Category Archives: Tools

Ecological Management, General, Networks

Ethan Zuckerman reviews Infotopia and discusess social decision-making

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On My heart’s in Accra Ethan Zuckerman reviews Cass Sunstein’s book “Infotopia”, which discusses how the internet changes group decision making processes. Zuckerman writes:

Infotopia… In his new book, Infotopia, [Sunstein’s] become a cyber-enthusiast to an extent that would have been hard to imagine a few years ago. Specifically, he’s excited about the ways new online tools make it possible for groups of people to assemble information and accumulate knowledge. He’s become a devotee of Friedrich Hayek, the Austrian economist who saw markets, first and foremost, as a way to aggregate information held by a large group of people. There’s ample evidence that Hayek was right in an examination of the failure of planned economies – smart men sitting in a room do a far worse job of setting the price of copper ore or bread than the collected actions of thousands of consumers, iterated over time.

Markets aren’t the only way to aggregate information from a large group of people. Deliberative groups, where a set of people get together and share the knowledge they have on a problem or an issue, are favored by many political theorists, including Jürgen Habermas, who bases much of his political philosophy on the establishment of a public sphere where deliberation can occur. Sunstein is deeply suspicious of the optimistic claims made for deliberation, and cites a wealth of studies that demonstrate that deliberation, in many cases, leads to bad decisions and the reinforcement of extreme views.

(You can think of Infotopia as a caged deathmatch between Hayek and Habermas, streamed live on the Internet. Habermas taps out somewhere around page 200.)

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Design

Reinventing nails: increasing efficiency via technological finesse

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nailSometimes the efficiency of resource use can be increased through technological that uses understanding to improve technological finesse. The redesign of the nail appears to be a great example of this situation. PopSci picked a new nail as its innovation of 2006. Research on nails has lead to better nail designs which has produced nails that hold things together much better, but that are not much more costly to manufacture. From PopSci’s Best of What’s New 2006

Hurricane winds rip apart nailed-together walls, and earthquakes shake houses so violently that a nailhead can pull straight through a piece of plywood. Since we can’t stop natural disasters, Bostitch engineer Ed Sutt has dedicated his career to designing a better nail. The result is the HurriQuake, and it has the perfect combination of features to withstand nature’s darker moods. The bottom section is circled with angled barbs that resist pulling out in wind gusts up to 170 mph. This “ring shank” stops halfway up to leave the middle of the nail, which endures the most punishment during an earthquake, at its maximum thickness and strength. The blade-like facets of the nail’s twisted top—the spiral shank—keep planks from wobbling, which weakens a joint. And the HurriQuake’s head is 25 percent larger than average to better resist counter-sinking and pulling through. The best part: It costs only about $15 more to build a house using HurriQuakes. $45 per 4,000;

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Adaptation, Cities, Design

Traffic Safety: Regulation vs. Self-Organization

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Drachten picture from spiegel nov 2006 European traffic planners are moving away from signs and regulations to increase traffic safety. Rather than legislating space for cars they are requiring drivers, pedestrians, and cyclists to think about what they are doing rather than obeying signs. This approach appears to fit many resilience principles – for example – allowing many small disturbances makes the overall system more resilient.

In a Nov 2006, Spiegel magazine article Controlled Chaos: European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs:

“We reject every form of legislation,” the Russian aristocrat and “father of anarchism” Mikhail Bakunin once thundered. The czar banished him to Siberia. But now it seems his ideas are being rediscovered.

European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren — by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs.

A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.

The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads “Verkeersbordvrij” — “free of traffic signs.” Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren’t even any lines painted on the streets.

“The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We’re losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior,” says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project’s co-founders. “The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people’s sense of personal responsibility dwindles.”

In 2004 Wired Magazine had an article about Hans Monderman:

Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign – literally – that a road designer somewhere hasn’t done his job. “The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there’s a problem with a road, they always try to add something,” Monderman says. “To my mind, it’s much better to remove things.”

