Category Archives: General

General, Reflections

A Moratorium on Geoengineering? Really?

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In the end of October 2010, participants in the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) included in their agreement to protect biodiversity , a moratorium on geo­engineering. This CBD moratorium came timely as the debate around geoengineering virtually exploded internationally with several high-profile reports being published by, amongst others, the British Royal Society, and the U.S. Congress. The IPCC has announced it will organize several expert meetings in 2011 to focus on geoengineering, to help prepare the next review of climate science, due for completion in 2014.

But what does this “moratorium” really imply? This is not a trivial question considering the often acclaimed fragmentation of global environmental governance, and the fact that most geoengineering schemes would have impacts on additional planetary boundaries such as land use change and biodiversity. Two main (and highly simplified of course) interpretations seem to exist in a quite complicated legal debate.

One is that the CBD moratorium places a considerable limit on geoengineering experimentation and attempts. The only exception are “small-scale” controlled experiments that meet specific requirements, i.e.: that they are assumed in controlled settings and for explicit scientific purposes, are subject to prior environmental impact assessment, and have no impacts beyond national jurisdiction. Proponents of this position note that even if the CBD moratorium is not legally binding, governments launching large geoengineering experiments would “risk their credibility and diplomatic reputations”, a strong enough disincentive that effectively “blocks risky climate techno-fixes”. The Canadian NGO ETC Group elaborates this point here.

The second position instead highlights several points that undermine the strenght of the CBD moratorium. The first is that the agreement has no legally binding power, and that formal sanctioning mechanisms are absent. The CBD moratorium is “soft law” which implies that States  still could launch geoengineering schemes unilaterally. Note also that the United States has not formally ratified the CBD convention.

Second, even though the CBD moratorium might be seen as defining an upper limit on the scale of geoengineering experiments, key definitional questions remain to be teased out. What is to be defined as “small-scale” and  “experiment”? And what is its status compared to other related pieces of international law, such as the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, the London Convention, and the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques, just to mention a few.

Third, as the US Congressional Research Service notes in its report, international agreements are best equipped to deal with disputes between countries, and not necessarily between one country and one private actor, or between private actors that may shift locations to suit their interests (pp. 29). And major private or semi-private actors and funders are out there, including the Bill Gates and Richard Branson $4.6 million Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Resources, Ice911, Intellectual Ventures (see WJS article “Global warming might be solved with a helium balloon and a few miles of garden hose”), Carbon Engineeering, Planktos Foundation, and GreenSea Ventures (featured in Nature here).

So, do we really have a real, effective global moratorium on geoengineering? Far from it it seems. Feel free to disagree in the comment field below.

Originally posted in adaptiveness.wordpress.com
General, Links

Short links: ecopyschology, ecodance, and urban innovation

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1) Miller-McCune writes Studies show nature restores our spirits, improves our thinking, keeps us healthier and probably even saner:

…“Attention Restoration Theory” or ART, which posits that a walk in the woods helps refocus the mind and revive the spirit, has been a growing field of research for the past 20 years. New studies are quantifying the restorative powers of nature and suggesting how the restorative process works.

“In the late 1980s, I discovered that ‘favorite places’ could be a good window [measurable unit of analysis] into how humans use their environment to restore themselves,” states psychologist Kalevi Korpela with Finland’s University of Tampere.

2) In Nature Nicola Jones writes about a collaboration between Vancouver ecologists (including some friends of the RA) and dancers in Dance: Rhythm and reason

3 ) Urban blog Polis writes about the evolution of Jane Jacobs’s ideas about the importance of old buildings in encouraging urban innovation in The use of old buildings, 50 years later

General

4 recent books that sounds interesting but I haven’t read

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1) Australian economist John Quiggin, author of Zombie Economics, recommends a recent book, State of Innovation, edited by Fred Block and Matthew Keller that examines the process of innovation in the US.  He writes that the books key conclusion is:

… over the last four decades, government programs and policies have quietly become ever more central to the American economy. From “basic research” to commercialization, the fingerprints of government can be found in virtually every major industrial success story of the late 20th and early 21st century.

2) Novelist and technology activist Cory Doctrow recommends:

Joseph Reagle Jr‘s Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia is exactly what a popular, scholarly work should be: serious but not slow, intelligent but not dull, and esoteric but not obscure. It’s practically a textbook example on how to adapt a dissertation as a trade book — dropping the literature review, moderating the stuff that’s meant to prove you’ve done your homework, and diving straight into the argument.

