Chapter 16
Introduction: People and Action (Stewardship, Community, and Implementation) Herman A. Karl
Abstract This chapter begins by describing the role of education and lessons learned from an innovative program to build the capacity among students to tackle wicked problems. It goes on to briefly describe each of the chapters in the section developing the linkage between them that people have the capacity to change societies’ relationship with nature. The first two chapters lay out a vision of communitybased ecosystem stewardship. The following discusses the culture of place—how and why people relate to the place they live. The fourth chapter describes a community collaborative group that practices the concepts and principles covered in the previous three chapters. The final chapter analyzes cooperative conservation through the lens of a coupled natural and social science approach. Keywords Ecosystem health • Relationships • Stewardship • Governance • Social-ecological systems • Collective action • Common good • Conservation
The previous two sections discussed the role of interdisciplinary research and technology and governance and policy for addressing environmental issues and restoring lands. In this section, we develop the role of citizens and communities. We set the stage by quoting at length from Holling and Chambers (1973, 13). But even if an ideal interdisciplinary research activity could be mobilized to produce a better mousetrap, no one would beat a path to its door. … A university can be an effective environment for research, but it is weak on the pragmatic experience required to implement it. On the other hand, institutions like government agencies, that have experience in policy formulation and implementation are so fragmented in their charge … that they are forced to concentrate on the fragments and not the whole. Neither the university nor the government
H.A. Karl (*) University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA e-mail:
[email protected]
H.A. Karl et al. (eds.), Restoring Lands - Coordinating Science, Politics and Action: Complexities of Climate and Governance, DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-2549-2_16, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2012
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agencies alone can bridge the gap between abstraction and rigor on one hand, and policy formulation and implementation on the other. … In this world of increasing complexity and with the apparent need for technological expertise, it becomes massively difficult for the citizen and his political spokesman to communicate well enough so that humane controls can be applied to technology and policy. It is this gap in communication between constituencies that must be bridged if the new approaches are not to yield social as well as ecological DDTs.
As we have shown, what Hollings and Chambers recognized almost 40 years ago essentially still holds today. The chapters in this section consider the role of federal agencies, citizens, and communities in restoring lands and ecosystem health; none of them speak specifically to the role of the university. Let’s consider that role now and then I will describe briefly the section chapters and connect them to each other. Many universities instituted science, technology, and society (STS) and environmental science/studies programs in an attempt to foster a more holistic and interdisciplinary training for students interested in environmental careers. Urban studies and planning, landscape architecture, and landscape design and ecology programs provide additional course curricula for such students. While there are more than 1,000 environmental studies/science programs at colleges and universities in the United States, many still struggle to integrate knowledge across disciplines and to graduate the problem solvers needed to tackle wicked problems (Clark et al. 2011a, b). Even if they were graduating students with the required skills, there are few career paths for them as the conventional institutions are not set up for interdisciplinary and holistic approaches to problem solving; those institutions need yet to be invented. The editors were involved with an effort by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop a program at MIT that would train students in the requisite skills to tackle wicked problems and bridge the gap described by Holling and Chambers. The program, MIT-USGS Science Impact Collaborative (MUSIC), was co-founded and co-directed by MIT professor Lawrence Susskind and then USGS scientist Herman Karl. Lynn Scarlett encouraged support of MUSIC during her 8-year tenure as Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management and Budget, Deputy Secretary, and Acting Secretary at the Department of the Interior (DOI). Juan Carlos Vargas-Moreno and Michael Flaxman taught courses and conducted action research in the program. MUSIC was initiated in 2004 and after a strategic review of its multi-year programs USGS ended its participation in 2010; as of this writing MUSIC continues as a MIT activity. MUSIC attempted to integrate the work of academics and practitioners by hosting Scholars-in-Residence for stays of up to 1 year at MIT. Charles Curtin (Environmental Policy Design) was the first Scholar. Others were David Mattson (USGS) Marilyn Tenbrink (USEPA), and Olivier Barreteau (Cemagref, a French environmental organization). There proved to be virtually no interest by the faculty to interact with these expert scholar practitioners, either on an ad hoc and informal basis or through formal structured activities. We are left to conclude that the strong culture of single discipline research of the university system, the pressure on junior
