Categories
peace

Confessions of a pacifist

Richardc Jackson

Pacifism is the most ethically consistent position…it entails a consistency of means and ends – we’re not using evil means for good ends.

Prof Richard Jackson is Deputy Director at the National Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (NCPACS) at the University of Otago. He has written several books on conflict and terrorism, mostly recently in the form of a novel Confessions of a Terrorist.

Talking points

I had a personal terrifying experience…a taste of the utter lawlessness of war, the arbitrary life and death decisions
Even though nothing happened to me, I was really just on the edges of the war, I realised how morally void war was – that’s one of the reasons why I became a pacifist.

A real impetus for me was to try to understand the causes of underdevelopment

My focus on how we deal with violent conflict, and how we can make the world a more peaceful place.

9/11 occurred, maybe a little bit before, I was starting to question whether we really understood the causes of war.

9/11 was a transforming moment…I started thinking about how we respond to terrorism.

9/11 was void of meaning so we saw the development of a language to describe it, it wasn’t a criminal act, it was terrorism and we quickly saw the response framed as a “war on terror”…it was televised…and it was on the back of years of increasingly racist sentiment…so the response was unlike anything we’ve experienced before…a whole new paradigm of irrational hatred.

The television coverage mirrored disaster films…so the interplay of real and virtual exploded.

This one was framed as “act of war”…and everyone repeated that around the world. The consequence of that, and maybe the intention, was to take terrorism out of the political or criminal frame and to put it in a military frame.

Partly this was a psychological response, because on that day the American military – the most powerful military in the world – proved itself incapable of protecting the American people. It was impotent. Now that impotence had to be banished, so the best way to do this was to say “well this is not just terrorism, and it’s not crime, not murder, this is an act of war”. And the only way to respond to an act of war is to launch a defensive war – to use our military, to deploy it to eradicate terrorism around the world. So a war on terrorism was declared. Then war became the primary frame, not just strategically but legally as well.

The military (response) has been the absolute disaster of it. Because you can’t deal with terrorism though a war response. Terrorism is a political problem and it can only have a political solution.

I’m trying to avoid giving the notion that 9/11 was a rupturing event, it was certainly rupturing, but a number of things had been occurring before that which fed into this moment, the rise of the risk society, the idea that there are these risks out there that are completely unpredictable, well terrorism seemed to prove that, so you have to have an extreme precautionary philosophy in order to try and deal with it. And that means redefining laws – putting people into prison for what they might do rather than what they have done.

This reinvigorated the military-industrial complex…the security sector is thriving in western economies. But it relies on a discourse of “unlimited terrorist threat and that the state has a duty to prevent that, so if we have to give up civil liberties and have surveillance – this is just the price of dealing with this immense uncertain risk that faces us”.

The population was so easily manipulated with a preexisting culture of fear, crime is going down but the fear of crime is going up, something to do with affluenza – we’ve reached a level of society where we’re affluent enough to be able to sit around and be able to worry about things…there are so many moral panics that sweep through society.

The terrorism scare has come at a moment in our society that we’re already in a state of fear.

The media plays a huge role in the drama of terrorism – they just go nuts, exaggerating and hyping up threats that if you look at them statistically are tiny

There’s been a failure of public intellectuals, media commentators, and courageous politicians to stand up and say “hold on a second, this is hysteria, we really don’t need to be this worried, we really don’t need to change our entire way of life for this kind of hyped up threat”.

I’m more of a pacifist than ever before.

Violence is an incredibly useless way of getting things done.

The harm that violence does vastly outweighs any good outcomes that it produces.

I’ve examined theories of ‘just war’ and they are completely ludicrous, they really don’t stand up to scrutiny.

For intellectual reasons, it seems to me that the most realistic, and the most credible, as well as the most ethically consistent position is pacifism. It doesn’t entail any division or bifurcation between the means and ends, instead it entails a consistency of means and ends – we’re not using evil means for good ends, it’s using good means for good ends.

Research is showing that non-violence is twice as successful as violence in achieving its goals, even against the most oppressive regimes.

But not only that, when you use non-violent means to over-throw a dictator, or resist an invader, or change laws – you are creating democratic societies and longer lasting peaceful societies.

The means and ends are intimately connected, and the way you construct your politics will affect the kind of politics you have.

Basic social theory, the way you practice things constitutes the thing you are trying to make. If you practice violent politics you are going to create a violent polity. So to me it makes more sense, and it is more ethical to use non-violence to create a peaceful society.

Every time we chose violence we create the condition for the next war.

We’re not doing nearly enough to educate for a peaceful society. Most of our cultural system and educational system is geared towards normalising war and militarism.

Our remembrance practices – how we remember war and commemorate war is mostly geared towards war is inevitable, necessary and that war can be good and heroic and that we ought to value the people who go and fight in wars, rather than remembering it as a tragic waste of life and sowing the seeds for subsequent wars. Instead of remembering it as “never again”…that narrative got transformed.

