(updated 4/11/08)
My primary focus for this workshop is a historical simulation based on the response to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. This classroom exercise gives historical roles to students and allows them to interact as members of the President's Advisory Committee on Pesticides in 1963. The students must research their own testimony, then integrate the various perspectives of bird watchers, chemical industry representatives, ecologists, social activists, entomologists, evolutionary biologists, public health experts, and governmental officials in agriculture. The module (operational, but still under development) may be previewed at: http://ships.umn.edu/modules/
I hope to introduce this module to others who may find it useful, and to collect guidance about what will make it more useful as I continue to develop it as a flexible resource package.
The pesticides module reflects an interest in using role-playing case studies to teach about interactions in complex, real-world situations. Another case I have developed will likely interest many workshop participants: http://ships.umn.edu/cases/ford
This is based on what seems like a simple case: expanding a painting facility at a truck-assembly plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Here, a group of 12 stakeholders must decide the terms of the operating permit: what level of pollution control will be required (at what cost) and what options the company may consider for the kind of paints and paint treatments it will use. The various roles highlight intersecting issues of: upstream/downstream relationships; the commons, and public v. market goods; who pays/who benefits; multiple scales of values (not always aligned); responsibilities to exceptional cases; cost/benefit and cost-effectiveness; point sources v. area and mobile sources of pollution; promising but unproven technologies; scientific uncertainty; and historical constraints or responsibilities. Stakeholders given roles include: company management (local and national), workers (junior and senior), environmental consultant, member of state environmental agency, senior citizens, frightened mother, local asthmatic, local business owners, grass-roots environmentalist.
I hope to profile this activity for those interested, but also raise discussion about the educational role of such role-playing activities.
Elsewise, educationally, I am interested in purging our system of ineffective teaching patterns based on lecture, powerpoint and exams. In research, I study cases of error and disagreement in science. That fits within a general focus on the history and philosophy of biology. I teach a large number of science teachers while teaching history of science and guide them in preparing HPS-oriented materials. I write a column for American Biology Teacher and organize HPS-oriented sessions for AAAS meetings.
Paul Erikson
My longstanding interest has been in understanding the relationship between scientific knowledge and policy responses: how the statistics, graphs, and models we choose to represent reality shape and constrain the way we intervene in the world. My initial work in this area explored development of rational choice models in the social sciences, culminating in a dissertation on the history of game theory, especially its use by the Cold War military (University of Wisconsin, 2006). More recently, I have begun to look comparatively at the development of population models in fields like demography, conservation biology, and epidemiology. A paper (co-authored with Gregg Mitman) is a preliminary effort along these lines. The basic question it poses is this: why do scientists typically model populations as homogeneous statistical aggregates rather than as interactive socially-differentiated units? This phenomenon has gained much critical attention in recent years in epidemiology (see e.g. the referenced articles by Levins and Krieger, Simon and Koopmans) in studies of forestry, agriculture, and natural resource management (e.g., James Scott’s Seeing like a State and Arun Agrawal’s Environmentality). The paper is a first cut at exploring the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, touching on the role of markets in producing knowledge about populations, the political context in which knowledge is used, changing norms of scientific objectivity, and the observational capabilities of researchers.
In the future I would like to develop this project further and bring it closer to policy debates on issues of health and the environment. In the past year I have given presentations drawn from this paper to policy audiences at the Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, and at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy (University of Michigan). I have also begun to incorporate related material into my graduate seminar on global environmental governance that I teach as a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Ford School. Many international environmental agreements are explicitly concerned with producing knowledge about and governing populations, for example, the International Whaling Convention (IWC), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and numerous accords on the management of fisheries and forests. Disputes related to these treaties commonly circle back to disagreements over what information about the populations in question is significant and what is not. For example, listing disputes under CITES often privilege statistical information (created by markets and customs officials) that represents flows of commodities derived from wildlife populations over direct observations of the populations themselves. Eventually, I would like to produce case studies that make such insights accessible to students of policy, environmental scientists, and public health officials.
Wendy C. Hamblet
(3/08)
Philosophy, Department of University Studies and Liberal Studies
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University My interest in thinking Science in Society issues from a fundamental challenge facing all (and especially higher education) teachers. I wonder: “What is the best form of paideia for fostering socially responsible citizenship appropriate to a democratic society?” Many higher education institutions, including my own, refer to the Liberal and Fine Arts as “soft subjects” and the sciences as “hard subjects.” Students take from this distinction a view of the Sciences as serious, objective, and absolute, over against the Humanities and Arts, which are seen as frivolous, fictional, subjective, and, while perhaps interesting or entertaining, impractical in preparing people for today’s competitive job market. The new language of “soft” and “hard” studies reflects a popular prejudice deeply embedded in the Western worldview. In this view of reality, “Science” is understood as the combined body of discoveries of an intellectual community responsible for disclosing objective “facts” about the world, collecting, analyzing, distributing, and passing on these facts, so that human wisdom, in theory limited to the lifespan of a single thinker, may accumulate over multiple lifetimes, and become incorporated into an edifice of knowledge as whose ultimate purpose is the improvement of the everyday lives of all of humankind. Science thus promises to overcome human time and its constraints to the accumulation of human knowledge. So does science also appear to overcome the problems of geographical space and cultural difference, since its truths—“objective facts”— exist at a higher level of reality than localized reality postulates. Scientific truths are shared across the global community—belonging indeed to the family of humankind rather to any one thinker or social group who “discovers” them. Thus has the West come to a radically polarized understanding of reality—Science, Truth, and Objectivity versus Myth, Religion, Tradition, and Subjective/Cultural Bias. In short, science is above society and its politics. What the popular view is bent upon denying is the phenomenological origins of all knowledge. All knowledge is created/discovered by subjects who are socially-embedded, and so its discoveries inevitably reflect the interests of the ruling class of the society, reigning economic conditions within the society, and social challenges that the society faces at that time. What comes to be seen as normal/ deviant, and desirable/ undesirable, what constitutes a problem, and what treatments or strategies will be understood as appropriate to the cure of social problems—these will be determined by social actors functioning within the cognitive framework that orients their social space. In other words, science is not a pristine realm above politics. Rather, what is taken for scientific truth arises out of the evolving associations of social life, adapts to the social environment, evolves in step with the political and economic climate, and labors actively to justify the status quo of power relations. To borrow a most economical neologism from Michel Foucault, science’s “objective truths” are simply “Power-Knowledge” systems. The beliefs that a society accepts as their orienting truths are generally those that serve the overriding goals of stability, order, and longevity of the social order. The social order is a defined structural network of social inclusion/exclusion that functions according to a ranking logic to preserve itself intact over the vicissitudes of historical and economic fluctuations. A society’s belief systems are designed to preserve the system. This necessarily means affirming the ranking and ordering that defines what is valuable and what is not. Social beliefs confirm the inequalities of the society. Whether the poor are understood to be victims of an unjust system (in need of intervention response programs—better education, jobs, health care, welfare support, and economic opportunities) or lazy, dim-witted, perhaps violent drones (to be funneled to low-grade schools, trained in rote learning to facilitate their usefulness in mindless factory jobs, or isolated from society in prisons) will depend on the view of human nature shared by the ruling elites. Accordingly, two models of “truth” about human society emerge to provide the framework for understanding political exigency and responsibility, and societies seem over time to fluctuate between the two poles in their view of, and responses to, social problems. Let us call these two views the organic view and the capitalist view. In the organic view, society is seen as an organic web of entwined possibilities and responsibilities, which provides mutual support for the broad spectrum of social members, despite their “natural” differences in potential. In the capitalist view, society is considered a collection of radically isolated, free individuals of “naturally” differentiated potential, who own their own labor and strive in competition with each other. What the two views share is the common assumption that human beings are “naturally” distinguishable according to intellectual capacity, moral character, and motivation toward economic success, and that these differences are analyzable and quantifiable. This assumption is bequeathed to us from a long history of science that has calibrated the shapes of heads, measured genitalia, administered I.Q. tests, and now maps out the strings of DNA., a history according to which the race, gender, and sexual orientation of scientist comes to be affirmed as superior, while others who do not fit the dominant descriptions inevitably come up short. Certainly there do exist some scientific "facts." Gravity is not a quaint social custom; it is indeed the law! But a great deal of what passes for scientific fact is simply prejudice. My interest is in exposing the non-objectivity of much of science's "truths," the biased assumptions undergirding much of what is accepted as certain knowledge, and the harm that such knowledge effects upon sub-populations, by explaining difference as deviance, and assigning the blame for social problems to the victims who suffer from them.