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faculty to establish their own identity and niche, and preferences of individual faculty simply do not foster and value collaborative learning. MUSIC attempted to disseminate knowledge of the program and attract USGS scientists to participate by designating three USGS MUSIC Field Directors in each USGS region with limited success. Ongoing projects with MUSIC students were established in Central Region under the supervision of Stephen Faulkner. Keith Robinson, Eastern Region, hired a MUSIC student as a summer employee. USGS programs are not structured to support interdisciplinary research into collaborative process approaches to enhance the value and use of science in decision-making and policy formulation. Without programmatic funding, the research was not sustainable. Housed in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), MUSIC had difficulty in attracting students from a broad range of disciplines. Because, students were required to take a substantial number of departmental core courses, there were very few electives they could take to develop essential skills to become what were called Science Impact Coordinators. Only one recurring course was specifically developed for the MUSIC curriculum, the others already existed in DUSP. Students were required to participate in a multi-semester field project with agency personnel. Students in the program needed to be grounded in a specific discipline, which could be physical science, biological science, social science, political science, etc., and to work in an interdisciplinary context. MUSIC attempted to teach five basic skills or core competencies: (1) ability to engage a range of individuals or groups in problem solving, (2) ability to reframe policy choices or courses of action, (3) ability to do social and political mapping and conduct a stakeholder assessment, (4) ability to synthesize and not merely compile information, and (5) ability to develop a common functional language that diverse actors could use to communicate. Students must think critically with open minds to attain these skills, which are minimal core essentials for organizing and facilitating people and communities in a deliberative, participatory process that fosters decisions made in the common interest and for the common good. A lesson learned from the MUSIC experience is that champions in leadership positions are necessary to institute such unconventional and progressive programs. A second lesson is that these programs require a significant investment in time and resources both financial and personnel. Third is that new standards of accountability are necessary to evaluate progress and success. And a fourth lesson is, even with champions, the institutions supporting these programs themselves must be progressive and unbound by convention to sustain the program. Once the champions leave if the institutional environment is not conducive to taking risks and breaking down walls, the program is bound to fail. Individuals within USGS and MIT made a sincere attempt to support and grow MUSIC. But there are strong barriers between departments at MIT as there are strong barriers between disciplines at USGS. Institutionally, neither organization is structured to support a program that unifies knowledge across disciplines and engages in long-term deliberative processes to solve problems. MUSIC was progressive in responding to the call from many advisory panels (National Research Council 1995, 2008, 2009) to conduct interdisciplinary
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research and develop collaborative approaches for dealing with environmental issues, but in its first 6 years, could not surmount these barriers.1 Most of all, academe and the agencies need to guard against relabeling old activities with new names that continue to function as they had only now masquerading as something else.2 The chapters in this section (and all in the book) implicitly if not explicitly make a strong case that skills and approaches such as those MUSIC endeavored to instill in students are needed to move environmental policy formulation and land management away from “…the sad spectacle of one obsolete idea chasing another around a closed circle” (Aldo Leopold in Meine 1988) toward action and to provide for people’s needs. Section III ended with a chapter on exploring the role of the neighborhood in adapting to climate change in an urban environment. In this section we expand the discussion of the role of people and communities in restoring and sustaining lands. Keep in mind that we embrace the larger concept of community of Leopold’s land ethic, which includes “… soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Leopold 1949, 204). Fittingly, this section begins with Chap. 17, Communitybased Ecosystem Stewardship: A Concept for Productive Harmony on the Public Lands of the Western United States, by Gary McVicker that develops the relationship, which includes stewardship and governance, of humans to nature. McVicker provides a comprehensive overview of what he calls “Communitybased Ecological Stewardship” for the public lands of the western United States, which have long been the center of many national controversies. He presses the case that to restore ecosystem integrity to the public lands, the idea of productive harmony (as defined by the National Environmental Policy Act) must be pursued where a clear connection between people and the land still exists – locally, at the community level. He describes a process of science, citizenry, and government coming together in a relationship that extends knowledge and power of choice downward and outward to citizens, rather than relying on current formal systems for seeking citizen input in government decision-making. In his view, collaboration begins through building local consensus on common objectives, but then must be continuously pursued on multiple fronts, with bureaucratic barriers yielding to and supporting local empowerment. He proposes a set of principles that he believes are needed to assure that the tenants of good government and responsible land stewardship are adhered to in that process. McVicker sees the process, when properly applied, as one that might ultimately help resolve the human conflict with nature on a much larger scale. However, he recognizes that there are many challenges to making that
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We do not comment on or evaluate the success or failure of environmental studies/science programs at other colleges and universities. We talked about MUSIC specifically because it was a federal agency/university partnership that involved the four editors in various capacities. MUSIC was part of the USGS Science Impact Program; that program has ended. 2 “How many universities have relabelled [sic] old boxes with ‘Faculty of Environmental Studies?’ How many governments have recycled existing activities into ‘Departments of the Environment?’ Such steps might lead to new panaceas that are more disastrous than the old because they are more global” (Holling and Chambers 1973, 13).
