Computers, Society, and Nature

On September 21, I went to an interesting talk given by Ismael Vaccaro, a professor from the department of Anthropology and the MSE, on “Environmental Anthropology and Landscape Analysis”. The main objective of the talk was to present a methodology for doing landscape analysis, which he exemplified by some earlier field research he did in the Valley of Lillet, situated in the Catalan Pyrenees. Briefly summarized, the methodology identifies six social variables to be used as guidelines to read the different layers of meaning a landscape can contain: 1) demography, 2) property regime, 3) managerial institutions, 4) productive practices, 5) cultures of nature, 6) anthropogenesis and ecological changes.
A lot could be said on any of these variables, but one aspect of the talk that struck me as especially interesting has to do mainly with the last two: cultures of nature and anthropogenesis and ecological changes. The first one consists in the perception different groups of people inhabiting a land have (or had) of nature. Said otherwise, this variable tries to grasp how different group socially construct something like “nature” and hence what meaning they attribute to it. And since “nature” is such a broad and basic concept, we can suppose that this variable is meant to grasp something like the basic metaphysical conception a group of people has, implicitly of explicitly, of itself. It is meant to grasp their answers to such questions as: What is nature? What is their place in it? How should they behave toward it? And so forth. Any explicit or implicit ethical relation toward something like “nature” would hence be captured by this variable.
As for the second variable, “anthropogenesis and ecological changes”, it is meant to capture the material transformations of the landscape done by those groups of humans, over time. According to professor Vaccaro, a ‘purely’ natural landscape, in the sense of a landscape that hasn’t been modified by humans at some point or another, is something that does not exist. This statement entails, for instance, that restoration ecologists have to make a decision as to which previous state of the landscape they want to bring it back, since there is no ‘natural’ or ‘original’ state to which it could be restored.
The interesting aspect to which I alluded to above is that professor Vaccaro’s research led him to conclude that both variables where incomplete without the other and that it were both necessary to refer to cultures to understand the ecological changes of a landscape and to refer to the latter in order to understand the former. If this is true, then it means that both an idealist analysis of a culture made in order to understand the impact of a given people on its environment and a material analysis of the changes in this environment (and hence of the impact this people has) would be insufficient. The study of landscape would therefore call for a conciliation of the materialist and idealist traditions, since, according to professor Vaccaro’s framework, material conditions transform cultural frameworks, but cultural frameworks also transform the material conditions in a way that cannot be properly understood if one takes only the material conditions into account (and vice versa). This process, wherein world-views are modified as a result of material conditions and material conditions are modified as a result of evolving world-views, is, I think poorly understood. So it could be thought of as setting up interesting research projects.

