Monday, August 2, 2010
BP Oil Spill and Swiss Cheese: Other Examples on Web
Some times it is nice to know that your view of something is shared by others and its seems that the Swiss cheese view of the BP oil spill is one of these views (maybe one day I will think of something new under the sun!). Tim Webb in the Observer on 18th July noted the BP executives used the ‘Swiss cheese’ analogy to explain how accidents occur. MasterResource, a free-market energy blog has some comments about the Swiss cheese model. BP’s "Leading from the top in BP" powerpoint makes reference to the Swiss cheese model of accidents. These are just a few examples from a quick search of the Web - I am sure there will be a lot more out there. So the concepts in model are clearly known about. How are they actually applied in practice if they are so well known?
Pakistan Floods and Landslide Hazard
The floods in Pakistan and the damage they are causing has statred to become of interest to the media. The new link to Dave Petley's Landslide Blog (Dave is the Wilson Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Durham) links this blog to an extremely useful site that deals not only with the current floods and potential for landslides but also provides an archive of information on landslides across the globe since 2007 when Dave started his blog.
Sunday, August 1, 2010
A Decade of Petroleum Company Disasters?
A recent report by the National Wildlife Federation has the provocative title Assault on America: A Decade of Petroleum Company Disaster, Pollution, and Profit. (introductory page, report accesibel from this page). The report states that the recent BP oil disaster is just one of four large events over the last 33 years that have made major headlines. Behind these big events, other smaller events, monthly and daily disasters that don’t make the headlines, characterise the oil and gas industries. To quote the beginning of the report: ‘These disasters demonstrate a pattern of feeding America’s addiction to oil, leaving in their wake sacrifice zones that affect communities, local economies, and our landscape.’
The report then goes on to chronicle various incidents that have happened in the US related to oil and gas companies activities, although the report admits the list is not exhaustive. The conclusion of the report is worth a relatively long quote:
‘As the preceding litany of disasters makes clear, exploiting oil and gas resources to feed a growing appetite for energy is a dangerous business. Furthermore, petroleum companies repeatedly fail to protect people, nature of the climate. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can and should be a wake-up call to all of us that now is the time to seriously begin reducing our dependence on dangerous fossil fuels …..’ (p.28)
The report finishes with a series of recommendations ranging from the financial such as ending corporate subsidies for fossil fuel energy development to legislature such as removal of exemptions from Clean and Safe Drinking Water Acts and passing comprehensive climate and energy legislation. Mixed in are policies to improve transport and home heating.
The report has a particular viewpoint, that nature of fragile and in such a delicate balance that it needs protection from humanity. The call for a move to a safer, cleaner source of energy is one I tend to agree with, but, and here is my problem, I am also someone who reads such reports and wants to try to understand more than is provided the headline figures, by the media friendly story. The nature that produces us, our lifestyles and resources may be fragile: a slight push and the whole system could collapse. Nature itself is also remarkably resilient, as the mass extinctions throughout geological time have demonstrated. Humanity could disappear and nature would still exist – this is not the sort of resilience I think most commentators opposed to the report might have in mind!
The report itself is more list than an analysis and this is where I would like to know more. The map of incidents, for example, provides no context. What is the population distribution? Does the number of incidents match this distribution. In other words are there more incidents where there are more people? This might be expected as more people mean more pipelines, more supply depots and the like. What about the comparison between the oil and gas industry and other industries? Is their record worse, better or the same as other industries over this period? What spatial context do these incidents take place in? Is the depot located in an industrial area, for example, so the general hazardscape is one of industrial hazard and industrial risk? Do the workers here know about the risk and accept it or assess it differently from those who wrote the report?
There are the economic and social contexts to consider as well. Is the economy of the area of the incidents dependent on oil and gas? Are the communities dependent on this industry? What are the displacement costs of the suggested policies? A healthy environment is essential for humanity but people have to work. Transition takes time during which people still need to eat. Suggesting some policies that will protect and enhance the environment are essential but alongside these there should be suggestions for smoothing the transition particularly where there is a spatial concentration of the ‘problem’ industries as this is also likely to result in a concentration of a dependent population. In other words policies need to be spatially sensitive as well as environmentally sensitive. There is also the question of the perception of the hazard. The report catalogues the incidents and by sheer weight of repetition you feel the burden of responsibility of the industry. Btu is this how the industry and, importantly, working in the industry is viewed on the ground. How people perceive hazards and how they react to that perception are crucial in understanding the risks individuals are prepared to tolerate. An environmentalist, viewing nature as fragile, may view any oil plant as an unacceptable risk. An oil worker may understand the argument of the environmentalist but may believe the risk has been overestimated or that the risk is less than the risk of their family starving if they are laid off because of environmental lobbying.