Reagle, an avid wikipedian himself, nevertheless takes up an objective distance and tries to suss out how it is that Wikipedia works as well as it does (I’m always amazed by critics who characterize Wikipedia as a hopeless quagmire of argument — there’s certainly a lot of argument there, but hopeless? If it’s so hopeless, how did those millions of articles get written and edited?). His thesis: Wikipedia works because it has a distinctive culture of assumed good faith; that is, there is a powerful (though not universal) norm of assuming that the person on the other side of the argument is every bit as committed as you are to getting high quality, accurate encyclopedic entries written and maintained.

3) Political scientist Henry Farrell recommends Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty:

Really, really good, in ways that are hard to convey in a review. An extraordinary combination of intellectual history and novel, using a series of vignettes to show how the USSR’s leaders sought to respond to the consumer utopia of the West, and how this affected the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. A deeply humanistic book, which takes economic theory seriously in ways that few humanists do, treating it not only as a way of thinking about the world, but as a tangle of hopes and aspirations.

4) Oregon plant breeder Carol Deppe‘s Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times is recommended by local sustainability author Casaubon who writes:

It is rare for me to read a book that … fills that middle gap by offering me genuinely new and engaging ideas, is local to its place but thoughtful about how information gleaned in one environment might connect to another, is written by someone who does have limits on time and energy and occasionally desire to do it perfectly, and finally, is conscious of the need to garden in response to difficult times. That’s why Carol Deppe’s _The Resilient Gardener_ is such a gift.

…The premise is one that I can’t but appreciate – she points out that hard times come to all of us, whether they are national or international in scale or purely personal. The narrative begins with the years she spent caring for her mother who suffered Alzheimers disease, and the ways that her garden was a respite and a nurturance to herself and to her mother, but also the ways that her garden had to become resilient to allow for demands on her time and resources. She then shifts us towards a world picture, but never forgets that our gardens have to serve us in complicated situations.

General

The Politics of Cascading Ecological Crises

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Twitter | @vgalaz

How do we make sense of ecological crises that cascade across spatial scales and that propagate from ecological to social and economical systems? Considering a number of recent crises events with clear ecological dimensions – ranging from the 2008 food crisis (video below) to the spread of plant disease Ug99 in East Africa and parts of the Middle East – there is actually quite little research on the sociopolitical dimensions of ecological crises events.

During 2008-2009, we organized several small workshops with political science and media scholars from the Swedish National Center for Crisis Management Research and Training (CRISMART). Our ambition was to bring together insights from the crisis management research community, and insights from resilience theory, especially the notion of “tipping points” and ecological surprise.

The results of our work have just been published in the journal Public Administration in an article entitled “Institutional and Political Leadership Dimensions of Cascading Ecological Crises”. Here we elaborate a range of difficult political challenges that emerge though different phases of a complex crisis: early warning, sense making, response and post-crisis learning. As we elaborate, even though there are several examples of successful governance of ecological stresses and crises, cascading ecological crises are:

• notoriously hard to detect in advance due to their underlying complexities,
and poor monitoring systems.
• challenge the decision-making and coordinating capacities of actors at multiple
levels of societal organization due to their cascading and recombining capacities.
• are prone to blame games, which hinder post-crisis learning and reform.

Also posted in Adaptiveness and Innovation in Earth System Science

General

Two new jobs at Stockholm Resilience Centre

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Stockholm Resilience Centre has two new Associate Senior Lecturer in environmental sciences positions it is looking to fill.  Application deadline is  22 January 2011.

Associate Senior Lecturer with emphasis on ecosystem-based management of the Baltic Sea

This position includes analysis of social-ecological systems that integrates ecology and management-related societal functions, including economy.

Main tasks will be research and coordination of research on ecosystem-based management within the programme Baltic Ecosystem Adaptive Management and to some extent teaching and supervising.

Required qualifications include a PhD or equivalent which qualifies for employment as an associate university lecturer. Preference is given to candidates awarded their degree no more than five years before the closing date for applications.

