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> "Changing Nature of "Nature": New Perspectives from Trandisciplinary Field Science"[The Third International Conference]
"Changing Nature of "Nature": New Perspectives from Trandisciplinary Field Science"[The Third International Conference]
Date: December 14-17 ,2009
Venue: Room No. 333, 3F, Inamori Foundation Memorial Hall, CSEAS, Kyoto University
http://www.cseas.kyoto-u.ac.jp/about/access_en.html
(Detail map: Inamori Foundation Memorial Hall 
)
Number of participants: 91
■conference Participants' views on the Global COE Program >>
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Session 1 : Rethinking Human Disturbance Motoko Fujita (CSEAS G-COE Researcher) |
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Session 2 : Cross-continental Connections Noboru Ishikawa (CSEAS Associate Professor) |
>>E |
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Session 3 : "Water Resource is a driving force for social change" Osamu Kozan (CSEAS Associate Professor) |
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Session 4 : "Defining the Scale and Scope of Enquiry" Shuhei Kimura (CSEAS G-COE Assistant Professor) |
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| December 14, 2009 | Abst | ||
| Field Trip to Satoyama (Shiga Prefecture) |
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| December 15, 2009 | |||
| 8:30 | Registration | ||
| 9:00 -9:15 |
Keynote speech by Noboru Ishikawa (Kyoto University) | ||
| Session 1 : Rethinking Human Disturbance (Conveners: Masayuki Yanagisawa, Kusumaningtyas Retno, and Motoko Fujita) |
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| 9:15 -9:20 |
Introduction | ||
| 9:20 -9:55 |
I-1 | Ryoji Soda (Osaka City University) “River Improvement History in Japan: Rethinking Human-nature Interactions” |
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| 9:55 -10:30 |
I-2 | Katsue Fukamachi (Kyoto University) “The Role of Sustainable Management of Traditional Satoyama Landscape Elements: A Case Study from the Ecological Viewpoint.” |
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| 10:30 -10:40 |
Coffee break | ||
| 10:40 -11:15 |
I-3 | Sara Cousins (Stockholm University) “Slow Species in Fast Landscapes” |
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| 11:15 -11:50 |
I-4 | Eben Kirksey (University of Pittsburgh) “The NaturalCultural History of Palo Verde, Costa Rica” |
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| 11:50 -12:20 |
Discussion | ||
| 12:20 -13:30 |
lunch | ||
| 13:30 -13:50 |
Short film by Eben Kirksey | ||
| Session 2 : Cross-continental Connections (Conveners: Kunio Tsunoda, Hiromu Shimizu and Noboru Ishikawa) |
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| 13:50 -14:00 |
Introduction | ||
| 14:00 -14:35 |
II-1 | Heather Swanson (University of California, Santa Cruz) “Patterns of Nature-cultures: The spatial redistribution of Pacific Salmon” |
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| 14:35 -15:10 |
II-2 | Eric Tagliacozzo (Cornell University) “A Sino-Southeast Asian Circuit: Ethno-histories of the Marine Goods Trade” |
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| 15:10 -15:20 |
Coffee break | ||
| 15:20 -15:55 |
II-3 | Anna L. Tsing (University of California, Santa Cruz) “Blasted Landscapes (and the gentle arts of mushroom picking)” |
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| 15:55 -16:30 |
II-4 | Fumito Koike (Yokohama National University) “Biological Invasions as a Cause of Irreversible Change” |
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| 16:30 -17:00 |
Discussion | ||
| 18:00 | Reception Place: Hakusasanso, Hashimoto Kansetsu Garden and Museum (Fee: 1500 yen) |
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| December 16, 2009 | |||
| Session 3 : Water Resources as a Driving Force of Social Change (Conveners: Toshitaka Tsuda, Yasuyuki Kono and Osamu Kozan) |
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| 9:00 -9:10 |
Introduction | ||
| 9:10 -9:45 |
III-1 | Kenneth Pomerantz (University of California, Irvine) "Drought, Climate Change, and the Political Economy of Himalayan Dam-Building" |
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| 9:45 -10:20 |
III-2 | Shinjiro Kanae (Tokyo Institute of Technology) “A State-of-the Art Global Water Resources Assessment and its Future Extension for Sustainability” |
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| 10:20 -10:30 |
Coffee break | ||
| 10:30 -11:05 |
III-3 | Fumiaki Inagaki (Keio University) “The Water Management of Central Asia in Transformation” |
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| 11:05 -11:40 |
III-4 | James Warren (Murdoch University) “Climate Change and the Impact of Drought on Human Affairs and Human History in the Philippines, 1582 to 2009” |
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| 11:40 -12:10 |
Discussion | ||
| December 17, 2009 | |||
| Session 4 : Defining the Scale and Scope of Enquiry (Conveners: Shigeru Araki, Naoki Shinohara and Shuhei Kimura) |
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| 9:00 -9:10 |
Introduction | ||
| 9:10 -9:45 |
IV-1 | Anthony Reid (Kyoto University / The Australian National University) “Seismology and Human Settlement: Global Contexts for Local (Sumatra) Patterns” |
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| 9:45 -10:20 |
IV-2 | Miyako Koizumi (Research Institute for Humanity and Nature) “Objective and Methodology of Natural Science and Its Limitations to Deal with Environmental Problems” |