The magnitude/frequency relationship could looked at as well. The four big incidents – are they all the same magnitude (however that is being defined) and what is the gap between them? Do the smaller events follow a known distribution (linear, geometric, logarithmic or another distribution?) and if so what is the cause of this? Going back to a pervious blog about the Swiss cheese model of hazards – did the industry learn from the small events or big events? In other words is there a continual process of safety checking based on what the smaller incidents tell the industry about the holes in its protocols and practices or is it the large, headline grabbing events that produce such change (if indeed these changes happen). The hope is that the small events have value in focusing thinking about the holes, but the fear is that it is only the larger events that prompt such thinking.
The report then goes on to chronicle various incidents that have happened in the US related to oil and gas companies activities, although the report admits the list is not exhaustive. The conclusion of the report is worth a relatively long quote:
‘As the preceding litany of disasters makes clear, exploiting oil and gas resources to feed a growing appetite for energy is a dangerous business. Furthermore, petroleum companies repeatedly fail to protect people, nature of the climate. The 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico can and should be a wake-up call to all of us that now is the time to seriously begin reducing our dependence on dangerous fossil fuels …..’ (p.28)
The report finishes with a series of recommendations ranging from the financial such as ending corporate subsidies for fossil fuel energy development to legislature such as removal of exemptions from Clean and Safe Drinking Water Acts and passing comprehensive climate and energy legislation. Mixed in are policies to improve transport and home heating.
The report has a particular viewpoint, that nature of fragile and in such a delicate balance that it needs protection from humanity. The call for a move to a safer, cleaner source of energy is one I tend to agree with, but, and here is my problem, I am also someone who reads such reports and wants to try to understand more than is provided the headline figures, by the media friendly story. The nature that produces us, our lifestyles and resources may be fragile: a slight push and the whole system could collapse. Nature itself is also remarkably resilient, as the mass extinctions throughout geological time have demonstrated. Humanity could disappear and nature would still exist – this is not the sort of resilience I think most commentators opposed to the report might have in mind!
The report itself is more list than an analysis and this is where I would like to know more. The map of incidents, for example, provides no context. What is the population distribution? Does the number of incidents match this distribution. In other words are there more incidents where there are more people? This might be expected as more people mean more pipelines, more supply depots and the like. What about the comparison between the oil and gas industry and other industries? Is their record worse, better or the same as other industries over this period? What spatial context do these incidents take place in? Is the depot located in an industrial area, for example, so the general hazardscape is one of industrial hazard and industrial risk? Do the workers here know about the risk and accept it or assess it differently from those who wrote the report?
There are the economic and social contexts to consider as well. Is the economy of the area of the incidents dependent on oil and gas? Are the communities dependent on this industry? What are the displacement costs of the suggested policies? A healthy environment is essential for humanity but people have to work. Transition takes time during which people still need to eat. Suggesting some policies that will protect and enhance the environment are essential but alongside these there should be suggestions for smoothing the transition particularly where there is a spatial concentration of the ‘problem’ industries as this is also likely to result in a concentration of a dependent population. In other words policies need to be spatially sensitive as well as environmentally sensitive. There is also the question of the perception of the hazard. The report catalogues the incidents and by sheer weight of repetition you feel the burden of responsibility of the industry. Btu is this how the industry and, importantly, working in the industry is viewed on the ground. How people perceive hazards and how they react to that perception are crucial in understanding the risks individuals are prepared to tolerate. An environmentalist, viewing nature as fragile, may view any oil plant as an unacceptable risk. An oil worker may understand the argument of the environmentalist but may believe the risk has been overestimated or that the risk is less than the risk of their family starving if they are laid off because of environmental lobbying.
The magnitude/frequency relationship could looked at as well. The four big incidents – are they all the same magnitude (however that is being defined) and what is the gap between them? Do the smaller events follow a known distribution (linear, geometric, logarithmic or another distribution?) and if so what is the cause of this? Going back to a pervious blog about the Swiss cheese model of hazards – did the industry learn from the small events or big events? In other words is there a continual process of safety checking based on what the smaller incidents tell the industry about the holes in its protocols and practices or is it the large, headline grabbing events that produce such change (if indeed these changes happen). The hope is that the small events have value in focusing thinking about the holes, but the fear is that it is only the larger events that prompt such thinking.
BP Oil Spill: Disaster, Media Hype or Fitting a Narrative?
The BP oil spill in the Gulf was an environmental disaster wasn’t it? Tony Hayward fell on his sword didn’t he (the point being nicely dulled by a pension but a gesture nonetheless)? BP have set aside billions to pay for the clean-up and for compensation haven’t they? A big commercial company wouldn’t do that if it didn’t need to surely? President Obama’s rating have plunged based on perceptions of his response. Photographs of oil covered pelicans fill the Web. But is the oil spill the eco-disaster that the images on the news and Web state?
A rethink, backlash, call it what you like is starting to emerge as exemplified by the article in Time on 29th July 2010 by Michael Grunwald (The BP Oil Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?), highlights that the oil spill disaster appears to be a lot less of a disaster than the public had been lead to believe by President Obama, by Green groups, the media and local Gulf communities. The article outlines four reasons why the spill isn’t as damaging as it was initially made out to be. Firstly, the oil from Deepwater is lighter and more degradable than usual (meaning in comparison with the Valdez oil spill). Secondly, the Gulf is warmer and, again comparing to the colder water associated with the Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, so bacteria has been able to break down the oil more rapidly. Thirdly, the flow from the Mississippi has kept oil away from the coast. Lastly, Mother Nature, apparently, is incredibly resilient.
