Posts Tagged ‘sustainability’

2 Apr

What do Prius drivers and drunk drivers have in common?

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

OK.  Let me start by saying I fully support fuel-efficient driving and I do not condone driving under the influence.  Let me also confess that I drive a Prius.  After buying the car, I noticed that all of its indicators on energy efficiency were causing me to alter my driving habits.  See the photos below:

consumption prius toyota-prius-display

These displays are great, and they succeed in their objective of making additional data readily at hand for the driver.  They also encourage drivers to act in ways that are more fuel efficient, and this is a great thing.  Yet like all positive change, this one comes with a few drawbacks.  The first is that all of the display work tends to draw the driver’s eyes from the road to the display.  This was the initial change that led me to think about how Prius drivers’ driving habits may be quite different than those of many other vehicles.  Of course, I can think of plenty of other activities that alter driving habits (texting, selecting music on usb connections, etc), so let’s not dwell on this too much.  It was an anecdotal observation and nothing more.  And we can think of technological solutions to this problem, like projecting onto the windshield, as many luxury cars do already.

However as I drove more, I started to see other issues – both good and bad – with driving based on this new information.  I began to display tendencies toward hypermiling behavior.  Hypermiling is adjusting your driving habits to achieve greater fuel economy.  We all do this to an extent, yet I am struck by the driving habits of hard-core hypermilers and how much some of these habits/tendencies resemble those of driving under the influence.  To see a great list of ways to increase your fuel efficiency through hypermiling, see http://ecomodder.com/forum/EM-hypermiling-driving-tips-ecodriving.php.

As you can see from this list, there are a number of habits that could lead to “irrational” driving or displays of driving resembling that of driving under the influence. From that list, I’ll make just a few comparisons.  First, the hypermilers talk about “target driving” or driving at a constant (low) level of fuel consumption.  This leads to slowing down and speeding up as you go up and down hills.  Such variable speed driving is a common symptom of a driver not “paying attention”.  Second, hypermilers often try to drive the minimum speed limit, rather than the maximum (or more), something problematic on many of our highways.  Third, the hypermilers suggest coasting to slow down and minimizing the use of brakes.  They also suggest when braking is needed, you should brake hard and later than normal.  All of these habits can lead to improving fuel economy.  However, they (and many other techniques) also resemble the sporadic driving behaviors of impaired drivers.

A few caveats… First, I see a great need to learn how to drive more fuel efficiently, and many of these techniques work and can make tremendous differences in fuel consumption.  Second, the website I refer to above also emphasizes safety and following traffic regulations, noting the trade-offs of safety inherent in some of their suggestions.  Third, there is a middle road between unsafe driving and being more conscientious of our driving decisions.  I’ve learned a lot about my own driving through experimenting with these techniques.  They are quite different from the racing and muscle car mentality that I grew up with.  In a future post, I’d like to look into automotive engineering breakthroughs.  I think that the true engineering breakthroughs are now coming on the efficiency front rather than on the speed/acceleration front.  But I’ll leave that alone for the moment.

Any thoughts from police and whether they see this phenomena as well?

13 Feb

Student Sustainability Consulting Projects

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

Now that the spring semester is in full stride, my Junior-level “Policy and Governance” class is once again engaged in a number of sustainability consulting engagements with local and state governmental agencies.  Student teams of 4 or 5 are working as consultants for government officials and responding to questions solicited from the agencies.  The projects include:

  • Helping Avondale research and set up a farmer’s market;

avondalefm

  • Creating a plan for Gilbert’s Water Conservation group to reduce commercial water consumption;

Gilbert water

  • Supporting Queen Creek’s efforts to have green waste pick up for its residents; and

QC landscape

  • Working with the Arizona State Forestry’s Urban and Community Forestry group on management of edible trees.

AZ Forestryoranges

In the coming weeks, I’ll provide more details about the projects and what the consultants are recommending. I’m very excited about these projects in terms of providing great experiential learning opportunities for the students, strengthening ties between the School of Sustainability and its community, and providing workable solutions to practitioners’ real issues.

 

24 Nov

Student-led Sustainability Science Video Journal

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

Recently I was filmed by some of ASU’s School of Sustainability graduate students regarding my research.  The interview became a part of their “Elevator Talks” series in the online video journal that they edit – the Sustainability Review (tSR), which is accessible at https://thesustainabilityreview.org/

tSR converted from a traditional journal format to a video format last year and publishes peer-reviewed science videos of sustainability research in an online format.  The goal is to make the science more accessible than many traditional forms of science communication.  This is particularly relevant as the challenges of sustainability science concern both the social and natural environment (the social-ecological systems that I so often mention).  However addressing these challenges requires changes in the societal drivers exacerbating these challenges, particularly within the Anthropocene.  Oftentimes, these changes require mobilization of the many.  Traditionally, science has not been successfully communicated or done an adequate job at increasing awareness of these dilemmas.  The science videos of tSR attempt to tackle these problems.  I encourage you to see what the students are working on.