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| 10:20 -10:30 |
Coffee break | ||
| 10:30 -11:05 |
IV-3 | Sanga-Ngoie Kazadi (Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University) “GIS and Remote Sensing for Wildlife Monitoring and Management in Eastern Africa” |
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| 11:05 -11:40 |
IV-4 | Sing Chew (Humboldt State University / Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research - UFZ) “Nature–Culture Relations over World History: Globalization, Crises, and Time” |
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| 11:40 -12:10 |
Discussion | ||
| 12:10 -14:00 |
Lunch | ||
| 14:00 -16:30 |
General Discussion Chair: Noboru Ishikawa |
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| 17:00 -18:00 |
Advisory board meeting | ||
conference Participants' views on the Global COE Program
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1. The GCOE program theme |
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| Participant A | I think the theme is entirely original, as far as I can see – I know of no other program like this anywhere in the US, or abroad for that matter. This is one of the program's great strengths – it is trying to do things that no one else has done before. | |
| Participant B | This was perhaps the most successful conference I have seen in engaging dialogue between social and natural scientists. Posing the question of “the nature of nature” turned out to be a useful mode of stimulating interdisciplinary dialogue. Furthermore, many new ideas for further dialogue arose both during the conference and in informal discussion afterwards. Such dialogue is a necessary first step to solving the problem of the great divide between the natural and human sciences. | |
| Participant C | The programme theme is vitally important as it is centrally concerned with inextricable relationship between the environment-hunman nexus with a primary focus on energy cycles, sustainability, and environmental change. There is both a temporal and comparative dimension built into the research and teaching aspects of the CCOE programme which is both admirable and crucially important for the future production of knowledge and research training with a radical practical cutting edge. | |
| Participant D | Excellent! The program theme is important and timely, not only in Southeast Asia, but also in Europe and elsewhere. Several calls and research groups have challenged that inter- and transdisciplinary studies are the only way to solve important and urgent questions regarding our environment. | |
| Participant E | The GCOE's effort to bring together scholars from the natural and social sciences to address seems to me to be exactly the kind of interdisciplinary program we need to find new and better ways to address our most pressing global problems. This kind of interdisciplinary research remains quite rare, and Kyoto University is certainly a leader in this area. | |
| Participant F | The theme was expansive, inclusive, and left room for an interdisciplinary convergence on several key foci. | |
| Participant G | The program theme covers the necessary elements which the program has identified as humanosphere, geosphere, biosphere for understanding global environmental changes of the 21st century. In this regard, it is a very strong interdisciplinary effort, and it is necessary to include these three ‘spheres' in order to account for the global changes and an understanding of global sustainability. | |
| Participant H | "In Search of Sustainable Humanosphere in Asia and Africa" | |
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2. Originality |
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| Participant A | I think the theme is entirely original, as far as I can see – I know of no other program like this anywhere in the US, or abroad for that matter. This is one of the program's great strengths – it is trying to do things that no one else has done before. | |
| Participant B | One of the most original features of the conference was the juxtaposition of historical and world-systems approaches to the environment, on the one hand, with both ethnographic and ecological case studies, on the other. The challenge of combining these kinds of studies has not been solved, but the genius of the conference was to pose the question of how it might be solved in the future. | |
| Participant C | The GCOE programme builds on the scaffolding, and, ideas , to a certain extent of the earlier multi-disciplinary research programmes developed by individual staff members and teams based at CSEAS since 1965.In this case, an earlier institutional agenda based on conducting systematic and integrated area studies research has been refined and enhanced by the more explicit incorporation of other major branches of scientific knowledge found within Kyoto University. The internal logic of the CCOE is both original in certain respects with regard to framing and categories of analysis and vitally important from both a practical and educational standpoint given the world we have made and the current transitions and transformations occurring on a global scale, but especially in the tropical parts of the globe and among nations situated on, or near the equator. The GCOE Programme ,from what I have been able to learn to date, is characterized by considerable ambition and is a program to be admired; a serious institutional effort has been undertaken to unify major branches of the sciences and social sciences under the banner of a new paradigmn concerned with the ;Humanosphere', with a primary focus on sustainability and energy studies in all their manifest form and variation. | |
