Category Archives: General

General

A Novel for the Long Now

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Imagine that we wanted our descendants to persist for 10,000 years. How could we help that to happen? This question motivates most of the research on resilience, as well as initiatives such as Clock of the Long Now < http://www.longnow.org/> and policy-oriented initiatives such as the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment <http://www.MAweb.org>. Many insights about resilience have come from research on native cultures, such as an influential volume by Berkes, Colding and Folke on Navigating Social-Ecological Systems, and many other works cited in this blog and in the journal Ecology and Society.

In Girl With Skirt of Stars, Jennifer Kitchell draws a sharp contrast between modern society and a culture that has occupied the southwest of North America for thousands of years.

Lilli Chischilly is a Navajo lawyer with a full brief of problems. Someone arranged mutilated carcasses of sibling coyotes on the hood of her battered Dodge pickup truck – no doubt a message, but of what?. Her old flame has returned to Indian Country, yet somehow he is connected to an inexplicable murder. Then she is assigned to escort a powerful politician through the Grand Canyon for a publicity stunt – obviously a set-up for a hydropower dam in a national landmark that will drown sites sacred to her people. In the shadowy background a mysterious sniper, motivated by a century-old massacre, stalks the politician. This meticulously-crafted debut novel weaves Navajo ethnography, sexual tension, political power, and the beauty of Grand Canyon country into a fast-paced story. Kitchell’s voice is confident, reflecting her deep knowledge of Navajo culture and the physical beauty of the Southwestern US.  The novel’s ending foreshadows more stories to come. I’m eager to read them.

At one moment in the novel, Lilli brings the politician into an ancient cave with petrographs that hold the key to a culture that can last for ten millennia. Will it be drowned by the dam? This encounter with deep-time resilience is the key to the novel, and perhaps the key to human persistence through the current environmental crisis.

This novel is fun to read. It evokes questions that are central to resilience thinking. It will appeal to students who are interested in natural history, ancient cultures, and connections of native people to modern life. Once you open it you will read it all the way through.

General

Psychological Distance Stimulates Creativity

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Scientific American reports on a new paper, by Lile Jia and colleagues from Indiana University in which they demonstrate that increasing psychological distance to a problem can increase creativity:

Why does psychological distance increase creativity? According to construal level theory (CLT), psychological distance affects the way we mentally represent things, so that distant things are represented in a relatively abstract way while psychologically near things seem more concrete. Consider, for instance, a corn plant. A concrete representation would refer to the shape, color, taste, and smell of the plant, and connect the item to its most common use – a food product. An abstract representation, on the other hand, might refer to the corn plant as a source of energy or as a fast growing plant. These more abstract thoughts might lead us to contemplate other, less common uses for corn, such as a source for ethanol, or to use the plant to create mazes for children. What this example demonstrates is how abstract thinking makes it easier for people to form surprising connections between seemingly unrelated concepts, such as fast growing plants (corn) and fuel for cars (ethanol).

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These results build on previous studies which demonstrated that distancing in time – projecting an event into the remote future – and assuming an event to be less likely (that is, distancing on the probability dimension) can also enhance creativity.  In a series of experiments that examined how temporal distance affects performance on various insight and creativity tasks, participants were first asked to imagine their lives a year later (distant future) or the next day (near future), and then to imagine working on a task on that day in the future. Participants who imagined a distant future day solved more insight problems than participants who imagined a near future day. They also performed better on visual insight tasks, which required detecting coherent images in “noisy” visual input, as well as on creative generation tasks (e.g., listing ways to improve the look of a room). Similar evidence has been found for probability. Participants were more successful at solving sample items from a visual insight task when they believed they were unlikely, as opposed to likely, to encounter the full task.

This research has important practical implications. It suggests that there are several simple steps we can all take to increase creativity, such as traveling to faraway places (or even just thinking about such places), thinking about the distant future, communicating with people who are dissimilar to us, and considering unlikely alternatives to reality. Perhaps the modern environment, with its increased access to people, sights, music, and food from faraway places, helps us become more creative not only by exposing us to a variety of styles and ideas, but also by allowing us to think more abstractly. So the next time you’re stuck on a problem that seems impossible don’t give up. Instead, try to gain a little psychological distance, and pretend the problem came from somewhere very far away.

