I had the opportunity to attend COP15 in 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?

Learning from others to provide a ‘how to’ guide for aspiring water policy makers is a principal focus of Dr Meijerink’s book Water Policy Entrepreneurs: A Research Companion to Water Transitions around the Globe’.

Human Ecology Forum, Friday March 5th between 10am and 12 noon in Room 101 (Old Library) of the Forestry Building (No. 48), The Australian National University

If you’re not a local, you can watch a video of her research. Catherine presented her video at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Millennium Conference: Water-Ecosystem Services, Drought and Environmental Justice (click on the video icon, hers is the third down) held in Georgia last year.

Catherine writes:
Concepts of justice and the distribution of public resources have been an important aspect of social debate for centuries.  Finding fair and just allocations of natural resources remains a major preoccupation for national governments and their constituent communities.  Where such allocations or decisions are perceived as unjust, underlying social tensions can emerge and result in social conflict.  This study examines two such social conflicts: a 2006 NSW government action to cut a water allocation and the Victorian government’s North South Pipeline and Food Bowl Modernisation Project.

This study investigates these conflicts from a justice perspective, concentrating on notions of fairness and justice. Using a transdisciplinary investigative framework the thesis explores these notions through stakeholder perceptions of procedural justice and distributive justice.  Procedural justice is concerned with the fairness of elements of the decision-making process and distributive justice with the outcome or decision.  The study aims to find out how people perceive fairness and justice within the social context of the decision-making process and how these perceptions contribute to their acceptance of an outcome. The seminar will explore how justice constructs can be used in decision-making processes to increase the acceptance of outcomes and how better outcomes might be achieved.

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?

He was referring to the Filipino artesanal fishers that we were to invite to a workshop on how addressing the fact that it often costs the fishers more to go fishing than to stay at home. Fishing is not very profitable  in the now sparsely populated coastal waters of northern Luzon, especially if you’re sticking to the legal handlines and traps rather than the illegal cyanide and dynamite.

Very soon after, another colleague took a photo of the fish we had been served for dinner, with his wedding ring as a reference point. Yes, the fish were increasingly small, and the incomes of the usually poorly educated fishers, even smaller. Words like intractable and insurmountable came far more easily to mind than hope and encouragement.

But Perry’s words have often come back to me, and I think they apply as much to the fishers as it does to  the countless development, disaster and research practitioners who are looking to improve the depressing trajectories that confront us every time we string a time series graph together. If we can’t hope, if our clients, participants and patients can’t hope, what will we have left? Philip Prett calls hope – substantial hope – ‘cognitive resolve’, and Braihwaite, Courville and Piper talk about the “bootstrapping that takes place between hope,
empowerment, ideas for change, and action”,  writing “hope is the most enduring of these,
lying in wait through cycles of adversity and resistance to change.”

Time to plot out a framework of the enabling role of hope in sustainability.

<<Thanks to a timely suggestion from our resident super star Lorrae Van Kerkoff,  I have been delving into the hope literature inspired by work of Val Braithwaite and colleagues.  See the special issue of The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2004; 592; 6 – the quotes are from Val Braithwaite’s preface “collective hope”.>>

Special saludo to Ines of Lisbon, who wants to join our community of practice through her work on sustainability and migration. Welcome Ines!

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.

You are welcome to participate through the forum or the blog.

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)

Deb Cleland is one of the rocking crew of students who completed Honours in Human Ecology at the Australian National University in 2007. Her innovative honours’ research took advantage of opportunities to work with the Modelling and Decision Support Working Group in the Coral Reef Targeted Research Project to carry out practical research on approaches to sustainable reef management. Deb worked with the MDS-WG to design interactive models and role play games to engage stakeholders in coral reef management and conservation issues. Deb has kindly allowed us to post her honours thesis on “Practice makes perfect? An iterative approach to participatory modelling for coral reef management” on the Human Ecology Forum website.

