Brian Petersen

U.S. Natural Resources and Climate Change: Concepts and Approaches for Management Adaptation

Public lands and waters in the United States traditionally have been managed using frameworks and objectives that were established under an implicit assumption of stable climatic conditions. However, projected climatic changes render this assumption invalid. Here, we summarize general principles for management adaptations that have emerged from a major literature review. These general principles cover many topics including: (1) how to assess climate impacts to ecosystem processes that are key to management goals; (2) using management practices to support ecosystem resilience; (3) converting barriers that may inhibit management responses into opportunities for successful implementation; and (4) promoting flexible decision making that takes into account challenges of scale and thresholds. To date, the literature on management adaptations to climate change has mostly focused on strategies for bolstering the resilience of ecosystems to persist in their current states. Yet in the longer term, it is anticipated that climate change will push certain ecosystems and species beyond their capacity to recover. When managing to support resilience becomes infeasible, adaptation may require more than simply changing management practices—it may require changing management goals and managing transitions to new ecosystem states. After transitions have occurred, management will again support resilience—this time for a new ecosystem state. Thus, successful management of natural resources in the context of climate change will require recognition on the part of managers and decisions makers of the need to cycle between “managing for resilience” and “managing for change.”

Resilience, Regime Shifts, and Guided Transition under Climate Change: Examining the Practical Difficulties of Managing Continually Changing Systems

Managing terrestrial systems has become increasingly difficult under climate change as unidirectional shifts in climate conditions challenge the resilience of ecosystems to maintain their compositional structure and function. Despite the increased attention of resilience management to guide transformational change, questions remain as to how to apply resilience to manage transitions. Rather than pushing systems across thresholds into alternative states, climate change may create a stepwise progression of unknown transitional states that track changing climate conditions. Because of this uncertainty, we must find ways to guide transitioning systems across climate boundaries towards states that are socially and environmentally desirable. We propose to ease the uncertainty of managing shifting systems by providing an approach to adaptive management that we call guided transition, where socially and environmentally important ecosystem functions are preserved through transitions by considering and maintaining the species and structures needed for the desired functions. Scientifically, it will require a better understanding of the relationships between structure, species composition, and function for specific systems. Managers will also need to identify important functions at the local, regional, and national scale, and to determine how best to transition systems to a desired state based on existing scientific knowledge. Guided transition, therefore, helps guide the process of adaptive management by specifying a function-based management pathway that guides transitions through climatic changes.

Explanations of a Changing Landscape: A Critical Examination of the British Columbia Bark Beetle Epidemic

This paper focuses on an unprecedented bark beetle epidemic in British Columbia, Canada. The epidemic has killed vast areas of forests, with significant impacts to ecosystems and timber-dependent communities. Explanations of this outbreak continue to overlook or underemphasize important actors and relationships. This paper offers a more detailed explanation of the actors and processes involved in the outbreak and associated responses. Political ecology was applied to guide this analysis, emphasizing both the ecological and social factors involved. Research methods entailed an extensive literature review and over seventy interviews with scientists, policy makers, land managers, and elected officials. Findings illustrate how the outbreak involved many actors, beyond bark beetles and trees, and resulted from complex interactions between ecological and social factors. This study also reveals how actors that prioritized short-term economic gains shaped the conditions that fostered the outbreak and continue to constrain responses. This study illustrates how applications of political ecology that give increased attention to ecology are necessary to fully understand the drivers of environmental change.

The Potential for Double-Loop Learning to Enable Landscape Conservation Efforts

As conservation increases its emphasis on implementing change at landscape-level scales, multi-agency, cross-boundary, and multi-stakeholder networks become more important. These elements complicate traditional notions of learning. To investigate this further, we examined structures of learning in the Landscape Conservation Cooperatives (LCCs), which include the entire US and its territories, as well as parts of Canada, Mexico, and Caribbean and Pacific island states. We used semi-structured interviews, transcribed and analyzed using NVivo, as well as a charrette-style workshop to understand the difference between the original stated goals of individual LCCs and the values and purposes expressed as the collaboration matured. We suggest double-loop learning as a theoretical framework appropriate to landscape-scale conservation, recognizing that concerns about accountability are among the valid points of view that must be considered in multi-stakeholder collaborations. Methods from the social sciences and public health sectors provide insights on how such learning might be actualized.

Ideological obstacles to effective climate policy: The greening of markets, technology, and growth:

In light of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, this project synthesizes and advances critiques of the possibility of a sustainable capitalism by adopting an explicit ‘negative’ theory of ideology, understood as ideas that conceal contradictions through the reification and/or legitimation of the existing social order. Prominent climate change policy frameworks – the ‘greening’ of markets (market-corrective measures), technology (alternative energy, energy efficiency, and geoengineering), and growth (the green growth strategy) – are shown to conceal one or both of the two systemic socio-ecological contradictions inherent in the current social formation: (1) a contradiction between capital’s growth-dependence and the latter’s degrading impact on the climate (the ‘capital-climate contradiction’) and (2) a contradiction between the potential of using technological infrastructure that aids in emissions reductions and the institutionalized social relations that obstruct this technical potential (the ‘technical potential-productive relations contradiction’). Attempts to reform the very techniques and institutions that brought about the climate crisis will remain ineffective and reproduce the social order that results in climate change. After proposing a way in which societies might move out of the ideological trappings of green markets, technology, and growth, two alternatives are proposed: economic degrowth coupled with Marcuse’s conception of a ‘new technology’.