On September 24th, I attended a round-table discussion with guest speakers from Evergreen and the Quebec-Labrador Foundation. An earlier post by ‘crocus’ addressed the former organization, so I will focus primarily on the latter.
The Quebec-Labrador Foundation (QLF) is a non-profit organization aimed at bringing human resources to small, often highly remote communities in eastern Canada and the New England States. In the early days of the organization, Ivy League students from the United States would disperse to remote communities to help develop educational programs there. Now, QLF is a much larger organization, offering internships to people from all over North America. Similarly, the vision of QLF has broadened from primarily focusing on building leadership skills in young people from remote villages, to a focus on developing conservation and stewardship skills in individuals and families, young and old. Indeed, with concerns about the environment increasing during the last quarter of the 20th century, issues such as sustainability, conservation and stewardship are integral pieces of QLF initiatives. For a more detailed history of QLF and their current projects, check out their website here.
One quality that QLF tries to incorporate and build upon in its programs is local, community-based knowledge. I learned quickly from my political ecology studies that many initiatives do not succeed if local interests and knowledge are ignored. Too often state-sponsored conservation initiatives are insensitive at the local-scale, leading to more harm than good. Thus, intelligently I think, QLF develops conservation awareness and skills by working at a local scale, with local knowledge and interests, to foster developments that, in turn, have implications at the national- and global-scales. For example, community-based marine conservation initiatives empower the local people with the knowledge and ability to manage the waters that they often depend upon for survival. Since fisheries around the world are collapsing, and marine fish species are increasingly threatened by extinction, the local-scale initiatives of QLF have global significance.
However, the appeal to bottom-up initiatives has often led to a glorification of the local-scale. Creating initiatives based solely on the knowledge and cultures of local peoples has its risks. For example, one of the guest speakers, an intern for QLF, noted that a local fisherman thought the porpoise fin he was holding in his hand was in fact a shark fin. Consequently, when locals comment on the species of fish in their waters, and give estimates of numbers of sightings for each species, one should be wary of the validity of this data. It would be unwise to create initiatives and base decisions on local knowledge alone.
The QLF brings expertise in the form of trained biologists, conservationists and other educators into communities and helps integrate it with traditional knowledge. I think this synergism between different spheres of knowledge (i.e. the academic, the professional, and the traditional) is an important component of any initiative to succeed on the ground in any community. For this effort, the QLF should be commended.
I do have one primary concern regarding the initiatives of non-profit organizations like Evergreen and the QFL: primarily, their sources of funding. Big corporations fund many of the organizations’ initiatives in part, or entirely. Considering that corporations have traditionally operated to promote their own interests and improve the bottom-line, how assured can one be that corporate funding for ‘green’ initiatives is not a façade to further promote corporate interests? For every hybrid that Toyota sells (they are the main source of funds for Evergreen), how many SUVs are sold with their logo? Should corporations stand above the moral standards that we set for other people and parties? It seems to me that corporations are tapping into the ‘green’ market purely because there is a market there. While they tap into this market, however, they maintain a foot in the older, more environmentally damaging market. With a foot in more than one market, corporations can make much more profit. My moral hackles rise when I consider corporations promoting environmentally-friendly goods and services one day, and environmentally-damaging ones the other; and sometimes on the same day on the same channel.

Following several discussions about how to enact environmental policy, this post is a negotiation of my comprehension. But before I begin, I must admit one crucial realization: the arena of environmental policy is one with which I am unfamiliar. I understand the motivating force(s) behind its construction and implementation (or lack thereof), but I am heretofore naïve about the real ways and reasons it all unfolds. Posts and comments on this blog have thus far dealt mainly with different ideas for bridging the gap between perceived dualisms, like science and policy. But how does such discussion act as a springboard for more concrete understandings and, most significantly, applications of this knowledge?

I do recognize that environmental policy is intricately linked with the predominant global economic system – namely, capitalism. Concepts such as “social capital” come into fruition because we understand that this culture’s ultimate ideals revolve around economic profit or benefit, despite simultaneous ties to conservation and preservation. Thomas Homer-Dixon, aforementioned on this blog, proposes a “no-growth economy” because he, like his predecessors, recognizes that change is not likely to be effected unless the worlds of money and nature are somehow separated. But this is not a realistic endeavour.

Curious how the Internet – our dominant medium for communication – would respond, and I what its input would bring, I Googled the term “environmental policy.” It brought me 293,000,000 results. I clicked on the first, titled, “How to Write an Environmental Policy.” The resulting web-page provides methodical instructions for non-governmental organizations and companies to create and implement basic environmental protocols. Outlining seven easy steps, the web-page makes the process seem linear, efficient, and effective. The web-page suggests using the Internet as a means of effecting these policies. But the ease with which this is supposed to occur is obviously not the reality at larger scales of national and international authority. Because it costs too much?