Kurt Jax
(4/06, updated 4/08)
My interest in the workshop series is because (being a biologist by education) I have been working for a long time with other ecologists but also with philosophers and social scientists on issues of ecological concepts and their use both in ecology as in its applications, e.g. in conservation biology. A specific part of this work increasing relates to concepts which stand at the boundary between the natural and the social sciences. A prominent example is that of ecological units, e.g. communities or ecosystem. They are conceptualized in various and partly incompatible manners. This conceptualization is determined both by different ecological theories embraced, but also by different images of nature and specific interests which people have with respect to nature. To restore "degraded" ecosystems but also to manage "intact" ecosystems or maintain "ecosystem functioning" requires characterizing what makes up the "identity" of an ecosystem. Depending on different social and scientific interests this is viewed in completely different ways. Moreover, these different perceptions and conceptualization are seldom made explicit.
My thesis is that these different perceptions of ecological units and their "identity" -if left implicit - lead to societal conflicts in the course determining the precise goals of ecosystem management and restoration. In a project in Southern Chile (BIOKONCHIL ) we try to identify the different ideas on nature and "translate" between these everyday ("lebensweltliche") views and different scientific conceptualizations of ecosystems. This turns out to be quite difficult, but we still think that this is a promising entry point for initiating and facilitating a public discourse on the aims of conservation and restoration. Restoration (the subject of the 2006 workshop, in which I already participated) is interesting for me especially because, in contrast to conservation in "pristine" areas, it is obvious that the goals have to be set explicitly and cannot simply be taken from what currently exists in the place.
Recently, I am writing on a book on "Ecosystem Functioning", with the basic idea to make the janus-faced nature of this concept (in terms of both scientific and social aspects) explicit and discuss how (and how far) the concept can be useful and how it can be operationalized. So one thing I would like to learn from the workshop is, to get new ideas and experiences, which might help also to communicate and further develop the notion of ecosystem functioning, both with students as with colleagues from different disciplines.
Selected Publications
Haider, Sylvia & Jax, Kurt (2007): The application of environmental ethics in biological conservation: a case study from the southernmost tip of the Americas. - Biodiversity and Conservation 16, 2559-2573.
Jax, Kurt (2006): The units of ecology. Definitions and application. - Quarterly Review of Biology 81 (3), 237-258.
Jax, Kurt (2005): Function and "functioning" in ecology: what does it mean? Oikos 111, 641-648.
Jax, Kurt & Ricardo Rozzi (2004): Ecological theory and values in the determination of conservation goals: examples from the temperate regions of Germany, USA and Chile. Revista Chilena de Historia Natural 77, 349-366.
Amy Lesen
(4/08)
My research and academic interests cross many different disciplines. I study environmental history as it pertains to coastal areas and communities. I meld work in ecology and resource management with the study of coastal cultures and economies. I collaborate with architects, urban planners, and industrial designers in environmental sustainability and sustainable urban planning. I use modern ecology and paleoecology to study changes in ecosystems and to tease apart natural changes from anthropogenic ones. Interdisciplinarity and collaboration, thus, are at the heart of my work.
My research falls into several areas:
I.
• Urban ecology, the environmental history of cities, and the interplay between ecological and cultural forces in cities.
• Environmental justice movements and their roles in shaping environmental policy.
• Marine environmental history.
I study urban areas as ecosystems themselves. The field of “urban ecology” is a growing field that takes the tools and knowledge we have of “natural” systems and applies them to studying cities as ecosystems. As urbanization grows worldwide, as we see a growth in megacities, and as a larger and larger proportion of humans on Earth migrate to cities, learning how to study the ecology and environment of urban areas is becoming increasingly crucial. In addition, I have been collaborating with social scientists who focus on urban studies, such as Miriam Greenberg, a former colleague from the Pratt Institute. These collaborations have spawned academic work integrating the ecological, the social, the historical, and the cultural (all infused with an environmental justice perspective) aspects of cities both in the U.S. and globally. I am most interested in looking at the interplay, as William Cronon has taught us to do, between the cultural and environmental history of urban areas. I am currently beginning a project looking at the concepts of “stasis,” “succession,” and “climax community” and comparing how they have been used in ecology, sociology, history, especially how these ideas have shaped the way we think about urbanization and human “progress.”
The field of environmental history melds science and the humanities and social sciences as a way of studying the interrelatedness of humans and nature in the past and how these relationships have shaped our current world. In July, 2006, Jeffrey Bolster, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, stated in an article in the journal Environmental History:
“The ocean may be the next frontier for environmental historians… the history of human interactions with marine environments remains largely uninvestigated, in part because of the enduring assumption that the ocean exists (or existed) outside of history… [there is a need to investigate] its changing nature and peoples' historically specific assumptions about using and regulating it….marine environmental history can complement on-going research in historical marine ecology… (Journal of Environmental History, Vol 11(3), July 2006). ”
With my background in fisheries science, in working with coastal and maritime communities, and my background as a coastal scientist, I believe I can make a unique and important contribution to marine environmental history. I am currently beginning work on a study of the environmental history of the U.S. Northeast and Maritime Canada (two places I’ve done a great deal of work), specifically in terms of the history of the fishery resource and the history of the fishing communities, their culture, and the economies there.
II.
• Environmentally sustainable recovery and sustainable urban planning in post-Katrina New Orleans.
• The intersection of environment and culture in post-Katrina New Orleans.
I am involved in work on the intersection of the environment and culture in post-Katrina New Orleans, and this work is closely links to my interest in urban wetlands, coastal ecosystems, and coastal communities. Since January 2006, I have been doing a great deal of teaching and academic work about the ecological, environmental, and social ramifications of the Hurricane Katrina/failed levee disaster. This past October 2007, I presented a paper entitled “Scientists versus the local community: A case study in pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans” at the American Studies Association conference in October in Philadelphia, on a multidisciplinary panel with Ann Holder (an historian at the Pratt Institute), Miriam Greenberg (Urban Studies, UC Santa Cruz), and Lynelle Thomas (American Studies, UMass Boston). We are currently working on developing an edited volume from our panel, "New Orleans, USA?: Racism, Science, Hurricane Katrina and the Abandonment of a Global City.” I was a panelist in early 2007, with city planners and architects, on a panel convened as part of Pratt’s “Shrinking Cities” exhibition called “Is New Orleans a Shrinking City?” New Orleans
is also an important part of my teaching. In spring 2006, my undergraduate and graduate level Eco-Metropolis course addressed the ecological and social aspects of cities, and we spent five weeks on New Orleans ecology and social and environmental history. Port Cities, a course I taught collaboratively with an archaeologist in the spring 2007 semester, dealt with the ecology of coastal cities, and New Orleans was once again a case study. I have also begun forging a collaboration with John McLachlan at Tulane’s Center for Bioenvironmental Research, in the CBR’s efforts to include sustainability and environmental concerns into the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans.
III.
• Environmental sustainability and sustainable urban planning
• The role of “green” design and architecture in promoting habitat sustainability.
One of my main academic interests is environmental sustainability, an interest that evolved out of my collaborations with colleagues at the Pratt Institute in New York City. As one of the founders of a cross-disciplinary group, Sustainable Pratt, I developed many courses and academic initiatives with colleagues form Architecture, Urban Planning, Industrial and Interior Design. Most of my work focuses on sustainability issues in cities, specifically strategies for incorporating sustainability into every aspect of urban planning. As one example, in fall 2006 I spoke about green roofs and biodiversity in New York City at a conference on Biodiversity in the Greater New York Area at the American Museum of Natural History. I have been asked to participate in many conferences in New York over the past four years (see my CV for details of my presentations) to discuss the role of science, architecture and design in sustainability. Another significant component of my sustainability work involves helping academics to promote and incorporate sustainability into higher education curricula, via organizing workshops and panels on sustainability education at forums such as the 2004 and 2005 Eco-Metropolis conferences in New York’s CUNY Graduate Center. Sustainability is one of my main interests in my own teaching: I have developed many graduate and undergraduate level courses on aspects of sustainability (see sample syllabi included with my application materials). I am currently talking to academic publishers about the possibility of writing a college textbook about ecological sustainability, and have received enthusiastic responses.
IV.
• Urban estuaries: ecology, water quality, carbon cycling and food web dynamics, and resource management.
• Developing environmental and water pollution indicators that will inform us as to the human impacts on marine and aquatic environments.
• The effect of climate change on coastal urban areas and coastal ecosystems.
