Ecologically sustainable but unjust?

by Sarah Klain, CHANs lab PhD Candidate

Fisheries have supported people along the central coast of British Columbia for millennia. Currently, you need hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars to buy the right to participate in the commercial sea cucumber and geoduck fisheries. These fisheries could provide more jobs for First Nations who live near these fisheries, but entrenched management systems would have to change. 

The coastal waters of the Great Bear Rainforest support lucrative fisheries, including sea cucumber, a marine invertebrate with leathery skin, and geoduck, a gigantic salt-water clam. Both are invertebrates These two fisheries are managed in ways that are, arguably, ecologically sustainable, but they currently provide few opportunities and little income to First Nation communities. In our recent publication, we applied the ideas of Nobel-laureate Elinor Ostrom related to design principles for sustainable common pool resource systems with emphasis on the history of a place and equity considerations.

The “geo” in geoduck is pronounced as “gooey.”

Based on evidence from our literature review and interviews, we argue that providing Central Coast First Nations with greater commercial access to these fisheries as well as more say in their management could likely maintain the ecological integrity of these stocks. This could also contribute to partially righting some historical injustices, addressing power imbalances and a more equitable distribution of rights, responsibilities and benefits associated with these fisheries. 

Sea cucumber in BC.

See:

Klain, S. C., Beveridge, R., & Bennett, N. J. (2014). Ecologically sustainable but unjust? Negotiating equity and authority in common-pool marine resource management. Ecology and Society, 19(4), art52. doi:10.5751/ES-07123-190452

Connecting through disconnection: learning from 'Life Off Grid'

by Jonathan Taggart, CHANs Lab PhD student

Could you imagine a life where water didn't flow automatically from the taps? Where electricity wasn't simply accessed by flicking a switch? A life in which networks of power, water – as well as food, heat, and waste disposal – were only available if you built them yourself? It sounds like a stretch... but the lessons might be worth the leap.

'Life Off Grid' trailer from Jonathan Taggart on Vimeo.

Between 2011 and 2013 I travelled across Canada with Dr. Phillip Vannini (Canada Research Chair II in Innovative Learning and Public Ethnography and my Masters supervisor at Royal Roads University) working on an ethnographic project that aimed to characterize and describe the lives of people living “off the grid” in every province and territory. The project revealed much about the challenges, motivations and practices of people who have chosen to disconnect from Canada’s electrical and gas infrastructures: many off-gridders, we discovered, are inspired by a profound attachment to, and concern for, place. Many believe that a good life is one characterized by deep and bodily involvement in the architecture and infrastructure of living – buildings, energy, food, water – and have taken up the challenge of producing these niceties and necessities for themselves.

In coastal British Columbia off-gridders can use surface water to generate power year-round because it rarely freezes. The prairies are typically sunnier, even in winter, and those on the east coast get plenty of wind for their turbines. Off-gridders use a variety of technologies (some home-made, like this stream engine on Lasqueti Island) to make electricity, each choice, or combination of choices, guided by the unique affordances of their surroundings.

In two years we interviewed nearly 200 participants in over 100 households, roughly 10 from each province and territory. With a mandate to make our research as accessible as possible, we designed the project to have multiple outputs, including magazine articles and a feature-length documentary film in addition to numerous academic articles and a monograph. The reception so far has been remarkable, and has shown how successful research can be in connecting with non-academic audiences: at last count, the film’s trailer has had nearly 21,000 views online, driven in large part by articles in Canadian Geographic and the Huffington Post, as well as by ongoing guest blogs we have written for the Huffington Post, The Tyee, and Mother Earth News. The story, in short, seems to be one that people want to hear.

But to what end are we pushing this research so far and wide? It’s easy to package and pedal the romance of wanting to “live deliberately”, as Thoreau put it, but surely there must be more to living off the grid than the self-satisfaction and solitude of living a cottage life year-round. Living off the grid is by no means the solution to the challenges facing our planet – “it’s colossally selfish”, observed one interviewee, pointing out the inequalities evident in his privileged access to the land, technology and education that have made his life possible – but the values espoused by many off-gridders are things we can all learn from.