“The environment” is an ambiguous, arbitrary term, dependent on cultural values and perceptions, and thus “environmental policy” is a blanket concept, which fails to convey specific meaning. How, then, can one enter into comprehension? How is it translated from subjectivity to applicability, or is it? Can it be? Vaccaro and Norman’s in-press article, “Social Sciences and Landscape Analysis,” provides an example of a more systematic approach to providing a necessary back-drop for conservation policy, incorporating the worlds of quantitative data collection with historical texts, spanning temporal and spatial layers. And this seems a more appropriate entryway for understanding and creating cultural-specific protocol, a more pragmatic combination of “soft” and “hard” sciences.

It must be additionally noted, however, that the social sciences seem to possess an over-generalized understanding of ecology, and that non-anthropocentric ecological studies must be incorporated into the aforementioned historical and geographical layers. Environmental policy is not – or in my mind should not be – strictly centred on ensuring sustainability and derived pleasure for future generations of people.

In terms of scale, the discipline of science can be thought of as having two extremes. The very large scale includes studies of matter, energy, and planetary systems while the very small scale studies microscopic processes, protein formation, and bacterial physiology. What lies between these poles David Waltner-Toews refers to as the “muddled middle”. Waltner-Toews is a veterinarian and epidemiologist by trade but has come to understand the importance of letting larger issues (social, economic) inform the work that he does (traditionally small in scale). To show this, in his lecture he detailed a case study of trying to prevent Hydatid disease in Nepal. Previous solutions proposed moving animal slaughter from its previous location on the riverbank to enclosed slaughterhouses, thus preventing street dogs from eating the discarded animal Hydatid cysts and subsequently passing the infection onto humans. In theory this plan should work as it eliminates the path of transmission from meat to dog to human. The plan also included improving street sanitation (normally done by young women), and killing stray dogs and treating those with homes; but the problem of infection persisted.

While the ideas stand to work in a vacuum, they cannot simply be implemented without other costs (social and cultural) and therefore may not be accepted by the people at risk. By creating slaughterhouses, the tradition of butchering animals with family and passing the trade through the generations is lost; by killing street dogs, a source of protection for residents and businesses is lost; by increasing the number of young women working as street cleaners it keeps them from attending school or caring for their children.

Waltner-Toews pointed out that consultation with the community and stakeholders identified larger problems to be addressed. People were concerned about water and food quality, garbage removal, childcare, and housing not Hydatid infection. After much hard work the community came upon an action plan: there were enclosed slaughter areas (but not slaughterhouses), homes were created for people originally squatting along the river, public toilets were created, and community gardens were planted in previously degraded areas. Many of the community’s problems were addressed in ways that complimented the way of life and the social constructs of the region by identifying the connections between them (i.e. by having childcare, women are able to remove more garbage from the streets, which reduces the number of street dogs that may carry Hydatid disease).

This seems like a great story – my one beef with it was that there has not been follow up to see if the infection rates of Hydatid disease have indeed dropped. It has been unfeasible for Waltner-Toews to continue a study originally focused on identifying methods of transmission and coming up with possible solutions. Instead, what started out as a study about disease transmission became one about how simple “logical” solutions are complicated by reality. Further, he stressed that one should not reduce a problem to the scale of their methods, but find new (perhaps non-scientific) ways of looking at the problem.

Aside from the lack of follow-up, I think this case study highlights a problem that permeates science: it exists in a bubble. While doing controlled, focused studies with few variables helps us understand very specific questions about an organism or ecosystem, we sometimes forget to see how the small pieces fit back together. We need to question if the answers we have found are feasible and how they interact with the social, cultural and economic spheres in which they will be implemented. Does this mean the scientific method needs to be restructured? No. After all, controlling for certain variables can yield valuable information for future study, or in the case of epidemiology for creating vaccines, etc. But there must be better understanding and flexibility when it comes to how the findings actually function in an uncontrolled setting. Vaccines and treatments, for example, cannot be provided blindly without considering what causes the prevalence of a disease in the first place, which may often be related to economic or cultural norms.

