2015 Conference

Workshop

Workshop Title:  The Climate Web - A 2.0 Tool for Preparing Students to Play “Climate Chess”

Workshop Length: ½ day

Proposed Theme and Justification:  Climate change forecasts suggest we may see 4^oC of average global temperature change and more than 6 feet of sea level rise this century, making it increasingly obvious that we have failed to address the problem. Hundreds of courses on climate change are now being taught around the country, but what is not being taught (because the tools do not exist to teach it) is “Winning at Climate Chess.” Climate Chess is the ultimate inter-disciplinary game, involving a multitude of players, pieces, disciplines, and objectives. By not teaching Climate Chess we are failing to provide students with the knowledge and skills they need to play the most important game on Earth once they enter the real world.

Goals and Learning Outcomes: Knowledge management (KM) is an increasingly important analytical and decision-making support tool, especially in today’s world of information overload. The two maxims “There's not an idea in our heads that has not been worn shiny by someone else's brains," and “If only we knew what we know” help illustrate why KM can be so useful in understanding and addressing “wicked” societal problems, and in supporting increasingly complex and inter-related decision-making. The workshop will illustrate how these maxims relate to climate change, and how the Climate Web can help address the two maxims to the benefit of students.

Teaching Methods: The workshop will be highly interactive.  The first half of the workshop will use the Climate Web to describe and introduce the game of Climate Chess, including:

• Who are some of the key players on each side of the board?
• What do many of the chess pieces in play look like?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of key pieces?
• Are there pieces not yet on the board that could be?
• Who’s working on advancing the positioning of which pieces?
• Who’s deployed the most successful strategies on the game board?
• Where on the board are real breakthroughs possible, if adequately supported?

The second half of the workshop will allow Participants to explore the Climate Web, either virtually through the workshop leader’s computer, or through their own direct connection to the Climate Web. The workshop will help explore how the Climate Web generates actionable decision-making knowledge, and helps get “the right information to the right person on the chess board at the right time.” With a knowledgebase encompassing some 10,000 documents and 10,000 URLs, the Climate Web tracks many pieces on the Climate Chess game board, from mitigation and adaptation topics to the psychology of climate risk perception and best practices in climate risk communication.  

Confirmed Leaders: Dr. Mark C. Trexler (www.climatographer.com) has been in the climate trenches for more than 25 years as an analyst, a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and as a management consultant.  In the last five years he has focused on “risk communication” as the biggest single barrier to climate progress, and has built the Climate Web as a knowledge management tool that helps overcome the risk communication barrier (among other barriers).

Brief Description:  Climate change forecasts suggest we may see 4^oC of average global temperature change and more than 6 feet of sea level rise this century, making it increasingly obvious that we have failed to address the problem. Hundreds of courses on climate change are now being taught around the country, but what is not being taught (because the tools do not exist to teach it) is “Winning at Climate Chess.” As a result we are not providing students with the knowledge and skills they need to play the most important game on Earth. Climate Chess is the ultimate inter-disciplinary game, involving a multitude of players, pieces, disciplines, and objectives, and the Climate Web is a path-breaking knowledge management tool for teaching Climate Chess. The workshop will provide participants with a hands-on introduction to The Climate Web, and explore how it can be used to prepare students to reverse 25 years of frustrating climate change mitigation efforts.

Workshop

Length: half-day

Theme:

Environmental Education Across the Disciplines

On many campuses, environmental education is confined to courses that are housed in specific departments such as geography or biology. This can be limiting in a variety of ways. First, it can mean that students learn about environmental issues from the lens of only one discipline. Second, if students take several environmental courses, there can be significant redundancy. Third, students working towards specific degree requirements in a different field may not have the opportunity to take environmental courses as electives. Additionally, it is important that engagement in environmental issues occur across a campus and involve faculty, staff, students and community members. 

Presenters from Capilano University propose a model in which environmental engagement is offered to the entire campus community not just through course work but via large campus initiatives such as a lecture series, student intern leadership and projects, workshop and service (community) learning. Specific courses in environment education from a variety of departments and Faculties are offered throughout the academic year and support students in learning the foundation of environmental issues. The model is called CapUWorks – an umbrella organization within which EarthWorks, PowerWorks, FoodWorks and PatchWorks explore and support campus engagement in environmental, energy, and food issues related to curriculum and campus issues as well as our community garden. A student intern leads each of these groups and works in concert with Facilities, our Sustainability Assistant and several faculty members. In this enriched education approach, students, faculty, staff and community members are a part of a larger fabric of learning and environmental education becomes infused throughout the entire campus, mirroring the complexity of environmental issues and the necessary transdisciplinary approach required for solutions.

An outline of goals and learning outcomes, and, if appropriate, plans for communication of results

• Provide a hands-on experience using our stakeholder framework to draft a template for their own campus or organization.
• Participants will know how to use the stakeholder analysis model and how we built the CapUWorks student/organizer team.
• Participants will leave the workshop with one initiative that they could implement at their campus.
• Organizers will create a brainstorming list of activities and resources and form this into groups that all participants will be able to access via a resource page.

An outline of the progression of topics and types of learning activities or teaching methods

• Short presentation of Capilano University’s CapUWorks and EarthWorks model.
• People will be organized in groups, ideally based on where they work/attend. It hoped that this workshop would be attended by interested faculty, staff and students who are participating in the conference.
• Group discussion will highlight existing strengths and barriers to environmental education at their campus.
• Participants will re-create the stakeholder model based on their own campus.
• Who would be the connecting people representing various levels in this model?
• Participants will brainstorm various types of environmental activities/events or sustainability changes that they would like to see at their campus.
• Selecting one of these, how could they envision planning this using the stakeholder model?
• Groups will share their ideas and discuss strengths and gaps.

A list of confirmed leaders and a sentence or two about their qualifications and proposed role in the workshop.

Cheryl Schreader (M.Sc. Geography)

(604) 983 - 3224 xt 2477 (office)

(604) 317 - 5230 (cell)

cschread@capilanou.ca

Cheryl has taught in the Dept. of Geography at Capilano University for 18 years. While she teaches a variety of physical geography courses, her focus for the past 10 years has been on environmental geography and environmental education in general. Cheryl is also currently co-teaching an environmental biology course. She is a founding member of EarthWorks at Capilano University and is the faculty facilitator of Capilano’s campus waste audit – one of its largest, interdisciplinary environmental education initiatives. Her research interests also include the intersection of environmental issues and indigenous sovereignty.

Susan Doig (MBA, SCMP)

Susan is the Director of Facilities at Capilano University and a founding member of the EarthWorks team. Her passion for sustainability and campus operations have been a driving force for change at Capilano since she joined the University in 2006.

In 2008/09 Capilano university adopted the BC provincial mandate of carbon neutrality beginning in 2010 and a GHG reduction target of 33% over 2007 baseline  by December 31 2015; a goal which Capilano is on track to achieve.

Susan realized that such an aggressive target could only by achieved when the passion of the students, the dedication of instructors in a broad base of courses and the commitment of the institution could join forces together. 

CapUWorks is the framework developed to successfully meet that challenge. 

(604) 990 - 7973 (office)

(604) 230 - 9225 (cell)

sdoig@capilanou.ca

A brief description of the workshop (50 words or fewer)

 This workshop will encourage people to think about ways that environmental education and engagement can be infused across their campus. Workshop organizers will share a working model called CapUWorks that has shown great success at Capilano University and they will assist participants in adapting this model to their campus.

Workshop

Many of the major environmental challenges we face today are exacerbated by humans’ disconnect from nature — a condition that not only impacts our planet but also the health of its inhabitants. Yet, despite such estrangement, we are all born with an affinity for nature, known as biophilia, and scientific research repeatedly illuminates its myriad benefits to our well-being. Knowing that efforts to bridge the boundary between the built and natural environments can lead to positive changes for both people and the planet, as well as inspire acts of altruism and environmental stewardship, educational institutions have a tremendous opportunity to make a difference by bringing nature back into focus.  

Since most of our learning, not to mention our daily activities, takes place inside of buildings, isolated from natural environments and processes, we propose a new paradigm: Instead of leaving nature outside, we can bring it in through biophilic art and begin to re-open critical conversations about our place in the world. The goals of our workshop, then, are to help attendees realize the power of art in fostering human-nature connections and show them how to implement an effective interdisciplinary biophilic art program, especially in the places where we engage others environmental studies, improving both human and ecological wellness.

Part I – Welcome

This half-day, hands-on workshop will begin with a guided meditation designed to center participants, allowing them to fully connect to their senses and become more open to the experience.

Part II – Understanding Through Learning, Research and Example

Next, we will review biophilia concepts, discuss research on its impacts on human health and environmental awareness, and, focusing on the intersections of built and natural environments, walk through the process for identifying patterns that bring spaces to life. Integrating biophilia is not as simple as hanging nature photos on walls so finding art that speaks to specific people and places is important. A case study on Phipps’ award-winning Living Building project will also be shared.

Part III – Multi-Sensory Mindful Experience

Moving forward, attendees will be led through an interactive, multi-sensory experience that will allow participants to become more fully and personally aware of, the many physical and emotional benefits of biophilic design.

Part IV – Biophilic Art Experience

Participants will learn how to make their own paint from natural organic and inorganic sources, using ecologically sound methods that have existed since the Paleolithic era, yet remain important to contemporary environmental art practice. Unlike commercial paints, those made by suspending pigments in natural glue carry the attributes of their original environmental sources.

The main goal of this hands-on workshop is to reinforce the importance of biophilic art as a powerful tool for fostering human-nature interconnectivity.  This interdisciplinary study of biophilia will encompass art, design, environmental science, chemistry and psychology.

Part V – Closing

At the end of the session, participants will have the chance to synthesize all of the information they learned during the class through a final discussion and guided meditation.

The workshop will be led by Richard Piacentini, executive director of Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens, and Sonja Bochart, a senior designer with SmithGroupJJR. For 20 years Piacentini has led the green transformation of Phipps, developing some of the world’s greenest buildings, as well as groundbreaking education programs that connect people to nature. Sonja strives to expand the boundaries of design, using biophilia and creating places that are not only functional and attractive, but also respect surrounding environments and promote occupant well-being.

Leading the art portion of the workshop is Judith Kruger, a visual artist who is recognized internationally for her research in and advocacy for historic, ecological painting materials and processes. Her paintings, prints and digital media pieces all employ natural matter, focusing on human-environmental connectivity. 

Primary learning outcomes:

1. Develop a deep understanding of the physiological and emotional benefits of biophilic design pertaining to human and ecological health and wellness.

2. Develop the skills to integrate enhanced biophilic art into learning programs.

3. Engage fully with biophilic design through mindful meditation and multisensory experiences.

4. Gain an understanding of how biophilic art can help create transformative experiences.

5. Work with an expert artist to create eco-art using natural pigments and ancient processes.

Brief Description:

This half-day workshop will help attendees learn the value, and how to implement interdisciplinary biophilic art and education programs as a way to bridge the boundary between nature and the built environment to help connect people to nature, and improve the outcomes for both human and ecological wellness.

Workshop

Workshop Title and Description: Making Campuses Green and Gold? A Political Ecology Workshop on the Technopolitics of ‘Greening’ Higher Education Spaces is a half-day workshop that explores the power dynamics, political processes and techniques that are central to greening higher education spaces.

Learning Outcomes, Topics and Activities: This workshop is part of a pilot research study that explores how ‘green’ or sustainability rating systems such as the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system for buildings, the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree Campus USA program, Princeton Review’s Guide to Green Colleges and the STARS national tracking program of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE), achieve not only material ends in campus landscapes, but also relatively unacknowledged political ends. The project’s PI, Dr. Ingrid L. Nelson (University of Vermont) is a political ecologist studying the politics and practices of new forms of intervention in ‘green’ human-environment processes and relationships. Examples of key project questions include:

1) How can we understand campus spaces as sites of enacting particular normalizing views of nature and what new political or green geographies follow from these actions?

2) In what ways do green rating systems constrain and/or expand both the actual and the possible practices and discourses of sustainability and nature?

3) How do rated campus spaces include or exclude different groups and how do racialized, gendered and other intersectional dynamics shape green campus technopolitics?

One of the intended outcomes of the workshop is to identify potential collaborators to develop a proposal for a funded nationwide comparative study and possibly an international analysis of greening campus spaces.

The proposed workshop consists of three parts to be facilitated by Ingrid L. Nelson (confirmed) and possibly an undergraduate student collaborating on the project (pending funding confirmation and availability). Part I of the workshop titled, Green and Gold in Practice, presents key conceptual working definitions of political ecology, sustainability, ‘green economy’ and technopolitics and an overview of the different ‘green’ campus rating systems. This presentation will also present results from an initial qualitative analysis of the nine previous Ball State University Greening of the Campus conferences and the Smart and Sustainable Campuses conferences hosted by the University of Maryland, which broadly emphasize the technical, strategic and pedagogical aspects of greening campus spaces, but rarely advance critical questions about the power dynamics and politics that are central to the greening of educational spaces. Participants will discuss the specific ‘green’ or sustainable practices that they have personally performed and observed and that are credited in various ‘green’ rating systems and those that are not presently acknowledged by these systems.

Part II of the workshop titled, New Green and Gold Norms, focuses on how we can understand campus spaces as sites of enacting particular normalizing views of nature and what new political or green geographies follow from these actions. Participants will work in groups and develop diagrams, map and describe the new relationships and practices fostered by participating in ‘green’ campus rating systems. Such ‘new norms’ may be very positive, introduce entrenched conflict or produce a mix of consequences for differently positioned people. Part II concludes with reflective moments and discussion on the potential hidden results of new campus greening norms that may have significant gendered, racialized or other implications across common axes of difference.

The final part of the workshop titled, Ethics and Methods in One’s Own Workspace, focuses on the key epistemologies, methods and ethical considerations necessary for pursuing critical political ecological questions in campus spaces. This is a brainstorming and sharing of strategies session that will inform future collaborative research on this topic. Example strategies might include ways of supporting ‘green practices’ on campuses that are not part of broader rating systems, as well as respectful ways of generating curiosity and critical feedback on campuses with shifting administrative goals and agendas.

A summary of the workshop discussions and content will be distributed to all participants two weeks after the conference, followed by a call for collaborators in co-designing a nationwide comparative study of key themes explored and suggested by workshop participants and suggestions for follow-up activities at future conference venues or virtual seminars/events.

Workshop

During the fourth week of March 2016, the Power Dialog will support hundreds of college and university faculty members in all fifty states to take their classes— numbering more than ten thousands students-- on a field trip to their state capitol. There they will meet as groups with their state’s officials in charge of implementation planning for the EPA’s Clean Power Plan. The Dialog will result in ten thousand plus young people weighing-in live on proposed carbon regulations, state policy-makers across the country hearing from a major constituency that would otherwise be silent, and widespread media coverage of the carbon regulation process.

The Center for Environmental Policy (CEP) at Bard College will organize the Power Dialog. Resources for the Future (RFF) will provide educational opportunities to prepare students for the Dialog. This workshop will engage participants in state level planning for the dialog, and develop recommendations for the types of curricula that will be most useful to participating faculty. The Clean Power Plan process presents students with a unique and critically important learning and civic engagement opportunity.  Student voices can impact the scope and direction of global warming pollution reductions in their states. 

Workshop

This workshop focusses on the use of online and blended learning modes in environmental studies and sciences programs. The workshop is presented by AESS’ Online and Blended Learning Subcommittee (OBLSC) and is structured in two parts. Part I of the workshop will review and reflect on the series of online workshops presented earlier this year organized through the OBLSC which aimed to (a) give AESS members the opportunity to experience online learning and teaching in action, (b) identify strategies and practices to better align sustainability teaching and practice, and (c) foster collaboration between academia and practitioners. Part II of the workshop will focus on future initiatives, including (1) building a community of practice amongst AESS members and others with interests spanning environmental education and online and blended learning modes, and (2) fostering a related research program of scholarship of teaching and learning. This workshop aligns with the conference theme through its focus on pedagogies in environmental studies and sciences that transcend boundaries between face-to-face, blended and online learning modes.

Workshop

For both existing and future leaders of environmental and sustainability academic programs, one of the most important challenges is how to work with their administration to develop and implement meaningful curricular change. This is especially true for interdisciplinary approaches that transcend traditional departments. This workshop provides strategies, approaches, and ideas for catalyzing change. This session builds upon previous AESS and Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD) workshops to enhance effective leadership. If you are new to this workshop process, we will work with you to get you familiar with the concepts and procedures we use. If you are a continuing participant we will expect you to report on your progress. We will start by reviewing basic tools for organizing environmental and sustainability curricular and co-curricular efforts across the campus: campus-wide Ponderosa or Piedmont style projects, offices of sustainability, student supported green funds, residence hall and other student mentor programs, internship coordinators, action teams or task forces, climate action plans, and presidents’ committees tasked to oversee them all. We will follow that with a “power mapping” exercise that will assist participants in assessing how they can maximize their leverage and effectiveness. Then we will ask returning participants to report on their progress. Our emphasis will be to highlight exemplary entrepreneurial models that facilitate curricular change. We will also consider strategies for overcoming administrative and conceptual obstacles. The workshop outcome will be twofold—a specific plan for your home institution and the continuing development of a CEDD and AESS support network for helping to implement those plans.

Workshop

Getting Published: Preparing Manuscripts for Journal Submission.

Length:   Half-day, Wednesday

Organizers:

Walter (Tony) Rosenbaum
Tonyros@ufl.edu
 University of Florida

 Kim Smith

ksmith@carleton.edu

Carleton College

This will repeat a workshop first held at the Vermont conference and repeated at the Pittsburgh conference.  It is intended for graduate students and young professional desiring on opportunity prepare articles and have manuscripts reviewed as they would for submission the Journal for Environmental Studies and Sciences, or other professional publication. How the workshop will be organized:

• Each prospective participant will be asked to submit a draft manuscript at least a month to six weeks in advance of the workshop.
• The manuscripts will be reviewed by the workshop organizer(s) and those submissions in satisfactory preparation will each be read by the workshop organizer(s) and at least two other workshop participants (the organizer(s) will divided the manuscripts among the participants. so that each participant will have no more than two articles to review.
• Before the session, the participants will be divided into small groups, each consisting of 2-4 workshop participants and a Journal editor or otherwise qualified reviewer. Each small group participant’s submission will be read by the other group members in advance of the meeting.
• The workshop will consist of several activities
  • a brief explanation of the journal’s editorial policy and the review process;
  • a division into the small working groups were the manuscripts will be reviewed and discussed among the members;
  • a final collective meeting to discuss issues and ideas from the review sessions.

  One purpose of the workshop is to identify and encourage prospective submissions to JESS. Additionally, the workshop should help the participants to anticipate issues commonly associated with journal article reviews and to prepare their manuscripts with greater professional skill.

Confirmed presenters and co-organizers:

•  Walter Rosenbaum, Editor-in-Chief, Journal for Environmental Studies and Sciences

• Kim Smith, Carleton College

•  Several Associate Editors of JESS to be selected.

•  Several members of the JESS Editorial Board to be selected.

   

Workshop

The nexus among food, energy and water (FEW) systems is an emerging area of societally relevant scholarship. The scholarship is enabled by advances in science (e.g. Liu et al, Science 2015) that enable simultaneous examination of multiple interacting systems. The need for this scholarship is enhanced because of trends in population growth and natural resource consumption that are causing stresses on food, energy and water resources. NSF and other federal agencies are recognizing the societal need and scientific opportunity through new funding opportunities.

Informal conversation indicates great interest among the scientific community in the FEW nexus but that most researchers are only looking at one system or perhaps the interplay between two such as energy and water. Relatively few scientists are exploring the three systems as an interacting system of systems. One of the biggest gaps is between humanities and the sciences. Faculty in the humanities are hungry for connections to scientists. Humanities faculty are instrumental in focusing on “sustainability” as a theme to weave together themes such as food security, energy and the environment, and health and wellness.

This workshop will enable faculty from natural sciences, social sciences and humanities with expertise in different aspects of FEW to share examples of challenges and successes in developing collaboration in this area. An outcome of the workshop will be an electronic document that presents the examples discussed in the workshop and recommendations for those who want to work on this trilemma.

Workshop

The world has to feed 9 billion people by 2015 using less water, less energy and on increasingly infertile land. With more than 70% of the World’s population expected to live in cities, it is critical that cities start to develop their own sources of food to avoid severe food insecurity associated with water shortages, land degradation, and climate change. This workshop will focus on interactive discussions, innovative ideas, science based solutions, and entrepreneurial approaches to address the following questions. 1) What do successful urban food-systems look like? 2) What is the role of academia in developing resilient models of urban food systems 3) What technologies do scientists and educators see as being game-changers? 4) What are the critical limiting factors and challenges?

Workshop

In the half-day “Presentation Skills for Scientists:  An Improv Workshop”, participants will go through a series of improv exercises that will help them improve their communication skills. 

Proposed Theme and Justification

This year’s conference theme is “Confronting Frontiers, Borders and Boundaries.”  A key component of, as the CFP states, “building international connections and collaborations and teaching across disciplines” is inspired and effective communication skills. 

AESS members and other academics spend considerable time developing and practicing their research and writing skills, but far less time developing and practicing their communication skills.  As the leader of this workshop, I have taught communication skills for over a decade, including working with the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science, which offers improv training to scientists.  In this workshop, I’ll use these techniques and more to help AESS members become powerful and effective communicators of their work. The workshop will help participants improve both verbal and non-verbal communication skills, storytelling skills and the ability to adjust their message to different audiences.  Finally, participants will bring their new skills together in a short presentation on an area of their research or activism. 

Outline of Goals and Learning Outcomes

In this workshop, participants will:

*Learn to express their viewpoints in an emotionally connected way

*Become better non-verbal communicators through exercises that improve body language

*Get techniques for relaxing in high-pressure communication situations

*Learn how to adjust to different audiences

*Become more vivid storytellers

*Develop the ability to listen in a relaxed way

Progression of topics

These goals will be achieved by moving through a series of exercises:

1.  Warm-up exercises –participants relax and warm up their bodies and voices and start to work together and communicate non-verbally

2.  Audience exercises –participants change their communicative approach for different audiences; learn how important their initial messaging is and how to shape that initial message

3.  Verbal communication and storytelling exercises – participants practice storytelling and learn to let their natural ability to communicate flow more easily

4.   Actual presentations – participants give short presentations of their current research or activist projects

Confirmed leader

Jennifer Joy, performing artist, writer and trainer, will lead this workshop.  As a performer, Jennifer Joy has a specialty in science-themed theatre.  She is the artistic director for the performing troupe ,The SciArt6.  This troupe creates performances based on research from environmental science and studies.  At the 2014 AESS conference, they wove performances responsive to the conference’s papers and themes throughout the conference.  She has performed her one-woman show, The Physics of Love, at a variety of theatres, including Highways in Santa Monica, Laurie Beechman Theatre in New York City and on the college touring circuit (University of Redlands, SUNY Potsdam, Alfred College, Scripps College and more).  She has performed her science-themed stand-up comedy at the New York Comedy Club, Broadway Comedy Club, Ochi’s at Comix and others in New York City, as well as at clubs in San Francisco.  She is also a professional speaker, including her popular talk on women in STEM.

As a trainer, Jennifer has helped clients in a variety of sectors, including corporate, scientific, academic, government and non-profit.  Her presentation skills, interpersonal communication skills, business writing, American accent and creativity workshops have earned rave reviews across the country. Her clients have included many international diplomats, scientists and corporate professionals.  She has also taught at the United Nations, Pace University and the City University of New York. 

Jennifer holds an MFA in Drama from the University of California, Irvine.

Brief Description

Building connections across boundaries takes effective communication skills, including dynamic presentation skills. In this improv workshop, participants play games that improve both verbal and non-verbal communication skills.  They experiment with story and metaphor, and do exercises that draw out their enthusiasm for their work, to dynamically engage audiences every time. 

Workshop

The session is primarily directed towards those who may want to improve student learning about energy and climate by use of a package of curricular resources centered on the PBS series “EARTH: The Operators’ Manual” (ETOM) and the accompanying book by award-winning geoscientist and communicator, Richard Alley. See http://earththeoperatorsmanual.com/landing/watch-share

Each of the three programs has its own page:

http://earththeoperatorsmanual.com/feature-video/earth-the-operators-manual

http://earththeoperatorsmanual.com/feature-video/powering-the-planet

http://earththeoperatorsmanual.com/feature-video/energy-quest-usa

A new NSF-funded project with NCSE and P2K is piloting the use of these resources for First Year Reading programs or in the classroom.

Our goal is to deliver a suite of materials that can be used by schools that require all first year students to read a single book on critically important topics to promote interaction and engagement among and between their first-year cohorts.

Participants will also learn how to access to thousands of high quality encyclopedia style articles and other information about a wide range of climate change science and solutions through the Climate Adaptation and Mitigation E-Learning (CAMEL) web resource www.CAMELclimatechange.org

Workshop

Making sense of indigenous environmental practices

The pinnacle of functional and successful cross-border environmental problem-solving is the comprehensive understanding of the environment-culture intricacies that form the bottom-line of the so-called local, indigenous, and underdeveloped communities (LIUC) in the world. The result of the current functioning of the global economy and environmental management systems is the dichotomization of LIUC as either biodiversity guardians, or environmental impact sufferers. They are guardians as they harbor most of the remaining global biodiversity, and sufferers because they are disproportionately affected by environmental pollution and degradation that stem from natural resource extraction to satisfy global demand; and they are predicted to suffer the most from climate change due to their limited economic, technological, and scientific ability to adopt mitigation and adaptation measures.

Endowed with scientific and technological know-how, the fundamental role of environmental scientists, experts, and managers, as well as international development workers, advocate groups, government agencies, and non-governmental organization has been to empower, or sometimes compel, LIUCs to manage their valuable environmental resources and address environmental injustices and climate change. Other roles, such as economic development and improving health standards, go hand in hand with the primary role. Usually, the dominant modernized, science-based culture prevails over the LIUC culture and knowledge. The result, in some instances, has been the failure of the initiatives and innovations introduced in these cultures or near social and economic collapse of the LIUC. The increasing threat of persistent, creeping, and scaling environmental problems, such as climate change, desertification, and biodiversity loss calls for a more culturally informed, collaborative approach to environmental problem-solving. The United Nations (UN), reiterated the importance to “redress and strengthen further the partnership established between indigenous people and the international community,” by educating indigenous and non-indigenous communities on the situation and cultures of indigenous people.”

The goal of this workshop is to deepen and broaden LIUC stakeholders’ knowledge and perspectives on the magnitude and significance of the interrelationship and interdependence of culture and environment, a prerequisite for designing culturally appropriate and relevant interventions so as to optimize environmental productivity and efficiency, and minimize catastrophic social, cultural, and economic outcomes.

At the end of this half-day workshop, the participants will:

1. Garner a deep understanding of the implications of culture-environment bonds in ecological protection, indigenous knowledge acquisition and transformation, and sociocultural interactions;
2. Understand the social, cultural, and economic  impacts of trivializing  the culture-environmental bond in partnering with and designing solutions for LIUCs;
3. Develop skills on how to make use of the culture-environment tie to acquire invaluable indigenous environmental knowledge, establish successful environmental projects, communicate environmental science, and introduce environmental innovations to LIUCs.

The workshop will cover the following topics:  indigenous environmental, biological, and ecological knowledge; a methodology for communicating science and acquiring relevant information; the concept of frame of reference; the concept of “blundering intruder;” how cultural practices safeguard ecological and environmental attributes; how ecological and biological aspects of the environment safeguard the sociocultural fabric of LIUCs, and, project management in LIUCs.

Learning activities will include participants’ self-evaluation of their knowledge on the culture-environment ties, and general understanding on how to work with cross-border LIUCs before and after the workshop.  In addition, they will define various concepts, items, and practices and compare their definitions with LIUCs. They will further provide solutions to real life case studies.

A case study demonstrating the significance of the environment and nature on culture, science knowledge, and management will be presented through interactive short lectures.  Examination of various practices, approaches, and methodologies for acquiring relevant environmental knowledge, designing appropriate environmental projects, diffusing scientific knowledge, and introducing environmental and climate change innovations will be done through big group discussions and interactive mini-lectures. A projector is needed for this workshop. Each participant will receive both paper and electronic copies of the detailed handouts of the lecture.

Workshop summary

Using interactive short lectures, large group discussions, and case study analyses, this workshop will broaden knowledge and skills necessary for functional and effective design, diffusion, and management of environmental problem-solving programs, policies, and innovations without impairing the cultural, economic, and ecological fabrics of local, indigenous, and underdeveloped communities.

Mealtime Roundtable

Many university students are reluctant to participate outside the classroom environment, yet, that is where true learning most often occurs. As a Professor of Composition, I have focused class readings and writing assignments on environmental issues. Students from all majors take my course. Their eyes are opened to the many environmental issues that  plague our world today.  In answer to their question, "What can I do?", twelve hours of service learning are required at one of the communitiy's sanctuaries, state parks, the UTPA Coastal Studies Lab on South Padre Island, TX, Sea Turtle Inc, and Gladys Porter Zoo, Brownsville, TX. Community boundaries are crossed by these students as they realize students are welcome to work at these organizations and their service is appreciated. Students learn hands-on the importance of protecting the waters, plants, and animals that share the earth with us. Lives are changed as many committ to becoming regular volunteers after their required hours are finished. Most never knew how emotional it can be to save a sea turtle and they pass on the importance of doing so to friends and family members. Many boundaries are crossed by each individual student. As students gain knowledge and become active in saving the environment, they mature in their classwork and become campus leaders, encouraging others to get involved. 

Mealtime Roundtable

Making the transition from graduate school to a post-graduate position in Environmental Studies and Sciences can be an incredibly challenging experience. In addition to the pressures that accompany assuming a new role with new responsibilities, ESS positions also frequently exist as part of a small and/or disparate team of colleagues under any number of academic affiliations, resulting in an "island effect." The purpose of this roundtable is to provide a space to talk about the job market and the transition from graduate school to faculty positions. This roundtable will be led by two first-year professors working in small, liberal arts contexts. We would like to gear the conversation towards the needs of graduate students and early career scholars, but welcome others who would like to contribute to this conversation.  Ideally, this session will help participants identify best practices, colleagues, and mentors.

Full Presentation Panel

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Advisory Committee for Environmental Research and Education (ACERE) is drafting a 10 year vision for ERE at NSF. The Vision document will update previous ERE reports over the past decade. The working title of this document due in spring 2015 is America’s Future: Environmental Research and Education for a Thriving Century

 The report will include:

• Understanding the challenges and opportunities of complex environmental systems.

• Designing the future: science, engineering, humans and control.

• Securing the future with sustaining the future with a sound environment.

• Enabling the future: big/small data; infrastructure.

The AESS conference will be one of the first public presentations of the report. This plenary presentation will include responses from AESS members from different components of environmental research and education - life science, geophysical science, social science and humanities. All conference participants will have an opportunity to participate in Q & A in the plenary discussion or in the follow up discussion symposium facilitated by Dr. Blockstein.