In all our cultural productions – TV and movies, they are all about very violent heroes, who we admire even though their violence is exactly the same as the bad guys, they do it for good reasons.

There are not many peaceful heroes out there. Partly it’s because it is hard to make peace sexy, viscerally admirable, exciting, something to aspire to.

But, we’re at a moment in history of war weariness, a growing suspicion of militarism and its connection to inequality, climate change, the bad structural things. There’s a growing global consciousness…

Violence is built into international system.

Now we have a broader war of insurgency – non state actors, part of a growing inequality.

Every time we use violence to deal with what is actually a political problem we actually create more violent resistance. It’s an endless cycle.

(Activist?) I do. As a scholar we have a responsibility not just to study the world but to try and change it. It’s not the biggest part of what I do but it is something I am trying to expand upon.

I don’t believe in remaining neutral – I don’t think it is possible. If you try to remain neutral you basically support the status quo, and that is a political act

.

(Motivation?) A desire for a more peaceful world and a desire that my contribution to the world is a positive one rather than a negative one on balance. I try to live my life in a way that does no harm but also positively challenges the evil structures that we’re facing and transform them.

(Challenge?) Create more of a voice for peace activists, and work to try and transform what is actually quite a violent society.

(Miracle?) The world’s leaders wake with a revelation about the futility of violence.

.

Categories
community geography

Communities at scale

Sean Connelly

The real challenge, no matter what scale you are taking action, is to be aware and responsive to what’s going on at other scales.

Dr Sean Connelly is a lecturer in Geography at University of Otago. We talk about how sustainability at a global scale is made of sustainable local communities – but that there’s a long way to go before those two are in harmony.

Talking points

Local populations get caught up in global environmental movement

If we are concerned with building and scaling up our actions, it’s hard to imagine what things look like at the global level, whereas we can easily talk about what happens in our own back yard.

My entry point is the unequal relations between the local and the global – local populations impacted by decisions made at much larger scales, often with very little thought given to their needs, or what control they have over their own environment, lifestyle and social well-being.

The real challenge, no matter what scale you are taking action, is to be aware and responsive to what’s going on at other scales.

Everything is interrelated, everything is complex, we live in one global system – with all kinds of subsystems but they are all interrelated.

Being aware of those interrelationships is really difficult, and in some ways being aware of the local offers some appeal. It can be romanticised as the wonderful place – everything’s fine, we can do things in our locality and forget about the challenges of making the connections beyond this place. but how do we connect a whole bunch of different localities around similar kinds of issues?

Human geography, people and environment – where do we place our emphasis.

(Human relationship with nature?) Challenging. Look at the state of the environment, locally, nationally and globally – there’s a lot to be concerned about, enough to suggest that our relationship to the environment should be rethought. We should be thinking about that relationship differently.

There are exciting and inspiring stories of people rethinking practices.

(On introducing sustainability in education) Start with state of the environment – why is this stuff critically important. But is is challenging to start with doom and gloom, it can be disempowering, the last thing you want to do is start by saying the future is pretty bleak. So the challenge it to tell it like it is, this is the state of the environment, but also to tell inspiring stories. This is the case of the present, our future is not locked in. We have complete control over our future – this is something only we can decide.

The term sustainability can be a quagmire…but this notion of, I don’t want to say balancing because I think that is where a lot of the discourse around sustainable development falls down, this notion of balancing and making trade-offs between the economy and society and the environment – but rather it is about how do we view those things as mutually reinforcing and integrating them, thinking about them much more holistically.

How do we embark on initiatives that don’t trade off any of these things against the other?

It is hugely problematic to put a dollar value on nature – it reinforces the very things that we don’t want to be doing – the whole problem is that setting a dollar value means it is expendable, we can use it and abuse it and just trade it for something else.

Engaging in food as a community, not just a commodity.

The scale issue is the critical challenge. Whether talking about food or energy, we can point to innovative examples, but they are still quite small – they don’t have huge impact on the way the majority of us go about our daily lives.

A lot of the food system infrastructure is social infrastructure. The real value of farmers markets, is the social relationships.

(Activist?) Yes. And that is particularly touchy for a Canadian at this point. Interesting things going on right now around the tar sands, the RCMP spying on environmental organisations concerned about blocking pipelines…claims of environmental radicals attempting to highjack the regulatory process…so this can be seen as a threat or source of pride – yes I am a radical. We’ve seen all kinds of people, grandmothers, people with children in the streets saying “you know what, I am a radical” We should all be radicals.

(Motivation?) All kinds of possibilities, for me this area of sustainability is so fascinating, there’s so many different aspects and entry points, and it is absolutely critical, the most important issue we’re facing, not just as individuals but as a species. And there are all kinds of inspiring activities that are going on.

(Advice?) If you are concerned with issues of the environment and sustainability, then follow your passion, no matter what it is that motivates you, there’s a sustainability angle to it.

Categories
behaviour change maori

Reconnecting to place

Claire Porima

Be curious, be open, allow yourself to have childlike wonder of the world.

