“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Saturday, November 3, 2012

Underground Ecocriticism Liveblog 15

Gillian Barker and Eric Desjardins, “Philosophy and the Environment.”
Here is Desjardins. 
"What Is the Place of Humans in Nature?"
Paul Crutzen
1950s call to include human factor in ecological theory by the scientists who developed ecosystem science
Yet still the human is rarely part of it
Things have changed in the last 30 years << resilience thinking
One recurrent claim is that the right unit of eco management is human institutions as well as bogs and meadows
Even ecologists are placing humans into nature--but what is that?

Ecological footprint as potent metaphor
How much land and water area we use compared to the annual biological production of these places
Since the 1970s our footprint is 50% too big (footprintnetwork.org). 
The general solution to this has been efficiency: LED bulbs, hybrid cars, recycling (downcycling), not eating meat
This suggests a merely quantitative change
do less of the same
It perpetrates the ideology that drove us into this mess

So maybe >> resilience thinking

Idea of maximum sustainable yield (MSY): as if we could understand products in isolation 
No complexity, no flux, no evolution in this model
Reform vs reduction; reduction is about command and control
Holling and Meffe 1996; adaptive management

Adaptive management: 
openly discuss social-ecological problem, goals, consider alternative modes of inervention
implementation (policies)
monitor
learn from these experiences/experiments
adapt (e.g. introduce new stakeholders, revise goals and/or policies)

 
 

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