Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

25 Jan

Inauguration Day, Resilience, and American Society

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

I must admit that I’m feeling very patriotic today.  It’s a bit of a hangover from the Inauguration earlier this week.  Nothing that follows has a blatant right vs. left political agenda, so I apologize in advance for any looking for a fight over that.  I’m sure that there will still be plenty to pick apart.  Again, this isn’t a rigorous scientific study, but I hope that it’s a thoughtful editorial.  For my international friends, it will have a bit of flag-waving.  So be it.

I am fortunate enough to be in the midst of a project on how to enhance the resilience of ecosystem services with other Resilience Alliance Young Scholars.  For those that don’t know, ecosystem services are provisions and services supplied to humankind from ecosystems, generally split into provisioning services (food, wood, etc), regulating services (erosion control, flood mitigation, etc), supporting services (crop pollination, nutrient cycles), and cultural services (recreation, religious use, etc).  In a paper recently published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, we identified 7 principles seen as enhancing the resilience of ecosystem services (see Biggs et al. 2012. “Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37:3.1-28. for the details).  For present purposes, I’ll skip over formal definitions of resilience and, to the chagrin of many of my colleagues, let’s just equate this with sustainability for the moment.  These 7 principles are:

  1. Maintain diversity and redundancy,
  2. Manage connectivity,
  3. Manage slow variables and feedbacks,
  4. Foster an understanding of complex adaptive systems,
  5. Encourage learning and experimentation,
  6. Broaden participation, and
  7. Promote polycentric governance systems.

If you are interested in what these mean in more detail and getting past the jargon, please contact me and/or read the full article.

For now, let’s return to Inauguration Day.  Clearly the (These) United States face a large number of challenges.  Several of these were mentioned in the various speeches, responses, and talking head debates from both sides of the fence.  Without prioritizing, these include a slowly growing economy, climate change, a violent world, a lagging educational system, a gridlocked political system, and so on.  However, if we think about the principles above as mechanisms for sustainability and long-enduring social-ecological systems, I feel enthusiastic about the future of this country.  In particular, the United States, by its design, is built around diversity and having a unique blend of peoples, cultures, and ways of thinking.  Clearly this often creates divides and dissension (see immigration reform).  It also creates opportunities and fosters new ideas.  We have a society, a political system and a private (and third) sector focused on learning and experimenting.  This is the America of innovation and entrepreneurship – in both the private sector and public.  Our society engenders as well as depends upon broad participation.  Putnam’s thoughts on social capital aside, I remain steadfastly optimistic about this as well.  Finally, the Federal system of government, the number of collaborative governance arrangements that I encounter in my regular research, and the vitality of the NGO community nationwide, provides evidence of polycentric governance systems of great breadth and depth.

Granted, there are a great many problems to fix, and the work is never-ending.  The US faces great difficulties, particularly in understanding and responding to complexity (witness the responses to climate change), but I believe these United States are, were, and will remain resilient.

8 Jan

The Stresses of Academia?

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

Recently, CNBC put out a report on the ‘least stressful jobs’ (found here http://www.cnbc.com/id/100349332).  Number one on the list – University Professor.  Since then, my Facebook and Twitter accounts have exploded with comments about this absurdity.  Several referenced the following blog entry:  http://factsandotherfairytales.com/2013/01/04/the-least-stressful-job-for-2013-a-real-look-at-being-a-professor-in-the-us/

This follow-up piece hits on a lot of the key refutations of the CNBC study.  CNBC clearly misunderstands what university faculty do for a living – that research is a huge part of it, that the demands on our time can be overwhelming, and that the work doesn’t stop with the end of the semester.  These points, and many of those raised in the responses from my colleagues, resonate with me.  However, there are a number of points that deserve to be revisited.  Some of this has to do with the number of academics that haven’t spent much time outside of academia.  With that, I’d like to focus on two aspects of the debate that have gone undocumented – one in the CNBC study and one from the rebuttals.

Other aspects of academia that the CNBC study doesn’t grasp include the two biggest stresses in the profession – finding a job and securing tenure.  It’s well documented that there is an overabundance of academics.  Is it because it’s less stressful?   Perhaps, but I’ll get back to this in a moment.  With more doctoral candidates than traditional university professorships, we often end up competing for positions with (literally) hundreds of other candidates for a single spot.  Clearly, there is competition for jobs in many fields, but few have such barriers for relatively low paying entry-level positions.  Similarly, academics are forced to go to the openings.  Fat chance for those desiring to live in specific locations, and for those in a two academic household – good luck with those job searches.  Additionally, the year to year fluctuation on the number of openings in a given research area can vary enormously.  Because of this, we see huge numbers of qualified candidates stuck in adjunct positions, post-docs, or working as barristas.  This is the starving actor model of career development, with a dozen years of university work on top.  Universities continue to take advantage of this through an increasing reliance on low-paying part-timers with no benefits.  But that’s a subject for another column.  Once we find a position, the tenure clock starts ticking.  This is an up or out mentality, similar to that in consultancies, law partnerships, and investment banks.  It’s hard-core, cutthroat, and, yes, stressful.  The issues with tenure are ripe for their own column.

