We’ve got grand plans of making this a more crowd sourced project next year with the help of our official webmaster Sandra Lauer.

In the meantime, stay safe over the Christmas period, and take some time out to contemplate the big things, a la Bill Waterson’s Calvin and Hobbs:

We’re famously called ‘navel gazers’ by other members of our Joseph’s coat faculty members.

Comparatively, said my colleague, the conservation biologists are given 5 minutes each once a month to talk about their stuff. They, she went on, publish a lot. We, on the other hand, publish not very much (but see today’s other post about the gerald young book award)

But neither group, she added, make one iota of difference to the terrifying trajectories of our planet’s life support systems.

So whilst one group secures adoring students, book awards, and knowing, cynical smiles, the other collects academic accolades, buckets of cash and newspaper headlines, some people are left asking whether we are not making a difference because university promotion schedules don’t recognise or reward real-world results, or whether we just aren’t very good, or willing to try our hands at implementation, advocacy and management…

At the time, I promised to put together a list of exemplary ANU Theses that were multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary or just plain undisciplined. I am sorry it has taken so long.

This list is by no means exhaustive, but a great place to start. All are available at Menzies Library, ANU, and some are available via ‘digital theses’ (links provided) – sadly these only available to ANU students at the moment.

Apologies to all those off-campus: think of it as a good reason to come and visit us!

• Valerie Brown (1978) Holism and the University curriculum: promise or performance?
• Lorrae van Kerkhoff (2002) ‘Making a difference’ : science, action and integrated environmental research
• Robin Connor (2004) Individual transferable quota in fisheries management
• Joern Fischer (2004) Beyond fragmentation: Lizard distribution patterns in two production landscapes and their implications for conceptual landscape models
• Katrina Proust (2004) Learning from the past for sustainability: towards an integrated approach
• Peter Deane (2004) A failing science: Understanding private landowners in the forestry milieu
• Ioan Fazey (2005) Understanding the role and value of experience for environment conservation
• Lisa Robins (2008) Get real: making capacity building meaningful
• Kate Sherren (2008) Sustainability Bound? A study of interdisciplinarity and values in universities.

"a timely, inspirational and important book" (Ronnie Harding)

Read the Nature review by Harold Segal here

He says “Tackling Wicked Problems is a timely volume that deserves a wide, global readership.”

Congratulations compañeros!

Tackling WickedProblems Flyer

Dr Percy gives a keynote at the National Human Ecology Conference, the Philippines

HE Framework at UPLB
Although the college has since developed a HE framework to work from, they are self-admittedly, still struggling to confidently champion HE in the academic and broader community.

Conference Participants

Like the approach at ANU, they are unashamed about the normative aspect of HE. As Maria said, ‘the conspicuousness of the goal of a functional human-ecological system is necessary to drive home the point that the study of human ecology cannot be divorced from current issues and problems impinging upon human ecological systems. This makes the study of human ecology problem- and solution-oriented’. The framework tries to convey the dynamic aspect of human-environment relationships as well as the temporal and spatial variability of its different elements.

HE as a perspective and as a disciplinal endeavor takes as its unit of analysis the systemic nature of human-environment interaction. The implication for Maria is that human ecologists are tasked with; considering the structural nature of a human ecological phenomenon while focusing on the functional and dynamic character of this phenomenon exemplified by the interaction between humans, either as individuals or as social groups, and environmental variables; and identifying, understanding and rethinking of forms of human-environment interaction which provide for the dynamic nature of any human ecological system.

What has been lacking in the program so far she argues, is a set of core courses which clearly reflect the HE approach for all majors in HE. I was surprised when she presented the proposed new program about the high number of core courses dedicated to HE. Here they are:
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Human Ecology Faculty, UP Los Baños

Where are they now? HE graduate stories
We also heard from Riki Sandalo, the president of the Human Ecology Society in the Philippines about his survey of HE graduates. 76 out of the 2000 total graduates responded. From his results he developed a profile of the ‘typical’ College of Human Ecology alumni:

Hedda and other conference participants

I wondered what we would get from such a survey of ANU HE graduates. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was quite similar. Interestingly the reaction from the audience was ‘how do we attract more men to Human Ecology?’ Any ideas, Human Ecologist males reading this?

The conference only went for one and a half days and I was surprised at the small number of presentations from academics. Many of the presenters were from the NGO sector reporting from the field. I think this was partly a reflection of the conference theme of ‘partnerships’. There was a lot of talk around the importance of working together with the private and civil society sectors. But I also got a strong impression that grants for research were thin on the ground for Human Ecologists and that most of the faculty members had their hands full with teaching.

