Economist Pavan Sukhdev, who headed The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity TEEB project that synthesized work on economics on biodiversity and ecosystem services, gives a TED talk Put a value on nature!
Category Archives: General
Stockholm University looking for Professor of Environmental Social Science
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.
New Masters in Social-Ecological Resilience for Sustainable Development at Stockholm Resilience Centre
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.
Eric Idle on “Who Wrote Shakespeare?” : The New Yorker
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.
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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.
Interdisciplinary science – what should we measure, and why?
Research impact assessments of academic environments with bibliometric indicators are becoming increasingly important. Not only do they define where you are placed in international rankings of research institutes, but they are also being used as a basis for distribution of funds. This might sound like a smart and simple way to secure funds for world-leading researchers. But it could also create difficulties for interdisciplinary research environments. Here is one example.
Lennart Olsson from Lund University gave an interesting and critical presentation at the Resilience Conference in Arizona early this year, and presented data indicating that resilience thinking has had very little impact in the social science community. The analysis is the following. First, pick the 10 top-ranked social sciences journals (based on Science Gateway) for a few disciplines. Then, search for articles that contain “social-ecological systems” AND “resilience”. The results:
So, is resilience thinking (from a social science perspective) in crisis? If the ambition is to target mainstream top-political science journals, we sure are. Two issues could be raised here however. One: is this really the best way to measure our impact in the social sciences? Why not (just as one example) look for articles that reference Holling’s, Folke’s or Elinor Ostrom’s work for example?
A second, and I would argue more important objection to the analysis, is whether the sort of metric Olsson uses really captures the core ambition of interdisciplinary research. Bluntly put: isn’t the whole point of building interdisciplinary teams, teaching, methods and research networks, to create innovative sustainability science that is hard to classify as “social” or “natural”? These articles are not likely to fit easily into mono-disciplinary social science journals. If that is the case, how do we measure the scientific success of such attempts, without contributing to an artificial split between the “social” and the “natural”?
I assume many of you have had similar experiences or thoughts. Feel free to share in the comment field below.
Green art – from collapse to resilience?
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.
Mapping China and India’s diasporas
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.
The tragedy of a common currency
The current crisis of the Euro emphasizes some basic lessons from the study of resilience of dynamic systems. Attributes of complex systems that enhance resilience are diversity, redundancy and modularity. There is a cost of maintaining resilience. The decision to have one currency among different countries in Europe was based on a focus of efficiency. This could be reached as long as economies would grow steadily and the countries kept their budgets in check.
Unfortunately, some countries did not so. Also Germany and France have broken maximum governmental budget shortages, and no actions were taken. It sounds as if the basic principles of institutional design were not met. Meaning that there was no proper monitoring and were no proper enforcement mechanisms. Surprisingly there are not even regulations how countries may leave the EU or Euro.
By creating a tightly connected system without proper enforcement it is no surprise that the resilience of the European, and global, economy has been decreased. The budget crisis leads now to a spiral of distrust among participants in the action arena of the global financial system. It does not help either that the USA is not able to reach to any solution to their own budget problems.
If there was more modularity we could afford countries to fail. But in the tightly globalized financial system, a failure leads to a cascade of dominos falling. A short-sighted focus on efficiency has led to a costly endeavor and likely collapse of the euro. We can learn from long-lasting biological systems and the importance to develop system features that enhance resilience. Hopefully during the recovery after the pending transformation more emphasis will be given to design system properties to enhance resilience.
Visualizations of Adaptive Governance
Inspired by a recent course I taught, and my colleague’s Garry Peterson’s search for visualizations of social-ecological systems, (also here), I found myself looking for illustrations of adaptive governance – that is, modes of governance that play out at multiple levels, and that are able to link institutional, with ecosystem dynamics (see Folke et al. 2005 [PDF]. Here are a few examples of how this has been illustrated in the literature. If you have other examples, please add them in the comment field!
This first one is from Andersson and Ostrom (2008), and their analysis of decentralization of natural resource management, and the need to link these initiatives in a wider polycentric setting.
This second one is from Berkes (2007), and explores institutional linkages at multiple levels, for a conservation project in Guyana.
This illustration is from Hahn et al. (2006), and builds on several articles published about Kristianstad Vattenrike (Sweden).
This beautiful visualization is based on a network analysis by Ernstson et al (2010) about network governance of urban ecosystems in Stockholm.
And lastly, one illustration from a report [PDF] from the finalized European project Governance and Ecosystems Management for the CONservation of BIOdiversity (GEM-CON-BIO). The figure shows an analytical framework applied for a range of case studies recently published in PNAS.
Links: R, Thai floods, Mongolian Herders, Oberlin, and Ashby
1) A set of ‘cheat sheets’ for programming various things in R – data mining, multiple regression, time series analysis, etc.
2) From AlertNet Thailand needs long term strategy to deal with floods.
3) From Solutions magazine Mongolian herders practice adaptive co-management
4) Environmental studies professor David Orr leads an attempt to transform Oberlin, Ohio into a national leader in sustainability – in a way similar to transition town movement.
5) W. Ross Ashby digital archive. An online archive of influential systems thinker’s work. Lots of stuff. For example, here are his notes on his homeostat.
6) In 2009 The International Journal of General Systems, 38(2), featured a special issue about “The Intellectual Legacy of W. Ross Ashby.” Unfortunately only the introduction is open access.
7) The Institute on the Environment (IonE) is searching for 4 world-class postdoctoral scientists to join the Global Landscapes Initiative (GLI), which is focused on understanding global-scale changes in land use, agriculture, food security, and the environment. For full info see: PostDoc Scientists.