Evelyn Brister

Disciplinary capture and epistemological obstacles to interdisciplinary research: Lessons from central African conservation disputes.

Complex environmental problems require well-researched policies that integrate knowledge from both the natural and social sciences. Epistemic differences can impede interdisciplinary collaboration, as shown by debates between conservation biologists and anthropologists who are working to preserve biological diversity and support economic development in central Africa. Disciplinary differences with regard to 1) facts, 2) rigor, 3) causal explanation, and 4) research goals reinforce each other, such that early decisions about how to define concepts or which methods to adopt may tilt research design and data interpretation toward one disciplines epistemological framework. If one of the contributing fields imposes a solution to an epistemic problem, this sets the stage for what I call disciplinary capture. Avoiding disciplinary capture requires clear communication between collaborators, but beyond this it also requires that collaborators craft research questions and innovate research designs which are different from the inherited epistemological frameworks of contributing disciplines.

Visualizing Plant Community Change Using Historical Records

Ecological data from land surveys from 1811 for the 100,000-acre Connecticut Tract in western New York were transcribed and then analyzed using ArcGIS and IDRISI GIS software. The surveys contained both witness tree data and line descriptions, which were analyzed for species composition and community type. Results illustrate that many changes have occurred in species composition. Possible causes of these changes to the mature forests may include introduced pests and diseases or anthropogenic land-use change. Comparisons to the National Wetlands Inventory Database reveal that while some of the wetlands that were present in 1811 still exist today, particularly in the Byron-Bergen Swamp and in the wetlands along the Lake Ontario shoreline, other original wetlands have been lost while new wetlands have replaced some upland forests. This study helps elucidate past causes of temporal and spatial variability, and it provides a reference point for land managers who need to understand the effects of land-use history for ongoing restoration efforts.

Proceduralism and Expertise in Local Environmental Decision-Making

Among Bryan Norton’s most influential contributions to environmental philosophy has been his analysis and evaluation of democratic processes for environmental decision-making. He examines actual cases of environmental decision-making in their legal, political, ethical and scientific contexts, and, with contextual constraints and goals in mind, he theorizes concerning what they accomplish and how they can be improved. Informed by the political theories of both John Dewey and Jurgen Habermas, Norton’s pragmatist approach holds that appropriate democratic decision procedures will generate broadly defensible decisions. Thus, his view of environmental decision-making is based in—and requires—inclusive, democratic, empirical inquiry. While accepting these criteria, I examine how, in practice, it is difficult to identify when these conditions have been adequately met. I investigate the limitations of Norton’s proceduralist approach through a case study in community-based forest management in a New York State urban old-growth park. I argue that Norton’s procedural priorities are too rigid given the contextual constraints of local decision-making. While they are useful for guiding an ideal, high standards sense of the decision-making process, less rigid Deweyan considerations of social learning and community engagement often provide sufficient guidelines for evaluating success.

Diversification of Land Management Goals and Strategies in Response to Climate Change

Ronald Sandler (2013) asks that we consider the implications of future rapid climate change for conservation strategies and conservation goals. We agree with Sandler’s conclusion that rapid ecological change requires rethinking land management goals and strategies. Although we were already convinced of this before reading Sandler’s article, he targets his argument at philosophers whomay be unaware of the range of land management approaches and at environmental ethicists who resist non-ideal goals and anthropocentric justifications for conservation strategies. We think that recognizing the complexities of management decision-making would further support Sandler’s conclusion. We also agree with Sandler—for the most part—about the direction in which management goals and strategies are shifting. As the pace of change will increase and because the effects of climate change and human development are unpredictable, managers need to be able to pursue both standard and novel strategies, they need to be prepared to shift from one strategy to another as more is learned about strategies’ effectiveness, and they need to be prepared to adapt long-term conservation goals to what is actually achievable. In effect, Sandler has outlined a good philosophical justification for land managers’ current thinking about conservation goals (Perrings et al., 2010), especially when compared to some philosophers’ support for outdated preservationist goals developed in and for the twentieth century. Sandler argues that specific conservation goals are local and contextual. As such, goals are likely to change, since our frames of reference and standards of success will shift in a time of crisis. A medical analogy may be apt: in a medical crisis, medical interventions that would normally be unacceptable can be used justifiably to save a patient’s life. When the crisis is ecological, it is desirable both that our goals be achievable through more than one strategy and that our strategies support multiple goals. It is for exactly this reason that Sandler supports reserve strategies over restoration approaches: reserves support multiple conservation goals, including not only species preservation (which he argues should have a lower priority than in the past) but also ecosystem stability, landscape permeability,

Return to Warden's Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows, Christopher Norment

Return to Warden’s Grove: Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows is published in a series of memoirs and literary nonfiction. Christopher Norment, an ecologist and ornithologist at SUNY–Brockport, tells the tale of three summers spent doing fieldwork in the remote Canadian north and reflects on the methods of natural history, the goals of science, the meaning of wildness, and the geography of memory. Using techniques of storytelling rather than the formal methods of philosophy, Norment personalizes and thus reframes questions at the heart of environmental ethics and philosophy of science. The book is balanced between a personal narrative of his academic and personal progress, including road trips from Kansas to the Northwest Territories and back again, and sober reflections on his work and state of mind while doing remote, tedious, and sometimes dangerous ecological research. The travel narrative, together with the descriptions of places, adventures, mishaps, and successes pull the reader into the book and swiftly through it. This is the delight of reading a well-written memoir: as in our own lives, the ideas Norment presents don’t have time to become stale or drab before we are pushed along to consider something new. The star of the book—and the focus of Norment’s attention—is the Harris’s Sparrow, a small brownish songbird, weighing in at a few dozen grams. When Norment began his dissertation research in Warden’s Grove in 1989, little was known about the birds’ ecology in its breeding territory on the edge between Canada’s boreal forest and arctic tundra. Norment finds that ‘in an ecotone, where the aesthetics, animals, and plants of two ecosystems blend, there is something pleasing about the interwoven geographies of space and species’ (p. 4). In this book, there are other ways in which geographies of space and species intertwine. Namely, Norment’s northward and homeward journeys follow the songbirds’ migration, and his own sense of place is constructed as he comes to an understanding of how the birds move around in and use their habitat. There is also a prolonged reflection on how his emotional geography is shaped by—or resists being shaped by—the natural geography of the arctic and the cultural geography of the remote. The book is organized both chronologically and thematically. As Norment moves into new stages of research, he considers questions that are raised by his growing knowledge of Warden’s Grove and its Harris’s sparrows. Among the problems he