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Ecological Management, Ideas

Elinor Ostrom answers 12 questions

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Elinor Ostrom is asked 12 questions in the German journal GAIA (4|2006). Arun Agrawal introdues Elinor “Lin” Ostrom in the journal as follows:

Few social scientists can lay claim to the kind of achievements for which Lin is famous: inventing and consolidating the commons as a whole new field of investigation, launching new institutions that shape the research careers of hundreds of social scientists, and influencing public policy in an entirely new direction in relation to natural resource governance. …The work that has brought her the acclaim and admiration of peers and the adulation of younger scholars has effectively countered widely accepted orthodoxies about the ineffectiveness of common property. Lin’s scholarly contributions are founded upon the bedrock of evidence from literally tens of thousands of studies, refutable propositions based in fundamental social science, and rock-solid, theoretically informed, rigorous empirical and experimental research. It would be no exaggeration to say that there is scarcely a political scientist better known within and outside the discipline.

A few of GAIA’s questions and Elinor Ostrom’s answers are below. Its great to discover that she thinks the work of the Resilience Alliance is exciting.

7. What field of research in environmental sciences – besides the one you are working in – do you consider most exciting?

The Resilience Alliance is, in my opinion, producing some of the most exciting contemporary research by bringing together centers throughout the world to study the resilience of ecological systems to natural- and human-induced disturbances.

8. Can you name any person or event that has had a particular influence on your commitment to environ- mental issues?

Before reading the work of Robert Netting in the early 1980s, I had no inkling it would ever be efficient to allocate land for human use using common property. I understood that water and fish existed in common-pool resources and required a variety of property-rights systems, but I thought land was a private good and needed private ownership to be allocated efficiently. Netting’s analysis was unnerving. He asked why Alpine farmers used private ownership to manage their valley farmlands, but the same farmers used forms of common property to manage Alpine meadows. His analysis demonstrated that forms of common property were more effective than private ownership when land had low productivity, when rainfall and other nutrients were spatially and temporally patchy, and when substantial economies of scale in building infrastructure existed. His in-depth evidence was substantial and the theoretical argument broadened my horizon tremendously. It blew my mind!

10. What knowledge about the environment would you like to pass on to young people?

Young people need to learn about the diversity of ecosystems and the diversity of institutional arrangements that humans have crafted to cope effectively with different settings and problems.

Humans have used a large set of rules in various combinations in the effort to match the specific characteristics of particular resource systems. Rules related to who can access, harvest from, manage, exclude others, and sell aspects of a resource system are the building blocks of resource use and protection situations. When systems fail, we need to use empirically warrantable diagnostic theories to analyze the sources of failure and which rules need to be changed (and how) to create a more sustainable future.

11. What are you reading at the moment?

I am enjoying reading Frans de Waal’s Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved. Since I have studied reciprocity and fairness among humans in the experimental lab and in field settings, it is fascinating to read his discussion of these processes among chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys.

12. Which question – apart from the ones we raised – is the most important one?

What can each one of us do every day to improve our environment? If we think that the only answers to environmental problems are what “the” government undertakes, we face a real tragedy.

Visualization

Visualizing Greenhouse Gas Emissions

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A World GHG Emissions Flow Chart from WRI’s Climate Analysis Indicators Tool (CAIT).

CAIT provides a comprehensive and comparable database of greenhouse gas emissions data (including all major sources and sinks) and other climate-relevant indicators. CAIT can be used to analyze a wide range of climate-related data questions and to help support future policy decisions made under the Climate Convention and in other fora.

world GHG flow chart

Click on the image to see a full size version.

According to the site: All data is for 2000. All calculations are based on CO2 equivalents, using 100-year global warming potentials from the IPCC (1996).

Inequality, Visualization

Mapping US urban income

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On radicalcartography Bill Rankin has produced some interesting maps of urban wealth patterns in large US cities, which show how patterns of wealth and poverty vary among US cities.

cityincome

Maps show the distribution of income (per capita) around the 25 largest metropolitan areas in the US (all those with population greater than 2,000,000). The goal was to test the “donut” hypothesis — the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the “revitalized” downtown, and the poor stuck in between.

This does seem to have some validity in older cities like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, or Chicago, but in newer cities it is not the case. Instead of donuts, one finds “wedges” of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery.