At the same time, the academic response to this perceived insult fails to understand a few things about stress and the job itself.  Once we obtain a tenure-track position, the CNBC study isn’t that far off.  Yes, the time requirements are excessive, and the expectations are high.  And there is a U-shaped curve for education and pay (more education can lead to declining salaries).  But let’s look at the job in more detail.  First, we have more flexibility than the vast majority of jobs.  Going in at 10 or leaving at 4.  Working at home or taking time off for holiday breaks or summers traveling.  Yes, I know that most are working a tremendous amount through these time periods, as well as late into the night and early in the morning.  But guess what…so are most other professions.  We have the ability to work around our personal schedules a lot more than most.  We can travel and work remotely, have the summers to pursue our own independent research, can secure grants to pay for it, are expected to travel for conferences, workshops, and meetings.

Next, let’s talk about “stress”.  Much academic stress is self-imposed.  Reading yet another paper or writing yet another article.  Likewise, the deadlines are often self-imposed.  Part of our challenge is that, as academics, our minds never shut off.  Face it, many in the profession have their own closet neuroses driving them to succeed.  Try to find an academic without a bit of OCD sometime.  But this is self-imposed and personal, aside from the job.

The work is what drives us into the field.  Most of us love what we research.  We read this stuff for fun.  If we work too long, toward crazy self-imposed deadlines, we’re doing it, in part, for the love of what we do.  Let’s contrast this with “stressful” jobs.  I’ve worked driving a lumber truck, on an assembly line in a foundry, as a mechanical engineer, and as a business consultant.  These all had their own stresses.  Businesspeople face the stress of million dollar deals, ticked off clients, and cutthroat competition.  Manual labor faces the day-to-day stress of working their tails off to squeak out a living.  Medical workers clearly have life or death situations by the minute.  And let’s not even discuss dangerous jobs – soldiers, fishers, foresters, and so on.  That’s stress.  Those revisions that I’d hoped to submit this week…not so much.

2 Jan

A Research Subject that I know only as a commonsense layperson

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: .

I had a long discussion with my neighbor yesterday, a 40 year NRA member.  I realized that we had a great deal in common regarding gun regulations.  He is sick of watching innocent people die in random acts of violence.  I agree and think that we may have crossed a tipping point in which people realize that our current trajectory does not lead any of us to the society that we idealize.

The Gun Supporters Cartoon

Later that day, I saw a Facebook note with a poster showing 25 Good Guys on one side and an equal number of Bad Guys on the other side.  Both sides had guns.  The second picture showed good guys with no guns and bad guys with guns.  The third caption said, “What part of gun control don’t you understand”.  The implication and clear message for decades has been that the criminals are going to break the law anyway, so we must defend ourselves.

What I realized is that the pictures show one of the ways that the two sides of gun control continue to talk past each other.

A More Accurate (Yet Still Cartoon) Version of Our Society

What sensible gun control advocates desire is not to eliminate all guns, to stop hunting and target shooting, or to make everyone defenseless.  But let me paint a different picture from the one above.  First, let’s not make the good guys and bad guys equal in number.  I truly don’t think that this is the society we live in.  What should it be 2 to 1, 10 to 1, 100 to 1?  Let’s say 4 good guys for every bad guy, which seems absurdly low to me.  At this point, everyone still has their gun.  Now we have 25 bad guys with guns and 100 good guys with guns.  But this still isn’t a fair picture of society.  Let’s add in the “innocents” – maybe we just want to include kids in this category.  Roughly 25% of our society in the US is under 18.  So let’s add 25 kids with no guns to the “Good” side of the picture.  This seems to be a closer view of our society than the original poster.