Full Presentation Panel

Theoretical Implications of Household Environmental Behavior Change Using a Private Well Water Testing Context

Dr. Crista L. Straub

Approximately 23 percent of private wells in the U.S. contain at least one contaminant at concentrations greater than EPA Maximum Contaminant Levels.  Several New England states have a large percentage of the population that uses private well water, and also comprises regions of high arsenic concentrations.  Although homeowners are responsible for the quality of their private well water, very few test their wells, and believe – even without testing – that they have high water quality.  While many state agencies and universities work to promote well water testing, there has been little application of environmental behavior change theory to household behavior.  However, there is growing concern due to the combined force of potential contaminants, increased health and environmental issues, an unknowing public, and lack of government regulations.  This paper explores the relationship between water quality attitudes and behaviors with theoretical constructs such as place attachment, economic insecurity, behavior motivation, consideration of future consequence, and social resilience, capital, and acceptability.  The study site included three regional arsenic “hotspots” in Maine: Southern Maine, Kennebec County, and Hancock County.  A random sample of 2,000 landowners was mailed a questionnaire.  This paper is unique in that it implements multiple constructs to investigate water quality attitudes and behaviors.  Our study incorporates significant factors defined into a predictive model of water quality attitudes and behavior that will increase understanding of behavior change and help focus future programs on fostering these behaviors.  Also, this paper will define numbers of individuals testing private well water, perceptions of community behaviors, knowledge related to groundwater, and levels of trust.  Results indicate that place attachment, perceptions of risk, and economic insecurity play a significant role in water quality attitudes and behavior.  Several options for agencies and universities to integrate these factors into their outreach strategies will be discussed.      

Rethinking our boundaries: examining bioregional identities and place attachment as factors influencing environmental behavior in Great Lakes coastal communities

Francis Eanes

Existing political boundaries are often insufficient for containing the effects of environmental challenges faced by residents of coastal communities, like aquatic “dead zones” and the spread of pollutants and aquatic invasive species. Bioregions have been proposed as helpful heuristic scales from which to understand and effectively confront these complex ecological problems. At the same time, emerging research in environmental psychology and environmental sociology points to the strong linkages between people’s sense of place, place-based values, and their propensity to engage in the sorts of pro-environmental behaviors necessary for addressing these ecological problems. Recognizing this, I will share ongoing research that investigates the development of bioregional place-based identities among residents of Green Bay (Lake Michigan) coastal communities. Surveys and semi-structured interviews, conducted between July 2013 and December 2014, assessed respondents’ attachments to placeat various scales (home, neighborhood, town/city, and bioregion), how those attachments developed, and their effect on landscape values and environmental behaviors. I will discuss preliminary results, including the sorts of educational and recreational experiences common to the subset of respondents who expressed strong bioregional place attachments/identities. In addition, I will explore the implications of these bioregional identities for researchers, natural resource practitioners, and educators who are interested in engaging communities in environmental place-protective behaviors.  

Promoting Climate Resilient Coastal Watersheds: Engaging Landowners in Climate Adaptation Strategies

Stacy Rosenberg, Ph.D.

It is well known that climate change will have significant impacts on coastal ecosystems and communities. Coastal landowners play a pivotal role in the management of land and water resources in coastal areas and their willingness to implement climate adaptation strategies is a key component in maintaining and improving watershed health. What types of climate information do coastal landowners need to begin modifying their land and water management practices to better prepare for climate impacts? What types of climate data and education and outreach tools do watershed groups and other community organizations need to better inform landowners? This presentation explores how Oregon coastal landowners are beginning to think about and adapt to climate change and the role that watershed groups and other community organizations play in the dissemination of information about climate change impacts. In order to investigate these issues, three Oregon watersheds were selected for in-depth analysis (one each from the North Coast, Central Coast, and South Coast). Research methods include key interviews with diverse stakeholders, face-to-face semi-structured interviews with coastal landowners, and a written questionnaire. The interviews and questionnaire include landowner views of climate science, personal experience in dealing with climatic events, familiarity and willingness to undertake climate adaptation strategies, trusted sources of information, and preferred outreach methods. This research provides timely information to watershed groups, local planning agencies, and other organizations interested in promoting climate resilient coastal watersheds. 

Re-framing Climate Change to Reduce Emissions: Perceptions on Energy Efficiency in Tucson, Arizona

Valerie Rountree, M.S.

There is broad consensus within the scientific community that the global climate will undergo unprecedented changes in the next century due to human activities, primarily the emission of greenhouse gases from unsustainable socioeconomic development. It has also become clear that presenting society with information on the causes of and solutions to global climate change is not sufficient to induce behavioral changes, that is, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  On March 27, 2015, the City of Tucson Office of the Mayor will hold a half-day summit on Energy and the Economy with business owners in Tucson to discuss the financial benefits associated with increasing energy efficiency. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the success of the summit in engaging participants and initiating action on energy efficiency in the private sector without mentioning climate change.  The study includes three phases: first, a pre-summit survey of prospective attendees will be administered to get baseline data regarding participants’ opinions and knowledge of energy efficiency.  The results of the survey will also be used to tailor the content of the summit to participants’ interests.  Second, a post-summit survey of attendees will be administered to evaluate the impacts of the summit on attendee opinions, knowledge and perceptions.  And third, follow-up interviews will complement surveys to evaluate whether participants plan to implement energy efficiency measures.  This study will evaluate the outcome on participant perceptions of framing energy efficiency as a financial benefit rather than a global climate imperative to understand if and how greenhouse gas emissions can be reduced through alternative messaging. Preliminary results of this study will be presented at the 2015 AESS Conference in San Diego.

Full Presentation Panel

Arts and Humanities Efforts in the Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network: Understanding Perceived Values and Challenges

Dr. Lissy Goralnik, MFA, PhD

Calls for interdisciplinary approaches to environmental problem- solving are common across the biophysical and social sciences. Recently, some of these collaborations have incorporated the creative arts and humanities, including projects across the 24 sites of the US Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) network. A substantial body of artistic and written work has been produced by LTER-affiliated sites. However, there has been no systematic analysis of this work. We used a survey and follow-up interviews with LTER Principal Investigators (PIs) to understand the extent and nature of arts and humanities inquiry in the LTER network and to assess perceptions about the values and challenges associated with it. Nineteen of the 24 LTER sites agree or strongly agree that arts and humanities inquiry is important and relevant for the sites. Perceived values of this work include its goodness in and of itself, its ability to foster outreach and public involvement, and its ability to inspire creative thinking. Contrarily, participants identified funding, available labor, and available expertise as limiting factors in the growth of arts and humanities inquiry in the LTER network. Respondents highlighted themes relevant to the relationship between ecological science and ethics, including a willingness to accept fostering empathy, an identified value of arts and humanities inquiry, as pertinent to LTER network goals and research on some level. This ethical potential of arts and humanities inquiry in the LTER network provides an opportunity to bridge ecological research with arts and humanities. 

Performing Agriculture: The “Survival Pieces” of Artists Helen and Newton Harrison

Leslie A Ryan

Ecological artists Helen and Newton Harrison, frequently cited as the “pioneers” of the environmental art movement, have engaged large scale ecological projects since 1970 when they determined to do no work that didn’t advantage the biosphere. They explored issues of basic sustainability in an early array of artworks entitled “Survival Pieces.” The series began with “Making Earth” (1970) and expanded to include a portable fish farm (1971) and a portable orchard (1972), among others. The Survival Pieces critically investigated food production, food security and the sustainability of our actions. As Wendell Berry has said, food is our most persistent relationship with the environment, and we are participants in agriculture. This presentation examines this early work, and its relevance to ethical land use and contemporary issues of food production.

 There was great interest in the 1970s for the issues addressed by the Harrisons: the Whole Earth Catalog was published 1968 to 1972; scientist Norman Borlaug received the Nobel Peace Prize for his foundational work with the Green Revolution; and in 1972 both the Clean Water Act and a ban on DDT  were passed. The issues raised in the Survival Pieces resonate today, as seen in the championing of local food production by communities worldwide.

 Explorations into food production, food security and the sustainability of our actions are becoming crucial as rapid urbanization deepens the divide between everyday life and an environment that is increasingly elsewhere and distant. This is an ethical crisis, notes Roger King, as ethical relationships are nurtured in the near environment: we learn to care for the environment as a whole by engaging what is at hand. The Harrisons’ ecological art practice has the potential to inform and re-imagine how we might appropriately use and live with the land and the other species which sustain us.

Horse Bones and Black Mayonnaise: A Brief History of Transboundary Pollution in New York City’s Watery Frontiers

Assoc. Professor Elizabeth Albert

New York City has long treated its watery frontiers as a deep gulf between the visible world and a bottomless other; a netherworld where one could hide and dispose of its unwanted; a place to make things disappear. Only recently, in the wake of Super Storm Sandy, has there begun a broad reckoning with our neglected shorelines and toxic waterways.

Two of NYC’s most abused waterways, Newtown Creek and Dead Horse Bay tell remarkable versions of the development of New York City and the resulting environmental consequences.  This presentation will offer a visual tour tracing the history of these two compromised sites and recent efforts at their remediation and revitalization.

Here is a brief description of the two sites:

• The Newtown Creek is a highly polluted industrial waterway recently designated an EPA Superfund site. It was and to a degree still is, the engine room of glittering Manhattan just across the East River. More than a century of oil and other production has left Newtown Creek’s bottom coated with a ten-foot layer of toxic sludge nicknamed “black mayonnaise.”  

• Dead Horse Bay lies just outside JFK International Airport. A century ago, pre-automobile, these shores were the site of 26 animal rendering plants where legions of New York City’s horses were chopped up and boiled into fertilizer by the city’s poorest work force. Later, the area became landfill, ultimately breeched by the tide.  To this day, the beach is littered with horse bones and glass tinkling in the waves.

These two sites are part of the interdisciplinary manuscript, Silent Beaches, Untold Stories: New York City’s Forgotten Waterfront, which explores ten lesser-known waterways through the intersecting lenses of environmental science, social justice, history, short fiction, and contemporary art. This presentation will offer a sample of the research for this project.

Untitled

Ben Cosgrove

Independent musician Ben Cosgrove has held artist residencies at Isle Royale National Park, Acadia National Park, and the Vermont Studio Center.  Currently resident artist at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Oregon, Cosgrove is working on a new set of works in collaboration and conversation with biologists, ecologists, and naturalists in the area. He will present on this work.  

Full Presentation Panel

Building a sustainable society cannot be accomplished through individual efforts – key is effective collaborations and partnerships.  In this session we discuss four different types of activities linking universities and communities. The University of Florida advances sustainability through interdisciplinary research and cross-sectorial partnering, organized through the creation of its Center for Adaptive Innovation. In Boston, campus-based efforts focus on the health of children challenged by environmental lead, and the need for grass roots activism through local organizations to find practical solutions.  In Wisconsin, university based Project 1808 seeks sustainable solutions in improving quality of education and sustainable livelihood in disadvantaged communities, working locally and in Sierra Leone.  The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability, based at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, focuses on the social sustainability element of the sustainability trilogy.  This work is done through exchanging ideas and approaches including the development of informational networks and annual conferencing from multiple venues stretching across the globe. Collectively this session aims to demonstrate effective approaches breaking down traditional boundaries providing obstacles to the advancement of sustainability in a variety of communities. 

Building Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research for Sustainability in Higher Education.  Seaton Tarrant, University Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, CAIRES Center for Adaptive Innovation, Resilience, Ethics, and Science University of Florida, Gainesville. 

Overcoming disciplinary silos and speaking across discipline-specific expertise is a substantial challenge to sustainability research. This presentation reports on six months worth of surveys and research determining best practices for supporting interdisciplinary, sustainability-focused research at higher education universities. The presentation details the missing links in the University of Florida’s own research efforts, and strategies deployed by the CAIRES center to better network and support sustainability researchers across the UF campus.

The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability: A Collaborative Approach to Strengthen Sustainability’s Neglected Third Leg.  Nicole D. Peterson, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology; Helen Hilger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Robert Boyer, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences; Brett Q. Tempest, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Thomas A Gentry, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture; Gary S. Silverman, Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences. University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The sustainability trilogy – the environment, the economy, and social equity - provides unsteady support for building sustainable societies. Rather, efforts typically concentrate on developing less consumptive and less polluting technologies, and stable economies, while rarely linking technological and economic options with cultural norms and preferences. Providing more attention to the social aspects of sustainability is just beginning to be seen as critical to the overall success of the sustainability movement.

The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS), headquartered at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, works with partners throughout the United States, the Americas and Europe to accelerate the rate at which social aspects of sustainability are more authentically included in policy, planning, and research about the built environment.   Through conferences and online discussions and resources, it identifies tools and opportunities for connecting people and projects, and enriching ideas and possibilities for sustainability.  The network provides an important conduit for sustainability scholars and practitioners to collaborate in developing approaches critical to the maintenance of a high quality of life in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Multinational School-Community-University Partnerships: Education and Capacity Building for Sustainability and Global Citizenship.  Linda Vakunta, PhD, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Program Director, Project 1808 Inc. 

 The 2014 Ebola crisis highlighted our global connectivity and the need for strong global citizenry. We have developed a multidisciplinary and multinational framework for educating and building young people’s capacity in both Koinadugu district, Sierra Leone and Wisconsin, USA. While much progress had been made in Sierra Leone after the ten-year civil war, the recent Ebola outbreak threatens recovery thus far. Project 1808 Inc has built partnerships and programs at the school, community and university level with various partners including the University of Wisconsin Madison and University of Sierra Leone to develop innovative programs focused on real time knowledge exchange and building workable models of community and people based solutions to holistic health problems that use locally available resources. These partnerships between students and faculty enable knowledge exchange, innovation and creativity through small pointed and targeted projects that address disconnects in health (nutrition, water, hygiene and sanitation, waste disposal and management, sexual health, workshops focused on one and infectious diseases like malaria, typhoid, and Ebola), community engagement (community mapping), and career development (career workshops, and leadership). Given the challenges the country faces, this program increased health awareness among 400 students on addressing community health issues such as Ebola. Overall, we observed increased learning, engagement, ownership, leadership, greater sense of optimism, hope as well as civic responsibility regarding community needs. We have also seen USA students become deeply educated in complex Africa related issues and serving as educators in their communities where it is critically needed. 

Collaborations to Protect Children from Environmental Lead in Boston.   Martha E. Richmond, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Director of Environmental Science, Suffolk University.  

Environmental lead is a classic “wicked” chemical problem.  While the gradual phase out of tetraethyl lead in gasoline has resulted in a marked decrease of environmental lead exposure for the general population, lead contamination remains an intractable environmental health problem in many US communities, especially underserved communities of older cities.  In such communities, significant numbers of children under 72 months of age continue to have blood lead levels that are higher than the presently accepted CDC standard of 5 ug/dL.  Despite educational and funding support to address many of the factors that contribute to environmental lead contamination, lead toxicity has not been addressed in meaningful ways in such communities. To more effectively speak to this problem, more collaborative approaches are necessary.  Recently, Boston, MA undertook steps to create a “lead free” Boston, including a Lead Summit and a Lead Working Committee composed of representatives from the public health, medical, legal, regulatory and academic communities.  This paper will discuss strategies that have been considered to more successfully address lead contamination, evaluate the effectiveness of the academic/regulatory/community collaborations, and suggest ways that the collaborations could be strengthened.  

Building Collaborative Interdisciplinary Research for Sustainability in Higher Education.  Seaton Tarrant, University Doctoral Candidate, Department of Political Science, CAIRES Center for Adaptive Innovation, Resilience, Ethics, and Science University of Florida, Gainesville. 

Overcoming disciplinary silos and speaking across discipline-specific expertise is a substantial challenge to sustainability research. This presentation reports on six months worth of surveys and research determining best practices for supporting interdisciplinary, sustainability-focused research at higher education universities. The presentation details the missing links in the University of Florida’s own research efforts, and strategies deployed by the CAIRES center to better network and support sustainability researchers across the UF campus.

The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability: A Collaborative Approach to Strengthen Sustainability’s Neglected Third Leg.  Nicole D. Peterson, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology; Helen Hilger, Professor Emeritus, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Robert Boyer, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography and Earth Sciences; Brett Q. Tempest, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering; Thomas A Gentry, Assistant Professor, School of Architecture; Gary S. Silverman, Professor, Department of Public Health Sciences. University of North Carolina, Charlotte.

The sustainability trilogy – the environment, the economy, and social equity - provides unsteady support for building sustainable societies. Rather, efforts typically concentrate on developing less consumptive and less polluting technologies, and stable economies, while rarely linking technological and economic options with cultural norms and preferences. Providing more attention to the social aspects of sustainability is just beginning to be seen as critical to the overall success of the sustainability movement.

The Integrated Network for Social Sustainability (INSS), headquartered at the University of North Carolina Charlotte, works with partners throughout the United States, the Americas and Europe to accelerate the rate at which social aspects of sustainability are more authentically included in policy, planning, and research about the built environment.   Through conferences and online discussions and resources, it identifies tools and opportunities for connecting people and projects, and enriching ideas and possibilities for sustainability.  The network provides an important conduit for sustainability scholars and practitioners to collaborate in developing approaches critical to the maintenance of a high quality of life in the twenty-first century and beyond.

Multinational School-Community-University Partnerships: Education and Capacity Building for Sustainability and Global Citizenship.  Linda Vakunta, PhD, Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Program Director, Project 1808 Inc. 

 The 2014 Ebola crisis highlighted our global connectivity and the need for strong global citizenry. We have developed a multidisciplinary and multinational framework for educating and building young people’s capacity in both Koinadugu district, Sierra Leone and Wisconsin, USA. While much progress had been made in Sierra Leone after the ten-year civil war, the recent Ebola outbreak threatens recovery thus far. Project 1808 Inc has built partnerships and programs at the school, community and university level with various partners including the University of Wisconsin Madison and University of Sierra Leone to develop innovative programs focused on real time knowledge exchange and building workable models of community and people based solutions to holistic health problems that use locally available resources. These partnerships between students and faculty enable knowledge exchange, innovation and creativity through small pointed and targeted projects that address disconnects in health (nutrition, water, hygiene and sanitation, waste disposal and management, sexual health, workshops focused on one and infectious diseases like malaria, typhoid, and Ebola), community engagement (community mapping), and career development (career workshops, and leadership). Given the challenges the country faces, this program increased health awareness among 400 students on addressing community health issues such as Ebola. Overall, we observed increased learning, engagement, ownership, leadership, greater sense of optimism, hope as well as civic responsibility regarding community needs. We have also seen USA students become deeply educated in complex Africa related issues and serving as educators in their communities where it is critically needed. 

Collaborations to Protect Children from Environmental Lead in Boston.   Martha E. Richmond, Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Director of Environmental Science, Suffolk University.  

Environmental lead is a classic “wicked” chemical problem.  While the gradual phase out of tetraethyl lead in gasoline has resulted in a marked decrease of environmental lead exposure for the general population, lead contamination remains an intractable environmental health problem in many US communities, especially underserved communities of older cities.  In such communities, significant numbers of children under 72 months of age continue to have blood lead levels that are higher than the presently accepted CDC standard of 5 ug/dL.  Despite educational and funding support to address many of the factors that contribute to environmental lead contamination, lead toxicity has not been addressed in meaningful ways in such communities. To more effectively speak to this problem, more collaborative approaches are necessary.  Recently, Boston, MA undertook steps to create a “lead free” Boston, including a Lead Summit and a Lead Working Committee composed of representatives from the public health, medical, legal, regulatory and academic communities.  This paper will discuss strategies that have been considered to more successfully address lead contamination, evaluate the effectiveness of the academic/regulatory/community collaborations, and suggest ways that the collaborations could be strengthened.  

Full Presentation Panel

Open Houses on the Open Range: Rangeland Conversion in San Luis Obispo County

Kyle Walsh

Rangelands are the dominant ecosystem type in San Luis Obispo County, California. They provide a diverse array of ecosystem services to society, including forage production for livestock, water regulation, and carbon sequestration, among others. The conversion of rangeland ecosystems to urban development and intensive agriculture influences the degree to which these landscapes can provide ecosystem services. However, rangeland conversion is not well documented at the county level in California. This study examined (1) the extent of rangeland conversion in the county during the past twenty years, (2) the drivers of conversion, and (3) the perceptions of ecosystem service provision held by ranchers and land managers in the region. We used a mixed-methods approach including geographic information systems analysis, surveys, and semi-structured interviews in order to address these three questions. Rangeland conversion in San Luis Obispo County during the last twenty years has been concentrated around urban centers and in the northern part of the county. Further rangeland conversion in the county may be slowed by severe drought, groundwater use restrictions, and increasing interest among landowners in long-term estate planning and conservation easements. The provision of rangeland ecosystem services in the county is largely contingent on both individual range management practices and an influx of more intensive agriculture. Our findings provide insight from ranchers and land managers into the nature of rangeland conversion in San Luis Obispo County and the influence of land use decisions on the provision of ecosystem services in the region.

From Degeneration to Regeneration? Inquiry into the Environmental, Social and Economic Viability of California’s Salad Bowl and Central Valley

Kyle D. Brown, Ph.D.

The counties of the San Joaquin Valley and the Central Coast of California comprise the most prolific agricultural region in the United States.  In 2012, these counties combined for over $35 Billion in gross revenue from agricultural production, much of it contributing to transnational exports (CAS Review, 2014).  At the same time, this region faces significant environmental challenges in the form of disproportionately high pollution burdens, significant social challenges associated with poverty, educational attainment, housing and political marginalization, as well as long-term economic challenges about the continued viability of production consistent with historical levels, particularly given persistent droughts and other implications of climate change.  In this paper we analyze this region through the three-part lens of sustainability, examining environmental, social and economic indicators to assess the long-term prospect for the region as a continued leader in agricultural production, and the implications for the environment and its people.  The results prompt numerous relevant questions about the continued subsidizing of agricultural exports in the face of declining water resources, the environmental consequences of such an economy, and the formation of inequalities across socio-economic categories resulting from the distribution of environmental burdens and economic opportunity.  This analysis contributes to the growing literature on cases of decline and collapse in the face of changing environmental, social, and economic conditions, and poses thoughtful discussion about regenerative futures for such communities.

The Spoils of Trans-Water Footprint Forgetfulness

Tershia d'Elgin

This presentation explores the perceived boundary between urbanized and agricultural America as seen through water, perhaps the biggest boundary issue there is. At an alarming rate, predatory cities and their agencies are shutting down our nation’s food growers by purchasing or shanghaiing agricultural water.

Multinationals, water brokers and water districts are on a tear. Consumers are unwitting collaborators. For example, Colorado’s ag-to-urban water transfers dried up 400,000 acres between 2002 and 2005. In 2006, groundwater well curtailments there hit 100,000 additional acres. Dry-ups have international environmental ramifications because Big Ag then exploits other countries’ water, land and labor.  The average American water footprint is 2000 gallons daily per person. Of these 2000 gallons, only 150 gallons-per-day are fresh water consumption. Those additional 1850 gallons come from agriculture and industry, either within or without the U.S. Purloining resources across international boundaries and with avoidable environmental impacts, food importation doubled 2003-2013. 

Industrial agriculture has many downsides, but ag-to-urban transfers remove water forever, so that farmland cannot correct its practices.  Particularly in the arid West, transfers desertify vast swaths of open space, increase global warming by subverting carbon sequestration and green-water storage, pollute water, raise sea-level, and increase flooding. These effects manifest the lack of coordination between disciplines in the face of catastrophic water scarcity and greenhouse gasses. My paper uses Imperial Valley and Colorado examples, demonstrating environmental costs. The specter of groundwater regulation  in the nation’s “fruit and vegetable basket,” the California delta, looms.

Full Presentation Panel

A Conceptual Approach to Environmental Law as a Foundation for Teaching Environmental Policy

David Driesen, J.D., M.Mus., B. Mus.

The boundary between environmental law and environmental policy is quite porous, for almost all significant environmental policies find their expression in laws. Thus, the teaching of environmental policy requires some knowledge of law. Yet, figuring out how to teach some law and what law and policy to teach poses a dilemma for policy-oriented environmental studies teachers.

This presentation highlights the possibility of using a conceptual approach to environmental law as a way of marrying the two fields in ways useful to environmental studies. It presents the conceptual framework underlying the textbook, Environmental Law:  A Conceptual and Pragmatic Approach (by Driesen, along with Robert Adler and Kirsten Engel), which some environmental studies teachers have used. Part of this conceptual framework will receive sustained scrutiny in a forthcoming article, Toward a Positive Theory of Environmental Law. Thus, the presentation will reflect the experience gained from classroom use of the earlier editions of the textbook for several years (a third edition will be published soon) as well as the preliminary research for the article.

This work reflects the methodology used to generate legal theory, which involves careful study of legal texts to produce high-level generalizations that describe the main normative commitments and dilemmas in a legal field. These generalizations identify key recurring policy issues. This approach offers a way of selecting materials for study most likely to provide a focused foundation for working with the vast and confusing array of environmental law and policy issues that environmental policy professionals must face. It also provides a means of orienting students well. 

Water, Infrastructure and Sustainability: Who Owns What Rain?

Prof. Lance Neckar, MLA

Sustainability education in a liberal arts curriculum can be focused on environmental analysis towards solutions.  One kind of pedagogy takes a transdisciplinary learning perspective on problems of interdependent systems and linked consequences in fragmented and discipline-, and legally-and financially-bounded decision structures.  The study of water and its infrastructure, the human interface with this natural resource, provides just such a distinctly powerful focus on the challenges of understanding and solving wicked environmental problems.  

What can be done in a liberal arts context to help students gain knowledge and experience toward solutions to such problems, especially here in Southern California, across so many boundaries, margins and systems?

A suite of several Environmental Analysis courses at Pitzer and the other Claremont Colleges examine water.  Two courses in the Sustainability and Built Environment track, Case Studies and Studio, sharpen this focus using design and planning experiences.  The projects and problems chosen for these courses illuminate the complexity of interdependent environmental systems and other resources such as food, energy and emissions, and other built infrastructure systems, especially transportation.  At the core of these courses are critical questions about the public realm.  How do values inform our decisions about the public realm that we share? Why do we design our infrastructure to take rain water as quickly to as possible to rivers and the ocean? How do the public and private benefits of water infrastructure mirror biodiversity, access, and environmental injustice challenges more generally? How could green infrastructure make a more sustainable and resilient commons?

In their case studies and design and planning projects, students see and then demonstrate what processes need to be adopted for more just, regenerative, integrative and place-specific policy, planning and design around water and the constellation of other systems with which this critical resource might be more carefully linked across boundaries.

Confronting Issue Borders and Disciplinary Boundaries: The Role of Environmental Studies Foundation Courses

Graham Bullock, PhD

Environmental studies and sciences programs and majors have developed over the past 50 years in large part to bring together disciplines to provide students with a more holistic understanding of environmental issues and challenges.  With some exceptions, most elective courses that count for environmental studies credit are nevertheless still firmly grounded in disciplinary perspectives and lack significant interdisciplinary content.  In order to provide such content to their students, environmental studies programs have designed foundation courses that are designed to highlight the connections across disciplines and address the gaps between them.   Often required courses for environmental studies majors and minors and designed to cover a wide range of theoretical concepts, research methods, and environmental knowledge, these courses are in many ways at the front line of efforts to confront the boundaries and borders that impede society’s – and academia’s – ability to both understand and solve serious environmental problems, from local biodiversity loss to global climate change.  Conceptualizing these foundation courses as “boundary objects” that have the ability to both enable and regulate communication across institutional and theoretical borders, this paper explores the strategies that these courses have used to transcend the boundaries between disciplines and issue domains.  Using a case study approach, the paper analyzes the content of several environmental studies foundation courses from a diverse set of colleges and universities.  It also provides a more in-depth analysis of the process of designing and teaching an environmental social sciences foundation course at Davidson College, which highlights the challenges of confronting different types of boundaries simultaneously.  The paper concludes with a set of recommendations regarding the development of environmental studies foundation courses and a discussion of areas for future research on this important form of “boundary work.”

Full Presentation Panel

Environmentalists have become adept at critiquing society's prevailing direction. Large-scale, accelerating ecological decline is a telling sign, they say, that we are on the wrong path. But what does a sustainable transition look like? And what precisely will it take to put the world on such a path? It feels sometimes as though contemporary environmentalism is long on assessment but short on vision. If people are to take seriously the challenge of crafting a more humane, more resilient world, it must ultimately be on the back of compelling, achievable visions of our shared future. Where is one to look for inspiration? Science fiction authors have long concerned themselves with the effects of human actions on the earth's living systems. From richly-drawn eco-topian visions to prophecies of large-scale ecological collapse, speculative fiction offers a panoramic vista of future worlds. It also offers tools and ideas that can be used in our classrooms to engage students (often disillusioned by a world that seems stuck on a single track). As people strive at this crucial moment to produce a new ecological imaginary, never has the power of this "last great literature of ideas" to offer fresh insights and powerful visions of our future been so welcome, nor so important. The papers on this panel will delve into speculative fiction, to see what this literary tradition has to teach not just about the world's present environmental condition, but also about alternative futures, and about the kinds of actions that might get us from here to there.

Full Presentation Panel

Modern Global Feminism and Environmental Awareness: A Logical Union

Sarah M Johnson, MA

This paper addresses the necessary connection between transnational feminism and pro-environmental behavior as the most logical step forward to increasing women’s rights all over the world.  We cannot study the environmental crisis without noting the injustices suffered by the poorest global citizens.  Nor is it possible to decouple that poverty from environmental instability, and its most likely recipient: women.  In most societies throughout the world women’s social realities are not identical to men’s.  Generally speaking, women have fewer resources, less access to the highest paying jobs in any given society, and unfortunately, fewer societal resources to protect and shield them from the grim realities of poverty.  Thus, it is women who tend to suffer more in times of economic crisis, at least when compared to the lives of men.  Additionally, environmental instability increases the risk of any nation experiencing an economic downward turn, and in particular, agriculturalist societies in which the stability of the climate is the determinant of agricultural yields and thus, survival.  It is well documented that the carbon emissions from industry in the developed world has rendered the global climate unpredictable.  Therefore, it is the working logic of this paper that (1) as modern feminists, we must closely scrutinize our ecological footprint, our consumptive behavior, and our desire to consume, especially as it relates to the perpetuation of poverty and thus, inequality for women all over the world, and (2) as women’s studies educators, or sociologists of gender, we must begin to critically examine our own behavior and bring a healthy dose of this attitude with us into the classroom as role models.

The Polar Archives of Anna Schwartz

Judit Hersko

his performance lecture examines polar exploration and science in the Arctic and the Antarctic through the fictitious archives of an unknown, female explorer, Anna Schwartz. The narratives as well as the objects in the archive build on real events including the biographies of women associated with polar exploration. The presentation reflects on the exclusion of women, as well as Arctic natives, from the official history of exploration and science in the Polar Regions and connects this exclusion to the heroic imaginary of the polar landscape. From whaling for baleen used in Victorian corsets to current climate change science this layered narrative explores a feminist aesthetic of loss in the era of the Anthropocene. It also suggests alternative approaches to studying and relating to the nonhuman world.

Anna Schwartz is a photographer and a naturalist obsessed with the microscopic and transparent planktonic snail the Limacina helicina and its predator the Clione limacina. Her intimate relationship with these tiny creatures is in contrast to the heroic notions of exploration of her day, while ironically, her focus on the minute and invisible layers of the landscape is more relevant to current research in polar science. These planktonic snails, studied by my scientific collaborators, function as canaries in the coalmine when it comes to ocean acidification - one of the most insidious aspects of anthropogenic climate change that is rapidly altering the food chain and ecology of the oceans. Even the shells of live planktonic snails dissolve under acidity levels predicted for the near future. These effects are occurring much more rapidly than previously expected in all regions (including the California coast) but especially so in the cold waters of high latitudes such as the Polar oceans.

Assessing Student Attitudes toward Environmental Science and Environmental Problems: Is there a Gender Gap?