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a reality and goes on to address in considerable detail those that apply to the public lands. Unlike the conventional academic paper, McVicker does not cite other sources. His ideas are the culmination of his professional life and experiences coupled with a long-standing concern over the human impact on nature. There is strength and authority in this personal narrative. Like the rest of the chapters in this section, it is a manifestation of having been in the arena (see footnote 8, Chap. 1). He concludes with a provocative question: “No doubt, there are many beneficiaries of what is now in place that will resist such change, but should proponents (beneficiaries) of the past decide our future?” In Chap. 18, Thoughts on How to Implement Citizen Based Ecosystem Stewardship from 32 Years in Governance, Richard Whitley provides a similar perspective to McVicker’s narrative. His experiences are based on a 32-year career with the Bureau of Land Management. Like McVicker, Whitely’s on-the-ground experience has instilled in him an intuitive knowledge of what works and why it works.3 He identifies the barriers and challenges inherent in the current institutions that impede change in the system. Whitley recognizes that science is value-laden and that decisions based on the best science (defining “best” is a source of conflict in itself) do not guarantee that the decision is right or wise. In recognition of this, he emphasizes the importance of relationships. In a collaborative process it is important to recognize other viewpoints as legitimate even if you fundamentally (and perhaps viscerally) disagree with them; those around the table must respect each other’s differences. Out of this respect and recognition of legitimacy of other perspectives comes trust. The Interagency Cooperative Conservation Team (on which Whitley and Karl served for 4 years) visited many collaborative stakeholder groups around the country. Without exception, every group said they could only work together because they learned to trust each other. Trust can take years to develop and is fragile, if broken the group may unravel. Whitley tells a metaphorical story related to the Interagency Conservation Team by an Arizona rancher. The rancher explained how he used to “break” horses in his youth using the brutal methods acceptable at the time. He then
3 Every field scientist knows this. It is not to say that definitive answers come from only observations in the field and not from scholarly research. Perspectives different from those of the scholar are arrived at. If scholarly analysis could be combined with practical experience, new insights would be gleaned through integration of scholarship and practice beyond those attained by the scholar and practitioner alone. This would, of course, require not only communication between the scholar and practitioner but also mutual respect. It is a laudable scholarly trait to be aware of the relevant literature and to cite it extensively. It is impossible, however, to have critically examined each article and book when many score and even hundreds are cited, particularly when research assistants are relied upon to cull through and summarize the literature. And without critical analysis there is danger of perpetuating dogma (the peer review system is not fail safe and most books are not blind peer reviewed). Far better to cite fewer references that are thoroughly analyzed and vetted than many that are by-and-large taken on face value as authoritative. In this way a system of checks-and-balances is set up to the advantage of both the scholar and practitioner communities; our understanding and interpretation of complex issues is more nuanced and knowledge, not dogma, more likely to be advanced.