At a round table discussion/employment pitch about building sustainable communities, two non-profit organizations came to speak about the objectives of their programs. Here I will focus on the organization Evergreen. The spokesperson talked about schoolyard greening initiatives that they help to fund and organize mostly in urban centers. There is a need for school children to have more than just concrete, gravel and grass around them when they spend a lot of time in the schoolyard and more importantly out in the sun. Evergreen aims to add tree cover as well as spots of interest and discovery, that teachers can use to incorporate lessons about science and the environment.

As part of its mandate, Evergreen does not do the schoolyard greening them selves. They provide the funding, workshops for the community and experts to help design the final plan and work with stakeholders to make sure the plan will be feasible. The residents provide the physical momentum and are expected to implement the plan, and provide the maintenance and support needed down the road. One thing that wasn’t surprising, but disappointing none-the-less was that the organization comes up against much resistance from the communities they work in. Residents would rather Evergreen do the greening projects, instead of being active participants themselves. When the project is complete the community supports it and has more of a vested interest in what they have created, but this does not change the fact that it is hard to get the public support to begin with.

This made me question why this is the case, as it is not an uncommon occurrence. Why to we resist responsibility even when given the tools and a fail-proof environment? Why to we not take accountability and action? Are we so used to our social and governmental systems doing everything for us that we don’t remember how to self motivate and self organize? Is this lack of motivation inherent in us? Is the “capital vice” of sloth so widespread? Perhaps it is simpler than that. Perhaps people are afraid of what they do not know. Perhaps in this case, the community feels that they do not know enough about science or plant care to help in a productive way (the same way I feel when I get a plant that I don’t know how to care for).

Regardless, for sustainable communities to really work contributors, players, and advocates are all needed. How do we achieve participation and support with all people (not just the same old converts) when it seems like this desire or commitment has been lost from our collective memory?

As mentioned by Jones on a previous post, Dr. John Holmes came to McGill to give a lecture entitled “Making better use of science in environmental policy making: a European perspective”. The aim of the talk could be summarized briefly as being three-fold: 1) to describe the gap between scientific knowledge and policy making by referring to recent examples of environmental policy making in United Kingdom, 2) to identify the main factors contributing to the formation of this gap, and 3) to propose some remedies to diminish the influence of these factors.
One of the main factors he identified is the lack of institutional channels allowing, on the one hand, scientists to make themselves heard by policy makers and, on the other hand, policy makers to ask questions to scientists at an early stage of the policy making process. The key element for efficient institutional channels, according to Holmes, is competent interpreters who know well the functioning of both worlds. Accordingly, forming more and better interpreters (or middleman) is one of the propositions he made to bridge the gap between science and policy. For Holmes, their role would mainly consist in synthesizing the findings of scientists, vulgarizing the synthesis to make it accessible to non experts and presenting it to the policy makers in a way adapted to their short-term time scale, not in the often long-term time scale of the environmental processes studied by scientists. The other way around, their role would be to assist policy makers in asking questions to scientists, help them decide which research projects need to be funded to provide the answers they seek and help scientists understand the compromises they have to make while formulating their policies.
The general idea is quite good, I think, and has the merit of being very intuitive. Nevertheless, I think it leaves out of the picture an important aspect of the policy making process, especially in our democratic societies: the citizens. The role of the interpreters should not be restricted to the promotion of a dialogue between scientists and policy makers, but should also include the bringing of citizens into the discussion by helping them understand environmental issues from the perspective of both scientists and policy makers. In a democratic society, mobilizing the population for a cause is often crucial for getting a political response to issues identified by scientists. If this is right, then the circulation of information should include three poles, not two: scientists, policy makers and citizens.