Download full vacancy announcement herePDF (pdf, 890 kB)

Associate Senior Lecturer with emphasis on modeling of social-ecological systems
This position involves modelling, analysis and simulation of social-ecological systems, thus integrating several different ecological and/or socioeconomic factors and issues, including resilience.

Main tasks include research, to some extent teaching and supervision, and management of a modelling and visualisation lab.

Required qualifications include a PhD or equivalent which qualifies for employment as an associate university lecturer. Preference is given to candidates awarded their degree no more than five years before the closing date for applications.

Download full vacancy announcement here PDF (pdf, 860 kB)

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Resilience Science in 2010: looking back

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How was 2010 for this blog?

Google Analytics can be used to find out what happens on a website, and according to Google Analytics, in 2010 Resilience Science had about 240,000 page views, 190,000 unique visitors, and over 500 feed subscribers (according to Google Reader).

The most common search term for Resilience Science was “resilience science”, but less expected frequent searches included “haiti earthquake sociology“, “adaptive architecture“, “biological art“, “Hunza landslide“, and “financial instability hypothesis“.

Visitors came from all over the world.  Our visitors are frequently from the USA (39%).  The ten countries with the most visitors, after the US, were the UK (9%), Canada (9%), Australia (5%), Sweden (4%), India (3%), Germany (3%), Netherlands (2%), France (1%), and Spain (1%).   Below is a map showing the top locations of visitors by city.  London, Stockholm, New York, Sydney, and Melbourne sent the most visitors.

Most visitors went to the home page.  Some posts are popular because they link to an interesting talk or graphic.  These posts are frequently accessed but only glanced at.  For example, the most popular post overall is a 2006 post on economy distorted cartograms.  Other longer posts are read for a while and provide something more analytical.  The five most popular longer posts from 2010 were:

  1. Haiti, disaster sociology, elite panic and looting
  2. A history of Stommel diagrams
  3. The growth of the ecosystem service concept
  4. Resilience meets architecture and urban planning by Matteo Giusti
  5. Undermine Nature/Culture dichotomy – Bruno Latour visits Stockholm by Henrik Ernstson.

About 45% of visitors came from search engines (>95% google), 40% from referring sites – The Resilience Alliance (35%), Facebook (6%), Twitter (4%), development economist’s Chris Blatman’s blog (4%), and Greenpeace (3%) were the top five referring sites.  Direct visitors made up 15% of the traffic.

Hopefully Resilience Science will continue to be interesting in 2011, and that 2011 will be a good year for our readers and writers.

General, Ideas

Books of the decade in ecocultural theory

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Screen shot from the blog “immanence” by Adrian J Ivakhiv

On his blog “immanence“, Adrian J Ivakhiv,  proposes an interesting list of the “books of the decade in ecocultural theory”. Please, check the whole list at his blog.

The three first books are by (1) William E. Connolly on Neuropolitics, (2) Arturo Escobar on social movements and ecological-cultural dynamics, and (3) Graham Harman on Latour and metaphysics.

He also lists several other interesting books that did not make it to the top ten, including books by Bruce Braun, Sarah Whatmore, Alf Hornborg, Donna Haraway, Tim Ingold, Bruno Latour, Doreen Massey, and John Law amongst several others.

Here follows the top three, including Adrian’s personal motivation:

The Immanence ‘Top 10′

1. William E. Connolly, Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) — This was the book that most coherently and provocatively connected together the entire set of interests I had been grappling with at the time — consciousness, neuroscience, affect/emotion, religious experience, the potentials of film and media, and, centrally, the possibilities for political and cultural change in our time. Connolly’s work in political theory has continually pushed far beyond the bounds of that field. While his Pluralism and the forthcoming A World of Becoming may signify a certain fruition of his thinking, his articulation of the thickly entwined interconnections between biology and culture in Neuropolitics, under the rubric of “immanent naturalism,” provocatively set out a range of avenues of exploration, which this blog has been active in pursuing and documenting.

2. Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (Duke University Press, 2008) — A tremendous synthesis that places social movements — actual people doing things together to change their worlds — at the center of thinking for how the ecological-cultural dynamic is changing in our time. Other books of environmental anthropology (by Anna Tsing, Paige West, and others) and of political ecology (by Paul Robbins, Biersack and Greenberg, and others) could be on this list, but Escobar engages conversations across these fields and others in the most provocative and satisfying ways.