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explained that now he uses behavioral techniques to bond with the horse. He said that both methods get the results he wants. The big difference, however, is that he never knew when the horse broken by the old method would turn on him – neither trusted the other; in contrast, he had built a relationship based upon trust using the behavioral training method and he was confident that horse would never turn on him. Policy formulation and implementation may be more effective by working with people to build a trusting relationship. Chapter 19, “Climate Change and the Language of Geographic Place,” by Jim Kent and Kevin Preister, introduces the perspectives of the social scientist to community-based ecosystem stewardship. In Chap. 1 we stated that a new ethos is necessary to achieve harmony among ecological, social, and economic systems. The seeds for that ethos will be sown at the grass roots level and it will sprout in many communities and places across the globe. As Kent and Preister point out, national and international strategies and “blue prints” laying out how to deal with climate change are “top down” driven and do not take into account “… the social cultural, and economics of everyday people who are being impacted by these policies.” The culture of place is very powerful.4 Human Geographic Mapping by Kent, Preister and their colleagues takes into account how people actually relate and identify with their landscapes, reflecting the natural boundaries within which people communicate and take care of each other. When policies reflect these boundaries and the activities occurring within them, they become an effective vehicle for positive, adaptive change. Moreover, they make the case that positive measures to address climate change must be occurring at a local level before aggregated actions at higher geographic scales can be successful. These features of informal community systems operating to take care of the land and the people are usually not used or understood by policy makers and natural resource managers. Understanding how people relate to the place they live should be routinely part of environmental policy design. Kent and Preister describe a process for grounding policy initiatives geographically by understanding the language of place. They assert that citizen-based stewardship is the key for adapting to climate change and, by extension, achieving sustainability. Chapter 20, The Tomales Bay Watershed Council: Model for Collective Action, by Pileggi, Carson, and King demonstrates the power of citizen-based stewardship and is the linchpin that ties together the other chapters in this book into a functioning
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Kent, Preister, McVicker, and Karl were instructors in the BLM Community-based Ecosystem Stewardship course. One of the workshops was held in McLaughlin, Nevada. Most of participants were coming from Bullhead City, Arizona a small ranching town just across the Colorado River from McLaughlin, a casino town. We had an advance registration of about 45. The first morning of the workshop only 8 participants showed up. We had to cancel the workshop. Kent and his colleagues had mapped a cultural boundary through the Colorado between Bullhead City and McLaughlin. We can only speculate that the Bullhead City participants did not cross the cultural boundary to attend a workshop in a Nevada casino. Had the workshop been held in a community center, or school, or firehouse, the usual places for the workshops, in Bullhead City we suspect that those registered would have participated. But we can only speculate.
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engine of action. The Tomales Bay Watershed Council (TBWC) operates on a consensus-based decision process that involves all stakeholders in the watershed that would like to participate. It is a model of a place-based, collaborative approach to watershed stewardship; it coordinates science, politics, and people for action to manage ecosystems and restore and preserve lands. Yet, as you will read it is a difficult task and not accomplished without challenges. I visited the TBWC in about 2002, 2 years after it had started. I was speaking to the group about joint fact-finding – part of a consensus-based process that involves scientific information. Two things are embedded in my memory: (1) I was asked by Ellen Strauss, a key figure in the local dairy industry, if I was there to tell them what to do; the answer was “no”, I was there to learn from them; and (2) the group had formed out of a conflict over oyster contamination and after solving that conflict expected to disband – however, they realized that conflict never goes away and that they needed a process that allowed them to make decisions in the face of ongoing conflict. As you read this chapter, pay particular note to the relationship with the federal, state, and local governmental agencies. Many agency personnel choose not to participate in consensus-based collaborative processes because they claim (falsely) that they are being asked to give up decision-making authority that is mandated to them by statue and law. This is not accurate. In a well-designed consensus-based process, they are being asked as equal participants to make the decision reached by the group. The TBWC recognizes this: “Indeed relevant agencies must also participate in this process on the same level as other stakeholders. Mandated by law, they are the guardians of the practical constraints to ecosystems.” The Interagency Cooperative Conservation Team visited the TBWC in 2003 to learn about its process and approach to conservation. As have other chapters in this book, this chapter concludes poignantly with the recognition that we (people) can make a choice: “We may continue on the