Claire Porima is a business and life coach and works with the University of Otago’s Office of Māori Development. She has previously worked for NZ Foreign Affairs and Trade. Recently Claire has led the He Kākano programme
– an innovative kuapapa Māori business and entrepreneurship programme for undergraduate Māori students.

We talk about transformation and explore what sustainability can learn from the journey of discovery of reconnecting with one’s roots.

Talking points

Reconnecting people to a sense of place

The first step is discovering yourself and where you are from.

Kaitiakitanga is rooted in a being so connected to the land, to a place you can return to. This comes with a responsibility, responsibility for that place.

Coaching is a powerful alliance…shining a different light.

(Activist?) I think I take positive action, an advocate for positive change
(Motivation) I’m so motivated by by people who are courageous and taking positive steps towards making positive change in their life – and this has a ripple effect out through their whānau or families and communities.

(Challenges) The challenges I think confront all of us are around creating a greater understanding of things Maori. Of how that can contribute to the development of this country, how it can contribute to the health and well-being of all of the people.

(Miracle) For me a miracle would be for all of us wake up knowing each and every one of us is creative, and resourceful, and powerful, and wise, and talented, and unique, and has the ability to contribute to make change happen in their life in whatever way they can – that would be an amazing miracle. We are all those things, but to know it, and to grab it to know you have the ability to make the changes that you want to see in the world

(Advice) Be curious, be open, allow yourself to have childlike wonder of the world.

Categories
green party politics

Community at the heart of change

Shane Gallagher

Regular co-host Shane Gallagher is standing for election in Dunedin South. Accordingly, to comply with the Electoral Act, he is unable to appear on the show as host until after the regulated period. In this show he appears as a guest. 

Shane Gallagher is a Green Party candidate for Dunedin South and a trade unionist. He works at the University of Otago and formerly owned AliMcD Agency. He was born in England to Irish parents, grew up in Dublin and went to university in Dublin and Edinburgh where he studied Linguistics and English.

Talking points

The idea that you have to sacrifice the environment for the economy is crazy thinking

Science informs our understanding of complex systems but it doesn’t fully explain it.

That technology can fix everything is the Prometheus myth – that technology is going to come along and solve all the problems that we have. But it’s not, it can’t – the problems we have are systemic, they’re massive, they’re to do with our behaviour, they’re to do with our relationships and to do with the quality of our exchanges in this world.

The system we have developed is driving us in a direction that is destructive, and it’s destroying the planet. Technology is not going to fix that problem because the problems aren’t really are of technology. We have solutions already, we can move extremely quickly to total renewable energy, we could go green very quickly, the technology is there or in its infancy but if threw the weight of our amazing intellects, innovation and incredible problem solving at them we could probably solve the last problems we have fairly easily. But the problem isn’t the technology but the systems that we have created: the corporatisation of the world, the drive to constantly grow – we can’t grow infinitely.

We have an elite that don’t want to say “hey, the party’s over, we’re living in the age of consequences”.

Solutions are myriad, and innovative and they’re all about community.

The innovations that we need – for instance insulating homes, solar panels on roofs, switching to 100% renewable energy, switching to a closed loop system for all our products – all these things generate economic activity and create jobs, they save us money, they improve communities as we build community gardens, create local resilience with local food gardens and market where people make genuine connections and communities come together to do positive things together

We need to shift away from a consumerist model of people being isolated in their homes…communities fragmenting, to rebuild community, to rebuild caring and empathy – empathy and compassion are really at the heart of what this is about.

When we look after the earth we look after each other and we look after ourselves. We do all three things simultaneously – it’s about love.

It’s about transforming the economic model. Some companies are starting to understand that if they want to exist in the long term, they have to start thinking about the long term. They’re not amoral agents in society, there to extract profit and nothing else. They have to do good in the world. It’s not enough not to do harm, they have to do good. You can make a profit out of that,

People are starting to understand that they are part of this world. That if they want a good life for themselves and their families their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren then they have to be a part of the solution, not part of the problem. Business is getting on board.

The old extractive industries making as much money as they can with no care for society or the environment or their workers – they’re there simply to make profit – they’re being superceded by a new generation of business people who actually understand that they’re part of society, they’re part of the world and they need to make an active contribution.

Activist: Yes. I knew I needed to change the world in some way.

Challenges: Bring the message of sustainability out there – firming up what it means for people, and how its different from what is happening now.

Advice: Get out and communicate with people.

Categories
agriculture

Land ethic on the ground

Murray Harris

You can’t always spot a good farm from the over the fence – a tidy farm is not always a good farm – sustainable farming is more about decision making, about seeing the benefits of a triple bottom line approach

Murray Harris joined the Otago Catchment Board as a soil conservator in 1973, eventually becoming Land Manager for the Otago Regional Council.  Since then he has run Land and Forest specialising in land and forest environmental matters.  In 2002, he co-authored the Soil Conservation Technical Manual.    In 2012 he was made a honorary member of the NZ Association of Resource Management.  We talk about how approaches to sustainable land use have developed since the 1970s, and current challenges of  land and water quality including riparian management and  farm effluent.