On September 17, Dr. John Holmes of Oxford University presented a lecture entitled “Making better use of science in environmental policy making: a European perspective”. Dr. Holmes addressed the issue of the gap between scientific knowledge on the one hand and policy decisions on the other. He explored the policy-making process in the United Kingdom, and explained that current objectives are aimed toward facilitating the efficient and reliable dissemination of scientific knowledge into the policy-making arena. These objectives include initiatives and reviews that explore pertinent questions, such as what science is good science (which research is most valid?), how to facilitate exchange between scientists and policy-makers (what is the role of the interpreter?), and how to frame questions that direct practical research (how does a scientist understand a question framed by a policy-maker?). The answers to these questions should help bridge the gap between science and policy. Additionally, Dr. Holmes gave examples of relatively recent policy initiatives in the UK that were directly responsive to scientific discovery (e.g. the implementation of contaminated land regulations; the licensing of water abstractions). Despite this positive note, he concluded that the process of disseminating scientific knowledge and its effective implementation is currently very slow and cumbersome.
I think the essential message to draw from the lecture is that streamlining the implementation of scientific knowledge into policy-making is requisite, for solutions to environmental problems depend on quick action. It is clear that more effort needs to be devoted to making this process quick and efficient. Regardless of what we know from science, if we can’t disseminate the knowledge in a timely manner, that knowledge is useless.
On the other hand, the implementation of knowledge into policy can only be stream-lined to a certain level. The very issues involved in proper, reliable, democratic integration of knowledge into policy-initiatives are what make the process slow and cumbersome. No matter how much we speed up the reliable dissemination of knowledge into the policy sphere, sifting through and debating the implications of that knowledge takes time, and very often, there are a number of interested parties at the bargaining table. To confront this apparently problematic relationship between science and policy, a common ground must be established where policy makers recognize the often serious consequences of slow action and do everything possible to promote timely decision-making, and where scientists accept the reality that democratic decision-making requires time, patience and compromise.

Thomas Homer-Dixon gave a public lecture in Westmount [Quebec] this week. He is political scientist based out of the University of Toronto, currently gaining more renown for his “general writing” in books like The Ingenuity Gap than his “academic writing” (a dualism which he himself constructs via his website, and one which seems to depressingly devalue the weight of his “general” best-sellers). His work – all of an academic grain, I argue – centres around mechanisms of societal adaptation to major economic, technological, and environmental rupture.

Homer-Dixon’s lecture was aimed at a large, public audience, and thus did not delve deeply into densely theoretical jargon or details. Broadly-speaking, he spent an hour discussing his own diagnosis and prescription (his analogy, not mine) for effecting action in environmental change. As a result, there are a multitude of avenues for discussion – about the environment and further – that I could explore here. But I have decided to use this blog post to discuss a conspicuous element (and slight exasperation) I found in both his writing and speaking: the invention, use, and promotion of what I label “buzz words” to iterate – and reiterate – or elicit an awareness of contemporary environmental issues.

Homer-Dixon’s creation of choice is “catagenesis,” a combination of “catastrophe” and “genesis,” which also generally outlines the thesis (and title) of his newest book: The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; in other words, he posits the notion that societal adaptation stems, in part, from the necessary renewal and rebirth that follows major upheaval – like the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which he cites in both book and seminars.

I must emphasize that my contention is not with the explanatory frameworks such combo-words provide, but rather the popular culture trends they espouse. Trends, by definition, lose momentum and quickly disappear, consequently rendering that which they encompass virtually meaningless. Like “sustainability,” I fear the aforementioned terms may only serve to arouse short-term, large-scale interest, rather than turn the material it intends to convey into concise, comprehensible, enduring language. “Sustainability,” for example, seems to have become something people think is supposed to be good, and of which they are supposed to be proponents; comprehension is superficial at best, and because it was the “buzz word” of Al Gore’s 2006, its use and enthusiasm for its pursuit is fading. Thomas Homer-Dixon addressed this point himself at the end of his lecture, joking that “resilience is becoming the new sustainability.” He did not seem to acknowledge that this sort of jargon transience may in fact be dangerous. I posit that the increased use of these catchy-sounding (and now, combination-style) “buzz words” is actually the first step in steering society away from clearly understanding and consequently caring about and acting on environmental issues such as climate change. People cannot engage in discussion or debate over words that do not carry weight.