My field and laboratory research centers in and around urban estuaries and coastal environments. For my Ph.D. research at UC Berkeley, I investigated carbon cycling, food web dynamics, human and natural impacts, and paleoecology in San Francisco Bay. Using benthic foraminifera, marine protists, as my research tool, I looked at modern and fossil populations and what they could tell us about how the bay has changed due to natural versus human causes. I am currently engaged in the third year of research collaboration with Andrew Juhl and O. Roger Anderson at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, looking at carbon cycling in microbial food webs in the Hudson River. We currently have a proposal being reviewed for NSF funding (submitted in August 2007 to the Biological Oceanography program) to support this research. My interests in urban coastal environments, urban estuaries, and vulnerable urban wetlands also link to my work on post-Katrina New Orleans (outlined below).
Having worked extensively with marine microorganisms, I am interested in developing methods for using these taxa, protists in particular, as environmental indicator species. Marine protists are extremely abundant and reproduce quickly, and thus their populations respond quickly to environmental stresses and could be valuable tools for identifying issues such as eutrophication, hypoxia, and the presence of toxics.
My undergraduate degree is in Marine Fisheries Biology. Before graduate school I spent several years working in the fields of marine resource management, and doing water quality research on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which is surrounded by salt marsh wetland habitat that is highly vulnerable to constant development. I have done scientific research and community work in coastal communities in the Northeast and Canada from Newfoundland to Maine to Cape Cod. Thus, my coastal work in both urban and rural areas seeks to integrate environmental science and resource management with community and economic development, and an acknowledgement of the linkages between the environment, culture, and economics.
Marisa Santos Matias
(4/07)
I have turned to social studies of science for my MA, where I developed a research on scientific, technical and health controversies and public mobilization over the sitting of hazardous waste management facilities. I am currently a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, where I am an active member of the Group on Studies of Science, Technology and Society. I am also a PhD candidate at the School of Economics, Coimbra University.
My research interests include: sociology of the environment and public health, social studies of science, and public policy and participation.
I have been involved in the international project "Reinventing Social Emancipation", directed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and hosted by Coimbra University, Portugal. This project involved six countries (Brazil, Colombia, India, Mozambique, Portug al and South Africa), and was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Since then, I became a member of the research teams of "Analysing Public Accountability Procedures in Contemporary European Contexts" (PubAcc) project and "Science, Technology and Government in Europe" (STAGE) and "Identifying Trends in European Medical Space" (ITEMS) networks, all EU-funded. I am currently a member of "Researching Inequalities through Science and Technology (ResIST)", an international EU-funded project which involves teams from Europe (UK, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Malta and Turkey), Africa (Mozambique and South Africa) and the USA.
*I have also participated as a trainer in advanced training courses on "Environment, Risk and Participation", "Law and Citizenship", "Methodologies of Participation in Areas related to Science and Technology", and "Public participation, Rights and Access to Justice".
As a civic and environmental activist, I have been a member of the board of Pro Urbe, a citizen organization based in Coimbra, over the last years.
The research I am developing for my PhD focuses on the relations between health, environment and sustainability, namely through their enactment in situations of public controversy. Over the last years, I have done some work on related issues, namely on environmental conflicts and scientific controversies in Portugal in relation to waste management policies. Within this project, my attention is focused on the relations between environmental and health problems. Thus, considering the analysis of some conflicts over waste management and treatment, this project aims to contribute to answering the following questions: How is the relation between an environmental problem and a health problem constructed? How to incorporate health as a structuring dimension of sustain able development strategies and policies?
Selected Publications
"Bottom-up Law and Democracy in the Risk Society: Portuguese Experiences in European Context", in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and César A. Rodríguez-Garavito (eds.), Law and Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (with João Arriscado Nunes and Susana Costa), 2005
"Don’t Treat us like Dirt: The Fight Against the Co-incineration of Dangerous Industrial Waste in the Outskirts of Coimbra", South European Society & Politics, Vol. 9, No. 2, 132-157. (Also published in Boaventura de Sousa Santos and João Arriscado Nunes (eds.), Reinventing Democracy: Grassroots Movements in Portugal. London: Frank Cass.), 2004
"From Public Accountability ‘in Books’ to Pub lic Accountability in Action: The Case of Portugal", Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences (with João Arriscado Nunes, Jorge Correia Jesuíno, Carmen Diego, Susana Costa and Sandra Carvalho), 2004 (forthcoming)
"Public Accountability: The Portuguese Landscape", Oficinas do CES, 198 (with João Arriscado Nunes, Jorge Correia Jesuíno, Carmen Diego, Susana Costa and Sandra Carvalho), 2003. available at http://www.ces.uc.pt/publicacoes/oficina/198/198.pdf
"Representations of Biotechnology in Portugal", in G. Gaskell and M. Bauer (eds.), Biotechnology 1996-2000: The Years of Controversy. London: Science Mu seum, 258-266 (with João Arriscado Nunes, Jorge Correia Jesuíno, Carmen Diego, Susana Costa and Pedro Alcântara), 2001
Mary McGuire
(4/08) My thesis, “Tobacco Culture and Environmental Consciousness: Ecological Change, Race, and Gender, Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1850-1870,” examined through an agroecological approach the myths and the realities of soil exhaustion as this ecological process relates to the developing environmental ethics of tobacco farmers of Prince Edward County, Virginia. An analysis of the Agricultural Schedules included in the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth U. S. Censuses demonstrated that significant change in land use and, just as importantly, land cover occurred in the county between 1850 and 1880. Issues of gender and race figured prominently in my thesis. The personal correspondence of the planter families revealed that the separation of productive and reproductive roles by gender and race influenced the way in which the men and women living and working on the tobacco farms of Prince Edward County developed different ways of knowing and understanding the natural world in which they lived. The analysis of biological and social reproduction on the tobacco farms, as it applies to ecology, modes of production, and worldviews, suggested that contests for power are not only those between indigenous and invading cultures but also those between men and women who vie for power within the same environment. With the transition from slave labor to wage labor from 1861 into the 1870s, the relationship of white men and women and African American men and women to the rural landscape changed, thus creating a diverse, dynamic environmental ethic among the tobacco farmers of Prince Edward County, Virginia.
The completion of my thesis represents the completion of the first leg of a long term intellectual inquiry into the unique aspects of the societies and cultures of the tobacco growing regions around the world. I am in the process of expanding my thesis research to write an environmental history that encompasses all of the counties in Virginia’s Old Tobacco Belt. I plan to use this bioregional study as the cornerstone of a comparative dissertation that investigates the cultural requirements of tobacco plants and soils as well as the social and cultural histories of the people who grow tobacco. Bioregional histories study the continuance of particular human societies and cultures that inhabit distinct places within larger regions of the geographic regions despite the forces of change within those larger regions. In other words, bioregional historians not only study the ways in which human society alters the environment, but also how society adapts to diverse environmental conditions. In addition to the Old Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina, other tobacco growing regions are located in China, Brazil, and parts of Africa. In each of these geographic regions the soils, the pests, the types of tobacco grown, and the labor conditions differed thus presenting a complex environmental history of tobacco and the people who grow it.
This larger project, I believe, will be well suited for digital history project for use by both environmental science and environmental history educators at the high school and undergraduate levels.
Pat Munday
(4/06)
Currently researching a book with the working title Clark Fork Revival: Cleaning up America's Largest Superfund Site. For more than a century, copper smelting and mining activities polluted air, land, and water in the Upper Clark Fork River Basin of western Montana with arsenic, heavy metals, and acid mine waste. Today, this region is the largest Super fund area in the United States, with three major contiguous sites taking in one of Montana's largest cities, several smaller towns, a huge toxic lake, a major dam site, and about 150 stream miles. The public and political process of selecting remedies for these Superfund sites is nearly over, with the last Record of Decision slated for completion early in 2006. This proposal focuses on the selection of remedies at eight sites within the project area. It will discover, describe, and assess the role of activist scientists, grass roots organizations, and local culture in the social negotiation of Superfund remedy.
Historiography Instructor and Steering Committee Member with "Teaching American History" institutes, 2003-2005, a Department of Education funded program with the Anaconda School District, Montana. This first TAH program is followed with an application for a second program ab out the history of technology, environmental change, and sense of place in the Pacific Northwest.
Helped plan, coordinate and facilitate sessions at the Arctic Grayling Symposium: Arctic Grayling Recovery--Working Together for a New Future, August 2005, in Wisdom, Montana. Hosted by the Big Hole River Foundation to address endangered species status of Arctic grayling in the Big Hole River. Scientific forums included fisheries biologists from British Columbia, Alberta, Alaska, and Montana. A series of public forums addressed issues of importance to ranchers, anglers, and the general conservation community.
Co-grant writer and co-project director of three Trout Unlimited projects for environmental restoration in German Gulch, a watershed heavily damaged by historic placer mining. 2002-2005. Total funding secured $1.27 million.