Environmental management is not a cost issue, it’s a part of farming business – get on with it.

 

Shane’s number of the week: 60.  Sixty percent of China’s ground water resource is polluted leading to tensions between unbridled industrialisation and environmental concerns (Xinhua).

Categories
energy science

Energy transformation

Gerry Carrington

 

The fossil fuel era is a hang-over from the hunter-gatherer era.   Finding fossil fuels is something that is a bit speculative – a form of hunting, and digging it up is a form of gathering.  We’ve moved away from that, most of us, 10-12,000 years ago in relation to food, we just haven’t done it in relation to energy yet.

 

Physicist Emeritus Professor Gerry Carrington was lead author on Royal Society of New Zealand’s recent paper on Facing the Future: Towards a Green Economy for New Zealand.

 

Talking points:

Energy efficiency is an open ended opportunity – it’s something that we can continue to work on and transform the way society works if you take it seriously.

65% efficiency is probably the sweetspot

Moving to electricity as a means to deliver energy

Just seeing the beginning of the  transition.   Nobody knows how quickly it will occur or when it will reach full maturity.

Some transitions in the past have taken place extraordinarily quickly, in the US when they transformed from being mostly run by horses to people having cars, the transition from 10% to 90% took place in 10-15 years.

Managing what you’ve got really well.

In the era we moved away from hunting the people that made arrows and spears found that business didn’t go so well, so yes there will be winners, and there will be losers and we have to find ways of dealing with that.

We need to have inclusive processes for developing a vision of a sustainable future

There’s no real relationship between emissions and social progress

I’m not one for preaching Armageddon, there are lots of opportunities, but we need to move purposefully, and stop sweeping things under the carpet

Sam’s joined-up-thinking:  Previously on Sustainable Lens, Dr Bran Knowles described how appealling to the selfish “do this because it will save you money” not only doesn’t work but does a disservice to sustainability.  This week Energy Minister Simon Bridges blamed the failure of power switch policies to lower power prices upon individuals not acting in their own best interests – we need to be more selfish he says.  This shows for me that while selfish behaviours might work at an individual level, they should not form the basis of public policy.  Instead we need structural change, and as Bran said, appeals to wider, perhaps altruistic motivations.

 Shane’s number of the week: 38.  That’s 38%, the predicted loss in food production for China with a 2 degree increase in global temperature (via Gwynne Dyer).

 

Categories
economics energy

Intelligent efficiency

John "Skip" Laitner

 

As a society we are currently at 14% energy efficiency – most of what we use we waste.  This is the major barrier to development.

John A. “Skip” Laitner is a resource economist. He currently leads a team of consultants ‘Economic and Human Dimensions Research Associates’ based in Tucson, Arizona. He was a senior economist for technology policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for nearly 10 years, where he won EPA’s Gold Medal award for his contributions to economic policy analysis for that agency. More recently, he led the Economic and Social Analysis Program for the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE), a well-known think tank based in Washington, D.C. Recent publications include The Long-Term Energy Efficiency Potential: What the Evidence Suggests. and with colleague Karen Ehrhardt-Martinez, People-Centered Initiatives for Increasing Energy Savings.

 

Talking points:

To continue to develop globally we need to double the amount of necessary energy.

If we could cut the amount of energy wasted in half, then renewables could easily meet the balance

We’re not talking about a return to the stone age – in fact the opposite.  We’re talking intelligent efficiency. 

(why has the market not already fixed this?) we need to shift to a focus on the cost of energy services.  This is an opportunity for new business models – the sale of services, including selling efficiency gains.

Why are people fretting about the budget of a city council at $200 million, when the same city is spending $500 million on energy and wasting most of it?

The measure of fuel poverty is spending 10% of your household income on energy.   If a city is spending more than 10% of its GDP on energy – the city is in fuel poverty.

The energy internet gives us the shift in communication and a new form of energy that was the basis of the first two industrial revolutions.  Now instantaneous 2-way communication and distributed energy resources mean we can move from a commodity based economy to a service based economy.

Improvements in technology will only take us so far – the real systems changes are people-centred.

We’ve a long way to go to help people understand how vital energy is, and how very central it is to our very economic and social well-being.  We tend to think of energy as an afterthought when it really needs to be brought forward into the mainstay of how we live as a society, how we get to work as an economy.

We can save 10-15% on energy use in their home by paying attention – that’s a smart thing to do,  but to really do it at the scale that we need and at the depth we need, we’ve got to do it as a community.  but we need way more than that – we need to do it as a community…it’s more than everyone changing their lightbulbs – though we need that too – we need system changes.

We need everybody understanding that the well-being of the community really depends on succeeding on this task of energy efficiency, and thinking through new business models that need to be brought forward to make it happen.

 

Categories
sociology

Societal tensions

Katharine Legun

Environmental/economic tension is rising and this overlaps with questions of social equity – who is benefiting from extraction and who is suffering ills from that?