Deb studied a combined degree in Arts/Science, majoring in Development Studies and Human Ecology/Sustainability Science, after a brief taste of law. She took a series of courses on ecology, climatology, biology and environmental management before getting involved in the coral reef management project by accident after asking to do an introductory computer modelling course through RSPAS (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies).

Deb went on going on to do an independent research project (a semester-long course) with the course coordinator, which led to an opportunity to focus exclusively on it for a year studying Honours. On the topic of finding great research opportunities, Deb says “students are a cheap way for overextended full-time researchers to get things done, so if you hear about an interesting project, it is always worth asking if you can participate in some way.”

For those of you not familiar with the Australian tertiary studies system, Honours is the final year of an undergraduate degree. Studying Honours in some programs may involve coursework, but programs such as Human Ecology are solely research-based theses, similar to Masters research programs, and as such can be a direct pathway to PhD studies.

ABSTRACT

As human activities continue to devastate coral reefs across the globe, new and innovative approaches are needed to link government, communities and researchers to improve reef management. As these new approaches are developed, it is crucial to explore how effectively they are able to bring together diverse stakeholders to integrate knowledge and build relationships to support sustainable reef management. To this end, this thesis takes the example of companion modelling, a participatory modelling method which is associated with combining computer models and role-play games. Using an iterative methodology, it draws upon companion modelling work previously completed in Mexico to guide the design of a new model and role-play game ‘ReefGame’, which was presented at a one-day stakeholder workshop in the Philippines. This experience demonstrated that the companion modelling approach successfully supported social leaning in a participatory setting, by encouraging reflection and discussion among participants. However, it was not able to usefully build relationships across community, researchers and government. Building effective collaboration between these three sectors will require a long-term commitment to building a local mandate and integrating research into existing management, power and communication structures. This research process revealed two important lessons for implementing companion modelling for improving reef management. Firstly, a comprehensive understanding of local complexities is critical in developing models which can effectively engage local people in dialogue and learning processes. Secondly, and notwithstanding the central role of contextual detail, explicitly extracting structural similarities over differing social and economic contexts to draw out lessons for practice plays an essential role in improving outcomes in the field, both for reefs and the people who depend on them.

ReefGame workshop in the Phillipines

Download

• Front matter
• Chapters 1-5
• Chapters 5-7
• Bibliography and appendices

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]

“Why is the world’s largest fish now vulnerable to extinction? One of the most successful Australian conservation campaigns has been Ningaloo Reef out from North West Cape (Exmouth) in Western Australia, where whale sharks aggregate and migrate annually. This Friday’s Forum will explore the issues for effective on-going conservation management, human interactions with and threats to the whale sharks, and the changes these bring to oceanic ecosystems, political processes and personal values (there will be a short video of swimming with whale sharks).”

For this Forum, Penelope Marshall led us through a work in progress on the current troubled importation of the Savannah Cat into Australia. This involved stepping back from the controversy to look at how this case depicts tangled webs of failing governance and deliberation, alongside the problematic consequences of humanities project of modernity and ethical dilemmas at the heart of how we think the world should be.

Savannah Cats are a relatively new (1980s) hybrid domestic cat, breed first in the USA. They are a cross between the Serval, Felis serval, an African wild cat of up to 20kg weight, and Felis catus, the Domestic Cat of up to 7kg in weight on average, topping out with certain breeds at 11kg. The Savannah Cat, dependent on generation, weighs up to 11kg (although unsubstantiated reports state to 18kg). It is further reported that the Savannah has some of the skills of Serval’s, including high intelligence and a strong jumping capability. In the USA, Savannah Cats are legal in some states and illegal in others. There is a proposal to import them into Australia and the Commonwealth Government produced a draft assessment on the importation of the Savannah Cat in June 2008. Against importation are groups like the Invasive Animals Cooperative Research Centre (CRC). The CRC hold that Australia has a poor record controlling introduced animals and that escaped domestic cats are already a key threatening process to Australia’s wildlife (and so why further exacerbate that with yet another complication to the already difficult to manage domestic cat). For importation are groups like Savannah Cats Australia who hold that the Savannah has an outgoing, predictable personality that is somewhat doglike (eg., can be walked on a leash) and that when on sale the cats will be de-sexed, micro-chipped and only sold to reputable owners. Presiding over this is the (Australian) Vertebrate Pests Committee, a co-ordination body for vertebrate pest policy and planning drawing from a variety of expert bodies, state and commonwealth departments plus the New Zealand government.