Governor's appointee to and charter member of the Uppe r Clark Fork Basin Remediation and Restoration Education Advisory Council and chair of Education Sub-committee, 1998-2002. The Council advises Governor and takes leadership role in encouraging public involvement, promoting educational activities, and developing policy involving the State of Montana's $215 million settlement for damages to natural resources caused by a century of mining and smelting activities.
Selected publications
Entry for "Science, History of," in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004): Volume 5, pp. 2182-2188. This summary includes an overview about the emergence of environmental history within the history of science.
"'A millionaire couldn't buy a piece of water as good:' George Grant & the Conservation of the Big Hole Watershed," M ontana Magazine of Western History 52 (2002): 20-37. This article is about the role of a grassroots environmentalist in galvanizing river conservation and preservation.
Montana's Last Best River: The Big Hole and its People (The Lyons Press, 2001). This popular press book is a history of place and how generations of people have used and shaped the land.
"Politics by Other Means: Justus von Liebig and the German translation of John Stuart Mill's Logic," British Journal for the History of Science 31 (1998): 403-18. As the title implies, this article is about the practical use of science and philosophy to change society.
Selected courses
As a professor with a public college that emphasizes undergraduate education, I teach 3-4 courses per semester. Some of the courses I teach on an annual b asis include: Technology & Society; Politics of Technical Decisions; History of Technology; and Technology, Communication, and Culture.
Websites
http://www.bhrf.org Information about my book, grayling restoration, and the Big Hole River Foundation.
http://www.cfrtac The Clark Fork River Technical Assistance Committee is an EPAfunded TAG group that I work with on Superfund issues.
I got my first degree in History at the University of Oporto and did my first research projects on the history of peasant agriculture, demography and family sociology, with an ongoing interest in the sociology of knowledge. After getting my PhD, I moved into Science and Technology Studies. I completed two long-term projects based on an ethnography of a cancer research laboratory in Portugal, and was involved as a researcher or as coordinator of the Portuguese teams in several national and European collaborative projects on globalization and science, on science, technology and governance, on the regulation and public perceptions of biotechnology, on public debate and participatory technology assessment and on public understanding of science.
Between 1998 and 2001, I was coordinator of the Portuguese team of the international project "Reinventing Social Emancipation", funded by the Macarthur and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundations, hosted by the Center for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra and directed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos. The project, involving over 60 researchers from six countries (Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, Mozambique, India and Portugal), studied local responses to neoliberal globalization and the emergence of solidaristic, alternative forms of globalization, and included case studies on participatory democracy, alternative forms of economic activity, multicultural citizenship, rival knowledges, biodiversity and intellectual property and emerging forms of transnational trade-unionism. The results are in the process of publication in five countries (Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, Britain and Italy) and four languages (Eng lish, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian).
My current research interests focus on: a) social studies of biomedicine and public health, in particular the enactments of cancer in oncobiological research; the management of uncertainty in tumor pathology; health and environment; a sociological history of the bacterium helicobacter pylori as a biomedical entity; b) the regulation of the life sciences and biomedicine (in particular medically assisted reproduction and research on human embryos); c) public participation in debate and deliberation on matters related to science, health and the environment, including collective action.
I was a member of the steering committee of the European network ITEMS (Identifying Trends in European Medical Space), funded by the European Union and am currently part of the research teams of the project ResIST (Researching Inequalities through Science and Techn ology) and of the network MEDUSE (on the interactions of health professionals, users and patients of health and medical services and social scientists), both EU-funded.
My current positions are: professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra (teaching in both the graduate and the undergraduate programs) and senior researcher at the Center for Social Studies (CES), an interdisciplinary research center of the same University, where I coordinate the Research Group on Studies of Science, Technology and Society. I am active in training courses for environmental protection staff, activists and members of the Civil Protection Agency, as well as in initiatives in science education and the development of participatory procedures in the fields of assessment of controversial knowledge and technology, health and environment (including participatory theatre and "grounded" versions of citizen juries).
I was a participant in the 2004 and 2005 editions of NeWSSC and am currently a member of its advisory group.
(4/07)
I am currently a PhD student at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College in the Science and Technology Education program of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. I also hold degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (EdM in Technology in Education) and Brandeis University (BA in Anthropology).
I am also a graduate Research Assistant at the Urban Ecology Institute, where I am helping to develop, evaluate, and research a capstone ecological science curriculum specifically designed for urban high school students funded by the National Science Foundation. Through this curriculum development process, we are working to:
Contextualize the ecological science, both in terms of the text and the activities, in urban neighborhoods;
Explicitly connect notions of environmental and social justice;
Center the curriculum around the notion of "action planning," where students develop (and hopefully act upon) a year-long plan to sustain or improve the environmental health of their neighborhood or the area around their school;
Create a parallel web-based version to foster access and sharing across the country.
My research interests include the dialogue and interactions in and around the curriculum during the curriculum development process, and how providing opportunities for activism engages learners in science learning and connects students to their communities. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring the roles emerging technologies -- such as wikis, blogs, information networks, social media, and social mapping -- can play in these dialogues and interactions.
Previously, I have worked as Learning and Media Specialist at CAST, an educational non-profit research and development organization focused on creating learning environments to accommodate a diversity of learners, especially those individuals with disabilities. I have also worked as Education Technology Coordinator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In 2007, I was named "Environmentalist of the Year" by the Waltham (Massachusetts) Land Trust for my work with the community and the Waltham city government to protect the woods on Jericho Hill, the largest undeveloped privately-owned tract of land in the city. Homepage
Erich Schienke
(4/07)
bio on blog
Since 1994, my empirical research in environmental science and political processes has covered issues such as toxic remediation of decommissioned U.S. military bases; mapping breast cancer and environmental exposure to toxins; toxic release inventory policy; applications of participatory GIS; China's development and greening policies; China's capacity in environmental/ecological sciences and civil society; the ethical dimensions of climate change; and, most recently, regional carbon modeling, mitigation, and adaptation. My dissertation, "Greening the Dragon: Environmental Imaginaries in the Science, Technology, and Governance of Contemporary China," focuses on the processes involved in the production of information-knowledge in the attempt to define and then manage crucial elements of China's environment. In the thesis, I developed new modes for analyzing how these processes are situated within the often conflicting contexts of China's already deteriorated environmental conditions; efforts to increase capacity in ecological and environmental science, monitoring, and regulation; rapidly developing economy; and growing impacts on and from global systems.
In my own thesis, postdoc, and ongoing work, I am dedicated to researching further and providing better analyses as to how environmental knowledge is produced, prioritized, and communicated between scientists, policy makers, and the public. Geopolitically, my interest in these questions remains situated in contemporary China. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University's Rock Ethics Institute and a Lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program. At the Rock Ethics Institute, I work under the direction of Nancy Tuana on two projects, namely, the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC) initiative, and a research project, supported by a grant from the NSF, concerning the training of ethics to environmental science graduate students. In the Spring term, I will be teaching an undergraduate course for the STS program (STS 200) titled, "Critical Issues in Science, Technology, and Society." I have also prepared a course syllabus titled "Global Environmental Change: Practice, Policy, and Discourse." Extending from my work at the Rock Ethics Institute, I plan to continue to teach some variation of the NSF funded ethics modules project, where a wide variety ethics modules are currently being developed and distributed as a means to integrate ethics training into graduate education in the environmental sciences. The ten modules cover topics such as the responsible conduct of research, benefit-cost analysis, data analysis, sustainability, and participatory research.
In thinking about graduate training in Earth Systems Science, I recently joined together with a group of natural and social scientists working on urban and regional carbon management issues. Extending from this collaboration, I recently co-authored a paper with Penelope Canan for Carbon Balance Management titled, "Responsibility, Opportunity, and Vision for Higher Education in Urban and Regional Carbon Management." Whereas, the Amsterdam Declaration of 2001 called for an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management, and a new system of global environmental science known as Earth Systems Science,'' we call for programmatic innovations in institutions of higher education in their reward structures such that they facilitate and promote transdisciplinary carbon management research and education for global environmental citizenship and ethical leadership.'' (Canan and Schienke 2006) Following from the suggestions in this paper and in my own research, I am interested in continuing to think about how education in the environmental sciences can be improved to produce better multi-disciplinary researchers who are competent in recognizing ethical issues.