Dr Katharine Legun is an environmental sociologist in Otago University’s Department of Sociology, Gender and Social Work.    She is interested in the relationship between the economy, social organization, and the environment.

Talking points:

Stretched out commodity chains have separated the consumer from the environment.

Food is an essential resource that goes beyond nutritional aspects – food politics is concerned with social security and your place in the world.

I believe in the power of conversation and political dialogue – this enables democratic processes

Economy, environment and society are not actually separate, but separated in institutional practices.

Resources: Dunedin free university

Shane’s number of the week: 2%.  Global warming will cut crop harvests by 2% each decade (more>>>).
Sam’s joined-up-thinking:  Jon Kolko describes the empowering role of teaching entrepreneurial hustle – the idea that you can actively cause things to happen rather than passively have things happen to you (more>>>).

Categories
democracy politics

Systematic disadvantage of ecological interests

Lisa Ellis

For policies such as preserving fragile habitats, democratic policy flux means there’s only really one medium term policy outcome and that’s extinction…
We need to adjust our structures so that there’s fluctuation within a sustainable range.

Lisa Ellis is an Associate Professor in University of Otago’s Department of Philosophy.

Talking points:

(on difficulty of senior management dealing with sustainability issues)

You need someone with access to reality bringing those messages up

We shouldn’t expect enlightenment at the top to save us

One thing that climate deniers have on their side is a really simple, easy to communicate message – that these elite people who are nothing like you, want you to make sacrifices for no good reason – it’s a very simple message, wrong, but easy to understand.

As we make our baby steps towards an appreciation of complex reality, which is chaotic with feedback loops, where even the best modellers are modest about the probabilistic nature of their predictions, it’s very difficult to mobilise the majority in any democracy behind a probabilistic slogan.

“If we all make this change then probably most of us will be better off, but we’re not sure” – nobody is going to go out and vote on that

The message hasn’t gotten through or people wouldn’t be hoping for a Promethean solution… a silver bullet technological solution for anything that nature throws at us (which assumes a divide between humanity and nature).

The timeframes are difficult for us…but if you have access to family photos of really good fishing expeditions, you might notice that the futher you go back in time, the larger and more delicious the fish your family caught were – the prize winning fish are shrinking.

(see for example)

You don’t have to go so many generations forward to get at the structure of contemporary environmental conflict – the majority sustainer, minority extractor

The future generations problem is a flaw in our current political structure

The structure of environmental conflict is straight democratic, we have political structures that disproportionately represent a tiny minority interest – those with interests in the extraction of resources

We systematically disadvantage ecological interests vis a vis extraction interests.

If you are trying to keep your seat at the table but your opponent is continually willing to break off negotiation because the default position is continued extraction not conservation, then you are going to be led willy-nilly to make continued sacrifices in order to keep the negotiations going…So you find yourself mystified, “Why are representatives bargaining away ecological interests?”, they’re doing it not because they are stupid, but because they are structurally disadvantaged.

There are really tough conundra, but we don’t have an alternative to democracy. It is based on a set of easy to understand ethical principles – opposition to injustice…

The very flux that democratic changes of government introduce into the policy making world (and of course if you have a democracy you must have changes in power, otherwise it’s not a democracy) but if you have changes in power then your policy changes, well if you policy was conservation and every move for conservation is temporary, but every move for extraction is permanent, then you have a real problem with unifying democracy and conservation policy, because you’ll necessarily have changes in policy, that’s what democracies do, that means sometimes the extractors are in power and sometimes the sustainers are – well everytime the extractors are in power they can make permanent changes, every time the sustainers are in power they can only make temporary changes, so…for some sorts of policies such as preserving fragile habitats, democratic policy flux means there’s only really one medium term policy outcome and that’s extinction.

We need to adjust our structures so that there’s fluctuation within a sustainable range. (eg Portland’s approach to development).

How is it that this lie that opposes all our interests has become the dominant ideology to which we all submit? Simple message, powerful interests. But these messages not impossible to counter. Unfair ideologies tend to fall when message gets through of the logical of equal justice.

All science is normative

The world is giving us messages that are harder and harder to ignore.

Shane’s number of the week: 40. 40% of bumblebee foraging trips were successful in a pesticide environment compared with 63% in a control environment (Feltham in Nature).
Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam is currently studying the relationship between the sophistication of ethical views and position on an anthropological/ecological worldview continuum.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Dolphin Research Australia

Dolphin Research Australia - Isabela Keski-Franti and Liz Hawkins

Every little step, every little change that you make is huge.

In the last of the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series we are joined by Dolphin Research Australia‘s Dr Liz Hawkins and Isabella Keski-Franti. They talk about research, education and Indigenous Management Frameworks

As well as academic performance, students have to have character strength, they have to have a feeling of citizenship – they have to belong.

Students have to remember that they belong in the ecosystem.

Children are very curious, they want to know what is around them, it’s a matter of providing them with opportunities

One of our traditions is to give something back to our host, so how can we show gratitude and respect for nature and place?