Lydia A. Dixon

Research suggests that women are more likely than men to rate environmental concerns highly (e.g., Zelezny, Chua, & Aldrich, 2000). Less explored are differences in how men and women think about the complexity of environmental problems. This research presents data from a survey of students enrolled in courses in the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012-2013. Questions captured student attitudes towards and awareness of complexity of environmental problems and views on learning environmental studies. Students used a five-point Likert scale to rate their agreement or disagreement with statements on the role of science, policy, and values in addressing environmental problems and the importance of using quantitative, communication, and integrative skills in learning. Preliminary analysis indicates that women agree more strongly with statements that highlight the scientific, policy, and values oriented complexity of solutions to environmental problems, while men agreed more strongly with statements that suggested science should direct policy-making, and decisions should not be made without scientific certainty. On learning, men preferred to learn environmental science through more traditional scientific methods, such as solving equations, analyzing diagrams, and taking examinations. Women preferred interactive approaches, including giving presentations and engaging in dialogue with the instructor. Results suggest that men have more confidence in using science in problem-solving. Women view environmental problems as complex and are less confident in science as the primary solution to problems. These results suggest that instructors may wish to consider diverse strategies for student engagement to capture the strengths of both male and female students. Similarly, assignments should aim to develop both scientific competency and appreciation of complexity inherent in environmental problems.

Full Presentation Panel

The challenging and rewarding relationship between urban forestry and interdisciplinary environmental studies programs

Jessica M. Vogt, Ph.D.

Urban forests – or trees and vegetation in the cities, towns, and communities where people live and work – produce numerous benefits (ecosystem services), including decreased urban temperatures, improved air quality, and stormwater management. The study of urban forests and practice of managing these forests aim to understand the how trees and their benefits are produced and maintained over time. Urban forestry and the related field of arboriculture (which focuses on single-tree maintenance and hazard management) are relatively little known outside of the forestry and horticulture programs in which these fields were developed. However, urban forests are best understood as social-ecological systems of linked human and natural components (Vogt & Fischer 2014; Mincey et al. 2012), and research on urban forests has begun to use interdisciplinary environmental science methods and theory is beginning to become more common. This presentation examines where urban forestry programs occur within traditional schools of forestry and horticulture, trade schools, and interdisciplinary environmental science programs. We survey leaders of forestry and horticulture programs listed in databases maintained by the International Society of Arboriculture (the trade and professional organization for the discipline) and U.S. Forest Service State and Private Forestry Regional Coordinators, as well as the general population of educators in the broader fields of natural resource management and environmental sciences/studies. The survey focuses on the location of formal and informal urban forestry programs within higher education, the challenges that urban forestry faces as an interdisciplinary field, and the approach to incorporating concepts from other disciplines into urban forestry program curriculum. Results are framed within the context of a professional urban forestry curriculum accreditation program.

Neighborhood and Nonprofit Urban Forestry Frontiers: Results of a 5-City Study

Dr. Sarah K. Mincey, PhD

Trees in urban areas provide ecological, economic, and social benefits to urban residents, and urban communities may plant trees with the intent of increasing these benefits. Few studies have examined the success of urban trees in the ecological and social context in which they are planted and grow. And even fewer have considered potential social benefits to community groups who partake in tree planting. This presentation will discuss the results of a 5-city study of urban nonprofit tree-planting programs. We gathered extensive data about tree planting projects occurring in neighborhoods between 2009 and 2011 in cooperation with 5 nonprofit members of Alliance for Community Trees: Trees Atlanta (GA), The Greening of Detroit (MI), Keep Indianapolis Beautiful (IN), Pennsylvania Horticultural Society (Philadelphia, PA), and Forest ReLeaf of Missouri (St. Louis, MO). This study collected information about the planted trees and their growing environment using the Planted Tree Re-Inventory Protocol and about maintenance practices and other community dynamics gathered through interviews and surveys of residents in neighborhoods in which trees were planted. By using a unique multi-city dataset that combines information on planted trees, nonprofit programs, individual planting projects, land use, and neighborhoods and neighborhood residents, this presentation will start to answer two questions: (1) What factors influence the survival of recently-planted urban trees? and (2) What are the social outcomes of participation in neighborhood and nonprofit tree planting for the community?

Looking up and out: Finding food security beyond gardens and cultivars in the city

Patrick Hurley, Ph.D.

As scholars and practitioners continue to explore ways to improve urban food security, an oft overlooked component is the city’s urban forest and the ways this existing, unintentional food-producing ecological feature can support the food needs of diverse populations. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the urban forests in New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, we discuss insights gained from examining the species diversity, food potential of these species, and harvesting practices by diverse individuals in these three cities.   

"Border Crossings" Through Urban Gardening

Sister Damien Marie Savino, Ph.D.

Urban gardens are expanding across the country as a way of growing food, improving the environment, and enriching community life in urban environments. The University of St. Thomas is a small Catholic liberal arts university located in the heart of Houston, Texas, where thousands of refugees from around the world are settled each year. Early in 2010, the Environmental Science and Studies Department at the University identified an opportunity to “green” the campus by constructing an urban garden on a vacant lot at the edge of campus. The development of the campus garden began with the building and planting of the first raised beds in the Fall of 2010 by undergraduate students in an Authentic Development and Sustainability class. In 2012, the Department was approached by an alumnus of the university who had founded a group called Plant It Forward Farms (PIFF). PIFF is dedicated to training Congolese refugees how to farm in Houston and locating urban garden plots for them to farm in order to grow their own businesses and support their families. In the spring of 2013, the university began an innovative program in which a partnership between PIFF and the University was established and a Congolese farmer was placed at the university community vegetable garden. In consultation with the Department of Environmental Science and Studies, the garden plots were significantly expanded, as were native flower gardens surrounding the garden plots. A small section was developed by a local student into a meditation area. This presentation describes the “frontiers” and different types of borders that have been crossed as the University has collaborated with the Congolese farmer and his family to bring students for service work at the garden and to open a farmer’s market on campus.  

Full Presentation Panel

Difficult-to-predict shocks or disturbances could disrupt food production or distribution severely enough to set in motion a breakdown of food supply. The risk of serious shortfalls, whether on a local or larger scale, shorter or longer period, is of genuine concern. Cities are particularly vulnerable. It’s difficult to get a clear grip on this topic because the food system is so complex, and failure could take forms never seen before, but the stakes are high. A collection of articles in JESS is framing this issue to clarify what environmental scientists and teachers can do through research, education, or community action to contribute to a more resilient food system. This session will focus on:
•    What are vulnerabilities in the food system due to climate change?
•    What are leverage points for reducing the risks?

Gerry Marten, An overview of the JESS special issue on American food resilience

The JESS special issue on American Food Resilience is about food system vulnerability to shocks that lead to serious disruption in food supply.  For example, drought in Australia – in combination with diversion of U.S. corn production to ethanol, an increase in the international oil price, and the 2008 mortgage crisis and ensuing recession – set in motion a chain of effects in international food markets that doubled the price of basic food commodities within a year and led to food riots in 65 nations. This presentation will review significant sources of risk and explain how the special issue on American Food Resilience explores ways to improve food system reliability in the face of such risks – setting the scene for examining the implications of climate change from this perspective.

Laura Lengnick, The vulnerability of the U.S. food system to climate change

The climate change vulnerability of a system is a function of exposure to specific climate effects, sensitivity to those effects, and the capacity to adapt to those effects in order to maintain system integrity. The widely-recognized environmental, social, and economic harms of the U.S. industrial food system contribute to global warming and degrade the adaptive capacity of the nation. According to Dr. Lengnick’s recent book “Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate,” the geographic concentration and specialization of agricultural production in the U.S. increases food system vulnerability to climate change effects, as does our dependence on imports of fruits, vegetables and seafood to augment domestic food supplies. The interactions between food production geography and regional climate change effects create unprecedented challenges to agriculture, particularly in Pacific Coast, Midwest and southern states where much of the U.S food supply is produced. Farmers and ranchers report that more variable weather, more frequent and intense drought and flooding, longer seasons, increased competition for water supplies, and novel pest management challenges are increasing the costs and complexity of food production throughout the country. The cost of federal agricultural support for industrial agriculture, including federally-subsidized insurance and disaster programs, is on the rise and is projected to increase in cost and importance as a climate risk management tool in coming years. The U.S. industrial food system’s overemphasis on investments in technology, efficiency, and recovery reserves at the expense of natural, human, and social response capacity presents significant barriers to effective climate change adaptation.

Dan Keppen, The 2014 drought and water management policy impacts on California's Central Valley food production

California’s Central Valley is responsible for approximately 30% of the nation’s fruit and vegetable production. In 2014 California experienced one of its worst droughts in 160 years of record keeping. Early in the year, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation announced an initial zero water allocation for Central Valley Project irrigation service contractors. The impact on food producers was devastating. Many farmers fallowed their fields because there was not enough water to meet their needs. Many crops were not grown in the same quantities normally seen in California, and citrus and nut-tree groves (e.g. almonds) were ripped out. Why did this disaster happen? From the perspective of someone who works for farm communities directly impacted by such a breakdown, this presentation will identify the primary lines of water-related risk in the Central Valley food system, describe what is being done to try to reduce the risks, and offer ideas for further reducing the risks and improving the capacity to cope with breakdowns. 

Michelle Miller, The power of story for adaptive response: Marshaling individual and collective initiative to create more resilient and sustainable food systems

Full Presentation Panel

The Environmental Leadership Program (ELP), housed in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, is a service-learning program that provides students an opportunity to apply classroom knowledge and skills to address local environmental issues. We focus on professional, leadership, communication and collaboration skills. Undergraduate students work directly with graduate students, local residents, agencies, non-profit organizations, and businesses to gain applied skills. During the 2012-13 and 2013-14 academic years, we offered the year-long MyMcKenzie Learning Initiative, which involved developing a set of interdisciplinary and complementary courses and service-learning projects focused on our local watershed. In this panel we will describe how we used our watershed as a framework to integrate the natural sciences, social sciences and environmental humanities to cultivate a strong sense of place and a deep commitment to stewardship and civic engagement. We will share lessons learned regarding project design and implementation, academic rigor and reflection, and quality control.  We will explore how service-learning can provide students with practical field and writing skills, an introduction to restoration knowledge, and experience working collaboratively in a team-based setting, while also providing useful products to our community partners. We will share how we approached integrating environmental humanities and service-learning, and we’ll share lessons we’ve learned in implementing collaborative, community-based environmental education projects, including project development strategies, structure of teams, funding mechanisms, evaluation tools and learning outcomes.

Kathryn A. Lynch

Environmental Leadership Program, University of Oregon

klynch@uoregon.edu

The MyMcKenzie Learning Initiative

The University of Oregon’s Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) is a service-learning program that provides students an opportunity to apply classroom knowledge and skills to address local environmental issues. We focus on professional, leadership, communication and collaboration skills. Undergraduate students work directly with graduate students, local residents, agencies, non-profit organizations, and businesses to gain applied skills. During the 2012-13 and 2013-14 academic years, we offered the year-long MyMcKenzie Learning Initiative, which involved developing a set of interdisciplinary and complementary courses and service-learning projects focused on our local watershed. As part of this initiative, we created a new interdisciplinary course, Understanding Place: the McKenzie Watershed, which served as the foundational course for the year. This class created an opportunity for students to develop a sense of place (which was an end goal in itself) but also prepared them for their spring service-learning projects. The course incorporated six field trips that took us from the headwaters to the confluence, where we explored lava flows, springs, dams, hatcheries, restoration projects, historical sites and more to gain insights regarding ecological and human communities. Through guest speakers, we heard various perspectives on Indigenous and Euro-American cultures, socio-economic issues, water quality and use, dam management, salmon restoration and land use. We contemplated what contributes to a sense of place, and how it influences people’s worldviews and choices. By design, this course was interdisciplinary: we applied multiple perspectives from the social sciences, natural sciences and humanities to gain a deeper understanding of the McKenzie. Although we focused on a single watershed, we learned about complex issues – salmon, water, rural economies – that ripple throughout the Pacific Northwest. In this introductory presentation, we will describe how we organized the 3-course community-based framework as well as specific details on the Understanding Place course.

Peg Boulay

Environmental Leadership Program, University of Oregon

boulay@uoregon.edu

MyMcKenzie: Stream Stewardship Projects 

Within the MyMcKenzie Initiative, we supervised five natural science teams focused on restoration planning and monitoring. Our community partners were the McKenzie Watershed Council, U.S. Forest Service, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, McKenzie River Trust and Whitewater Ranch. The Stream Stewardship Teams (2013, 2014) surveyed for and controlled invasive plants, monitored riparian plantings, measured stream channel morphology, conducted fish surveys, characterized vegetative communities, planned a 5-acre restoration project, and wrote a detailed grant proposal. The River Restoration Team (2014) collected inventory data and made management recommendations to inform a future floodplain restoration planning process. The students surveyed fish, amphibian and invertebrate populations using a variety of methods. They also used Global Positioning System units and aerial photos to created detailed maps of side channel and levee locations. This team had the remarkable opportunity to work side-by-side with 6 professionals (4 biologists, 1 hydrologist and 1 geologist). The Sustainable Farms Team (2014) created a management plan for a degraded creek located on a private ranch. The students conducted an historic analysis and site assessment; interviewed the landowner and land manager; collected baseline data on soils, vegetation, stream channel morphology, and fish populations; evaluated opportunities and constraints; and planned conceptual restoration activities. In this presentation, I will share lessons learned regarding successful project design and implementation, academic rigor and reflection, and quality control. I will describe how service-learning can provide students with practical field and writing skills, an introduction to restoration knowledge, and experience working collaboratively in a team-based setting, while also providing useful products to our community partner.

Aylie Baker

Environmental Leadership Program, University of Oregon

aylieb@uoregon.edu

MyMcKenzie: River Stories Projects

Within the MyMcKenzie Initiative, we developed two service-learning projects called “River Stories” that integrated photography, video, and oral histories. The River Stories Teams (2013, 2014) worked in collaboration with the McKenzie River Drift Boat Museum to document and archive the cultural history of the McKenzie River. The teams explored questions of how the stories we tell about a place impact the way we feel about it and the way we take care of it, and how stories bring us into community with others. Using video and photography, they captured the experiences and insights of river guides, boat builders, fishermen and women, conservation advocates and others, with the goal of preserving this unique heritage for future generations and promoting stewardship of the river. Our goal was for students to become critical media consumers and critical media makers – to really grapple with how the stories we hear and tell influence the larger, lived stories of communities on the ground. With a foundation in media gathering and production, students set out to capture the world around them, and returning to the classroom were tasked with the challenge of representing that complex and tangled world in a way that reaches others. This act of “world-making” exposes students to different knowledges and ways of seeing a shared world. The act of sharing stories locally, in their place of origin, challenges students to present stories in a way that both honors the tellers and sheds light on those diverse, and not always aligning, perspectives that together expand our ideas of what is possible and important in our communities. In this discussion we will share how we approached integrating environmental humanities and service-learning, and we’ll share lessons learned regarding developing and implementing these types of learning opportunities.

Jenny Crayne

Environmental Leadership Program, University of Oregon

jcrayne@uoregon.edu

MyMcKenzie: Environmental Education Projects 

Within the MyMcKenzie Initiative, we created three different service-learning projects that focused on providing high-quality environmental education (EE) programs for local youth that strengthen their connection to the place they live, and inspire stewardship of the McKenzie River. The Critters & Currents Team (2014) worked with students at Adams Elementary, focusing on the McKenzie River and its importance as our sole source of drinking water. Ten undergraduates developed and implemented this place-based curriculum that emphasized empathy for and awareness of the McKenzie River with the intention of motivating students to become involved in the stewardship of the river. The curriculum included classroom visits and field trips for the entire school. The X-Stream Team (2013) also developed an experiential, place-based curriculum for Adams Elementary that focused on the McKenzie watershed. A series of hands-on, interactive classroom lessons and field trips to the McKenzie River provided the children an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of where they live, and the importance of conservation and stewardship. Field trips included stewardship activities, such as mulching 300 planted trees, in collaboration with the McKenzie River Trust. The Canopy Connections Team (2013) collaborated with the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and Pacific Tree Climbing Institute, to develop and facilitate a unique field trip experience -- one that gave middle-schoolers an opportunity to climb into the canopy of an old-growth forest. The curriculum focused on forest ecology and watershed structure. Activities included learning to read topographic maps, building watershed models, treasure hunting for decomposers, and journaling, among others. This discussion will share lessons we’ve learned in implementing these collaborative, community-based environmental education projects, including project development strategies, structure of teams, funding mechanisms, evaluation tools and learning outcomes.

Discussion Symposium

This session will be an open discussion of  America’s Future: Environmental Research and Education for a Thriving Century: A Decadal Vision for Environmental Research and Education at NSF. It will follow the plenary presentation of this report of NSF's Advisory Committee on Environmental Research and Education. AESS Board Members will be present as discussants, and all conference participants are invited to discuss the report, opportunities for implementation at NSF and the implications for their programs.

Discussion Symposium

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), under its authority of the Clean Air Act, has proposed a Clean Power Plan to ensure large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions through a variety of low-carbon, renewable energy and energy efficiency technology options.  A variety of research groups have provided comments and detailed assessments which point to significant economic and social benefits from this proposed rulemaking. Economic and Human Dimensions Research Associates, for example, issued an assessment for the Environmental Defense Fund noting that, if the EPA rulemaking stimulated a 20 percent improvement in the efficient use of electricity, that productivity benefit could result in a cumulative net energy bill savings of $380 billion over the period 2014 through 2030. Moreover, the transition to a more energy-efficient economy might also drive a net gain of 800,000 new jobs for the U.S. economy even as it also reduces carbon pollution by 971 million metric tons, and sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides by 700,000 and 800,000 tons, respectively. This panel will examine: (a) the broader economic and advanced technology implications of this proposed rulemaking, (b) the role of executive policymaking in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and (c) potential implications for educational curricula in advancing both the social and economic benefits of clean air and climate change policies within the United States.  Brief opening remarks will be followed by ample time for discussion.

Full Presentation Panel

Factors Impacting Urban Energy Use – Micro Climates and Patterns of Habitation

Prof. Yehuda L. Klein, Ph.D.

UHI (Urban Heat Island) is often measured using weather station data. In our work we harness data generated by millions of air conditioning users during peak ambient temperature months. Our examination of urban and suburban energy use in the greater New York area yields a clear pattern of UHI based energy use; summer evening energy use shows a secondary peak in urban areas that persists almost until the dawn. In suburban areas summer night energy use is either flat or drops precipitously.

Patterns of habitation vary from urban to suburban regions. Essential differences include housing density, the size of individual housing units, and percent of impervious surfaces.  Relative to adjacent suburbs, urban areas are more densely populated, with smaller housing units and more impervious surfaces. Per capita income is lower as well.  Since household energy consumption is driven by both per capita income and patterns of habitation, we would expect urban energy consumption to be less relative to suburban areas.  

In this study we examine the relationship of energy use to cooling degree days and population in urban and suburban areas. We consider energy use in the greater New York Metropolitan area to illuminate the impacts of urban density, population, affluence and the built environment on energy use.

As urban areas in the north-east evolve into a continuous urban center stretching from Washington DC to Boston, understanding how different patterns of habitation may correlate to energy use and challenges to electric distribution can mitigate the inevitable infrastructure overload. In this work we strive to identify urban morphology, demographic and energy use relationships that can inform more resilient urban and suburban development.

Beyond city limits: Influencing a global urban agenda

Alisa Zomer

Cities are increasingly acknowledged as important sites for sustainable development at a global scale. Mayors are perceived as having the right mix of authority and flexibility to take action on complex sustainability issues, such as climate change. At the same time, the formalization of a global urban agenda through the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, Habitat III, and other parallel processes raises fundamental tensions about participation and representation in urban planning decisions. This paper explores the participatory mechanisms available to influence the global urban agenda, with a specific focus on urban environment and climate change issues. Based on evidence from international proceedings, archival analysis, and semi-structured interviews, research findings show that there is a disconnect between advocacy groups and agendas at the international and city-scales. In particular, environment and climate organizations at the international scale are not coordinated with established social and economic urban movements, such as affordable housing, labor, and public health. As a result, emerging tenets of urban sustainability at the global level fail to account for complex social realities and increasing inequality at the city scale. Furthermore, this disconnect distorts lines of accountability and authority by moving urban decision-making beyond city borders and the people who live there. Factors that exacerbate this gap include institutional barriers to entry, including complicated rule proceeding, exclusionary networks, technocratic jargon, and limited capacity and resources. Drawing from environmental governance and urban climate planning theories, this paper identifies challenges and opportunities for the development of a participatory global urban agenda in order to better reflects local priorities in cities.

Urban Responses to Climate Change

Kimberly Lucke

This presentation explores urban responses to challenges produced by a changing climate and how these responses are shared between urban areas through out the United States and internationally. Climate change is an issue that crosses all borders and is therefore of global importance especially in cities because urban areas—known contributors to climate change—are vulnerable to challenges posed by a changing climate. According to the United Nations, urban areas will become hosts to more than 70% of the world’s population by 2050 with the fastest rate of urbanization occurring in the Global South. Climate change threatens the stability and quality of urban living, particularly for vulnerable communities who will be disproportionately affected by expected increased temperatures, increased/decreased precipitation events, increased intensity of storm events, increased occurrence of infectious disease, energy crises and increasingly unstable food systems. Therefore, it is imperative for cities to develop both mitigation and adaptation strategies that effectively deal with current and predicted climate change impacts. I suggest that, given the complexity and uncertainty related to climate change impacts, cities must develop a dialogue to share best practices and resources. I will present a comparative analysis of four United States metropolitan region climate plans, with a specific focus on how effectively local level action is in creating and instituting climate change plans. I will also share my findings on the importance of an international dialogue from my attendance at the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference. This presentation is valuable because climate change is an issue that crosses all borders and yet action to mitigate and adapt to it are hindered by these very borders. Finding a way to communicate mitigation and adaptation strategies with others is essential for the future livability of our densely populated cities. 

Mealtime Roundtable

Recent AESS conferences have experimented with incorporating the environmental arts in a variety of ways.  One idea gaining interest is a proposal to create a lifetime achievement award in the environmental arts.  This roundtable will invite AESS members to help us imagine what such an award process might look like and how it might contribute to the conference and to AESS. We hope this conversation can serve as a springboard for a broader conversation about how best to incorporate the arts into the AESS conference.

Mealtime Roundtable

Food, Energy and Water will be the theme of 2016 National Conference and Global Forum on Science. Policy and the Environment, organized by the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE). This discussion will be an opoortunity for AESS members to become engaged and provide input on the conference agenda.

Full Presentation Panel

This panel discussion brings together people who have crossed that invisible yet real boundary between campus and community, by design, with their environmental studies courses. This boundary-crossing goes by many names — community based learning, service learning, experiential learning, and place based learning — which indeed have real theoretical differences, but in practice have similar learning goals and challenges. Particularly in the context of interdisciplinary environmental studies courses, these goals often include: helping students concretize global/abstract environmental issues through the lens of their immediate community; illustrating complexity through confronting a real-life interdisciplinary problem; exercising problem-solving skills; learning by doing; meeting a need(s) for a community organization or public entity; and building campus-community goodwill. Challenges we have encountered include: building community trust; maintaining momentum beyond any given semester; and allowing our students (and ourselves!) to struggle with unpredictability, unfinished projects, an unanticipated consequences. Panelists will draw upon their own experiences and empirical findings to critically reflect on what has and has not worked (pedagogically and logistically), both in the classroom and with the community. These personal and institutional experiences will serve as a conceptual guide for others interested in designing these types of courses and learning experiences. 

Key questions panelists will address include:

What are the challenges that arise when we make the community our classroom? 

How can we as instructors navigate the inherent unpredictability from having our students design and implement a project with a community partner?

Challenges & opportunities of community based learning: Using a ‘consultant’ model in a capstone course

Jane L. Wolfson, Towson University

The ‘consultant’ model, as used here, describes developing a capstone project based on receiving a request, from a professional in the community, for students to address a ‘real’ community-based problem; the professional is seeking the intellectual ‘person-power’ of the students to address an issue for which they need help.  A project so created is challenging for all concerned since 1) it can fall outside of the professor’s area of expertise; 2) students have had no input into the project selection and different students in the class have more or less interest in the topic; 3) the community partner needs to understand the limitations of the product produced.  It presents great learning opportunities in that 1) employees often don’t select the projects they are given by their employers; 2) interest and intellectual mastery can expand with exposure to new topics; 3) students realize the inherent complexity of local issues and the challenges of developing a suite of viable solutions.  Specific experiences will be discussed to illustrate these challenges, in addition to strategies I have used to address them.

Land Use Controversy and the Politics of Student Activism

Seaton Tarrant, University of Florida

This presentation presents a case study on the course Politics of Sustainability using content analysis of open-ended interviews with upper level sustainability students at the University of Florida. Students in Politics of Sustainability worked with Alachua Conservation Trust, recipient of the land conservation trust of the year award, 2013, to investigate the multiple communication strategies of these land developers, and produce and disseminate pamphlets to the public that attempt to more clearly communicate what is at stake, along with clarifying the interests of the different vested parties. They attended public hearings as observers and participants. They met with local stakeholders and community leadership to discuss what is going on behind the curtain of public image. The presentation will present two pedagogical responses to common challenges in the ES classroom. First, how to extend the impact of community work across semesters and student teams through online repositories and student responsibility for documenting and passing down workflow; I call this strategy “delayed collaboration”. Second, how to build up to the needed student skills in communication and organization through what I call “tiered experiential learning,” which presents students with multiple, increasingly complex learning environments over the course of the semester. Attendees of my presentation will leave with a better sense of how action research and experiential learning can empower students in environmental studies courses to make a difference in their communities, and they will better understand how to actualize the productive tension between learning and advocacy, through practicing traditional liberal arts skills in critical and reflective thinking.

Partnerships for Community-Engaged Learning in Sustainable Urban Agriculture; a Model for Strong Institutional Support

Julie A Maxson, Metropolitan State University

Metropolitan State University was founded in 1971 with a commitment to community-based learning at the core of its mission.  The university serves urban, primarily adult learners in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN.  The combination of the university’s location in a low-income neighborhood on St. Paul’s east side, and its established culture of community-engaged pedagogy has created a remarkable range of opportunities for fruitful partnerships between our nascent Environmental Science and Environmental Studies programs and local community organizations.  Our community partners focus on environmental quality, public health, and food security, all issues of interest to our students.

This presentation will focus on the role of institutional support structures in two new partnership projects.  In the first partnership, university students and faculty work with Urban Roots, a neighborhood non-profit organization that hires urban youth for summer internships in urban farming, from soil preparation to farmers market sales. Environmental Science students assess soil fertility and test for lead and arsenic contamination of urban soils, and present an informal soil science curriculum for the youth interns. The second project, which is much larger in scope, involves planning the renovation and re-use of a shuttered research greenhouse.  The goal of

this project is to develop a center for sustainable urban agriculture, with combined use for academic programs, educational outreach, and community organizations involved in urban agriculture.

Confronting the Boundaries of a Curriculum: Core competencies, program assessment, and the management of an MS program in Sustainability Studies

Keith McDade

Lenoir-Rhyne University recently established a new MS degree in Sustainability Studies at the Center for Graduate Studies of Asheville, NC.   This paper analyzes 1) core competencies developed by students, 2) community perspectives on student learning, and 3) reflections by faculty on the extent to which the program, now in its third year, is meeting its objectives.  The MS program combines courses in sustainability science with business decision-making, economics, public policy, sustainable energy and material use, environmental policy, research, and community planning.  At the center of the curriculum is a grounding in sustainability behavior, education and communication. The program requires a student-designed and -led Master’s project with a community partner that functions like a small experiment to advance sustainability.  Analysis of this MS program is conducted using i) tools designed for program assessment, ii) a series of observations, and iii) results from course project surveys.  The paper details lessons learned and ways in which the program is being adaptively managed, responding to feedback, changing conditions, and a constantly morphing field.  Also explored are challenges related to the assessment of the program at the system level. 

Discussion Symposium

Following the theme of this year’s conference, this symposium confronts the boundaries of science and society to better understand the roles played by researchers, decision makers at different scales of management, and community stakeholders.  How can the integrity of these roles be maintained so that open dialogues and continuous progress can be sustained in addressing environmental issues.  As a symposium, this session aims to offer a focused discussion of specific elements of boundary organizations (need for boundary organization, challenges, organizational structure, stakeholder communication, object creation) as a group.  Specific questions include: 

• What are examples of boundary organizations, how they are defined, structured and funded?
• What is the need for boundary organizations that cannot be fulfilled by other organizations?
• How do the missions of the research agencies, funding agencies, and stakeholders differ? How are all the objectives met?
• How is two-way communication most effectively achieved between researchers and stakeholders?
• What boundary objects are created? How are they used?  How are they generalized for broader impacts?
• What professional incentives are provided for researchers to undertake boundary work?
• How does boundary work advise policy while still ensuring scientific integrity? 

Discussion Symposium

Many ESS faculty, students and staff are often called upon to be the campus “sustainability expert”.  This panel will explore how sustainability intersects with ESS in academic programming, curricular and co-curricular development.  How should the sustainability curriculum differ from the ESS curriculum?  What does sustainability programming add to ESS?  What are areas for overlap and synergetic collaboration?  What are tensions and contradictions?  Panelists will be called on to share lessons learned, common pitfalls and practical guidance in program development. 

Full Presentation Panel

Energy Democracy in America? Competing Imaginaries of Sustainable Energy Transitions

James E. Wilcox

Energy Democracy is an emerging discourse that offers an alternative vision of energy systems governance and operation that challenges the existing paradigm of centralized generation and oversight. In this paper, I draw on three years of empirical research in New York and concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies to map the conceptual, political, and infrastructural terrain in which nascent calls for energy democracy are situated. I trace the emergence of energy democracy discourses in New York; explore how questions of social and environmental justice are framed and addressed in energy democracy initiatives; and identify tensions between a focus on 'procedural' and 'operational' energy democracy. I argue that innovation in institutional designs and hybrid forms of expertise are needed to advance energy democracy from discursive to material reality

Sustainability: Global Population, Wealth Distribution, & Energy

Dr. John Wickham

“Sustainability creates and maintains the conditions under which humans and nature can exist in productive harmony that permits fulfilling the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations.” (EPA)

This EPA definition raises several questions: 1) what are the social and economic requirements of the global population - how should wealth be distributed? 2) what are the energy requirements for an economically sustainable world by 2100? 3) Can nuclear and renewable energy replace fossil fuels to avoid disastrous climate change?

The existing global population is projected to reach ~11 billion by 2100. Currently, differences in standard of living are extreme: 8% of the global population owns 79% of the wealth while 68% owns 4.2%. At present, we do not live in an economically sustainable world.

If the developing countries attain the standard of living of the developed countries, it will take a lot of energy. The existing population of developing countries needs 6 times their present energy consumption to attain the standard of living of the developed world.

Where will the energy come from as the global population increases to 11 billion? The traditional energy resources (nuclear and fossil fuels) can supply that energy through 2100 at the expense of climate change and nuclear security. Investment in renewable energy does not come close to meeting the energy needs of a sustainable world by 2100. Currently, we invest about $200 billion/year in renewables. To meet the energy demands of a sustainable population in 2100, we need an annual investment of $1 trillion/year starting today.

Without significantly reducing global wealth inequality and greenhouse gasses, increasing global population and climate change is like a slow-motion train wreck that will crush humans in the lifetime of our children and grandchildren.

