Cool video about how a movement for social-ecological transformation took advantage of a window of opportunity.
Dutch cyclist organizations pushing for new cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands.
Read more on the Bicycling Dutch website in this post. An interesting post compares public space in locations in Netherlands in 2012 and 1957.
I will be participating in a public discussion Resilience and Political Ecology at Upssala University April 27th in a moderated discussion with Prof. Alf Hornborg a professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, which will be moderated by Eva Friman from the Uppsala Centre for Sustainable Development, Uppsala University
The discussion will be Friday 27 April 2012, 14.15-17.00, Hambergssalen, Geocentrum, Villavägen 16, Uppsala University. More information is on the DevNet website here and here.
Alf Hornburg and I previously had an online discussion on this blog where I tried to understand and respond to his critique of resilience, based on a review Victor Galaz had of a recent paper of his. I expect that the discussion will be interesting and I hope that there will be some fruitful discussion.
While the discussion has been framed by the organizers as a debate, I do not see political ecology and resilience as opposed. Indeed, I wrote a 1999 paper in Ecological Economics -Political ecology and ecological resilience: An integration of human and ecological dynamics - (doi:10.1016/S0921-8009(00)00217-2) that suggested some ways I thought ideas from political ecology could be included in resilience thinking. While resilience researchers have long argued that issues of power need to be included in resilience thinking there hasn’t been a mass movement towards their integration, but there have been a fair number of researchers how have attempted to explicitly combine aspects of political ecology and resilience thinking.
For people that are interested in thinking I’ve stated a group on Mendeley to share papers that attempt to integrate resilience and political ecological theory and methods. Right now there are about 30 papers in there, but I expect there are a number that have been missed, and I hope Resilience Science readers can add them to the group.
I haven’t carefully read all the papers in the Mendeley group, but three papers that I found particularly interesting are:
- Karl S Zimmerer’s 2011 The landscape technology of spate irrigation amid development changes: Assembling the links to resources, livelihoods, and agrobiodiversity-food in the Bolivian Andes. Global Environmental Change 21(3) 917-934. doi: 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.04.002,
- McSweeney and Coomes 2001 Climate-related disaster opens a window of opportunity for rural poor in northeastern Honduras<. PNAS 108(13) 5203-5208.doi: 10.1073/pnas.1014123108
- Turner and Robbins 2008 Land-Change Science and Political Ecology: Similarities, Differences, and Implications for Sustainability Science. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 33(1) 295-316. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.environ.33.022207.104943
Conceptual diagram from Turner and Robbins
Stanford humanities professor Robert Harrison has a great online podcast, Entitled Opinons, that discusses various aspects of the Humanities.
Robert Harrison is a Dante specialist, but he is also very interested in people’s relationships with the Earth. His enthralling books Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition, and Forests: The Shadow of Civilization provide much food for thought.
His shows cover diverse topics and thinkers such as Michel Foucault, eco-critic Ursula Heise on Extinction, and A Monologue on Machiavelli.
In his show on Joesph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness |MP3| he gives a (to me) an interesting environmental interpretation of the novel. He states (transcript from Beams & Struts):
What did the intervening century [since Joseph Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness was written] do to change the situation [of Western nihilism outlined in that book]? If one is honest, precious little. On the contrary, the twentieth century just enacted the most virulent forms of Western nihilism through two catastrophic world wars, and the endless genocides associated with communism and cold war politics and so forth. So it’s very difficult I think to soberly look back on the twentieth century and to say that the vision of nihilism that Conrad puts forward in ‘Heart of Darkness’ was not well founded.
I think it was well founded, raising the question of whether we are to be stuck in that dark hole that he so vividly portrays for us, or whether the twenty-first century might find a way out of it…
One of the visions that Conrad has of Western nihilism in ‘Heart of Darkness’ is of the sheer carelessness of the Western rapacious attitude toward Africa and the continent of Africa, as raiding its resources, and taking from the Earth as much as one can take without giving anything back in return. And this is the formula for nihilism.
Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ sees Western modernity as a kind of ferocious drive to extract as much out of the Earth as possible without giving anything back to it…So the question for the twenty-first century will be whether a turn is possible in our relations with the Earth, whether we can return to the primary human vocation of being caretakers rather than destroyers in our relation to the Earth.
The Convention on Biological Diversity just released a report [PDF] put together by their Liaison Expert group on geo-engineering and biodiversity. The report – to which I have contributed as one of several lead authors – brings together peer-reviewed literature on expected impacts of a suite of geoengineering technologies, on biodiversity and ecosystem services. The last chapter also elaborates social, economical and ethical dimensions as they relate to the technologies’ impacts on biodiversity. Key messages include:
10. There is no single geoengineering approach that currently meets all three basic criteria for effectiveness, safety and affordability. Different techniques are at different stages of development, mostly theoretical, and many are of doubtful effectiveness. Few, if any, of the approaches proposed above can be considered well-researched; for most, the practicalities of their implementation have yet to be investigated, and mechanisms for their governance are potentially problematic. Early indications are that several of the techniques, both SRM [Solar Radiation Management, my addition] and CDR [Carbon Dioxide Removal, my addition], are unlikely to be effective at the global scale.42. Geoengineering raises a number of questions regarding the distribution of resources and impacts within and among societies and across time. Access to natural resources is needed for some geoengineering techniques. Competition for limited resources can be expected to increase if land-based CDR techniques emerge as a competing activity for land, water and energy use. The distribution of impacts (both positive and negative) of SRM geoengineering is unlikely to be uniform – neither are the impacts of climate change itself. (Section 6.3.4)
This is a guest post by Thad Miller, Assistant Professor in Urban Civic Ecology and Sustainable Communities at Portland State University’s Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning. You can visit his website here and follow him on Twitter at @Thad_Miller. This is the second post in a series on technology-Anthropocene-resilience. The first post about geoengineering and planetary stewardship, can be found here.
Scientists have declared that the Earth has entered a new epoch—one that is characterized by human impact on the planet’s biophysical processes. So, too, has the notion of the Anthropocene come to dominate discussions around sustainability and the environment in the lead up to Rio+20. One would have been hard pressed to find a single session in which it was not mentioned at last week’s Planet Under Pressure conference in London. Over the past year, we’ve reached a veritable discursive tipping point as an avalanche of papers on one aspect or another of the Anthropocene have hit major scientific journals (including this recent article in Science), the blogosphere, and the popular press. In short, if you haven’t heard of it, it is time to get out of your cozy Holocene cave.
Many of these discussions about the Anthropocene, particularly at Planet Under Pressure, have focused on what scientists know about the human impact on earth systems. For example, to what extent has human activity begun to push the Earth beyond certain “planetary boundaries” beyond which lies potential ecological catastrophe? (Quick aside: for a scathing—if not off-base, according to the moderator of this blog—critique of planetary boundaries see this guest post by Schellenberger and Nordhaus at Roger Pielke, Jr.’s blog). While such questions may indeed be important, two critical themes are missing in discussions of the Anthropocene: technology and ethics.
The Anthropocene is not an era in which humans simply dominate the world, but an era in which humans engineer it. If there is one thing we humans do, it is building things. This is, of course, part of what got us into this mess (and, paradoxically, what has helped advance human well-being and development throughout much of the world over the last several centuries). We have literally constructed the Anthropocene. What we decide to make of the Anthropocene and make it more desirable (for humans and nonhumans alike) will in large part be influenced and enabled by technology. Yet, if technological innovation got us into this situation (albeit with many incredible benefits), why should we assume that it will get us out? (If, for instance, I was a betting man and I had to choose the more probable pathway to global food security—a sudden shift in the priorities and practices of our global political and economic institutions or technological advances in genetically modified crops and fertilization—I’d choose the latter.) I am not suggesting that we revert to technological fixes; rather, that we begin to think critically about the complex role of technology in both creating unintended consequences and providing sorely needed solutions. Perhaps it is hubris, but we must begin to merge humanity’s great technological project with an ethical one.