| Participant D | The integration of disciplines at such a large scale as you have done is definitely original and will provide important methodological tools for multidisciplinary programs. I have still not seen anything similar. Particularly the way you make people work together! Not only will the direct results be important but also the methods of creating a good and creative atmosphere between researchers from different disciplines (which you seem to have done well) will be important insights for other countries/research groups/programs. This is one of the reasons why I think you should publish a scientific popular book in both Japanese and English (see below). |
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| Participant E | The conference structure, themes, and mix of participants all struck me as highly original. And indeed, all of the participants' presentations also seemed to me to be very original, bringing together the natural and social science in new ways. Lastly, the fieldtrip to the satoyama landscapes was also a very original and essential part of the conference, and it provided a literal ground for the rest of the program. | |
| Participant F | The symposium organizers recentered key questions in novel ways. | |
| Participant G | Intending to address the three “spheres” with their overlaps is a rather innovative way of dealing with the issue of sustainability as most research programs that I am familiar with tend to restrict their areas of examination. | |
| Participant H | This was a unique conference which involved specialists from key areas, ecologists, anthropologists, historians, scientists. | |
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3. Approaches to the issues and questions |
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| Participant A | The approaches seem worthwhile to me – they are very inter-disciplinary in nature. | |
| Participant B | I was impressed by the use of the term “humanosphere” to mean different things. Rather than a liability, I believe this is an asset to the program. The term needs to be big enough to attract scholars from many approaches. In the last session on “scope and scale,” the different uses of the term (e.g., “broad” versus “narrow” senses of the term) offered a useful framing device for thinking of how interdisciplinary dialogue might be engaged. Many of the interchanges during the conference provide openings to pursue new kinds of dialogue in the future. Here are some examples of opportunities that I believe could be followed up: (1) Philosophical exchanges on the nature of the humanosphere. It would be interesting to pair scholars using the term differently to explicitly bring out how the term might be useful to their work using different meanings. (2) Philosophical exchanges on the nature of field-based research. I would love to see a workshop devoted entirely to dialogue between ecological and ethnographic scholars on the question of how fieldwork influences their research questions. To hold this dialogue at Kyoto University would be particularly good to make use of the rich tradition of Kyoto-based fieldwork approaches in both social and natural sciences. This discussion could indeed form the basis of cutting-edge interdisciplinary discussion. Whereas hypothesis-testing approaches are often touted as more efficient, I believe field-based approaches can show their superiority particularly in interdisciplinary questions. (3) Explicit pairing of scholars from different disciplines to discuss the possibilities of studying either (a) particular cases, for example “satoyama landscape”; or (b) particular concepts, for example, “disturbance histories.” (4) Extension of the discussion of “scope and scale” to pair scholars with focus on different scales in similar cases, to work out some advantages and disadvantages of each. |
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| Participant C | The approaches to the pressing contemporary social and environmental issues and problems are sound. The GCOE program is crucially concerned with issues relating to the control and distribution of energy, and ultimately with helping to address the issue of poverty and equitable entitlement. The emphasis on the tropical regions of the world makes sense given the more recent history of the uneven nature of the growth and development of the global economy over the past several centuries.There is a concern here ,and, a need, to find ways to grow more sustainable economies into the market, develop better technologies to help make this happen, and to reassess our lifestyles and relationships with other people and places, in the process live by example. | |
| Participant D | I don't know if it was the particular theme of the conference in December but I got the feeling that there were less natural science researchers now. I hope I am wrong! It is so important that one discipline doesn't have a critical mass because then you loss the originality of the whole program. | |
| Participant E | I felt that, through this program, I was able to learn about a variety of approaches to integrating the natural and social sciences in order to study environmental and human problems. | |