Revisiting the Democratic Case for Environmental Offset Markets

Devin Judge-Lord

In their influential 1988 article “Reforming Environmental Law: The Democratic Case for Market Incentives” Bruce Ackerman and Richard Stewart proposed wider use of environmental offset markets, not just because economists hypothesized it would be more efficient regulation, but because these two prominent legal scholars hypothesized it would be good for democratic discourse. This article reviews Ackerman and Stewart’s proposal in light of decades of experience with these ideas—from SO2 trading to wetland banking to carbon, habitat, and water quality credits. It finds that, in retrospect, offset markets did not unfold as Ackerman and Stewart suggested and that we may still be looking in the wrong places for opportunities for public participation. An overview of the development of eight different kinds of markets supports two arguments about broadening participation in offset market design. First, instead of focusing democratic engagement on the cap and leaving the trading rules to technical experts, evidence suggests instead focusing on participation in making the rules of trading and leaving numerical caps to experts. Second, because caps can be seen as subsidiary functions of larger landscape and economic planning, stakeholder engagement in planning can offer indirect democratic accountability to caps. Additionally, by examining 48 cases of water quality trading programs in the U.S., this article identifies characteristics of offset markets that might affect participation in market design. 

Full Presentation Panel

Frontiers in Environmental Psychology: Views from the Ivory Tower and the Green Tower

Thomas Joseph Doherty, Psy.D.

This presentation provides an orientation to environmental psychology for a general environmental studies audience. It also applies a “frontiers, borders and boundaries” perspective to the field of environmental psychology to reveal diversity amongst its subcultures and discourses. This has implications for understanding differing psychological worldviews regarding humans' place in nature, and competing approaches to solving environmental issues, found in other fields and in society at large.

Approaches within psychology that address human-environment relations, restorative effects of nature, and interventions regarding environmental health, behavior, conservation, and sustainability will be described. These include the traditional environmental psychology of built and natural landscapes, conservation psychology, ecopsychology, etc. Examples of environmental psychology in action include addressing environmental concerns or despair in the general public, facilitating nature based psychotherapies, promoting conservation behaviors in organizations, and developing the theory and research base regarding the psychological impacts of global climate change.

Much like the environmental movement, environmental psychology has expert/scientific subcultures and more grassroots and holistic subcultures, symbolized by the images of the "Ivory Tower" and the "Green Tower." The presenter will share experience and anecdotes from various professional roles in environmental psychology as a clinical psychologist, organizational consultant, educator, journal editor, and leader in professional organizations.

Viewing environmental psychology in terms of "frontiers, borders and boundaries" provides an interesting perspective. The presenter will describe how differing beliefs and worldviews regarding humans' place in nature, as well as competing approaches to solving environmental issues, can be seen as a form of "environmental diversity." Using this "environmental diversity" lens, approaches within psychology can be distinguished using various meta frameworks, for example how they exhibit romantic, modern or postmodern attitudes, or how they exemplify well-known environmental discourses. 

The presenter will further discuss how environmental diversity (i.e., in terms of worldviews) can be seen as intersecting with other forms of multicultural diversity, such as race, ethnicity, class and gender. This provides insights into how inequalities (i.e., in terms of access to healthy green spaces) or other environmental justice issues may or may not be addressed in psychology, and possibly in other areas of environmental studies. 

They're Not Like Us: Identity, Affiliation, and Collaboration in Environmental Justice Conflicts

Sarah Lashley, Ph.D.

Although efforts to manage conflicts in the environmental justice context collaboratively are beginning to emerge, the factors that promote and hinder effective collaboration in cases of environmental justice have not yet been explored. The purpose of this research is to define and understand the roles of identity and affiliation in collaboratively managing conflicts in the environmental justice context.

A comparative case study approach is used to understand the roles of identity and affiliation in creating barriers and bridges to collaboration. Participant observation, interviews, and archival information from government documents, newspapers, and organizational publications and records are used in the case analyses. Cases in New York City and Detroit, Michigan are studied.

Two communities in southeastern Michigan had a common opponent – an aluminum smelter that had closed its facility in one community and relocated it to another.  Both communities had complaints about pollution and were struggling to gain the attention of local, state and national regulators.  Though they had similar goals, residents and organizers from these two communities have not collaborated with each other. Meanwhile, over six hundred miles away in New York City, residents from diverse communities with historically divergent perspectives and interests collaborated to create a shared vision for a new waterfront park space in West Harlem.

Preliminary results suggest that identities and characterizations have the potential to create perceptual boundaries that obstruct visions for the possibility of collaboration. However, the presence of charismatic and credible leaders who seek to understand divergent perspectives, create space for voicing and hearing concerns, and value transparency can facilitate the development of affiliation and shared identities in environmental justice conflict situations. 

The Politics of Environmental Justice and Art: Reading Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun

Lai Ying Yu

In this paper, I examine the role that politically-oriented art can play in creating greater social equity. In particular, I study the use of sentimental affect as a framework for urban environmental justice and consider how sentiment can establish a space for cross-difference sympathies as well as harden or erect new barriers for systemic change. I conclude by suggesting that shifting what we look for in socially oriented art, de-emphasizing sentiment as the basis for social change, may lead to innovative solutions for problems of urban environmental injustice.

I develop my argument through a reading of the classic play by Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun (1959). About a working-class black family living in South Side Chicago, the play highlights the ways in which urban segregation stymies generations of hard-won progress. As part of my analysis, I consider contemporary court challenges to urban segregation and the little-known contract sales that contributed to creating the racial boundaries of South Side Chicago. These court cases, like Raisin,emphasized a language of sentiment and moral ethic. The challenges were dismissed, however, because the defendants used a competing language of sentiment for a set of alternative social bonds. I consider these alternative bonds as they were expressed in contemporary urban planning policies.

I believe this presentation is of interest to AESS because my paper is informed by an interdisciplinary approach, incorporating literary analysis with examinations of urban planning and legal discourse. I also think this paper is about the “problem-solving” aspect of AESS because it focuses on how environmental scholars may approach art as a political tool. I think that the presentation fits with the 2015 theme because it is about one artist’s challenge to the racial borders of urban segregation. I think this paper fits into themes of equity and representation.

Crossing the Boundary from Faith to Action

Cybelle T. Shattuck

Awareness of climate change and concerns about impacts on human communities have inspired activity within religious organizations as leaders call on people of faith to conserve resources, build more equitable and resilient communities, and advocate for environmental policies. Efforts to promote a faith-based response to environmental issues are of interest because religion played a significant role in historical periods of social change such abolition of slavery and the US civil rights movement. Previous scholarship has focused on “eco-theologies” through which religious leaders articulate scriptural precepts describing why people of faith should practice environmental ethics, however, there has been no systematic research examining the empirical experiences of faith-based environmental initiatives that do arise. Recent research suggests that theology alone is insufficient to motivate behavior change in faith communities. Consequently, this research seeks to examine the motivations and processes through which people of faith undertake environmental action.

This paper uses data from field research conducted in fifteen faith communities that have developed durable sustainability initiatives with activities focused on: sustainable land stewardship, environmental advocacy, and conservation practices such as recycling, generation of renewable energy, and green building. The research uses an interdisciplinary approach that draws on religious studies and environmental disciplines to examine motivations and processes through which the initiatives emerged and were implemented within the faith communities. Religious studies provides information about beliefs and congregational structures, conservation psychology imparts insights into individual motivations, while social movement and collaborative resource management fields contribute information about factors that affect collective action. The cross-case analysis indicates that personal interests of individual champions, supportive organizational structures, and participatory decision processes are just as important as theology for embedding sustainability in the social norms of religious organizations. 

Environmental Attitudes in Religious Communities: A Case from Multi-ethnic Los Angeles

Dr. Amanda Baugh

A 2014 national survey of over 3,000 Americans found that Hispanic Catholics are twice as likely as white Catholics to be concerned about climate change, just as Black Protestants are more likely to be concerned than white Protestants.[1] One possible explanation for these results is that minority communities express greater concern because they are the first to suffer from catastrophes caused by global warming. But is this reasoning actually expressed in those communities?

In this paper I will share preliminary findings of a research project designed to understand how factors related to religion, race, ethnicity, and class factor into environmental attitudes and behaviors. Drawing from focus groups and survey data in both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking congregations in a multi-ethnic neighborhood in Los Angeles, I will discuss how different community members expressed their relationships with the environment.  My preliminary raw data will offer insight in its own right, but its greater significance is to offer vocabulary and a set of questions that can direct future research about the influence of race, ethnicity, and class on environmental attitudes and behaviors in religious communities.

Full Presentation Panel

We are facing increasing complex environmental problems that will require interdisciplinary solutions. One such solution is green infracture (GI) or low-impact development (LID), which are decentralized and sustainable design practices used in urban environments to reduce stormwater runoff and improve energy efficiency. GI/LID approaches include maintaining natural landscapes, and implementing green roofs, porous pavement, rain barrels. GI/LID solutions have been shown to mitigate the effects of climate change, cool buildings and paved surfaces, improve water quality, and reduce flooding; the EPA claims that “applied on a broad scale, LID can maintain or restore a watershed's hydrologic and ecological functions.” But there is some question of the effectiveness of GI/LID in addressing environmental problems, especially give economic and other barriers to its effective implementation. In this full presentation panel, we address these issues from multiple disciplines and perspectives.

The Role of Green Infrastructure to Mitigate Vulnerability of Water Conveyance Infrastructure Due to a Higher Frequency of More Extreme Precipitation Events

Michael Simpson

Results will be presented from NOAA funded research in the Hiawatha Lake watershed in Minneapolis, MN. This research examined the hydrologic impact of climate change and land use scenarios on existing water conveyance infrastructure. One key scenario was incorporating green infrastructure through storm water fee rebates for this built-out urban landscape.

This build-out scenario was combined with estimated, mid-21st century storm magnitudes based upon downscaled global greenhouse gas emission scenarios. Once vulnerable zones within the City were identified, a marginal cost analysis was completed incorporating the efficacy of green infrastructure in the context of off-setting alternative methods of storm water mitigation.

The technical outputs of these studies informed concurrent community resilience building processes that increased stakeholder capacity at the local level in adapting to change.

The Economics of Green Infrastructure as a Demand Management Strategy
Yehuda Klein

UHI is a significant concern in high-density urban hubs like New York City. The thermal storage potential of urban centers keep urban temperatures high through out the day and into the evening. The New York Independent System operator map of New York electric demand identifies the southeastern New York (SENY) region as a “load pocket”, an area of high electric demand the requires electricity delivery from outside the region to supplement the in region electricity supply during warm summer months.

Based on the work of Gaffin et al on green roofs on a Queens office building, summertime energy savings can be achieved during the summertime air conditioning season using green roofs. Previous economic analysis of green roof associated cooling load reduction neglects an important aspect of the New York State energy market. Standard cost of energy assessments of the cooling effects of green roofs neglect the potential for “peak demand reduction”. The dollar value of peak demand reduction in New York State is many times greater than the standard electric rates. In this paper we examine the economic value of green infrastructure for electric demand management in New York City.

Residents Preferences for Adoption of Low Impact Development Practices
Zahra Golshani

Low impact development (LID) practices are innovative decentralized stormwater management strategies to manage urban stormwater run off. LID practices provide multiple ancillary benefits while managing the stormwater run off. Therefore, widespread investment in LID practices would not only manage the stormwater run off but also would yield multiple benefits for societies. Residents and households as potential investor and adopters of LID practices can play a major role in successful implementation of LID practices. Therefore residents’ response and motivations to invest in LID is of important value to stormwater managers and program developers. By learning about incentives and barriers to adopt LID, stormwater managers would know what issues to address when designing stormwater management programs.

LID practices provide a combination of private and public benefits and costs that would affect residents’ decision making when selecting an LID practice. This study is designed to examine the role of selected private and public LID attributes and characteristics on residents decision making. The study employs a multi-attribute discrete choice modeling to examine the role of selected attributes of LID techniques on residents’ choices and willingness to pay for those practices. The results of this study is useful in policy context by identifying which attributes of LID practices are significant determinants of the values people place on these practices (at residential level), the implied ranking of these attributes, preferences and willingness to pay for attributes and the trade off made between selected attributes when evaluating the adoption of different LID practices.

Assessment of the Effectiveness of Green Infrastructure at Improving Water Quality and Reducing Flooding at the Watershed-Scale
Kate Meierdiercks

The processes that control runoff quality and quantity in urban watersheds are complex and not well understood. While impervious surface coverage has traditionally been used to examine altered hydrologic response in urban watersheds, several studies suggest that other elements of the urban landscape, particularly those associated with urban infrastructure and the drainage system, play an equally important role. Research from the Kromma Kill, an urban watershed located in Albany County, NY, suggests that while percent impervious coverage can be used to predict general water quality, other elements of the urban landscape, particularly those associated with subwatershed slope and drainage network structures, have a greater impact on the magnitude of flood response and specific water quality parameters than percent imperviousness. Thus watershed plans that rely only on reducing the percentage of effective imperviousness of the watershed may not serve as the most effective solution for every management objective. Here, we assess the effectiveness in improving water quality and reducing flooding of green infrastructure (GI) and other stormwater management strategies that aim to reduce the percentage of effective imperviousness versus those that target the drainage network system. These issues are examined in the subwatersheds of the Kromma Kill using monitoring data and a rainfall-runoff model.

Full Presentation Panel

International and domestic environmental policies are inextricably linked in many respects.  Some issues necessarily warrant a global response, such as ozone depletion and climate change.  The causes and impacts of other issues may be contained within national borders, but nevertheless are linked indirectly to other countries through globalization as information, knowledge, technology, and goods flow across borders.  How do international politics and multilateral agreements shape domestic policies?  How do political identities shape how we respond to environmental threats?  Through what mechanisms are policies and norms diffused?  This panel explores these questions through international and domestic policy linkages across a diversity of countries and range of issues, from food security to forest policy, from environmental enforcement to public participation.  Panelists consider the variation across space and time, as well as through different stages of the policy process: what initial conditions influence policy linkages and transfer?  And, what is the role of environmental performance measurement in shaping environmental policy?  Extending beyond the boundaries of environmental policies, panelists also explore the impact of investment, trade, and aid on the environment.

Investments by Gulf Cooperation Council countries in food security programs in the Middle East and Africa: Challenges and opportunities

Remi Piet

This paper analyzes the different food security programs and large scale investments in agricultural production recently
implemented by several Gulf Cooperation Council countries (Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE) in the Middle East and
Africa. It builds on a oneyear long research initiative supported by the United Nations FAO office in Cairo to engage
international institutional actors and encourage the dissemination of efficient crops in the MENA region, such as quinoa. This
paper assesses the compatibility of such agricultural developments with individual GCC national food security initiatives and
focuses on the opportunity they offer for local development through microcredit programs. It also addresses the risks of land
grabbing, the impact on local needs and processes as well as the evolution of traditional societal and economic structures.
Using a comparative approach and a multi case study framework, this paper underlines best practices and the potential for the
mitigation of negative externalities. It also aims at contributing to the sustainable development of the region while answering the
objectives of GCC countries’ food security programs.

Disentangling Siberia's Changing Identities

Matthew Knight

Siberia, Russia’s main frontier, is marked with the distortion of a scaleless spacetime, vast and mostly invisible. A land once dominated by the Tartars and Genghis Khan has seen a population shift from expansionists to those existing on the fringe to a deracinated population forgotten by the Kremlin. As in American frontier regions, outsiders from more densely populated places politically dominate Siberia. The outsiders, treasure hunters in many respects, construct much of its identity because the region’s vastness, inhospitality, and unlimited potential intrigue them. The Siberian frontier has given Russian leaders visions of utter exploitation and near-total domestication. Flexing imperial muscles further constructs the Siberian identity as a place where steely determination subdues a previously unyielding nature.

Taming Siberia has proven almost impossible. As climate change tempers its rigors, how will Russia’s petrocrats treat its possibilities? Will they create a new identity driven by the destiny of reclaiming the land and its resources from nature’s icy grip? What will become of its mostly-urban population, about a quarter of the Russian total? Which regional identities, places, and groups will emerge or dwindle as climate change allows new forms of development, specifically assertive Russian exploitation of Siberia which may put economic pressure on the U.S. and other northern players?

Siberian climate change suggests economic, cultural and possibly military conflict with China, a new world power needing raw materials for its rapid industrialization. Can Russia maintain its current Siberian frontier? Or, will the region revert to its pre-Muscovite state as a place of continual contestation?  Through analysis of the policies of Imperial, Soviet and Republican Russian toward Siberia, I will argue that tracking Siberia’s constructed, political identities will aid in understanding the environmental fate of a globally scaled piece of land set within a nation that confuses its own European and Asian identities.

Linking the global to the national: An application of the international pathways model to examine the influence of international environmental agreements on Cameroon’s forest policy

Richard Mbatu, Ph.D.

Cameroon’s tropical forest cover is one of the largest in the world. It is home to some of the world’s rarest plant and animal species.  However, the country has suffered extensive forest loss for many decades as a result of socio-economic and political factors. The growing global concern for the health of the world’s forests and related global issues has placed pressure on Cameroon to sustainably manage its forests. The intricacies of domestic and international pressures on Cameroon’s forest sector means that policy-makers have to take into consideration the dynamics of the domestic-international nexus in developing the country’s forest policies. The increasingly integrated global governance of the world’s forests – international agreements, protocols and treaties, international program, international institutions, international actors, and international norms – together constitute international policy regimes that have influenced the direction of Cameroon’s forest policy. Employing the international pathways framework model, an analytic model which describes how transnational actors and international institutions affect domestic policies and policy making, this paper examines the extent to which international environmental agreements (IEAs) have influenced the direction of Cameroon’s forest policy and policy-making. The application of the international pathways model facilitated analytic review and allowed for a better understanding of how Cameroon has utilized the complex global forest governance arrangements to enhance its domestic forest policy. 

Environmental Norm Diffusion through Trade Agreements: A New Wave of Environmental Conditionality

Abby Lindsay

This paper is interested in how preferential trade agreements (PTAs) are used to diffuse environmental policies and norms from developed to developing countries. Centrally, we argue that the US uses PTAs as vehicles to coercively diffuse environmental norms and policies that have long been central to US environmental policy making. Specifically, we show how the US used the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and the US-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement (TPA) as vehicles to diffuse norms of public participation in environmental policy making, and effective enforcement of environmental laws. We focus on these two norms because we find them consistently across most US PTAs, however we also highlight the agreement-specific environmental norms/policies diffused in each of our three cases. We argue that these provisions represent a second wave of environmental conditionalities –this time through trade rather than aid.  Given the increasingly deep integration on environmental issues the US is pursuing through PTAs and cautionary lessons we have from the literature on conditional aid, it is surprising how little scholarship has examined the expanding scope of environmental governance through PTAs.

Does measurement matter? Assessing policy impact of the Environmental Performance Index

Alisa Zomer

Environmental challenges, just like ecosystems, are not confined to geopolitical borders. The space within and across jurisdictional boundaries, however, can serve as important units to collect data to measure, monitor, and promote improved environmental performance. Synthesizing examples from existing literature and from the experience of the Environmental Performance Index (EPI), a biennial ranking of 178 countries across 20 environmental indicators, the goal of this paper is to critically examine where national environmental performance indicators and composite indices are contributing to national policy and decision-making processes. This article will accomplish this by examining several aspects of national and subnational environmental performance indicators: their relationship with scientific knowledge, role in shaping policy, as well as limits and challenges to their application and utility. To examine evidence of how indicators shape the policy process, we look at case studies where national governments have replicated and adapted the EPI framework at the subnational scale. Despite challenges in constructing national and sub-national indicators that, in some ways, arbitrarily constrain cross-border environmental issues, indicators prove to be useful policy tools for management. We demonstrate that indicators provide an effective method to assess baseline environmental performance, track progress towards policy goals, and reveal gaps and weaknesses in environmental data systems. Furthermore, the integration of indicators, both quantitative and qualitative, into national environmental policies shows efforts to bring scientific rigor to analyzing environmental performance. 

Full Presentation Panel

Madagascar, A Treasured Island

Toby Smith

A political coup in 2009 left Madagascar adrift – isolated from the international community, deprived of foreign aid and conservation funding. One of the planet’s most precious ecological treasures is home to one of its poorest nations and it raises difficult and complex questions about the relationship between necessity and luxury. Amidst political uncertainty, the island’s fragile and unique ecology is being smuggled out illegally, boat by boat, gem by gem. 

An AOSIS in the Pacific: Quenching Cooperation or Diluted Deals?

Michael Schwebel

The proposed presentation, “The AOSIS in the Pacific: Quenching Cooperation or Diluted Deals?” is part of my forthcoming dissertation on climate change policy and adaptation in Pacific Small Island States (PSIS). I use interviews and analyses performed with 18 PSIS in the Pacific Region which is composed of 13 independent states, 3 groups of territories, and 2 semi-autonomous islands via their UN Missions in New York City. Through 18 semi-structured interviews, I analyze and apply PSIS’ views on the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) regarding climate change policy and cross-boundary regional cooperation, where their ideological and physical frontiers are crossed and sometimes clash. PSIS work across their EEZs and customary boundaries on a daily basis, making them an embodiment of confronting frontiers, borders, and boundaries – no matter how small. As a political ad-hoc group at the United Nations, AOSIS advocates on behalf of small island states for policies that would protect them and create better global conditions for their continued survival in the face of global climate change. However, some members of AOSIS are neithersmall nor island states themselves, and some abut other small islands that are the domain of larger continental countries (such as EU Territories). These divergent legal and sociopolitical viewpoints cause jurisdictional boundary clashes among the concerted effort of regional associations within joint environmental decision-making. Because AOSIS purports to speak on behalf of all islands states as well as states that share so-called island state characteristics, some argue that by trying to please so many equates to minimally acceptable diluted responses that will not affect any meaningful change: an unacceptable final frontier for islands that may become uninhabitable in the upcoming decades or centuries. 

There Be Dragons: Human Impact on the Unique Environments of the Galapagos and Lord Howe Islands

Ms Lea Kannar-Lichtenberger, MA

This presentation that will be an exploration (including first hand research) and comparison of aspects of life relating to the islands of the Galapagos (Ecuador – Research Oct 2014) and Lord Howe Island (NSW Australia – Research April 2015).  These islands have waters rich in marine life whilst the annual ocean temperatures fluctuate significantly.  They are also home to unique terrestrial and aquatic species that have either become extinct or now struggle to re-establish a foothold on the landscape through various means including controlled breeding or restricted human access.

I am exploring the impact of controlled Tourism in its current form and how the Anthropocene may be considered with regard to both the aquatic and terrestrial flora and fauna on these islands; further extrapolating how future water temperature changes could impact on current marine life.

My investigation, which involves a studio art practice, looks to create awareness surrounding the alterations we make in nature that transforms not only the flora and fauna but also social, ethical and cultural values towards them.  Through this I create metaphors for our connection to these changes and the Anthropocene.  Through a visual reflection on the microscopic and macroscopic I use cellular, geographical and habitational images.

Lamont (Monty) Hempel, University of Redlands, hempel@redlands.edu

The Last Invasion:  Lessons from Palau 

For the past 19 years, I have been observing environmental, social, and economic change in the Republic of Palau.  Each year, I organize a month-long expedition with 10-12 undergraduate students to explore Palau's coral reefs, marine lakes, and limestone forests – all with an eye to understanding the relationship between ocean health, economic development, and changes in the matrilineal clan-based culture. 

A series of real and metaphorical "invasions" serve to dramatize the major forces at work in changing Palau's island ecology.  These include colonial legacies, devastating military invasions, commercial fishing pressures, the unprecedented arrival of three back-to-back supertyphoons, related issues of climate disruption, the emerging specter of ocean acidification, and, most recently, the sudden invasion of Chinese mass tourism. 

The cumulative impact of these and other driving forces on people and the environment is far more apparent in a small island state like this one than in sprawling superstates, such as the U.S.  My goal in this session will be to attempt to draw some vital lessons about sustainability from this microcosmic ecological civilization of 20,000 people.

Full Presentation Panel

Difficult-to-predict shocks or disturbances could disrupt food production or distribution severely enough to set in motion a breakdown of food supply. The risk of serious shortfalls, whether on a local or larger scale, shorter or longer period, is of genuine concern. Cities are particularly vulnerable. It’s difficult to get a clear grip on this topic because the food system is so complex, and failure could take forms never seen before, but the stakes are high. A collection of articles in JESS is framing this issue to clarify what environmental scientists and teachers can do through research, education, or community action to contribute to a more resilient food system. This session will focus on:

• How do food crises happen?
• How can system dynamics simulations help to clarify food resilience issues and solutions?

Gerry Marten, The dynamics of food system collapse: Lessons from crises

Unexpected shock can set in motion a chain of effects that leads to severe disruption of food supply. For example, British truckers protested a dramatic hike in the price of diesel fuel by obstructing the delivery of fuel to service stations in September 2000. Within a week, most service stations ran out of fuel, transport was crippled, absenteeism spread through the economy as people were unable to get to work, grocery store shelves emptied out, and many other sectors of society were on the verge of collapse. In another example, drought in Australia – in combination with diversion of U.S. corn production to ethanol, an increase in the international oil price, and the 2008 mortgage crisis and ensuing recession – set in motion a chain of effects in international food markets that doubled the price of basic food commodities within a year and led to food riots in 65 nations. This presentation will use these and other experiences to illustrate how vulnerability works and identify lessons for reducing the risks of food crises in the future.

Krystina Stave, A system dynamics perspective on food system vulnerabilities in highly developed countries: Insights from a three-stage conceptual model

This presentation uses a system dynamics perspective to examine food system vulnerabilities in developed countries. While there has been considerable attention to specific issues such as organic food, agri-business, effects of pesticide and fertilizer runoff, or introduction of genetically modified organisms, it is hard to get a clear picture of the ways in which the food system as a whole is vulnerable at the national level. In this analysis, I describe links and feedback between the human health, food, and environmental sectors at three progressively more detailed levels. The resulting conceptual maps make system structure visible and reveal that the system is vulnerable in multiple places to exogenous disturbances, but also contains potential instability in its supply chain and commodity market structure as well as in feedback loops linking food sector activities and the environment. Such loops can crowd out regenerative agriculture production systems and make a transition towards more diversity and higher adaptive capacity both expensive and time consuming.

Andrew Huff, How resilient is the United States food system to influenza pandemic and what can be done to improve resilience?

A severe influenza pandemic could have serious detrimental impacts on many sectors of society because of the labor shortages it creates. People stay home because they are sick, taking care for sick family members, or avoiding exposure to the disease. A system dynamics model was constructed to demonstrate the likely effects of a pandemic on a regional food supply chain in the United States. The pandemic was assumed to last 500 days with waves of infection that reduced the labor supply for farms, food processing plants, transport, and distribution and retail outlets. The response of food supply to labor shortages was explored with two thousand replicate runs of the model in which the labor shortages fluctuated cyclically through time between 10% absenteeism and a peak of absenteeism that varied from 15% to 50% in different runs of the model. Median results of the simulations showed waves of food supply shortfall reaching 50% or more for several months at a time. Overall, the model demonstrated that a severe pandemic with greater than a 25% reduction in labor availability could plausibly cause significant and widespread food shortages. This presentation concludes with suggestions for improving the resilience of food supply chains in the event of pandemic.

Full Presentation Panel

Science is ever-evolving with new findings emerging on a regular basis. This leaves communities wondering what scienc­e they should use in their planning processes addressing coastal hazards and climate change. Additionally, it leaves local governments wondering if they should delay implementation of strategies until the “best” information becomes available. Through the usage of innovative and interdisciplinary research and planning, communities can assess and plan today for the future, but still have enough flexibility to incorporate new information as it becomes available, and update policies and plans as appropriate. As part of this session three separate case studies will be presented, providing on-the-ground examples of how communities throughout Southern California are creating opportunities for regional collaborations in planning for an uncertain future: (1) the University of California, Irvine’s Flood Resilient Infrastructure and Sustainable Environments (FloodRISE) project’s interdisciplinary research into how to more effectively communicate about flood hazards in two distinctly different communities; (2) the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve’s Climate Understanding & Resilience in the River Valley (CURRV) project which is using scenario planning to help move climate adaptation planning forward along the US-Mexico border; and (3) the University of Southern California Sea Grant’s AdaptLA project which implemented innovative adaptive management approaches to help the City of Los Angeles adapt to sea level rise.

Juliette Hart, PhD

University of Southern California Sea Grant

jahart@usc.edu

AdaptLA, developed by USC Sea Grant in partnership with the City of Los Angeles, is a science-based and stakeholder-supported adaptation planning process. The primary goal for creating AdaptLA was to help the City begin planning for the impacts of sea level rise along its coastline. A team of subject matter experts assessed the physical, social and economic impacts of sea level rise on the City's resources and population, as well as the possible impacts to coastal and shoreline assets. As part of the AdaptLA model, USC Sea Grant advocated for  “adaptive” adaptation planning that incorporated an iterative planning process. This allowed for inclusion of the best available science throughout the study, while also recognizing likely electoral and political changes throughout the life of an adaptation plan. In the midst of this first AdaptLA project, new, important scientific information emerged which required consideration while the study was already anyway. Similarly the mayoral administration changed, which required gaining quick support of the findings near the close of the study period before release of the report. The final report was released with the new administration’s support and approval.  In our presentation, we will describe how the adaptive management approach was helpful in addressing these two obstacles, focusing on the critical need for effective interdepartmental communication. We will close with an overview of how this approach is now being utilized throughout L.A. County in a regional AdaptLA project.

Dr. Jeff Crooks

Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve

jcrooks@trnerr.org

Preparing for Climate Change in a Binational Watershed

The Tijuana River Valley (TRV) contains the largest intact coastal wetland system in Southern California, despite intense pressure from development associated with being situated on an international border between two major metropolitan areas- San Diego (California, United States) and Tijuana (Baja California, Mexico). Through the Climate Understanding & Resilience in the River Valley (CURRV) project, the Tijuana River National Estuarine Research Reserve (TRNERR) is using scenario planning to outline local vulnerabilities, focusing on the relationship between sea level rise and riverine flooding.  The project is helping move forward local climate planning by recognizing the primary obstacles that often prevent the process from being effective, including uncertainty, multi-agency jurisdictions, and balancing the built and natural environments.  The results of the scenario planning process are informing the development of climate adaptation strategies for the TRV, addressing the potential impacts that threaten the future resiliency of important natural ecosystems, critical infrastructure, and surrounding human communities.  This presentation will introduce audiences to collaborative climate adaptation planning in the San Diego region, and more specifically the CURRV process, providing a unique case study of how TRNERR is improving the ability of public agencies to adapt to climate change, as well as offer tools for effective participatory ecosystem-based management in light of these changes.

Kim Serrano

University of California, Irvine

krserra1@uci.edu

FloodRISE is an NSF-funded, UC Irvine-led research project to promote resilience to coastal flooding in southern California and Mexico. The project unites flood modeling engineers with social scientists and economists to work alongside two communities facing increased flooding from climate impacts like sea level rise and changing storm patterns: Newport Beach, California, and Los Laureles Canyon, Tijuana. These communities are vastly different in their demographics, governance structures, and development practices, yet face similar challenges of preparing for dangerous flood events. FloodRISE responds to uncertainties associated with flood planning through collaborative interdisciplinary research that blurs the traditional boundaries between campus and community. Engineers build parcel-level flood models that are validated, adjusted, and improved by residents and property owners in affected areas, while social scientists and economists work with community members to characterize local perceptions of flood risk. Given the distinct ways that communities in different contexts think about and prepare for flooding, the FloodRISE project is also concerned with devising innovative, context-driven communication strategies that make information about flood risk accessible and intelligible to those at greatest risk from a flood event. By incorporating community knowledge at each stage of the research process, the FloodRISE project aims to generate context-specific approaches to managing flood hazards that foster community resilience and sustainability.