Resilience. In essence, this is what Homer-Dixon’s lecture was about. Using his latest book “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Society” as the guide for his lecture, he detailed five main stresses currently growing throughout the world and ways to combat them… sort of.

The first half of the lecture detailed five global stresses: population growth (especially in developing countries), energy scarcity, environmental degradation in developing countries, climate change, and the ever-growing gap between rich and poor (both regionally and globally) all of which create vulnerability and instability. Homer-Dixon sees these as “tectonic stresses” that grow and create friction under the surface, while everything on the surface seems fine (this is where we are currently). That is until the energy and friction of each stress combine to create a catastrophe. There are also two factors that exacerbate these stresses: the increasing connectivity of people and places throughout the world, and the increasing ability of small groups of people to cause great harm to many (i.e. terrorists). Homer-Dixon’s point in detailing these stresses is that many people want simple answers without really knowing the underlying problems, and one cannot come without the other. The last half of the lecture was not solely dedicated to solutions, because in many of these cases solutions for the immediate future are not a reality (i.e. climate change impacts over the next 50 years). Instead Homer-Dixon stressed in his lecture that out of catastrophe could come great opportunity for positive change and reorganization, if we are ready to take advantage of the opportunity. The term he used is called catagenesis (cata = down, genesis = rebirth), but it is the same as the reorganization phase in an adaptive cycle: the ability to adapt and start renewal in the event of catastrophe or breakdown. In society, our ability to build more resilient communities and societies is what will determine how we get through the stresses placed upon us and how we rebuild after catastrophes occur.

This lecture was prepared for a public audience, not an academic one. If I am to criticize it on the basis that it did not go deep enough into the issues, I also have to acknowledge that it may be the audience and not the speaker that required that. However, regardless of the audience, I feel that Homer-Dixon’s lecture should have focused more on the concept of resilience and how it could operate in society (how do we prepare and start creating more resilience?) – I left the lecture feeling that there are good ideas at work here, but that many will be a challenge to materialize. During question period, one person asked for examples of how people are looking forward, building resilience and being prepared to use catastrophe as the potential for future change. A large part of his answer was that people were “starting to talk about it”. This is frustrating, but again may be due to the fact that even though scientists have been studying the resilience of natural ecosystems for some time, this is a new concept to place in a social context. The way in which we have organized ourselves to date (in hierarchical and management frameworks) works against the principles of resilience and creates rigid structures susceptible to breakdown. This may be hard to change.

As for the implications of this presentation for environmental research, I feel that most of what was presented was more applicable to social science environmental research as it focused on how people and society should start to build up systems that will allow us to withstand major changes. That said this research might require knowing more about how resilient our natural ecosystems are to change. In this way, we can determine how future catastrophes (i.e. climate change) will impact ecosystem functioning and how to respond accordingly in the social arena. Knowing what impact the melting of arctic sea ice will have on coastal regions is important in determining what kind of social institutions (or new ways of thinking) are needed to handle the blow. I feel that there is much to be gained in discussing the idea of resilience across disciplines as our ecological, economic, social, and political systems all feed each other. Perhaps natural systems can be used as a guide for social systems to reduce their rigidity.

In all, I think that what Thomas Homer-Dixon presented is an important concept that needs to be further developed: we know that we cannot simply fix our problems, and indeed in some cases we will not be able to fully adapt to their consequences either. We can however, use catastrophe as the impetus for positive reorganization of our institutions and ways of thinking. I do not feel, however, that the idea of building resilient communities can be scaled up to the global level (I did not get a clear indication of what Homer-Dixon thought about this). Instead, I feel that creating smaller webs of connectivity is more feasible and would be more successful as it could avoid the rigidity that prevents resilient systems from building in the first place.