Penelope used the Savannah Cat issue to interrogate at least three differing aspects to the complex world we live in: (1) the governance of wildlife-human interactions in Australia; (2) the institutional structure (and failures) of modernity; and, (3) the ethics of how we, deep in our towers of abstraction, manipulate other life without regard to the actual unfolding consequences (and potential pain) for all life of such manipulations. We were confronted in the Forum space with the difficulties of drawing boundaries in regards human-nature inter-relationships of which the Savannah Cat case is replete with examples. We looked into:

• how the debate around the cats resonated with a moral panic that disguises the real complexity, ambiguities and hypocrisies of our inter-relationships with animals;
• the way that the cat was the locus of goods/bads which distracted from how the debate was shaped in various ways by the actors involved;
• how the language used was often full of problematic imagery and ideas that where often irreconcilable and further detracted from opening up discussion;
• how the debate drew heavily on science but could not be settled by science;
• how the regulatory systems informing the debate (especially that embodied in the Vertebrate Pests Committee) were not readily transparent nor easily accountable; and,
• how our ability to overcome the systems level inhibitors on dealing with this and other difficult socio-natural conundrums were poor to non-existent.

Although Penelope is still working on finalising her ideas, the story of Savannah cats and our incapacity to reasonably determine what is right regarding what we can so manifestly do in and to the world is a further cautionary tale on other intractable problems we are currently sunk in.

John Schooneveldt (Nature and Society Forum)

Well, for this Forum John Schooneveldt lead us on one very stunning trip, covering 4 billion years, into some seriously big ideas and re-conceptualisations (and which I can not do justice too in a few paragraphs, but here below is a shot at a slice of it). Also, for those of you who would like a closer look, here is John Schooneveldt’s PowerPoint presentation (please do not quote from this work/Powerpoint thanks, as it remains a project under development).

Traditional wisdom has long recognised that societal arrangements, beliefs, languages and cultures evolve over time but they do so rather differently to the way living organisms have evolved. In other words, while Darwinian evolution is widely accepted as explaining the evolution of our physical selves, including our brains, our minds seem to change in rather more mysterious ways.

In this Forum I argue against this dualism by going back to Darwin’s original work and earlier Greek ideas of causation to explore the possibility that contextually generated selection pressures not only offer an elegant explanation of biological evolution but the evolution and development of mind, culture, language etc as well.

So starting with John’s title ‘From the Music of the Spheres to the Clatter of the Dice and Back Again’, I’d like to try and depict one idea from John’s talk. Essentially, on the way to re-explaining and recovering core ideas propagated by Darwin (and Aristotle), John gave us a new set of insights into the evolution of culture and the nature of social change. Firstly, John took us on a tour of the Western intellectual tradition (starting with the Greeks) via the principle ‘know thyself’ (as once inscribed on the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in Greece) and the Greeks understanding of ‘harmony and beauty as a property of nature which was alive’ (ie., panpsychism – all entities/objects possess an inner experience of the world around them) and ‘ever-changing (evolving)’. Mathematical patterns abound, from music to the movement of the planets and which gives us (in John’s title) ‘…the Music of the Spheres’. Somewhere in this history, from the Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, things changed and beauty became a property of the mind, individual entities/organisms became machines, and nature became a system in service to abstract utilitarian values. Further, into the depths of our mad loss of understanding wholes, we supply our food by killing all that is not useful (agriculture), isolate our children from the rich context of the world inside abstract structures of the material and of mind (eg., disciplinary knowledge) and conform deviate individuals/cultures through a wide variety of fundamentalisms. In this we have reduced, isolated and broken the world into pieces on the way to appropriating, dominating and controlling, so ‘what is left is an empty, meaningless world of clattering dice’ (this being the second component in John’s title).

