Author: Stephen Trombulak

Social identity and the future of Montana

Stephen Trombulak / / Systematic Conservation Planning, Understanding "place"

Today’s New York Times reports on an effort currently underway by a non-profit organization to create a 3-million acre reserve in the grasslands of Montana.  The American Prairie Reserve is buying ranches that are for sale and slowly stitching together a landscape in which bison can roam freely and in which ecological conditions akin to those present 200 years ago can flourish.

This project is admirable in its scope and goals.  Bison, as the largest native herbivore in North America since the time of the post-Pleistocene mass extinction, were powerful ecological engineers, and their loss — brought about primarily by overhunting — has had widespread consequences on the biological integrity of this continent’s prairies.  Coupled with subsequent land-use changes that have largely involved ranching, with its associated fencing and cattle, the loss of bison herds is one of the biggest wildlife transformations anywhere in North America.

Which makes the work of the American Prairie Reserve one of the biggest wildlife conservation stories today.

What I find interesting about this story, however, is not what they are trying to achieve.  Rather it is the social environment within which they are trying to achieve it.  This story does not involve government intervention, eminent domain, or an Eastern Establishment driving up property values.  Fair-market value is paid to willing sellers who are approached after they put their ranches up for sale.

Yet as reported by the New York Times, this conservation effort faces opposition from some ranchers in the area because … it does not conform to their vision of how the land ought to be used: cattle ranching.

This reminds me of similar conflicts that emerged in New England in the 1990s over logging and timber lands.  All such stories about the “legitimate” uses for large landscapes seems to involve similar questions.

Are there limits to private property rights that would allow neighbors to say to someone, “You cannot sell your land to this other person because they aren’t going to use it the way I think they should”?  It is easy to understand why one would not want to allow a new neighbor to build something that was destructive or dangerous on their land, but should rancher be able to say that a conservation group should not own land because they are practicing conservation?  Or a snowmobiler be able to say that a new landowner cannot post their land against snowmobiling?

On what basis can those who believe in a particular cultural narrative of place claim that their narrative is the most important?  It’s understandable that ranchers who want to continue ranching should expect to be able to continue ranching on their land.  But what gives ranching primacy over other cultural narratives, such as those held by Native Americans who lived there before the ranchers?

And what constitutes the “place” being considered?  An individual ranch?  A single valley? A 20-million acre prairie?  As spatial scale increases, so too does the opportunity for and challenges of diverse cultural narratives to come together —  woven together either collaboratively or in conflict.

This really isn’t just a story about Montana or ranching or bison.  It’s a story about landscape-scale conservation planning everywhere and the role of social identity in shaping the cultural narrative that is used to describe a place.  How we learn — or don’t learn — to unpackage those issues will determine how successful conservation will be in the 21st century and beyond.

What is the role of transportation in sustainable food systems?

Stephen Trombulak / / Sustainability

Back in 1999, my colleague Chris McGrory Klyza and I wrote in our book The Story of Vermont that at one point in Vermont’s post-colonial history, it could easily be described as “sustainable.”  This was in the 1700s and early 1800s.

After the mid-1800s, however, not so much.  What caused the transition?  In a word, transportation.  Once Vermont — or any other place in the world, for that matter — becomes connected to a larger region through an efficient transportation network, the limits imposed by the need to live within the regenerative capacity of one’s own landscape break down.

In Vermont, the development of a railway system that connected farmers to markets in Boston and New York City moved the people away from sustainability.  The development of the interstate highway system 100 years later only accelerated that trend.  While an environmental ethic continued to grow and take root, sustainability was lost.  Vermont is now as “green” as anywhere in the U.S. but it is as unsustainable as it has ever been.

I don’t believe that we will ever go back to being an isolated outpost of insular settlements.  But if we are to decrease the unsustainability of societies — here and everywhere — we have to think more creatively about the environmental costs of how we achieve our connectivity.

In that spirit, my curiosity is piqued by the Vermont Sail Freight Project.  A plywood ship, powered by sail, is sailing down the Hudson River to New York City, loaded with 15 tons of locally produced agricultural products (e.g., potatoes, grains, syrup) bound for the booming local foods markets there.  The organizers of this venture describe the ship, called the Ceres after the Roman goddess of agriculture, the “to” in “farm to table.”

I wholeheartedly applaud the creative thinking behind this project.  The organizers moved from identifying a problem (e.g., the carbon footprint of modern transportation networks) to analyzing the landscape in which the problem is manifest (in this case, the Hudson River Valley, which flows directly into New York City) to imagining a solution (a wind-powered barge).  And not incidentally, along the way they encountered the need to apply key leadership skills, included fundraising and team-building.

What I’m curious about is how, or even whether, this system can be scaled up to make any real difference to the sustainability of a place like New York City or the agricultural systems of a place like Vermont.  Rail and road networks were so successful because they scaled easily.  Can barge traffic along waterways do the same?

I hope so.  And I look forward to seeing what the future brings for this project.

