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Archive for the ‘Academic’ Category
Friday, August 27th, 2010
Next year’s Annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers will be in Seattle. I was considering attending but I think it might be best to let the dust settle after moving back to the UK in January. Many others will be there however, including James Porter, a colleague and friend from PhD times at King’s College, London. On his behalf, here’s the call for papers for a session he’s organising at the meeting. Deadline is 1st October, more details at the bottom.
Call for Papers
The Politics of Expectations: Nature, Culture, and the Production of Space
Association of American Geographers, Annual Meeting, 12-16th April 2011, Seattle.
Session Organisers:
James Porter (King’s College London) and Samuel Randalls (University College London)
Expectations are incredibly powerful things. Whether materialized via climatic models, economic forecasts, or based on the promise of personalised medicines, expectations (and those who engineer them) play a deeply political yet often unsung role in bringing into being a particular kind of future as well as shaping a particular kind of present. Savvy actors seeking to engineer change may decide to write editorials, give press briefings, or try to normalise trust between the communities involved so as to enrol support and resources for an emerging marketplace (and consumer) they have envisioned. Such discursive as well as performative practices pre-emptively shape the social and economic context for developing technologies so that the actors involved not only develop their physical objects but also influence other people’s thinking. Rather than dismiss such efforts as exaggerated or self-serving claims, the “sociology of expectations” (cf. Brown, 2003; Hedgecoe, 2004; Law, 1994) points to the constructive, performative, and even destructive role such expectations have in today’s world where competition for funding, research impact and innovation are so intense. As many geographers researching the ‘commercialization of nature’ have noted (cf. Castree, 2003; Johnson, 2010; Lave et al., 2010; Prudham, 2005), expectations of future natures inhabit contemporary environmental management in a series of subtle and not so subtle ways for all actors.
But how are expectations created, configured, and stabilized? What, and whose, interests shape them, and in turn, whose interests do they shape? And why do some persist whilst others don’t? Such questions speak directly to the ways in which nature (and knowledge of it) is being increasingly commercialized and commodified through its interactions with science and technology. This session builds on controversies such as the climate change emails at UEA, medical trials, carbon forestry and much more to showcase how the “future” is mobilized to govern or proliferate uncertainty and justify particular mechanisms for managing environmental problems. Geographers are uniquely placed to comment on this providing theoretical depth and empirical evidence that sheds light on the commodification of nature whilst also contributing to the socio-technical analyses employed by science and technology studies scholars. We therefore invite papers addressing (though not limited to) the following questions:
- Who constructs expectations and why? How / where do they get enacted (i.e. technological, sociocultural, artefacts, etc.)? And how do they get accepted, institutionalized, or perhaps resisted?
- How are expectations of nature commercialized? To what extent are expectations central to processes of commercialization and does this vary depending on the specific environmental arena? Are there unnatural expectations?
- Do expectations have agency? Can they be negotiated or adapted? If so, what role have geographers played in shaping past perceptions and might hope to play in the future?
- What happens if a set of expectations is not successful? Why didn’t they succeed? And what lessons can we learn?
Abstracts should be sent to both James Porter (james.porter at kcl.ac.uk) and Samuel Randalls (s.randalls at ucl.ac.uk) by Friday 1st October 2010.
For conference information, see: www.aag.org/cs/annualmeeting
This work by James D.A. Millington is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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Sunday, July 11th, 2010
Around the time I wrote this blog about the National Assessment of UK Forestry and Climate Change Steering Group report I was thinking about writing a proposal to the Leverhulme Trust for an Early Career Fellowship. I found out recently that my proposal was successful and so from January 2011 I will be back at King’s College, London!
The Leverhulme Trust makes awards in support of research and education with special emphasis on original and significant research that aims to remove barriers between traditional disciplines. Their Early Career Fellowships are awarded across all disciplines and in 2010 approximately 70 were expected to be awarded to individuals to hold at universities in the UK. Given the emphasis on original, significant and cross-disciplinary research made by the Trust I looked for something that matched my research skills in coupled human and natural systems modelling but that pushed work in that area in a new direction. I thought back to the ideas about model narratives I have previously explored with David O’Sullivan and George Perry (but have not worked on since then) and Bill Cronon’s plenary address at the Royal Geographical Society in 2006 on the need for ‘sustainable narratives’. With that in mind, and given the UK Forestry and Climate change report I had been reading, I decided to make a pitch for a project that would explore how narratives from the use of models could help individuals identify how local actions transcend scales to mitigate global climate change in the context of the anticipated woodland planting that will be ongoing in the UK in future years. It proved to be a successful pitch!