(On kids fund raising to adopt a dolphin) It’s the interconnectedness of everything, that makes them understand the importance of saving an animal, that even though they don’t have a direct connection but they are doing something – this is empowering them in becoming a citizen – an active citizen in their community.

If you want to live in the dolphin’s world you would need to lose your eyes

Everybody can make the changes, everybody has a right to be different

There is a role for all of us – if you do what your character strength is

Making the change through connecting with children – helping them shift the status quo of our society.

To talk about an inter-generational future, we need to connect with our children and help them make connections with their ecosystem – this is activism. We need to be part of the ecosystems and working together.

We create our world, our reality, dependent on the changes we make.

(Isabela on challenges for the future) I find myself in a really good place. I am really doing what I love – what I feel connected with. I am an optimistic person. I live every day at a time. I have hope for the future, and I think my work with children helps a lot. And I’m working with people who are passionate about it. This helps a lot, and I’m blessed to be working with people that have great integrity, ethics and works as a team. So I can’t see challenge right now. Life is exciting.

(liz on challenges for the future). It’s always challenging keeping an NGO afloat – making science sexy to attract and attracting community support.

Every little step, every little change that you make is huge. So don’t feel overwhelmed by the news or what is happening around you. Focus on every little change that you make on a daily basis.

(Am I an activist?). I don’t like labels to be honest because I think they limit us. I like to think of myself as…everybody can make the changes, bit everybody has a right to be different. You don’t have to either be one thing or another. There is a place for everybody.
(I was very busy designing our dolphin education programme and someone asked me to a protest about oil seam coal mining)…I would like to be there, but I didn’t find it in me to be there because I was so excited about designing our programme, my insight was I didn’t have to be there – there is a place for everybody. We need the role of all of us – we do what our character strength is.
If I am making the change through connecting with children, helping them shift the status quo of our society – the focus inter-generationally speaking, for the families and our future – I see this as an activism. If others want to be more actively participating in manifests…I think that’s perfect we need all these ecosystems working together,

This is the last in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Saving whale habitats

Sarah Courbis

Not so much about saving the animal as the ecosystem where they live – habitat destruction is the biggest threat to almost every animal on the planet

Dr Sarah Courbis is a Research Associate at Portland State University, specialising in whales and mammals in Hawaii.

This is the fifth in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. Sarah’s attendance at the conference was provided by the Conservation Council of Hawaii and Honua (Hoe-New-ah) Consulting.

We don’t need to anthropomorphise to make them interesting

They are really amazing social animals with lots of cool behaviours and intricate relationships

(Am I an activist?). I wouldn’t say that. I do have opinions. But as a scientist it is really important for me to go into a situation and do my research without having a desired outcome – I just want to see what’s true. Whether or not that supports my opinion, maybe I’ll need to change my opinion. I don’t think activist is a good way to describe my approach to things, but I would say I am an environmentalist, and I do think that it is important that we do understand and take care of our environment – and I’m hoping to do my little part to help that.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Dolphins:communities

Tara Whitty

I don’t come in saying “hi guys, I know you’re struggling to survive, let’s save the dolphins”.

For me it has become as much about understanding and helping these communities as it is about helping the animals.

Tara Whitty describes herself as an aspiring ecologist, conservationist, do-gooder and wanderer. She is also a PhD student at the Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Tara has developed an interdisciplinary approach, “mapping conservation-scapes,” synthesizing methods from ecology and social sciences. Conservation-scapes are the set of factors composing a conservation situation, encompassing: how human activity overlaps with and impacts organisms; sociocultural and economic drivers of human activity; and governance structure and potential for management. Tara is applying these conservation-scapes to developing an understanding of Irrawaddy dolphins in Malampaya Sound (The Philippines) and Guimaras Strait, Philippines; Trat coastline, Thailand; Mahakam River, Indonesia.

Talking points:

The over-arching issue is how do we look at fisheries management in a way that might contribute to dolphin conservation.

Socio-ecological systems: Systems that involve links an interactions between complex human systems and complex natural systems

I hesitate to distinguish between human systems and ecosystems. Ecosystem based management explicitly states that humans are part of ecosystems.

I’d like to see an set of social-environmental metrics…so we can rate sites based on social cohesion, community engagement, strength of enforcement…develop sets of profiles.

We can learn from areas such as public-health, they’ve had a long history of balancing collecting information and taking action.

The dolphins are not doing OK, they are being caught as by-catch at an unsustainable rate

Sometimes I would forget I was working on dolphins, because I was looking at very entangled issues of fisheries management, and those will take a long time to fix. Even if it doesn’t save the dolphins, it’s worthwhile doing it but you’re going to hopefully improve the ecosystem as a whole, including to improve human livelihoods. But realistically speaking I don’t think it is going to happen in time for these dolphins unless some serious triage efforts happen quickly.

Tara Whitty was in Dunedin as as part of the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. Her talk was titled “Mapping conservation-scapes of Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) and small-scale fisheries in Southeast Asia: An interdisciplinary approach”.