If we agree that the path to living within planetary boundaries is marked as much by social as it is by technological change and innovation, perhaps off-gridders can show us what life might look like if we not only use less energy and fewer resources, but also what a world might look like if we shift to a paradigm in which we want and need less[i]. It’s a paradigm shift fueled in part by increased involvement in the production of what we consume, and by awareness, in the words of another interviewee, of “what things actually cost”. In consideration of these externalities and “actual costs”, living off grid is also an act of deconcession or divestment: while their individual impact may be small, off-gridders are ‘voting with their feet’, moving their financial resources away from large utility providers and, by taking control of their own energy and food production in ways that respect their particular bioregion, incrementally shifting demand away from the corporate entities they view as responsible for threats to biodiversity and the environment[ii].

Imagine cooking your meals using the power of the sun: tracking its path with your solar oven, waiting longer for dinner when it’s overcast, and maybe firing up the wood stove instead when the winter rays are low. This solar oven on an off-grid Manitoba farm is essentially a giant reflector that uses reclaimed printer’s tin to redirect the sun into a glass-fronted insulated box – just one example of how some off-gridders work with the weather rather than around it. On a sunny day it is relatively easy to bring an oven like this up to 400°.

While the life being lived by a handful of people in the deep woods and far reaches of Canada may not be broadly scalable (the necessary land base alone is prohibitive: off-gridders generally agree that 10 acres is the minimum parcel needed per family for food, water and firewood), the associated attitudes are admirable and adoptable. By advocating for a life dictated by the whims of wind and weather (a reality in many homes powered by renewable energy), they are exchanging an anthropocentric worldview for one that is more relational and arguably more sustainable.

Life Off Grid is currently touring film festivals: it will be appearing at Ethnografilm2015 in Paris, April 8-12, 2015. ‘Off the grid: Reassembling domestic life’, co-authored by Phillip Vannini and Jonathan Taggart, is available from Routledge here. A collection of Jonathan’s off-grid photographs from across Canada will be on display at Liu Institute for Global Issues as part of the Capture Photography Festival throughout April 2015.

You can also connect with Life Off Grid on Facebook and Instagram for video snippets, photographs, and for news on additional media and festival appearances.

Life Off Grid was made possible by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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[i] Vannini, P., & Taggart, J. (2014). Making sense of domestic warmth: Affect, involvement, and thermoception in off-grid homes. Body & Society, 20(1), 61-84.

[ii] Vannini, P., & Taggart, J. (2014). Growing, cooking, eating, shitting off-grid organic food: deconcession, convenience and the taste of place. Food, Culture and Society, 17(12), 319-336.

Saving the world with your reusable mug? A rap by Maayan Kreitzman

Maayan is a CHANS Lab PhD student, and her song Carry Mug is a loosely rhymed, free-verse rap interrogating the neuroses of “responsible” consumption in a materialistic world. The song is a humorous critique of the cultural importance of small interactions with material goods, which also contain in them the heavy symbolism of knowledge, identity, and agency. Using the symbol of the coffee cup, it explores the conflation of detail-oriented consumer choices with a conservation ethic and with questions of personal identity in a changing world. See the link to the song below, followed by Maayan’s commentary. 

The audio: check it out by clicking here! 

One way that people have been encouraged to “make a difference” towards a sustainable future is in their private consumption habits. As the western economy has moved from production to consumption, goods have transitioned from meeting people's needs to creating their sense of self. Many critiques have examined the unlikelihood of buying ourselves out of sustainability problems like climate change by switching consumption to greener products. For example, many of us, like the character in the song, own a stack of reusable carry mugs, purchased (and given to us at conferences) in an attempt to reduce our use of disposables, yet these items turn into even more clutter. A more fundamental argument common in the environmental movement is the need to reduce total throughput in the consumption production cycle and move away from a growth economy. Both the “green consumption” and “buy less” ethos might be steps towards sustainability, but they also create a situation in which people feel responsible and empowered to contribute to a more sustainable world, but also insecure and overwhelmed about the choices to be made.