Grundwald supports his argument with comments from a number of spill-response fund contractors, in particular a former Louisiana State University professor Ivor van Heerden who he reminds readers debunked, along with out the Paul Kemp another former LSU professor, the myths the overtopping of the levees by Katrina being due to the nature of the extreme event, as suggested Army Corps of Engineers, and the role of engineering failures in the disaster. The subsequent suggested harassment and van Heerden’s loss of post are used to imply a martyr for the truth. Kemp also highlights to the author that the oil spill is a tiny contributor to the 2,000 sq. mile loss of coastal Louisiana over the last century with the canals and pipelines of the oil and gas industry being highlighted as potential contributors. Similarly, he cites and annual rate of loss of wetlands of 15,000 acres in Louisiana, whilst only 350 acres of oiled marshes have been found by assessment teams (leave aside for a moment if the two terms are technically the same and how identification is made by assessment team – it still implies a minor impact).
So has the oil spill been hyped up, only now to be found to be a leak, as Grundwald begrudgingly credits Rush Limbaugh as foreseeing? The answer is tied up with how the spill has been represented and with the expectations this raises about how the story should unfold. Science is meant to be an objective process, a final, impartial arbitrator, yet it rarely is. Grunwald is at pains to point out the affiliations of his sources, mostly scientists working for spill-response fund contractors, suggesting he understands the funding of the source will be seen as an important issue by his readers. Why? If science is objective then whoever funds it shouldn’t matter, the facts will remain the same. Science does provide a consistent method for producing consistent and repeatable results (anyone really, deeply interested in this I refer to my textbook, Science, Philosophy and Physical Geography, insomniacs will find it very useful!) The questions asked, the type of information obtained, the theories tested and interpretation is all a matter for choice. Sometimes choice is extremely limited as one technique becomes the standard in a field of study, for other areas of science there may be a range of techniques for trying not answer the same type of questions. In a field science, which is what the ecologists, biologists and engineers are trying to practice, the complexity of the real world they are trying to study makes determining a single unequivocal interpretation extremely difficult. On top of the signature of the oil spill you have the signature of long-term changes and of site-specific impacts such as canal developments that can hide, amplify or do nothing to the impact of the oil spill. This is not the simple, clear narrative that the media or, to some extent, the public want.
The labelling of the BP oil spill as an environmental disaster resulted in an almost immediately referral back to the Valdez oil spill. The visual storyline that unfolded was graphic in its portrayal of shivering, oil soaked birds, they feathers slick with black gooe. Waves of blackness struggling to break on black shore, a stark contrast to the pristine whiteness of the mountains often just in view. Armies of volunteers crying as the corpses of wildlife were dredged from the shores of the sound. There was even a clear villain – the captain of the vessel, so an easy target for blame. In other words, the media referred back to an incident that had a clear narrative structure allied by a clear series of visual images to back up that narrative structure. The label oil spill was associated in the mind of the media and the public with those images, with that narrative.
The BP oil spill of 2010, as it is now labelled, is a different beast. The context is different. This is not an enclosed body of water; it is a large, dynamic expanse of fluid into which the oil is spilling. The dynamics of dispersal are different and so the damage may be different both spatially and through time. There are images of pathetic-looking pelicans but often recycled rather than new images. There are no images of vast expanses of oil-soaked beaches with tourists struggling bare-foot through oil-caked sand. In other words, the storyline doesn’t match the Valdez. There is no struggle of fragile nature to witness in close-up, there is no valiant struggle of volunteers with the hint of nature redeemed by humanity; there may be a villain but Tony Hayward is now exiting stage left. The visual story does not match the story of the Valdez, so the impression is the disaster is not as significant. Without the visuals that match the expected story of environmental disaster dictated by the Valdez, what narrative can the media resort to?
Mother Nature is incredibly resilient apparently. Another narrative. Evidence can be selected to support this as Grunwald does. Environmentalists would state that nature is delicately balanced and we disturb that. Another narrative and another set of evidence. The impact of the BP spill may take a lot more scientific research to pin down; it may interfere with environmental systems in unexpected ways, it may take a short time, it may take years, it may produce newsworthy pictures and stories, it may produce dry, detailed and rigorous academic papers. The psychological blow of the spill to the perception of the Gulf coast as a safe clean area is part of this impact. The spill was a disaster for those killed in the blast, it is a an ongoing environmental disaster but it is different in its nature from the seeming point of reference for the media and some of the public, the Exxon Valdez. The impact is and will be complex, but it will unfold with its story, its own spatial and temporal scales. Media-wish this may or may not fit neatly into an existing narrative. What is certain is that the media, the politicians, environmentalists, the bloke at the bar, will all take the opportunity to interpret the spill in their own way, to fit their narrative and, importantly, to fit their own political views and needs.