After we recorded this session, Tara was awarded the J. Stephen Leatherwood Memorial Award for the most outstanding student presentation on marine mammals of South and Southeast Asia, with particular emphasis on conservation. Congratulations Tara.

This is the fourth in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Whaley wicked problems

Andy Read

Inaction is failure

Andy Read describes wicked problems as the basis of the situation of much of marine mammal conservation globally. But, he says, the wickedness of problems is no excuse for standing by while species go extinct.

Dr Andy Read is the Stephen Toth Professor of Marine Biology at the Duke University Marine Laboratory, in Beaufort, NC, USA. He is interested in the life history and population dynamics of threatened and endangered species, the application of spatial analysis to marine ecosystems, the intersection of oceanography and foraging ecology and the development of new approaches to conservation.

Trying to understand patterns and processes in an environment you can’t see…this mysterious world that exists in three dimensions. I found that fascinating, and still do.

Climate change is felt most keenly at the poles, we can work there to understand over shorter time periods ecological changes…as a signal of what’s coming in other places, we should be very concerned.

Wicked problems are complex, difficult to characterise, you don’t know how to intervene and if you do you don’t know if you’ve been successful or not – we have lots of those.

Tricky conservation problems keep you up at night – how to balance the needs of social justice and feeding 60 million desperately poor, with the ecological needs of 80 dolphins who are the last of their species.

Truly wicked problems are ones that don’t have answers, if they did they wouldn’t be wicked.

There are no technology solutions to wicked problems

So we’re concerned about the viability of the Mekong river dolphins, but if you think about the problem we need to solve, it’s food security for 60 million desperately poor people living alongside the river.

(We look for) strategies that benefit human communities and are as least damaging as possible to the environment

There are no solutions, just good or bad bad options

The conservation community was afraid of action, and we lost an entirely family of mammals (the baiji or Chinese river dolphin)

The more each of us thinks about how each of our actions impacts the sustaining systems, the better off we’ll be. We have to do this all the time, and it’s a challenge as we’ve evolved to be deliberately not good at making connections.

There is something innate about being human that we appreciate the complexity of the natural world – when we simplify it as a result of careless inactions it becomes a less beautiful place.

Conservation is a normative discipline, we believe that the loss of biodiversity is a bad thing. We should do everything we can to minimise that loss of biodiversity caused by human activity and to restore it where we can. In way, yes I’m an activist, but I feel all people working in conservation are activists – it’s a normative discipline and we accept that part of our science.

Dr Read was in Dunedin as a Plenary Speaker at the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. His plenary talk was titled “Conservation of marine mammals in the twenty-first century: challenges and opportunities”

This is the third in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the conference.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals

Ocean noise

Jay Barlow

Whaling is not the biggest threat to the marine mammals of the world, it’s fishing, it’s climate change, it’s ocean noise. I’d like to see the concern that was generated in the 60s and 70s to stop whaling which was largely successful, applied to other areas. Stopping harmful fishing practices, stopping needless propagation of sound from our shipping vessels. This story is harder to tell, but to be effective stories have to be personal.

You can take a person and play them a recording of what the ocean should sound like, and then play them a recording of what it sounds like now. We don’t really have any sense of how much human caused noise there is in the ocean. That noise never leaves the ocean.

If our national parks were as noisy as our national marine sanctuaries are underwater, people would never stand for it.

Dr Jay Barlow is a research scientist within the NOAA’s Protected Resources Division, Southwest Fisheries Science Centre. He is the leader of the EEZ Marine Mammals and Acoustics Programme within the Protected Resources Division and is an Adjunct Professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

I’m not an activist. There are a lot of pathways to being scientists, advocates and fundraisers. Every marine mammal scientist has to be a bit of a fund-raiser. I shy away from the role of a pure advocate because it is really difficult to keep your scientific credibility if you appear too passionate, and let your passions outrun your academic approach to the science. But on the other hand, my passions drive what science I do.

This is the second in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
conservation biology marine mammals ocean

Succeeding at marine mammal conservation

Barbara Taylor

Threats are now largely invisible, it’s no longer the graphic carnage…now it’s more indirect but no less a threat to the species.

NOAA’s Dr Barbara Taylor argues that we need a new approach to marine mammal conservation. Principal current and near-future conservation challenges include direct human-caused mortality (via fisheries by-catch in small-scale fisheries and hunting) and an indirect reduction in population growth due to habitat degradation from over-fishing, environmental contamination, and global climate disruption.

Dr Taylor was in Dunedin as a Plenary Speaker at the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society. Her plenary talk was titled “All the ingredients—how to succeed at marine mammal conservation”.

This is the first in the Sustainable Lens #whaleofasummer series recorded during the Biennial Conference of the Marine Mammals Society.

Categories
innovation systems

Complex systems

Henk Roodt

Rocket science is simple compared to the complex systems that involve modelling people and the environment.