Responding to a Forest Catastrophe: The Emergence of New Governance Arrangements in Southern California

The San Bernardino National Forest in southern California experienced an unprecedented bark beetle outbreak in the early 2000s. The outbreak, coupled with a looming threat of catastrophic wildfire, droughts, changing forest management priorities, and a legacy of poor forest management practices coalesced to create a challenge that existing institutions and management agencies could not address. In response, an interagency collaborative effort, the Mountain Area Taskforce (MAST), was initiated. Based on key informant interviews, this paper details how this new governance organization emerged and how it effectively addressed a landscape scale forest challenge. Forest governance analyses often focus attention on macroscales, overlooking the microlevel arrangements that set MAST apart from other responses to bark beetle outbreaks. Interagency collaboration has taken on greater importance in efforts to address forest management at landscape scales and this case study provides important insights into the challenges and opportunities of these new governance arrangements.

Climate Change and the Polanyian Counter-movement: Carbon Markets or Degrowth?

ABSTRACT In the midst of a wave of market expansion, carbon markets have been proposed as the best way to address global climate change. While some argue that carbon markets represent a modern example of a Polanyian counter-movement to the environmental crisis, we adopt a structural interpretation of Polanyi to refute this claim. Carbon markets represent a further expansion of markets that fails to address the underlying contradictions related to the commodification of nature. In addition, they increase risks to society and the domination of economic elites. While carbon markets further subject social and ecological relations to market mechanisms, we examine degrowth as a possible response to climate change that prioritises social and environmental goals over economic growth. While degrowth continues to be dismissed as impractical or impossible, a growing number of scholars, scientists and activists argue it is the only way to address global climate change. In contrast to carbon markets, we argue degrowth could represent a genuine Polanyian counter-movement in response to climate change. In addition, degrowth could help all those disenfranchised by market fundamentalism by addressing the triple crises related to the commodification of land, labour and money.

Tradeoffs in the Policy Process in Advancing Climate Change Adaptation: The Case of Australia's Great Eastern Ranges Initiative

Abstract The first continental-scale climate change adaptation strategy for biodiversity conservation has been adopted in Australia. The Great Eastern Ranges Initiative (GERI), aims to bolster the resilience of biodiversity by enhancing connectivity in eastern Australia for species migration in a changing climate. The Initiative is now being carried out on the ground, and is among the earliest national-level adaptation strategies for biodiversity conservation advanced by policymakers. In this paper we explore the implications of the rapid progression of the Initiative through the policy process, providing insights useful for decision makers advancing adaptation policies elsewhere in the future.

A Review of: “Nordhaus, Ted, and Michael Shellenberger.Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility.”: Boston: Houghton Mufflin Company, 2007. 344 pp.

In 2004, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger’s essay, ‘‘The Death of Environmentalism,’’ sparked an intense debate about the relevancy of the U.S. environmental movement in the face of global climate change. Nordhaus and Shellenberger continue this conversation in an important new book, Break Through, which is likely to be just as polarizing and controversial. In the first half of Break Through, Nordhaus and Shellenberger correlate contemporary U.S. environmentalism with the emergence of postmaterialist values. They argue that postwar affluence and prosperity laid the foundations for the rise of environmentalism. Nordhaus and Shellenberger insist that environmentalists ignore the fundamental role of economic growth and instead repeat an inaccurate story that stresses humanity’s role in protecting a pure form of ‘‘nature’’ and privileging natural places over unnatural human settlements. This false narrative has led environmental groups to become fixated on a ‘‘pollution paradigm,’’ which emphasizes physical limits to growth and characterizes industrialization as the root source of environmental destruction. While the pollution paradigm led to a wave of popular environmental laws like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, Nordhaus and Shellenberger contend it is a myopic view that reduces environmentalism to a narrow interest group, more concerned with promoting the fear of environmental catastrophe for political gain than with addressing contemporary human needs like jobs, health care, and education. Nordhaus and Shellenberger use two case studies, actions to preserve of the Brazilian Amazon and efforts to promote environmental justice, as examples of why environmental efforts too often fail. While the merit of each case is debatable, Nordhaus and Shellenberger suggest that these initiatives promote a distorted logic that views society as separate from the environment and ignores the real needs of people. This ‘‘politics of limits’’ is not only unable to address emerging ecological threats like climate change but ultimately promotes self-sacrifice where none is needed, fails to envision society as part of the solution, and constrains the human imagination. Society and Natural Resources, 22:783–787 Copyright # 2009 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-1920 print=1521-0723 online DOI: 10.1080/08941920903052219

25.00 (hardback). ISBN 978-0-618-65825-1.

AbstractFarmers stand to be greatly affected by changes in the climate, necessitating adaptive responses, yet little is documented on how U.S. Midwestern farmers understand and perceive climate change adaptation. Eight focus groups with 53 Michigan farmers were conducted in 2011–12 to better understand the following: 1) what do farmers think about the relationship between climate change and agriculture, 2) what differentiates normal weather-related management from climate change adaptation actions, and 3) how do farmers understand the term “climate change adaptation.” Farmers expressed skepticism at global climate change yet conveyed specific details about the local changes in climate they are experiencing on their farms. They were not able to clearly define the term “climate change adaptation” but did note specific adaptive actions they have already implemented. The farmers explained that nonclimate factors were of more concern to them when making management decisions, and they showed reactive (not proac...