 

 

 

29 Oct

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

It’s the time of year when the academic calendar starts to get long in the tooth, and I only occasionally have time to peek out from behind the curtain of campus.  When I did this recently, I realized that there were a few phrases that I use regularly in my teaching and research that seem commonplace to me, but my friends outside of academia had no idea what I was talking about.  This concerned me both because I was so out of touch but also because these seem, to my mind, to be crucially important concepts for today’s society.  The two phrases were the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration.  I remember having similar feelings several years ago when I referred to global climate change, and I was met with either blank stares or a “you mean global warming” question.  Happily, I generally hear global climate change today.  I hope that soon I won’t encounter blank stares when I mention the Anthropocene.

To begin, the Anthropocene captures the idea that human society has so fundamentally altered the planet that we are no longer in the geological epoch known as the Holocene but now in a new human-dominated epoch, the Anthropocene.  This is introduced by Will Steffen and others in a wonderful paper in Ambio in December 2007 (Steffen, W., Crutzen, P. J., & McNeill, J. R. (2007). The Anthropocene: are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature. Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment, 36(8), 614-621.). [Note:  there are references to the Anthropocene going back several more years to 2000, but this article is 1) one of the most highly cited and 2) a really good read.]

The basic idea is that in the Pre-Anthropocene period, humans didn’t have the capacity or the technological means to dominate nature (the Earth Systems).  This started to change in the Industrial Era (Stage 1 of the Anthropocene) from around 1800-1945.  With the onset of industrialization, the expansion of the use of fossil fuels, and the advancements of technology, we began to transform the earth on a global scale.  This shift from local effects to global was the key change.

Stage 2 of the Anthropocene (1945-present) is when things really started changing.  This is known as the Great Acceleration.  Pressure on the global environment intensified.  Often people talk about exponential growth in population or the global economy, but the Great Acceleration goes far beyond that, as shown in the figure below.

4-1

The figure is from the very informative website:  http://anthropocene.info/en/home.  This website explains these ideas in much more detail with great references for further, more specific questions.  This is interesting for a number of reasons.  Of importance to me are a number of questions about the ramifications for social-ecological systems and what this means for changing how we govern and collectively make decisions in such an environment – in a world being altered at an accelerating pace, with increasing connectivity around the global between people and their aggregate actions.  Ultimately, if humans are shaping the world in entirely new directions, can we also collectively decide the type of world that we want to live in and make decisions to get there.

I’ll end with one final comment.  There is a proposal to formally adopt the Anthopocene as a geological epoch.  It is currently under review with the International Commission on Stratigraphy, with a current target decision date of 2016.  The question is whether geologic formations would show a distinct demarcation for when the Anthropocene began.

8 Oct

Linking Complexity and Indigenous Knowledge

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , .

Let me begin by saying that I’m treading on ground that I’m only beginning to explore.  However, I find it fascinating to think about linking cutting edge science with traditional knowledge systems.  In a similar fashion to how ultra-conservative politicians often sounding like left-wingers and hyper-liberals sounding like John Birchers, it’s interesting to explore recent work in complex adaptive systems with very different ways of understanding the world.

Last week in my undergraduate course, Systems Thinking, my TA, Edward Dee, spoke about the Navajo knowledge system in which he was raised, and he began to clarify his own thinking about how many commonalities exist between complex adaptive systems and the Diné concept of hozho or the broader elements of Sa’ah Naagháí Bik’eh Hózh==n. (SNBH), which is often translated as “one’s journey of striving to live a long, harmonious life.”  Edward noted common features of these two world views – in taking a holistic perspective, linking the social and ecological as a single entity, seeing emergent behavior (as in the example of the Red Ant Way in Diné tradition or how individual interactions lead to a collective behavior unpredicted by the individual actions in complexity jargon), and drawing on multiple ways of understanding.

In following up on his class, I came across a blog posting on hozho that clearly explains what I was trying to comprehend in a straightforward layperson’s account.  The website is at resilience.org, which surprised me as I consider myself a scholar of Resilience Thinking.  The website draws on the academic literature of resilience but does so in the pursuit of “resilient communities” as part of the Post Carbon Institute.  I know very little about this organization at this point, but I did find the post on hozho to be very nice.  Click here to see the article:  http://www.resilience.org/stories/2011-02-14/desperately-seeking-hozho

Enjoy.  I’ll post more as I learn more about the topic.