A Reasonable Starting Vision of Gun Control

Now, let’s start with our poster with 125 good folks on one side (100 with guns) and 25 bad guys on the other side (also with guns).  Let’s say that there are some restrictions put in place.  At this point I won’t enter the debate on what this should be – maybe something with assault rifles, automatics, large-capacity clips, whatever.  Let’s assume at minimum that people will be able to keep their hunting stock, sport-shooting guns, etc.  But let’s say that this reduces levels of gun ownership hugely, say 50%, which I don’t think anyone is actually discussing.  Now the good guys have 50 guns.  The bad guys ignore the rules, but maybe it’s a little harder for them.  Instead of 50% reductions, there is a 5% reduction.  The bad guys only lose 1 gun.  Clearly, the original vision of the gun supporters is untenable.  “Good Guys” still outnumber the bad guys.  And this doesn’t count law enforcement officials at all at this point.

Does this Achieve Anything?

This isn’t my area of expertise, and I’ve done no research beyond reading the papers occasionally.  However, it doesn’t seem to make the bad guys more powerful – the leading argument from the NRA, from Charlie Daniels “Take ‘em away from the criminals first, and I’ll gladly give you mine”, and others.

But what else does it do?  If the statistics are correct, accidental fatalities are 4-5 times higher in homes with guns.  Just removing some of these weapons actually helps.  Regarding those concerned with preserving the 2nd Amendment, I pulled a citation from an article by Gregg Easterbrook, a columnist for a number of publications and no left-winger “The Second Amendment creates an individual right of gun ownership, including an individual right of lawful handgun ownership, but also stipulates that gun ownership be “well-regulated.”  Note, this is a Supreme Court decision by a conservative court.  I agree with my neighbor, we should be able to have sensible gun control in place without fearing that our government is going to convert to a totalitarian state.   Concerns for a Mao-type communist take-over or a Nazi-style fascist state seem to warrant ridicule in their absurdity.

There are a number of other points from both sides that I don’t raise here.  The only comments that I wanted to raise are that:  1) it seems simple to take action here that will protect our kids without leading to a loss of all guns and 2) the argument about leaving innocents everywhere defenseless to a massive criminal onslaught doesn’t hold water.  Finally, I’ll freely admit that this isn’t my area of research or expertise, but let’s not pretend that most of what we hear and read in the media, on Facebook, or written online in general is either.

I hope that I don’t lose any friends or relatives because of this…

14 Dec

A Short Riff on Open Access Journals

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

Over the past few months, my good friend and co-editor of the International Journal of the Commons, Frank van Laerhoven has spoken and written eloquently about open access scientific journals in a number of places.  This link (http://www.oastories.org/2011/09/netherlands-journal-international-journal-of-the-commons/#more-220) goes to an interview with Frank on the subject.

For the present purposes, I wanted to make a few comments for a broader readership that may not know what I’m mean by open access publications.  I’m referring to online academic journals that are available free of charge.  If your child is working on a school project, try these.  If your interested in a specific area, check them out.  There are many available.  So on to my comments…  

First, open access scientific publications are growing rapidly.  These are different from blogs, such as this one, and other unreviewed web sources.  Open access journals are often peer reviewed to the same or higher standards than print journals.  IJC is currently tracked by Scopus (the European academic journal accreditor) and will hopefully be tracked by ISI (the American version) soon.  All of our articles are reviewed by 3 experts in the field in a double-blind process.  So if there are no differences in quality to traditional journals, what are the differences?

There are two main ones in my mind.  First, it continues to baffle me why journals still force publications into an annual print cycle of monthly, quarterly, or semi-annual publication.  The internet allows us to immediately share the latest breaking scientific advancements as soon as they have been reviewed.  It also provides a mechanism to have others comment and respond – either in a reviewed format or in a more public forum – in manners that are missing or veerrry slow in print versions.  

Second, our journal’s readership, authors, and editorial board are scattered globally.  Many are in developing countries.  One of the major issues with traditional publishing formats is that journal subscription is geared toward libraries.  As a result, individual subscriptions and access to individual articles is prohibitively expensive.  If individuals don’t have access to a Research One caliber library, they often have no access to the publications, electronically or in print.  This is unacceptable for us, given our topic.  Instead, we offer open access freely to anyone with internet access.  In addition, authors retain copyrights to their work, as opposed to the copyrights in traditional journals where authors and reviewers alike often work as indentured servants to the publishing houses.

The downside to this free access, is that we require a publication fee for authors.  Through volunteerism (editors and reviewers), low-cost (and somewhat minimalist) copy-editing, and minimal overhead, we can keep the charges to $15/page.  A standard article comes in at around $300.  This contrasts with other pay-for-publication journals of closer to $1000.  We know that this is a challenge, but granting agencies are quite open to covering these costs.  We also try to offset these expenses for developing country submissions.