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New Environmental Faculty Positions at McGill University

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McGill School of Environment, at McGill University in Montreal, is seeking to hire new professors in urban ecology and sustainability and ecological/environmental economics.  The positions are joint appointments with the departments of Geography and Natural Resource Sciences, respectively.  For more information see the MSE’s website:

Urban Ecology/Sustainability

Urbanization is one of the primary processes responsible for global transformation of ecosystems and landscapes. Over half of the world’s inhabitants now live in cities and the environmental footprint of urban areas extends well beyond the physical fraction of the Earth’s surface they occupy. Cities themselves are complex ecosystems: they have inorganic and organic components; they provide habitat for distinct assemblages of species; they consume and transform energy and resources; they generate waste; and they are intricately connected to natural systems. At the same time, urbanization removes inhabitants from the immediate experience of supporting ecological systems making the concept of sustainability more virtual than visceral. As cities expand, their populations increasingly dwell in locations vulnerable to changes in the global environment and urban-based producers and consumers account overwhelmingly for the world’s fossil fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. A grand challenge of our times is to build knowledge of how urban places can be transformed to support human development in ways that sustain bio-physical environments, knowledge that is of critical importance given the current trajectory of global climate change.

The person who fills this position will conduct research that contributes to our understanding of how complex urban systems respond to, and in turn drive, environmental perturbations across scales from the local to global. The person would have expertise in ecology and sustainability, and in innovative approaches to achieving a sustainable interface between the urban setting and the non-urban environment.

This position will provide an important addition for undergraduate and graduate programs offered by the School of Environment (http://www.mcgill.ca/mse/) <http://www.mcgill.ca/mse> and the Department of Geography (http://www.geog.mcgill.ca/) <http://www.geog.mcgill.ca>, and has the potential to contribute to programs in Sustainability Science and Urban Systems. There would also be potential interactions with other Departments with interests in the environment, such as Biology, Natural Resource Sciences, and the School of Urban Planning.

Applied Environmental / Ecological Economics

The successful candidate will build an internationally recognized scholarly research and teaching program in the field of applied environmental / ecological economics. We are particularly interested in an individual who works on significant environmental challenges facing society, who can inform policy and regulation, and who has a broad knowledge of economic institutions and environmental policy, especially with reference to agricultural and natural resource conservation, along with a thorough understanding of steady-state and ecological economics.

We seek someone whose research addresses questions such as: What are the impacts of market design and legal and policy frameworks on ecological management? Can markets be designed to encourage effective and equitable ecological management, and if so, how? If not, what alternative policies might allow the economy to find itself again in balance with the biosphere? What are the appropriate ways to integrate ecological values into policy analysis and decision making? What are the economic costs and benefits of environmental changes, such as changes in climate, nutrient pollution, the use of GMO crops, the emergence of disease, and the spread of invasive species? How can policy responses be prioritized in the face of the growing imbalance between economic and ecological cycles? How might individual and collective processes for decision-making be better designed so that economy and biosphere are integrated?

The successful candidate will be required to teach within the Agricultural Economics program, and to bring the perspective of ecological economics to the core program of the McGill School of Environment. A commitment to high quality undergraduate and graduate teaching and advising in the Agricultural Economics Program and the McGill School of the Environment and a willingness to contribute to strengthening graduate programs are expected.

General

Buzz Holling appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada

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Buzz Holling was recently appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada.  From the Nanaimo News Bulletin

“I was stunned, delighted and joyful when I heard. It was wonderful,” said Holling. “I certainly wanted it, but never thought I would get it. It’s a great honour. It’s Canada’s highest award as a citizen.”

He was recognized for contributions to the field of ecology and his work in ecosystem dynamics and theories in resilience and ecological economics.