Peter Taylor
(4/07)
I joined the Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) Program in the Graduate College of Education (GCOE) at UMass Boston in the fall of 1998 and have been enjoying the challenges of teaching experienced educators, other mid-career professionals, and prospective K-12 teachers. Working in the CCT Program (which I directed/coordinated from 1999-2004) also provides opportunities to promote reflective practice in ways that extend my contributions to ecology and environmental studies (ES) and social studies of science and technology (STS). In those fields I focus on the complexity of, respectively, ecological or environmental situations and the social situations in which the environmental research is undertaken. Both kinds of situation, I argue, can be characterized in terms of unruly complexity or "intersecting processes" that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time. These cannot be understood from an outside view; instead positions of engagement must be taken within the complexity. Knowledge production needs to be linked with planning for action and action itself in an ongoing process so that knowledge, plans, and action can be continually reassessed in response to developments -- predicted and surprising alike. In this spirit, ES, STS, and critical pedagogy/reflective practice have come together for me in a project of stimulating researchers to self-consciously examine the complexity of their social situatedness so as to change the ways they address the complexity of ecological and socio-environmental situations. Through collaborations in and beyond the GCOE. I also seek to promote a vision of critical science and environmental education that extends from improving the teaching of scientific concepts and methods to involving citizens in community-based research. (* In 2004 I became director of the Program in Science, Technology and Values.) Recently, I have begun to take these interests in a new direction through historical and sociological analysis of social epidemiological approaches that address the intersections of environment, health, and development.
This project had its beginnings in environmental and social activism in Australia which led to studies and research in ecology and agriculture. I moved to the United States to undertake doctoral studies in ecology, with a minor focus in STS. Subsequently I combined scientific investigations with interpretive inquiries from the different disciplines that make up STS, my goal being to make STS perspectives relevant to life and environmental students and scientists. Critical thinking and critical pedagogy became central to my intellectual and professional project as I encouraged students and researchers to contrast the paths taken in science, society, education with other paths that might be taken, and to foster their acting upon the insights gained. Bringing critical analysis of science to bear on the practice and applications of science has not been well developed or supported institutionally, and so I continue to contribute actively, to new collaborations, programs, and other activities, new directions for existing programs, and collegial interactions across disciplines. Further elaboration of this work and details of specific products
Lee Worden
(2/07)
Selforganization, collective dynamics, and transformation. Ecological evolution, community structure,
and dynamics. Cultural change, consensus formation, democracy, cooperation. Critical analysis of
scientific discourses. Ways of facilitating global justice, equality, solidarity and sustainability.
New England Workshop on Science and Social Change
Spring 2008 Workshop, "Science-in-society: Teaching and engaging across boundaries"
Participant Profiles
please update, supplement, streamline, include links(as of Mar 30, '08) Douglas Allchin,Paul Erikson, Wendy Hamblet,Kurt Jax, Amy Lesen, Marisa Matias, Mary McGuire, Pat Munday, João Nunes, JoAnn Oravec, Jeremy Price, Erich Schienke, Peter Taylor, Lee Worden
Douglas Allchin
(updated 4/11/08)My primary focus for this workshop is a historical simulation based on the response to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. This classroom exercise gives historical roles to students and allows them to interact as members of the President's Advisory Committee on Pesticides in 1963. The students must research their own testimony, then integrate the various perspectives of bird watchers, chemical industry representatives, ecologists, social activists, entomologists, evolutionary biologists, public health experts, and governmental officials in agriculture. The module (operational, but still under development) may be previewed at:
http://ships.umn.edu/modules/
The pesticides module reflects an interest in using role-playing case studies to teach about interactions in complex, real-world situations. Another case I have developed will likely interest many workshop participants:
http://ships.umn.edu/cases/ford
This is based on what seems like a simple case: expanding a painting facility at a truck-assembly plant in the middle of a residential neighborhood. Here, a group of 12 stakeholders must decide the terms of the operating permit: what level of pollution control will be required (at what cost) and what options the company may consider for the kind of paints and paint treatments it will use. The various roles highlight intersecting issues of: upstream/downstream relationships; the commons, and public v. market goods; who pays/who benefits; multiple scales of values (not always aligned); responsibilities to exceptional cases; cost/benefit and cost-effectiveness; point sources v. area and mobile sources of pollution; promising but unproven technologies; scientific uncertainty; and historical constraints or responsibilities. Stakeholders given roles include: company management (local and national), workers (junior and senior), environmental consultant, member of state environmental agency, senior citizens, frightened mother, local asthmatic, local business owners, grass-roots environmentalist.
Elsewise, educationally, I am interested in purging our system of ineffective teaching patterns based on lecture, powerpoint and exams. In research, I study cases of error and disagreement in science. That fits within a general focus on the history and philosophy of biology. I teach a large number of science teachers while teaching history of science and guide them in preparing HPS-oriented materials. I write a column for American Biology Teacher and organize HPS-oriented sessions for AAAS meetings.
Paul Erikson
My longstanding interest has been in understanding the relationship between scientific knowledge and policy responses: how the statistics, graphs, and models we choose to represent reality shape and constrain the way we intervene in the world. My initial work in this area explored development of rational choice models in the social sciences, culminating in a dissertation on the history of game theory, especially its use by the Cold War military (University of Wisconsin, 2006). More recently, I have begun to look comparatively at the development of population models in fields like demography, conservation biology, and epidemiology. A paper (co-authored with Gregg Mitman) is a preliminary effort along these lines. The basic question it poses is this: why do scientists typically model populations as homogeneous statistical aggregates rather than as interactive socially-differentiated units? This phenomenon has gained much critical attention in recent years in epidemiology (see e.g. the referenced articles by Levins and Krieger, Simon and Koopmans) in studies of forestry, agriculture, and natural resource management (e.g., James Scott’s Seeing like a State and Arun Agrawal’s Environmentality). The paper is a first cut at exploring the causes and consequences of this phenomenon, touching on the role of markets in producing knowledge about populations, the political context in which knowledge is used, changing norms of scientific objectivity, and the observational capabilities of researchers.In the future I would like to develop this project further and bring it closer to policy debates on issues of health and the environment. In the past year I have given presentations drawn from this paper to policy audiences at the Center for Science, Policy, and Outcomes at Arizona State University, and at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy (University of Michigan). I have also begun to incorporate related material into my graduate seminar on global environmental governance that I teach as a postdoctoral fellow in the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Ford School. Many international environmental agreements are explicitly concerned with producing knowledge about and governing populations, for example, the International Whaling Convention (IWC), the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), and numerous accords on the management of fisheries and forests. Disputes related to these treaties commonly circle back to disagreements over what information about the populations in question is significant and what is not. For example, listing disputes under CITES often privilege statistical information (created by markets and customs officials) that represents flows of commodities derived from wildlife populations over direct observations of the populations themselves. Eventually, I would like to produce case studies that make such insights accessible to students of policy, environmental scientists, and public health officials.
Wendy C. Hamblet
(3/08)Philosophy, Department of University Studies and Liberal Studies
North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
My interest in thinking Science in Society issues from a fundamental challenge facing all (and especially higher education) teachers. I wonder: “What is the best form of paideia for fostering socially responsible citizenship appropriate to a democratic society?”
Many higher education institutions, including my own, refer to the Liberal and Fine Arts as “soft subjects” and the sciences as “hard subjects.” Students take from this distinction a view of the Sciences as serious, objective, and absolute, over against the Humanities and Arts, which are seen as frivolous, fictional, subjective, and, while perhaps interesting or entertaining, impractical in preparing people for today’s competitive job market.
The new language of “soft” and “hard” studies reflects a popular prejudice deeply embedded in the Western worldview. In this view of reality, “Science” is understood as the combined body of discoveries of an intellectual community responsible for disclosing objective “facts” about the world, collecting, analyzing, distributing, and passing on these facts, so that human wisdom, in theory limited to the lifespan of a single thinker, may accumulate over multiple lifetimes, and become incorporated into an edifice of knowledge as whose ultimate purpose is the improvement of the everyday lives of all of humankind. Science thus promises to overcome human time and its constraints to the accumulation of human knowledge. So does science also appear to overcome the problems of geographical space and cultural difference, since its truths—“objective facts”— exist at a higher level of reality than localized reality postulates. Scientific truths are shared across the global community—belonging indeed to the family of humankind rather to any one thinker or social group who “discovers” them. Thus has the West come to a radically polarized understanding of reality—Science, Truth, and Objectivity versus Myth, Religion, Tradition, and Subjective/Cultural Bias. In short, science is above society and its politics.
What the popular view is bent upon denying is the phenomenological origins of all knowledge. All knowledge is created/discovered by subjects who are socially-embedded, and so its discoveries inevitably reflect the interests of the ruling class of the society, reigning economic conditions within the society, and social challenges that the society faces at that time. What comes to be seen as normal/ deviant, and desirable/ undesirable, what constitutes a problem, and what treatments or strategies will be understood as appropriate to the cure of social problems—these will be determined by social actors functioning within the cognitive framework that orients their social space. In other words, science is not a pristine realm above politics. Rather, what is taken for scientific truth arises out of the evolving associations of social life, adapts to the social environment, evolves in step with the political and economic climate, and labors actively to justify the status quo of power relations. To borrow a most economical neologism from Michel Foucault, science’s “objective truths” are simply “Power-Knowledge” systems.
