Find Me at Synergia Cooperative Institute https://synergiainstitute.org/mooc-overview/

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Energy Calamity and the Tar Sands - Reviews


Reviewer Comments
 
“Drs. Debra J. Davidson (Associate Professor, University of Alberta) and Michael Gismondi (Professor, Athabasca University) newest book, Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity, is one of the few social scientific analyses of the Alberta tar sands-an enterprise warranting much closer scrutiny from academe than it has received to date. The authors do two things in this book. First, they take a good hard look at the tar sands from the broader context of peak oil and climate change, and conclude without much trouble that this form of development just doesn’t add up. Second, they analyze the frames, images and narratives that are used to legitimize this enterprise and the potential sources of weakness in those frames, and also the frames and narratives that are used to oppose it, and their potential to unseat legitimacy. They conclude that the legitimacy of the tar sands (and its state and industrial proponents) is fragile, but concerned citizens and organizations making up the resistance may not be capitalizing on those sources of fragility as well as they might. They situate this political moment in a complex systems framework, drawing on contemporary theory and critical perspectives on complexity/mobility, political ecology, human geography, legitimacy, citizenship, environmental sociology and discourse analysis.” (University of Alberta: Augustana Campus News)

“The book stands to make an important contribution not only to our understanding of tar sands development in Alberta politics ( a topic increasingly of global significance, as the authors note) but also to broader more “theoretical” issues of state legitimacy and contestation …The authors bring theoretically sophisticated tools to bear…” Springer Press Reviewer



The Canadian tar sands are becoming globally known and debated as an energy, natural resource, mining and climate issue. It is no longer just a local or regional or even a national issue but is part of global debates on how to sustainably manage the earth resources, defended and offended in different way by different groups. It has become an example…for many other major challenges of the present time…. In the way the issue is approached and dealt with, I can see interests coming from scholars in sociology, environmental studies, geography, economics, political sciences, anthropology, energy studies. Professionals in the field of energy, climate change, various mining business, governmental sectors, NGOs would be interested.” Springer Press Reviewer

To learn more, visit http://www.springer.com/environment/book/978-1-4614-0286-2

Researchers and students can order an ebook copy from SpringerLink.  

Energy Calamity and the Tar Sands - Teaching Videos


These video clips provide useful teaching points developed by  Debra J. Davidson (Associate Professor, University of Alberta) and Michael Gismondi (Professor, Athabasca University) who explain aspects of  their newest book, Challenging Legitimacy at the Precipice of Energy Calamity, one of the few social scientific analyses of the Alberta tar sands.


  • Deb - Legitimacy
    Alberta tar sands expansions are at the epicenter of a larger global debate about energy, peak oil, and climate change issues.

  • Mike - Rescuing Voices
    Why are so many good ideas about alternative directions and futures heard, but not publicly deliberated or acted upon?

  •  Deb- Hearings: A Question of Democracy
    The limitations of public hearings.

     
  •  Mike – History
    Discusses the long history of public financing and state support for the tar sands industry from early 1900s to Suncor in 1967, and how pride in emergence of industry in 1960s is now an obstacle to contemporary change.

  •  Deb – Bitumen
    Struggle over the words tar sands and oil sands. They have become politicized and used to label and reject critics.

     
  • Deb – Discourses
    How do pro tar sands narratives and storylines work on belief systems.


     
  • Mike - Language and Power
    Language can erase or language can frame and guide our understanding of tar sands issues. Discusses claim by government that tar sands is a knowledge economy.


  • Mike- Visualizing the Tar Sands
    How photographs and images of tar sands landscapes and tar sands industry become part of civic history and a civic virtue.


  • Deb – EROI
    Discusses falling Energy Return on Investment in the energy industry in general, and as it applies to tar sands extraction.


  • Deb – Keystone
    Situated Keystone pipeline as both material and symbolic issue, used to legitimate the global flows of capital, oil and power.