His resilience theory focuses on sudden changes and collapses in ecosystems and how the ecosystem adapts.

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Holling’s journey into ecological sciences started small.

“It started with a small thing like insects eating the trees and damaging to finally looking at the regional problem affected by global change and climate change,” he said.

General

Summer reading

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As summer approaches (at least here in the Northern hemisphere) newspapers, magazines, and radio shows are proposing lists of summer books to read.

Below are a list of some of the books I’m hoping to read, most of which have only oblique connections to resilience, along with reviews that got me interested in the book.

In the comments, I’d love to hear what others are planning to read and why

2666 by Roberto Bolaño

In Time Lev Grossman wrote: “the relentless gratuitousness of 2666 has its own logic and its own power, which builds into something overwhelming that hits you all the harder because you don’t see it coming. This is a dangerous book, and you can get lost in it. How can art, Bolaño is asking, a medium of form and meaning, reflect a world that is blessed with neither?”

After Dark by Haruki Murakami
I’ve read and enjoyed most of Murakami’s books. Michael Dirda writes: “After Dark is a short book, hypnotically eerie, full of noirish foreboding, sometimes even funny, but, most of all, it’s one that keeps ratcheting up the suspense. At times, the novel recalls those unsettling films of Jean-Luc Godard or Michelangelo Antonioni where something dire seems always about to happen, even as attractive young people, full of anomie and confusion, meander aimlessly through an ominous urban landscape.”

India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha

In the Guardian Amit Chaudhuri wrote “Guha’s book reminds us of what some other recent studies of India have been getting at, but without this civilised single-mindedness: that it’s not just the story of independence that’s worthy of being counted as one of the great triumphal stories of 20th-century world history; that the survival and perhaps the flourishing of free India counts legitimately as another.”

Principles of Ecosystem Stewardship: Resilience-Based Natural Resource Management in a Changing World edited by Terry Chapin, Gary Kofinas, Carl Folke

A new book by many of my collaborators. From Springer’s website: “This textbook provides a new framework for natural resource management—a framework based on stewardship of ecosystems for ecological integrity and human well-being in a world dominated by uncertainty and change. The goal of ecosystem stewardship is to respond to and shape changes in social-ecological systems in order to sustain the supply and availability of ecosystem services by society. The book links recent advances in the theory of resilience, sustainability, and vulnerability with practical issues of ecosystem management and governance.”

The Wild Places by Robert Macfarlane

Andrew Motion in the Guardian: It means, among other things, that The Wild Places is an odd addition to today’s books about the environment: a consoling thing, as well as an admonitory one. It’s not just that Macfarlane finds certain kinds of satisfaction for himself – creating, as he promised to do at the outset, a map in which the priorities of motorists are replaced by sites of natural wonderment, and discovering that wildness is not inevitably “about asperity, but about luxuriance, vitality, fun”. He also encourages his readers to feel that while many of our fundamental connections have been broken or lost, many remain – if only we have the sense and tuned senses to appreciate them. This may not seem a particularly striking conclusion but it’s well worth saying. And the journeys to reach it are so vigorously animated, they are well worth taking with him.

It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong

Development economist Chris Blattman writes “Wrong is among my favorite journalists writing on Africa (a favorite piece is here). Her new book is superb – part journalism, part diary, and part Le Carre novel. The academic in me wasn’t always pleased; her assessment of ethnic politics is thinly constructed (this syllabus might come in handy), and her portrait of Githongo can’t help but be influenced by a close friendship. But a more interesting and readable book on Africa is hard to find.”

McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld by Misha Glenny

Geoff Manaugh writes “I can’t recommend this book enough. A look at the global counter-economies of sex trafficking, drugs, illegitimate construction, counterfeit goods, and light weaponry, the otherwise somewhat embarrassingly titled McMafia shows us a planet riddled with labyrinthine networks of unregistered transactions, untraceable people, and even illegal building sites. … this is one of the most interesting books I’ve read all year.”