So, in regards the third component of John’s title, ‘…and Back Again’, where now? John’s talk is part about social change and the way that our poor understanding of what the universe could be cripples our ability to act in a more appropriate manner as to the bio-physical limits and possibilities we are faced with. John has set out to reconceptualise our ideas of what we and the universe are via utilising a Darwinian framing to account for ‘…the evolution of mind, culture and belief’. This is done without making the same errors the Neo-Darwinists and Socio-Biologists made by forcing culture into an overly constrained understanding of Darwinian Theory.

John does this all by (doing a lot of stuff I can’t possibly cram in here but) noting that a Darwinian approach is based on radical individualism, where living organisms are agents interacting with each other and with each having an internalised experience of reality that changes over time. Supra-organisms (eg., ecosystems/institutions) are not causative agents and there is no such thing as transcendence (from which, in one form, we constructed the idea of ecosystems/institutions). Instead, change/evolution is a process of 4 billion years of organisms internalising experience in developing (to the now). This is fundamentally a biological process involving interaction between a living cell/organism and the environment which evokes expressions of particular genes and in sum involves change that is exponential in nature (positive feedback) tensioned by other cells/organisms (negative feedback). Individual adaptations of organisms are echoed by contextual enhancements in the environment that can cumulatively assist in survival and reproduction. These interaction patterns functionally emerge from diversity and complexity in extremely subtle ways, ie., internalised and in the end encoded experience expressed as a potential, and as interactive with the environment, then emerges (as) behaviour. Core expressions of emerged behaviour are encapsulated as motility (eg., ability to make choices, such as find better food), imitation (eg., making choices via what others have chosen, such as herding) and anticipation (eg., predicting the behaviour of others, such as camouflage/pretence). Humans have learnt through increasingly sophisticated expressions of motility, imitation and anticipation to change the environment to suit us in the last 10,000 years, and so we have taken more control over contextual enhancements, thereby minimising individual adaptations (ie., ceased adapting). This has two consequences; (1) human progress is illusionary, as we misinterpret the control over contextual enhancements as what it is to be fully human; and, (2) the consequences of controlling contextual enhancements alone leaves us in an increasingly tight spiral of acting (to control) and reacting (to contain the feedback from our maladaptive understanding). This comes at the steadily increasing expense of the planetary bio-sphere, thereby slowly but steadily weakening our ability to make further contextual enhancements. So, ‘…Back Again’, means propagating, treasuring and drawing on diversity in knowledge creation and action, re-enchanting wonder in all things and as direct experience, plus using the tools of logic, mathematics and semantic metalanguages without loosing sight that they are just tools and that the work of finding other ways to put together new futures is preeminent. It would also be smart to re-read and understand Darwin and Aristotle. John’s recapitulation is a major life work and we look forward to seeing how he continues to develop it into the future!

“Climate change policy makers face some unique challenges. Climate change is clearly a global issue and, whilst the fourth IPCC assessment report released last November stated warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that it is very likely due to an increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, the element of uncertainty surrounding the cause has generated conflicting discourses within media coverage of climate change. Media coverage influences public opinion and policy makers. The policies required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and effect climate change mitigation are generally unpalatable to mainstream voters, but one factor which may induce them to support such politically difficult policies is the perception of climate change as a threat to their lifestyles, or even to their existence. And if politicians perceive majority support they are encouraged to push for mitigation policies. This research project aims to investigate the interactions between public awareness, public opinion, policy making, and policy implementation, specifically focussing on how perceptions of public support for climate change mitigation policies may have influenced policy making and the extent to which that public support has been formed by perceptions of climate change as a threat”.