A rethink, backlash, call it what you like is starting to emerge as exemplified by the article in Time on 29th July 2010 by Michael Grunwald (The BP Oil Spill: Has the Damage Been Exaggerated?), highlights that the oil spill disaster appears to be a lot less of a disaster than the public had been lead to believe by President Obama, by Green groups, the media and local Gulf communities. The article outlines four reasons why the spill isn’t as damaging as it was initially made out to be. Firstly, the oil from Deepwater is lighter and more degradable than usual (meaning in comparison with the Valdez oil spill). Secondly, the Gulf is warmer and, again comparing to the colder water associated with the Valdez spill in Prince William Sound, so bacteria has been able to break down the oil more rapidly. Thirdly, the flow from the Mississippi has kept oil away from the coast. Lastly, Mother Nature, apparently, is incredibly resilient.
Grundwald supports his argument with comments from a number of spill-response fund contractors, in particular a former Louisiana State University professor Ivor van Heerden who he reminds readers debunked, along with out the Paul Kemp another former LSU professor, the myths the overtopping of the levees by Katrina being due to the nature of the extreme event, as suggested Army Corps of Engineers, and the role of engineering failures in the disaster. The subsequent suggested harassment and van Heerden’s loss of post are used to imply a martyr for the truth. Kemp also highlights to the author that the oil spill is a tiny contributor to the 2,000 sq. mile loss of coastal Louisiana over the last century with the canals and pipelines of the oil and gas industry being highlighted as potential contributors. Similarly, he cites and annual rate of loss of wetlands of 15,000 acres in Louisiana, whilst only 350 acres of oiled marshes have been found by assessment teams (leave aside for a moment if the two terms are technically the same and how identification is made by assessment team – it still implies a minor impact).
So has the oil spill been hyped up, only now to be found to be a leak, as Grundwald begrudgingly credits Rush Limbaugh as foreseeing? The answer is tied up with how the spill has been represented and with the expectations this raises about how the story should unfold. Science is meant to be an objective process, a final, impartial arbitrator, yet it rarely is. Grunwald is at pains to point out the affiliations of his sources, mostly scientists working for spill-response fund contractors, suggesting he understands the funding of the source will be seen as an important issue by his readers. Why? If science is objective then whoever funds it shouldn’t matter, the facts will remain the same. Science does provide a consistent method for producing consistent and repeatable results (anyone really, deeply interested in this I refer to my textbook, Science, Philosophy and Physical Geography, insomniacs will find it very useful!) The questions asked, the type of information obtained, the theories tested and interpretation is all a matter for choice. Sometimes choice is extremely limited as one technique becomes the standard in a field of study, for other areas of science there may be a range of techniques for trying not answer the same type of questions. In a field science, which is what the ecologists, biologists and engineers are trying to practice, the complexity of the real world they are trying to study makes determining a single unequivocal interpretation extremely difficult. On top of the signature of the oil spill you have the signature of long-term changes and of site-specific impacts such as canal developments that can hide, amplify or do nothing to the impact of the oil spill. This is not the simple, clear narrative that the media or, to some extent, the public want.
The labelling of the BP oil spill as an environmental disaster resulted in an almost immediately referral back to the Valdez oil spill. The visual storyline that unfolded was graphic in its portrayal of shivering, oil soaked birds, they feathers slick with black gooe. Waves of blackness struggling to break on black shore, a stark contrast to the pristine whiteness of the mountains often just in view. Armies of volunteers crying as the corpses of wildlife were dredged from the shores of the sound. There was even a clear villain – the captain of the vessel, so an easy target for blame. In other words, the media referred back to an incident that had a clear narrative structure allied by a clear series of visual images to back up that narrative structure. The label oil spill was associated in the mind of the media and the public with those images, with that narrative.
The BP oil spill of 2010, as it is now labelled, is a different beast. The context is different. This is not an enclosed body of water; it is a large, dynamic expanse of fluid into which the oil is spilling. The dynamics of dispersal are different and so the damage may be different both spatially and through time. There are images of pathetic-looking pelicans but often recycled rather than new images. There are no images of vast expanses of oil-soaked beaches with tourists struggling bare-foot through oil-caked sand. In other words, the storyline doesn’t match the Valdez. There is no struggle of fragile nature to witness in close-up, there is no valiant struggle of volunteers with the hint of nature redeemed by humanity; there may be a villain but Tony Hayward is now exiting stage left. The visual story does not match the story of the Valdez, so the impression is the disaster is not as significant. Without the visuals that match the expected story of environmental disaster dictated by the Valdez, what narrative can the media resort to?