The beliefs that a society accepts as their orienting truths are generally those that serve the overriding goals of stability, order, and longevity of the social order. The social order is a defined structural network of social inclusion/exclusion that functions according to a ranking logic to preserve itself intact over the vicissitudes of historical and economic fluctuations.
A society’s belief systems are designed to preserve the system. This necessarily means affirming the ranking and ordering that defines what is valuable and what is not. Social beliefs confirm the inequalities of the society. Whether the poor are understood to be victims of an unjust system (in need of intervention response programs—better education, jobs, health care, welfare support, and economic opportunities) or lazy, dim-witted, perhaps violent drones (to be funneled to low-grade schools, trained in rote learning to facilitate their usefulness in mindless factory jobs, or isolated from society in prisons) will depend on the view of human nature shared by the ruling elites. Accordingly, two models of “truth” about human society emerge to provide the framework for understanding political exigency and responsibility, and societies seem over time to fluctuate between the two poles in their view of, and responses to, social problems. Let us call these two views the organic view and the capitalist view. In the organic view, society is seen as an organic web of entwined possibilities and responsibilities, which provides mutual support for the broad spectrum of social members, despite their “natural” differences in potential. In the capitalist view, society is considered a collection of radically isolated, free individuals of “naturally” differentiated potential, who own their own labor and strive in competition with each other.
What the two views share is the common assumption that human beings are “naturally” distinguishable according to intellectual capacity, moral character, and motivation toward economic success, and that these differences are analyzable and quantifiable. This assumption is bequeathed to us from a long history of science that has calibrated the shapes of heads, measured genitalia, administered I.Q. tests, and now maps out the strings of DNA., a history according to which the race, gender, and sexual orientation of scientist comes to be affirmed as superior, while others who do not fit the dominant descriptions inevitably come up short.
Certainly there do exist some scientific "facts." Gravity is not a quaint social custom; it is indeed the law! But a great deal of what passes for scientific fact is simply prejudice. My interest is in exposing the non-objectivity of much of science's "truths," the biased assumptions undergirding much of what is accepted as certain knowledge, and the harm that such knowledge effects upon sub-populations, by explaining difference as deviance, and assigning the blame for social problems to the victims who suffer from them.
Kurt Jax
(4/06, updated 4/08)My interest in the workshop series is because (being a biologist by education) I have been working for a long time with other ecologists but also with philosophers and social scientists on issues of ecological concepts and their use both in ecology as in its applications, e.g. in conservation biology. A specific part of this work increasing relates to concepts which stand at the boundary between the natural and the social sciences. A prominent example is that of ecological units, e.g. communities or ecosystem. They are conceptualized in various and partly incompatible manners. This conceptualization is determined both by different ecological theories embraced, but also by different images of nature and specific interests which people have with respect to nature. To restore "degraded" ecosystems but also to manage "intact" ecosystems or maintain "ecosystem functioning" requires characterizing what makes up the "identity" of an ecosystem. Depending on different social and scientific interests this is viewed in completely different ways. Moreover, these different perceptions and conceptualization are seldom made explicit.
My thesis is that these different perceptions of ecological units and their "identity" -if left implicit - lead to societal conflicts in the course determining the precise goals of ecosystem management and restoration. In a project in Southern Chile (BIOKONCHIL ) we try to identify the different ideas on nature and "translate" between these everyday ("lebensweltliche") views and different scientific conceptualizations of ecosystems. This turns out to be quite difficult, but we still think that this is a promising entry point for initiating and facilitating a public discourse on the aims of conservation and restoration. Restoration (the subject of the 2006 workshop, in which I already participated) is interesting for me especially because, in contrast to conservation in "pristine" areas, it is obvious that the goals have to be set explicitly and cannot simply be taken from what currently exists in the place.
Recently, I am writing on a book on "Ecosystem Functioning", with the basic idea to make the janus-faced nature of this concept (in terms of both scientific and social aspects) explicit and discuss how (and how far) the concept can be useful and how it can be operationalized. So one thing I would like to learn from the workshop is, to get new ideas and experiences, which might help also to communicate and further develop the notion of ecosystem functioning, both with students as with colleagues from different disciplines.
Selected Publications
Amy Lesen
(4/08)My research and academic interests cross many different disciplines. I study environmental history as it pertains to coastal areas and communities. I meld work in ecology and resource management with the study of coastal cultures and economies. I collaborate with architects, urban planners, and industrial designers in environmental sustainability and sustainable urban planning. I use modern ecology and paleoecology to study changes in ecosystems and to tease apart natural changes from anthropogenic ones. Interdisciplinarity and collaboration, thus, are at the heart of my work.
My research falls into several areas:
I.
• Urban ecology, the environmental history of cities, and the interplay between ecological and cultural forces in cities.
• Environmental justice movements and their roles in shaping environmental policy.
• Marine environmental history.
I study urban areas as ecosystems themselves. The field of “urban ecology” is a growing field that takes the tools and knowledge we have of “natural” systems and applies them to studying cities as ecosystems. As urbanization grows worldwide, as we see a growth in megacities, and as a larger and larger proportion of humans on Earth migrate to cities, learning how to study the ecology and environment of urban areas is becoming increasingly crucial. In addition, I have been collaborating with social scientists who focus on urban studies, such as Miriam Greenberg, a former colleague from the Pratt Institute. These collaborations have spawned academic work integrating the ecological, the social, the historical, and the cultural (all infused with an environmental justice perspective) aspects of cities both in the U.S. and globally. I am most interested in looking at the interplay, as William Cronon has taught us to do, between the cultural and environmental history of urban areas. I am currently beginning a project looking at the concepts of “stasis,” “succession,” and “climax community” and comparing how they have been used in ecology, sociology, history, especially how these ideas have shaped the way we think about urbanization and human “progress.”
The field of environmental history melds science and the humanities and social sciences as a way of studying the interrelatedness of humans and nature in the past and how these relationships have shaped our current world. In July, 2006, Jeffrey Bolster, Professor of History at the University of New Hampshire, stated in an article in the journal Environmental History:
“The ocean may be the next frontier for environmental historians… the history of human interactions with marine environments remains largely uninvestigated, in part because of the enduring assumption that the ocean exists (or existed) outside of history… [there is a need to investigate] its changing nature and peoples' historically specific assumptions about using and regulating it….marine environmental history can complement on-going research in historical marine ecology… (Journal of Environmental History, Vol 11(3), July 2006). ”
With my background in fisheries science, in working with coastal and maritime communities, and my background as a coastal scientist, I believe I can make a unique and important contribution to marine environmental history. I am currently beginning work on a study of the environmental history of the U.S. Northeast and Maritime Canada (two places I’ve done a great deal of work), specifically in terms of the history of the fishery resource and the history of the fishing communities, their culture, and the economies there.
II.
• Environmentally sustainable recovery and sustainable urban planning in post-Katrina New Orleans.
• The intersection of environment and culture in post-Katrina New Orleans.
I am involved in work on the intersection of the environment and culture in post-Katrina New Orleans, and this work is closely links to my interest in urban wetlands, coastal ecosystems, and coastal communities. Since January 2006, I have been doing a great deal of teaching and academic work about the ecological, environmental, and social ramifications of the Hurricane Katrina/failed levee disaster. This past October 2007, I presented a paper entitled “Scientists versus the local community: A case study in pre- and post-Katrina New Orleans” at the American Studies Association conference in October in Philadelphia, on a multidisciplinary panel with Ann Holder (an historian at the Pratt Institute), Miriam Greenberg (Urban Studies, UC Santa Cruz), and Lynelle Thomas (American Studies, UMass Boston). We are currently working on developing an edited volume from our panel, "New Orleans, USA?: Racism, Science, Hurricane Katrina and the Abandonment of a Global City.” I was a panelist in early 2007, with city planners and architects, on a panel convened as part of Pratt’s “Shrinking Cities” exhibition called “Is New Orleans a Shrinking City?” New Orleans
is also an important part of my teaching. In spring 2006, my undergraduate and graduate level Eco-Metropolis course addressed the ecological and social aspects of cities, and we spent five weeks on New Orleans ecology and social and environmental history. Port Cities, a course I taught collaboratively with an archaeologist in the spring 2007 semester, dealt with the ecology of coastal cities, and New Orleans was once again a case study. I have also begun forging a collaboration with John McLachlan at Tulane’s Center for Bioenvironmental Research, in the CBR’s efforts to include sustainability and environmental concerns into the post-Katrina recovery of New Orleans.
III.
• Environmental sustainability and sustainable urban planning
• The role of “green” design and architecture in promoting habitat sustainability.