Design, General

WorldChanging Book

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WC bookBill McKibben reviews five recent books on ideas on the ecological futures of humanity in the New York Review of Books. He discusses books on climate and energy, and what we can do about it.

His review includes his descrption of the new WorldChanging book – Worldchanging: A User’s Guide for the 21st Century:

It is precisely this question — how we might radically transform our daily lives — that is addressed by the cheerful proprietors of the WorldChanging website in their new book of the same name. This is one of the most professional and interesting websites that you could possibly bookmark on your browser; almost every day they describe a new technology or technique for environmentalists. Their book, a compilation of their work over the last few years, is nothing less than The Whole Earth Catalog, that hippie bible, retooled for the iPod generation. There are short features on a thousand cool ideas: slow food, urban farming, hydrogen cars, messenger bags made from recycled truck tarps, pop-apart cell phones, and plyboo (i.e., plywood made from fast-growing bamboo). There are many hundreds of how-to guides (how to etch your own circuit board, how to break in your hybrid car so as to maximize mileage, how to organize a “smart mob” (a brief gathering of strangers in a public place).

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Ecological Management, General, Greenlash

Gilbert White: Floods are acts of God, but flood losses are largely acts of man

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Gilbert White a pioneer in understanding the social-ecological nature of natural disasters died recently in Colorado. He died, in early October 2006, age 94 after a long and diverse career that centered on the impact of flooding.

White argued that ‘hard’ engineering solutions to flooding, such as dams and levees, frequently produced pathological results. His PhD research at the University of Chicago “Human adjustment to floods,” showed river engineering had increased, rather than decreased, the costs of floods, because river engineering resulted in more settlement in the floodplain, increasing vulnerability to large flood.

The Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder maintains a Gilbert White archive.

The University of Colorado has an obituary. The Washington Post also has an obituary that quotes Gilbert White:

While watching the German occupation of France, I became convinced that man can no more conquer or preserve a civilization by war than he can conquer nature solely by engineering force,” Dr. White told broadcaster Edward R. Murrow for the radio program “This I Believe” in 1951.

“I found that an occupying army or a concentration camp can repress men’s basic beliefs but cannot change them. The good life, like the balance of all the complex elements of a river valley, is founded upon friendly adjustment. . . . It embraces confidence in fellowship, tolerance in outlook, humility in service and a constant search for the truth.”

Ecological Management, Millennium Ecosystem Assessment

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment: Research Needs

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In an enhanced Policy Forum in Science 314 (5797): 257, Steve Carpenter and several other senior participants from the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) that outlines the Research Needs identified by the MA. They highlight the need for:

  • Theory Linking Ecological Diversity & Dyanmics
  • Briding Scales; Monitoring
  • Research that Assesses Policy Success;
  • Improved understanding of Social-Ecological Change
  • Improved methods of Ecological Valuation.

Their comments on Ecological theory, learning from policies, and Social-Ecological theory are of particular interest to resilience research. They write:

We lack a robust theoretical basis for linking ecological diversity to ecosystem dynamics and, in turn, to ecosystem services underlying human well-being. We all need this information to understand the limits and consequences of biodiversity loss and the actions needed to maintain or restore ecosystem functions.

The most catastrophic changes in ecosystem services identified in the MA involved nonlinear or abrupt shifts. We lack the ability to predict thresholds for such changes, whether or not a change may be reversible, and how individuals and societies will respond. Thus, the risks of ecosystem catastrophes are poorly quantified. Major ecosystem degradation tends to occur as syndromes of simultaneous failure in multiple services. For example, the populous dry lands of the world are facing a combination of failing crops and grazing, declining quality and quantity of fresh water, and loss of tree cover. Similarly, many rivers and lakes have experienced increases in nutrient pollution (eutrophication), toxicity, and biodiversity loss.

Relations between ecosystem services and human well-being are poorly understood. One gap relates to the consequences of changes in ecosystem services for poverty reduction. The poor are most dependent on ecosystem services and vulnerable to their degradation. Empirical studies are needed.

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