Mother Nature is incredibly resilient apparently. Another narrative. Evidence can be selected to support this as Grunwald does. Environmentalists would state that nature is delicately balanced and we disturb that. Another narrative and another set of evidence. The impact of the BP spill may take a lot more scientific research to pin down; it may interfere with environmental systems in unexpected ways, it may take a short time, it may take years, it may produce newsworthy pictures and stories, it may produce dry, detailed and rigorous academic papers. The psychological blow of the spill to the perception of the Gulf coast as a safe clean area is part of this impact. The spill was a disaster for those killed in the blast, it is a an ongoing environmental disaster but it is different in its nature from the seeming point of reference for the media and some of the public, the Exxon Valdez. The impact is and will be complex, but it will unfold with its story, its own spatial and temporal scales. Media-wish this may or may not fit neatly into an existing narrative. What is certain is that the media, the politicians, environmentalists, the bloke at the bar, will all take the opportunity to interpret the spill in their own way, to fit their narrative and, importantly, to fit their own political views and needs.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Phronetic Social Science is on Facebook
Please note the new link to Phronetic Social Science on Facebook. This is a site run by Bent Flyvbjerg to help to promote the understanding and development of this approach in the Social Sciences. Well worth a look and a wander around the links to get a better understanding of the approach, its application and the debates surrounding it.
Hazards: The Developmental Approach
Way back as an undergraduate I eagerly read Hewitt’s 1983 book ‘Interpretations of Calamity’. An edited collection of papers from a number of authors it offered a different perspective, a new angle (to me anyway) on what hazards were and how to study them. The book fits into a more general trend at this time to analyse hazards differently from the then dominant, scientific approach (with, admittedly, a cardboard caricature of science being contrasted), hence the term ‘alternative approach’ used by Hewitt.
So what is so different that the approach deserves the tag ‘alternative’? Hazards are no longer seen as sudden breaks with normality, abrupt geophysical events that are unpredictable in their occurrence and impact. Instead hazards are viewed in context. They may be physical in nature but their impact is always differentiated and there is always a human element to them. Beyond the simple ‘without people there are no hazards’ aspect, the developmental approach, as the name might suggest, focused on looking at where the impact of hazards was greatest – the developing world. The claim was and is that this is no an accident. Hazards and disasters highlight an ongoing process of underdevelopment, of lack of access to resources and to economic and political structures to empower people to respond and resist the impact of hazards. Hazards are not breaks with normality, instead they throw into sharper focus the normality of vulnerability and underdevelopment of certain sectors of the population and of the world. Some authors even suggested that such underdevelopment was an essential component of the world economic system, ensuring that certain countries never got to the level to compete with developed countries.
As you might guess, this view of hazards has an acute political angle, a key concern with development and social justice. Hazards that are ‘natural’ are no-one’s fault; hazards that are a product of an unequal society can be blamed on someone or some group. Again not surprisingly, Marxist and structuralist researchers were and are very active in this field and research has tended to focus on the poor and underprivileged in both developing and developed nations. From a Marxist beginning, the importance of social, economic and cultural factors in understanding differential vulnerability to hazards and recovery from disasters is now firmly engrained whatever the political persuasion you happen to be (at least I think so!) The approach is probably best explained through a couple of illustrations.
One of the classic illustrations of this approach is the issue of soil erosion in developing countries. In a dominant approach study you might measure physical properties such as soil fertility, slope angle, rainfall erosivity (how powerful the rainfall is so how much it can erode), soil erodibility (how susceptible the soil is to being eroded) – all terms found in the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) which I will chat about in a later blog. You might then recommend that the locals change their ways to reduce environmentally harmful soil loss (conveniently forgetting that they have somehow survived for hundreds maybe thousands of years in this environment using their framing methods). You might even draw on a convenient list of crops that would bind and help prevent soil loss. This highlights a classic tactic or claim about the dominant approach. The victims become those responsible for the problem. It is the farmers fault there is erosion; it is the farmers fault he farms the land that gets flooded by the storms in Bangladesh. The developmental approach doesn’t assume this. It asks a different set of questions.
A farmer in Nepal has a difficult enough life as it is without a Western expert telling them to stop doing what has worked for generations. They have to pay rent, they have to pay for the fertilizer and farming equipment they need to use the new crops the expert told them to use and their landlord insists they grow because they mean he can put their rent up. His wife (in a very sexist caricature here) is always on about the latest things they should have that her cousin in Kathmandu has. The children need to walk to school and he needs to pay for their education if they are to escape the same trap as he. Is this painting a picture of an uncaring, deliberately environmentally destructive farmer? Or is this painting a picture of someone struggling to become part of a wider society with all the pressures, demands and aspirations that this means as illustrated in Figure 1. This is the view of the developmental approach, soil erosion isn’t a sudden problem, it is part of the system, it is an inevitable consequence of the farmer’s position within a capitalist society.