“And the reason why some have four feet and others many was that the stupider they were the more supports god gave them, to tie them more closely to earth. And the stupidest of the land animals, whose whole bodies lay stretched on the earth, the gods turned into reptiles, giving them no feet, because they had no further need for them…” Plato: Timeaus 49.92

This seminar will explore several aspects of the current construction of the savannah cat controversy. Firstly, it will reveal the competing discourses evident in the savannah cat case as complex; if not irreconcilable; Secondly, it will reveal the nomenclature relied on within these discourses as equally complex. Thirdly, it will highlight suggested changes to the existing administrative powers of the national Vertebrate Pest Committee as being neither transparent nor accountable and therefore of concern.

You can check it out (and buy it!) here:
or for a free preview of the first 20 pages, visit here.

Details: van Kerkhoff, L. ‘Making a difference: Science, action and integrated environmental research’. 2008. Transdisciplinary Studies Series. Hunsinger J, G Bowker et al. (Series eds.) Rotterdam. Sense Publishers.

ISBN 978-90-8790-392-3 hardback
ISBN 978-90-8790-391-6 paperback

Price is US$49 for the paperback.

John Schooneveldt (Nature and Society Forum)

Traditional wisdom has long recognised that societal arrangements, beliefs, languages and cultures evolve over time but they do so rather differently to the way living organisms have evolved. In other words, while Darwinian evolution is widely accepted as explaining the evolution of our physical selves, including our brains, our minds seem to change in rather more mysterious ways.

In this Forum I argue against this dualism by going back to Darwin’s original work and earlier Greek ideas of causation to explore the possibility that contextually generated selection pressures not only offer an elegant explanation of biological evolution but the evolution and development of mind, culture, language etc as well.

It has been a while since we did one of our periodic collective ‘brain dumps’, so as we have reached the middle of the 2008 and you’ve all no doubt got many ideas and plans buzzing around in your heads the aim of this Human Ecology Forum is to draw those ideas and such out for collective mulling over and discussion.

The plan is to have a round table discussion amongst those who turn up within the broad category of social science, natural science, humanities research / practice / dilemmas / debates / dialogues or just on the conundrums of doing ‘right’ practice out there in the world.

This may be a thorny research issue your tackling that you’d like to throw out for reflection on, through to a proto-presentation your thinking of doing and would like some feedback on (short 5 minute PowerPoint or similar presentations are fine to toss up on the projector during the session), or a future set of plans you’d like to unpack a tad more, or a new idea/paper you’ve found, to a practical challenge you’ve encountered in trying to understand the complexities of our world…if you have something you’d like to discuss within a collective space, then the 11th is the day to bring it along and give it a try or if you’d just like to come and contribute to the discussion (sans ideas), please feel free to do so.

Keith’s own background was within a government environmental organization and he had, over many years, noted how the context in which environmental management was occurring had become increasingly complex as bracketed by legislative aspirations of a high order (in New Zealand). This complexity included the shift from environmental management to sustainable development, increased accountability, rise in the extent of group participation, more litigation, larger scales of impact, intensifying exploitation and so on. Inspired by the work ‘In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life’ by Robert Kegan, which suggests that the demands of modern society outstrip (as a generalisation) peoples’ ability to actually deal with it, and using the work of another cognitive/educational thinker, Michael Basseches (‘Dialectical Thinking and Adult Development’), alongside his own experience, Keith asked the question: if we need more complex approaches to the complex problems we face do we have in our (environmental) organizations and the people within them the actual capacity to meet that need?

If I was to sum up Keith’s presentation, the answer is no. Keith took us through his empirical research with 31 managers of environmental organizations and of the organizations themselves, and showed the way in which environmental managers could be grouped into a small number of cognitive levels and how developmental processes may operate to encourage people to increase their thinking and practical capacities. These levels, to compress a broader discussion, ranged at the low(er) end from straightforward thinkers who accepted the order of things without much questioning of such, internalised organisational ideology, did not break through or re-organise boundaries and had minimal self-reflection, to an upper end of complex thinkers who were comfortable with chaos and complexity, sought to question assumptions, saw connections, were open to learning, found self-reflection easy and where able to re-order boundaries as necessary. The ability of organisational contexts to foster complex thinkers was minimal (effectively only 1 amongst all the managers), although organisational
capacity existed to move people from lower level thinking upwards to some degree, it did not exist to move people more fully towards truly complex thinking.