Rockström et al. urge us to maintain a “safe operating space for humanity.” This seems like a reasonable place to start (though it does potentially mask important local and regional variations in what that space might look like, how it is determined and by whom). However, the question of what kind of world(s) we want to live in cannot be determined by scientific elites alone (also, those advocating global governance may want to take note of recent attacks by American Tea Party groups). It is a messy social and political task that must tackle a complex net of trade-offs between values—across both space and time, human and nonhuman. It is a task that challenges neat categories of artificial/natural or human/nonhuman and will force a rethinking of knee-jerk reactions against, for instance, technology by some traditional environmentalists. This is an issue that Emma Marris eloquently highlights in her book, Rambunctious Garden.
Our ability to navigate the Anthropocene will depend on our capacity to innovate; hopefully, with a strong dose of humility and guided by an open debate of what trajectory we ought to take. How, for example, can we harness humanity’s proficiency for technological innovation to pursue what Ruth DeFries, Erle Ellis and colleagues refer to as planetary opportunities (for full article, click here)? Both natural and social scientists in the resilience/sustainability community must begin, as Victor Galaz concludes in his earlier post, to more rigorously engage with values, politics and technology. One way to start is to make sure that there are at least a few engineers and humanists at the next Planet Under Pressure (or, better yet, Rio+20).
Thanks to Victor Galaz for inviting me to post on Resilience Science this week.
Should we deliberately intervene in the Earth system to counteract the negative impacts of climate change? Certainly not, if we ask prominent Earth system scholar Will Steffen. In a recent article published in Ambio , Steffen and colleagues argue that geoengineering and Planetary stewardship are opposing extremes because the former deal with “symptom treatment” rather than the reduction of anthropogenic pressures on the planet (Steffen et al. 2011:752).
In my view, this very much depends on what particular technology you focus on, and on what scale. In a recent article in Ecology and Society “Geo-engineering, Governance, and Social-Ecological Systems: Critical Issues and Joint Research Needs” , I argue that there is an interesting, and unexplored interface between some types of geoengineering technologies, and Planetary stewardship.
One important detail that tends to get lost in the public debate about geoengineering, is that the concept not only includes technologies that intend to counteract warming through the regulation of solar radiation (e.g. injection of stratospheric aerosols, cloud brightening), but also a suite of proposals that build on ecosystem-based approaches such as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), long-term storage of charcoal in soils (biochar), and reforestation and afforestation.
Once this wider spectrum of proposed and future technologies is acknowledged, a whole different set of poorly explored issues emerge.
Earth stewards could play a key role in various phases of geo-engineering research, ranging from theory and modeling, to technology development, and subscale field-testing. […] Two issues will prove critical. One is to secure that geo-engineering experiments explore technologies that not only address climate stresses, but could also bring multiple social-ecological benefits to communities. […] Second, participatory and co-management processes always play out within an institutional context. Hence, the creation of institutional mechanisms at the national or international level that support consultation, the disclosure of information, provide ombudsmen functions, and endorse integrated assessments of social-ecological dimensions will provide a critical underpinning for participatory processes (from mentioned article in Ecology and Society).
Is this really geoengineering? Well, if you follow the conventional definitions of the concept, I would argue that it is. But it is geoengineering in a different way. As Mark Stafford-Smith and Lynn Russell so elegantly summarizes it in a recent article in Carbon Management
Instead, the geoengineering debate should urgently be reframed as, “what combination of many smaller geoengineering options could be resilient, least harmful and yet effective in mitigating global environmental change?”
Time has come for the resilience community to think more creatively about technology, and seriously engage with the geoengineering debate.