General

Paul Krugman on Betraying the Planet

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In his New York Times column economist Paul Krugman strongly criticizes climate change denial in the US congress:

…we’re facing a clear and present danger to our way of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify failing to act?

Well, sometimes even the most authoritative analyses get things wrong. And if dissenting opinion-makers and politicians based their dissent on hard work and hard thinking — if they had carefully studied the issue, consulted with experts and concluded that the overwhelming scientific consensus was misguided — they could at least claim to be acting responsibly.

But if you watched the debate on Friday, you didn’t see people who’ve thought hard about a crucial issue, and are trying to do the right thing. What you saw, instead, were people who show no sign of being interested in the truth. They don’t like the political and policy implications of climate change, so they’ve decided not to believe in it — and they’ll grab any argument, no matter how disreputable, that feeds their denial.

Indeed, if there was a defining moment in Friday’s debate, it was the declaration by Representative Paul Broun of Georgia that climate change is nothing but a “hoax” that has been “perpetrated out of the scientific community.” I’d call this a crazy conspiracy theory, but doing so would actually be unfair to crazy conspiracy theorists. After all, to believe that global warming is a hoax you have to believe in a vast cabal consisting of thousands of scientists — a cabal so powerful that it has managed to create false records on everything from global temperatures to Arctic sea ice.

Yet Mr. Broun’s declaration was met with applause.

Given this contempt for hard science, I’m almost reluctant to mention the deniers’ dishonesty on matters economic. But in addition to rejecting climate science, the opponents of the climate bill made a point of misrepresenting the results of studies of the bill’s economic impact, which all suggest that the cost will be relatively low.

Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?

Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.

Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.

Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.

General

What is resilience thinking and what is it not

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Adaptive cycleVictor Galaz‘s post Machine Fetishism, Money and Resilience Theory reflected on Alf Hornborg‘s recent paper Zero-Sum World: Challenges in Conceptualizing Environmental Load Displacement and Ecologically Unequal Exchange in the World-System, in which, among other things, Hornborg presents a partial critique of what he calls “the gospel of resilence” – resilience theory and adaptive management.

There have been many comments on Victor’s post, including responses from the paper’s author.  To highlight this discussion, I’ve hoisted some points from the comments on that post.

Alf Hornborg writes that he is waiting for a convincing response to his criticism of social-ecological resilience:

At the most general level, the rhetoric on social-ecological resilience is framed in terms of a nomothetic search for the functional principles of socio-ecological systems (SES), as if human ecology was analogous to medicine.  SES are approached like biological systems with processes of adaptation and change that can be studied from a detached, objective position. The recurrent aim is to increase our “understanding” of how SES actually function, as if more data and better models could improve our management of these systems (again, analogous to medical practice).

Rather than try to develop a conspicuously and naively non-political cybernetic etiology of socio-ecological degradation – based on the assumption that such processes, irrespective of capitalist extractivism, are universally patterned, predictable, and potentially manageable – I challenge resilience theorists to address the operation of the global economic system that is the very obvious source of such processes. The attempt to provide an abstract vocabulary for describing SES often cries out for empirical examples that might get the discussion grounded in the real politics of human-environmental relations. For example, when it is argued that we must define on which scales agency is located and how an increase or decrease of scope for agency at one level influences agency on other levels, we need to consider a concrete case in order to assess whether the concept of resilience is really the most useful way of accounting for what actually seems to be a (rather well understood) problem of power.

Is “path dependence” so much better than various understandings of cultural, social, political, and generally structural problems of inertia and conservatism?

What do we gain by rephrasing environmental conflict and armed resistance as “regulation”?

How can we hope to predict and manage the abrupt surprises and discontinuities implied by notions of “critical thresholds” and “flipping”?

Why should concepts such as “non-linear dynamics”, “disturbance”, “opportunities for innovation”, “adaptation”, and “renewal” provide a better way of understanding what Joseph Tainter and many others for decades have recognized as socio-ecological collapse?

What are, quite frankly, the discursive/ideological benefits of subsuming social systems within the vocabulary of natural science?

