Gregory L. Simon

Win-Win Scenarios at the Climate-Development Interface: Challenges and Opportunities for Cookstove Replacement Programs Through Carbon Finance

Achieving win-win outcomes in environment-development programs is a laudable goal, but frequently difficult to realize. In this paper we review the possibilities for win-win climate and development outcomes in programs that distribute improved efficiency cookstoves (ICS) with the use of carbon finance. We show that ICS technologies form an important, if asymmetrical, environment-development interface, and illustrate the mutually supported local (development) and global (climate change) benefits of continued improved stoves use. We also describe how program results are highly contextual and that, in practice, there are a number of challenges to achieving effective ‘win-win’ outcomes. While carbon finance provides an opportunity to fund scaleable and enforceable stove programs, it may also introduce mutually supported impediments. Drawing on development debates for ICS use, scientific reports on stove-based greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, and preexisting case studies of carbon and non-carbon financed cookstoves, we conclude that the challenge for future carbon financed ICS projects will be to leverage inherent symbioses between climate and development arenas in order to overcome mutually supported impediments. Achieving substantive win-win conditions will require further scholarly and practical engagement to tackle the many outstanding challenges and uncertainties reviewed in this essay.

Management experiences and trends for water reuse implementation in Northern California.

In 2010, California fell nearly 300,000 acre-ft per year (AFY) short of its goal to recycle 1,000,000 AFY of municipal wastewater. Growth of recycled water in the 48 Northern California counties represented only 20% of the statewide increase in reuse between 2001 and 2009. To evaluate these trends and experiences, major drivers and challenges that influenced the implementation of recycled water programs in Northern California are presented based on a survey of 71 program managers conducted in 2010. Regulatory requirements limiting discharge, cited by 65% of respondents as a driver for program implementation, historically played an important role in motivating many water reuse programs in the region. More recently, pressures from limited water supplies and needs for system reliability are prevalent drivers. Almost half of respondents (49%) cited ecological protection or enhancement goals as drivers for implementation. However, water reuse for direct benefit of natural systems and wildlife habitat represents just 6-7% of total recycling in Northern California and few financial incentives exist for such projects. Economic challenges are the greatest barrier to successful project implementation. In particular, high costs of distribution systems (pipelines) are especially challenging, with

The Great Indoors: Research frontiers on indoor environments as active political-ecological spaces

1 to 3 million/mile costs experienced. Negative perceptions of water reuse were cited by only 26% of respondents as major hindrances to implementation of surveyed programs.

Beyond Leave No Trace

In this progress report we call for nature-society geographers to give greater attention to indoor environments as active political-ecological spaces. Nature-society geographers often treat such spaces as fixed and unnatural. Yet a growing body of research attests to the active role played by sites ranging from homes to factories to shopping malls in the production of nature, scale, and environmental citizens. Furthermore, environmentalist and public health projects have increasingly targeted indoor spaces for scrutiny and action, yet these projects and scientific literature typically lack a critical geographical perspective on scale, space, power, and nature. We argue that exploring indoor environments is necessary to fully encompass socio-natural assemblages that include flows of energy and knowledge, embodied subjects, technologies of power and resistance, and a variety of non-humans.

Place-based urban ecology: A century of park planning in Seattle

Leave No Trace (LNT) has become the official education and outreach policy for managing recreational use in parks and wilderness areas throughout the United States. It is based on seven core principles that seek to minimize impacts from backcountry recreational activities such as hiking, climbing, and camping. In this paper, we review the history and current practice of Leave No Trace in the United States, including its complex role in the global political economy of outdoor recreation. We conclude by suggesting a new framework for building on the successes of Leave No Trace, while moving beyond its self-imposed limitations, and recapturing wilderness recreation as a more collaborative, participatory, productive, democratic, and radical form of political action.

Mobilizing cookstoves for development: a dual adoption framework analysis of collaborative technology innovations in Western India

This research responds to calls from within the field of urban ecology to explicitly incorporate humanities-based research in order to achieve robust interdisciplinarity. Our research provides an example of a place-based urban ecological analysis. We use this framework to analyze over a century of park planning and development within the city of Seattle. We identify four eras of park planning that are linked by a comprehensive 100-year park plan. This case study examines how the political, cultural, and economic aspects of park planning have produced and been influenced by long-term trends and historical contingencies. This research also offers practical insights for effective contemporary urban planning, emphasizing the need for flexible and adaptive long-term plans when confronted with unpredictable events, emerging political arrangements, changing cultural priorities, and shifting fiscal climates.