Additional resources of interest:
Lynn M Russel et al. (2012). “Ecosystem Impacts of Geoengineering: A Review for Developing a Science Plan”, Ambio
STEPS Centre (2012). Biochar: “Triple Wins”, Livelihoods and Technological Promise, STEPS Working Paper [PDF]
Oxford Geoengineering Programme (Oxford University)
Stockholm Seminar with Jason Blackstock on Solar Geoengineering
The Montpellier Panel, a group of experts from the fields of agriculture, sustainable development, trade, policy, and global development chaired by Gordon Conway from UK’s Imperial College, have a new report ‘Growth with Resilience: Opportunities in African Agriculture’. The report looks at how agriculture is connected to economic growth, food production, climate change and ecosystem services, but interestingly puts resilience at the centre of their approach. They argue that that while there are many challenges to agriculture in Africa, there are an under appreciated set of opportunities.
The figure below summarizes their report’s strategy.
Gordon Conway has written an article for SciDev.net has a about the report. He writes:
Developing resilient agriculture will require technologies and practices that build on agro-ecological knowledge and enable smallholder farmers to counter environmental degradation and climate change in ways that maintain sustainable agricultural growth.
Examples include various forms of mixed cropping that enable more efficient use and cycling of soil nutrients, conservation farming, microdosing of fertilisers and herbicides, and integrated pest management.
These are proven technologies that draw on ecological principles. Some build on traditional practices, with numerous examples working on a small scale. In Zambia, conservation farming, a system of minimum or no-till agriculture with crop rotations, has reduced water requirements by up to 30 per cent and used new drought-tolerant hybrids to produce up to five tons of maize per hectare — five times the average yield for Sub-Saharan Africa.
The imperative now is scaling up such systems to reach more farmers.
Another solution is to increase the use of modern plant and animal breeding methods, including biotechnology. These have been successful in providing resistance to various pests of maize, sorghum, cowpeas, groundnuts and cotton; to diseases of maize and bananas; and to livestock diseases.
These methods can help build resilience rapidly. We need to combine them with biotechnology-based improvements in yield through improved photosynthesis, nitrogen uptake, resistance to drought and other impacts of climate change.
Agro-ecology and modern breeding methods are not mutually exclusive. Building appropriate, improved crop varieties into ecological agricultural systems can boost both productivity and resilience.
…
Developing agriculture with resilience depends on science, technology and innovation; but there are no magic bullets. We need strong political leadership.
An excellent example is Ghana, where agricultural gross domestic product has risen by five per cent each year for the past decade and the millennium development goal of halving hunger by 2015 has already been achieved.This was largely due to the leadership of former president John Kufuor who gave agricultural development a high priority and created an enabling environment for the adoption of new technologies and other innovations.
The Resilience Science weblog is on twitter, and has been for a little while.
@resilienceSci contains tweets by me plus links to resilience science posts by all contributors.
If you are on twitter you can follow to get links to more links to resilience related news, science, and thinking than are posted on the weblog.
The above video on the Anthropocene was created for the Planet Under Pressure global change and sustainability conference in London, UK, which starts today, March 26th, and continues to the 29th. The movie is:
A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
It presents a contemporary picture of the world in which we live in, and how dynamics of the biosphere and the ways it supports human wellbeing. The shifting anthropocene provides the basis for how people can act to improve their lives in this decade and that provides the background for the conference.
The conference, which is attempting to better integrate the community of researchers working on sustainability and global change (importantly not just climate change), and to focus more on how to solve rather than only document problem. There are lots of resilience researchers at the conference. A partial list of Stockholm Resilience Centre participation is on our website.
The conference website is live streaming on the web, the conference programme is here, the conference has the tag #planet2012 on twitter, and also has a blog.
The conference organizers are also experimenting with a variety of atypical scientific conference activities (e.g. a debategraph, globally distributed events ) to try and improve innovation and connect the conference to the world. And that is helping me watch a bit of the conference while I am on parental leave in Stockholm.
The 40th anniversary of Limits to Growth is a good time to share Paul Gilding‘s TED talk – the Earth is Full.
Paul Gilding is an australian environmentalist and entrepeneur who recently wrote the Great Disruption, a good book based on how civilization could respond to the coming “great disruption.”