I find it hard to respond to this critique because I do not recognize my work or that of my colleagues in the Resilience Alliance in Hornborg’s characterization of resilience thinking.

Perhaps this is because his article only shallowly engages the resilience literature, focusing on the Linking book edited by Berkes and Folke (an overview of resilience books and articles is available on the Resilience Alliance website), but I think it may be because Resilience thinking is not a formula for explaining how the world works.  In a recent paper, Steve Carpenter and Buz Brock described resilience as:

Resilience is a broad, multifaceted, and loosely organized cluster of concepts, each one related to some aspect of the interplay of transformation and persistence. Thus, resilience does not come down to a single testable theory or hypothesis. Instead it is a changing constellation of ideas, some of which are testable through the usual practices of natural or social science. Although particular ideas may be rejected or supported, the program of research on resilience itself is evaluated in a different way. As long as resilience thinking produces interesting research ideas, people are likely to pursue it. When it seems empty of ideas, it will be abandoned or transformed into something else.

Below I give some specific response to some aspects of Homborg’s comments:

  • Neither ecosystems nor society are super-organisms – and therefore most resilience researchers do not think that medicine or health are good metaphors for managing, manipulating, or understanding ecosystems.
  • Social-ecological systems are different from ecosystems or social systems.  How they are different was specifically addressed in the 2002 book Panarchy in a chapter by Westley F, Carpenter SR, Brock WA,. Holling CS, and Gunderson LH. called “Why systems of people and nature are not just social and ecological systems”
  • Resilience thinking takes a subjective rather than objective view of systems.  Being founded in systems theory, it aims to articulate the subjective perspective from which a system is analyzed to assist in the mapping and translating between multiple perspectives.
  • I believe that more data can help us  make the world more sustainable.  Data can show where theory is wrong, identify new problems, and suggest new ways of doing things.  Science and society don’t know how to create a sustainable society – consequently I believe we need to experiment, monitor, and observe to build a better world.
  • I don’t think resilience research lacks case studies.  Researchers in the Resilience Alliance has worked on a lot of case studies.   Ellinor Ostrom in particular has done a lot of compartive case studies.
  • Homborg writes that resilience researchers are trying”to develop a conspicuously and naively non-political cybernetic etiology of socio-ecological degradation – based on the assumption that such processes, irrespective of capitalist extractivism, are universally patterned, predictable, and potentially manageable.”
    The goal of my research is to help people make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty.  I want to better understand the dynamics of human dominated ecosystems – or social-ecological systems – not “subsum[e] social systems within the vocabulary of natural science”.   I am very interested in how people interact with ecosystems and I have tried to read and collaborate with a broad set of social and natural scientists to better understand social-ecological dynamics. As far as I know, none of the various social scientists I have worked with want to subsume the social sciences within the natural sciences but rather create new ways of understanding these linked systems, especially how they cope with change and surprise.

To response to specific questions:

  • Is “path dependence” so much better than various understandings of cultural, social, political, and generally structural problems of inertia and conservatism?
    Path dependence is a shorthand way of describing these things.   The term is general and not a term produced by resilience researchers.
  • What do we gain by rephrasing environmental conflict and armed resistance as “regulation”?
    Who does that?
  • How can we hope to predict and manage the abrupt surprises and discontinuities implied by notions of “critical thresholds” and “flipping”?
    That’s what resilience research is all about. There is a lot of active research on predicting “flips” (one recent example), with lots of papers being published on it in the last few years.
  • Why should concepts such as “non-linear dynamics”, “disturbance”, “opportunities for innovation”, “adaptation”, and “renewal” provide a better way of understanding what Joseph Tainter and many others for decades have recognized as socio-ecological collapse?
    While non-linear dynamics and disturbance and general terms from math and ecology, the other concepts are exactly what some resilience researchers have added to Tainter’s analysis.  Many resilience researchers are interested in how to avoid collapse and actively transform systems to new better states.  These concepts are new additions to our exploration of social-ecological systems.