I’m sure I will blog plenty more about the project in the future, so for now I will just leave you with the proposal rationale (below). I’m looking forward to getting to work on this when I get back to London, but before that there’s plenty more things to get done on the Michigan forest landscape ecological-economic modelling.
Model narratives for climate change mitigation
The abstract, vast, and systemic narratives that dominate the issue of global climate change do little to illustrate to individuals and groups how their actions might contribute to mitigate the effects of what is often framed as a global problem (Cronon 2006). Ways to improve the ability of individuals and groups to identify how their local actions transcend scales to mitigate global climate change are needed. In this research I will explore how narratives produced from computer simulation models that represent individuals’ actions can provide people with insights into how their behaviour affects system properties at a larger scale. Although the narrative properties of simulation models have been highlighted (O’Sullivan 2004), the use of models to develop localised narratives of climate change which emphasise individual agency has yet to be explored. Confronting individuals with these narratives will also help researchers reveal important underlying, and possibly implicitly held, assumptions that influence choices and behaviour.
This research will address the following general questions:
- How can computer simulation models be better used to reveal to individuals how their local actions can contribute to global environmental issues such as Climate Change Mitigation (CCM)?
- What are the narrative properties of simulation models and how can they be exploited to help individuals find meaning about their actions as they relate to global climate change?
- By using simulation tools to spur reflection what can we learn about the factors influencing individuals’ choices and behaviour with regards CCM options?
Answering these questions will require a uniquely interdisciplinary research approach that spans the physical sciences, social sciences and humanities. Such ground-breaking, boundary-crossing work is necessary if we are to re-connect the physical sciences with the publics they intend to benefit and find solutions to large-scale and pressing environmental problems. For example, one of the key findings from a recent report by the National Assessment of UK Forestry and Climate Change Steering Group (Read et al. 2009) was that “[t]he extent to which the potential for additional [greenhouse gas] emissions abatement through tree planting is realized … will be determined in large part by economic forces and society’s attitudes rather than by scientific and technical issues alone” (p.xvii). The report also argued the need “to better understand and consider the role of different influences affecting choices and behaviour. Without the appropriate emotional, cultural or psychological disposition, information will make no difference.” (p.210). Narratives based on scientific understanding which portray how individuals can make a difference to large-scale, diffuse environmental issues will be important for fostering such a disposition. Simulation models – quantitative representations of reality which provide a means to logically examine how high-level and large-scale patterns are generated by lower-level and smaller-scale processes and events – have the potential to contribute to the construction of these narratives.
This work by James D.A. Millington is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted in Academic, CHANS, Environmental, Forests, Modelling, Social, Sustainability | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 21st, 2010
The 25th US-IALE annual meeting I attended in Athens, Georgia, a couple of weeks ago was notable for the presence of so many important figures in the field of landscape ecology. Several gave interesting plenary talks and the Presidents Symposium had presentations by many of the previous US-IALE Presidents and past editors of the journal Landscape Ecology. I also attended interesting presentations and discussion in the wildfire symposium and elsewhere.
Plenary Presentations
In the introductory plenary Profs. Richard Forman, Gary Barrett and Monica Turner gave their views on the origins and state of the field. Forman described his PhD work, rooted in the theory of island biogeography, in a Pine barrens landscape. He told how he suddenly realised he had been ignoring the context of his ‘islands’ and decided to look at how he might consider his study area as a landscape of patches arranged in a mosaic. He also talked about the ‘ecumenicalism of landscape ecology’ and how it is an important field for the development of interdisciplinary human-environment research.
Barrett spoke about the importance of the Allerton Park meeting in 1983 and the relationship of landscape ecology to the LTER network. He highlighted that landscape ecology is a ‘meeting point of [ecological] theory and application’ and the creation of the journal Ecological Applications (but also noted the creation 27 years earlier of the Journal of Applied Ecology).
Turner, the organiser of the very first US-IALE meeting, pointed out how similar current research themes are to those of 25 years ago. Questions still of relevance to landscape ecology include those about the relative importance of different drivers of ecological patterns and the importance of heterogeneity for driving ecosystem processes and species interactions.
Of the other plenary presentations, I found Joe Tainter’s presentation very interesting. His ‘big’ talk discussed the rise and fall of civilisations from the perspective of social and cultural complexity and Energy Return On Energy Investment (EROEI). He highlighted that sustaining complex societies requires a high EROEI and used the Roman and Byzantine Empires as examples to illustrate this. He stressed that sustainability is an active condition of problem solving – the capacity for which must itself be sustained – and questioned whether renewable energy resources (such as solar and wind power) have sufficient EROEI to allow us to do that in the future.