| Participant F | After the Science Wars of the 1990s, it has been difficult to get people from the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences to talk with each other. The approach of symposium to nature succeeded in breaking down boundaries that are increasingly rarely crossed. | |
| Participant G | The issues and questions proposed are broad enough to cover the global changes and sustainability concerns that have appeared on the horizon and identified as critical issues of the millennium. | |
| Participant H | The approach to the entire seminar was unique and very topical. It urged participants to develop new conceptual tools, to understand and address the true complexity of human and nature interactions in the past, at present and in the future. It covered wide spectrum of forest and water resources, focussed on specific species of flora and fauna and also the national concerns of economic development. | |
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4. Project scheme and structure |
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| Participant A | The structure seems fine – trying to get people from across a range of disciplines to talk to one another is not easy, but it is worthwhile, as we saw at the meeting last week. Although we don't always have the same vocabulary to talk about things, we can say useful things by examining problems together – and I felt that went very well this past week. | |
| Participant B | The conference formed an unusual opportunity for many participants to deal with materials outside their areas of expertise. In some cases, this resulted in rich new kinds of history, ethnography, and science. Professor Reid's ability to incorporate earthquake and tsunami materials into his history of Sumatra was a wonderful example of what can happen when historians engage the natural world. Similarly, the work of Professor Fukamachi and Professor Cousins on the ecologies of anthropogenic landscapes showed how natural scientists can engage history. The challenge for the future, I think, is to use exemplary cases like these to stimulate discussion for other scholars about how new kinds of research paradigms might be formed. Perhaps a workshop structure of intimate discussion will be more useful than paper presentations for this next step. For this kind of design, however, it isparticularly important to invite very generous scholars, capable of listening to and working with others. |
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| Participant C | I cannot comment in detail on the scheme and structure given my recent acquaintance with the GCOE program, except to say that there is an elegance and balance inherent within it that reflects the wisdom of first nation people and the metaphysics of the primal mind, namely the interdependence and interconnection of all things. Let me briefly comment on areas of investigation that I think should not be neglected within the framework of the GCEO programme. 1.The historical basis of climate change which is the most important challenge we have ever faced. Climate connects us all and we have influenced our climate and environment by how we have made use of fuels, our water and and our land. We live in a world that is increasingly vulnerable to climatic shocks. It is imperative that we extend our understanding of the interaction between climate and history. 2.the significance of stress and resilience within systems. Here, namely at the individual, community and national level in terms of a vulnerability and a capacity to cope .What is most important in both the past and present is to be able to recognize and define the breaking , or tipping point. 3. The historical basis of greed and its link to Capitalism.This area of investigation is linked directly to the above point. Clearly ,poverty , the agrarian question and the issue of equitable entitlement needs to be addressed within the framework of the GCOE programme on a systematic basis. 4. Global population growth stresses everything nowadays. Issues pertaining to the rise and demise of population and appropriate technology and education to do family planning must also be addressed at some stage within the framework of the GCOE programme , a future programme which will build on the findings and outcomes of this initial five year programme. |
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| Participant D | Excellent! | |
| Participant E | Both the intellectual structure and logistical structure of this conference were excellent. I would be thrilled to participate in a similar program or a follow-up program in the future. | |
| Participant F | The Symposium was more heavily weighted towards social scientists than natural scientists. I would have liked to see a more even balance between the two and perhaps also an institutional mandate for closer collaboration among people working on similar problems representing different traditions of knowledge. | |
| Participant G | Reviewing the documents provided, it looks workable in light of the structure of the research program and the institution. | |
| Participant H | It is because of this complex and open scope that the conference needed to involve scholars from different specialities as mentioned above. This often led to very fruitful and stimulating discussions. Sometimes the discussions also seemed to lack structure, which was probably intended to an extent to facilitate a more open ended discussion. The real challenge in future would be for experts to cross disciplinary boundaries. In my opinion this would not be possible by holding discussions but by achieving a certain knowledge and appreciation of each others methodologies with a common purpose in mind. | |
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5. Cluster sub-themes (initiative 1 – 4) |
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| Participant A | I'm not sure what this refers to? | |
| Participant B | The themes seem interesting and attractive. We did not have too much chance to discuss them in the conference, at least in an explicit form, so I have just read about them in the G-COE brochure. Perhaps as they inspire publications and discussion, I will be able to see how they work. | |
| Participant C | NA | |
| Participant D | I answer the same as in the spring 2009. Most clusters seem to be very well integrated although I will raise a question mark to the biofuel initivative that seems slightly ‘off-side'. | |
| Participant E | I thought these were excellent as they allowed us to focus on more specific topics within the broader GCOE program theme. I also liked that the clusters were largely organized by up-and-coming scholars. This allowed them to express and develop their own theoretical ideas within the framework of the program. | |
| Participant F | The sub-themes were clear, well articulated, and organically emerged out of the papers themselves. | |
| Participant G | The themes are logically connected pertaining to an understanding of sustainability. I find initiative 4 innovative as it attempts to cover thematics that are not usually addressed in other environmental research programs that I am aware of, or have affiliations with. Given such an emphasis, there should be consideration given to, for example, an examination of the idea of ‘place' (or‘community') and the value orientation various communities place on this ‘ecopsychological' attachment, and the connection this has for sustainability practices and issues. | |
| Participant H | NA | |
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6. Educational outcome and impact on up-and-coming researchers. |
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| Participant A | I think the impact on up and coming researchers is likely to be vast, and again, one of the best things to come out of this project. For young researchers o be exposed to this degree of inter-disciplinarity at an early stage of their careers is a lucky thing indeed. All the more so of the attempt is done as well as this one is being done. | |
| Participant B | The inclusion of young researchers as section leaders was a particularly good innovation. Learning something about their thoughts was very important for the conference. It might be possible in the future to have a conference in which young scholars (PhD students, postdoctoral fellows, and assistant professors) formed the bulk of the presentations, with senior scholars as only commentators and discussants. My student Heather Swanson proposed just this idea as a potential collaboration between young scholars from Kyoto University and the University of California. Young scholars are open to new ideas, and they might be able to push forward conversations both across institutional and disciplinary traditions. |
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| Participant C | I think the GCOE program could have a profound impact on many fields in terms of the highly original trans-disciplinary work it is attempting to undertake currently. A genuine effort is being made to forge dramatic new links and partnerships between fields, and ties between scholars in diverse disciplines that will bind, in order to form enduring research clusters and networks based on new ways of framing and addressing contemporary social and environmental issues and problems. | |
| Participant D | The well integrated atmosphere that you have created is an excellent platform for young researchers. Cross- and multidisciplinary studies are difficult and it takes time to learn each others tools, trade and language. I think you will succeed in this, particularly as you seem to focus on the young students and researchers which are excellent. However I think it is important that the researchers are also encouraged to keep up with their work also within their different disciplines. When finding jobs/grants afterward it is important to have a track record in both large interdisciplinary studies and more specific research areas. In other words publish publish publish in good international journals. |
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| Participant E | As an up-and-coming researcher myself, I feel this program was one of the most valuable experiences I have had. Not only was I able to learn much from the presentations themselves, I was also able to have many informal conversations with both senior scholars and up-and-coming researchers. I am very grateful that I was able to have such an opportunity so early in my career. | |
| Participant F | As an “up-and-coming researcher” myself, I found that the conversations were stimulating. The informal conversations over meals exposed me to new literatures and knowledge traditions that I had not yet been aware of. | |
| Participant G | The program appears to have an active set of conferences and seminars to facilitate educational learning outcomes. Institutional exchanges with other like-minded institutions could be initiated to move beyond researcher to researcher collaborations beyond Kyoto University, and other institutions in other parts of the world. This will further intensify the collaborative research process. | |
| Participant H | NA | |
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7. Suggestion on the way to disseminate the GCOE program |
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| Participant A | I would send the GCOE booklet – the nice, laminated one distributed to us in our hotel rooms – out to selected universities across the world, so that others might see what is being done by Kyoto. | |
| Participant B | Perhaps program publications should begin by addressing varied disciplinary audiences before trying to integrate into one single publication, which might get lost if it is too general. | |
| Participant C | The findings of the GCOE program should be disseminated through a dedicated website, a series of working papers both in Japanese and English, master classes conducted by invited senior scholars who would participate in the postgraduate training programme. Such classes would be available for postgraduate students, younger scholars, and the public. A monograph series dedicated to the research findings of the various teams should be another major consideration. | |
| Participant D | Important that you reach out outside Japan and South East Asia because you will have important knowledge, for example by writing articles in refereed international journals. I also suggest that you write a book about your results in a popular scientific way in both Japanese and English. In one of the interdisciplinary projects I have participated in we paid for a “science” journalist to write/edit the book. He started with reading our scientific papers, then he interviewed us and we had the possibility to correct chapters that were our different results. The result is very appealing with lots of good photographs and illustrations that are now also used as a book in eduction (nature protection). Here is the link but unfortunately the book is in Swedish. But there are some text in English http://www-hagmarksmistra.slu.se/eng/index.htm but from the pictures in this page http://www-hagmarksmistra.slu.se/boken.htm you can see the layout of the book. I think this would be perfect for your program. |
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| Participant E | Websites and print materials both seem possible. | |
| Participant F | Once the papers from the symposium are published the use of new media—podcasting, multimedia web portals—would enable our results to reach the widest popular audience. | |
| Participant G | Members of the program could present their research findings based on the program initiatives to a variety of academic and environmental settings. Selective postings of the program on various list-servs should also be pursued, including the establishment of an independent website with independent web address focusing on the program. | |
| Participant H | There are several ways that GCOE program can be disseminated. One obvious way would be to compile the researches and outcomes into a single volume. Another way could be to take up a project which involves both desk and field research involving different scholars, filming it in the process and turning it into a documentary. | |
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8. Suggestion on the cooperation with other institutions |
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| Participant A | I would think that the hard-science institutes like MIT and Caltech would really love this program – they could learn a lot from its structure and inception. Many of these places want to know how to connect to more social-science type institutions, too, and this suggests a model on how to do that. | |
| Participant B | It would be useful to identify important schools of thought—not institutions per se, but institutions that support a particular research agenda. Rather than reaching out randomly, I would suggest strategic dialogues and alliances with key institutions for sustainable humanosphere research. For example, my home institution of the University of California, Santa Cruz, hosts an interdisciplinary conversation on human-nonhuman interactions, which might be relevant. It would be interesting to form cooperations with schools that hosted varied interdisciplinary approaches. | |
| Participant C | I have written to Sugihara Sensei and Ishikawa Sensei under separate cover about possible collaboration at one level involving the Asia Research Center, Murdoch University, and a major project anchored at Mc Gill University where I have a research affiliation. | |
| Participant D | I think a good way is to send out students/post docs for short visits (3-6 months) to work in other countries. I still think you should approach some of the other large interdisciplinary programs in Europe, for example Look into the Stockholm Resilience Alliance in Sweden that have similar aims as you. http://www.stockholmresilience.org/ A good person to contact is Professor Carl Folke. The centre is very open to collaborations. However I think you are more advanced in your integration. |
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| Participant E | The program provided a wonderful opportunity to network with scholars from a variety geographic regions. The program enabled me to make professional connections that I predict will grow into full-scale collaborations in the future. | |
| Participant F | There seems to be an affinity between the conversations emerging at Kyoto and those taking place at UC Santa Cruz. The Santa Cruz campus is under serious budget constraints at the moment, like every other campus in the University of California system, but at the level of intellectual content there are certainly many areas of common interest. | |
| Participant G | Identification of like-minded institutions in Europe, Asia, and North America for possible collaboration on the four initiatives. | |
| Participant H | Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, India Also, International Center for Gandhian Studies and Research, New Delhi, India |
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9. About the development paradigm shift“from production to reproduction/livelihood/humanosphere” |
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| Participant A | I think the whole idea of the humanosphere and its relation to the geosphere and the biosphere is interesting and novel. This is a concept that can get a lot of miles out of it, if it develops in the ways that you hope it will in the future. | |
| Participant B | This is a useful and inspiring idea, which encompasses research agendas in both the social and natural sciences. There is something challenging and interesting in the terms “reproduction,”“livelihood,” and “humanosphere.” Might they spark interdisciplinary conversations? More importantly, might they spark a new development paradigm? Part of the problem of thinking about this is the rather radical critique that would be entailed in accepting this new paradigm. How would governments and business representatives be drawn in? The only possibilities that I can see would be the formation of a very robust interdisciplinary conversation, in the way that anthropogenic climate change has developed increasingly as a “fact.” How would we move from words to such “facts”? Perhaps interdisciplinary dialogue centered around particular cases at a landscape scale (by this I mean “incorporating enough patch heterogeneity for several kinds of questions” and not “using GIS technologies”) would be a good starting place. | |
| Participant C | This is crucial in terms of dealing with the issue of poverty and equitable entitlement | |
| Participant D | This is interesting and could be really potential but should be carefully used as it could be regarded as slightly ‘soft' or fuzzy scientifically. Get rid of the three ‘issues' and only use one as this can cause confusion. I suggest “from production to sustainability” | |
| Participant E | It seems to me that this shift is absolutely essential as it allows us to integrate diverse disciplines and theoretical approaches in new ways. | |
| Participant F | Agamben describes a distinction between biographical life (bios) and reproductive life (zoe). Perhaps playing with this distinction might be fruitful in the context of your paradigm shift. | |
| Participant G | This is an interesting epistemological and ontological shift, especially in an era whereby sustainability is the ‘cause celebre' and it is analysis of the reproduction of life that also needs addressing in light of what the productivist paradigm has brought forth. In this context, initiative 4 plays a key role in anchoring this paradigm shift. The issue of the ‘dematerialisation' of consumption and reproduction will be of interest. | |
| Participant H | This particular shift is very pertinent. While production connotes a more mechanical approach, livelihood and reproduction capture the more symbiotic aspects of human-nature relationships. | |
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10. About the development paradigm shift“from template zone-centered to tropic zone-centered” |
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| Participant A | This I found to be less important perhaps, than the overall scheme of the project. | |
| Participant B | One of the exciting possibilities this shift suggests is the possibility of finding “tropical” questions (that is, research approaches developed in the tropics) in the temperate zone, thus reorienting temperate zone studies as well as global ecological studies. For example, tropical zone studies have highlighted multispecies interactions (e.g., insect-fungi-plant ecologies), traditional agroforestry alternatives (e.g., integral swidden agriculture), and non-timber-forest-product economies (e.g., rattan, eaglewood). These foci of research can also invigorate temperate-zone studies. Meanwhile, people from the global south are increasingly becoming“nature workers”in the global north, transferring “tropical-zone” skills and traditional knowledge bases to temperate zones. For example, in the United States, the forest-products and agricultural skills of indigenous people from Central America, on the one hand, and Southeast Asia, on the other, are having a major effect on natural resource management in agriculture and forestry. In one exemplification, Hmong refugees from Laos have started strawberry fields at the sides of U.S. highways that have undercut the prices of conventional farms. Migration histories from the global south to the global north thus join earlier north-to-south histories of knowledge and technology transfer in reshaping global ecologies. |
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| Participant C | This is vital in terms of world population and development, as well as to redress the balance | |