Resilience researchers believe that because living in a human dominated biosphere, in which our way of life is destabilizing the ecological systems that stabilize our life support systems, learning how to be resilient to shocks and surprise are useful and important research goals.

I do this type of research because, I want to contribute to making human impacts on the biosphere positive rather than negative, and doing this requires a better, richer, understanding how social-ecological systems actually work.

General

Postdoctoral Position: Amazonian indigenous people, cultural change, and biodiversity

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An interesting post-doc opportunity:

Join an exciting team on a unique project investigating the
consequences on biodiversity of cultural changes in Amazonian
indigenous communities. They are seeking enthusiastic candidates for
an 18 mo postdoctoral position, jointly based in Stanford University
(USA) and Toulouse University (France).

Responsibilities: The successful candidate will contribute to an NSF-
funded project, by developing a mathematical model of the hunting
practices of Makusi and Wapichana people in Southern Guyana and
northern Brazil. Duties will include integration and synthesis of existing
socioeconomic, hunting and environmental data sets, statistical
analyses, model building, and manuscript preparation. Opportunities to
develop independent research projects using data generated by the
project are encouraged.

Qualifications: A PhD with a background in ecology/evolution,
demonstrated interest in the broader questions in social studies and
tropical systems, a proven publication record especially in
mathematical modeling, and strong motivation. Research experience in
social systems is desirable.

Employment Conditions: The starting date is negotiable between July
and August 2009. We will offer a competitive salary commensurate
with the experience of the successful candidate.

To Apply: Please send a single PDF file containing letter of application
with statement of interest, CV and two letters of reference to Jose
Fragoso (fragoso@stanford.edu), with cc to Jerome Chave
(chave@cict.fr). For full consideration, apply by June 15 2009. The
position will remain open until filled.

General

Erle Ellis on “Postnatural” Environmentalism

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Erle Ellis, whom has mapped the world’s anthromes, writes an provocative editorial in Wired about what environmentalism means in the Anthopocene. In  Stop Trying to Save the Planet he proposes a “postnatural” environmentalism:

Nature is gone. It was gone before you were born, before your parents were born, before the pilgrims arrived, before the pyramids were built. You are living on a used planet.

If this bothers you, get over it. We now live in the Anthropocene ― a geological epoch in which Earth’s atmosphere, lithosphere and biosphere are shaped primarily by human forces.

Yes, nature is still around ― back-seat driving, annoying us with natural disasters from time to time, and everywhere present in the background ― but definitely in no position to take the wheel. That’s our job now. Don’t blame nature for global warming, sea level rise, invasive species, mass extinctions, crop failures and poverty. That’s our thing.

… Ours is a used planet. Thanks to us, Earth has become warmer, less forested and less biodiverse for millenniums.

So what now? First of all, we’ve got to stop trying to save the planet. For better or for worse, nature has long been what we have made it, and what we will make it.

And it’s time for a “postnatural” environmentalism. Postnaturalism is not about recycling your garbage, it is about making something good out of grandpa’s garbage and leaving the very best garbage for your grandchildren. Postnaturalism means loving and embracing our human nature, the nature we have created to feed ourselves, the nature we live in. What good is environmentalism if it makes you depressed about the future?

To fully embrace the principles of postnatural environmentalism, it is essential to recognize the potential of repurposing and recycling waste as a means of building a sustainable future. By utilizing Dumpster Rental Services – Grissman Dumpsters, we can efficiently manage and repurpose our discarded materials, transforming them into valuable resources. This approach aligns with the core tenets of post-naturalism, where we strive to create something good out of what may initially appear as “garbage.” By responsibly managing waste through recycling and repurposing, we not only reduce our impact on the environment but also contribute to the creation of a more vibrant and resilient ecosystem within our farms, backyards, and cities. Embracing this mindset allows us to find hope and inspiration in our ability to shape a better future for both current and future generations.

This is about recognizing that our farms, and even our backyards and cities, are the most important wildlife refuges in the world and should be managed as such. We can keep people out of places we want to think of as wild, but these places will still be changing because of global warming and the alien species we introduce without even trying.