Presidents Symposium
In the Presidents Symposium, Jianguo Wu provided a pluralistic and hierarchical perspective of landscape ecology. Wu argued that the goal of landscape ecology should not just be about reporting on landscapes but about changing them. He also argued that the human landscape is the ‘most operational spatial scale for sustainability science’. He highlighted the formation of two new sections in the landscape ecology journal; ‘Landscape Ecology in Review’ and ‘Landscape Ecology in Practice’.
These issues were taken up later in the same session by Paul Opdam who discussed the transfer of pattern-process knowledge to society (as he wrote about with Joan Iverson Nassauer). He argued that there are three ways to do this; i) by asking questions about how our scientific knowledge is used in practice by planners, managers and stakeholders, ii) developing methods by testing them in practice, and iii) co-producing knowledge with non-scientists. He also argue that practical application of knowledge is the key methods for the ‘learning scientist’ and that research along these lines would be welcomed in the Landscape Ecology in Practice section of the journal.
Wildfire Symposium
The wildfires session contained some familiar faces. Rachel Loehman and Maureen Kennedy presented progress on their wildfire-related models and Don McKenzie outlined his efforts to take much of the recent work towards a coherent ‘theory of landscape fire’. The key elements to this theory he suggested would be energy, regulation (management) and scaling. In particular he emphasizes that we need to work hard on understanding the importance of landscape memory and the legacy of previous wildfire events on future ones.
Particularly encouraging to see was the work by Paul Hessburg and Nick Povak on self-organization and wildfire scaling in California (using data for 1950-2007). They argued that broken-stick regression is needed to represented their wildfire frequency-area data, as scale free power-law behaviour is only present across about two orders of magnitude in the medium size fires. At the lower end of the frequency-area distribution (smaller, frequent fires) they suggested bottom-up controls on the wildfire regime due to insects, stand dynamics and topography, and at the upper end of the frequency-area distribution (larger, infrequent fires) they suggested top-down controls on the wildfire regime due to climate and geology. This work examining the drivers of different wildfire regime scaling statistics certainly seems to be the way to go.
Other Discussions
My presentation seemed to go down well and I got some interesting questions. Frederik Doyon of Université du Québec en Outaouai was particularly interested in our work in the mixed hardwood-conifer forests of Michigan. Also in my session, Maria Santos presented her work comparing culture and ecology between the Mediterranean oak woodland landscapes of Portugal and California. We discussed some of the links between her work and my PhD research.
All round it was a good meeting with some interesting discussions in the various plenary session, symposia and in the pub. Here’s to another 25 years of US-IALE.
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Posted in Academic, Ecological, Sustainability, Wildfire | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 30th, 2010
Next week is the Twenty-fifth Anniversary Symposium of the US chapter of the International Association of Landscape Ecology (US-IALE). I’ll be in attendance in Athens, Georgia and am currently working on my presentation, entitled Ecological-economic modeling for sustainable forest management (scheduled for Thursday 8th, 2.20pm in room T/U). In the context of our larger modelling project I’ll present work we’ve published, stuff we’re still working on, and the initial results from putting it all together.
Several symposia have been organised and I plan to be at those that consider landscape ecology and wildfires, bioenergy and land-use change, and climate change and landscape connectivity. Particularly interesting should be Don McKenzie’s presentations on ecosystem energetics and scaling laws in the wildfire symposium and Paul Opdam’s presentations on Natura 2000 and the role of landscape ecology in the climate change symposium. Two of the plenary addresses I’d like to catch are Collapse and Sustainability: Lessons from History (Joseph A Tainter) and Linking Renaissance Ecologists with Citizen Scientists to Advanced Scientific Research and Literacy (Carol Brewer).
As usual CSIS has a strong presence at US-IALE this year with seven presentations, including the insights of Jack Liu and Wu Yang into the challenges and opportunities for landscape ecology and conservation in coupled human natural research, the analysis by Andres Vina and Xiaodong Chen of the potential conservation benefits that might be offset by natural disasters, Mao-Ning Tuanmu’s work on Giant Panda habitat and the work by Pete Esselman and Dana Infante on the National Assessment of the Status of Fish Habitat. The full list of CSIS presentations is below.
It’s shaping up to be a good couple of days! I’ll try to tweet and blog some thoughts as they arise during the conference and maybe reflect on things afterwards also.
CSIS Presentations at US-IALE 2010
6th April
Are conservation benefits offset by natural disasters? — The case of the May 12, 2008 Wenchuan Earthquake. Andrés Viña, Xiaodong Chen, Wei Liu, et al.
