2010 Global Sustainability Summer School-Blog

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Please feel free to use this page to share thoughts about lectures and activities, and share relevant links with the group.

Monday July 12

Carolina De la Rosa Tincopa
Shirley Papuga
Anita Carrasco

Tuesday July 13

Deva Seetharam
Joseph Burger
Caleb Gallemore

Thinking about Doyne's question regarding whether the earth is our garden or a wilderness seems to me to raise questions about the role of anthropocentric thinking in thinking about sustainability. I remember that someone floated the question of whether or not we can think of sustainability without humans. Both these questions, I think, highlight a difficult intellectual challenge we face in thinking about sustainability. On the one hand, we are - usually explicitly - involved in a normative exercise. When we talk about sustainability, we at the very least imply a vague notion of a state or set of states worthy of being sustained. In almost all cases (except perhaps for some forms of deep ecology), one property of these states is the continued existence of at least some humans at some tolerable - or, preferably, enjoyable - standard of living. The interesting problem we face is this: in order to keep humans around, we are for the most part agreed that leverage must be brought to bear on the economic and social systems we have created, as well as the environmental damages we have already perpetrated. This means we must think of humans as somehow free to choose and change, even if only within limited boundaries and only some of the time. Humans, in other words, are our leverage point onto the world whose fate concerns us. At the same time, we have to think of the ways in which humans are embedded within that world and subject to pressures from social structures and natural feedbacks of our collective making. It seems to me that several of the debate questions actually center around this question of social possibility - we simply do not know what we ourselves may or may not be capable of changing about our actions and the systems that produce and sustain us.

If the world is our garden, then this seems to suggest that we are relatively autonomous from it and that we can meaningfully look on it and make choices about what its properties should be. But it may in fact be that the world is a wilderness, despite that humans have touched it everywhere, such that some geographers have started calling our age the "anthropocene." Usually we think of the wilderness as something that is untouched or pristine or unaffected by "civilization," however defined. This way of thinking, actually, is closely aligned with the conception of the garden. Again it is a view of a world untouched by humans to which humans somehow enter from the outside, a view common in much of the social sciences even at present. Of course, we know that this is not the case. Humans grow from the inside of the wilderness, just like weeds or badgers or elephants. Like all species, our advent in the wilderness has come to change it - in our case in more substantial ways than most - but we remain firmly a part of the wilderness.

All this may seem a little ambling. What I mean to say is this: we are a part of wilderness, and thinking of the social as somehow a strictly different beast can be deceiving. It can give us a sense that we have too much choice and too much power. On the other hand it can give us a sense that wilderness has too little of these things. We continue to discover both positive and negative feedbacks to our actions in the world at large, and we continue to find that the world is more dynamic and flexible than we imagined. Thinking of the interplay between our social structures, our choices, and the responses of the rest of the wilderness requires that we relax habits of thought in which we place ourselves as something acting on nature from the outside, which, in practice, most sustainability work already does. The trick is to get the social sciences to do it, as well.

Wednesday July 14

David Bryngelsson
Veronika Huber

The day started out with an instructive and helpful session with Ann Kinzig. Besides making me realize that I have found a satisfying definition of sustainability for myself yet, the discussions during her lecture left me with a few insights that I kept pondering about.

One strong point Ann made was that “information is power”. She argued that an important part of making sustainability a more meaningful concept is to develop the right measurement indices. There are many caveats to respect when trying to come up with quantitative indices. Certainly, there are limits to assigning monetary values. (How much is the spectacular sunset worth that made the mountains behind Santa Fe gloom in all shades of red and yellow tonight). At the same time, as Ann pointed out, many important decisions are taken by explicitly or implicitly assigning values. Our world works based on all sorts of incomplete and insufficient indices. Achieving sustainability (and I am sticking for now with my gut feeling of what that means) would require much more than ‘just’ implementing new indices that reflect changes in natural and social capital overlooked so far. Yet, I would argue it is a necessary condition.

Whenever you open up a newspaper, whenever you watch the news, you read and hear about “growth”. Our societies are addicted to economic growth. We cheer when the prospects of growth look great; we fall into depression when the growth forecasts are reduced by a few decimal points. GDP is – I would say – the most powerful index that has ever been developed. Replacing it or at least complementing it with a more inclusive measure of wealth could have a great influence on how we steer our planet into the future.

A second much more technical comment I would like to make concerns the lifetime of CO2 in the atmosphere. We were discussing today with some people whether its atmospheric lifetime was really thousands of years – as Dennis mentioned at some point. Here is a link to a recent paper by David Archer that is extremely helpful in this regard: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.2009.ann_rev_tail.pdf.

Gina La Cerva

Thursday July 15

Deborah Strumsky
Therese Hertel

Today we changed our lecture-location for the first time. We had all day at the Santa Fe Institute. to be continued :)

Joe Cresko

Friday July 16

Janeane Harwell
Mary Turnipseed

Saturday July 17

Eli Lazarus: It's Saturday night at St. John's, and late; outside my room facing the Upper Dorms quad, a Breadloaf Writing Workshop party is bumping and raucous. Our GSSS10 crew is just back from an epic day on the road between Santa Fe and Taos -- I'm compelled to hold what pops and flashes of the last 12 hours I can before I sack out. The Taos itinerary was eclectic and spirited -- a guided tour of Earthships Biotecture, a vertiginous view into the Rio Grande Gorge, and, courtesy of Doyne Farmer, a brief stop at "the best doughnut shop in northern New Mexico." But for me, in the company of my summer-school research group, the drive itself brought a lovely and unexpected catalysis, a subtle condensing of something inspired and formative.

(And that's atop a week of the most intellectual discussion, concentration, and provocation I've ever experienced.)

Northbound, about 30 minutes outside of Santa Fe, we cracked into a few big-picture ideas, periodically interrupting each other to point beyond the highway -- talus slopes, tourist-ballasted river rafts, mesa walls of dipping strata, pine-thick mountain flanks unraveling into valley chaparral. (All of it fodder for thinking about complex, dynamic relationships between landscapes and land-use transitions.) Southbound, we took the high road from Taos and this time shimmed our stories between exclamations about bison, dust devils, pickup-truck dogs, cloud breaks, and the rain-blued mountains to the west. By the time Highway 84 widened into the Santa Fe fringe, excitement about our coming collaboration was palpable. We'd already seen our metaphor from the ridge -- all the distance we'll soon be traveling, the verdant expanse of possibilities there to explore.

Monday July 19

Hitesh Soneji
Dana Coelho
Hongtao Yi

Tuesday July 20

Lawrence Lin
Erasmus Owusu
Amanda James

Wednesday July 21

John Robert Baker
Michael Dorsey
Christian Casillas

Thursday July 22

Cecilia Roa-Garcia
Stephen Posner
John Paul Gonzales