One of my main academic interests is environmental sustainability, an interest that evolved out of my collaborations with colleagues at the Pratt Institute in New York City. As one of the founders of a cross-disciplinary group, Sustainable Pratt, I developed many courses and academic initiatives with colleagues form Architecture, Urban Planning, Industrial and Interior Design. Most of my work focuses on sustainability issues in cities, specifically strategies for incorporating sustainability into every aspect of urban planning. As one example, in fall 2006 I spoke about green roofs and biodiversity in New York City at a conference on Biodiversity in the Greater New York Area at the American Museum of Natural History. I have been asked to participate in many conferences in New York over the past four years (see my CV for details of my presentations) to discuss the role of science, architecture and design in sustainability. Another significant component of my sustainability work involves helping academics to promote and incorporate sustainability into higher education curricula, via organizing workshops and panels on sustainability education at forums such as the 2004 and 2005 Eco-Metropolis conferences in New York’s CUNY Graduate Center. Sustainability is one of my main interests in my own teaching: I have developed many graduate and undergraduate level courses on aspects of sustainability (see sample syllabi included with my application materials). I am currently talking to academic publishers about the possibility of writing a college textbook about ecological sustainability, and have received enthusiastic responses.
IV.
• Urban estuaries: ecology, water quality, carbon cycling and food web dynamics, and resource management.
• Developing environmental and water pollution indicators that will inform us as to the human impacts on marine and aquatic environments.
• The effect of climate change on coastal urban areas and coastal ecosystems.
My field and laboratory research centers in and around urban estuaries and coastal environments. For my Ph.D. research at UC Berkeley, I investigated carbon cycling, food web dynamics, human and natural impacts, and paleoecology in San Francisco Bay. Using benthic foraminifera, marine protists, as my research tool, I looked at modern and fossil populations and what they could tell us about how the bay has changed due to natural versus human causes. I am currently engaged in the third year of research collaboration with Andrew Juhl and O. Roger Anderson at Columbia’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory, looking at carbon cycling in microbial food webs in the Hudson River. We currently have a proposal being reviewed for NSF funding (submitted in August 2007 to the Biological Oceanography program) to support this research. My interests in urban coastal environments, urban estuaries, and vulnerable urban wetlands also link to my work on post-Katrina New Orleans (outlined below).
Having worked extensively with marine microorganisms, I am interested in developing methods for using these taxa, protists in particular, as environmental indicator species. Marine protists are extremely abundant and reproduce quickly, and thus their populations respond quickly to environmental stresses and could be valuable tools for identifying issues such as eutrophication, hypoxia, and the presence of toxics.
My undergraduate degree is in Marine Fisheries Biology. Before graduate school I spent several years working in the fields of marine resource management, and doing water quality research on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, which is surrounded by salt marsh wetland habitat that is highly vulnerable to constant development. I have done scientific research and community work in coastal communities in the Northeast and Canada from Newfoundland to Maine to Cape Cod. Thus, my coastal work in both urban and rural areas seeks to integrate environmental science and resource management with community and economic development, and an acknowledgement of the linkages between the environment, culture, and economics.
Marisa Santos Matias
(4/07)- I have turned to social studies of science for my MA, where I developed a research on scientific, technical and health controversies and public mobilization over the sitting of hazardous waste management facilities. I am currently a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies, where I am an active member of the Group on Studies of Science, Technology and Society. I am also a PhD candidate at the School of Economics, Coimbra University.
- My research interests include: sociology of the environment and public health, social studies of science, and public policy and participation.
I have been involved in the international project "Reinventing Social Emancipation", directed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos and hosted by Coimbra University, Portugal. This project involved six countries (Brazil, Colombia, India, Mozambique, Portug al and South Africa), and was funded by the MacArthur Foundation. Since then, I became a member of the research teams of "Analysing Public Accountability Procedures in Contemporary European Contexts" (PubAcc) project and "Science, Technology and Government in Europe" (STAGE) and "Identifying Trends in European Medical Space" (ITEMS) networks, all EU-funded. I am currently a member of "Researching Inequalities through Science and Technology (ResIST)", an international EU-funded project which involves teams from Europe (UK, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Malta and Turkey), Africa (Mozambique and South Africa) and the USA.*I have also participated as a trainer in advanced training courses on "Environment, Risk and Participation", "Law and Citizenship", "Methodologies of Participation in Areas related to Science and Technology", and "Public participation, Rights and Access to Justice".
- As a civic and environmental activist, I have been a member of the board of Pro Urbe, a citizen organization based in Coimbra, over the last years.
The research I am developing for my PhD focuses on the relations between health, environment and sustainability, namely through their enactment in situations of public controversy. Over the last years, I have done some work on related issues, namely on environmental conflicts and scientific controversies in Portugal in relation to waste management policies. Within this project, my attention is focused on the relations between environmental and health problems. Thus, considering the analysis of some conflicts over waste management and treatment, this project aims to contribute to answering the following questions: How is the relation between an environmental problem and a health problem constructed? How to incorporate health as a structuring dimension of sustain able development strategies and policies?Selected Publications
Mary McGuire
(4/08) My thesis, “Tobacco Culture and Environmental Consciousness: Ecological Change, Race, and Gender, Prince Edward County, Virginia, 1850-1870,” examined through an agroecological approach the myths and the realities of soil exhaustion as this ecological process relates to the developing environmental ethics of tobacco farmers of Prince Edward County, Virginia. An analysis of the Agricultural Schedules included in the Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth U. S. Censuses demonstrated that significant change in land use and, just as importantly, land cover occurred in the county between 1850 and 1880. Issues of gender and race figured prominently in my thesis. The personal correspondence of the planter families revealed that the separation of productive and reproductive roles by gender and race influenced the way in which the men and women living and working on the tobacco farms of Prince Edward County developed different ways of knowing and understanding the natural world in which they lived. The analysis of biological and social reproduction on the tobacco farms, as it applies to ecology, modes of production, and worldviews, suggested that contests for power are not only those between indigenous and invading cultures but also those between men and women who vie for power within the same environment. With the transition from slave labor to wage labor from 1861 into the 1870s, the relationship of white men and women and African American men and women to the rural landscape changed, thus creating a diverse, dynamic environmental ethic among the tobacco farmers of Prince Edward County, Virginia.The completion of my thesis represents the completion of the first leg of a long term intellectual inquiry into the unique aspects of the societies and cultures of the tobacco growing regions around the world. I am in the process of expanding my thesis research to write an environmental history that encompasses all of the counties in Virginia’s Old Tobacco Belt. I plan to use this bioregional study as the cornerstone of a comparative dissertation that investigates the cultural requirements of tobacco plants and soils as well as the social and cultural histories of the people who grow tobacco. Bioregional histories study the continuance of particular human societies and cultures that inhabit distinct places within larger regions of the geographic regions despite the forces of change within those larger regions. In other words, bioregional historians not only study the ways in which human society alters the environment, but also how society adapts to diverse environmental conditions. In addition to the Old Tobacco Belt of Virginia and North Carolina, other tobacco growing regions are located in China, Brazil, and parts of Africa. In each of these geographic regions the soils, the pests, the types of tobacco grown, and the labor conditions differed thus presenting a complex environmental history of tobacco and the people who grow it.
This larger project, I believe, will be well suited for digital history project for use by both environmental science and environmental history educators at the high school and undergraduate levels.
Pat Munday
(4/06)Currently researching a book with the working title Clark Fork Revival: Cleaning up America's Largest Superfund Site. For more than a century, copper smelting and mining activities polluted air, land, and water in the Upper Clark Fork River Basin of western Montana with arsenic, heavy metals, and acid mine waste. Today, this region is the largest Super fund area in the United States, with three major contiguous sites taking in one of Montana's largest cities, several smaller towns, a huge toxic lake, a major dam site, and about 150 stream miles. The public and political process of selecting remedies for these Superfund sites is nearly over, with the last Record of Decision slated for completion early in 2006. This proposal focuses on the selection of remedies at eight sites within the project area. It will discover, describe, and assess the role of activist scientists, grass roots organizations, and local culture in the social negotiation of Superfund remedy.
- Historiography Instructor and Steering Committee Member with "Teaching American History" institutes, 2003-2005, a Department of Education funded program with the Anaconda School District, Montana. This first TAH program is followed with an application for a second program ab out the history of technology, environmental change, and sense of place in the Pacific Northwest.
- Helped plan, coordinate and facilitate sessions at the Arctic Grayling Symposium: Arctic Grayling Recovery--Working Together for a New Future, August 2005, in Wisdom, Montana. Hosted by the Big Hole River Foundation to address endangered species status of Arctic grayling in the Big Hole River. Scientific forums included fisheries biologists from British Columbia, Alberta, Alaska, and Montana. A series of public forums addressed issues of importance to ranchers, anglers, and the general conservation community.