Figure 1 Web of RealtioNs Affecting the Farmer (Note scale not mentioned as yet)
A farmer is nested within a set of hierarchical relations all of which constrain how he (or she but that is fairly unlikely in this context) can behave. If the economy alone is considered then something like Figure 2 could illustrate the farmer being nested in his own farm within a local economy, which is in turn nested in a regional economy which is itself part of a global economy. The farmer is impacted by the regional economy where as a tenant he needs to pay rent to a landlord who may be absent. The landlord may be enmeshed in a regional economy where cash is vital to maintain his or her lifestyle forcing the local farmer to grow cash crops to pay the rent in cash rather than any other form such as labour or goods in lieu of cash. Instantly, this drags the farmer into the global economy. Cash crops may require different farming practices from traditional ones plus funds for seeds, fertilizer, etc. Now imagine a drought hits the area. The farmer can not response as they used to with traditional methods as now their land is growing cash crops that aren’t use to the extreme natural conditions. The farmer can’t grow enough food for his family nor to pay the landlord. What has caused the disaster? The farmer or the relatively powerless position of the farmer in the world economy?
Figure 2 Hierarchy of economic relations affetcing farmer
Adding other layers such as society (Figure 3) and some complicated interactions are bound to ensue. Institutions are regional or national level, such as the government or state religion, will impact on the day to day life of the farmer and so influence how he behaves. Equally, however, these institutions are dependent on the individuals for their existence, without people governments can’t exist, but it is accessibility to these institutions that determines whether individuals feel they have the power to alter their circumstances. Access is partly determined by money, so economics weaves into the social. I have drawn circles as global, regional and local. This is really just for convenience you could define other spatial units, such as nations, development boards or even continental organisations, and other sets of relations for these units. The important point is that there is a nested set of relations that can very soon developed into a very complicated web of relations that constrain the behaviour of an individual. In these cases placing the responsibility for a disaster at the feet of an individual seems a little harsh.
Figure 3 Combining hierarchies: Economic and social levels - note units can differ in scale and there are inter-scale linkages to consider - in other words it gets very, very complicated!
A very useful starting point for understanding hazards using the developmental approach is:
At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters by Piers Blaikie, Terry Canon and Ben Wisner (2003)
So what is so different that the approach deserves the tag ‘alternative’? Hazards are no longer seen as sudden breaks with normality, abrupt geophysical events that are unpredictable in their occurrence and impact. Instead hazards are viewed in context. They may be physical in nature but their impact is always differentiated and there is always a human element to them. Beyond the simple ‘without people there are no hazards’ aspect, the developmental approach, as the name might suggest, focused on looking at where the impact of hazards was greatest – the developing world. The claim was and is that this is no an accident. Hazards and disasters highlight an ongoing process of underdevelopment, of lack of access to resources and to economic and political structures to empower people to respond and resist the impact of hazards. Hazards are not breaks with normality, instead they throw into sharper focus the normality of vulnerability and underdevelopment of certain sectors of the population and of the world. Some authors even suggested that such underdevelopment was an essential component of the world economic system, ensuring that certain countries never got to the level to compete with developed countries.
As you might guess, this view of hazards has an acute political angle, a key concern with development and social justice. Hazards that are ‘natural’ are no-one’s fault; hazards that are a product of an unequal society can be blamed on someone or some group. Again not surprisingly, Marxist and structuralist researchers were and are very active in this field and research has tended to focus on the poor and underprivileged in both developing and developed nations. From a Marxist beginning, the importance of social, economic and cultural factors in understanding differential vulnerability to hazards and recovery from disasters is now firmly engrained whatever the political persuasion you happen to be (at least I think so!) The approach is probably best explained through a couple of illustrations.
One of the classic illustrations of this approach is the issue of soil erosion in developing countries. In a dominant approach study you might measure physical properties such as soil fertility, slope angle, rainfall erosivity (how powerful the rainfall is so how much it can erode), soil erodibility (how susceptible the soil is to being eroded) – all terms found in the Universal Soil Loss Equation (USLE) which I will chat about in a later blog. You might then recommend that the locals change their ways to reduce environmentally harmful soil loss (conveniently forgetting that they have somehow survived for hundreds maybe thousands of years in this environment using their framing methods). You might even draw on a convenient list of crops that would bind and help prevent soil loss. This highlights a classic tactic or claim about the dominant approach. The victims become those responsible for the problem. It is the farmers fault there is erosion; it is the farmers fault he farms the land that gets flooded by the storms in Bangladesh. The developmental approach doesn’t assume this. It asks a different set of questions.
A farmer in Nepal has a difficult enough life as it is without a Western expert telling them to stop doing what has worked for generations. They have to pay rent, they have to pay for the fertilizer and farming equipment they need to use the new crops the expert told them to use and their landlord insists they grow because they mean he can put their rent up. His wife (in a very sexist caricature here) is always on about the latest things they should have that her cousin in Kathmandu has. The children need to walk to school and he needs to pay for their education if they are to escape the same trap as he. Is this painting a picture of an uncaring, deliberately environmentally destructive farmer? Or is this painting a picture of someone struggling to become part of a wider society with all the pressures, demands and aspirations that this means as illustrated in Figure 1. This is the view of the developmental approach, soil erosion isn’t a sudden problem, it is part of the system, it is an inevitable consequence of the farmer’s position within a capitalist society.