Videoke
As for the social/light side of the conference, Filipinos certainly know how live up a conference dinner. Not even half-way through the main course, the MC had already kick-started the karaoke with a few brave folk dancing. But having heard of the legendary late night revelry at conference dinners in the Philippines, I was slightly disappointed when it was all cut short at 9:30 PM. Still, I was pretty impressed to see senior academics get up and belt their lungs out. Fun times.

Conference Dinner

I had the opportunity to attend COP15 last December as part of the ANU climate change science and policy field school. I came out of Copenhagen with many experiences and insights, but this blog focuses just on my ‘research’ area, which I presented a couple of weeks ago at the Human Ecology Forum.

At COP15 (amongst the range of my other interests) I was studying the inclusion of health co-benefits of climate change mitigation in the conference agenda, with a comparison to what is presented in the literature. I kept it pretty broad, including issues such as direct health impacts, socio-economic impacts from environmental change and the ethical dimensions of these issues in my research scope. Being at COP15 gave me a chance to attend health-related events and booths on topics as diverse as water and food scarcity, disease, meteorological science and the displacement of people. The aim was to explore how health issues were perceived and represented, and if there was any agenda push or official inclusion of health co-benefits in the negotiations and text. Due to the access restrictions of the NGO pass issued to ANU students, the bulk of my experiential research concentrated on the health issues presented by the side events and booths and is therefore weighted from the perspectives of NGO delegates. At the same time I was conducting a literature review looking at how the health co-benefits and impacts are presented, and if there is any discussion of how to argue ‘health co-benefits’ external to the conference of the parties.

To my surprise, there were few side events at COP15 explicitly about health, but many others I attended mentioned health either:

-       As part of a national climate change agenda (e.g. the government of Kiribati, who impressed me with their level-headed explanation of measures they were taking rather than just appealing for help)

-       In relation to other climate change issues

• Migration
• Employment
• Youth
• Gender
• Technology transfer

-       As part of a broader agenda (e.g. in an event on adaptation including the International Human Dimensions Program- a very promising ‘human dimensions science’ collaboration)

For me another highlight was the World Health Organisation, who was at the conference with a very clear mandate to argue the health co-benefits. However, from my personal experience as an ‘NGO’ delegate, this mandate was weakened by the rabble of so many other events going on at once, and then by most of the interested conference attendees being locked out in the final days in which the specific health events were concentrated.

How does this compare to the literature? I was happy to see that in terms of facts, statements and graphics, the information presented to me at COP15 was very similar or the same as the arguments currently going around in the literature. But what surprised me is that inclusion of the health co-benefits of climate change is only really a recent thing in the ‘official’ dialogue, even though it has always been implied (e.g. in the UNFCCC, where adverse climate change effects are explained to include health issues).

The real difference between the literature and COP15 was not the information itself, but how it was presented and pushed as an agenda. I found that presentation of the health co-benefits was there- but all over the place (as is true of the conference as a whole). In COP15 health issues were also brought up in light of thier potential to become part of a wider issue grouping of the ‘human dimensions’ to climate change, which goes beyond most of the sector-focused literature. This could be in part due to the sheer number of applications for  side events which the organisers received for COP15, which resulted in them having to ask various groups with similar interests to work together within single events (with mixed success).

My main realisations from looking at health at COP15 go beyond the health agenda and are probably true for any interest grouping in these sorts of conferences. I have been considering whether these groups (such as WHO) could have done any better in the foray that was COP15, and realised that even with some effective presentation of the health co-benefits and collaboration between groups, my focus as an NGO delegate had missed the main problem. Before I came to the conference I did not realise how much of a disconnect there would be between the rabble of side events/booths and the official negotiations, which were too busy in themselves to consider any other happenings. It was like there were a number of different conferences going on at once, with different audiences and different purposes. With this sort of forum, I should not have been surprised that there was very little run through of the health agenda (being presented in one forum) to the actual negotiations (going on in another forum, and almost totally decided upon already).

This study has, surprisingly, made me consider issues which don’t just apply to health co-benefits. Notably, my frustrations have centred on the question: what is the point of having side events and booths at the conference, when it is clear that the negotiators have no time at all to engage with them, and can’t really change their official positions anyway? I realised that at COP15, their real role was to help networking and collaboration between different organisations, rather than reach the negotiators. I’m hoping that for the health agenda at least, the range of events also helped to broadly engage and encourage grassroots action in parallel with an international agreement (which some including myself would argue is the more effective mode of change).