My view is that open access journalism will continue to grow at an exponential pace.  The traditional journals continue to be under attack for profiteering off the hard work of others and offer flawed output.  I don’t see them going away entirely, but I’m optimistic for the future of our journal and other open access offerings.  Please support us and see what is available at:  http://thecommonsjournal.org 

20 Nov

Cross-scale Governance of Environmental Dilemmas – Part 1

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

I have been fortunate enough to be active in three separate endeavors to better understand the governance of natural resources across multiple scales and their interactions.  The project furthest along is the SES-MAD group (Social-Ecological Systems Meta-Analysis Database).  This project started as an idea with Michael Cox (the lead and database developer) to write a paper that would scale up the main principles of common-pool resource management.  It would take concepts developed in the study of small-scale projects and see if the same variables necessary for sustainability at the local level were still appropriate at larger spatial scales.  So much for a paper.  The project team now has 14 members and has been working over the past 18 months to develop a database, train team members, and begin the coding of cases across a number of resource areas (protected areas, fisheries, forests, international rivers, and pollution).  The training, reliability checks, and database building efforts are complete, and we are actively researching cases to populate our study.

We have recently submitted a grant proposal and are working on a special feature for publication in the August issue of International Journal of the Commons.  We plan to add members to our research team in the coming year.  Please let me know if you’re interested.  We plan to work on this project for the foreseeable future.  

Over the next couple months, I’ll share some of the key findings already emerging from the early stages of the project.  I’ll also share some of the interesting findings on a few of the cases that I’ve been working on personally – notably the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park and the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer.  Stay tuned…

21 Sep

Upcoming Paper on Ecosystem Services and Resilience

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

Another collaborative paper now available is entitled “Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services” (see full citation at the bottom).  This is a paper (the wonderful Oonsie Biggs as lead author) that the Resilience Alliance Young Scholars network has had accepted to the Annual Review of Environment and Resources to be in print in November.  It’s currently available via the Annual Review’s online service.

The paper provides a great overview of key concepts inherent to resilience thinking and working toward sustainability.  For those interested in the academic literature on the resilience of social-ecological systems, this provides an easy entry point to learn about several key components of resilience – the need for diversity (social and ecological), the importance of slow variables (and what that means), taking a complex adaptive systems approach (and what that means), and several others.

It also provides a nice means of taking a first look at ecosystem services and what these are.  The paper avoids direct discussions of trade-offs among ecosystem services (like agriculture for food vs. biofuels or setting aside land for conservation vs. for provision), but these conflicts are outlined in detailed in another paper (“The Importance of Social Drivers in the Resilient Provision of Ecosystem Services” in Global Environmental Change).  

The full citation is Biggs, R. et al. 2012. “Toward Principles for Enhancing the Resilience of Ecosystem Services”, Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37:3.1-28.

11 Sep

Cool new paper on ecological modeling

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized.

Earlier this year, three collaborators (Kenny Salau, Jacopo Baggio, and Marco Janssen) and I published a paper on modeling large-scale conservation.  Rather, the paper shows the results of an agent-based model of two species (predator and prey) that move across a simple fragmented landscape.  To put into simple English, we throw a bunch of predators (think lion) and prey (think impala) randomly across a landscape.  In this landscape, they can stay on a patch of habitat or move to another one.  The predators move if there aren’t enough prey around.  The prey move if there are too many predators or too many other prey.  We vary the ease of moving between the patches (their level of connectivity).  We also vary a number of other parameters of the model to see what happens if we look at different types of animals, different habitats, etc.

Basically what we see is that the goal isn’t only to continually increase connectivity.  This goes against some popular conservation thinking, where more is always better.  Instead, we know that there may be problems as we increase connectivity.  These problems may come from invasive species, the spread of disease, etc.  But they may also be internal dynamics from the system.  For instance, at high levels of connectivity, the populations of the separate patches may start to act like one big patch.  Local die-offs may lead to system-wide extinctions.  This is a central challenge to conservationists.

At this point, the model is purely ecological, but the broader research program is about how conservation planners and land managers interact to facilitate connectivity on a patchy landscape.  We have recently finished a paper that is under review that describes the interactions of a manager and how they can influence this system.  More on that in the future.

The current paper is:

Salau, Kehinde, Michael Schoon, Jacopo Baggio and Marco Janssen. 2012. “Varying Effects of Connectivity and Dispersal on Interacting Species Dynamics”, Ecological Modeling 242: 81-91.

17 Aug

Recent publications – Understanding Disturbances

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized.

It’s been a productive year and a half, at least regarding publications on environmental issues and sustainability.  I thought that over the next couple months, I could start to regularly showcase some of the work that has recently been published.  I have four that are out already this year and another five in review, so I’ll start working through that list.  My goal is to give a short layperson synopsis.  If you want the abstract or full article, you can pull it from the publications section of my website or use the citation to look it up.