Keith’s research was of a high order and reflected the inherent complexity of the topic. It will be with great interest to see what he does with it in the future and hopefully too, we will see Keith back in the forum again sometime down the track for a further installment on this topic.

Using the Canberra suburb of Duffy as a major case study, Andrew invited us into the complex spaces that exist between the ideal of what a suburb ‘should be’ and the often difficult reality of what a suburb actually ‘is’ (and, as pointed out from the forum floor, that there is often far more to suburbs than meets the eye). This is exemplified by Duffy, which suffered so horribly in the 2003 Canberra fires (200+ houses/structures destroyed and three lives lost) and which has been subject to considerable re-development. Andrew pointed out that in Duffy, a fairly typical Australian suburb, around 1/3 of destroyed but now rebuilt houses had a significantly bigger floor area (from 264m2 up to 309m2) and nearly half of all rebuilt houses saw a transfer of title (new owners). Andrew posed questions about why this was occurring, how people have engaged with re-building, what residents make of the changes and how this all impacts on their understanding of the suburban landscape and how planning authorities and other stakeholders have dealt with the situation. He then went onto discuss what such a scale of rebuilding can then reveal about previous, older conceptions of the suburban ideal, planning practices and the existing built environment against often pressured and substantially different ideals of suburbia, planning and practical actions that inform the immediate re-building process (exemplified in Canberra by ‘densification’ – the amount of built space is increasing but the number of people for the total built space is falling).

Andrews’ contextualisation of the changing nature of suburbia, its historical and theoretical flows and his efforts to piece together a study that does justice to the significant and diverse thinking on the subject next to the need to allow residents/stakeholders a capacity to speak their lives out in an open and participatory manner meant that our two hour discussion time disappeared very quickly indeed. Hopefully we can get Andrew back at some later stage to hear what this most interesting PhD has developed into!

“A need to protect water supply ‘life lines’ as well as ‘sites’”

Current drought conditions have graphically revealed, in the form of thousands of hectares of dead and dying red gums and other flood-dependent vegetation, the inadequacies of current pre-ecological policies, structures and institutions, to achieve an ecologically sustainable future for the lower Murrumbidgee floodplain. The massive destruction of natural capital, on behalf of Australian society, is attributable in a large way to maintaining processes informed by the knowledge and values of the first half of the twentieth century, when catchment conditions and scientific understanding were very different from today i.e. protecting ‘sites’ rather than whole ‘systems’ and water regimes. Kingsford and Thomas (2001: 74)* provide the following illustration:

The Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain illustrates a problem for protection of wetland areas under [current] conservation legislation and policy. Conservation legislation is primarily designed to protect areas of significance as reserves (e.g. National Parks and Nature Reserves). Two examples from the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain illustrate how this can fail. Yanga Nature Reserve lies in the
Fiddlers-Uara stratum and was primarily conserved for its Black Box woodland vegetation community. Similarly 23,800 ha of the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain was protected in the Lower Murrumbidgee floodplain from clearing by legislation … Legislation and policy measures usually protect actual sites of wetlands from development but do not control threatening processes upstream … To protect wetland areas, policies and legislation for wetland conservation need to be applied to flow regimes. This necessitates the interaction of policies applied to the floodplain with legislation that governs the management of water. Until there is protection of the flow regimes that define wetlands and their biota, their long-term future, even if they have reserve status, cannot be guaranteed.

Approximately 65 000 hectares of historically inundated flood-dependent land on the floodplain has become ‘stranded’. A considerable part of the stranded landscapes now receives water only during rare major flood events (the last being in the mid-1970s). In a country with notoriously poor soils, a relatively large area of rich alluvial soils has virtually been taken out of ecological and agricultural production.