Coupling human and natural systems: Challenges and opportunities for landscape ecologists. Jianguo Liu
The spatial framework and results of the initial National Assessment of the Status of Fish Habitat. Peter C Esselman, Dana M Infante, et al.
7th April
Effects of human-environment relationships on the spatiotemporal dynamics of giant panda habitat. Mao-Ning Tuanmu, Wei Liu, Andrés Viña, et al.
8th April
Ecological-economic modeling for sustainable forest management. James D A Millington, Michael B Walters, Megan S Matonis, et al.
Mechanisms for effective conservation in coupled human-natural systems. Wu Yang, Wei Liu, Mao-Ning Tuanmu, et al.
Patterns and drivers of reforestation: A case study in the Qinling Mountains, China. Yu Li, Andrés Viña, Jianguo Liu
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Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010
I hoped it would be quicker than previous papers, but the review process of the ‘Mind, the Gap’ manuscript I worked on with John Wainwright hasn’t been particularly fast. I guess that’s just how it goes with special issues. I’ll discuss some of the topics we touch on in the paper in a future post. For now here’s the abstract – look out for the full paper on the ESPL website in the next couple of months.
Mind, the Gap in Landscape-Evolution Modelling
John Wainwright and James Millington
Earth Surface Processes and Landforms (Forthcoming)
Abstract
Despite an increasing recognition that human activity is currently the dominant force modifying geomorphic landscapes, and that this activity has been increasing through the Holocene, there has been little integrative work to evaluate human interactions with geomorphic processes. We argue that agent-based models (ABMs) are a useful tool for overcoming the limitations of existing, highly empirical approaches. In particular, they allow the integration of decision-making into process-based models and provide a heuristic way of evaluating the compatibility of knowledge gained from a wide range of sources, both within and outwith the discipline of geomorphology. The application of ABMs to geomorphology is demonstrated from two different perspectives. The SPASIMv1 (Special Protection Area SIMulator version 1) model is used to evaluate the potential impacts of land-use change – particularly in relation to wildfire and subsequent soil conditions – over a decadal timescale from the present day to the mid-21st century. It focuses on the representation of farmers with traditional versus commercial perspectives in central Spain, and highlights the importance of land-tenure structure and historical contingencies of individuals’ decision making. CYBEROSION, on the other hand, considers changes in erosion and deposition over the scale of at least centuries. It represents both wild and domesticated animals and humans as model agents, and investigates the interactions of them in the context of early agriculturalists in southern France in a prehistoric context. We evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the ABM approach, and consider some of the major challenges. These challenges include potential process scale mis-matches, differences in perspective between investigators from different disciplines, and issues regarding model evaluation, analysis and interpretation. If the challenges can be overcome, this fully-integrated approach will provide geomorphology a means to conceptualize soundly the study of human-landscape interactions.
This work by James D.A. Millington is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Posted in Academic, Landscapes, Modelling, Publications | 1 Comment »
Sunday, October 18th, 2009
Those interested in landscape modelling might want to be aware of the deadlines for LANDMOD 2010 and US-IALE 2010.
LANDMOD 2010
LANDMOD 2010 will be held at SupAgro in Montpellier, France, February 3rd to 5th 2010.
The 2010 international conference on integrative landscape modelling will gather leading scientists in each of the main disciplines dealing with ecosystems and landscape simulation and management, complex dynamic modelling and assessment of vulnerability, resilience and adaptation of agro- and eco-systems under human influence.
The main objectives of the conference are:
- To discuss the objectives, priorities and expectations when modelling the functioning of landscapes;
- To share experience about landscape modelling and to identify major existing conceptual and technological gaps;
- To release a ‘state of the art’ about landscape modelling and simulation;
- To start building an international network on integrative ecosystems and landscape modelling.
Deadlines
October 31st : deadline for submission of extended abstracts
November, 30th: notification of acceptation of talks and posters
December, 31st : deadline for registration and payment
Website: http://www.umr-lisah.fr/rtra-projects/landmod2010
US-IALE 2010
The 25th annual meeting of US-IALE (US Regional Association, International Association for Landscape Ecology) will be held in Athens, Georgia, from April 5-9, 2010. One of the unique aspects of the 25th annual meeting is to reflect upon progress made in the past 25 years and to chart an even more productive course for landscape ecology over the next quarter century. The meeting will include special sessions at which past presidents of US-IALE and other leading landscape ecologists will provide retrospectives on and perspectives for landscape ecology.
Approximately 20 NASA-MSU Awards and 10 CHANS Fellowships will be available to support students, postdoctoral associates, junior faculty and other junior researchers to attend the meeting.