3. Graham Harman, Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics (re.press, 2009) — While Harman’s Tool-Being and Guerrilla Metaphysics may be his more lasting philosophical contributions, this book, which first brought anthropologist of science Bruno Latour firmly into the ambit of philosophy, introduced me — and judging by internet activity, many others — to the growing movement of post-Continental-philosophical “speculative realism.” As a movement that tries to theorize the make-up of the world in ways that completely avoid traditional dualisms (culture/nature, society/ecology, etc.), it’s a breath of fresh philosophical air, and one that has influenced the development of this blog much more than I could have known when I started it.

In presenting his blog, Adrian’s writes:

[The blog is an] online space for environmental cultural theory, this weblog has two primary objectives: (1) To communicate about issues at the intersection of ecological, political, and cultural thought and practice [… and] (2) To contribute to the development of a non-dualist understanding of nature/culture, mind/body, spirit/matter, structure/agency, and worldly relations in general.

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ANU’s Fenner School looking for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Human Ecology

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The Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra is looking for a Lecturer/Senior Lecturer in Human Ecology.  They write:

The Fenner School of Environment and Society seeks a motivated early career academic to contribute the research and teaching in Human Ecology, working in an interdisciplinary environment. The successful applicant will achieve quality research outcomes, supervise research students, and contribute to leading-edge, flexible undergraduate and graduate coursework programs.

A PhD in a relevant area is required, along with demonstrable research and teaching competence. Areas of particular relevance include systems thinking, rural and agricultural environments and production systems, and integrative research design and implementation.

General

An Algorithm for Discovery

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A decade ago in Science, Paydarfar and Schwartz, neurologists from University of Massachusetts, wrote about an An Algorithm for Discovery (DOI:10.1126/science.292.5514.13).  They suggest that there is a useful algorithm for creating new knowledge that has five steps:

1. Slow down to explore. Discovery is facilitated by an unhurried attitude. We favor a relaxed yet attentive and prepared state of mind that is free of the checklists, deadlines, and other exigencies of the workday schedule. Resist the temptation to settle for quick closure and instead actively search for deviations, inconsistencies, and peculiarities that don’t quite fit. Often hidden among these anomalies are the clues that might challenge prevailing thinking and conventional explanations.

2. Read, but not too much. It is important to master what others have already written. Published works are the forum for scientific discourse and embody the accumulated experience of the research community. But the influence of experts can be powerful and might quash a nascent idea before it can take root. Fledgling ideas need nurturing until their viability can be tested without bias. So think again before abandoning an investigation merely because someone else says it can’ be done or is unimportant.

3. Pursue quality for its own sake. Time spent refining methods and design is almost always rewarded. Rigorous attention to such details helps to avert the premature rejection or acceptance of hypotheses. Sometimes, in the process of perfecting one’s approach, unexpected discoveries can be made. An example of this is the background radiation attributed to the Big Bang, which was identified by Penzias and Wilson while they were pursuing the source of a noisy signal from a radio telescope. Meticulous testing is a key to generating the kind of reliable information that can lead to new breakthroughs.

4. Look at the raw data. There is no substitute for viewing the data at first hand. Take a seat at the bedside and interview the patient yourself; watch the oscilloscope trace; inspect the gel while still wet. Of course, there is no question that further processing of data is essential for their management, analysis, and presentation. The problem is that most of us don’t really understand how automated packaging tools work. Looking at the raw data provides a check against the automated averaging of unusual, subtle, or contradictory phenomena.

5. Cultivate smart friends. Sharing with a buddy can sharpen critical thinking and spark new insights. Finding the right colleague is in itself a process of discovery and requires some luck. Sheer intelligence is not enough; seek a pal whose attributes are also complementary to your own, and you may be rewarded with a new perspective on your work. Being this kind of friend to another is the secret to winning this kind of friendship in return.

Although most of us already know these five precepts in one form or another, we have noticed some difficulty in putting them into practice. Many obligations appear to erode time for discovery. We hope that this essay can serve as an inspiration for reclaiming the process of discovery and making it a part of the daily routine. In 1936, in Physics and Reality, Einstein wrote, “The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.” Practicing this art does not require elaborate instrumentation, generous funding, or prolonged sabbaticals. What it does require is a commitment to exercising one’s creative spirit—for curiosity’s sake.