Vulnerability-in-Production: A Spatial History of Nature, Affluence, and Fire in Oakland, California

Domestic cookstoves in rural India have long been targeted by development programs dedicated to solving a diverse range of problems from deforestation and indoor air pollution to global warming and rural market inefficiencies. Theories on how technologies are mobilized in these design and diffusion innovation projects and what this presages for development outcomes can be improved by explicitly detailing the composition and structure of program governance frameworks. I develop a ‘dual adoption analytic framework’ to interrogate two technology innovation programs in Western India. This framework underscores the collaborative nature of technology mobilizations and, more specifically, how power is distributed across partnerships at different stages of the development process. Local partners are shown to function as influential mediating agents operating between extrinsic agencies and targeted village groups. They reinforce funding agency planning commitments while also activating economic contingencies and generating alternative development pathways. I also reveal how the structure of technology innovation projects—as either administratively heavy handed or committed to free market principles—influences intermediary behavior, intrapartnership structures of control and, ultimately, development outcomes for targeted artisan communities and households.

The 100th Meridian, Ecological Boundaries, and the Problem of Reification

Vulnerability-in-production is offered as a theoretical construct to highlight two interrelated aspects of vulnerability: a process where landscapes are altered and developed in a manner that retains their productivity for property owners and other stakeholders and a recursive and relational process that is always in production and inscribed unevenly over time and space. The 1991 Oakland Hills (Tunnel) Firestorm remains the largest conflagration—in terms of numbers of dwellings destroyed—in Californias history. Using the Tunnel Fire as a starting point for analysis, this article argues for the dedicated application of spatial history analysis to vulnerability. A first spatial history section highlights how land development strategies from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s contributed to the production of vulnerable conditions in Oakland. A second section describes how conservative homeowner politics and state tax restructuring spanning the 1950s to the 1980s further generated vulnerabilities throughout the city. A third spatial history section reveals processes that undergird and connect uneven patterns of affluence and vulnerability within Oakland. Collectively, these sections enhance our epistemic commitment to the study of vulnerability through spatial–historical analysis that uses diverse data, visualizations, and analytic techniques; our understanding of vulnerability as a recursive and relational process; and our appreciation for the political ecological nature of vulnerability—where affluence and levels of net vulnerability are highly uneven yet also deeply intertwined in their production.

The Affluence-Vulnerability Interface: Intersecting scales of risk, privilege and disaster

Fuzzy and investigative ecological boundaries are reconstituted as absolute and tangible when used to inform natural resource management policies. The process of treating symbolic representations of ecological discontinuities as if they were authentic reflections of reality represents a process of reification and may lead to inappropriate policy provisions with adverse local ecological and social consequences. This essay describes how the United States Department of Agricultures Conservation Reserve Program takes the 100th meridian—a simplified representation of the ambiguous gradient between the non-arid East from the arid West—and hardens it into a concrete boundary where farmers follow different rules depending on what side of the boundary they reside.

Leave No Trace Starts at Home: A Response to Critics and Vision for the Future

This paper examines vulnerability in the context of affluence and privilege. It focuses on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California, USA to examine long-term lived experiences of the disaster. Vulnerability is typically understood as a condition besetting poor and marginalized communities. Frequently ignored in these discussions are the experiences of those who live in more affluent areas. This paper seeks to more closely explain vulnerability at its interface with affluence. The aim is to challenge uncritical explanations of vulnerability. We also offer alternative ways of conceptualizing vulnerability as a material condition and social construct that acknowledges broader cultural, ecological, and economic conditions, which may offset, maintain or deepen true risk exposure. Drawing on in-depth interviews with residents and emergency service managers, the paper presents a suite of vulnerability categories that intersect to create two concomitant and competing conditions. First, vulnerability is variegated between households within communities, including those in more affluent areas. Second, household vulnerability is collectively altered, and oftentimes reduced, by the broader affluent community within which individual households reside. By paying closer attention to the Affluence–Vulnerability Interface the paper reveals a recursive process, which is significant in the context of building more disaster resilient communities.