Proposed by Paul Hirsch, Environmental Studies, SUNY-Environmental Science and Forestry

and

Jeff Ramsey, Department of Philosophy and Program in Environmental Science and Policy, Smith College

The proposers of this panel, Paul Hirsch and Jeff Ramsey, attended the "See the Future for the Trees: Why Complexity is Critical to Sustainability Science, Communication, and Action" discussion symposium in Washington, D.C.  We both felt that, rather than acknowledging the complexity of environmental problems, complexity was being addressed largely by proposing analytical and communication strategies that made the problems appear simple.  More broadly than just the discussion panel, the often ill-structured and even unstructured nature of environmental problems is often recognized in the literature.  See, for instance, Steve Rayner's "Wicked Problems: Clumsy Solutions" and Donald Ludwig's "The Era of Management is Over."  If environmental scientists, environmental studies scholars and environmental activitists do not recognize and conceptualize complexity adequately, problem solving is frustrated.  To more fully engage the issue of complexity in environmental studies we propose that complexity be used as a frame for environmental problem definition and solution.  This panel addresses this in the following way:

To adequately engage and be engaged by communities that are affected by complex and multi-faceted environmental problems, those addressing the problems must embrace complexity as an aspect of problem definition and solution seeking. Seeing the problems as amenable to a single mode of analysis invites approaches in which one group or discipline poses questions, establishes research agendas, provides and synthesizes information and generates solutions. Inevitably, key problem dimensions are missed by this approach, and they are likely to be missed in ways that privilege some groups or perspectives and marginalize others. To overcome these limitations, this symposium uses complexity as a frame for problem definition and solution. The goals are 1) to uncover and critically analyze frameworks that read out or ignore complexity; 2) examine the consequences those frameworks have for the participation of others; and 3) propose and investigate alternative analytical frameworks that engage the complexity of the issues.