As the song expresses, I argue that these types of changes towards responsible consumerism or anti-consumerism elicit the same problematic projections of status and identity as the ones characteristic of a typical consumer choice. Though such consumption changes might be beneficial to the sustainability cause (or at worst benign), they are still limited within “personal choice” decisions while neglecting more systemic design issues involving the built environment, standards imposed by health and safety regulations, etc. Nonetheless, such choices shape and are shaped by the surrounding culture, and potentially effect higher scales [4]of the social-ecological system over the long term. Carry mug  situates this dilemma of limited, but weighty personal agency in an everyday situation familiar to many of us.

While the song mainly portrays a moment fraught with guilt and paralysis, which balloons into a neurotic crises of unhealthy proportions, it might end on a note of more hope and action, noting that within the materialistic space, “between the cup and the sleeve” there is still an opportunity for action as “there's a lot of shit to do”. 

Learning from failure -- in science communication and in life! Guest blog by Jill Caviglia-Harris

KC: Jill Caviglia-Harris is a Professor of Economics at Salisbury University in Maryland and a Leopold Leadership colleague. Her story about her son had me guffawing out loud and learning some critical lessons about science communication. Since her original post on the Leopold 3.0 blog didn’t contain the story, I asked to share it on CHANS Lab Views.

As a Leopold Leadership Fellow, I am interested in learning more on how to communicate research findings and make an impact on current day environmental policy.  In the last year, I have honed in on the secret sauce by researching, practicing, and writing blog posts on how to make compelling presentations and tell captivating stories while abiding by the rules of great design. That is where Kai comes in -- after reading my “5 Secrets of Captivating Stories” and the application of these lessons Kai wanted to read the speech I had created for an honors society induction for a large preparatory school in my area. My charge was to motivate the students to continue along their positive academic path, go to college, and succeed in life. Clearly, these students were already highly motivated. How could I inspire them further? I decided on a story about my son, Solomon, that illustrated the message that in life it’s ok to fail — it’s just not ok not to learn from failure.  What follows here is that speech:

The Secret to College Success

Jill Caviglia-Harris

Cum Laude Honors Society Induction Ceremony, Worcester Preparatory School

April 23, 2014

I am here today to talk with you about success.  Success in school and success in life.  How many of you that are here today are planning to attend college?  How many of you plan to drop out of college?  No one plans to drop out of college, but do you know that 40% of students that enroll in college do not graduate in 4 years?  The number drops when we look out over 6 years, but still about 30% do not graduate.  That means that about between 30-40% of those you in this room that plan to attend college will not make it.  Now, I know that you’re thinking that is not me…She’s not talking to the right crowd.  We’re all graduating from college.  We’re honors students from an elite preparatory school.  But, whether you want to believe or not, 30 to 40% of honor students do not make it through college.  Harvard…. the statistics hold for this university, one that is filled with students that excelled in school.

The question is then how do I succeed in college when so many before me have not?   I'm here to tell you that I know the secret…But before my big reveal I’m going to tell you a story.

This story is about my son, Solomon.  He’s 9 now.  This story takes place when he was in kindergarten.  He was just as strong-willed, determined, and tireless as he is today at nine.  He is driven, and always wants to win.  It was Field Day and he wanted me to attend, and if I couldn’t make it for the full day I had to be there in the afternoon when they would race to determine the fastest kindergartener. Well, he really wanted first place…he wanted it so badly that he had his grandparents from both sides come in from out of town, had my husband and I make sure to be there at the race time, and practiced every day on the playground for a month.  From these practices he learned there was only one kid he had to worry about.  There was only one kid that occasionally beat him. 

On Field Day they ran heats for the 5 kindergarten classes; the top three from each class were in the final race.  By the time that I arrived I learned of these results.  He was first in his class.  Race time arrived by late afternoon and the 15 kids lined up to take off at the sound of a whistle… and as it turns out my son took about 10 paces and fell down.  He came in second-to-last place.  As we walked back into the school I could see his anger: his fists were clenched, he wouldn’t let me touch him.  I struggled to figure out what to say to him.  I could have told him that I was disappointed, but really, what parent would do that (and how much really was at stake)?  I could tell him that he would do better next time, but that felt so shallow.  Instead, I asked him “What did you learn?” he turned to me and said “Nothing, what do you mean? I fell, I learned that I fell.”  And the conversation continued:

“Well, why do you think you fell?”  