Deadlines
October 15, 2009: Proposals for symposia and workshops
December 15, 2009: Abstracts for oral and poster presentations
December 15, 2009: NASA-MSU Awards Applications
December 15, 2009: CHANS Fellowship Applications
Website: http://www.usiale.org/athens2010/
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Saturday, September 12th, 2009
I have a new paper to add to my collection of favourites. Hidden in the somewhat obscure Journal of Critical Realism it touches on several issues that I often find myself thinking about and studying: Interdisciplinarity, Ecology and Scientific Theory.
Karl Høyer and Petter Naess also have plenty to say about sustainability, planning and decision-making and, although they use the case of sustainable urban development, much of what they discuss is relevant to broader issues in the study of coupled human and natural systems. Their perspective resonates with my own.
For example, they outline some of the differences between studying open and closed systems (interestingly with reference to some Nordic writers I have not previously encountered);
… The principle of repetitiveness is crucial in these kinds of [reductionist] science [e.g. atomic physics, chemistry] and their related technologies. But such repetitiveness only takes place in closed systems manipulated by humans, as in laboratories. We will never find it in nature, as strongly emphasised by both Kvaløy and Hägerstrand within the Nordic school. In nature there are always open, complex systems, continuously changing with time. This understanding is in line with key tenets of critical realism. Many of our most serious ecological problems can be explained this way: technologies, their products and substances, developed and tested in closed systems under artificial conditions that generate the illusion of generalised repetitiveness, are released in the real nature of open systems and non-existing repetitiveness. We are always taken by surprise when we experience new, unexpected ecological effects. But this ought not to be surprising at all; under these conditions such effects will necessarily turn up all the time.
…
At the same time, developing strategies for a sustainable future relies heavily on the possibility of predicting the consequences of alternative solutions with at least some degree of precision. Arguably, a number of socio-technical systems, such as the spatial structures of cities and their relationships with social life and human activities, make up ‘pseudo-closed’ systems where the scope for prediction of outcomes of a proposed intervention is clearly lower than in the closed systems of the experiments of the natural sciences, but nevertheless higher than in entirely open systems. Anticipation of consequences, which is indispensable in planning, is therefore possible and recommendable, although fallible.
The main point of their paper, however, is the important role critical realism [see also] might play as a platform for interdisciplinary research. Although Høyer and Naess do highlight some of the more political reasons for scientific and academic disciplinarity, their main points are philosophical;
…the barriers to interdisciplinary integration may also result from metatheoretical positions explicitly excluding certain types of knowledge and methods necessary for a multidimensional analysis of sustainability policies, or even rejecting the existence of some types of impacts and/or the entities causing these impacts.
These philosophical (metatheoretical) barriers include staunchly positivist and strong social constructionist perspectives;
According to a positivist view, social science research should emulate research within the natural sciences as much as possible. Knowledge based on research where the observations do not lend themselves to mathematical measurement and analysis will then typically be considered less valid and perhaps be dismissed as merely subjective opinions. Needless to say, such a view hardly encourages natural scientists to integrate knowledge based on qualitative social research or from the humanities. Researchers adhering to an empiricist/naive realist metatheory will also tend to dismiss claims of causality in cases where the causal powers do not manifest themselves in strong and regular patterns of events – although such strong regularities are rare in social life.
On the other hand, a strong social constructionist position implies a collapsing of the existence of social objects to the participating agents’ conception or understanding of these objects. …strong social constructionism would typically limit the scope to the cultural processes through which certain phenomena come to be perceived as environmental problems, and neglecting the underlying structural mechanisms creating these phenomena as well as their impacts on the physical environment. At best, strong social constructionism is ambivalent as to whether we can know anything at all about reality beyond the discourses. Such ‘empty realism’, typical of dominant strands of postmodern thought, implies that truth is being completely relativised to discourses on the surface of reality, with the result that one must a priori give up saying anything about what exists outside these discourses. At worst, strong social constructionism may pave the way for the purely idealist view that there is no such reality.
At opposite ends of the positivist-relativist spectrum neither of these perspectives seem to be the most useful for interdisciplinary research. Something that sits between these two extremes – critical realism – might be more useful [I can't do this next section justice in an abridged version - and this is the main point of the article - so here it is in its entirety];
The above-mentioned examples of shortcomings of reductionist metatheories do not imply that research based on these paradigms is necessarily without value. However, reductionist paradigms tend to function as straitjackets preventing researchers from taking into consideration phenomena and factors of influence not compatible with or ignored in their metatheory. In practice, researchers have often deviated from the limitations prescribed by their espoused metatheoretical positions. Usually, such deviations have tended to improve research rather than the opposite.
However, for interdisciplinary research, there is an obvious need for a more inclusive metatheoretical platform. According to Bhaskar and Danermark, critical realism provides such a platform, as it is ontologically characterised doubly by inclusiveness greater than competing metatheories: it is maximally inclusive in terms of allowing causal powers at different levels of reality to be empirically investigated; and it is maximally inclusive in terms of accommodating insights of other meta-theoretical positions while avoiding their drawbacks.
Arguably, many of the ecologists and ecophilosophers referred to earlier in this paper have implicitly based their work on the same basic assumptions as critical realism. Some critical realist thinkers have also addressed ecological and environmental problems explicitly. Notably, Ted Benton and Peter Dickens have de
monstrated the need for an epistemology that recognises social mediation of knowledge but also the social and material dimensions of environmental problems, and how the absence of an interdisciplinary perspective hinders essential understanding of nature/society relationships.
According to critical realism, concrete things or events in open systems must normally be explained ‘in terms of a multiplicity of mechanisms, potentially of radically different kinds (and potentially demarcating the site of distinct disciplines) corresponding to different levels or aspects of reality’. As can be seen from the above, the objects involved in explanations of the (un)sustainability of urban development belong partially to the natural sciences, partially to the social sciences, and are partially of a normative or ethical character. They also belong to different geographical or organisational scales. Thus, similar to (and arguably to an even higher extent than) what Bhaskar and Danermark state about disability research, events and processes influencing the sustainability of urban development must be understood in terms of physical, biological, socioeconomic, cultural and normative kinds of mechanisms, types of contexts and characteristic effects.
According to Bhaskar, social life must be seen in the depiction of human nature as ‘four-planar social being’, which implies that every social event must be understood in terms of four dialectically interdependent planes: (a) material transactions with nature, (b) social interaction between agents, (c) social structure proper, and (d) the stratification of embodied personalities of agents. All these categories of impacts should be addressed in research on sustainable urban development. Impacts along the first dimension, category (a), typically include consequences of urban development for the physical environment. Consequences in terms of changing location of activities and changing travel- ling patterns are examples of impacts within category (b). But this category also includes the social interaction between agents leading to changes in, among others, the spatial and social structures of cities. Relevant mechanisms at the level of social structure proper (category [c]) might include, for exam- ple, impacts of housing market conditions on residential development projects and consequences of residential development projects for the overall urban structure. The stratified personalities of agents (category [d]) include both influences of agents on society and the physical environment and influences of society and the physical environment on the agents. The latter sub-category includes physical impacts of urban development, such as unwholesome noise and air pollution, but also impacts of the way urban planning and decision- making processes are organised, for example, in terms of effects on people’s self esteem, values, opportunities for personal growth and their motivation for participating in democratic processes. The influence of discourses on the population’s beliefs about the changes necessary to bring about sustainable development and the conditions for implementing such changes also belongs to this sub-category. The sub-category of influences of agents on society and the physical environment includes the exercise of power by individual and corporate agents, their participation in political debates, their contribution to knowledge, and their practices in terms of, for example, type and location of residence, mobility, lifestyles more generally, and so on.
Regarding issues of urban sustainability, the categories (a)–(d) are highly interrelated. If this is the case, we are facing what Bhaskar and Danermark characterise as a ‘laminated’ system, in which case explanations involving mechanisms at several or all of these levels could be termed ‘laminated expla- nations’. In such situations, monodisciplinary empirical studies taking into consideration only those factors of influence ‘belonging’ to the researcher’s own discipline run a serious risk of misinterpreting these influences. Examples of such misinterpretations are analyses where increasing car travel in cities is explained purely in terms of prevailing attitudes and lifestyles, addressing neither political-economic structures contributing to consumerism and car-oriented attitudes, nor spatial-structural patterns creating increased needs for individual motorised travel.
Moreover, the different strata of reality and their related mechanisms (that is, physical, biological, socio-economic, cultural and normative kinds of mechanisms) involved in urban development cannot be understood only in terms of categories (a)–(d) above. They are also situated in macroscopic (or overlying) and less macroscopic (or underlying) kinds of structures or mechanisms. For research into sustainable urban development issues, such scale-awareness is crucial. Much of the disagreement between proponents of the ‘green’ and the ‘compact’ models of environmentally sustainable urban development can probably be attributed to their focus on problems and challenges at different geographical scales: whereas the ‘compact city’ model has focused in particular on the impacts of urban development on the surrounding environment (ranging from the nearest countryside to the global level), proponents of the ‘green city’ model have mainly been concerned about the environment within the city itself. A truly environmentally sustainable urban development would require an integration of elements both from the former ‘city within the ecology’ and the latter ‘ecology within the city’ approaches. Similarly, analyses of social aspects of sustainable development need to include both local and global effects, and combine an understanding of practices within particular groups with an analysis of how different measures and traits of development affect the distribution of benefits and burdens across groups.