Then, is there any more effective and open way to try to bring branching agendas such as ‘health co-benefits’ to a COP? I was forced to conclude that by the time a COP is underway, it is too late for any new agenda to be introduced. The really effective agenda push has to come in the years leading up to the conference itself, when the substantive part of the text is drafted. Organisations such as WHO have been working on this, for example, by making repeated submissions to the secretariat outlining their agenda and where they want to the text to change. However, I’m not sure how effective this has actually been in getting changes realised in the text- maybe a topic for my further undergrad study?

Should I take some comfort from the fact that manufacturers clearly think they need to state their green credentials? Or just be outraged that anyone may actually think that they have made a legitimate environmental claim?

Following advice from the recently published book ‘Doctorates down under’, a group of PhD students researching the nexus between people and environment are establishing a ‘peer support group’. The group will meet semi-regularly, both through Skype and face-to-face, to discuss their ideas and issues. Interested? contact Deb (deborah dot cleland at gmail dot com). This Friday (15 Jan 2010) we will meet at 10am at Vivaldi’s cafe on the ANU campus.

Mangroves, Simeulue Island, Aceh

Two years ago I brought over to Jogyakarta a copy of Walker and Salt’s “Resilience Thinking” , which had just been released in Australia. The book was enthusiastically copied and circulated around environmentalist circles (in fact, I recently saw a copy in the library of the Environmental Bamboo Foundation in Bali). One of the readers who came across the book was Ben Brown, formerly the director of Mangrove Action Project Indonesia. Just prior to encountering the book, Ben had been researching mangrove ecosystems and mangrove management in Indonesia, and was so taken with resilience thinking as a conceptual framework that he incorporated it into an awesome report that he wrote on mangroves as resilient ecosystems.

As Ben relates in the Foreword to the report,

“One year after the 2006 Yogyakarta Earthquake, I found myself poking around a friend’s house in Bantul, one of the regions most devastated by the quake. Approximately 200 of the 250 houses in his village were either destroyed or properly damaged. Most of the houses, one year after the fact, had been rebuilt, do to the fund-raising prowess of an ex-pat who runs Yogyakarta’s largest handicraft export business, and has resided in the same village for nearly a decade. Before this substantial aid found its way to the village, truckloads of community volunteers had already come pouring down from the Central Javanese highlands, laden with bamboo and free or cheap labor, to help in reconstruction.

I had not yet heard much of the term resilience, but seemingly, social systems in Yogyakarta (local community, government, non-government, and international) were by and large up to the task of rebuilding, at least to a greater extent than the 2004 tsunami disaster in Aceh. At any rate, this is not a paper on the resilience of disaster stricken communities, but my introduction to resilience thinking came during this time period. While at my friend’s house, I came across an unassuming looking paperback with the succinct title “Resilience Thinking.” What immediately caught my eye, was the photograph on the cover depicting a solitary, four-leaved mangrove seedling (Ceriops tagal), poking up from an uplifted coral head. By chance, I had just returned a week before from a mangrove restoration assessment on Simeulue Island, Aceh (see case study #2), from 6 sites which had undergone tectonic uplift of around 1 meter. I had in my, literally one hundred of my own photos identical to the one gracing the cover of “Resilience Thinking.” I borrowed the book, read it cover to cover, made eight copies, and now am re-borrowing (haven given away all eight copies) the book as a reference for this writing.

… I am not a true mangrover, perhaps more of an associate of mangroves. The best that can be said for myself and the staff of Mangrove Action Project in Indonesia is that we are very close to the fisher-folk with whom we work, and we probably have a better understanding of rural coastal community dynamics in Indonesia than most. …What we are attempting with this paper is the application of a wonderful way of thinking (resilience), to a system very dear to us (mangroves). Our hope is that at least a few readers will take up the challenge to learn more about resilience thinking and to apply it to current mangrove management efforts in their own regions.”

Ben made some interesting comments about resilience as a holistic, integrative paradigm. He says, “When we first heard about resilience thinking, we were stoked. The concepts were immediately familiar to us: to all of us working in mangroves, mangroves are a textbook example of a resilient ecosystem. What the book managed to do was make the concept of resilience clear and accessible. And it becomes a framework that allows you to manage the ecosystem for both the social and ecological paradigm: it gives you a methodology for putting the two together. It gives you an integrative scientific model, in which the social side becomes social science, instead of social work or development, which wasn’t thought of scientifically so much.” It was fascinating for me to hear, coming from a university course focusing on interdisciplinary human-environment problems; being a humanities student in the Faculty of Science. These kind of holistic approaches make sense to me, but there’s always the concern of how useful they are in practice. It’s great to see someone in the field attracted to these ideas in a similar way, and applying them.