Floodplain-saltbush-red gum resilience cycle

A feature of traditional European land-use and natural resources management in the lower Murrumbidgee landscape was that landholders did not confine themselves to one ecosystem. They practiced annual stock movement between floodplain and saltbush ecosystems (similar to Swiss transhumance). Stock was moved to graze on the saltbush plains in winter and back to the floodplain vegetation in summer, after flooding had receded, so that both ecosystems could be ‘rested’. Many properties still retain frontage (floodplain) and back (saltbush) blocks in their ecosystem mix. This is a vestige of the pastoral era that dominated land-use in the region until the early 1980s and is being revisited in the light of climate change and a decline in the availability of oil.

During periods of difficult economic conditions, such as droughts or economic depressions, community members can, to this day, make a living from red gum forest products. This means that they do not have to leave their community to find work and the local economy is sustained during ‘hard times’. The red gum forests are looked upon as a source ‘exceptional circumstance’ community income. While there is a small amount of continuous forest product extraction in the district, red gum generally provides a major input to the local economy approximately once in a generation (25 years).

* Kingsford, R.T. & Thomas, R.F. 2001. Changing Water Regimes and
Wetland Habitat on the Lower Murrumbidgee Floodplain of the Murrumbidgee
River. NSW NPWS, Hurstville.

Friday 20 June, 2008 12:00 – 2:00pm

Development of Duffy 2002 (left) and 2005

The suburban landscape is predominately a twentieth century phenomenon. Likewise, much criticism has occurred in the last century, if not the last fifty years. Early planning literature in Australia suggested the detached dwellings should be the dominant suburban form as it was in keeping with notions of respectability and social progress (Hoskins 1994). In the USA, critics such as Mumford observed that the role of developers and housing construction companies had far greater influence than the planning aspirations for aesthetically pleasing healthy communities. As a result the aesthetic ideals originating from the Garden City and City Beautiful movements were supplanted by monotonous rows of houses with very little character. Today’s suburbs have been variously linked to a range of social ills from environmental pollution caused by increased stormwater run off to childhood obesity. However valid these concerns are, little is understood about how the suburban landscape is perceived or valued. Few studies have explored how residents interpret changes to the character of their suburban landscape and what effect this has on the way planning and design incorporate these landscape values held by the community. This study presents an opportunity to interpret how different social actors’ values and aspirations have affected the character of the suburb.

Few decision makers face complexities that are as persistent and pervasive as those who are tasked with managing the environment or managing human impacts on the environment. Does this mean that managers working on complex systems, such as these, need to be especially good systems thinkers and able to engage with the perspectives and thinking of multiple communities of interest?

After many years as a senior manager in New Zealand’s Department of Conservation, Keith Johnston is completing a PhD with the ANU’s School of Management, Marketing and International Business. His thesis studied environmental managers working in New Zealand. The over-arching question he set out to address was: What is the level of complexity of thinking and meaning making that might be required to sustainably manage the environment and how does this compare with the levels demonstrated by existing managers?

Using theories and methods from the field of adult development, he argues that managers need a high level of complexity of thinking and meaning making, or this at least needs to be present within management teams, if sustainable management is to be attained. He developed a framework for environmental management and leadership, providing indicators of systems capability and meaning making at different levels of management. But he did not find the levels of capability that he expected were required, even amongst the teams that were judged to be the most successful. What are the implications of these findings?”

The presentation will reflect on Viveka’s PhD work into design-led research and research-led design as a tool for change towards a sustainable future. The presentation will outline the concepts being played with in this metadesign project in order to open up the ideas for discussion. The aim of entering into this conversation is to get some feedback on the concepts being developed and to generate some ideas on how design-led methods might be of use to the research community in general.

Viveka is shortly attending three conferences to present her thoughts on co-designing a sustainable future. Towards that end she has supplied here two papers and one abstract relating to each of the three conferences:

* Designing a Travel Guide to the UnNatural World: Exploring a Design-led Methodology (331 KB)
* Changing the Change Conference: Co-designing a Sustainable Culture of Life (1.1 MB)
* Abstract (20 KB) for ‘Design with a Thousand Faces: Design-led methods for the social science research community’