  •  Deb- Jobs
    Discusses pros and cons of jobs created by a boom – bust industry.

  •  Deb - Imagining Other Futures
    Advances the idea of an alternative to the industry.

  • Mike - Entrenched Ideas
    Talks about how hard it is to change the directions of the oil economy.

  • Deb- No Place for Denial
    Argues that trends in climate change and uncertainty of declining energy supply are happening, whether we like it or not. Calls for alternatives.

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Athabasca River Basin Research Institute (ARBRI) - My View

For the last few years we have been collecting the ARBRI bibliography, thousands of references to research conducted in the Athabasca River Basin, by thousands of researchers from many, many fields of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Important works, but works that will only be helpful going forward if we change our methodological and theoretical approach to a more holistic understanding of the river basin watershed as a dynamic complex ecological and social system.

This will require us to engage in a new kind of scholarship, a collaborative interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research program, with an emphasis upon synthesis and integration of the social and the ecological.

Such a future will not be without challenges. From within the university, one of the challenges we face, ironically, is something that we value as a strength, that is, the specialized research of disciplines themselves. Basarab Nicolescu, a physicist, tells us that as recently as the 1950s, there were 54 disciplines; yet by the year 2000 that number exploded to over 8000 (and no doubt even more today). As he says “over 8000 ways to look at reality.”

The implications are clear that specialization, whatever its merits for careers, publishing, and data collection, brings with it a huge problem of communication across disciplines and among researchers, and frankly this causes fragmentation of our understanding of complexity.
Fortunately there are some good examples, of clusters of researchers across the natural sciences and social sciences and the humanities, doing the kind of work that we need going forward. I am thinking of Elinor Ostrom and the many researchers inspired by her who are examining commons issues; or the groups at the Stockholm Centre for Resilience examining governance of social and ecological systems.

Resilience is an old ecological concept. But it has emerged as a symbol for using multiple methods and interdisciplinary work to overcome the divides in “cultures” and methodological practices and helps us imagine ways to integrate a wide range of research into fuller understandings of governing complex social ecological systems.

In part, this also requires more thinking about how to integrate other ways of valuing nature, different ethical systems, different notions of justice, and different ideas about managing our intergenerational obligations to the future, as we discuss river basin research and governance.

Questions arising include: How to balance and integrate those sometimes competing values into Basin management design and decision-making in a transparent way: how to integrate the uses of our knowledge in public life in ways that are just and fair.

The good news is that river basin management is an international field, and we are not alone in grappling with complexity. No doubt some good examples have also come up in the other talks here today.

One special area that Athabasca University might contribute to in a unique way, and I am not even sure if they know it yet, is research into modeling. But here I am not simply meaning the modeling of ecosystems and user impacts, but more importantly, the modeling around complex decision-making concerning rules and governance about uses of the basin.

I am talking about how to integrate the data from field research and building outcome scenarios; the kind of scenario building that projects the future implications of our decisions.
This modeling, sometimes called agent based modeling, can be designed to help the public envisage, imagine and deliberate on alternative futures.

Despite the complexity of the computer modeling, some researchers have been talking about democratizing of modeling itself, that means exploiting the democratic opening made available by the Internet and user friendly web technologies, to allow citizens to use and contribute to the models.

My dream for ARBRI is a place where people can come in person or via the web to facilitate that democratic process of the co-construction of a research agenda, to construct collaborative visions of possible alternative futures, in order to assist public deliberation and decision-making into our future prospects and that of the Athabasca River Basin.

Works Cited
Basarab Nicolescu. “ Transdisciplinarity: Basarab Nicolescu Talks with Russ Volckmann.” 2007. http://basarab.nicolescu.perso.sfr.fr/Basarab/Docs_articles/VolckmannReview2007.pdf

Amy Poteete, Marco Jansen, Elinor Ostrom, Working Together: Collective Action, the Commons and Multiple Methods in Practice. 2010.

The Stockholm Resilience Centre
http://www.stockholmresilience.org/