How sustainable is our use of ocean resources?

Stephen Trombulak / / Sustainability

The 2013 Ocean Health Index was just released (http://www.oceanhealthindex.org/).  This index assesses ten different aspects of humanity’s relationship with the ocean environment across a range of ecosystems services and scores them with respect to what they consider to be attainable goals that are “more sustainable than the current conditions.”  Even with the bar set at this fairly low level (in that “more sustainable” is not the same thing as “sustainable”), the results are not pretty.  For example, the score for harvesting food sustainably is a paltry 33 out of 100.  In a future where more people will come to depend on more food from the world’s oceans, the unsustainability of our current harvesting practices highlights the vital importance for us to do better.

Yet the critical question is not just what should be done to improve the sustainability of harvesting practices.  A series of interviews by leading fisheries scientists (http://vimeo.com/47318459) makes clear the importance of changing people’s perceptions of oceans as a free-for-all open market.  Steve Gaines of the University of California, Santa Barabara, says it best: People need to put more of a sense of ownership into the oceans.  With a sense of ownership comes, as a general rule, a sense of responsibility, for the present and the future.

The question is really how to this can be achieved.  How can people — individually and collectively — be led to feel that managing ocean resources sustainably matters?

Can reading literary fiction enhance leadership skills?

Stephen Trombulak / / Leadership skills

Every since Daniel Goleman published his seminal work on emotional intelligence (Emotional Intelligence, 1995, Bantam Books), it has been well appreciated that effective leadership requires much more than simple mastery of facts.  Leaders need the capacity to interact effectively with people on a personal, non-cognitive level, which led Goleman to propose that emotional intelligence was at least as important, if not more so, than I.Q.

Viewed now, almost 20 years later, this idea seems obvious.  The concept of “leadership” is only relevant if more than a single person is involved, and as soon as people need to work together, effective interaction requires empathy for emotional states, different communication styles, and non-verbal cues.

So improving one’s emotional intelligence — in particular one’s ability to interpret correctly non-verbal cues and emotional states — is an important leadership skill.  The question then becomes, “How can it be done?”

The most recent contribution to that conversation was recently published on-line by the journal Science, the primary publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.  In their October 3rd article titled “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York City, write:

Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies. Yet little research has investigated what fosters this skill, which is known as Theory of Mind (ToM), in adults. We present five experiments showing that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective ToM (experiments 1 to 5) and cognitive ToM (experiments 4 and 5) compared with reading nonfiction (experiments 1), popular fiction (experiments 2 to 5), or nothing at all (experiments 2 and 5). Specifically, these results show that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances ToM.

In simple terms?  Literary fiction is typically character driven, rather than plot driven, as is more typical of popular or genre fiction.  Following a story being advanced by characters requires that the reader engage with the characters themselves, with all the nuance, ambiguity, and subtlety given to them by their creators.  Reading literary fiction therefore trains the reader to interpret nuance, ambiguity, and subtlety.

The authors note that they aren’t (yet) able to demonstrate that this effect lasts over time, primarily because their experiments weren’t designed to look for that.  But like all good science, their results open the door to more questions worth pursuing.

But even these limited results are intriguing.  The connections between the humanities and leadership are even more direct than the simple truism that leaders need to be well-rounded citizens of the world.

To improve your leadership skills … go read a literary book!

Welcome to The Stream

Stephen Trombulak / / School of the Environment

Our flow into a more just and sustainable future — both as individuals and as a society — requires that we engage with others to understand current issues and to craft effective solutions to environmental problems.  This seemingly simple statement is, in fact, complex in execution.  “Engagement” requires open-minded listening to the views of others as well as persuasive communication about our own views.  To “understand current issues” requires that one think critically about both facts and attitudes across a range of lenses used to understand any issue, including history, culture, politics, and environmental science.  Only with a truly interdisciplinary perspective to understanding the narrative of how an issue came into being in a particular place can the solutions that will move us forward from the present be seen or effectively advanced.  And to “craft effective solutions” requires more than just knowing the scientific facts and the sociopolitical history of an issue.  It requires people who have the skills needed to become effective agents of change.  It requires leaders.

The School of the Environment seeks to be a doorway into a learning environment that will help students become the environmental leaders of the future.  And this blog, The Stream, is one of the tools we intend to use to promote engagement, understanding, and leadership.  We don’t think of the School as an isolated six-week experience that comes into being each June and then disappears again in August.  The School is an on-going … and growing … network of people who want to be a part of creating that just and sustainable future.  The Stream is our way to keep the conversation going and to build the community.

Posts on The Stream will largely focus on topics related to the classes we will be teaching in the upcoming year, so if you are a prospective student, you can get a good sense of what you will be exposed to at the School.  We will also post on topics about leadership skills, social change, and the School itself.  And I have every expectation that it will grow over time and adapt to meet the needs of students, alumni, and anyone who wants to be part of this community.

Welcome to The Stream.