“Because I tripped”

“Why do you think you tripped?”  

Luckily, I was privy to the photos that his grandfather took of him racing right before this conversation.  What I saw was that he ran this race looking sideways at the boy that he had to beat.  He fell because he was not looking forward.  He fell because he really really wanted to win. He, of course, did not realize (or believe) this until we showed him the photos (and at that point, he found them funny).  Ever since that day this has been a family motto: “What did you learn?” 

Now getting back to my secret. It is this: the secret to success is the ability to embrace failure and overcome setbacks.  It's ok to fail and to fail miserably.  It's just not ok not to learn from failure. 

Michael Jordan was once quoted:

I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

It turns out that successful people have one thing in common and that's that they have this ability to overcome failure, to learn from setbacks. You may think that honors students have nothing to worry about in college but the fact is that over-achieving students are sometimes at most risk.

I believe that intelligence is not something that we are born with.  I believe intelligence is something that comes from hard work. I recognize that some skills are easier to acquire than others and that some subjects in school will be harder than others. But I do not believe that there is any subject matter that cannot be learned.  I do not believe in the statement (or any similar) “I do not do math.” A problem can arise when over achieving students identify with achievement and then take a class in college that kicks their butt.  People with a fixed mindset are those that believe that intelligence is innate; that you're born with it or not.  People with this mindset are more likely to fail in life because they internalize setbacks and failures; these become reflections of who they are. “I failed and therefore I am a failure.”  On the other hand, people with a growth mindset are those that believe that talent, skills, and intelligence can only be acquired through hard work…by persevering through setbacks… and embracing failure. 

My message is therefore this… Expect college to be challenging and if you take a course that is more difficult than you expected, fail an exam, or wish to avoid a topic that is difficult just so that it will not impact your GPA; avoid the temptation to shrug it off, blame the instructors, or excuse away your setbacks.  Instead learn from them. Don’t just try hard, learn from these setbacks – and do something differently if you fail: reach out to faculty when you don't understand, get extra help when you need it and figure out ways to teach yourself how to learn.  And most of all, wish for setbacks. These wakeup calls are what have inspired the most successful people in life since the beginning of time.   

Tweeting for Healthier Social-Ecological Systems: Introducing #SocEcoSys

By Kai Chan
 
Can Twitter be a useful teaching tool? Can it advance social-ecological systems thinking, research, and practice? I think so (as I argued in "3 Ways Tweeting Will Improve Your Reach & Impact—In Any Communication"), but I'm about to put the question to the test.

We use the term 'social-ecological systems' to refer to interacting
social and ecological subsystems, but pinning down how such
systems behave can be harder than it might seem.

This semester, I'm teaching a graduate course called 'Towards Social-Ecological Systems' (RMES 510; 'towards' in that I'm not assuming that the systems view or the current SES literature captures all important dynamics). For the first time ever, I'm assigning grades based on student tweets. In so doing, I'm advancing one strong social-media trend, and fighting against another.

The continued advance is intentionally using Twitter for scholarship purposes, and making this scholarship 'actionable'. As far as I can tell, there's no hashtag for Social-Ecological Systems research and practice. Given that virtually no sustainability issue can be properly understood without a social-ecological lens, this is a tremendous shame. Accordingly, I hereby introduce #SocEcoSys, the hashtag for social-ecological systems research and practice.

The fight is against the trend that social media is only for what's new, even if what's old is far more important and insightful. RMES 510 students will be tweeting also with two additional hashtags: #OBG for oldie but goodie (already in use, but used in conjunction with #SocEcoSys to refer to classic papers illuminating key social-ecological dynamics); and #hiddengem for papers and other resources that seem to have gone unnoticed or unappreciated in SES thinking.

Have you used Twitter in courses? Please share your experiences in the comments below.

At the end of the semester (December) we'll take stock with a frank assessment of the educational value, and the vitality of the new conversation about social-ecological systems. Stay tuned!

P.S. If you see the value in #SocEcoSys, and in unearthing classic articles and key contributions (via #OBG and #hiddengem), please share this post using the social media buttons below.