This first piece is on “disturbances” to social-ecological systems and was written with my good friend and collaborator, Michael Cox.  Basically, we note that most of the research that we rely on is discussion human-nature interactions as a system, but the researcher generally sets the boundaries for that system – a forest, a city, a country, an ecosystem, etc.  They then often want to understand its resilience, robustness, vulnerability, adaptive capacity, or sustainability in the face of a number of disturbances.  However, when discussing these disturbances the researchers tend to do one of two things.  Either they talk abstractly about some unknown disturbance or they talk about a specific set of disturbances that forms the heart of their research and/or concern.

What we tried to do was take a closer look at these disturbances and classify them in a useful way for further analysis.  Our goal is to talk about broad categories of system disturbances in a way that allows people (researchers, practitioners, institutional designers, etc) to make sense of what they are doing, what they hope to accomplish through their actions, and call to mind how and why they’ve defined the system that they have and what disturbances they expect to face.

The citation for this piece is:

Schoon, Michael L. and Michael E. Cox. 2012. “Understanding Disturbances and Responses in Social-Ecological Systems”. Society and Natural Resources 25(2): 141-155.

5 Jul

A Call for Big Thinking Social Scientists

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized.

I won’t go into lengthy details about the buffoons, like Senator Tom Coburn, that lament on the poor science coming out of NSF’s Social, Behavioral and Economics Directorate, the misguided efforts to rebalance the trillions of dollars of federal deficit on the $255 million SBE budget (roughly 0.02% of the budget for the mathematical inclined), or the need to better link basic and applied research (moving toward Pasteur’s Quadrant of use-inspired or actionable research, which I firmly believe and practice).

Instead, I’m curious about all the news regarding Higgs Boson over the past week.  This is very cool and interesting, the missing link in the Standard Theory and all that.  But my curiosity is the contrasting of this news with that of the previous paragraph.  The funding of Fermilabs, CERN, etc has taken place over the past 30 years and sums to hundreds of billions of dollars.  Don’t get me wrong…the science is exquisite and has a lot of potential benefits.  What I find disconcerting is that the social sciences are sweating a few millions, while the physicists are dreaming up $10 billion projects.  Is it because the Standard Theory is more important?  More important than understanding how and why people cooperate, why wars break out, how to better govern ourselves and resolve collective action dilemmas, understand the economic cycle, or any of the countless other challenges being confronted by social scientists?

I’m not putting the blame on the politicians who have already garnered their 10% approval ratings, although their myopic vision continues to amaze me.  I’m sure not denigrating the natural scientists for their grand ideas.  In this case, I think that a share of the blame needs to land on social scientists for not allowing themselves to dream big, to come up with $1 billion ideas, to push for the urgency to resolve many of the social challenges humanity faces, and for not working towards workable solutions.

12 Jun

Loss of a Leader and Inspiration

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized.

It’s times like this that I wish that I could really write.  In 2003, I left a career in business to “save the world”.  I wanted to work on environmental issues and try to make the world a better place.  The cynic in me wonders if I’ve actually done anything.  I thought that teaching would provide a multiplier effect through the education of energetic students.

It’s to my good fortune that when I entered academia smart people convinced me to go to Indiana University to study with Elinor Ostrom.  I wasn’t smart enough to see her brilliance until much later.  Even now I often realize that some of my good ideas are really notions that Lin wrote about (and that I read years ago) that I’m only now comprehending.  Over the coming days, I’m sure that I’ll hear and read a great deal about her scholarship, her leadership in the field, her successes, etc.  But I’d like to focus on a few other points about Lin, mainly about her as a mentor.

When I think back to my naive ideals about saving the world, I see that frequently the only place that academics make a difference is in weighing down library shelves.  Lin actually wrote things that policymakers and practitioners read and utilized.  When I think about my desire to inspire students, I see a teacher that was fully engaged all the time.  How she ever found the time (and patience) to read drafts of my early papers, I’ll never understand.  Most importantly, I think about her as a mentor – how she constantly reiterated that my work was important and needed to be heard, how she typically presented her work through the lens of all the great things that her students and collaborators did, as if she were simply along for the ride, how she always seemed positive, energetic, and truly alive.  These are the ongoing lessons that Lin has given me and countless others.

People often comment that the Workshop at Indiana is Lin and Vincent’s family.  Likewise, I feel that they are my family.  Lin is like my third grandmother.  She was a grandmother that would really lay down the hammer for not putting forth best effort, but she’d also be quick with a hug and a kind word as well.  Lin, I’m going to miss you.

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »