Valerie A. Brown

Applying Resilience Thinking to Natural Resource Management through a “Planning-By-Doing” Framework

Natural resource management (NRM) organizations are increasingly looking to resilience thinking to provide insights into how social and environmental systems interact and to identify points of intervention. Drawing on complex systems analysis, resilience thinking emphasizes that landscapes constantly change from social and ecological interactions, and focuses NRM planners’ attention on identifying key variables, feedbacks, and thresholds that can help improve intervention strategies. More deliberative approaches are being developed to use resilience thinking in ways that engage and build human capacity for action. This article documents experiences shared with NRM agencies in rural Australia as we developed new approaches to link resilience thinking with collective learning principles. We present an emerging framework through which heuristics associated with resilience thinking is being used as part of a planning-by-doing process. The framework is being tested to assess whether and how it can enable change agents to advance their capacities for adaptation and transformation.

Multiple knowledges, multiple languages: are the limits of my language the limits of my world?

Reconciliation of the multiple knowledges involved in international development depends, in the first instance, on all participants hearing the multiple languages of the people involved. A dream that surfaces and resurfaces throughout human history is the dream of a world in which all peoples can hear each other. For the 12 years period from 1992 to 2004, the Local Sustainability Project worked with over 300 communities in four different countries on resolving sustainability issues. Some five sets of collaborating and often competing contributions to all lasting decisions were those of the individual, the community, the expert, the organisation and the integrative thinkers. The divisions between different interests were strong enough to represent distinct paradigms or knowledge cultures with their different content, forms of inquiry and languages. This article argues for the development of an open and inclusive language that respects the original languages, allows all the speakers to be heard and opens up fresh avenues for collective learning. It argues against the proposition that the limits of a language mean the limits of the speakers world.

Pull and push in educational innovation: Study of an interfaculty programme

ABSTRACT As specialists become more specialised, increasing demands are made for curricula in the universities which relate scientific evidence to the demands of decision-making. A multidisciplinary or holistic course in human sciences has therefore been introduced in the Australian National University, and has been the subject of detailed research. The students study problems each of which can be solved only by applying principles and methods of many disciplines: the moral and aesthetic implications of such problems are discussed, as well as the relevant concepts from the natural and social sciences. Hence the programme is not, as are some multidisciplinary courses, merely a collection of specialist units from different departments. Great difficulties were experienced in arranging that both the science and the arts faculties accepted the programme: before it became permanent, a stringent review was made of its academic level. The students who take the course are from the full range of academic abilities,...

Tackling wicked problems through collective design

Many of the concerns of intelligent architecture fit into the category of wicked problems, that is, problems whose resolution falls outside the current problem-solving capacity of the society that produced them. Wicked problems involve a diverse range of interests, defy a single definition, challenge the society that has produced them, and can have no final solution. Collective resolution of a wicked problem requires moving beyond the ruling constructions of knowledge to draw on all seven ways of understanding of which the human mind is capable. A contribution to architectural planning and design that addresses these conditions is the pattern language developed by Christopher Alexander. This paper explores the contribution of collective thinking and pattern language to planning and design that can meet the demands of transformational change.

The theory of biology and the education of biologists: A case study

ABSTRACT A set of questions on evolutionary theory and the philosophy of biology was given to students of zoology at three levels: third-year undergraduates (23); fourth year, honours (13); graduates (25). Answering was voluntary. The responses were assessed independently by a zoologist, an educator and a philosopher. None of the students failed conventional courses, but each author ‘failed˚s nearly half the students; sixteen were ‘failed˚s by all three authors. There was little evidence of a general, critical understanding of the concept of natural selection. About two-thirds of students accepted natural selection as an axiom or dogma. About half understood ‘tautologous˚s. Most students regarded physics and biology as fundamentally similar, and more than half held all biology to be ultimately reducible to physical science. Very few understood the significance of refutable propositions in science. We suggest that these findings reflect a general trend, related to the specialisation of biological teaching;...

Principles for EcoHealth Action: Implications of the Health Synthesis Paper, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, and the Millennium Development Goals. Workshop Group, EcoHealth ONE, Madison, Wisconsin, October 2006

The first years of this century have seen significant advances in integrating the many perspectives on what it will take to achieve a healthy and sustainable future. Intense activity among agencies worldwide has produced a stream of reviews of the global condition. These include the combined United States Research Council (1999); a consortium of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), World Bank, and World Resources Institute (2000); the Millennium Development Goals (2000). United Nations Environment Program (2003); the Global Reporting Initiative (2006); and Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005). Each review has deplored a lack of adequate follow-up action on the implications of previous reports. Continuing concern about the state of the planet and the associated risks to health (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005; Corvalen et al., 2005) has increased the challenge to deliver an effective response. That success is possible has been demonstrated in the Montreal protocols, in which United Nations members continually monitor and control their use of chlorofluorocarbons and so slow the disintegration of the planet s ozone layer (United Nations Environment Programme, 1999). Local government authorities agreement to reduce their carbon emissions in the face of global warming is beginning to show results (ICLEI, 2002). Such effective responses are still far from established practice. There is an inability, first, to agree on, and then to implement, protocols controlling global environmental hazards; for instance, the Kyoto protocols for reducing national carbon dioxide emissions have only just established a framework (United Nations Environment Program, 2006). At the local scale, the management of ecosystem resources tends not to take sufficient account of the needs for long-term sustainability (Corvalen et al., 2005). These precedents confirm that there is much yet to be learned on taking action in response to scientific reports on the state of the world. In this essay, we report on a workshop on that theme held at the EcoHealth ONE meeting, in Madison, Wisconsin in October 2006. The workshop reviewed the three initiatives below with the aim of determining how EcoHealth actions can best be guided in the future. One, a master plan has been provided by the suite of eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals, formed from the synthesis of national commitments made separately at conferences and summits during the 1990s Published online: February 7, 2007 Correspondence to: Valerie A. Brown, e-mail: val.brown@anu.edu.au EcoHealth 4, 95–98, 2007 DOI: 10.1007/s10393-007-0082-8

The uses of social and environmental health indicators in monitoring the effects of climate change

This paper argues that information collected in the field of Public Health has the potential to provide a valuable contribution to the forecasting and evaluation of the impact of climate change. The well-developed sets of social and environmental health data collected to monitor the health of human populations could also offer sensitive indicators of the effects and potential effects of climate change. City collections of public health data and general demographic information are reviewed as examples of the availability of such monitoring systems.The interests of those monitoring climate change and those monitoring health march together in other ways as well. Changes in radiation, rainfall and temperature will change food and building safety levels, as well as waste disposal capacity. People who are on the poverty line or ill, or both, have little opportunity to respond to such changes, or the strategies designed to control them. Since the Canadian Lalonde Report of 1974, health services have increasingly linked their social and physical health information to environmental data. Coordinated planning using a multidisciplinary data base and responses to change which give due regard to equity are both central considerations in responding to changes in the environment as well as to risks to human health.

Reflections on Collective Learning: Open and Closed

This chapter contains reflections on the outcomes of a collaborative action research programme, the Local Sustainability Project (LSP), Australian National University, 1995–2015. The aim of the LSP was to support whole-of-community change towards a sustainable future. The Project team conducted over 300 workshops using collective learning as the vehicle for community-wide change. Project participants came from parties interested in the proposed change. The workshops were held across four continents, using a framework adapted from David Kolb’s long-established experiential learning cycle: first ideals, then facts, followed by ideas and action.

The Emergence of the Collective Mind

In an era of transformational changes to both society and environment, institutions of all kinds are moving into a new operating and learning space, the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is the label being given to the current era marked by the significant effects of human ideas and actions (anthropos) on the planet’s natural and social environments. This chapter goes beyond current moves to transdisciplinarity and explores the emergence of a collective mind which reframes opposites as relationships and asks introspective physical, social, ethical, creative, sympathetic and reflective questions of complex issues in times of transformational change. Each of these questions taps into a different domain of thinking with its own tests for the validity of the answers. Answering the reflective seventh question establishes that, after many generations of specialization, we can still find ways to combine diverse answers into a meaningful whole that throws light on the complex issues of the Anthropocene.