19 Sep

Getting a job in the field of Sustainability

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

As a faculty member in a School of Sustainability (https://schoolofsustainability.asu.edu/), we spend a great deal of time preparing our students for life after college.  It’s a bit different than many other majors.  After all, everyone knows what an engineer or an accounting major can do.  But what does a sustainability graduate do?  What skills do they bring to the table?  I’ve written a great deal about the structure of our curriculum, the training our students receive, and how we prepare them for future employment in the past:

https://michaelschoon.com/2014/04/11/training-students-to-be-solutions-oriented/

https://michaelschoon.com/2014/01/08/a-new-application-of-problem-and-project-based-learning/

https://michaelschoon.com/2013/04/11/a-brief-comment-on-problem-and-project-based-learning-in-the-classroom/

In future posts, I’ll write a bit more on our learning objectives in the school and how we’ve structured curriculum along skill sets that we want our students to take away rather than the topical areas of many other lines of study (environmental or otherwise).  I’ll expand a bit on the New American University at that point as well (for now, see http://newamericanuniversity.asu.edu).

Instead, what I’d like to focus on is something of grave concern to our current students, their parents, and prospective students – job prospects upon graduation.  I’m very pleased to write that tracking all of our students from the first graduates until the past semester, we see the following:

  1. We have graduated 448 undergrad sustainability majors.
  2. Tracking most of those, 86% of them are employed with another 12% in graduate school.
  3. Of those employed, nearly 50% are in a sustainability position or a sustainability field.
  4. We have graduated 50 Master’s students and 13 PhDs.
  5. All of our grad students are employed.
  6. Of our Master’s students, 82% are employed in Sustainability.

So, if you are thinking about enrolling in Sustainability but are worried about finding a job, or if your friends and family are pushing you away from following your dreams toward a more “realistic” path, please take a look at the data first.  Great opportunities await.

For more information, see our Dean Chris Boone’s blog post (http://cgboone.personal.asu.edu/wordpress/) as well as the data on the School of Sustainability’s website, noted above.

25 Jul

Social-Ecological-Technical Systems

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

In the next month, I will kick off a new required course designed for ASU’s School of Sustainability’s incoming graduate students.  The course is called “Social-Ecological-Technical Systems”.   This literature based seminar course will guide students in developing an integrated approach/framework for thinking about complex adaptive systems in a sustainability context. While overviews of content, theories and methods from each of the SETS domains (Social, Ecological and Technical Systems) will be presented, the primary focus will be on how to bring these domains together. The goal is to enable students to explore the SETS interfaces (intersections) from an integrated perspective and to equip students to make those linkages in their research and in subsequent elective courses.

Translated into everyday language, we hope to get students thinking in a more holistic manner across a wider range of knowledge domains.  Most of the sustainability problems confronting humanity are not pure social, political, or economic in nature.  Nor are they environmental problems apart from human contribution and influence.  Likewise, the causes of and solutions to these problems are also not exclusively technical.  Rather, they are a conflagration of these three knowledge domains.  While we cannot expect anyone to be a master of all, we do hope to provide a baseline standard and recognition of how various fields inform our study of phenomena of interest and contribute to our understanding of them.  As such, the course will require reading seminal literature on a wide range of topics – biodiversity conservation, ecosystem services, environmental and natural resource economics, industrial ecology, and resilience/robustness and many others.  If you have suggestions for topics that we should be covering or readings that we should do, please let me know.  We have a planned syllabus, but this has great scope and potential as a grand experiment.

8 Jul

Business and Resilience

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

It seems that everyday a new article – popular or academic – comes out about Business and Sustainability.  All about supply-chain efficiencies, corporate social responsibility, the corporate role in sustainable development.  Of course, there is at least as much coming out about the problems, deficiencies, contradictions between capitalism and development and the prevailing neoliberal order.  I’ve recently read Dauvergne and Lister’s “Eco-Business: A Big Brand Takeover of Sustainability”, which does a nice job at introducing the arguing sides to each other – the language, the pros/cons of each position, and what seems to be working.  This post isn’t about this.  Rather my intent is to comment on a recent workshop at IBM-Montpellier as part of the Resilience 2014 conference.  Margot Hill Clarvis and Gail Whiteman coordinated an off-site session on Business and Resilience.  Following presentations from IBM on their corporate view of and response to Resilience and from speakers from the Resilience Alliance (Brian Walker) and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), we split into parallel sessions.