Dr Henk Roodt knows about the development of technology. And about making that real. A Scientist/Engineer with 25+ years experience in high technology environments, he is currently Research Programmes Manager at Waikato Institute of Technology. We asked Henk to talk about his background (it’s rocket science), whether 3D printing will really change the world, and innovation processes as applied to Green-Tech. Henk is associated with Audacious – Dunedin’s student business incubator, where he is Entrepreneur in Residence.

Talking points:

It’s only when it is really big, and audacious that you go for it. Big things in the history of science were driven by real world problems.

Need to model the environment and the people at the same time. Not the physical model then slap in the people as an add-on. Start with people, the complexity of the people and their culture.

So how do you pitch the right level of modelling? (for complex problems such as hunger in Africa)…one of the things I’ve discovered is that doing mathematical models at that level is stupid. non-quantitative models, morphologies that show how things fit together, that opens up the discussion rather than bringing it into a fixed framework. A model like that gives you an instant picture at a moment in time. This sets the scene for the next level, and the next, the whole model is a work in progress.

Modelling systems is not like modelling airflow over the wing of an aircraft – sure that’s super-mathematics…but to model complex systems and people you often only need a piece of paper and a computer to help you look at all the options.

You have to make certain choices, and that comes down to ‘what are those guiding principles you have in your life that you are willing to live by?’. You have to set those up in your mind and listen carefully to that voice.

Opening up a social good category in Audacious meant they could put their emotions and their hearts into their businesses. They are mixing the social responsibility and the business – this is the edge that will deliver the social good.

I ask myself: can I change things by applying my skills?

Shane’s number of the week: 2.07&#176C is how much hotter the >Australian Spring was above average, producing the warmest spring on record.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam is working up a survey into the values and educational expectations of incoming IT students.

Henk described Ken Erwin’s book Communicating the New.

Categories
computing education

Opening education

Wayne Mackintosh

 

The key challenge we are trying to address is how to provide spaces for the additional one hundred million students – that’s the equivalent of building four sizeable universities with roughly 30,000 students each, every week for the next 15 years.

 

Dr Wayne Mackintosh imagines a world where anyone in the world has access to a world-class education online for free, and getting credentials for it.    But he is not just imagining it, he is doing it.  Wayne holds the UNESCO-COL Chair in OER at Otago Polytechnic. He is the founding Director of the OER Foundation and the International Centre for Open Education based at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand.  He talks about the launch of Open Educational Resources University (OERu) – a significant milestone in higher education globally, and marking a transition from an international collaboration prototype to a sustainable, scalable program of accessible OERu study.

We are shifting the question from how do you achieve sustainable OER projects at your institution to, how will your institution remain sustainable without OER? We are the competition on the doorsteps of tertiary education institutions around the world

The conventional model of delivery is not going to be able to respond to the challenge of the growing need internationally.

I’m a teacher by choice, and it’s been the most rewarding decision I have taken in my career

Smart thinking, use technology to reach the unreachable

Absolutely I’m an activist, an open source, open education activist.

it’s (open education) mission critical for a more sustainable planet. We need to be using scarce resources more effectively, and respect the fundamental freedom of expression – freedom of speech- that we espouse to in modern democracies

Shane’s number of the week: 4,500,000. That is there are 4.5 million people in the UK who are members or supporters of environment and conservation groups.

Sam’s joined-up-thinking: Sam talked us through the increasingly important role of social enterprise in computing.

Categories
climate change

Reluctant activist

Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is a reluctant activist. But he is very good at it. The founder of the 350.org movement, Bill is currently in New Zealand hosted by 350 Aotearoa as part of his Do the math campaign.   Sustainable Lens went along for a listen and a chat.

Here are some of our favourite bits:

Asking for same liveable planet people always had isn’t radical. Changing the global system for profit is radical.

Jail over climate change wasn’t the end of the world, the end of the world is end of the world.

We can’t outspend the other guys, we have to find other currencies to work in.

The fossil fuel industry is no longer a normal industry.  Being against the laws of physics makes it a rogue industry.  Either Exxon has to bend or laws of Physics.

Time to stop tinkering. How do we make it possible for politicians make the system changes we need?

Misplaced kindness: NZ subsidising richest industry on earth to come drill here.

We don’t lack technology, just political will.

Desmond Tutu:  Climate change a deeply moral issue: if wrong to wreck planet, it’s wrong to profit from it.

In China 25% get their hot water from solar. In US is less than 1% and is mostly used for swimming pools.

Why are we continuing to explore for oil when existing oil reserves are  five times more than a 2 degree warming?

If 1 degree warming melts the Arctic, we’re fools to be experimenting with the earth to find out what 2 degrees will do.

Hurricane Sandy insight into utter vulnerability of our systems to climate change.

We’ve taken one of the biggest physical features on earth and broken it. Bill McKibben on effect of climate change on Arctic ice

Bill McKibben: loves Dunedin, but on a rational planet shouldn’t have to have come back.

 

Bill was last in Dunedin in 2009, we spoke with him then too, before we were on the radio.