millennium Assessment is the most thorough survey of global ecosystems ever undertaken. It’s also the first report of its kind to link ecosystem health to human well-being, and in so doing, strikes the rich, rich vein of human self-interest. Showing people what’s in it for them is a great way to get something done.

Scenarios

Climate change fiction – news and interviews

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Book reviewer Rick Kleffel has an audio report on US National Public Radio (NPR) on how science fiction writers, such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Michael Crichton, address global warming.

Kleffel also has an interview will Bill McKibben (author of the End of Nature) about science fiction and climate change.

There is another recent podcast interview with Kim Stanley Robinson on his climate change books and science on IT converations.

Also see earlier Art of Climate Change: telling stories to understand the future.

Visualization

Mapping ecological footprint

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The Ecological Footprint Network has some interesting maps and animations of “Footprint Intensity” between 1961 and 2001. The maps also show how the human Footprint has increased 2.5 X between 1961-2001.
Ecological footprint intensity is the footprint per 1/2 degree grid cell. These maps are made by combining population distribution maps and national level ecological footprint data.

The maps were created by Chad Monfreda at SAGE University of Wisconsin – Madison.

I previously posted on SAGE maps of disease burden and mapping humanity’s footprint.

Also, Marc Imoff et al (Nature 2004) have another map of human ecological appropriation.

Ecological Economics, Ideas, Vulnerability

What Drives Humanity’s Footprint on the Earth?

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I recently read a good paper by Richard York, Eugene A Rosa & Thomas Dietz 2003 Footprints on the Earth: The environmental consequences of modernity. American Sociological Review 68(2) 279-300.

The paper uses the statistical analysis of several competing models of what shapes human impact on the earth. The test models of ecological modernization (that democratic capitalist development is developing solutions to environmental problems – i.e. the environmental kuznets curve), political economic (the neo-Marxian treadmill of production), and ecological models (Impact=Population X Affluence X Technology). They found that population and economy size are the best predictors – by far – of a country’s ecological footprint. There is no evidence of ecological modernization, and a little support for political economic models, such as urbanization increases ecological footprint.

They note

Basic material conditions, such as population, economic production, urbanization, and geographical factors, all contribute to environmental impacts and explain the vast majority of cross-national variation in impacts. Factors derived from neo-liberal modernization theory, such as political freedom, civil liberties, and state environmentalism have no effect on impacts.

and conclude

The sobering note from this analysis is our failure to detect the ameliorating processes postulated by neoclassical economics and ecological modernization theorists. This suggess we cannot be sanguine about ecological sustainability via emergent institutional change.
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A key consquence is that because of high levels of consumption in affluent nations, even a slow rate of population growth in these nations is at least as great a threat to the environment as is rapid rate of population growth in less developed nations. After all, the footprint of the typical American is nearly 25 times greater than that of the typical Bangladeshi.

ISI selected Footprints on the Earth as a fast breaking paper in Sociology last year.

A bibliography of their related research is avaiable in the STIRPAT Bibliography.

Regime Shifts, Visualization, Vulnerability

Mapping Possibility of Alternative States in African savannas

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At the end of last year M. Sankaran et al had a paper Determinants of woody cover in African savannas (Nature 2005 438(8) 846-849) that maps the possibility of savannas that can exist in alternative states based on rainfall.  This is the first map I have seen that maps the possibility of alternative states at a large  scale.

Map of alt savanna states in africa

Figure: The distributions of MAP-determined (‘stable’) and disturbance determined (‘unstable’) savannas in Africa. Grey areas represent the existing distribution of savannas in Africa. Vertically hatched areas show the unstable savannas (>784mm MAP); cross-hatched areas show the transition between stable and unstable savannas (516–784mm MAP); grey areas that are not hatched show the stable savannas (<516mm MAP).

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Ecological Management, Regime Shifts, Tools

Resilience Surrogates: a special feature in Ecosystems

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The december isssue of Ecosystems 8(8) 2005 has a special feature on Surrogates for Resilience of Social–Ecological Systems.

In the introductory paper, Surrogates for Resilience of Social–Ecological Systems, Steve Carpenter, Frances Westley and Monica Turner, explain resilience surrogates using a figure.

resilience surrogates

Figure 1. In most cases, resilience of an SES is shrouded by barriers to observation, and can be observed only partially or indirectly. Surrogates are inferred from observations, often with the aid of models. The relationships among observations, surrogates and models should be explicit and transparent. However, the relationship of the surrogate to resilience of the SES is usually uncertain.

The special feature includes the following papers (involving contributors to this blog):

  • Surrogates for Resilience of Social–Ecological Systems by S. R. Carpenter, F. Westley, M. G. Turner
  • A Systems Model Approach to Determining Resilience Surrogates for Case Studies by E. M. Bennett, G. S. Cumming, G. D. Peterson
  • The Use of Discontinuities and Functional Groups to Assess Relative Resilience in Complex Systems by C. R. Allen, L. Gunderson, A. R. Johnson
  • Building Resilience in Lagoon Social–Ecological Systems: A Local-level Perspective by F. Berkes and C. S. Seixas
  • An Exploratory Framework for the Empirical Measurement of Resilience by G. S. Cumming, G. Barnes, S. Perz, M. Schmink, K. E. Sieving, J. Southworth, M. Binford, R. D. Holt, C. Stickler, T. Van Holt
Big Back Loop, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Scenarios

Re-Orient: world economic production in MA scenarios

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Scenario Share of World Econ

Proportion of World Economy projected in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment scenarios (Tg – TechnoGarden, go-Global Orchestration, am- Adapting Mosaic, and OS-Order From Strength). Compared to yesterday’s post of Maddison’s data, which is in Purchasing Power Parity, this graph estimates the size of the world economy using 1995 exchange rates, which under estimates the purchasing power of poor countries – particularly the Chinese economy. Consquently, this graph and yesterday’s graph do not match in 2000.

This graph shows Asia passing Western Europe + North America & Oceania in about 75 years, later in the slow economic growth world of Order From Strength. If purchasing power is used then crossing date would be earlier.

Big Back Loop, Ideas, Reorganization

Re-Orient: world economic production over five centuries

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Regional share of world economy over last five centuries

Regional Share of World Economy

Share of the total world economy represented by different regions. W Eur, NA, AusNZ= Western Europe, North Americam, Australia and New Zeland. E Eur + FSU = Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Union. Data from Angus Maddison 2005 Measuring and Interpreting World Economic Performance 1500-2001. Review of Income and Wealth, 51:1-35.

Graph shows how the recent centrality of Western Europe and North America to the world economy appears to represent a temporary break in Asian centrality in the world economy. The centrality’s of the West in the world economy began in about 1850 and appears likely to end soon.

Andre Gunder Frank, who died in early 2005, discussed this idea in his 1998 book Re:Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age.