The Role of Technological Innovation and Social Learning in Disaster Risk Reduction: Evidence from a Cross-National Study on Earthquake Losses

Qing Miao

While the importance of technology in reducing disaster risks is widely recognized in the policy world, it has received much less attention from researchers. Recent studies which investigate the determinants of natural disaster losses have largely focused on the effect of economic development and institutional quality (e.g., Kahn, 2005). This study provides the first empirical analysis which quantitatively examines the role of technological innovation and social learning in mitigating disaster impacts. Drawing upon the adaptation literature, I consider innovation and learning as a key aspect of adaptive capacity which affects a society’s ability to cope with extreme events. The notion of adaptation implies that people constantly learn from their prior exposure to certain types of hazards, and acquire new knowledge that could be either tangible (e.g., new technologies) or intangible (e.g., experiential knowledge) for reducing future disaster risks. My study examines the treatment effect of both technological innovation and prior disaster exposure, considering the latter as not only a driver of learning but also a proxy of intangible knowledge.

Using a global cross-section, I estimate the effect of a country’s innovations in earthquake-proof building technology and prior quake exposure on earthquake-related fatalities and economic damages. I find that countries that have accumulated more patents in quake-proof buildings suffer fewer human and economic losses from earthquakes of the same intensity. This suggests technological innovation, as a dynamic social learning process, provides a long-term adaptation strategy. I also find that a country’s prior earthquake experiences can also significantly reduce the losses from later quakes. This “learning-by-doing” effect is more pronounced in high-income countries, which suggests their stronger adaptive capacity.

Full Presentation Panel

Individual abstracts

Making ESS Relevant -- Pedagogical Implications of Class Background

Sasha Adkins, Antioch University New England, sasha.adkins18@gmail.com

How do we translate the principles of environmental justice into pedagogy? How do we create learning communities where we practice what we preach? I propose, for the sake of discussion that just as a community or an ecosystem is only as healthy as are its most vulnerable members, so a classroom is only healthy and functional when we care for our most vulnerable members. How do we model for students an equitable balance of voice and power in the classroom, particularly when the teacher was raised with more societal privilege than her or his students?   

Amy Knisley, Warren Wilson College, aknisley@warren-wilson.edu

Am *I* Environmental? Privileging 'Privilege' in Environmental Policy Instruction

In teaching environmental policy and law, the intellectual and practical skills involved in framing and articulating problems, and in advocating certain solutions, are natural opportunities to explore the existence and impacts of privilege as it has become manifest in our canon of environmental law and policy. In this session, we briefly consider how the impact of race, ethnicity (especially tribal affiliation), gender, and rurality is evident in certain common environmental policy topics, and discuss some in- and out-of-class pedagogical techniques for positioning various "others" in the role of "environmentalist."

Nancy Rich, Springfield Technical Community College, nrich@antioch.edu

When Students are from Environmentally Unjust Urban Communities: Implications for ESS Teaching 

Abstract

How is it the same or different to teach “ecological footprint” to students whose income scarcely buys enough food to get through the month?  What does the notion of keeping a journal of outdoor nature experience mean to inner city students who fear they will get shot if they linger outside? What does it mean to teach environmental appreciation when students and their families are not from here, and this land and weather feel alien?  How does discussion of poverty as a cause of environmental degradation play out with students who are but a small step from poverty themselves?  This presentation explores issues, assumptions, and research needs that arise in teaching environmental science in an inner city community college.

Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Western Science into Forestry, Natural Resources, and Environmental Programs

Priya Verma, California Polytechnic University, pverma@calpoly.edu

A new minor titled Indigenous Studies in Natural Resources and the Environment (INRE) has recently been approved (i.e., 2013) at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California.  The INRE Minor became operational and available to students in the Fall 2013 quarter.  The INRE Minor aims to bring together principles of both Indigenous knowledge and western science.  Instruction in these two approaches is intended to provide students with the necessary skills, practical knowledge, research skills, and critical thinking skill to address complex environmental issues and natural resources management problems facing both indigenous and non-indigenous communities around the world today.  The INRE minor seeks to prepare students by providing a balanced education in the arts, sciences, and technology while encouraging inter-disciplinary and co-curricular activities.  This paper reports on the need for the INRE minor, learning outcomes, curriculum, approval process, student interest surveys, and enrolled INRE students focus group observations. 

Discussion Symposium

Abstract

Discussion Symposium

The speakers in this symposium will discuss the issues on the UN Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This agenda and these goals are likely to be of broad interest and importance to the AESS membership. This symposium discussion would be to build AESS membership on new and innovative sustainable development agendas and goals and identify environmental science and research themes and issues, and the potential role of environmental science departments and educators. Included in this discussion is a discussion of climate and sustainability finance, public and private partnerships, and government administration and e-government for sustainability.  AESS hosted a webinar on the UN SDGs, which includes an updated information webpage on the Post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda, which is found at http://www.aess.info/content.aspx?page_id=22&club_id=939971&module_id=163287.

Full Presentation Panel

Negotiating Absences of Data and Publics: Implications for Translating Environmental Justice into Superfund Policy

Jennifer Liss Ohayon

The last two decades have seen a growth in federal initiatives to integrate environmental justice (EJ) principles into agency programs and practices. Employing a case study of Vieques, Puerto Rico, and drawing from semi-structured interviews and analysis of environmental assessment documents, health reports, and meeting transcripts, I discuss how Superfund policy conceptualizes and translates EJ concerns into cleanup programs. From 1941-2003, the U.S. military used the small, populated island of Vieques, Puerto Rico for training purposes, including intensive bombing from land, sea, and air. I argue that the Vieques case study demonstrates that the current Superfund policy approach falls short of addressing grassroots environmental justice concerns by equating EJ with undertaking a remedial program of hazardous waste removal and containment rather than also tackling the residual health effects of past and persistent exposures to military waste and weaponry testing. Moreover, controversy over the responsibility of federal agencies for addressing elevated rates of illnesses in Vieques is compounded by the impossibility of reconstructing past exposures due to limited data on military activities and environmental conditions. This paper expands on the implications for environmental justice in Superfund policymaking given how regulatory science addresses 1) Insufficient knowledge on past and present health exposures 2) The limits in modeling the risk of long-term, cumulative, and synergistic exposures to contaminants 3) How to account for illnesses in small and mobile populations.

Trying to Solve the Environmental Justice Problem: Insight from Agent-Based Modeling

Prof. Heather E Campbell, PhDSince the 1987 United Church of Christ report on Environmental Justice (EJ), significant empirical work has supported the concern that racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately affected by environmental bads, including new ones, even when controlling for other factors such as income. Given that several meta-analyses show that evidence preponderantly confirms this finding, we argue it is important to turn from the question of whether race-and-ethnicity-based environmental injustice exists to questions of how society may solve the EJ problem.
We take the novel methodological approach of using agent-based modeling (ABM) to simulate environmentally unjust outcomes and then test solutions. ABM is a method for simulating complex phenomena on the computer; it is akin to the game SimCity for researchers. Using ABM, we have analyzed several competing causes for the EJ problem (Authors 2012; Authors 2014). In the proposed paper presentation we will present the results of two different possible policy solutions to the EJ problem: zoning and cleanup. Our findings indicate that zoning may be of value, but is difficult to design correctly and may take a long time before benefits are obtained. On the other hand, cleanup of polluted sites appears to be a win-win policy since we find it improves overall environmental quality for both the minority and the majority while also reducing the environmental quality gap. Even better, this policy is robust to different decision rules. We model three routinely proposed decision rules: (1) focusing cleanup on the most valuable sites, (2) focusing cleanup on the most polluted sites, and (3) focusing cleanup on sites in minority communities. The third option most reduces the environmental quality gap, but all three are found to reduce the gap while also improving overall quality. Thus, our policy recommendation: begin solving the EJ problem by cleaning up polluted sites.

Superfunding Silicon Valley: Anti-Toxics Activism, Technical Expertise, and the Politics of Remediation

Dr. Travis L. Williams, PhD

This paper examines the mobilization and exploitation of technical expertise by anti-toxics activists in Silicon Valley during the Superfund cleanup effort in the wake of the Silicon Valley groundwater crisis.  I draw from historical archives and semi-structured interviews with activists, experts, government officials, former high-tech workers, and current and former Silicon valley residents to argue that anti-toxics social movement organizations in Silicon Valley helped to enhance and expand public perceptions of complex environmental issues by mobilizing and exploiting technical expertise.  In the wake of the public discovery of widespread groundwater contamination in Silicon Valley, a grassroots anti-toxics coalition emerged to help organize community participation in local environmental remediation efforts.  One of their primary strategies was to mobilize and exploit technical expertise in the service of providing directly impacted communities with more meaningfully engaged oversight of the remediation process.  The article examines toxic contamination of soil and groundwater in Silicon Valley by the local high tech industry, official actions taken to document and remediate that contamination, and the efforts of local grassroots anti-toxics organizations to enhance public oversight of the remediation process for the largest toxic plume in the region.  I show how grassroots anti-toxics activists strengthened public oversight of the official remediation effort in Silicon Valley and made technically complex environmental issues more legible to the local community by mobilizing and exploiting technical expertise.   However, I also explain how specific forms of social privilege enjoyed by the anti-toxics movement in Silicon Valley provided activists with access to political resources for mobilizing technical support that are not equally accessible across all contaminated communities.  I then relate this disparity to the problem of participatory parity highlighted by the Environmental Justice Movement and discuss its wider implications.

Local Environmental Resistance Movements in Turkey: The Case of Rize

Ayse Nai

In the last decade people in different parts of Turkey have been putting themselves in front of bulldozers quite frequently in order to stop various construction projects. A very common type of resistance is against the numerous hydroelectric power plants (HEPP) that are being planned and constructed without taking the ecological and social impacts of them. There are almost no limits where HEPPs can be constructed. In this paper I analyze the HEPP projects in Turkey and the resistance of the local people with a focus on the province of Rize in the Eastern Black Sea region from the perspective of how the local people react to changing involvement of state in their lives. Rize is selected as the research focus of this paper since the Turkish state played a significant role especially starting in the 1950s and 1960s in promoting the emerging tea industry, increasing the economic development and shaping the employment structure in the region through the state owned tea company Cay Kurumu. However, since the 80s, this traditional emphasis on agriculture and the state’s direct involvement with the people has gradually changed. The change has been especially stark in the last decade under the government of Justice and Development Party (AKP). The emphasis on state-led agriculture was replaced with an emphasis on privatization, urbanization and energy development. The valleys and the rivers in Rize have attracted the attention of national and multinational companies quickly because of the topography of the region which is mountainous and rich in water resources and therefore, energy potential. In the case of Rize, this paper analyzes how the resistance movements of local people changes the relationship between the state and local people in terms of having access to representation in environmental policy making. 

Discussion Symposium

Environmental Studies engages the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences to investigate and improve the relationship between humans and their biophysical surroundings. Earth System Science integrates physics, chemistry, biology and geology to understand processes and environments on Earth.  While the disciplines that underlie both Environmental Studies and Earth System Science are well established, both of these broader, boundary-crossing fields are in a newer formational stage and must identify a meaningful scholarly trajectory to make disciplinary progress, while also adequately addressing very urgent, ‘wicked,’ real-world issues.  We posit that systems and complexity theories play a vital role in this endeavor throughout the disciplines.   Specifically, our panel will focus on:  1) How has Earth System Science used systems theory both as an analytical tool and as a framework? How has Environmental Studies used systems and complexity theories as analytical tools and frameworks? Might systems and complexity frameworks contribute to conceptualizing how Environmental Studies and Earth System Science curricula interrelate?  2) What conceptual frameworks can help our students address crucial cross-boundary issues that require both science-based Earth System Science and broad Environmental Studies disciplines – issues such as climate change, energy systems, pollution, and resource management -- in a creative, scholarly, and adequate manner?   3) Can the current work opportunities and grant funding opportunities that face our graduates in Environmental Studies inform our curricular design to provide theoretical constructs and analytical skills needed to best prepare them, both for feasible careers, and for cogent contributions to real world environmental solutions? 

Full Presentation Panel

Deepening Understanding of Environmental Tradeoffs of Alternative Energy Sources

William Ascher, PhD

To explore how to overcome superficial understandings of the tradeoffs among different energy uses, several experiments have been conducted to determine how exposure to information about the benefits and risks of energy sources (e.g., natural gas generated through fracking, coal-sired plants, nuclear power generation) can be effective in a) deepening citizens' appreciation for these tradeoffs; b) inducing information searches to learn more about these tradeoffs. The "before and after" surveys of citizen attitudes and actions reveals considerable promise in inducing more constructive assessment of the alternatives.

The Fukushima Crisis: Civil Society and Policy Transitions in Japan and Beyond

Robert Mason

The transformative potential of Japan’s 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis—and the related earthquake and tsunami—is the focus of this paper. Immediately following the disaster, there were high expectations and many calls for revolutionary changes to civil society and energy and environmental policies in Japan. By many measures, Japan’s civic environmentalism— which combines a tradition of local activism with a national environmental movement that is limited in size and policy influence—lags in comparison with peer industrialized countries.  But the transformative potential of significant environmental shocks is demonstrated by the policy consequences of the 1995 Great Hanshin Earthquake, which helped bring about significant reforms that made it easier for NGOs to attain legal status and raise funds. The Fukushima crisis, by contrast, has brought some major changes to Japan’s energy and environmental trajectories, but not the significant political and civil society transformations that had been widely anticipated. Germany, on the other hand, moved to phase out nuclear energy in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. Other major nuclear powers tended to “pause” and make limited course corrections in response to Fukushima—but no other country responded as precipitously as Germany. This paper explores various explanations for these dramatically differing responses--giving due attention to the challenges in making such international comparisons—and speculates on the longer term implications for civil society, and energy and environmental policy, in Japan. 

Full Presentation Panel

This panel discussion brings together people who have crossed that invisible yet real boundary between campus and community, by design, with their environmental studies courses. This boundary-crossing goes by many names — community based learning, service learning, experiential learning, and place based learning — which indeed have theoretical differences, but in practice have similar learning goals and challenges. Particularly in the context of interdisciplinary environmental studies courses, these goals often include: helping students concretize global/abstract environmental issues through the lens of their immediate community; illustrating complexity through confronting a real-life interdisciplinary problem; exercising problem-solving skills; learning by doing; meeting a need(s) for a community organization or public entity; and building campus-community goodwill. Panelists will examine the efficacy of these types of environmental studies courses for achieving these goals. Panelists will draw upon their own research and the results of institutional assessments to explore the following questions:

What sorts of things do we intend for students to take away from these learning experiences, and what do they actually learn?

What are the impacts of these courses on affiliated community partners?

What are some of the qualitative strategies and/or quantitative frameworks which have been successfully used to assess student (and community) learning?

AESS Community-Based Learning Part 2: Assessing Student Learning Outcomes & Community Impacts

Panel Organizer: Francis Eanes, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstracts for Individual Presenters:

Title: “Issues in Assessing the Outcomes of a Community-based Research Project

Presenter: John C. Berg, PhD — Suffolk University

Community-based research is a form of service-learning in which upper level students bring their academic skills into the field to meet the needs of a community partner. This presentation will discuss a partnership developed over two years between a course in Environmental Policy and Politics and the organization Clean Water Action (CWA). Groups of 6 to 8 students worked with a CWA staff member to tackle such problems as reducing leaks in gas lines, removing consumer products containing toxic substances from stores, and implementing public aid to small businesses for energy-saving projects. After briefly describing the activities, the presentation will focus on problems and possible solutions in assess the student learning outcomes of the community-based portion of the course.

Title: “Multi-level Assessment of Community Engagement Experiences:  Assessing Student-, Program-, and Community-Level Outcomes”

Presenter: Karen G. Mumford, PhD, MS, MA — University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire

Courses employing community engagement practices provide unique opportunities for environmental studies and sciences faculty to assess and document the importance of these practices to their students, programs, institutions, and community partners.  Even as assessment practices in higher education have emerged and been strengthened to ensure program accountability and student learning, many do not address the multiple levels of outcomes associated with community engagement efforts.  Examples of outcomes that could be assessed at multiple levels are discussed including strategies for the collection of quantitative and qualitative information.  Critical to this discussion is the development of outcomes in which measurement or collection of information is possible.  The value of assessing community-based experiences at multiple levels will be examined including how to use the information to improve the experiences for students, faculty, and partners; how to reduce challenges for future projects; how to generate a shared understanding of the experience among those involved; and how to indicate at the program and institutional level of advantages of community-based experiences.

Title: Preparing Students for the Future through Research-Based Service Learning in the    Community

Presenter: Dave Gosselin, PhD — University of Nebraska-Lincoln

An overarch theme for the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln is to provide opportunities for real work on real issues so students can make an impact. In the program's Environmental Engagement in the Community Class, each student, as a member of a team, works with a client to address a challenge that the organization has. Clients propose a challenge with which their organization could use help. Through a consensus-based process students are assigned to project teams based on their interest, skills and abilities. Business-based assessment tools help students understand their behavioral and motivational characteristics and the potential impact these characteristics have on their abilities to collaborate with others. These groups collaborate with the client to develop a product that: 1) clearly identifies the challenge, 2) provides relevant research-based background information on what other organizations are doing, 3) offers potential solutions, and 4) provides recommendations for moving forward. As part of the process, students develop work plans, budgets, and client-centered products.

Clients for the Engagement class have included the Lincoln’s Mayor Office; Lincoln Electrical System; WasteCap Nebraska;  Lincoln EcoStores; Lincoln-Lancaster  County Health Department; Cleaner Greener Lincoln, Nebraska Department of Education, City of Lincoln Recycling Office; Robinette Farms; Norris School District; TriCon Industries; and University of Nebraska Facilities. Based on anecdotal information, these projects have had an impact on  their clients. For example, five project groups testified to the Joint Project Authority for a new arena in Lincoln and their input strongly influenced the design of waste management and reduction in the arena. Studies also presented a new video they created to members of the Nebraska Department of Education promoting the Green Schools initiative. Another indication of success is that clients keep returning and look forward to working with the students each spring. 

Title: ”Assessing Experiential Learning in a Senior Capstone Course Examining the Impact of Environmental Lead on Children in Underserved Boston, MA Communities." 

Presenter: Martha E. Richmond, PhD, M.P.H. —Suffolk University

Experiential learning provides a rich opportunity for students to understand and appreciate the challenges faced by residents of underserved communities.  A senior-level environmental studies course offered at Suffolk University is designed to provide each student an opportunity to investigate a different facet of environmental lead with a specific focus on its impact in underserved communities.  Each student will develop a project that provides first-hand knowledge of challenges inherent to lead contamination and remediation. As a whole, the class is required to synthesize findings by developing a position paper/proposal suitable for presentation to a legislative or regulatory body.  To assess the effectiveness of experiential learning, students are asked prior to and after completion of the course to complete a questionnaire addressing several issues of lead contamination, its effects on underserved communities, including health, socio-economic issues, challenges for remediation funding, and the regulatory environment that impacts remediation.  Individual questionnaires will be returned to each student.  Students will be asked to write a short qualitative piece comparing before-after responses and to consider the way(s) that their thinking about challenges of environmental lead may have changed.  

Full Presentation Panel

Stormwater is a complex and multi-scaled environmental problem. Efforts to sustainably govern and manage stormwater extend within and beyond city boundaries, levels of policy, and across organizations. While much research exists on the technical solutions surrounding stormwater, the social and governance dimensions of stormwater are not as well explored. In this full presentation panel, we will bring together research on and practice in stormwater policy and management to explore the opportunities and constraints surrounding sustainable stormwater governance. The papers to be presented will touch on important issues of technical and financial challenges to local stormwater management, the benefits and challenges of decentralized stormwater governance, and the role of organizational motivations in guiding stormwater-related activities. A coordinated discussion following the presentations will integrate perspectives from environmental policy, environmental sociology, college programming and education, and watershed organizations. Below, we provide abstracts of the papers to be included in the session. 

The Role of Colleges and Universities in Overcoming Barriers to Green Infrastructure and Other Sustainable Stormwater Initiatives

Katherine Meierdiercks

Sustainable approaches to stormwater management such as green infrastructure and low impact development are wonderful ideas in theory. They can reduce runoff, improve water quality, and provide green space in urban communities. But these same communities can face several challenges when working to implement them. The challenges could be legal and regulatory, technical, financial, or lack of support from members of the community.   Through educational and research projects, College and Universities can play an important role in helping communities to overcome some of these challenges, particularly technical and financial. At the same time, sustainable stormwater educational and research projects produce students with technical knowledge as well as provide the training necessary to prepare them to address the world’s complex water problems.

Urban Stormwater Management and Democracy: An Interpretive Policy Analysis of a Governance Network

Katharine Travaline

The Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) is the first US water utility to enact a city-wide green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) approach to managing urban stormwater. Doing so, PWD must address the interconnection of its stormwater with the rest of the City, including its land and its infrastructure – where its residents live, work, and play. The water utility must therefore work, in one way or another, with the city agencies that manage those spaces. In other words, PWD has set out to manage the City’s stormwater in a governance network, in which multiple city agencies and public entities and individuals work together. Some believe such networked forms of policymaking to be more democratic forms of governing as they connect a broad range of actors within the policy process, thus overcoming the limitations of representative democracy as well as addressing and harnessing the high levels of complexity and uncertainty of today’s environmental problems.  I analyze these inter-agency collaborations to explore such claims, asking How can PWD, working within a traditionally fragmented city government, foster meaningful partnerships with other city agencies? To answer these questions, I conducted an interpretive policy analysis of the Green City, Clean Waters program, employing methods of document analysis, participant-observation, and interviewing. I identify some of the benefits as well as the challenges of this decentralized policymaking process. PWD is addressing the failures of the City’s traditional practices of government as it implements an inclusive and adaptive policy process. At the same time it faces the daunting tasks of managing a plurality of, often conflicting, interests and identities as well as navigating blurred lines of accountability. I suggest that lessons drawn from this interpretive policy analysis through the lens of deliberative democracy may enhance the democratic policymaking processes of the City’s stormwater governance.

Nine Mile Run: Restoration and Stormwater Challenges in Pittsburgh, PA

Sara Powell

Nine Mile Run is one of very few free-flowing streams left in Pittsburgh, PA. Despite the fact that roughly two-thirds of the stream has been culverted over and many watershed residents are unaware of its existence below their homes and businesses, the stream is a unique urban asset for the region providing recreational opportunities and other important ecosystem services. In 2006, the US Army Corps of Engineers completed the $7.7 million Nine Mile Run Aquatic Ecosystem Restoration, a project designed to ameliorate decades of neglect and allow the free-flowing portion of the stream to better respond to the high volume of stormwater it receives during wet weather. 

The restoration has improved many aspects of the stream’s ecological health. However, during wet weather, Nine Mile Run is still quickly inundated with stormwater, flooding it with pollutants and causing stream bank erosion. Sewage overflows also occur regularly during wet weather because of aging and inadequate storm and sanitary sewer systems.

This presentation will discuss efforts of the Nine Mile Run Watershed Association to protect the restoration and involve local leaders and volunteers in community greening initiatives in the upper watershed. Lessons learned will be shared from various projects, including a large residential rain barrel program, development of a social enterprise focused on stormwater management, and involvement in regional discourse on green versus gray methods of stormwater control.

Stormwater governance without substantive meaning? Organization motives and local stormwater policy in Utah

Andrea Armstrong

Municipal and special district governments are required to implement and enforce many forms of local stormwater policies under state and federal water quality statues.  Within this regulatory framework, municipal stormwater programs are also adapting to biophysical change and, in many cases, urban expansion. One form of local stormwater policy is the stormwater management plan, in which municipalities outline their water quality, programmatic, and infrastructure goals. A second form of policy is infrastructure, which is physical representations of organizational policies and goals. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the reasons why municipalities make adaptations to their stormwater management plans.  I assess the drivers of local policy adaptation within two theoretical frameworks: the adaptive cycle of resilience thinking, and organizational ecology. I apply these theoretical frameworks to online survey responses from municipalities throughout Utah. In identifying the important reasons for taking on policy changes, I also examine how adaptation relates to use of innovative or ‘green’ infrastructure.

Full Presentation Panel

Three Institutional Barriers to Moving toward Sustainable Practices in Energy, Food, and Chemical Products

Patricia M DeMarco, Ph.D.

Moving toward pathways to our sustainable future requires changes in policies and practices that drive the economy based on fossil fuels and petrochemical derivatives. The solutions to the current course of policy require different choices, which are often stated and clear among scientists, but confusing and obscure to the public. Several significant institutional barriers impede our progress toward a sustainable future, and require policy changes to expedite a transition. This presentation examines the patterns and processes entrenched in our culture and law that impede a transition away from fossil fuels and toxic chemicals. It presents the results of roundtable investigations, surveys and focus groups addressing: utility tariff system and the interface and interconnection of distributed power; the financial and regulatory impediments to sustainable and renewable choices; the building codes and standards that inhibit sustainable systems; prevention rather than emission control in managing pollution and toxic materials; and, the greatest institutional barrier, public attitudes toward change. Some examples of success in overcoming institutional barriers are presented based on practices implemented in Pittsburgh. (This work was funded by The Pittsburgh Foundation W.Clyde and Ida Mae Thurman Fund.)

Solar Energy System Performance Estimation and Analysis for Making Better Investment Decisions

Ryan Winn

The advent of solar energy can potentially improve the costs of energy consumption on global, national, and tribal levels.  Interest in this abundant, renewable power source spans from governmental entities, to utility companies, corporations, and residential homeowners.  In each case the question of if and when the investor will recoup their initial investment is an important barrier to be considered.  The Internet is ripe with products that will calculate the costs and benefits of investing in solar energy, but what if the people making data driven decisions about solar energy were working with incomplete models?  We at the College of Menominee Nation’s (CMN’s) Solar Energy Research Institute found numerous inaccuracies when we compared the actual data from our solar panel array in Keshena, Wisconsin to the current, free, online models readily available.  We contest that creating an accurate solar energy prediction model is paramount to the proliferation of investments in this inexhaustible power source.

Political Culture Barriers to Sustainable Transportation Development

Aiden Irish, BA, MS

Cities are the source for 80 percent of pollution emissions and home to over half of the world’s population. Therefore, in the pursuit of reducing negative environmental impacts globally, progress towards sustainable development must be made locally. Despite numerous successful examples of effective urban sustainable development, a great number of cities have yet to adopt such methods even when they produce not only environmental, but social and economic benefits. This begs an important question, why not? If sustainable development policies have myriad benefits and have been accomplished in economically diverse cities ranging from Bogota, Columbia, to Frankfurt, Germany, what are the barriers to such development?

In order to explore this question, this research study focuses on the political culture characteristics of city leadership and the impact of those cultural values, norms and expectations on regional interactions and the resulting local development. Through semi-structured interviews with officials in two case study cities - Pomona and Pasadena, California - this research identifies cultural characteristics surrounding transportation development. Having identified significant cultural attributes, this study analyzes the impacts of these characteristics on the support of, or barriers to, the pursuit of a more sustainable, “complete streets” model of transportation development.

Though this research focuses on one area of development policy in only two cities, the implications are significant on a much broader level. Increasingly, barriers to critical sustainable development practices have less to do with money and technology than they do with politics. Understanding the political culture obstacles to sustainable development is the first step in overcoming them.

Discussion Symposium

Those who do research in communities (Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal) know there are two approaches: the community as research subject and the community as engaged research partner.  This symposium is an invitation to community based researchers to come discuss with and learn from each other research strategies and methods that attempt to engage communities as research partners.

This symposium offers the opportunity to engage in a facilitated discussion around critical questions for environmentally grounded researchers working in non-academic communities with the twin goals of improving our own understanding of collaborative research approaches and coming to grips with what the research process looks like from the perspective of community members and ensuring they are as much engaged and benefitting from the process as we are.

Questions open for discussion include:

1. What are the different definitions of collaborative community research and what fundamental principles should be included;
2. What is required on the part of academic researchers and a community to actually engage as research partners effectively and productively;
3. What techniques or methods improve or even start community engagement;
4. What are communities hoping for or needing from a researcher;
5. How do we assess successful community partnering;
6. How do we give back to our partners effectively?
7.        How can collaborations best address different worldviews?

Other questions are likely to arise in the course of our discussion, and we will use a facilitated discussion format to start to articulate ideas for implementing engaged research partnerships with communities.

The facilitators/participants have extensive experience working collaboratively with Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities, and will share a few of their own lessons in a preliminary presentation, before opening the symposium up for others to share their experiences.

Discussion Symposium

The emerging research suggests that current energy and resource inefficiencies are limiting the robustness and sustainability of both local and national economies.  At the same time, those inefficiencies also erode job and income creation opportunities. The social consequences that follow a less robust and unsustainable economy may also wear down the ability of political institutions and markets to contribute to long-term solutions that can improve the common good.  In effect, social turmoil and tribal responses may drive a suboptimal economic and community outcome. This discussion symposium will explore emerging questions and tools that can help open up new areas of inquiry. It will then introduce a new web-based tool, The Climate Web™, which is a unique knowledge management (KM) system for understanding, tracking, and communicating energy, economic, and climate change issues and risks to multiple audiences including students, policy makers, and business leaders.  

Discussion Symposium

Common sense suggests that a growing population leads to sprawling development and greater crowding, more pollution and less room on the landscape for other species. Common sense and economic theory suggest that flooding labor markets drives down wages for less skilled workers, undermines unionizing efforts and increases economic inequality. A new book, "How Many Is Too Many? The Progressive Argument for Reducing Immigration into the United States," argues that when it comes to immigration-driven population growth, common sense is right. Current immigration levels—the highest in U.S. history—undermine efforts to achieve a more economically just and ecologically sustainable society. Join the author and four critics as they explore these themes, with particular emphasis on the connection between population matters and ecological sustainability.

Full Presentation Panel

Phenology - A Mindful Approach to Climate Change

Dr Mark L Hineline, Ph.D.

For decades now, concern about anthropogenic climate change (ACC) has been primarily the domain of scientists, in research and in public interest outreach, of environmentalists, and as a political football in the United States. While there have been and continue to be other aspects of ACC, the one area that has been little explored is the impact it will have on individual lives, here in the United States and elsewhere. This is unfortunate, inasmuch as climate change, and the climatic changes that issue therefrom, promise to be the defining issues in the lifetimes of all people alive today, and many who are not yet born – defining in the sense, say, that plague defined the 14th Century or that expanding literacy defined the 17th Century.

Climate change - and climatic changes - are a fact of life, and will continue to be so for decades to come. While it is more important than it has ever been to develop policies designed to prevent catastrophic consequences from ACC, it is also important to think and talk about how to live with this fact of life. One way to do this is to develop an observational and contemplative approach to climatic changes through the practice of phenological observing and record keeping.

The proposer is currently at work on a handbook for citizen-observers across a spectrum of levels of commitment, with the idea that attending to phenological signposts, recording them, and reflecting upon them, is an appropriate (but far from complete) response to climate change. This presentation will be a brief abstract of my forthcoming work, The Dooryard Phenologist: Noting Climatic Changes through the Seasons.

