Chunglin Kwa

Science and Decisionmaking

Publisher Summary This chapter discusses science as an activity independent of society. There is certainly one pathway in science that is a pure investigation of natural processes. But, in this age when the very sustainability of the Earth and its critical ecosystems are in question, it is important to communicate the key findings of environmental science and be used by those who make decisions about the future of the Earth. The challenge is how the scientists can effectively impart appropriate and useful information to decision-makers. Science is an integral part of decision making, as scientific results and model predictions are rarely expressed in terms of end points that have direct meaning or inherent value to decision makers. A number of questions arise to facilitate this interchange between science and decision-making. Three examples of how science is used in making decisions about land management, and their use are explained. Based on the common elements of these examples, a set of questions about appropriate ways to transmit science to decision-makers are also included.

Local Ecologies and Global Science: Discourses and Strategies of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme

The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), a large international research programme, served to set the research agenda of a number of environmental sciences around the issue of global warming and global change. This paper examines the impact of the interdisciplinary cooperation within the IGBP on ecology and the ecologists’ response. Ecology was an integral part of the IGBP from the beginning, yet it was sometimes in uneasy cohabitation with the other sciences involved. The issues of global warming and global change posed opportunities and challenges to ecology. They posed opportunities because an important cause emerged, with promises of exciting new (space) technologies and new funds for the environmental sciences. They posed challenges, because by aligning itself to sciences that study the earth system as a whole, ecology was invited implicitly to bracket its focus on the specificity of local ecosystems, that is, to give up ecology’s traditional focus on field studies of plant and animal communities. My aim in this paper is to place the opportunities that global change research offered to ecology in the context of changes within the field that were already underway. Power relationships between disciplines did not give ecology an upper hand vis-à-vis the other earth sciences, but ecologists were able nevertheless to redefine subtly the notion of the global.

Alexander von Humboldt's invention of the natural landscape

Landscape took on a new meaning through the new science of plant geography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1857). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “landscape” was foremost a painterly genre. Slowly, painted landscapes came to bear on natural surroundings, but by 1800 it was still not common to designate sites as “landscapes.” Humboldt looked at plant vegetation with a painterly gaze. Artists, according to him, could suggest in their work that an abstract unity lay hidden underneath observable phenomena. Humboldt projected painted landscapes on nature and found its ecological unity. By doing so, he ultimately stripped the concept of landscape from its primary visual meaning.

The programming of interdisciplinary research through informal science-policy interactions

At the universities, a particular model of interdisciplinary science can be found: large coordinated international programmes. Nowadays, the programming of sciences does not stop at the planning phase but continues during the entire running phase of the programmes. The net effect is that scientists are guided toward real cooperation. Two mechanism help to accomplish this goal: sharing data, and sharing technology. Since 1990 or so, funding agencies have taken it upon themselves to steer the sciences toward interdisciplinarity. Prior to 1980, funding agencies spoke in the name of science to the national states, articulating the needs of science. They now speak to science, urging reforms and increased cooperation among scientists. In this paper, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) is studied, along with an informal science policy body: the International Group of Funding Agencies for Global Change Research (IGFA). Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Interdisciplinarity and Postmodernity in the Environmental Sciences

Postmodern science has aspects of both technoscience and interdisciplinary science, but is described exhaustively by neither. Twenty‐five years ago, Lyotard expected that postmodern science would reinforce our capacity to endure incommensurability. This paper suggests that the reverse is true also. Ignoring incommensurability is a precondition for the emergence of postmodern science. The bias in several large international science programs since around 1980 is toward data gathering and the technological and experimental aspects of science. Interdisciplinarity is the mechanism used to bring this about. One precondition of the success of these efforts is the low status of theory in current science and a predominance of data.

Modeling the Grasslands

Dans leur contribution au Programme Biologique International, les Etats-Unis ont finance, entre 1968 et 1976, un vaste programme de modelisation de la structure et du fonctionnement des ecosystemes. Analyse des origines et du devenir de ce projet

Visualising Landscapes: Do Pictures Represent Theory or Data?

Aesthetic features of landscape pictures play a role in many stages of research in geography and landscape ecology. The ability to discern patterns in pictures is dependent on the availability of two Gestalts: the holistic and the fragmented landscape. The former was historically formed around the landscape painting, the latter is evident in aerial photography and pictures of landscapes on the basis of remote sensing. Gestalts are at the beginning of a road towards increasing mathematisation. But at the end of the road, the qualities of the images (usually obtained after a modeling process) do not revolve around geometric abstraction, but rather, in an opposite way, they show the unforeseen. Inspecting images for unexpected outcomes can be seen as a form of ‘de-mathematisation’.

Ecological theories and Dutch nature conservation

This paper aims to achieve insight into various ecological theories in the Netherlands which have different, and sometimes opposing, views on the conservation of nature. Interviews, publications and archival research brought to light four separate theories: ‘vitalistic/holistic’, ‘dynamic’, ‘cybernetic’ and ‘chaos’. Diversity is reached through stability according to vitalistic/holistic and cybernetic theories, but through change and instablility according to the ‘dynamic’ and ‘chaos’ theories. These two groups are working apart, and continue to have their own ideas. Prediction of the future is only possible with the ‘vitalistic/holistic’ and ‘cybernetic’ theories. Ecologists who adhere to these theories feel responsible and able in different ways to change ecological nature towards desirable end goals. The other two theories, ‘dynamic’ and ‘chaos’, appear to be less activist.

[Review of: H. Aldersey-Williams (2005) Findings: hidden stories in first-hand accounts of scientific discovery]

philosophical navel-gazing. Of the three parts of the volume, Section A may be the most useful, since it presents a collection of Scerri’s works on one of his main preoccupations: reductionism. He raises many detailed and cogent points against the presumption that modern chemistry is merely applied quantum mechanics. Scerri is at his most convincing when he delves into the details of the theoretical practices of quantum chemists to show that their most impressive achievements, from Bohr’s prediction of the nature of hafnium to the claimed ab initio computations of ionisation energies (Paper 8, actually in Section B), have not been made as strict deductions from fundamental theories of quantum physics. The second part may be less useful, as much of its content has been presented in a more systematic synthesis in Scerri’s recent book, The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance (Oxford University Press, 2007). However, this collection gives an interesting view on how his thinking developed over the years. In addition, there are important discussions of the very concept of chemical elements, probably best summarised in Paper 9. Scerri stresses that we need to distinguish “simple substances” from “basic substances” (or “elements”). Elements, as such, are unobservable (such as the chlorine hidden in sodium chloride); we should not confuse them with the simple substances that are observable manifestations of elements when they are not combined with other elements (such as the green toxic gas that is chlorine, sharing no significant properties with sodium chloride). I think this is an excellent answer to a question that many scientists and philosophers do not even think to ask. Scerri traces the ancestry of his own view back to Dmitri Mendeleev, and to the radiochemist Fritz Paneth, whose son Heinz Post was Scerri’s own PhD supervisor. Section C contains three papers revolving around the issues of realism and education. I think that Paper 11, a critique of a claimed direct observation of orbitals published in Nature in 1999, would make a wonderful case study for teaching. The final paper provides interesting reflections on normative vs. naturalised philosophy of science. Actually, I think that Scerri’s notion of normative philosophy is unnecessarily tied to traditional doctrines. Yes, traditional philosophy of science was normative, but it is quite possible to be normative while rejecting many traditional tenets; Feyerabend would be an obvious example. I therefore find it unsurprising that what Scerri considers a more naturalised approach can come back to have normative