Figure 1 Web of RealtioNs Affecting the Farmer (Note scale not mentioned as yet)
A farmer is nested within a set of hierarchical relations all of which constrain how he (or she but that is fairly unlikely in this context) can behave. If the economy alone is considered then something like Figure 2 could illustrate the farmer being nested in his own farm within a local economy, which is in turn nested in a regional economy which is itself part of a global economy. The farmer is impacted by the regional economy where as a tenant he needs to pay rent to a landlord who may be absent. The landlord may be enmeshed in a regional economy where cash is vital to maintain his or her lifestyle forcing the local farmer to grow cash crops to pay the rent in cash rather than any other form such as labour or goods in lieu of cash. Instantly, this drags the farmer into the global economy. Cash crops may require different farming practices from traditional ones plus funds for seeds, fertilizer, etc. Now imagine a drought hits the area. The farmer can not response as they used to with traditional methods as now their land is growing cash crops that aren’t use to the extreme natural conditions. The farmer can’t grow enough food for his family nor to pay the landlord. What has caused the disaster? The farmer or the relatively powerless position of the farmer in the world economy?
Figure 2 Hierarchy of economic relations affetcing farmer
Adding other layers such as society (Figure 3) and some complicated interactions are bound to ensue. Institutions are regional or national level, such as the government or state religion, will impact on the day to day life of the farmer and so influence how he behaves. Equally, however, these institutions are dependent on the individuals for their existence, without people governments can’t exist, but it is accessibility to these institutions that determines whether individuals feel they have the power to alter their circumstances. Access is partly determined by money, so economics weaves into the social. I have drawn circles as global, regional and local. This is really just for convenience you could define other spatial units, such as nations, development boards or even continental organisations, and other sets of relations for these units. The important point is that there is a nested set of relations that can very soon developed into a very complicated web of relations that constrain the behaviour of an individual. In these cases placing the responsibility for a disaster at the feet of an individual seems a little harsh.
Figure 3 Combining hierarchies: Economic and social levels - note units can differ in scale and there are inter-scale linkages to consider - in other words it gets very, very complicated!
A very useful starting point for understanding hazards using the developmental approach is:
At Risk: Natural Hazards, People's Vulnerability and Disasters by Piers Blaikie, Terry Canon and Ben Wisner (2003)
Monday, July 26, 2010
COMMUNITIES AND ENVIROMENTAL GEOGRAPHY
ENVIRONMENTAL GEOGRAPHY THAT MATTERS
I outlined my initial view of environmental geography a couple of blogs ago. Since then I have been looking around for something that could clarify, expand and explain my view with a little more clarity and depth. I hope that my outline of the different approaches to studying hazards is beginning to show how environmental geography can be relevant.
I have been, however, loking for something that would serve as a reference for dicsussion; something that might need expansion and correction from time to time but one which readers of the blog might like to mull over and consider. A useful starting point might be the quote below taken from a book by Bent Flyvbjerg. I have just replaced the words ‘social science’ with the words ‘environmental geography’.
‘.. we must take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power like great social scientists have advocated ….. Finally, we must effectively communicate the results of our research to fellow citizens. If we do this we may successfully transform [environmental geography] from what is fast becoming a sterile academic activity, which is undertaken mostly for its own sake and in increasing isolation from a society on which it has little effect and from which it gets little appreciation. We may transform [environmental geography] to an activity done in public for the public, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in our ongoing efforts at understanding the present and deliberating about the future.’
(Bent Flyvbjerg, 2001, Making social science matter – why social science inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p.166.)
Bent Flyvbjerg is professor at the University of Oxford, in the Said Business School (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/research/people/Pages/BentFlyvbjerg.aspx). He has lead a debate calling for a rejection of the natural science model of research in the social sciences and making social sciences more relevant to people outside science such as citizens and policy makers. He has developed the phronetic approach to social sciences, i.e. studying of social phenomena with a focus on power and values. This approach asks four specific questions:
1. Where are we going?
2. Is this development desirable?
3. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?
4. What, if anything, should we do about it?
(see Wikipiedia for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronetic_social_science)
Whilst Flyvbjerg focuses on a idealised model of how physical science is done culminating in a predictive model of reality that is not necessarily how mdoern science with one eye on complexity views or understands reality, he does make an interesting point that predictability as understood in the natural sciences may not be achievable in the social sciences. The application of a model with relaible equations or laws may not be that useful in trying to predict human behaviour or in answering questions of what ought to be, of what is fair, questions of value and judgement that natural science, in the view of many social scientists, has trouble with.
My own view is that the physical sciences (for want of a better term) ask important, but different types of questions of the environment than social sciences so it is not a surprise that different types of answers are produced by each type of study. What the above quote does emphasis is that study for its own sake will produce a sterile subject. Although environmental geography has not wandered down this cul-de-sac yet, it is vital that it is practised and practised in a relevant context for it to develop and to provide communities with the perspective and power to improve their circumstances. In other words environmental geography must be relevant.
