ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University

Richard Norgaard, "The Ringing Call that Clanks", ISSS 2006 at Sonoma State University, Wednesday, July 12, 2006, 10:25 a.m.

Ecology and Sustainability

These participant's notes were created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the Systemic Business Community ( http://systemicbusiness.org ).

Millenium Ecosystem Assessment

Problem of understanding what we're doing to ourselves is a relatively recent phenomenon

No so long ago, hunters and gatherers
150 years ago, markets and industrialization, specialization happening as a results

Natural science and birth of the social scientists
A fraction of human history

Most metaphors are still out of agricultural
Trying to understand the system we're in

Millenium Ecosystem Assessment

Many scientists
Global warming is easy, compared to this
Greenhouse gas is a greenhouse gas
Ecosystem change is lots of different types of change, a much more complex story

The idea of assessment is that there's research and science that exists: literature and data

Assessment is apart from science, something that supports decision-makers
It's a social method of assessing science
It applies judgement to existing knowledge
Assessment takes place all of the time, in science
We're doing this across the disciplines
It's a social process apart from science, judgement that is different from that within disciplines

Came into the Millenium Assessment a year ago.

They had developed a framework

Life and human-well being, and the links between them
Indirect drivers and direct drivers
No dollar signs here, the economy is merely a tool for human well-thinking

This was created by economists in the south, who disagreed with the economists in the north

Not going to talk about dollars, e.g. GDP growth
Climate change is funnelled through GDP

Ecosystem services, and the way that they connect to human needs

Did modelling and had numbers, and decided that the level of description that makes sense is directional

Only down area: we're growing more temperate forests

Findings: conservatively written

This is what we can get thousands of scientists to agree on

If that's all you can say, why would you spend $24 million, and write a report that costs $13 thousand per page?

The real message is about the process

How do we change science?

Social and non-social scientists have long traditions, with fractured, disciplinary knowledge
Multiple conceptual frameworks even within ecology
Shared learning, from World Bank, from indigenous cultures
How do we understand ecosystems? 8 or 10 different models
How do we understand ecosystem services? Want to put them together in one model
Scientists don't put this together, the millenium assessment puts it together
Different scales, grains and extents

Developed a group, to think

Had a group, but had to develop a report, because agencies need something that they can use
Challenge: understanding is a group ability, and it's hard to write down
Policy makers want rule, regulations, predictions that can be held accountable to

Set up an incorrect system, that is Newtonian, need to switch towards a deliberative understanding

If democracy is an oak tree, progressive governance needs a different direction
We all need to be part of a network

Millenium assessment is a panel of experts

Scientists with open minds?
Assessment as separate from science, how could we design them together? The next research phase
Scientists brought together

Implications for how we teach

Universities are multiversities

In order to grasp the mess we've made, we need to reduce its complexity

We need to back off, and simplify our lives to understand our complexity
That's the reverse of the traditional science
Millenium Assessment can't say we're headed to disaster, although we can see direction

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Questions

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