Seismic Uplift on Simeulue (Kerry Sieh 2007)

The paper was published by IUCN (the World Conservation Union) and was read by mangrove researchers in Sri Lanka, Phillipines and Thailand; copies were also distributed to various government agencies in Indonesia. As Ben explains, much of the report aimed to present concepts of resilience thinking for dissemination in policy circles which might otherwise not have the opportunity to engage with these ideas:

“This paper intends to present the precepts of “Resilience Thinking” as they relate to mangrove management in Indonesia. The paper’s only real design is to provide mangrove managers with basic information on resilience, so that they may begin to think of mangrove forests under their jurisdiction as socio-ecological systems and begin to perceive management actions based on their ability to maintain or increase the resilience of the mangrove forest. Before going into the specifics of resilience and mangroves, we need a basic understanding of the concept of resilience as described by David Salt and Brian Walker, authors of “Resilience Thinking.” As opposed to paraphrasing the authors (and misconstruing their connotations), many of the key concepts on resilience are taking verbatim from the book “Resilience Thinking” and the Resilience Alliance website, not with the intent to plagiarize, but because so many mangrove managers in Indonesia will not be able to access the original, and also so that translation from English to Indonesia takes place with as little distortion as possible. Again, the main emphasis of this paper is to make a new mode of thinking accessible managers who have limited access to written materials.”

Download: “Resilience Thinking Applied to the Mangroves of Indonesia“, Ben Brown, IUCN & Mangrove Action Project, Yogyakarta, INDONESIA, 2007.

(sorry about the monster file size, I’ll upload a smaller file soon)

I’m currently working with for Digital Media Services at the Powerhouse museum on a project called About NSW, which is an attempt to do large-scale mapping and unifying of government data. As such, researching innovative ways of presenting and visualising data for the purposes of research and communicating with the public takes up a large part of my day, and a lot of what I’m finding would be of significant interest to the researchers in the human ecology vein, or anyone who find a visual mode useful for dealing with complex data. I’m happy to discuss the nature of that job with anyone who is grappling with data mapping and visualisation problems, by the way. But first, I hope you’ll indulge me if i present a virtual slide show of some handy approaches to data that I’ve ran across recently.

The thing that piqued my interest in this idea was this article at the indispensable WorldChanging blog showing the relative costs of various greenhouse gas emission abatement strategies. I first saw this style of diagram in the research by UTS’s institute for sustainable futures, but never for global-scale data sets. (as an aside, has anyone else seen this vase that visualises global climate change? Possibly not quite as pedagogically useful as it is cheeky, sadly.)

Treading the fine line between exquisite design and useful presentation of information, the gorgeous Virtual Water poster presents water footprints in a fascinating and easy understandable way. Over at foodwebs.org, they are rolling their own creative visualisations with weirdly pretty computer aided foodweb design. Those sample images are weirdly reminiscent of ANU’s own web mapping project, VOSON, who map social networks. I’m hopeful that it’s a mere surface similarity.

Less a clever visualisation than a clever placement for a normal visualisation, the Real Costs project annotates travel agents websites with the carbon footprint for the mode of transport you select, and comparative greenhouse costs of the alternatives. Hands up who’d like to negotiate pre-installing it on, say, all campus computers?

Treehugger has reblogged a pretty fascinating bit of geographic data visualisation about the rush for energy reserves in a time of peak oil: New Arctic Map Shows Just What Boundaries We’ll Be Fighting Over For Oil. From where I’m sitting, GIS has really exploded out of the geography labs and into the wider world in the last two years. Explore our planet recently posted the below image whish visualises shifting global temperatures in a pretty evocative way.

But with Google weighing in, arm-in-arm with the British government, we can expect some interesting large scale data-munging.

And finally, visualising a different kind of complexity, renowned architectural mag BLDGBLOG discusses architectural mock-ups and the media around them as potential impediment to architectural sustainability with some of the sophisticated ideas around net-positive impact buildings that i first ran into via Janis Birkeland – although thanks to the magic of the internet this discussion is kicking off without waiting for her new book to ship. The sooner the better, I say. Now can anyone recommend how I can pitch to the powerhouse museum management that their next major redevelopment should be taking those principles into account? Review copies of Birkeland books gratefully accepted.

[Image credit: Inhabitat]