So what would a relevant environmental geography look like? Could it square the circle of incorporating both natural and social science? Could it inform and empower communities? A possible example of this type of environmental geography is provided by the South Durban Environmental Alliance (http://www.sdcea.co.za/). This is a community based organization, active since 1996, (an umbrella for 14 affiliate organizations) that lobbies, reports and researches industrial incidents in the South Durban area of South Africa. It is a good example of participatory science or democratic science where communities get involved in developing, logging, collating and interpreting scientific information and knowledge. The division between ‘expert’ and ‘local’ knowledge becomes deliberately blurred. The reporting of incidents, for example, is collated and mapped http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/mapsincidentstoscale0406.pdf . A set of data reliant on local knowledge, presented in a format understandable to local people and available for local communities to lobby on the basis of ‘scientific’ information.
Geography is central to this alliance and they have produced a brochure on their use of GIS in developing this community based science. http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/gisbrochurejuly08a.pdf
http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/gisbrochurejuly08b.pdf
Although this type of community based activity may not be translatable across the globe it does illustrate how individuals can use geography to monitor, interpret and lobby for action on their local environments. Environmental geography that really matters.
I outlined my initial view of environmental geography a couple of blogs ago. Since then I have been looking around for something that could clarify, expand and explain my view with a little more clarity and depth. I hope that my outline of the different approaches to studying hazards is beginning to show how environmental geography can be relevant.
I have been, however, loking for something that would serve as a reference for dicsussion; something that might need expansion and correction from time to time but one which readers of the blog might like to mull over and consider. A useful starting point might be the quote below taken from a book by Bent Flyvbjerg. I have just replaced the words ‘social science’ with the words ‘environmental geography’.
‘.. we must take up problems that matter to the local, national, and global communities in which we live, and we must do it in ways that matter; we must focus on issues of values and power like great social scientists have advocated ….. Finally, we must effectively communicate the results of our research to fellow citizens. If we do this we may successfully transform [environmental geography] from what is fast becoming a sterile academic activity, which is undertaken mostly for its own sake and in increasing isolation from a society on which it has little effect and from which it gets little appreciation. We may transform [environmental geography] to an activity done in public for the public, sometimes to clarify, sometimes to intervene, sometimes to generate new perspectives, and always to serve as eyes and ears in our ongoing efforts at understanding the present and deliberating about the future.’
(Bent Flyvbjerg, 2001, Making social science matter – why social science inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p.166.)
Bent Flyvbjerg is professor at the University of Oxford, in the Said Business School (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/research/people/Pages/BentFlyvbjerg.aspx). He has lead a debate calling for a rejection of the natural science model of research in the social sciences and making social sciences more relevant to people outside science such as citizens and policy makers. He has developed the phronetic approach to social sciences, i.e. studying of social phenomena with a focus on power and values. This approach asks four specific questions:
1. Where are we going?
2. Is this development desirable?
3. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power?
4. What, if anything, should we do about it?
(see Wikipiedia for more details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phronetic_social_science)
Whilst Flyvbjerg focuses on a idealised model of how physical science is done culminating in a predictive model of reality that is not necessarily how mdoern science with one eye on complexity views or understands reality, he does make an interesting point that predictability as understood in the natural sciences may not be achievable in the social sciences. The application of a model with relaible equations or laws may not be that useful in trying to predict human behaviour or in answering questions of what ought to be, of what is fair, questions of value and judgement that natural science, in the view of many social scientists, has trouble with.
My own view is that the physical sciences (for want of a better term) ask important, but different types of questions of the environment than social sciences so it is not a surprise that different types of answers are produced by each type of study. What the above quote does emphasis is that study for its own sake will produce a sterile subject. Although environmental geography has not wandered down this cul-de-sac yet, it is vital that it is practised and practised in a relevant context for it to develop and to provide communities with the perspective and power to improve their circumstances. In other words environmental geography must be relevant.
So what would a relevant environmental geography look like? Could it square the circle of incorporating both natural and social science? Could it inform and empower communities? A possible example of this type of environmental geography is provided by the South Durban Environmental Alliance (http://www.sdcea.co.za/). This is a community based organization, active since 1996, (an umbrella for 14 affiliate organizations) that lobbies, reports and researches industrial incidents in the South Durban area of South Africa. It is a good example of participatory science or democratic science where communities get involved in developing, logging, collating and interpreting scientific information and knowledge. The division between ‘expert’ and ‘local’ knowledge becomes deliberately blurred. The reporting of incidents, for example, is collated and mapped http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/mapsincidentstoscale0406.pdf . A set of data reliant on local knowledge, presented in a format understandable to local people and available for local communities to lobby on the basis of ‘scientific’ information.
Geography is central to this alliance and they have produced a brochure on their use of GIS in developing this community based science. http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/gisbrochurejuly08a.pdf
http://www.sdcea.co.za/images/stories/pdfs/gisbrochurejuly08b.pdf
Although this type of community based activity may not be translatable across the globe it does illustrate how individuals can use geography to monitor, interpret and lobby for action on their local environments. Environmental geography that really matters.
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