- Co-grant writer and co-project director of three Trout Unlimited projects for environmental restoration in German Gulch, a watershed heavily damaged by historic placer mining. 2002-2005. Total funding secured $1.27 million.
- Governor's appointee to and charter member of the Uppe r Clark Fork Basin Remediation and Restoration Education Advisory Council and chair of Education Sub-committee, 1998-2002. The Council advises Governor and takes leadership role in encouraging public involvement, promoting educational activities, and developing policy involving the State of Montana's $215 million settlement for damages to natural resources caused by a century of mining and smelting activities.
Selected publications- Entry for "Science, History of," in New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (Charles Scribner's Sons, 2004): Volume 5, pp. 2182-2188. This summary includes an overview about the emergence of environmental history within the history of science.
- "'A millionaire couldn't buy a piece of water as good:' George Grant & the Conservation of the Big Hole Watershed," M ontana Magazine of Western History 52 (2002): 20-37. This article is about the role of a grassroots environmentalist in galvanizing river conservation and preservation.
- Montana's Last Best River: The Big Hole and its People (The Lyons Press, 2001). This popular press book is a history of place and how generations of people have used and shaped the land.
- "Politics by Other Means: Justus von Liebig and the German translation of John Stuart Mill's Logic," British Journal for the History of Science 31 (1998): 403-18. As the title implies, this article is about the practical use of science and philosophy to change society.
Selected coursesAs a professor with a public college that emphasizes undergraduate education, I teach 3-4 courses per semester. Some of the courses I teach on an annual b asis include: Technology & Society; Politics of Technical Decisions; History of Technology; and Technology, Communication, and Culture.
Websites
João Arriscado Nunes
(4/06)Selected Publications
Available at http://www.ces.fe.uc.pt/investigadores/cv/joao_arriscado_nunesen.php
JoAnn Oravec
Jeremy Price
(4/07)I am currently a PhD student at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College in the Science and Technology Education program of the Department of Curriculum and Instruction. I also hold degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Education (EdM in Technology in Education) and Brandeis University (BA in Anthropology).
I am also a graduate Research Assistant at the Urban Ecology Institute, where I am helping to develop, evaluate, and research a capstone ecological science curriculum specifically designed for urban high school students funded by the National Science Foundation. Through this curriculum development process, we are working to:
My research interests include the dialogue and interactions in and around the curriculum during the curriculum development process, and how providing opportunities for activism engages learners in science learning and connects students to their communities. Furthermore, I am interested in exploring the roles emerging technologies -- such as wikis, blogs, information networks, social media, and social mapping -- can play in these dialogues and interactions.
Previously, I have worked as Learning and Media Specialist at CAST, an educational non-profit research and development organization focused on creating learning environments to accommodate a diversity of learners, especially those individuals with disabilities. I have also worked as Education Technology Coordinator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. In 2007, I was named "Environmentalist of the Year" by the Waltham (Massachusetts) Land Trust for my work with the community and the Waltham city government to protect the woods on Jericho Hill, the largest undeveloped privately-owned tract of land in the city.
Homepage
Erich Schienke
(4/07)bio on blog
Since 1994, my empirical research in environmental science and political processes has covered issues such as toxic remediation of decommissioned U.S. military bases; mapping breast cancer and environmental exposure to toxins; toxic release inventory policy; applications of participatory GIS; China's development and greening policies; China's capacity in environmental/ecological sciences and civil society; the ethical dimensions of climate change; and, most recently, regional carbon modeling, mitigation, and adaptation. My dissertation, "Greening the Dragon: Environmental Imaginaries in the Science, Technology, and Governance of Contemporary China," focuses on the processes involved in the production of information-knowledge in the attempt to define and then manage crucial elements of China's environment. In the thesis, I developed new modes for analyzing how these processes are situated within the often conflicting contexts of China's already deteriorated environmental conditions; efforts to increase capacity in ecological and environmental science, monitoring, and regulation; rapidly developing economy; and growing impacts on and from global systems.
In my own thesis, postdoc, and ongoing work, I am dedicated to researching further and providing better analyses as to how environmental knowledge is produced, prioritized, and communicated between scientists, policy makers, and the public. Geopolitically, my interest in these questions remains situated in contemporary China. Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pennsylvania State University's Rock Ethics Institute and a Lecturer in the Science, Technology and Society Program. At the Rock Ethics Institute, I work under the direction of Nancy Tuana on two projects, namely, the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change (EDCC) initiative, and a research project, supported by a grant from the NSF, concerning the training of ethics to environmental science graduate students. In the Spring term, I will be teaching an undergraduate course for the STS program (STS 200) titled, "Critical Issues in Science, Technology, and Society." I have also prepared a course syllabus titled "Global Environmental Change: Practice, Policy, and Discourse." Extending from my work at the Rock Ethics Institute, I plan to continue to teach some variation of the NSF funded ethics modules project, where a wide variety ethics modules are currently being developed and distributed as a means to integrate ethics training into graduate education in the environmental sciences. The ten modules cover topics such as the responsible conduct of research, benefit-cost analysis, data analysis, sustainability, and participatory research.
In thinking about graduate training in Earth Systems Science, I recently joined together with a group of natural and social scientists working on urban and regional carbon management issues. Extending from this collaboration, I recently co-authored a paper with Penelope Canan for Carbon Balance Management titled, "Responsibility, Opportunity, and Vision for Higher Education in Urban and Regional Carbon Management." Whereas, the Amsterdam Declaration of 2001 called for an ethical framework for global stewardship and strategies for Earth System management, and a new system of global environmental science known as Earth Systems Science,'' we call for programmatic innovations in institutions of higher education in their reward structures such that they facilitate and promote transdisciplinary carbon management research and education for global environmental citizenship and ethical leadership.'' (Canan and Schienke 2006) Following from the suggestions in this paper and in my own research, I am interested in continuing to think about how education in the environmental sciences can be improved to produce better multi-disciplinary researchers who are competent in recognizing ethical issues.
Peter Taylor
(4/07)I joined the Critical and Creative Thinking (CCT) Program in the Graduate College of Education (GCOE) at UMass Boston in the fall of 1998 and have been enjoying the challenges of teaching experienced educators, other mid-career professionals, and prospective K-12 teachers. Working in the CCT Program (which I directed/coordinated from 1999-2004) also provides opportunities to promote reflective practice in ways that extend my contributions to ecology and environmental studies (ES) and social studies of science and technology (STS). In those fields I focus on the complexity of, respectively, ecological or environmental situations and the social situations in which the environmental research is undertaken. Both kinds of situation, I argue, can be characterized in terms of unruly complexity or "intersecting processes" that cut across scales, involve heterogeneous components, and develop over time. These cannot be understood from an outside view; instead positions of engagement must be taken within the complexity. Knowledge production needs to be linked with planning for action and action itself in an ongoing process so that knowledge, plans, and action can be continually reassessed in response to developments -- predicted and surprising alike. In this spirit, ES, STS, and critical pedagogy/reflective practice have come together for me in a project of stimulating researchers to self-consciously examine the complexity of their social situatedness so as to change the ways they address the complexity of ecological and socio-environmental situations. Through collaborations in and beyond the GCOE. I also seek to promote a vision of critical science and environmental education that extends from improving the teaching of scientific concepts and methods to involving citizens in community-based research. (* In 2004 I became director of the Program in Science, Technology and Values.) Recently, I have begun to take these interests in a new direction through historical and sociological analysis of social epidemiological approaches that address the intersections of environment, health, and development.
This project had its beginnings in environmental and social activism in Australia which led to studies and research in ecology and agriculture. I moved to the United States to undertake doctoral studies in ecology, with a minor focus in STS. Subsequently I combined scientific investigations with interpretive inquiries from the different disciplines that make up STS, my goal being to make STS perspectives relevant to life and environmental students and scientists. Critical thinking and critical pedagogy became central to my intellectual and professional project as I encouraged students and researchers to contrast the paths taken in science, society, education with other paths that might be taken, and to foster their acting upon the insights gained. Bringing critical analysis of science to bear on the practice and applications of science has not been well developed or supported institutionally, and so I continue to contribute actively, to new collaborations, programs, and other activities, new directions for existing programs, and collegial interactions across disciplines.
Further elaboration of this work and details of specific products
Lee Worden
(2/07)Selforganization, collective dynamics, and transformation. Ecological evolution, community structure,
and dynamics. Cultural change, consensus formation, democracy, cooperation. Critical analysis of
scientific discourses. Ways of facilitating global justice, equality, solidarity and sustainability.