Margot and I hosted a session titled “Investing in Resilience: Challenges and Opportunities” with a number of industry speakers, including:

  • Dr. David N. Bresch, Director Global Head Sustainability, Swiss Re
  • Dan Dowling, Assistant Director, Sustainability and Climate Change, PwC
  • Linda Freiner, Flood Resilience Program Manager, Group Corporate Responsibility, Zürich Insurance
  • John Fullerton, Founder & President, Capital Institute
  • Prof. Sander van der Leeuw, Arizona State University

From the abstract:  Our concern was that business, and the finance institutions that lend to, invest in, and insure them, are at the heart of many of the drivers and solutions to ecological degradation, resource depletion and social vulnerability. Resilience principles should be at the heart of practical steps to both alleviate these pressures and frame opportunities for more sustainable financing models and investment practices. So far, the majority of dialogue on resilience and investment has focused on a limited set of issues primarily relating to disaster risk resilience. However, there has been very little investigation into these issues within the academic discourses on resilience, and even less dialogue with this practitioner community than other communities (e.g. park rangers, water managers etc). At the same time, the business and investment community are scaling up efforts to transform accounting and valuation practices and strategic priorities in order to facilitate more sustainable investment.

The session aimed to present novel perspectives from a range of practitioners involved in finance (i.e. insurance, accounting, investment) or financing ‘resilience’-based activities in order to provide insights into the challenges and opportunities for integrating resilience into the practical mechanics of enterprise risk and investment evaluation. Panelists gave an overview of how their practical work/research intersects with resilience issues and science, the challenges in the operational application of these frameworks, the expected opportunities and benefits to doing so (focusing on the novel insights it provides) and how best to drive further progress.

As compared with the standard corporate perspective, the financial organizations, particularly the insurance industry seems to value a resilience approach as a means to assess and design preventative approaches (adaptation) rather than ex post responses to disasters or sustainability shortcomings (mitigation).  Unlike many politicians, they see global change and are cognizant about the various potential futures unfolding. This is less about liberal/conservative philosophies and more about preparing and responding to reality in a rapidly changing environment.

Stay tuned for more on business and resilience.

15 May

Student Project – Maus Haus – on TV

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

Previously I’ve had a couple posts regarding the student project, Maus Haus that resulted in the building of a micro dwelling.  As part of ASU’s School of Sustainability year-end Open House of Student Projects, the Maus Haus made prime time.  See the link to the video below:

http://www.azfamily.com/good-morning-arizona/Mauhaus-creators–258646611.html

29 Apr

Sustainability, Governance and the Navajo Nation

Posted by michaelschoon in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

In the last few weeks I’ve had the wonderful good fortune of working with representatives of the Navajo Nation on governance.  One of the School of Sustainability’s doctoral students, Edward Dee, a member of the Navajo Nation, approached me about a meeting on the proposed Navajo Decentralization Plan and the incorporation of sustainability concepts in their Intra-tribal Consultation Policy.

My starting point drew on my previous work in southern Africa on transboundary conservation and the challenges of interactions between national agencies while simultaneously working between local communities and national governments.  This becomes particularly challenging when land claims and the settlement of indigenous rights are involved.  While limited in the comparisons that are appropriate between the cases, I believe that the Navajo Nation faces similar constraints both between Navajo chapters and between tribal and federal land, particularly when facing transboundary environmental problems such as water conservation, fire management, and biodiversity threats.

In thinking about environmental policy and sustainability, I stress three main points – the need for collaborative, nested, and adaptive institutional arrangements (or rules and operating procedures).  Because sustainability challenges are often ‘wicked’ in that they have no single, right answer (incomplete, inconsistent, and changing requirements) and because they generally involve multiple stakeholder groups, effective governance requires collaboration.  Effective governance requires legitimacy.  Collaboration and broader levels of participation are ways to build legitimacy in rule-making.

Sustainability challenges are also multi-scalar and cross many political boundaries and land use/land tenure borders.  Building on ideas of polycentricity and institutional fit, governance systems should try to manage to the scale of the problem.  As sustainability challenges are often comprised from multiple problems, governance will often need to be nested to address multiple problems at multiple scales.

Finally, sustainability challenges occur in dynamic, complex systems filled with uncertainty and surprise,  nonlinearity and  threshold effects.  As a result, there is no such thing as an optimal set of rules/laws/policies.  Instead, governance arrangements need to be adaptive to deal with the unknown and be able to confront a dynamic environment.

These ideas are obviously quite vague in details.  I look forward to working with representatives from the Navajo Nation on how to operationalize the concepts.

« Older Entries