Tag: Environmental

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Critical Realim in Environmental and Social Sciences

Richards (1990) initiated debate on the possibility of the adoption of a realist perspective toward research in the environmental sciences (specifically geomorphology) by criticising the then emphasis on rationalist (hypothetico-deductive) methods.

The ontology of Critical Realism (CR) theorises that reality exits independently of our knowledge of it or scientific research or theories about it, and that it is structured into three levels:

  1. ‘Real’ natural generating mechanisms
  2. actual events caused by the real mechanisms
  3. empirical observations of the actual events

The separation these three levels impose between real processes and human observation means that whilst reality exists objectively and independently, we cannot observe it. Therefore perception and cognition are important components of our knowledge about the real world. In this way, critical realism sits as an alternative between positivism and relativisms, between the nomothetic and the idiographic, and between determinist and stochastic perspectives (Sayer 2000).

Whilst mechanisms are time and space invariant, actual events are not because they are realisations of the generating mechanisms acting in particular conditions and contingent circumstances. The history and geography of events matters. Identical generating mechanisms will not produce identical events at different locations in space and time.

CR does not claim absolute truth; rather it understands science is a method to progress towards understanding true reality. A critical realist approach does not require falsification or predictive success – theories are proven through consistency of theory and explanation at multiple time and space scales. Thus, it emphasises looking at systems within their context and undertaking multidisciplinary scientific activity.

CR has been suggested as a useful perspective for examining environmental (and social) systems for several reaons;

  1. It addresses systems and their elements in context. This is very important given the complex (multiple interacting elements), ‘open’ (energy and mass able to flow across system boundaries) nature of many environmental systems (von Bertalanffy 1950).
  2. It does not attempt prediction of time and space dependent environmental events and phenomena, the accuracy of which is logically impossible to verify (Oreskes et al. 1994, Oreskes 2000).
  3. It provides a more holistic and multi-disciplinary approach to studying environmental systems. Such a perspective is consistent with other other theoretical frameworks (e.g. General Systems Theory, Gestalt Systems, Hierarchy Theory) and as advocated elsewhere in the environmental sciences (e.g. Naveh 2000).

As Sayer (2000) notes; “Realists expect concrete open systems and discourses to be much more messy an ambiguous than our theories”. That is, realists don’t expect their model results to match empirical observations. Rather, the key is to develop an understanding of the relevant causal structures and mechanisms. Characteristically realist questions are:

  • What does the existence of this object presuppose?
  • Could object/process A exist without object/process B?
  • What is it about the structure of this object which enables it to do certain things?

Many landscapes are characteristic of the open, complex systems Richards and Sayer are referring to. Multiple interacting actors and elements are combined with flows of energy and mass and, when humans are in the landscape, meaning and value into and out of them. At the human scale, observed and located in the real world, landscapes exist in a unique time and place – the non-ergodic nature of the universe makes individual events within them virtually unreproducible (Kauffman 2000). In these systems history and geography are important. Adopting a realist perspective toward modelling of these systems, whilst not offering predictions of their future states, offers an approach to better understand them and inform debate about their future.

References
von Bertalanffy, L. (1950) The Theory of Open Systems in Physics and Biology Science 111 p.23 – 29

Kauffman, S. (2000) Investigations. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Naveh, Z. (2000) What is Holistic Landscape Ecology? A Conceptual Introduction. Landscape and Urban Planning 50 p.7 – 26.

Oreskes, N., Shrader-Frechette, K. and Belitz, K. (1994) Verification, Validation, and Confirmation of Numerical Models in the Earth Sciences, Nature 263 p.641 – 646.

Oreskes, N. (2000) Why Predict? Historical Perspectives on Prediction in Earth Science In Sarewitz, D., Pielke Jr., R.A., and Byerly, Jr., R. (Eds) Prediction: Science, Decision Making and the Future of Nature. Washington D.C.: Island Press.

Richards, K. (1990) ‘Real Geomorphology’. Earth Surface Processes and Landforms 15 p.195 – 197.

Richards, K., Brooks, S., Clifford, N., Harris, T. and Lane, S. (1997) Theory, Measurement and Testing in ‘Real’ Geomorphology and Physical Geography In Stoddart, D. (Ed.) Process and Form in Geomorphology. London: Routledge.

Sayer, A. (2000) Realism and Social Science. London: Sage

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Lester Brown: Plan B 2.0

We went straight from the pub to Lester Brown’s lecture at MSU this evening so I didn’t have a pen or pad of paper with me. I need to jot something down before I forget so why don’t I blog it…

President of the Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown’s talk was based largely around his recently updated book Plan B 2.0. Essentially this was an ecological economics discussion, and many of his examples echoed what I heard at the THEMES summer school earlier this year (did I blog that yet? I should). For example, one clear message was that biofuels (ethanol) is NOT a viable alternative to gasoline for running cars; the resources and area demanded to grow the products to produce the biofuel are to great to ensure it’s economic or ecological viability. A more sustainable alternative presented was wind power; the US could satisfy its annual electricity needs by installing wind turbines in just the three windiest states (I forget which they are). If the number of hybrid electricity/gasoline cars increased this wind power could be efficiently harnessed, stored and used for travel.

Orders for wind turbines globally are so high that waiting lists for production currently stretch to 2008. Why not use the infrastructure already in place in the form of automobile factories to constuct these wind turbines? Unfeasible? Not possible? The example of the shift from automobilie manufacture to arms manufacture in the US during the second World War shows that “where there’s a will there’s a way”.

But do we want have the will? Are we in denial? Why is it so easy to persuade ourselves that there isn’t a problem? Lester Brown suggests that one reason is that we’re not doing our economics properly; we’re hiding many of the costs of the products we produce just as Enron did before their collapse. It may only ‘cost’ $3 to produce a packet of cigarettes (at least that’s the cost they could sell at before tax), but when you factor in ecological and human health into the equation we find that it actually costs $7 in terms of ecosystem and health services.

Echoing Al Gore in his recent movie (still need to blog about that), unless the environmental question is on the lips of the constituent when they meet their political representative, these issues can get swept under the carpet. We need to have the will to make the necessary changes, and we need to let our politicians know we want that change.

And I need to get some sleep so that my presentation tomorrow doesn’t collapse into farce…

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Naveh’s Holistic Landscape Ecology

(or “One of the reasons I’ve ended up doing what I’m doing“)

I don’t know if he was the first to come up with the term, but I first read about holistic landscape ecology in a couple of papers by Prof. Zev Naveh (in 2001 during my third year undergrad course at King’s, ‘Landscape Ecology’ run by Dr. George Perry). Whilst reading today I came across some old notes I made from one of those papers (not terribly critical as you can see!?). Distinguished Professors of a Certain Age are allowed licence to run riot with their accumulated wisdom as you can see. I’m not being facetious – they can write bigger ‘blue skies’, ‘call to arms’ pieces than other (more lowly) academics.

These are the two papers that really got me interested anwyay (as well as my Disertation; finally, as a 3rd year undergrad!?). I think I thought something along the lines of, “there are problems here that we should be thinking about now and this guy is suggesting a paradigm of how we might start approaching them scientifically“. I think they’re one of the reasons I started a MSc (“I can’t stop now I’ve only just found this stuff“), and then later continued onto this ‘ere PhD (“this is interesting – I want to keep going“).

Later I got to these questions;

  • What sort of scientific tools and methods will we need to address problems that we have in our socio-environmental systems now?
  • How do we integrate tools and methods from different scientific disciplines? (i.e. how do we really become ‘inter-disciplinary’?)
  • What sort of science will this be? Normal? Post-Normal? Something else?

It could take a while to answer these – but it doesn’t seem like we’ve got that long. We’ll have to work them out as we go along I think…

Refs

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Bill Cronon: Secular Apocaplyse


I saw this photo a couple of days ago. It’s a comparison of the state of a Chilean glacier in 1928 with 2004. The glacier is retreating by 14 metres per year, attributed by scientists to a warming of the global climate. At that rate of retreat the it could be gone in 25 years. Look at that panorama though – would’t it be great to go and see that before it’s gone? Imagine if you were stood there confronted by this awesome sight, what would you be thinking? Greenpeace have been pretty sneaky though (as they have a right to be). Using those beautiful photos that would stick in my mind; when I arrived at that vista I might just think, “I contributed to this”.

I made a point of going to see Bill Cronon at the Thursday morning plenary “Narrative of climate change” at the RGS conference. He suggested that narratives of climate change have been used as both prediction AND (secular) prophecy. This idea of a secular prophecy comes from recent intonations of Nature as a secular proxy for God. Prophecies are often told as stories of retribution that will be incurred if God’s laws were broken. If Nature is a proxy for God then Climate Change is portrayed as a retribution for humans breaking the laws of Nature.

Cronon suggests that Global Narratives are abstract, virtual, systemic, remote, vast, have a diffuse sense of agency, posses no individual characters (i.e. no heros/villains), and are repetitive (so boring). These characteristics make it difficult to emphasise and justify calls for human action to mitigate against the anthropic influence on the climate. Cronon suggests these types of prophetic narrative are ‘unsustainable’ because they do not offer the possibility of individual or group action to reverse or address global climate problems, and therefore are no use politically or socially.

Coronon went on to discuss the micro-cosms (micro narratives) Elizabeth Kolbert uses in her book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” to illustrate the impacts of global change in a localised manner. She uses individual stories that are picked because they are not expected, they are non-abstract and the antithesis of the unsustainable global narratives. He concluded that we need narratives that offer hope, and not those tied to social and political models based on anarchic thought that do not address the systemic issues driving the change itself. This is the political challenge he suggests – to create narratives that not only make us think “I contributed to this” when we see evidence of glacier retreat, but that offer us hope of finding ways to reduce our future impact upon the environment.

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Energy for Free

Defying the laws of thermodynamics? Skeptical, very skeptical…

Some interesting discussions in their forum about potential consequences however. For example, how long before the oil companies put a stop to this nonsense and buy them out to shut them up? Or do they think this is so lacking in credibility they’ll leave it to self-combust…

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Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire

Book Review

I expect I was wheeling my bike through the tourists, guzzling on my choco-milk after a session in the gym. Those book stalls under Waterloo Bridge on the South Bank get me everytime. This one must have jumped at me, out of the titles and authors streaming by, me the fly.

I’m sure it was because I’d read Norman Maclean before – A River Runs Through It, the story of Montana fly-fishing. But the title also intrigued me; Young Men and Fire. It wasn’t until I’d parted with my £3.50 and began reading just recently that I really discovered how intrigued I would become.

Other reviews will offer you a
better description of the story and more evocative excerpts, but I’ll concentrate less on the story and more on the storytelling. The story is the events of 5th August 1949 when 12 USFS smokejumpers died on a fire in Mann Gulch, Montana, and Maclean’s exploits to understand the tragic events years later. The telling is part story, part history,part science.

“Historical questions the storyteller must face, although in a place of his own choosing, but his most immediate question as he faces new material is always, Will anything strange or wonderful happen here? The rights and wrongs come later and likewise the scientific know how.”

The first third of the book is the story of the tragedy. It’s only later that the detective story begins, where we start “… examining how all the little cockeyed things all fit together to explain one big cockeyed thing”. This is where Maclean begins to suggest that not only did the events of the day happen because ‘everything was just right’ but that the route to discovering what happened also depends on everything being ‘just right’. The process of discovering is often as historically contingent as the history.

Maclean describes his ‘ah-ha!’ moment, his ‘eureka!’, when he thought “that’s funny”. On a boat trying to piece the bits of puzzle together in his mind of how and why those men got caught by the fire, he sees a wave on the water ‘going the wrong way’. Or rather, going in a direction he wasn’t expecting because of the winds that come and go.

Wind is the whip of the fire, spurring it on, pointing the way. The winds on the day of the fire all came together at the right time across the unique topography of the gulch to cause a ‘blowup’, an explosion of fire throwing flames tens of metres high and accelerating fire spread to speeds faster than a man can run. Faster even than a man running for his life.

Everything that had to fit that day did fit that day – but the evidence of those conditions may still be observed in the broader patterns of the landscape that are shaped by the prevailing winds. Processes acting at different rates and extents leave their evidence at different rates and extents. Maclean saw those patterns one day by chance and thought “that’s funny”.

So just as the tragedy was dependent upon “everything fitting together”, so too is the path or route to discovery? The patterns are there but they must coincide with our observation for us to understand? Or is this just the way we tell the story of discovery, linearizing the complex web of our thought processes? How can we know what subconscious links are being made when we think “that’s funny”? Or is the most important skill knowing when “that’s funny” really is funny?

The scientist in the storytelling is Richard C. Rothermel, he of mathematical fire modelling fame. Maclean asks for Rothermel’s help to use his mathematical models to plot the race between the young men and fire on the axes of distance and time. Maclean seems reasonably confident with results of the model – the numbers seem to fit with his qualitative understanding of the events. But he’s not totally convinced by the numbers alone. Just as fire requires the triangle of heat, fuel and oxygen, the events and his understanding of them require story, history and science;

“We are beyond where arithmetic can explain what was happening in the piece of nature that had been the head of Mann Gulch … Near the end of many tragedies it seems right that there should be moments when the story stops and looks back for something it left behind and finds it and finds it because of the things it learned, as it were, by having lived through the story.”

Young Men and Fire is quintessentially ‘Direction not Destination’. The route to discovery is important. The modelling is as important as the model. Hindsight is a wonderful thing because of contingency and history. But hindsight is also painful; it allows us to understand the tragedies that befell the young, who could not see it until it was upon them.

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Maclean, N (1992) Young Men and Fire Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 0226500624

Buy at Amazon

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Landscape Influences Human Social Interaction

Scientific American: Landscape Influences Human Social Interaction

Thay know all about this in Spain. One of the presentations at the THEMES Summer School I was at in June was all about the current problems in the Barcelona suburbs as people decide they want nice green lawns like they see on Desperate Housewives.

Domene E., Sauri D., Parés M. 2005, ‘Urbanization and Sustainable
Resource Use: The Case of Garden Watering in the Metropolitan Region of Barcelona’,
Urban Geography, Vol.26, Number 6, pp.520-535.

So maybe it’s “natural” for us to want to live in “unnatural” surroundings…