Acknowledging that reality consists of different strata, that multiple causes are usually influencing events and situations in open systems, and that a pluralism of research methods is recommended as long as they take the ontological status of the research object into due consideration, critical realism appears to be particularly well suited as a metatheoretical platform for interdisciplinary research. This applies not least to research into urban sustainability issues where, as has been illustrated above, other metatheoretical positions tend to limit the scope of analysis in such a way that sub-optimal policies within a particular aspect of sustainability are encouraged at the cost of policies addressing the challenges of sustainable urban development in a comprehensive way.
In conclusion; critical realism can play a very important role as an underlabourer of interdisciplinarity, with its maximal inclusiveness both in terms of allowing causal powers at different levels of reality to be empirically investigated and in terms of accommodating insights of other meta-theoretical positions while avoiding their drawbacks
I’m going to have to spend some time thinking about this but there seems to be plenty to get ones teeth into here with regards the study of coupled human and natural systems and the use of agent-based modelling approaches. For example, agent-based modelling seems to offer a means to represent Bhaskar‘s four planes but there are plenty of questions about how to do this appropriately. I also need to think more carefully about how these four planes are manifested in the systems I study. Generally however, it seems that critical realism offers a useful foundation from which to build interdisciplinary studies of the interaction of humans and their environment for the exploration of potential pathways to ensure sustainable landscapes.
Reference
Høyer, K.G and Naess, P. 2008 Interdisciplinarity, ecology and s
cientific theory: The case of sustainable urban development Journal of Critical Realism 7(2) 179-207 doi: 10.1558/jocr.v7i2.179
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Posted in Academic, CHANS, Ecological, Philosophical, Sustainability | 2 Comments »
Saturday, September 5th, 2009
The presentation I made at ESA 2009 is now online at Nature Precedings, a platform for sharing new and preliminary findings globally. The presentation itself is embedded below, or visit Nature Precedings for more details (including the abstract).
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Tuesday, September 1st, 2009
Details of plans for CHANS-Net activities at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers (AAG) in Washington, D.C. have been posted.
Presentations and a workshop are expected to synthesise across CHANS research projects, potentially leading to publication. The CHANS-Net website also indicates there are opportunities for junior scholars to receive financial assistance.
Deadline for abstract submission to the AAG meeting is 28th October 2009 (submissions to the CHANS events are due by 20th October).
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Wednesday, August 19th, 2009
Experimentation can be tricky for landscape ecologists, especially if we’re considering landscapes at the human scale (it’s a bit easier at the beetle scale [pdf]). The logistic constraints of studies at large spatial and temporal scales mean we frequently use models and modelling. However, every-now-and-then certain events afford us the opportunity for a ‘natural experiment’ – situations that are not controlled by an experimenter but approximate controlled experimental conditions. In her opening plenary at ESA 2009, Prof. Monica Turner used one such natural experiment – the Yellowstone fires of 1988 – as an exemple to discuss how disturbance affects landscape dynamics and ecosystem processes. Although this is a great example for landscapes with limited human activity, it is not such a useful tool for considering human-dominated landscapes.
 Landsat satellite image of the Yellowstone fires on 23rd August 1988. The image is approximately 50 miles (80 km) across and shows light from the green, short-wave infrared, and near infrared bands of the spectrum. The fires glow bright pink, recently burned land is dark red, and smoke is light blue.
Before getting into the details, one of the first things Turner did was to define disturbance (drawing largely on Pickett and White) and an idea that she views as critical to landscape dynamics – the shifting mosaic steady state. The shifting mosaic steady state, as described by Borman and Likens, is a product of the processes of vegetation disturbance and succession. Although these processes mean that vegetation will change through time at individual points, when measured over a larger area the proportion of the landscape in each seral stage (of succession) remains relatively constant. Consequently, over large areas and long time intervals the landscape can be considered to be in equilibrium (but this isn’t necessarily always the case).
Other key ideas Turner emphasised were:
- disturbance is a key component in ecosystems across many scales,
- disturbance regimes are changing rapidly but the effects are difficult to predict,
- disturbance and heterogeneity have reciprocal effects.