path to extinction. Or we may well be at the threshold of a path to new possibilities, creating innovative and holistic ways of thinking and of being. … Ultimately, the choice is ours.” In the last chapter in this section, Outcomes of Social-Ecological Experiments in Near-shore Marine Environments: Cognitive Interpretation of the Impact of Changes in Fishing Gear Type on Ecosystem Form and Function, by Curtin and Hammitt, we examine another form of participatory conservation that couples the intersection between human perception of change and the role of alternative fishing strategies in influencing ecosystem composition and resilience. This chapter is an output of the MUSIC program. Charles Curtin was the first MUSIC scholar-in-residence who over the course of several years taught a range of courses at MIT from collaborative and adaptive management (with Herman Karl), to landscape ecology and complexity and policy design. The complexity course led to a forth-coming book to be published by Island Press. Curtin has nearly two decades experience developing placebased conservation and large-scale research projects in marine and terrestrial ecosystems spanning North American, East Africa, and the Middle East. He has recently founded the Resilience Design Group at Antioch University in Keene, New Hampshire that focuses on applying resilience and complex system theory to environmental and social problem solving. Sarah Hammitt was a student in the MUSIC
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program and chose the topic of the chapter as her required field project under Curtin’s supervision. This chapter is a strong example of the scholar practitioner approach for analyzing a case. Curtin has an academic background in ecology and social-ecological systems. He is akin to an anthropologist in that he lives in the communities in which he conducts his studies. He associates with the people in these communities on a daily basis, many of them are his friends, his children go to school with their children; his family is part of the community. Yet, he uses rigorous scientific methods in his action research. He develops both an intuitive and scientific understanding of the social-ecological system and he is able to get “under the surface,” which enables an understanding unlike that either the scholar or practitioner could obtain working independently. The Maine fisheries case, although an investigation of a particular place, scale, and time, provides general lessons about the response of cultural (social) systems and ecological systems to disturbance and the resilience of those systems to change. The chapter is an example of the coupling (a true integration) of natural science and social science approaches to tackle wicked problems; many reports cite interdisciplinary integration between the natural and social sciences as necessary to deal with adaptation to climate change. The theme that unifies these chapters is the belief that people and communities have the capacity to change our relationship with nature – to develop a new environmental ethos. Environmental policy and natural resource management should be a collaborative effort between citizens and government. This will require experimentation with new forms of governance as discussed in Section III and new approaches to utilizing science and technology as discussed in Section II. It will require acknowledgement that current institutions and ways of formulating policy are not adequate to deal with the continuing and increasing conflict around ecosystem management and land restoration especially in the face of rapidly changing climate. It is people and not governments that will force the necessary changes. As in all social movements, people initiate action. Politicians follow and ultimately enact the laws that are necessary to support and enforce social change before there is general acceptance by the citizenry. Yet, these laws are not sustainable unless there is a fundamental change in societal culture; development of a new ethos takes years and perhaps generations. The civil rights movement in the United States is a case in point. There is no better way to end this section introduction than by combining concluding statements from Chaps. 17 and 20: No doubt, there are many beneficiaries of what is now in place that will resist such change, but should proponents (beneficiaries) of the past decide our future? Ultimately, the choice is ours.
References Clark SG, Rutherford MB, Auer MR, Cherney RL, Mattson DJ, Clark DA, Foote L, Krogman N, Wilshusen P, Steelman T (2011a) College and university environmental programs as a policy problem (Part 1): integrating knowledge, education, and action for a better world? Environ Manag 47:701–715, 27 ms
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Clark SG, Rutherford MB, Auer MR, Cherney RL, Mattson DJ, Clark DA, Foote L, Krogman N, Wilshusen P, Steelman T (2011b) College and university environmental programs as a policy problem (Part II): strategies of improvement. Environ Manag 47:716–726, 30 ms Holling CS, Chambers AD (1973) The nurture of an infant. Bioscience 23:13–20 Leopold A (1949) A Sand County almanac and sketches here and there with an introduction by Robert Finch (1987). Oxford University Press, Oxford, 228 p Meine C (1988) Aldo Leopold, his life and work. The University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 638 p National Research Council (1995) Science, policy, and the coast: improving decision making. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC National Research Council (2008) Public participation in environmental assessment and decision making. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 305 p National Research Council (2009) Informing decisions in a changing climate. The National Academies Press, Washington, DC, 188 p