Building an Ecosystemic Model of Culture: Consequences for Public Policies, Research and Teaching Programmes

André Francisco Pilon

The contemporary world is increasingly dependent upon very large, intertwined and interdependent complex interacting systems, which legitimize power as domination and exploitation, wealth as predatory exploitation, growth as unlimited expansion, work as a segmented specialization. In view of the asymmetries of power between citizens and corporations and the dominant political-technological-economical system controlled by egocentric producers and consumers, critical thinking, interdisciplinary and holistic, values driven approaches are needed.

To deal with the problems of difficult settlement or solution in the world, an ecosystemic approach is posited for public policies, research and teaching programmes, encompassing four dimensions of being in the world (intimate, interactive, social and biophysical), as they combine, as donors and recipients, to induce the events (deficits and assets), cope with consequences (desired or undesired) and contribute for change (potential outputs), as long as they preserve their singularity (identity, proper characteristics) and dynamic reciprocity (mutual support).

Problems are defined within the “boiling pot”, where they originate, and not reduced to the bubbles of the surface (effects, fragmented, taken for granted issues); deficits and assets of all the dimensions are considered in the origin of the events, in order to strengthen their connections and seal their ruptures; since all dimensions are complementary in a mutually entangled web (configurations), that should be in a dynamic equilibrium, in view of natural and built environments and physical, social and mental wellbeing.

In the socio-cultural learning niches, projects of life are unveiled and dealt with by heuristic-hermeneutic processes, contributions of the participants are analysed from a thematic (“what”) and an epistemic point of view (“how”) in different space-time horizons of understanding, feeling and action; new forms of interpretation and understanding prepare the transition to an ecosystemic model of culture, integrating politics, economics, culture, education, environment, health, ethics and overall quality of life.

Perspectives on Planetary Boundaries: A Framework of Safe Operating Space for Humanity in a Changing Planet

Mohammed F.Rabbi, Professor of Life Sciences and Environmental Science

In the last 200 years, the dominant force for change in the earth system, i.e., the Earth’s climate and ecosystems embodies the human factor, and humanity has transitioned into a new planetary epoch, the Anthropocene. This new geologic era is characterized by an accelerating departure from the stable environmental conditions of the past 12,000 years into a new, unknown state of the Earth. There are increasing concerns that due to exponential growth of the anthropogenic activities, biophysical systems that are critical for regulating the stability of the Earth system could be destabilized and approach “tipping points” for unacceptable global environmental changes and that might trigger catastrophic events for human well-being.

A novel approach towards global sustainability has recently been proposed as “Planetary boundaries” with respect to the functioning of the Earth system and to explore frameworks of a safe operating space for human activities. In this novel concept, “unacceptable global environmental changes” are defined as the risks humanity faces in relation to the planetary transition from the stable environment of the Holocene era to the present geologic era of Anthropocene. This novel concept of planetary boundaries can transform our approach to growth and addresses the challenges of how to determine “safe boundaries” for humanity, based on the Earth systems and to operate within them.

The concept of planetary boundaries emphasizes the Earth as a complex system. In order to maintain a global environment that is advantageous for human development and well-being, Earth-system processes or well-defined areas of planetary boundaries as well as those that humanity has already transgressed are described in this presentation.  

Archives of Knowledge and Endangered Objects in the Anthropocene : Amy Balkin’s “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting”

Lisa E Bloom, Ph.D.

This article focuses on environmental work by artists that attempts to visually address new forms of art, seeing, feeling and sociality that are coming into being in the age of the Anthropocene.  It asks, in what ways can art portray what Rob Nixon calls in his book “Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor” “the violence of delayed effects”? (Nixon 2011: 2-3) How might it do so in a way that goes beyond the socio-political phenomena in question to address the emotional disturbance of living amidst these delayed effects? The work of Amy Balkin’s “A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting” is an archive literally of “debris” – the things that are already left or will be abandoned in the wake of environmental destruction. The collection contains objects from the Arctic and Antarctic as well as other parts of the world like Mexico City that one doesn’t think of as sinking and melting.  The focus of Balkin’s work is  how to represent environmental damage yet to come, a task that has often been delegated to the realm of science fiction writers often with powerful results. Balkin complicates in her work this notion of the future through rethinking the genre of the post-apocalyptic .Her project’s particular focus is on the slow-motion violence of climate change often discounted by dominant structures of perception but one that is relayed by ordinary people around the world who as non-experts or non-scientists are often not seen as authoritative witnesses. In this conceptual work, emphasis is put on documenting, analyzing and archiving everyday occurrences often dismissed from memory and policy planning by framing them as accidental, or random. The archive focuses on the inequitable exposure to climate –related losses for diverse communities and is displayed at libraries, galleries and online.

Full Presentation Panel

The presentations in this panel will examine the rapid expansion of marine national monuments in American maritime jurisdiction, the role of nongovernmental organizations in marine conservation in Papua New Guinea, the application of geographic information systems in coastal conservation, and sustainability in the cultured pearl industry.  The panel will also consider the relationship between terrestrial and marine conservation efforts.

Presidential Nature Conservation and the American National Monuments

George Busenberg

The protection of natural areas in the United States has been fundamentally shaped by the 1906 Antiquities Act, a federal law that grants the President unilateral authority to proclaim protected national monuments on federal lands.  The Antiquities Act has been widely used to protect a vast collection of natural areas within the land and sea jurisdictions of America.  A critical question that surrounds the national monuments power is the durability of the protections initially established under that power, since successful nature conservation requires perpetual protection.  The purpose of this study is to examine the durability of the Antiquities Act, and the durability of the protections initially proclaimed under the authority of that Act.  To what extent has the Antiquities Act remained intact in the face of attempts to restrict or repeal its delegation of unilateral conservation power to the President, and to what extent have the protections initially established under the Act been sustained, diminished, or reinforced over time?  This study examines these two research questions by examining the history of the Antiquities Act and a comprehensive quantitative dataset on the evolving status and acreages of protected natural areas originally proclaimed as national monuments in the period 1906 through 2014.  This study finds a prevailing pattern of durability in both the Antiquities Act and in the protections initially proclaimed under its authority.  While some national monuments have been diminished in acreage and a few have been revoked, the vast majority of the total area originally protected by national monument proclamations is still protected in some form today.  Furthermore, many national monuments have been given additional protections by Congress over time through national park and wilderness designations.  Therefore, the dominant pattern in this policy domain is the perpetuation and reinforcement of federal protections for natural areas initially protected as national monuments.

Marine versus terrestrial conservation in Papua New Guinea: The effects of issue characteristics on NGO organizing

Simone Pulver

Issue characteristics are central to explanations of outcomes in environmental politics.  Characteristics such as complexity, difficulty in monitoring, and long timescales are used to explain failure in addressing certain environmental challenges.  Conversely, certainty, emotivity, and short causal linkages between harm and victims are issue characteristics argued to facilitate solutions to environmental problems.  These lists, though informative, vary from case to case and lack a systematic analysis of the causal mechanisms linking particular issue characteristics with particular outcomes in environmental politics. Focusing on the case of conservation advocacy in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a framework is presented to explain how the different characteristics of terrestrial versus marine ecosystems explain the lag in marine conservation advocacy relative to advocacy centered on terrestrial conservation.  Despite parallel threats to terrestrial and marine resources, the majority of the forty-two conservation NGOs in PNG focus on terrestrial conservation efforts.  NGOs targeting marine issues are more recent entrants into the environmental advocacy community in PNG and tend to be local subsidiaries of international NGOs.  The framework uses four social movement theories about the rise of environmental mobilization—theories based on harm, resource mobilization, political opportunity, and identity—to connect particular issue characteristics to mobilization outcomes. 

Mobile GIS Applications for Coastal Planning

Diana Mitsova, PhD

This study reports on a cross-college collaborative teaching effort focusing on development of prototype mobile GIS applications to address coastal issues. Three faculty concurrently taught courses in urban planning, computer engineering and multimedia studies which resulted in seven GIS-based prototypes of smartphone mobile applications for coastal conservation and planning. Instructors and students examined the applicability of these modules in the context of coastal conservation, climate change, disaster management and sustainability. The modules included developing mapping applications, interacting with layers, features and attributes, and running analysis tasks. Some examples of the prototypes that were developed as a result of the cross-college collaboration include: “Sea Turtle Watch” application  for conservation and  protection of  sea turtles urban habitat; “Lion Fish Catcher” to report on an invasive  predatory reef fish threatening Florida reefs; “Water Safe” to report on the environmental health of beaches and rivers in South Florida; “Shark Migration” for  data collection on migrating shark species; and “Marine Debris,”  and app that brings awareness of the negative impacts of marine debris/ trash on the oceans and marine life. Furthermore, faculty and students explored ways to strengthen the app content basis through “rigorous citizen science” and collaborations with local community and government agencies. The collaborative teaching effort involved both discipline-specific and interactive face-to-face class sessions. The students in urban planning developed the conceptual framework and provided content for the mobile GIS applications. The computer engineering students wrote the programming code while the multimedia students designed the graphical interface. A learning outcomes rubric was designed to conduct pre- and post- testing of knowledge gains for all the 50 students from 3 different disciplines. The results indicate increase in both discipline-specific and synergistic knowledge. The prototypes are available through Bitbucket [https://bitbucket.org/shankarfau/profile/teams].

Fostering Environmental Collaborations in the Marine Cultured-Pearl Industry

Dr. Julie Nash

Marine ecosystems face threats as a result of overfishing, watershed based pollution, marine pollution, and unregulated coastal development. Coral reefs are at the forefront, with more than sixty percent under immediate and direct threat from local, man-made, sources. It is imperative that these ecosystems be protected in a manner that engages local stakeholders and provides tangible economic benefits for local communities. If managed responsibly, marine cultured-pearl farming can have a positive environmental footprint on marine ecosystems. The sensitivity of oysters to pollution creates an inherent incentive for pearl farmers to maintain water quality. In addition, research on coral reefs and pearl farms demonstrate that fish are more abundant in areas with pearl farms, positively linking responsible farming to healthy coral reef environments. The Sustainable Pearls research project was formed to enhance understanding of the industry’s positive environmental impacts and to explore alternative private governance collaborations.

This paper focuses on the Sustainable Pearls action research project and the boundary spanning collaboration that designed marine cultured-pearl sustainability principles. Between 2011 and 2014, the Sustainable Pearls partners connected marine cultured-pearl producers and key industry stakeholders from over dozen countries throughout Asia, North America, and Europe. The international boundary spanning enabled the design of sustainability principles that accommodated differences in ecosystems, geographies, and business models.  The academic boundary spanning fostered the development of principles that displayed both environmental and social aspects of sustainability in consumer friendly language.  These marine cultured-pearl sustainability principles were presented at the first marine cultured-pearl industry roundtable in June 2014.

Full Presentation Panel

This panel will provide an array of multi-disciplinary approaches being used to investigate and respond to current challenges occurring at the nexus of environmental and human health. While each individually-applied method provides valuable insight into the causes and potential solutions of the challenges we face as a society, we achieve greater clarity and power by combining a variety of approaches when seeking complex and sustainability-minded resolutions.

Participants include a diversity of backgrounds ranging across the social and natural sciences, and presentations range from projects on new opportunities for access to clean water, to improving water quality by decreasing pharmaceutical contamination, to expanding the applicability of health impact assessments, to lessons learned from the Ebola pandemic. Each presentation asks us to confront disciplinary boundaries in a way that will enhance our methodological tools, as well as the outcomes of our scholarly endeavors. 

Direct Potable Water Reuse: Confronting Scientific Frontiers and Social and Legal Boundaries

Authors: Caroline Scruggs¹, Katie Zemlick², and Bruce Thomson²

Affiliations:

¹University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning, Community and Regional Planning Program (Discussant contact:cscruggs@unm.edu)

²University of New Mexico School of Engineering, Civil Engineering Department

PRESENTATION I:

Abstract: In the face of increasing population, development pressures, and climate change, many regions around the world face freshwater shortages, which threaten human quality of life and erode ecosystem biodiversity. Communities must choose between numerous supply- and demand-side options to create sustainable and reliable water supplies. Direct potable water reuse (DPR) is a supply-side option that holds promise for improving sustainability and reliability of water supplies by generating high-quality drinking water from wastewater. Most DPR research has focused on large coastal communities with relatively high mean household incomes. Significant advances toward DPR implementation have occurred, and San Diego provides one important example; the presentation will discuss the evolution of DPR and progress to date in this community. In addition, there are many candidate communities for DPR scattered throughout the inland portion of the Southwestern US, where far less research has been performed, and where demographics and other important factors look very different from the coastal context. We propose that the case for DPR is very different for larger, wealthier coastal communities as compared to small-to-mid-sized inland ones. The presentation examines the differences between DPR in the inland and coastal contexts in terms of: (1) appropriate treatment technologies and configurations, (2) public perception of water scarcity and attitudes toward potable water reuse, (3) water availability, (4) cost considerations for capital and operations and maintenance, and (5) legal/regulatory issues. We conclude that the challenges associated with DPR in the coastal and inland contexts are very different, and it may be difficult for water managers in inland communities to make informed decisions based on the growing body of DPR literature that is specific to the coastal context. More research is needed on DPR feasibility in inland communities, and we highlight what would be most useful to assist inland communities in assessing their options.

PRESENTATION II

Synthesizing two applied research frameworks to understand urban riverine access to Pacific lamprey: The case of Willamette Falls, Oregon

Authors (alphabetically): Manar Alattar^1,2, Ariana Chiapella^1,2, Daniel Larson^1,3, Anandi van Diepen-Hedayat^{1, 4}

Affiliations:

¹ Portland State University NSF-IGERT: Ecosystem Services Supporting Urbanizing Regions

² Portland State University School of the Environment, Environmental Sciences & Management

³ Portland State University School of the Environment, Geography

⁴ Portland State University Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning (Discussant contact:av5@pdx.edu)

Abstract:This is a project conducted by four doctoral students participating in Portland State University’s NSF-IGERT program, organized around the theme Ecosystem Services Supporting Urbanizing Regions. The project, to which we are devoting a year of work, mobilizes mixed methodologies—qualitative field methods for primary data and quantitative statistical methods for secondary data—to characterize the use of Pacific lamprey (Entosphenus tridentatus) by regional Native Americans, as well as the species’ potential impact to these human consumers. The project is part of a larger governmental/tribal/academic collaboration centered on the impending redevelopment and restoration of Willamette Falls, a multi-use site in a post-industrial landscape in Oregon City, where a large paper mill has just closed.

Scholars and practitioners, including environmental planners, have lately applied the health impact assessment (HIA) analytic to understand relationships between human health and built and natural environments. For our AESS presentation, we will synthesize the HIA approach with the ecosystem services (ES) framework to reconcile a research program consisting of three forms of data: ecological (lamprey conservation), environmental (water pollution), and anthropological (human harvest and consumption of lamprey). We will discuss HIA and ES on their own, recent syntheses thereof, our formulation of research questions and synthetic design and methodology, and finally, our preliminary findings on the mutual constitution of site-specific lamprey ecology and human ecology in the face of change.

PRESENTATION III

Pharmaceutical waste as an environmental contaminant: seeking points of intervention

Authors: Christine Vatovec^1,2,  Patrick Phillips³, Emily Van Wagoner¹, Bret Turner⁴

Affiliations:

¹ Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont

² University of Vermont College of Medicine

³ United States Geological Survey pjphilli@usgs.gov

⁴ Pennsylvania State University, Environmental Resource Management

Abstract: Pharmaceuticals are among the many chemicals of emerging concern that are increasingly found to have negative impacts on natural ecosystems. Sources of pharmaceuticals in aquatic ecosystems include waste disposal practices (e.g. flushing, or municipal waste leachate), along with human excretion. Each of these sources requires different multi-disciplinary approaches to minimize the amounts and variety of pharmaceuticals entering the environment. This presentation will report on a multi-disciplinary approach to identifying points of intervention to minimize the impacts of pharmaceutical waste in aquatic ecosystems. Our mixed-methods approach includes quantifying the types and concentrations of pharmaceuticals entering Lake Champlain via wastewater effluent, spatial analyses to identify areas of concern, a survey of watershed residents about their current medication consumption patterns and disposal practices, and interviewing providers to investigate “upstream” opportunities to minimize drug waste. This approach may serve as a model for investigating the complex social governance of other similar environment and human health challenges in order to develop better policies and practices to aid in their mitigation.

Discussion Symposium

The proposed session builds on a mini-symposium, titled “Status Quo, Conflict, and Innovation in the ESS Curriculum,” to be published in the Journal of Environmental Studies & Sciences (JESS), and presents an opportunity for broader discussion by members of the ESS community. Key questions include “Is there a status quo in today’s ESS curriculum, and if so, how was it achieved?”; “What remain (or have emerged) as some of the major conflicts regarding the ESS curriculum, and how shall we understand and address these conflicts?”; and “As we consider the ESS curriculum in future, what are some possible and desirable paths for innovation?” The JESS mini-symposium features seven peer-reviewed articles on a variety of contemporary curricular issues in ESS, including the pre-undergraduate and undergraduate ESS experience; the role of objects, regions, and sustainability; the role of organizations such as the College Board and the National Council for Science and the Environment; and the range of implicit claims regarding social change and power embedded in undergraduate ESS curricula. Session participants will briefly summarize these papers, offer their own perspectives, then facilitate broader discussion, ultimately focusing on implications for the future ESS curriculum. In order to sustain discussion following the session, mini-symposium editors will extend an invitation for brief written comments to be submitted to JESS, to which authors will respond in an upcoming issue. Based on attendance and participation at a related session held at the AESS 2014 conference in New York City, we expect the proposed session to be well attended and generate lively discussion. Ultimately, we hope that the session will offer a forum for deeper discussion of the frameworks, actors, and norms upon which the future ESS curriculum will be constructed.

Discussion Symposium

The identified speakers and additional speakers and presentations in the symposium will discuss Arctic environmental issues which are of importance to the AESS membership. This symposium discussion in each instance will build on information presented in the Forum on Arctic Change in two recent issues of the Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences, and other Arctic science. The focus in the symposium will be to build AESS membership understanding on new and innovative areas of Arctic environmental studies and sciences, and to identify environmental science and research themes and issues that are of relevance to environmental science departments and educators. Included in this symposium will be a discussion of the recent report to the National Science Foundation:  "Motivating Research on the Science Communications Front- Conveying the Nature and Impacts of Rapid Change in Ice-Dominated Earth Systems to Decision-makers and the Public".  

Mealtime Roundtable

Interdisciplinary scholars are finding homes in numerous programs and departments across college campuses, and universities throughout the world are embracing the idea of interdisciplinarity. But is academia ready to evaluate interdisciplinary scholarship when it comes to tenure and promotion? Please join this roundtable for an in-depth discussion of what constitutes “excellence” in an interdisciplinary academic career. Everyone from emerging scholars to seasoned professors is welcome and encouraged to attend. A goal is for participants from different programs/departments to refine their ideas into peer-reviewed journal articles on this topic.

Mealtime Roundtable

Human health and the environment are both integral components of sustainability. Without a healthy environment, humans cannot flourish. Likewise, practicing healthy behaviors can help to enhance environmental quality (for example, think of the co-benefits of riding a bike to work: you support your health and reduce your carbon footprint). Given this interplay between human health and the environment, how can we best help students in health fields to recognize the importance of the environment? How do we support students in environmental studies and sciences to value the important role of health in environmental challenges? Join this conversation to share ideas about pedagogy in action, along with a discussion of course and academic program designs that may best serve our students as they evolve their interests, skills, and contributions as environment and health-conscious sustainability-minded citizens.

Full Presentation Panel

A climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) is a key step in determining appropriate mitigation and adaptation actions, and in monitoring and evaluating the efficacy of these actions in ensuring the sustainability of a community in the face of climate change. While CCVA is helpful in capturing different vulnerability dimensions (e.g. physical, social, cultural, economic and political), it fails to distinguish between internal and external determinants, the latter being indirect and embedded in common indicators of vulnerability.  Such indirect vulnerability arises because communities are inter-dependent, not just for economic commodities but also for the basic resources needed to sustain a population’s wellbeing.

No community is self-sufficient - food, energy, water, raw materials and products are imported and exported. Therefore, each community is affected by the vulnerability of other areas on which they depend on for critical needs, including the transport routes connecting those areas. As such, CCVAs for communities must be enhanced to articulate this inter-dependency and present a clearer picture of vulnerability.

The practice of conducting supply chain assessments can be adapted to articulate the indirect vulnerability arising from critical needs networks. The main objective of the panel presentation is to demonstrate the supply chain analyses to the critical needs of a community, and assess these chains through a climate change vulnerability lens. The panel papers focus on tracing the supply chains for critical needs inputs on rice, electricity and water and basic output of waste; in the context of Metro Manila’s vulnerability to climate change.

Individual Abstracts for the 4 panelists:

An Application of Supply Chain Analyses to Assess Indirect Vulnerability to Climate Change: An Assessment of the Water Supply Chain of Metro Manila

Presenter 1: Maria Aileen Leah G. Guzman, Ph.D.

Presenter 1 Paper Abstract:

In the Philippine context, it has long been recognized that climate change affects the water cycle and thus the freshwater supply. Warming temperatures and increases in extreme events, together with population growth and ecosystem degradation further complicate the balance of water supply and demand (Jose & Cruz, 1999). Although many studies already exist that explores the vulnerability of water supply systems in the context of climate change, most literature focus on quantitative results (Connor, et al., 2012). The project provides an opportunity to investigate the water supply chain of a mega-city such as Metro Manila through a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) -based model that integrates an input-output model to identify “weakness” in the water supply chain. Preliminary results indicate that the weak links in the water supply chain of Metro Manila include the limited number of raw water sources, temporary storage facilities (for raw and treated water), treatment plants and distribution facilities.

Presenter 2 Paper Title:

An Application of Supply Chain Analyses to Assess Indirect Vulnerability to Climate Change: An Assessment of the Waste Management Chain of Metro Manila

Presenter 2: Abigail Marie T. Favis 

Presenter 2 Paper Abstract:

Metro Manila generates upwards of 8.700 tons of solid waste daily. While the Solid Waste Management Act of 2000 prescribes that the collection, transfer, transport, diversion, and disposal waste is the responsibility of the local government unit (LGU), solid waste management is still a problem both within and outside the city boundaries. For instance, the bulk of Metro Manila’s waste is disposed of in landfills outside the city, and substantial land and sea transport is needed. Thus, an understanding of the vulnerability of solid waste collection, transportation, and disposal will help determine Metro Manila’s indirect vulnerability and will lead to interventions that enhance the city’s resilience. To accomplish this, mapping solid waste transport routes and disposal sites and key informant interviews will be conducted and the data gathered will be analyzed in conjunction with climate change projections.

Presenter 3 Paper Title:

An Application of Supply Chain Analyses to Assess Indirect Vulnerability to Climate Change: An Assessment of the Rice Supply Chain of Metro Manila

Presenter 3: Charlotte Kendra Z. Gotangco, Ph.D.

Presenter 3 Paper Abstract:

Metro Manila, a highly urbanized region composed of 17 cities and a municipality, supports an estimated 12 million people who rely on rice as a staple of the Filipino diet. Rice is a climate-sensitive crop, with decreases in yield associated with increases in night-time temperatures and increases in growing season minimum temperatures during the dry season. Metro Manila is highly dependent on the provinces of Isabela, Nueva Ecija and Bulacan, and on importation, for its rice needs, having no substantial agriculture industry on its own. This represents a significant source of indirect vulnerability for Metro Manila in the face of climate change and climate variability, as all three provinces are projected to experience temperature increases throughout the year, and precipitation decreases during the summer months. Furthermore, during episodes of extreme rainfall events, even those not directly affecting Metro Manila but affecting neighboring provinces and the rice bowls of Luzon, transport of rice supply to Metro Manila is hampered by flooding leading to higher prices of commodity. For these reasons, it becomes important to map the climate exposure of Metro Manila’s rice sources, as well as the road and transport networks, and the major markets/retailers, to help characterize Metro Manila’s indirect vulnerability. To accomplish this, Geographic Information Systems are employed together with ground-truthing, and surveys/interviews of stakeholders in the rice supply chain, both for government rice and commercial rice.

Presenter 4 Paper Title:

An Application of Supply Chain Analyses to Assess Indirect Vulnerability to Climate Change: An Assessment of the Energy Supply Chain of Metro Manila

Presenter 4: Marion Lara L. Tan 

Presenter 4 Paper Abstract:

Metro Manila does not generate its own energy; its energy supply relies heavily on the surrounding provinces. The fuel supply chain downstream movement to Metro Manila concentrates from two main geographical location: the proximate provinces of Bataan (East of Manila) and Batangas (South of Manila).  Almost 100% of Philippines’ fuel comes from imports which are received in Bataan and Batangas.  The two provinces also host the primary and largest refineries of the country. Two main gas pipelines, one from Bataan and the other from Batangas, transport the petroleum products to the National Capital Region for further distribution. Moreover, Metro Manila’s electricity heavily relies on the fuel importation; as power still mainly comes from gas-sourced power generated in Batangas (55%).  Given the current energy set-up of Metro Manila, the metropolis may be subjected to multiple exposures to climate change risks. This paper provides a vulnerability assessment of Metro Manila’s energy supply chain. The initial intended outcome of this assessment will be a Geographic Information Systems -based model overlaid with climate change projections. The integrated model will have the capability to assess the ‘weak links’ of Metro Manila’s energy supply network in the context of climate change.

Discussion Symposium

Many ESS faculty, students and staff are often called upon to be the campus “sustainability expert”.  This panel will explore how sustainability intersects with ESS in academic programming, curricular and co-curricular development.  How should the sustainability curriculum differ from the ESS curriculum?  What does sustainability programming add to ESS?  What are areas for overlap and synergetic collaboration?  What are tensions and contradictions?  Panelists will be called on to share lessons learned, common pitfalls and practical guidance in program development. 

Full Presentation Panel

Addressing Wicked Problems: When Boundaries Don’t Exist and Change Happens

Jillian Girard

Addressing climate change, managing toxics, “all lands” forest management, and assessing the role of genetic engineering in agriculture can all be characterized as “wicked problems” due to their social and ecological complexity.  These issues share a number of attributes – they cross ecological boundaries, require the engagement of multiple actors and sectors, and cannot be resolved through a single technological or policy fix.  Scientific uncertainty and colliding value systems color the debate in each case – while much is known, ranges of probability can be mistaken for lack of data, and what may be “true” may be seen as different from what is “right”. 

While complexity and evolving knowledge are the hallmark of these challenges, traditional policy and governance structures have rarely been designed to encompass these attributes.  Policies and management frameworks are usually media specific (focusing on air, water, or land) and are rarely designed to allow the many different agencies and actors that touch on an issue to work together in a coordinated manner. Budgets and performance measurement systems are based on specific organizational goals and objectives, not recognizing that to address such complex issues will require that multiple actors find alignment between their goals and work together in complementary ways.  The evolving nature of our understanding of such issues makes an adaptive approach essential; however, policies and programs are rarely designed with feedback loops or with the “permission” to adapt as we learn more about what works and what doesn’t.

This presentation will explore this context for two complex issues – toxics management and approaches to managing genetically engineered crops – and will examine approaches that seek to acknowledge and embrace the complex social and environmental dynamics of these topics.  What is the evolving role of national vs. state or local policy in these arenas?  How do regulatory and mandatory approaches interface with voluntary initiatives? What role do markets play in shaping the management and policy dynamics in each case? What strategies can be used to find areas of alignment among multiple actors? Are there themes or lessons to be learned that can inform approaches to other “wicked problems”?

Trends of Mercury Exposure in the Peruvian Amazon: A systematic review of mercury concentration studies of humans and the environment

David J.X. Gonzalez

Decades of artisanal small-scale gold mining activity in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios, Peru has resulted in significant mercury contamination of air, water, soils and biota.  To understand trends of mercury concentration resulting from releases of mercury in Madre de Dios in the environment, wildlife, and human populations, we collected and reviewed all the empirical studies reporting empirical measurements of mercury concentrations in a range of abiotic and biotic media in Madre de Dios.  Included in our review were: studies published in the international and Peruvian peer reviewed scientific literature, student thesis and dissertations, primary research reported in published and unpublished government reports, and in poorly circulated Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) project reports.  Studies were collected through extensive searches of online literature and dissertation databases, interviews with mercury researchers, archives of government and NGO project logs, and consultations with current and former funders and government administrators.  

Trends of mercury concentrations are reported in four generalized categories to facilitate comparison among relevant studies: mercury concentrations in humans, concentrations in fish, concentrations in other wildlife, and ambient (abiotic) mercury concentrations. The existing body of mercury research in Madre de Dios indicates that mercury exposure is widespread throughout the region and has been increasing over time. Serious gaps in knowledge regarding mercury concentrations and effects in wildlife and human populations are shown and discussed. This study represent a synthesis of every published mercury study in the Southern Peruvian Amazon to date, and reveals a twenty year temporal record of mercury contamination in a major  Amazonian watershed.  

Reducing water pollution from herbicides through sustainable agriculture: An examination of agricultural practices and farmer learning

Joanna Ory

Atrazine is the second most commonly used herbicide in the US, with an annual use rate of 73-78 million pounds (Grube et al., 2011). It is also a known endocrine disruptor that causes the feminization in many wildlife species (Rohr and McCoy, 2011). The US EPA’s Atrazine Monitoring Program shows that levels have exceeded the Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) set by the Safe Drinking Water Act of 3 µg/L in drinking water for 58% of systems sampled in their monitoring program (EPA, 2011). The EPA states that prolonged exposure to atrazine in exceedance of the MCL can lead to cardiovascular and reproductive problems in humans. The discovery of drinking water contamination from atrazine and other herbicides has prompted regulatory responses in different countries with the aim of controlling pesticide pollution. Italy and Germany were the first countries to ban atrazine in 1991. In the US, Wisconsin is the state with the strictest atrazine restrictions. Environmental groups such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) have called for a total atrazine ban throughout the US (Wu et al., 2009). This paper is a case study of both the Wisconsin atrazine restrictions and the atrazine ban in Italy. This multidisciplinary paper documents the history of the policies and their environmental consequences with a focus on the environmental sustainability of atrazine alternatives. Survey data and interviews from 2012 are used to describe the agricultural decisions made by corn farmers in response to atrazine restrictions and which alternatives are currently being used. The chapter includes data synthesis of water quality monitoring performed to highlight how the policies ultimately affected water quality. The conclusion contains lessons learned as well as recommendations for international and US environmental policy. 

Full Presentation Panel

Difficult-to-predict shocks or disturbances could disrupt food production or distribution severely enough to set in motion a breakdown of food supply. The risk of serious shortfalls, whether on a local or larger scale, shorter or longer period, is of genuine concern. Cities are particularly vulnerable. It’s difficult to get a clear grip on this topic because the food system is so complex, and failure could take forms never seen before, but the stakes are high. A collection of articles in JESS is framing this issue to clarify what environmental scientists and teachers can do through research, education, or community action to contribute to a more resilient food system. This session will summarize conclusions from the articles and explore:

• What are the potential and limitations of local and regional food systems as a line of defense against disruption in food supply?
• What is already being done by civil society and the private sector to reduce the risks?

A block of time will be reserved for discussion among everyone present about strategies for improving food system resilience and what we should do next to move forward on implementing those strategies.

Laura Lengnick, Metropolitan food webs: A resilient solution to the climate change challenge?