Landscape Dynamics
In contrast to what you might expect, very large disturbances generally increase landscape heterogeneity. For example, the 1988 Yellowstone fires burned 1/3 of the park in all forest types and ages but burn severity varied spatially. Turner highlighted that environmental thresholds may determine whether landscape pattern constrains fire spread. For instance, in very dry years spatial pattern will likely have less effect than years where rainfall has produced greater spatial variation in fuel conditions.
Turner and her colleagues have also found that burn severity, patch size and geographic location affected early succession in the years following the Yellowstone fires. Lodgepole pine regeneration varied enormously across the burned landscape because of the spatial variation in serotiny and burn severity. Subsequently, the size, shape and configuration of disturbed patches influenced succession trajectories. Turner also highlighted that succession is generally more predictable in small patches, when disturbances are infrequent, and when disturbance severity/intensity is low (and vice versa).
Ecosystem Processes
One of the questions landscape ecologists have been using the Yellowstone fires to examine is; do post-disturbance patterns affect ecosystem processes? Net Primary Production varies a lot with tree density (e.g., density of lodgepole pine following fire) and the post-fire patterns of tree density have produced a landscape mosaic of ecosystem process rates. For example, Kashian and colleagues found spatial legacy effects of the post-fire mosaic can last for centuries. Furthermore, this spatial variation in ecosystem process rates is greater than temporal variation and the fires produced a mosaic of different functional trajectories (a ‘functional mosaic’).
Another point Turner was keen to make was that the Yellowstone fires were not the result of fire suppression as is commonly attributed, but instead they were driven by climate (particularly hot and dry conditions). Later in the presentation she used the ecosystem process examples above to argue that the Yellowstone fires were not an ecological disaster and that the ecosystem has proven resilient. However, she stressed that fire will continue to be an important disturbance and that the fire regimes is likely to change rapidly if climate does. For example, Turner highlighted the study by Westerling and colleagues that showed that increased fire activity in the western US in recent decades is a result of increasing temperatures, earlier spring snowmelt and subsequent increases in vegetation moisture deficit. If climate change projections of warming are realised, by 2100 the climate of 1988 (which was extreme) could become the norm and events like the Yellowstone fires will be much more frequent. For example, using a spatio-temporal state-space diagram (seebelow), Turner and colleagues [pdf] found that fires in Yellowstone during the 15 years previous to 1988 had relatively little impact on landscape dynamics (shown in green in the lower left of the diagram). However, the extent of the 1988 fires pushed the disturbance regime up into an area of the state-space characteristic of the shifting-mosaic steady state (shown in red).
 The spatio-temporal state-space diagram used by Turner and colleagues [pdf] to describe potential landscape disturbance dynamics. On the horizontal x-axis is the ratio of disturbance extent (area) to the landscape area and on the vertical y-axis is the ratio of disturbance interval (time) to recovery interval. Landscapes in the upper left of the diagram will appear to an observer as relatively constant in time with little disturbance impact; those in the lower right are dominated by disturbance.
Remaining Questions
Turner finished her presentation by highlighting what she sees as
key questions for studying disturbance and landscape dynamics in a changing world:
- How will disturbance interact with one another?
- How will disturbances interact with other drivers?
- What conditions will cause qualitative shifts in disturbance regimes (like that shown in the diagram above)?
It was comforting to hear that a leader in the field identified these points as important as many of them relate closely to what I’ve been working on thinking about. For example, the integrated ecological-economic forest modelling project I’m working on here in Michigan explicitly considers the interaction of two disturbances – human timber harvest and deer herbivory. The work I initiated during my PhD relates to the second question – how does human land use/cover change interact and drive changes in the wildfire regime of a landscape in central Spain? And recently, I reviewed a new book on threshold modelling in ecological restoration for Landscape Ecology.
Much of Turner’s presentation and discussion applied to American landscapes with limited human activity. This not surprising of course, given the context of the presentation (at the Ecological Society of America) and the location of her study areas (all in the USA). But although natural experiments like the 1988 Yellowstone fires may be useful as an analogue to understand processes and dynamics in similar systems, it is also interesting (and important) to think about how other systems potentially differ from this examplar. For example, the Yellowstone fires natural experiment has little to say about disturbance in human-dominated landscapes that are prevalent in many areas of the world (such as the Mediterranean Basin). In the future, research and models of landscape succession-disturbance dynamics will need to focus as much attention on human drivers of change as environmental drivers.
Turner concluded her plenary by emphasising that ecologists must increase their efforts to understand and anticipate the effects of changing disturbance regimes. This is important not only in the context of climate as driver of change, but also because of the influence of a growing human population.
This work by James D.A. Millington is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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