A transformation of the U.S. food system to a nationally integrated system of sustainable metropolitan food webs is a resilient solution to the climate change challenge. A review of food systems research based on Dr. Lengnick’s recent book “Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate,” converges on two key changes that together would enhance the resilience of U.S. food supply to climate change and other 21st century challenges. We must transform production methods (from industrial to sustainable) and geography (from regional specialization to regional diversity). Leading sustainable farmers and ranchers around the country offer proof of concept – they remain successful despite lack of government support and intense concentration and consolidation of the food system, manage impressive diversity, and sell high quality foods into direct local and regional markets. For more than 40 years, these farmers and ranchers have been busy weaving a resilient U.S. food web with the help of sustainable agriculture researchers and educators, food activists and consumers. The New American Food System is a web of regional sustainable food systems oriented around major metropolitan areas with numerous and strong local linkages within the region, some or moderate interregional linkages, and few or weak national and international linkages. To cultivate this new food system, we have the benefit of the existing knowledge bases in agroecology, sustainable food systems, adaptive management and adaptive governance. We can begin now to build on the existing physical and social capital generated by the sustainable food movement, cultivating sustainability and resilience through the redirection of existing federal programs of farm support and regional economic development.

Nancy Creamer, The local food movement, public-private partnerships, and food system resiliency

This paper addresses the question of what can be done to make the mainstream food system more resilient to shocks that can disrupt food supplies. We suggest that the interest and energy connected to the local food movement extant in a wide-ranging set of public and private groups, as well as among a widening base of consumers, creates a unique opportunity to strengthen food system resiliency. We specifically focus on the supply and distribution systems of supermarket retailers and consider the opportunities and challenges associated with localization of food procurement and distribution. We discuss actions to address these opportunities and challenges in the context of the work of the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, providing examples of how public and private entities that hold shared interests in local agriculture can partner as part of a holistic approach to diversifying and strengthening the food system.

Gerry Marten, An overview of results from the JESS special issue on food resilience and their implications for ways to leverage improvement

Articles in the JESS special issue cover a broad range of perspectives on the food system, highlighting the significance of each perspective for food resilience. Two common themes are (a) the role of diversity and adaptive capacity and (b) the potential of local and regional self-sufficiency and alternative food systems to compensate for deficiencies in the current mainstream food system. Some articles relate what environmental and food-system professionals are already doing with farmers and food supply chain corporations in the mainstream system to increase local and regional self-sufficiency or improve the sustainability of food production. A noteworthy example is use of the leveraging power of institutional food procurement to impose specifications on the way food is produced or distributed. Innovative procurement policies typically focus on purchasing from local food sources and may also address sustainability in other ways. Enormous opportunity and challenge exist for environmental and food-system professionals to work as facilitators at all levels of food supply chains to improve resilience.

Full Presentation Panel

What Do Graduates from Environmental Programs Need to Know? What Do They Need to Be Able to Do?

Dr. Liam Phelan

This paper reports on a recently completed project to define threshold learning outcomes (TLOs, or minimum standards) for tertiary programs in the field of ‘Environment and Sustainability’ offered by universities in Australia. In developing the TLOs we asked, ‘What is the critical learning graduates need from Environment and Sustainability programs and why?’ The literature offers a wide range of different approaches, opinions and findings in relation to these questions, rather than a clear consensus position. We undertook this project using a collaborative approach to engage national and international stakeholders (academic, industry, student, indigenous and community) through 2014.We used a social learning approach which fosters discourse and framing of joint problem solving because we sought to articulate a set of TLOs that reflected a shared consensus amongst stakeholders in Environment and Sustainability education to ensure ownership of the TLOs by ‘frontline’ teachers. The collaborative development of the TLOs was informed by over 2,500 individual recommendations from more than 250 stakeholders, and this resulted in a set of TLOs grouped in four categories: Transdisciplinary knowledge, Systemic Understanding, Skills for Environment and Sustainability, and Ethical Practice. Piloting of the TLOs indicates the collective wisdom and experience of a broad and diverse set of stakeholders has resulted in an inspiring yet workable set of student learning standards for tertiary qualifications in Environment and Sustainability. Both the standards themselves and the process through which they were defined may be of interest to environmental educators internationally.

Full Presentation Panel

Ocean Acidification and Potential International Legal Responses

Dr. Wil Burns, Ph.D.

While most of the focus in the past thirty years in terms of burgeoning levels of carbon dioxide emissions has been on the potential impacts on climate, an equally foreboding threat is posed by declining pH caused by the uptake of the world's oceans of approximately 30% of this carbon, a phenomenon known as "ocean acidification." Ocean acidification may undermine the ability of calcifying species that form critical components of ocean ecosystems to form shells in the future, including coral polyps, coccolithophores, and pteropods. Moreover, acidification could effect profound and negative behavioral changes in many ocean species. This presentation will seek to assess the potential ramifications of ocean acidification in this century and beyond, critical research gaps, and potential international legal responses under regimes such as the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and regional ocean pollution treaties.

Enhancing Cross Border Conservation: the Conservation of Sedentary Species on the Continental Shelf and the Deep Sea Bed.

Prof Simone Borg, PH.D., M.Jur, LL.D.

Our research proposal focuses on portraying the difficulties in ensuring the conservation of a separate group of living marine resources referred to under UNCLOS as “sedentary species” that may occur on the continental shelf and the deep sea bed. There is a distinction in the regulation of such species under Internatioanl law due to the human made borders between areas or national and areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). The regulation of such species in marine ABNJ areas is completely omitted under the 1982 Convention. There is no mention of sedentary species under the UNCLOS high seas regime or in Part XI relating to the deep sea bed. They are considered as an integral part of the resources of the continental shelf when they occur in marine areas subject to national jurisdiction and are specifically excluded from the EEZ regime. Furthermore, UNCLOS does not refer to the many conservation duties the coastal state may have in their regard under the continental shelf regime, as the focus of this Part of UNCLOS was formulated with the intention of regulating mining and extraction of non-living resources. The UNCLOS provisions leave gaps in international law that have not been addressed by other legal instruments. Due to the absence of regulation, there are uncertainties surrounding jurisdictional claims over sedentary species on the deep seabed, which are seriously jeopardizing their conservation. Awareness about the commercial and conservation importance of sedentary species in high seas areas when UNCLOS was negotiated was certainly not the same as it is today. Nor was it technologically feasible and commercially viable to exploit such species at that time. Consequently, as International law lagged behind developments in the field of bioprospecting on the deep seabed, the international community was left to face a legal dilemma as to whether bioprospecting should be classified as a harvesting activity, an extracting activity or even as marine scientific research (MSR). In other words identifying under which legal boundary bioprospecting falls has been impossible and consequently it remains an unregulated activity. Wev propose the formulation of an Implementation Agreement to UNCLOS specifically designed to address the conservation of sedentary species on the seabed when occurring both within and outside national jursdiction. Our proposal emulates  two existing Implementation Agreements under UNCLOS, namely The Deep Sea Mining Agreement and the Fish Stocks Agreement, which have both served to trouble-shoot the deadlock concerning Part IX of the 1982 Convention and the conflicting interpretations of sub-section two of Parts VII, respectively. They were a successful compromise to a political deadlock that dragged on for entire decades. The conclusion of Implementation Agreements avoided reopening discussions over the provisions of UNCLOS and instead supplemented them further in accordance with prevailing state practice. Consequently, our proposal could serve as a model for States to by-pass conflicting and polarized positions and instead focus on regulating current operators in a manner which safeguards one of the most vulnerableand least known components of biodiversity on the planet whilst ensuring a compatible conservation regime across human drawn borders and limits.

Is U.S. Marine Mammal Conservation a Wicked Problem?

Richard L. Wallace

All marine mammals in the U.S. are protected under the Marine Mammal Protection Act of 1972 (MMPA). The MMPA is a groundbreaking law: in addition to serving as the basis of the Endangered Species Act of 1973, it provided the first—and to date, only—statutory ecological mandate for the protection of wild living resources. It also expanded the scope of values associated with wildlife and created an oversight and appraisal structure unique in U.S. environmental law. Since the act’s passage, marine mammals have gained precedence in public awareness, spawning effective advocacy communities and a broad societal mandate for their protection. However, as Reynolds et al. (2009) and others have noted, the MMPA remains hamstrung by the limitations of the institutions, agencies, and individuals responsible for its implementation, including human arrogance, a false confidence in the power of science as a rationale for conservation, the influence of diverse and often conflicting values on the processes and outcomes of conservation decision making, and the tendency of decision makers to focus on proximate rather than ultimate causes of conservation problems. In this presentation, I will discuss how these limitations demonstrate the existence of the “wicked problems” complex (Rittel and Webber, 1973) in marine mammal conservation: it is normative, difficult to define, multi-causal, dynamic and unstable, and lacking well-defined termination (other than extinction). As well, conservation strategies often create unanticipated problems, contain little room for trial and error, and are predisposed to policy failure. I contend that, as with other complex social problems that environmental professionals face, the wicked problem of marine mammal conservation argues for large-scale paradigmatic change to successfully achieve conservation goals—change that is difficult (at best) and anathema (at worst) to the responsible individuals and agencies. 

Early warning of regime shifts in ecological systems

Dr. Tarsha Eason

The broad implications of catastrophic regime shifts have prompted the need to find methods that are not only able to detect regime shifts but also provide warning of them before they occur.  Variance, skewness, kurtosis, and critical slowing down have all been proposed as indicators of impending regime shifts. However, these approaches typically do not signal a shift until it is well underway which is often too late for management intervention. Further, they have primarily been used to evaluate model or simple systems characterized by few variables. Accordingly, additional work is needed to determine whether these methods will provide distinct signals when assessing real, complex multivariate systems.  In this work, we present an information theory based approach of assessing dynamic changes in system condition. The utility of this method is evaluated by comparing it's performance to traditional indicators through the assessment of model and real systems.  Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach in providing warning of critical transitions and therefore may facilitate the development of better methods for detecting and managing systems that are of importance to humans. This work offers great promise for resilience science and sustainability.

Full Presentation Panel

Geoengineering: Beyond Green Thinking?

Hee-Yoon Kim, MA, MSc

Despite the uncertainty and risks associated with large-scale technological interventions into the Earth's climate system - collectively known as 'geoengineering' or 'climate engineering', they are justified by their proponents in light of the existential threats that climate change poses at present and for the future. Bearing the already-advanced accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and still limited progress on global efforts to tackle climate change in mind, should humanity focus more on such deliberate technological attempts to stay within planetary boundaries? Mainstream environmentalism, informed by norms of restraint and non-domination, has taken a rather negative view on the issue for decades. In the present study, Q methodology is applied to elicit the perspectives of graduates in environmental studies in an effort to broaden the understanding of environmentally concerned individuals' attitudes toward geoengineering, which was subsequently supplemented by post hoc interviews. Three perspectives are identified: (1) 'Traditional environmentalists', closely tied with deep ecology; (2) 'Hopeful rationalists', related to ecological modernization; and (3) 'Floaters with doubts', characterized by criticism over expert-driven governance. Though the dominant view is that large-scale technological interventions into the Earth system are likely to be environmentally detrimental, support for more research on geoengineering exists, albeit with slightly differing attitudes. The lack of preferences for different geoengineering proposals - which are highly divergent in terms of their mechanisms, impacts, cost effectiveness, and timeframes - suggest that more research as well as effective communications are necessary for engagement and sophisticated societal discussions, should any of geoengineering proposals be implemented or not. With further discussions on the respective strengths and weaknesses of such perspectives, it is argued that more instrumental view on science and technology may be necessary for modern environmentalism in the face of accelerating climate change.

Technological Hubris and the Earth System: Limits beyond Boundaries?

Bertrand G. Guillaume, Prof.

This paper offers an historical and philosophical synthesis of the relationship between political and ethical ‘milieu’ (μ?σον) on the one hand, and economical and ecological milieu (ο?κος) on the other hand, or symmetrically it engages with the link Hubris /Anthropocene.

The word ‘milieu’ means in French both the center and the environment. Its origin is twofold: the méson (μ?σον) and the oïkos(ο?κος). We would like to echo this double etymology with regards to the contemporary ecological crisis.

The ‘milieu’ (μ?σον) is also a political space of measure (ο? μ?τσοι). It is the space of the common measure, as well as the space of ethics, the one of Aristotelian mésotes (μεσóτης), or the one of sôphrosunè, which opposes to excess. Following this etymology, the ecological crisis is also a crisis of ‘proper balance’, namely it engages with Nemesis punishing Hubris.

We discuss this interpretation, and clarify the very sense of proper balance as a way to help us caring about our ‘milieu’ (or not).

We show that, if the essence of modern man is to be no longer ‘good measure’, but ‘good reason’, then contemporary man emerges when the two figures of measure and excess conflate. For example, the Anthropocene can be thought of as the time when we measure our excess. From this point of view, our geological age is more the systematic measure of the climate than its modification, and less the excess of one machine than the excess of the world itself (‘the world in a machine’).

With humility, we eventually try to make a history of technological Hubris, and a philosophy of our technological Anthropocene.

Rethinking Conservation in the Anthropocene: Castor Canadensis as Leitmotif

Philip D Brick, Ph.D

The scale and pace of anthropogenic climate change is forcing the conservation movement to re-consider not just its priorities, but also the meaning of conservation itself.  What should be conserved, how, and for whom?   This essay suggests that we can learn from the natural history and ecology of keystone species to help us address the paradoxes of conservation in an era of climate change.  As one of nature’s most industrious, adaptive, resilient, and controversial keystone species, castor canadensis (North American beaver) show us that persistent, humble, and ecologically synergistic labor at the capillaries of our life systems can guide conservation past its addiction to narratives of loss and decline, toward new approaches and priorities.

Three metaphors for global sustainability

Dr Rasmus Karlsson

his paper presents three different metaphors for global sustainability and evaluates their respective policy implications.  The first metaphor is the widely used notion of an “ecological footprint” by which the planet’s regenerative capacity is compared to the global demand for natural capital using present technologies. As such, ecological footprint essentially offers a snapshot in time. Interpreted in normative terms, the fundamental implication of ecological footprint analysis is that the aggregate consumption rate must come down in order to bring an end to the current episode of “ecological overshoot” and thereby enable a transition to “sustainability”. The second metaphor, suggested by Nick Bostrom, is one of a rocket taking off. Unlike the static ecological footprint metaphor, this metaphor captures the dynamic element of an emerging planetary civilization and the possibility that achieving a long-term sustainable trajectory might require a temporary state of even higher levels of unsustainability. Finally, a third metaphor in which human civilization is likened to an airplane and modernity to a runway is suggested. This metaphor combines the dynamic long-term implications of the rocket metaphor with the possibility that long-term sustainability can be achieved either by (1) an acceleration into a post-scarcity space-faring civilization or (2) a deceleration into a decentralized small-scale economy based on norms of frugality and simplicity. The third metaphor highlights the possibility that insufficient political commitment to either trajectory might lead to (3) catastrophic ecological overshoot which would permanently deplete the natural resource base and cause irreversible environmental damage. Finally, the paper discusses how these metaphors may be used in real-world policy making but also in education for sustainability.

Full Presentation Panel

Each year AESS gives two awards for AESS Graduate Student Presentations, one for best presentation, and the second for best poster. Graduate students on the shortlist of four abstracts for the presentation award give their presentations at this session (in addition to the panel they are already on).  Come support the next generation of AESS scholars!

Discussion Symposium

San Diego County now spends about $10 billion per year for energy consumption across all sectors of the regional economy.  The question to be asked is whether this set of expenditures provides area businesses and its 3.2 million residents with an optimal set of benefits – whether measured in terms of jobs and incomes, or in terms of health and environmental impacts.  The County’s Department of Planning and Development has contracted with a California collaborative, Empower Efficiency, for the development of a Comprehensive Renewable Energy Plan to lay the foundation for a more robust and sustainable economic activity (especially within the unincorporated areas of the county). The initial set of “innovation scenarios” provided by the draft plan suggests that the region can meet 100 percent of its total electricity needs through a combination of energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies by the year 2050.  This panel session will review the business, market, and political implications of the final comprehensive plan (due in June 2015) as well as the necessary level of investments, best practices and workforce training that will ensure its success. Brief opening remarks will be followed by discussion of ways this approach might be replicated within other regions of the U.S. economy.

Full Presentation Panel

More and more college graduates entering the professional work force of the 21st century are confronted with multi-causal “wicked” problems that cannot be effectively addressed through the lens of any one discipline. In response to this dilemma, various models of multi-disciplinary instruction are emerging in higher education as pedagogical approaches better suited to the realities and complexity of real-world problems. Nowhere is this movement to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries more evident than in sustainability education. 

This panel seeks to explore the pedagogical and institutional challenges of multi-disciplinary team-teaching in sustainability education. We focus on all three dimensions of sustainability; thus, our inquiry encompasses the natural and social sciences and the humanities. Our analysis ranges from the mundane yet unavoidable obstacles and opportunities within the realm of curricula policy and bureaucracy, to more fundamental pedagogical issues associated with holistic approaches to curriculum development. By examining how experiences with multi-disciplinary team-teaching vary by disciplinary combinations we gain insights into the synergy and challenges of epistemological pluralism. Longstanding disciplinary traditions and curricular policies coupled with institutional fiscal realities raise questions about the viability of multi-disciplinary team-teaching as an enduring pedagogical innovation. Thus, we conclude by exploring supra-disciplinary approaches to sustainability education focused on preparing students to tackle the challenges of adaptive management at the human-environment interface.

Full Presentation Panel

Humans and our environments exist as systems of interacting components, but appropriately conceptualizing and studying these socio-environmental systems and their associated problems can be a boundary to understanding. A useful method for expanding this frontier is synthesis, a research approach that generates insight by combining existing data in novel ways.  This approach is particularly well suited to understanding socio-environmental systems, because they display aggregate behavior resulting from large-scale interactions among social and environmental components. Despite the power of the synthesis method, there are few starting resources available for researchers interested in using it.  This panel will introduce the concept of synthesis as an interdisciplinary research method, share strategies related to employing the synthesis method, and present case studies that illustrate the potential and the challenges of socio-environmental systems research. Our panel shares strategies for researchers working to cross boundaries and expand frontiers within and among disciplines when conducting real-world socio-environmental research. Our four-presentation panel consists of postdoctoral fellows from the University of Maryland’s NSF Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center located in Annapolis, Maryland.

Dr. William Burnside, PhD

What is Socio-Environmental Synthesis, and Why is it useful for understanding environmental issues?

Discussion Symposium

At recent meetings of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD), a committee has met to work on the role of the environmental humanities (EH) in interdisciplinary environmental and sustainability programs. In exploring the topic, the committee has defined numerous challenges and opportunities the EH fields face in interdisciplinary environmental education and we have planned a report to summarize what we have learned. Two members of this committee (Kaza and Mincey) seek to organize an AESS conference symposium with the same focus in hopes that, in sharing and critically discussing the experiences of participants and audience members, we will learn from one another to improve our individual programs and further inform the CEDD report. The overarching goal will be to confront the boundaries often faced by the EH fields and to consider cutting edge or frontier efforts in their inclusion in interdisciplinary academic efforts.  Participants from a variety of interdisciplinary environmental and sustainability programs will share “case studies” by reflecting on their own academic institution’s experiences, addressing the following:

1. Their definition of the environmental humanities and its purpose in their program
2. Their programs’ structure – related description of degree(s), concentration(s), learning outcomes and how EH is included in environmental studies or environmental science programs
3. Their EH curriculum – a survey of the pedagogical approaches and topical areas (e.g. literature, ethics, arts, religion, communication, etc.)
4. Boundaries / challenges facing their program – student, faculty and/or course issues
5. Careers – what are their EH-focused students doing after graduation and how are they facilitating their success (internships, etc.)?

Full Presentation Panel

One of the most important aspects of an education is preparation for a career. Surveys indicate that employers perceive graduates to not be career ready (see attached AACU report). The majority of employers place value on skills such as written and oral communication, teamwork, critical thinking, and the ability to apply knowledge in real-world settings, among others. These are the skills they feel graduates do not adequately possess. Applied learning through internships, senior projects, field-based research, etc. is overwhelmingly popular among employers as avenues for learning skills to be career ready upon graduation. In addition, when these applied learning and undergraduate research opportunities are designed to respond to community needs, they are a critical tool for engaging and retaining underrepresented minority students in the environmental and natural resource fields. This panel considers various applied learning tools that relate knowledge in a real-world, community-based setting to provide students with the required skills employers seek and the drive to successfully complete their degree programs, leading to the diversification of the environmental and natural resources fields. In particular, these types of activities provide a more culturally responsive learning environment for many Hispanic and American Indian students, while providing them with the necessary skills to achieve long-term success in their careers.

Proposing Appreciative Inquiry to supplement applied learning

John F. Cabra

Educational trends have more and more highlighted the fact that creativity and innovation are essential 21st century skills.  In an era of increased complexity, turbulence and change, educational experts and business leaders have consistently cited creativity, innovation as crucial for professional success in the new millennium. A 2013 report from the Association Of American Colleges And Universities noted: Employers say colleges should place varying degrees of emphasis on the ability to analyze and solve complex problems, and the ability to innovate and be creative.  While in 2015, Bloomberg Business Week asked 1320 corporate recruiters to name the skills they value most, creative problem-solving was top-ranked. In this discussion, Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which is a creative process based on positive psychology is introduced as a process to supplement applied learning. What scholars have discovered was that when dealing with difficult, emotionally charged, problems, participants found it much easier, and more effective to focus on what was working, and build from there. This isn't to say that problems, and systemic failures should be ignored, but rather that starting from the positive position of "what is working?" within the problem space helps to create the momentum and optimism that enables people to invent, and implement new solutions.

Full Presentation Panel

Waterbodies.org

Victoria Vesna

Waterbodies.org is an attempt to create a framework for curated crowd sourcing to raise the issue of collective consciousness about water as a life force and a reflection about the state of humanity.
Waterbodies.org is an extension of Victoria’s “Water Bowls” artwork installation “to a network of others working in the same realm.”  Her concept approaches from the micro-macro point of view by employing the idea of the fourth state of water – “neither liquid, ice or vapor but ‘in an between molecular state’ - as an overarching framework and uses ports as human network nodes. She joined forces with Claudia to develop a network of artists, environmentalists, architects and scientists addressing issues and solutions related to water. Claudia’s research and experiments are in creating digital environments that derive from multiple interacting elements relating to each other through generative processes and becoming complex adaptive systems. Focusing on the complexity of water and the characteristics involved in the social networks around water, Claudia’s hope is to expand Victoria’s view so that in time waterbodies.org can translate data into knowledge, generate new knowledge relationships via data visualization, and bring human and water resources together across institutional, geographic, cultural, artistic, technological, and scientific boundaries.

Examining the role of antecedent values in the practice of adaptive management

Brandon Rudroff

It is argued that most environmental problems are of the “wicked” variety; that they are recursive in such a way that any solution will ultimately compound the problem to a degree. As such, when addressing environmental problems, we must avoid our traditional means-ends approach and foster a more adaptive process. That is, we must place more emphasis on the process over the problem, which could ultimately lead to a greater understanding of how we can arrive at, and ultimately fix, those things at the center of our environmental ailments. This conceptual reorientation is embodied in the practice of adaptive management, which calls for our social and political forces to be more responsive to deliberation and experimentation in policy implementation.

Unfortunately though, it seems that the application of adaptive management runs contrary to the way that both our political and social forces operate; that calls for resolution often drown-out those for experimentation and social learning. Motivated by research performed for a recently awarded INSPIRE grant centered on rethinking the remediation of contaminated groundwater sites [http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1344238], this paper seeks to address the ostensible failings of adaptive management in policy formation. I will suggest that central to the difficulties behind the application of adaptive management is the misguided assumption that policy formation can be accomplished without an appeal to antecedent values. Without this appeal, we lose an understanding of what it is that we hope to accomplish in our policy formation; the motivation behind the practice. I will argue that until we can arrive at a set of antecedent values – values that are converged upon by both our social and political forces - the abovementioned conceptual orientation can never truly take hold, and that as a society, we will continue to fall victim to the “wicked” problem.

Groundwater management across borders and climate change adaptation

Elena Maggioni

This research explores different groundwater governance frameworks in the US, in Australia, in the EU and in India. It analyzes in detail how they regulate extractions, water level monitoring, contamination, water storage, replenishment, accountability and conflict resolution. It analyzes the decision making process, and the relationships with other water management agencies.

It is based on the increasing awareness that groundwater resources are going to be greatly affected by the concurrence of changing climate and demographic and economic trends. Changes in precipitation are very likely to affect land use changes in aquifer recharging areas and this, in turn, will affect groundwater availability in ways that are not well monitored or understood. Many groundwater basins, both in the US and elsewhere, lie across border lines and new regional conflicts on groundwater resources are very likely to emerge.

It is also grounded in the literature on institutions and climate change adaptation that claims that climate change adaptation is highly dependent on natural resources management. Any institutional arrangement that will handle adaptive processes needs to take into account three very important issues: the nature of the adaptive process, its scale and the society in which they are embedded. As adaptation is a continuous stream of activities, actions, decisions and attitudes that inform decisions and reflect existing social, institutions that will address adaptation will have to be able to address a continuously changing environment, to provide feedbacks regarding changes and to constantly redefine goals and policies.

The water paths: challenges in the international debates in question

Rodrigo De Freitas Espinoza

The present doctorate research aims to characterize the global crisis context in ways of using and accessing the water resource, considering the Worldwide Water Forums organized by the World Water Council.  Based on the information taken from these documents produced by international debate arenas, this research has investigated how the uneven water distribution offers a specific dynamic for the debate among the national states representatives. Especially among the countries known as rich and poor, configuring a scenery in which the sociological perspective may present important contributions to analysis.

The present doctorate study has been showing that the discussion about water management is in a wrapper of specific technical and scientific knowledge, occupied mainly by the engineering areas. The study has been identifying a social-technical debate characterized by a symbolical violence dimension, which honors a type of determined knowledge.  Consequently, it would be excluded from the debate agents which do not master this form of knowledge; this is, the domain of the economical nomination ways of environmental issues by groups and agents is one of the bases of social distinction with this area of international discussion. In this way, this research aims to investigate if the production of technical and scientific knowledge about the water and the political force itself within international organizations are more guided by economically stronger countries, thus promoting a hierarchical production statements about the topic. Referenced by the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Michel Foucault, this research proposes to understand interpretively the knowledge production on water from the dominant epistemology of modernity, namely, the technical and scientific knowledge and economic rationality. The possible differences and conflicts present in the arenas of debate that could feature a binary between the West and the rest of the world were also investigated, as the analytical developments of authors such as Stuart Hall and Edward Said, consolidating possible relations of subordination and ownership of discourse.

However, the theoretical deepening of postcolonial and decolonial currents has been seen as a fundamental and necessary step for the development of this research.

Full Presentation Panel

Although academics and campus operations share a common mission of making colleges and universities hospitable for those engaged in teaching, learning, and research, the people in academics and operations historically carry out their responsibilities separately. What can bridge their two separate worlds?  This panel  will explore possible answers this question, bringing together those on the campus who otherwise might have been strangers.  In the process, instructors are designing new courses around interdisciplinary campus-centered topics such as energy, food, and waste.

Panelists will draw upon their own experiences and empirical findings to address questions such as:

1) What has worked in bridging the world of campus operations and campus academics?

2) What challenges arise in making a campus a living learning lab for sustainability, both for instructors and for those in campus operations?

3) What are the learning outcomes for courses designed to bridge the two worlds? 

Full Presentation Panel

Q Methodology provides an innovative approach to study environmental issues that are complicated by individual perspectives and biases, which in turn shape discourses, actions, and outcomes.  It is increasingly being used within environment-related fields as a way to systematically study the subjectivity of individuals.  For example, it can be used to study subjective questions regarding the equity and justice of governance that frequently arise when issues cross political, social, and environmental boundaries.  Moreover, different conceptualizations of environmental problems and people’s biases contribute to competing solutions.  Q method’s quantitative methodology provides a means to study such subjective or qualitative data using a version of factor analysis to cluster survey respondents according to common preferences.  This panel will examine Q Method through current research on topics such as mining, natural resource management, urban infrastructure, and conflict assessment.  After brief presentations, the panel discussion will explore opportunities where Q method could complement or advance environmental research, as well as some of the challenges associated with using such a method.  

Title: Advancing Environmental Research with Q Methodology

Organizer: Abby Lindsay, American University, abby.lindsay@american.edu

Facilitator: Abby Lindsay, American University, abby.lindsay@american.edu

Session Abstract:

Q Methodology provides an innovative approach to study environmental issues that are complicated by individual perspectives and biases, which in turn shape discourses, actions, and outcomes.  It is increasingly being used within environment-related fields as a way to systematically study the subjectivity of individuals.  For example, it can be used to study subjective questions regarding the equity and justice of governance that frequently arise when issues cross political, social, and environmental boundaries.  Moreover, different conceptualizations of environmental problems and people’s biases contribute to competing solutions.  Q method’s quantitative methodology provides a means to study such subjective or qualitative data using a version of factor analysis to cluster survey respondents according to common preferences.  This panel will examine Q Method through current research on topics such as mining, natural resource management, urban infrastructure, and conflict assessment.  After brief presentations, the panel discussion will explore opportunities where Q method could complement or advance environmental research, as well as some of the challenges associated with using such a method. 

Presentations:

1. Q Theory, Method and Technique, Will Focht, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Political Science, Oklahoma State University, 228 Murray Hall, Stillwater, OK 74078, will.focht@okstate.edu;

Abstract: Q methodology was developed by William Stephenson in 1935, as outlined in a brief article published in Nature (“The Technique of Factor Analysis”) and fully articulated in his book, The Study of Behavior: Q Technique and Its Methodology, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1953.  Since then Q methodology has been used to scientifically explore subjectivity in fields as diverse as nursing, journalism, psychology, sociology, political science … and environmental studies and sciences.  The International Society for the Scientific Study of Subjectivity (ISSSS) was founded more than 30 years ago to advance and expand the application of Q methodology.

This presentation will briefly review Q methodology in an attempt to convince environmental researchers of the unique power of Q to link qualitative and quantitative research methods to naturalistically reveal and analyze subjective perspectives on environmental issues.  A discussion of the theory underlying Q methodology will be reviewed, followed by a discussion of Q method and technique, and concluding with arguments for its value in various environmental research applications.  As such, this presentation will serve as a foundation for the presentations to follow in this panel, which demonstrate how Q has been used successfully in environmental research.

1. Q-Sort Application to Sustainable Forestry- Natural Resource Management, James S. Gruber, Ph.D., Department of Environmental Studies, Antioch University New England, jgruber@antioch.edu

Abstract: Community-Based Natural Resource Management (CBNRM) has been recognized as an effective governance approach for sustainably managing common-pool resources or ‘the commons.’  There is, however, limited empirical research on answering the critical question: ‘What are the principles and key characteristics that are needed to ensure long-term effective and sustainable CBNRM programs?’   One research approach that can be applied to gain an understanding of the perspectives of a range of constituency groups associated with successful CBNRM sites is the use of Q-sort methodology.

The basic difference between Q-methodology as compared to standard survey analysis is its design to identify patterns within and across individuals rather than patterns across individual traits, such as age, class, etc. (Barry and Proops 1999). The result is the development of factors (or group perspectives, discourses) based upon shared values and meanings.

This presentation will illustrate the application of Q-sort methodology through a research project that included three successful forestry CBNRM sites. These sites are located in the Apuseni Mountains of Romania; Randolph, New Hampshire; and Ixtlán de Juárez of Oaxaca, Mexico.  The Q-sort findings in this study, point to four unique perspectives as to what is essential for effective governance of their common-pooled resources. There were also a number of areas of consensus. Some of these findings transcend cultural differences, while others are associated with specific local conditions and cultural characteristics.  This presentation will conclude with summarizing the challenges of effectively using Q-sort methodology across different cultures and languages.

1. Using Q-methodology to Explore Ecological Restoration Worldviews in Practice, Marissa Matsler, Toulan School of Urban Studies and Planning, Portland State University, a.marissa.matsler@pdx.edu; Paper co-author: Sarah Kidd, School of the Environment, Portland State University

Abstract: Ecological restoration is a process driven by human actions. There is active debate, however, in the field of restoration regarding the appropriate degree of human intervention in ‘natural’ ecosystems required to produce desired ecological outcomes from restoration projects. Within the restoration practitioner community, there is further disagreement regarding how and if these restoration interventions are tied to ecological theory. We utilize Q-method as an exploratory mixed methods approach to describe a variety of ecological worldviews found in the restoration community to better understand this contestation over appropriate restoration implementation. Over 50 restoration practitioners participated in our study during the Society for Ecological Restoration (SER) World Conference in 2013. Conducting the surveys at this biannual gathering allowed us to interact with restoration practitioners involved in many levels of on-the-ground restoration project implementation and management. Using Q-sorts and follow-up interviews, we identify the ways in which restoration practitioners prioritize contrasting ecological theory (in particular ecological succession and novel ecosystems), creating hybrid theories and frameworks to justify different restoration techniques; we also begin to understand how practitioners classify ‘designed’/‘man-made’ nature vs. ‘natural’ nature by exploring their perceptions of the required human input/management/intervention in short-term and long-term maintenance of restoration projects. The continued professionalization of the field of restoration makes this a timely investigation. As an international organization that provides resources and leadership for the restoration practitioner community, SER is developing the first global restoration practitioner certification program. Standardization of the field of ecological restoration will impact the use of different management techniques and ecological theories. A firmer grasp on the ways different ecological theories and worldviews influence restoration implementation and continued site management can assist SER, and the field of restoration ecology in general, in designing a certification program that will explicitly represent their goals and mission statement on the ground.

1. Rare earth and the minerals that lie beneath: Competing perspectives of nature between multiple use access and extractive resource development in Wyoming's Black Hills, Jeffrey Jenkins, Department of Environmental Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), jsjenkin@uscs.edu  

Abstract: The Black Hills National Forest (BHNF) is recognized by rural land users as a premier multiple use landscape for hunting, off-highway vehicles, timber production, and grazing. It is also the site of the proposed Bearlodge rare earth mine, currently under environmental review by the Forest Service. Evidence from the ‘new’ conservation and resource use debate demonstrates that for federal lands conservation and resource management there is an ontological divide over the ecological role of humans within or apart from the natural world and values-based rift over how lands should be administered to serve human needs (Soule 2013, Karieva and Marvier 2012).

An analysis of stakeholder perspectives about economic development and environmental change from extractive mineral development was undertaken using Q-method. Statements that best reflected the concourse of perspectives were chosen from 153 scoping comments submitted by the public in response to a draft environmental impact statement for the proposed mine. Stakeholder participants (N=24) were asked to sort a final set of 32 statements. A preliminary analysis of these results reveals that the perspectives of rural land users and environmental groups diverge from that of the state permitting agencies and the mining corporation with regard to 1) perspectives on ecological degradation and the role humans within or apart from nature, and 2) whether or not federal lands should be managed for natural resource development or local access to multiple use activities. These findings suggest that land managers with local ecological knowledge, not necessarily traditional urban environmentalists, have contested the state and the corporation most vociferously. Thus, if the socio-ecological 'license' to operate is to be granted, it must incorporate a more nuanced approach that takes into account local understandings for how nature works and how users access surface resources that aren't otherwise part of state or corporate scientific assessments.

Full Presentation Panel

As teachers working across the humanities and the sciences on a range of environmental topics, we are often faced with the impenetrability of the border that divides the classroom from the world. In the classroom, arguments about climate change, environmental policies, and animal suffering might sound logical to our students, but does this mean that they are applying them in their daily lives? Do class discussions translate into students asking questions about how their habits impact the world around them? And should the teacher’s task include expanding students’ circle of concern beyond the classroom? If so, how can classroom practices best help students to understand that rocks, vegetables, animals, water, all have an intrinsic value not necessarily associated with us—with the human? This panel will address the classroom-world border by discussing specific readings and assignments from our courses that aim to expand our students’ circle of concern beyond the classroom. But in our discussion we aim to address the question of whether or not we should penetrate the classroom-world border in the first place: should our focus be on theory or the cultivation of intellectual habits that inform our actions in the world?  We seek papers that discuss pedagogical strategies (specific assignments, group work, field work, lecture etc.) and/or course readings (single, pairings or groupings) and address the human-environment border alongside the classroom-world border. Papers and presentations should be no more than fifteen minutes long in order to allow for vivid discussion.

Sergia Hay (Philosophy)

Pacific Lutheran University

A Defense of Classrooms

The virtues of blurring of the boundary between the world and the classroom are celebrated and valued in contemporary pedagogy. There is increasing pressure to involve students in direct and hands-on practice through service learning and to emphasize specific and measurable skills that lead to job readiness. Although this approach brings some clear advantages, it is also worth investigating what this approach excludes and unfairly underestimates. In this presentation, I will argue that the boundary between the world and the classroom needs to be preserved in order to maintain the classroom as a unique space set apart from the world in which a different set of values prevail and a space from which the culturally dominant values may be scrutinized. I will make these claims by referencing how one may teach about the concept of nature in a philosophy course.  

Adela Ramos (English)

Pacific Lutheran University

Writing and Reading Animals: Care and Critical Inquiry in the Composition and Literature Classroom

As a teacher, I embrace my home institution’s mission “to educate students for lives of thoughtful inquiry, service, leadership, and care—for other people, for their communities and for the Earth.” But in the classroom, the challenges of yoking together care and critical inquiry daily prompt me to consider the extent to which critical reading and writing can or should lead students to care for other animal beings. This, in turn, leads me to question the implications of my pedagogical practices: should care and service be the means for my students’ development as critical thinkers? In this paper, I explore the oftentimes contentious relationship between care and critical thinking by examining two borders: the textual border—which can, and often does, detach the literary animal from the real animal—and the institutional border—which can separate the classroom from the environment.

To address these borders, I consider creative writing assignments from upper-level courses designed to introduce English literature majors to the discipline alongside critical writing assignments from first-year composition courses which prompt students to examine a work of literature by way of their service at the local soup kitchen and community garden. In addition, I share conversations with my students about caring and not caring for other animal beings and my own ruminations about their right not to care and their obligation to do so. Through these materials and classroom experiences, I argue for porous textual and institutional borders, but not for their demolition. Instead, I adopt ecofeminist Marti Kheel’s conception of care as an epistemological practice that begins with “many small acts of attention.” By conceiving of care as attentiveness, I advocate for a direct relationship between the text and the environment, learning and service, but one that also acknowledges the crucial differences between these spaces and practices.

Matthew Vitz (History)

University of California, San Diego

Beyond Borders: Approaches to Fusing Environmental Politics and Environmental History

In this paper I will explore how the methods and approaches of environmental history can blur the boundary between world and classroom, or put differently, environmental politics and scholarship. I argue that the key lies in breaking down other boundaries—one might venture to call them binaries—such as the deeply rooted divide between nature and culture, along with its cousin nature/city, and the less rigid, though still apparent, border between past and present. Students have a tendency to view nature and culture as separate entities that act on each other. For example, in the crudest form of this perspective society either destroys or preserves nature, and nature, in turn, either strikes back or becomes a place to admire and enjoy. I assign readings that illustrate the co-constitution of nature and culture over time, making students see landscapes as hybrid and environments (whether urban, rural, land, or water) as lively and dynamic socio-natural entanglements. The implications of this dialectical understanding are more than just academic; students, I believe, become more critically engaged with environmentalism. They more effectively comprehend the roles of social power and human labor in environmental change and the ways material environments alter, reinforce, or create social relations. History is an excellent window into the formation and evolution of hybrid environments. More than just a relic or a bunch of stories with little contemporary relevance, history can spur action on pressing environmental problems. Besides readings, assignments such as commodity projects and contemporary environmental theme papers can bridge the gaps between past and present and scholarship and politics. There is still another border to transcend, however: the physical border separating the U.S. and Mexico. For future classes I hope to organize field trips to places of bi-national environmental concern and invite speakers working on transnational environmental justice. 

Discussion Symposium

Broadening participation, that is, bringing members of under-represented groups into academic science, is a major challenge. There are so many different, and yet interlocking, pieces of the problem that the issue can appear to be almost insoluble. And yet, every day, people, like you,  are actively engaging in activities that are broadening participation in the sciences.  How do we take stock of what you are doing well?  How do we inquire appreciatively about your actions that are novel, and impressive?  Based on an NSF-sponsored study to explore what works to broaden participation in Environmental Biology, the moderators will lead a discussion using Appreciative Inquiry (AI).  AI is a theory of organizational change that suggests that instead of looking at a system’s failings, we look for what is working, study it, and then find ways to replicate and disseminate the knowledge. This discussion takes an AI approach to examine the high points, those moments of great pride, related to actions participants took to broaden participation.

Discussion Symposium

On the one hand, the inefficient use of energy and other resources are limiting the robustness and sustainability of both local and national economies. On the other hand, those community-level strategies which dramatically increase all resource efficiencies – whether the more efficient use of materials and water, but especially energy – offer the first major opportunity to build a vigorous and sustainable economy. This panel discussion will examine: (i) the economic imperative of resource efficiency, (ii) the broad set of community-scale technologies that can increase those efficiencies, (iii) the municipal, legal and financial mechanisms that can enable more productive initiatives and investments, and (iv) the environmental policies and governance strategies which can enable a more collaborative management of complex urban systems. 

Discussion Symposium

Our discussion symposium will explore the idea of generational change, and the roles and engagement of the older generation (senior citizens and elders) in achieving global sustainability. This symposium is intended to be a wide-ranging conversation that touches on topics such as:

• generational differences in the experiences of parents and children in facilitating major behavioral change
• research done on sustainability and the older generation
• stories from retired or soon-to-be retired AESS members on their post-retirement sustainability activities
• environmental-friendly products/facilities for senior citizens
• indigenous wisdom from aboriginal elders
• examples of environmentally active senior organizations such as Norway’s “Grandparents Climate Campaign”
• etc.

Natural Security and Elder Energy: Reimaging How Elderly Americans Improve Climate Change in Communities

Mark J O'Gorman, PhD

Older Americans will dominate US population changes in the next three decades, and yet scholarly and policy discussion lags behind on how this generation will impact, and aid, climate change policy.   Refocusing senior research away from their vulnerabilities and, instead, on how the daily choices of our elders shows pathways towards energy productivity policy actions for communities and governments can only improve America’s carbon footprint.  The US over-50 population more than doubles by 2040, but elder-age-cohort policy studies on work, transportation, housing, and electronic use lack a robust, integrative focus on how the elderly can positively impact US (and global) climate resilience.  That is unfortunate because, ironically, the simpler and energy-saving lifestyles seniors choose are precisely those that policy makers yearn to imbed in the entire US population.  Is it time to listen to our elders, once again, to better understand a next set of actions related to energy efficiency and climate resilience preparedness?  

Stereotyped as an exclusively vulnerable population, senior Americans exhibit economic and social choices that reveal cost-efficiencies and global footprint reductions that could form one strand of future US natural security policy.  To be sure, poor health and financial hardship are forcing elderly energy reduction choices.  But for the growing number who can and are able to choose, what energy-efficient and green construction housing choices, for example, are needed to combine elder accessibility and carbon footprint reductions for empty-nest parents looking to downsize?  How is the local trip-combining strategy by seniors a key in developing future carbon-reducing transportation platforms?  Can senior-aged electronic use (e-use) create work and social actions that improve energy productivity?

Data gathered from urban & rural elderly populations in Tennessee, building on European and North American eco-gerontological research, will support green elder-focused and carbon-efficient community development recommendations people of all ages will enjoy.

Full Presentation Panel

An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Socio-Environmental Studies

Debbie Kasper, Ph.D.

“An Integrated Theoretical Framework for Socio-Environmental Studies”

Environmental studies literature is replete with calls for a comprehensive framework within which diverse disciplines and their work can be situated, and from which they can commonly proceed in studying, and informing efforts to address, socio-environmental issues. Despite certain efforts, however, the consensus is that we still lack a unifying framework, without which it is more difficult to achieve the interdisciplinary work needed.  And given the evidence pointing to the likelihood of near term and massive societal transitions (whether via shifting environmental, energy, and economic circumstances or deliberate efforts to mitigate problems through intentional social re-organization), a framework that can handle the interdependent relationships and processes at work in socio-environmental phenomena is crucial for navigating and/or mindfully directing these kinds of changes.  Synthesizing contributions across the social and natural sciences, I develop a parsimonious model depicting the general pattern of socio-environmental processes over time.  Such a model can help facilitate communication and collaboration among the disciplines that study them.  The basic premise is that the more accurately we understand the interdependence of social and environmental processes—and how things come to be as they are—the better equipped we will be to direct these processes more deliberately.  We already have what we need to cultivate a deeper and more integrated understanding.  The proposed framework is a small initial step toward enhancing that understanding and our capacity to use it.

The Earth’s Critical Zone as an Integrating Theme for Undergraduate ES Courses: Case Study at the Calhoun Critical Zone Observatory

Katherine O'Neill

Environmental Science (ES) seeks to integrate multiple scientific disciplines towards understanding how natural processes and patterns both impact and are impacted by human activity.  However, much of the basic science underlying these discussions at the undergraduate level remains disciplinary in nature with limited availability of inter- or multi-disciplinary datasets for use in classroom and laboratory activities. The NSF Critical Zone Observatory (CZO) program is a national network of land-based observatories that focus interdisciplinary research towards quantifying the physical, chemical, and biological processes operating within the Earth’s Critical Zone (the layer of the Earth’s surface extending from the base of weathered bedrock to the top of the vegetation canopy). Critical Zone (CZ) science is explicitly interdisciplinary and encompasses components of the earth (hydrology, geology, soil science), life, and atmospheric sciences.  At the same time, Critical Zone science is relatively new, with the first set of CZO’s formally established in 2007.  Perhaps not surprisingly, little of the emerging CZ science has filtered to the undergraduate level, particularly at primarily undergraduate institutions, where concepts from the earth sciences (soils, geology, hydrology) are often framed with little direct conceptual overlap to topics from other natural and social science disciplines. Here, we discuss the potential for using emerging science from the CZO network as an integrating theme in undergraduate ES courses using examples from the Calhoun CZO.  Like much of the southern Piedmont, the landscape represented by the Calhoun CZO was severely impacted by extreme soil erosion and water degradation resulting from agricultural practices during the 18th - early 20th century which was later followed by land abandonment and reforestation.  As such, emerging research from the Calhoun CZO provides the opportunity for ES students to explore place-based, interdisciplinary scientific research within the context of land management, environmental history, and social/cultural institutions.

Peter Smallwood

Undergraduate programs in Environmental Studies and Sciences have developed a diversity of approaches to employ experiential learning in the curriculum. They range from having the class participate in clean-up projects, to creating environmental programs for their campus, to working as an environmental consulting organization for local clients. Each approach has its own advantages and disadvantages, both for the students and the faculty of the courses.  We co-taught the capstone course for our Environmental Studies degree, where we have used policy advocacy as the basis for experiential learning.  After studying the scientific, economic and policy aspects of our chosen environmental problem, students in the course developed specific policy recommendations for officials of the Commonwealth of Virginia, and advocated for those policies. Our choices for specific problem areas to address with our recommendations have been very opportunistic.  In our most recent iteration of the course, we noted that the Governor of our state had appointed a commission to make recommendations for actions to help the state adapt to climate change in the coming decades.  We found the structure of the committee focused on the built environment, with little attention to the natural environment.  Therefore, we developed recommendations for conserving the state’s biodiversity in the face of climate change, and presented them to members of the Governor’s Climate Change Commission.  Mechanisms of advocacy included writing and submitting opinion pieces for local newspapers and face-to-face meetings with Virginia officials.  Here, we review our approach to experiential learning for environmental studies, the advantages and disadvantages to our approach, and compare them to a selection of other approaches. We again advocate an opportunistic approach to bringing experiential learning into the classroom.

The Environmental Sciences and Ethical Thinking

Dr. Richard Shearman

I relate the effort made at RIT to incorporate ethical reflection as a component of the intellectual tool kit for prospective environmental scientists. This has been realized in part via a required course entitled Environment and Society. This course is one among many that participates in the Ethics Across the Curriculum program, affiliated with the Society for Ethics Across the Curriculum. The purpose of both the Society and its iteration at RIT is to incorporate ethics in all academic disciplines.  Over the past two years a rubric with clearly defined learning outcomes has been developed and implemented at RIT. In my opinion, this has contributed greatly to the inclusion of meaningful ethical content into many disciplinary areas, including environmental science. While this experience does not provide a substitute for a more comprehensive exploration of ethical thinking in particular or of the humanities in general, it does offer a means for students to engage more holistically in environmental problems and their potential solutions and perhaps offers a blueprint for future related endeavors.

Discussion Symposium

Theme:  Recognizing an imminent threat to our lives and taking a proactive stance

Justification: If we continue our ‘business as usual’ approach, we may be too late in saving the oceans for our children and grandchildren.  This is really Confronting  Frontiers, Borders, and Boundaries.

First, we will look at what we are doing to our oceans. This segment ideally will be conducted with Dr. Ken Caldeira.  This will end with ocean acidification and its effects. 

Next, Dr. Greene will discuss the Carbon Cycle, i.e. how and how much generated CO2 is naturally stored in the atmosphere, gradually dissolved in the oceans, changing their chemistry (pH), and gradually sequestered on the ocean floor.  He will draw an analogy of how the Oregon oyster farmers faced this issue but on a smaller scale.  He will do a first order estimate of how much energy it will take to address this issue and over what period of time.  He will posit “Where will we get massive amounts of carbon-free energy to address the problem?”

Then, Dr. Malhotra, if available, will review available clean energy options.  He will project global energy demand through mid-century.  He will then describe what we must do to achieve each increment of energy to meet future demand.  It then becomes immediately obvious that on our current path we will be generating more CO2 in 2050 then we are today and that wind and solar are incapable to close the gap.

Finally, Dr. Cannara will describe why nuclear power is really our only viable alternative.  He will briefly describe why our current nuclear technology is the ‘greenest’.  But he will then explain the advantages of moving to ‘new nuclear’, i.e. Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs) and those based on a Thorium Fluoride fuel cycle (LFTRs).

Dr. Greene will do a quick recap and a ‘call to action’.

The floor will then be opened for follow-on questions and discussions.

Full Presentation Panel

What Community Perspectives on the Roles and Rules of Church Forests in Northern Ethiopia Suggest about Conservation Mechanisms

Krystyna Stave

The vast majority of Ethiopia’s forests have been converted to croplands, pasture, and other non-forest uses. One of the sole exceptions has been on lands managed by followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, where for centuries priests and rural church communities have conserved patches of indigenous forest around church buildings. While church forests are often studied as sacred spaces, in this context they serve utilitarian as well as spiritual functions, and are an integral part of the smallholder agricultural systems of the surrounding communities.  Church forests can provide firewood, construction timber, fodder, food, medicine, and important ecological benefits such as water regulation, erosion control, local climate stabilization and soil fertility improvement.  However, these unique ecosystems are under threat from increasing land scarcity in the midst of increasingly degraded agricultural landscapes, which leads to encroachment and overuse of forest land and are the focus of efforts to find mechanisms for forest conservation.

This study uses a unique panel survey of smallholder farmers in four Ethiopian Orthodox Communities northern Ethiopia to explore changes in community perspectives on the social and ecological roles of church forests, and rules governing church forest use, in four Orthodox communities over a 10-year period. A total of 244 surveys were completed in 173 households. These include 122 households in 2003 and 122 in 2014 - with 71 of the surveyed households interviewed in both periods.  This sample allows us to observe changes in aggregate community attitudes towards church forests over the past decade, as well as changes in individual smallholder responses between the 2003 and 2014 surveys.  A close look at the perceptions of neighboring smallholder farmers about church forests suggests there may be a role for payment for ecosystem services in conservation efforts that will not destabilize existing institutions and provide potential mechanisms for preservation of these threatened forest ecosystems.

Efficient use of water in agriculture model: the case of family farms in southeast Spain

Laura Piedra-Munoz, PhD. in Economics

This paper aims to relate the environmental impact of water use with the system and organizational relationships that exist in the agricultural model. In particular, the case of family farming inAlmeria, province located in southeastSpain, is considered. This study contributes on the aspects of these family structures that affect a better use of natural resources, particularly in the efficient use of water. It shows the degree of awareness for the efficient use of water in these family businesses and its relationship with certain characteristics of both the owners and the company itself.

To this end, we analyze data from both official statistics and surveys conducted for farmers, irrigation communities and marketers.

Socio-economic factors and ecology in agrarian systems: The case of family farms in southeast Spain

Jose Adolfo Zepeda-Zepeda

The present paper looks at the socio-economic features of food system as a driver to ecological practices. Several behavioral factors and economic characteristics of farmers in horticulture in southeastSpainare analyzed. In particular, it shows how family farms and their networks can integrate socio-economic and ecological goals, contributing to the generation of synergies between the aims of sustainability. To this end, we analyze data from both official statistics and surveys conducted for farmers, irrigation communities and marketers. This study contributes to existing debates on this topic, especially on the role of familiar farming in the management of natural resources and in the adoption of environment-friendly production methods.

Challenges and opportunities of studying socio-ecological transition zones

Sandra Valencia and Chad Boda

What are referred to as frontiers, borders or boundaries in many contexts are not in reality clearly delineated, but rather represent a constantly shifting spectrum of biophysical, socio-economic, cultural and political characteristics which are in a state of transition, for example the rural-urban “boundary” or oceanic “coastlines”. Transition zone dynamics are driven by a complex assemblage of internal and external processes. This complexity is reflected in the diverse applications of the transition zone concept in a variety of disciplines. Not only do the spatial, biophysical and sociopolitical-economic arrangements of these transitioning assemblages change over time, the drivers and processes that produce them also change. The diversity that emerges in transition zones can be both a benefit and a burden, providing increased levels of biological and socio-cultural diversity while simultaneously becoming the loci of increased conflict and competition over access to resources and services. In this paper we explore the challenges and opportunities of studying and working with place-based social-ecological transition zones for sustainability science research. We draw on our work on peri-urban areas in Colombia and coastal areas in Florida, USA to problematize attempts to define the temporal and spatial boundaries used to analyze and manage such transition zones. We scrutinize which aspects are perceived to be in transition, how internal and external interactions between these aspects play out, and how the variety of multi-scalar drivers behind these transitions can influence change dynamics. We argue that the transition zone concept can be considered a boundary concept useful for integrating various social and ecological dimensions in sustainability research. We therefore promote viewing the concept not as static, reified or rigidly defined, but rather open and dialectical. Such an understanding calls for interdisciplinary and process-oriented research as a way to better capture the complex reality of zones in transition.

Local perceptions of land use change in Tanzania: Using participatory art to reveal the past, present, and future

Emma Li Johansson

The overall aim of this study is to explore how the supply and demand of water changes due to land system change from large-scale land acquisitions (LSLA), and how this in turn changes socio-environmental systems in rural Tanzania. In order to understand socio-hydrological interactions I focus on water as a sub-system of land system change by analysing how water availability has changed since land was acquired in terms of quantity, quality and accessibility. For this fieldwork I use the emergent method of participatory art, where people affected by LSLA create three paintings of their perceptions of how their socio-hydrological environment has changed since the arrival of the company: how it was before land was acquired, how it currently is, and what they think the future will be. It is important to investigate how human-induced ecosystem changes impact on rural communities that immediately depend on surrounding natural resources for human well-being. Both art and science attempt to capture the essence of the world around us in creative and innovative ways to create novel knowledge and awareness, and one should not neglect the way arts can synthesize complex issues and communicate this to a wide range of people. By using art as a way to explore how people affected by LSLA perceive water-related changes, this study contributes with a novel way of understanding how socio-environmental conditions are constantly re-shaped in areas that are transitioning from one state to another. The need to integrate art and science is particularly important when doing research in areas where - as in my case - there is a culture and language barrier between the researcher and the studied community, and can help to comprehensively identify key drivers of change as well as desirable socio-environmental pathways to sustainability in a world of persistent uncertainty and change.  Reproductions of paintings produced as part of this project will be on view in the Exhibitors' area of the conference.

Discussion Symposium

This discussion symposium will reflect on collaborative interdisciplinary teaching as practiced by faculty in the Graduate Program on the Environment. Our goal is to share with the broader AESS community what is going well in our program and what we see as areas for improvement. We invite others to join us in a discussion on the overarching question: What lessons have we learned from engaging in collaborative team-teaching across disciplines at Evergreen, and how applicable are these lessons for collaborative interdisciplinary teaching at other institutions?

The Evergreen State College has practiced collaborative team-teaching across disciplines since its creation in 1967. While this pedagogical approach is the norm at Evergreen and is supported by our structures, we realize that our experiences may not easily translate to other institutional contexts. At this discussion symposium, panelists will consider how our approaches to interdisciplinary team-teaching might be translated to other colleges and universities with more traditional structures.

We will share insights from the perspectives of program directors, faculty engaged in team-teaching, and students. Panelists will open with brief remarks focused on the following themes:

Administrative:

• Reflections from administrative leadership on how the program has changed over time and factors contributing to program success

Curriculum Planning:

• Team-teaching logistics
• Negotiating curriculum across gender, seniority, disciplines, and the positivist/post-positivist epistemological divide
• Designing graduate level curriculum for a diverse group of students with different undergraduate backgrounds
• Moving from multi-disciplinary to interdisciplinary teaching

Pedagogy:

• Successful examples of interdisciplinary and collaborative assignments
• Strategies for inculcating effective collaboration and communication skills across disciplinary boundaries towards real-world environmental problem-solving
• Balancing disciplinary grounding and interdisciplinary pedagogy
• Balancing breadth and depth of material in limited time and space
• Teaching across difference (race/class/gender, epistemological positions)
• Student perspectives on how the graduate program has enabled multi-dimensional/multi-disciplinary explorations of the world, and facilitated ‘thinking outside the box’

Full Presentation Panel

This panel undertakes a critical analysis of the term “Anthropocene” from the point of view of post-structural theory, speculative philosophy, art and imaginal ecology. Modern humans are the ultimate frontier species. Through the control and manipulation of nature, humans have pushed through the boundaries of competitive evolutionary constraints and redefined the very terms of how and where borders are formed amongst all of the biota of the Earth. The manipulation of natural ecosystem boundaries has allowed humans to flourish, however it has also led to the spread of invasive plants and animals, melting of the polar ice caps, rising seas, ocean acidification and dead zones, deforestation, freshwater depletion, desertification, over-fishing and overconsumption of natural resources and global warming. The disregard of ecological boundaries is not only causing one of the largest extinction events in Earth’s history but also raising important questions as to how humans will continue to thrive.

Each paper in this panel explores the role of boundaries in creating an integral ecology – a sustainable human/Earth community. What implications does the term “Anthropocene” have for the future of this planet? Could it lead to an erasure of difference (ecological and cultural) or act as a symbol that signals the end of a diverse planetary system? Will the term reinforce the hubris of the human race and continued ecological destruction? What responsibilities and opportunities do humans have to imagine a different world – a mutually enhancing human/Earth relationship – and are there perhaps more appropriate terms to symbolize this transition?

Individual Abstracts:

Kimberly Carfore - Planetary Difference under Erasure: A Post-Structural & Critical Analysis of the Anthropocene

Paul Crutzen’s moniker “Anthropocene” was coined during a meeting of fairly elite scientists.  As this term has the potential to determine the trajectory of humans, nonhumans, and the state of our planet in the future, it is important to consider what narratives are being highlighted and which are being erased in the epistemological move of naming the Anthropocene.  In my paper I will consider the following two questions—1) Who is choosing (i.e. who is doing the naming); and 2) Whose voices are being heard (and whose are not)?  To explore these questions I will use Gayatri Chakravarty Spivak’s seminal essay, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

History has been androcentric—mostly males writing about males.  These writings have focused mainly around struggles over domination and land ownership.  Not only has history been androcentric, our thinking and philosophy has also been male-centered.  Western metaphysics is phallogocentric—a neologism coined by 20^th French philosopher Jacques Derrida—which refers to the privileging of the masculine (phallus/presence) in meaning making.  That which is present, vocal, and masculine has been privileged over that which might be considered invisible, non-vocal, and feminine.  While these “others” (non-humans, women, minorities, children, indigenous people) combined make up the majority of the planet, it is their stories that are threatened towards erasure in naming the Anthropocene.

In this paper I draw attention to the erasure of difference that might occur upon accepting the term “Anthropocene,” resulting in the possible homogenization of future generations to come.  Is ethnic and cultural apartheid on our horizon?  While this might be an extreme scenario, examining assumed structures that are potentially perpetuated in this naming is critical.  Might the term Androcene be more appropriate?  What about Elachistocene (Schneiderman 2014)?

David Steinrueck - Immanence and Environmental Justice

Quentin Meillassoux is a powerful force in the return to metaphysics in early 21st century European thought, aiming to construct a speculative philosophy that can deal with the important ethical and political concerns of our time. This paper deploys Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects to argue that the ‘Anthropocene’ has brought on 1) the collapse of Meillassoux’s critique of correlationism, 2) the realization of Meillassoux’s virtual God in the human being and 3) the necessity of self-imposed boundaries to restore the natural systems of the Earth.

The first section explores Meillassoux’s ontology – its metaphysical critique of human/nature correlationism and its understanding of immanence. Meillassoux breaks down human/world codependence and argues that not only is it impossible for humans to know the non-human world, but that anything is possible within it. Furthermore, this claim is extended to human existence; all the laws of the universe hold true until a chaotic event occurs and a new immanent existence emerges. Under these conditions, Meillassoux argues for the possibility of a future divine existence – a virtual God that could logically emerge from the field of chaos based on an unknown possible event.

The second section discusses Morton’s hyperobects – objects that defy the traditional sense of space and time – as possible events for establishing a new field of immanence. The Anthropocene is explored as a hyperobject event that has moved the human into the role of Meillassoux’s virtual God. What responsibility have humans taken on as ‘God’ of the universe? Is a self-caused human event possible – a boundary event that dethrones the human and restores the natural processes of the world? For a new event to occur the term ‘Anthropocene’ must be abandoned and a new reality must be envisioned that creates an immanent existence of respect and acknowledgement of non-human life on Earth.

Sam Hinds - The Role of Art and Media in Revisioning the Anthropocene
What makes humans human? A variety of characteristics have been posited as to what constitutes the defining factor distinguishing the human from the rest of the animal kingdom. One hallmark characteristic of the human is symbolic consciousness — the ability to generate abstract representations via sign or symbol which act as referents to the immediate world. The historical emergence of this ability coincided with an increased capacity to objectify and willfully act upon the world. It is the human’s unrivaled ability to enact change in the world, changes so dramatic that they are now generating significant changes on the geological level, that has given rise to the notion that the human species represents the chief driving force of geological change in the present geological epoch — thus, the proposed title of the Anthropocene.