Abstract
This chapter begins by describing the role of education and lessons learned from an innovative program to build the capacity among students to tackle wicked problems. It goes on to briefly describe each of the chapters in the section developing the linkage between them that people have the capacity to change societies’ relationship with nature. The first two chapters lay out a vision of community- based ecosystem stewardship. The following discusses the culture of place—how and why people relate to the place they live. The fourth chapter describes a community collaborative group that practices the concepts and principles covered in the previous three chapters. The final chapter analyzes cooperative conservation through the lens of a coupled natural and social science approach.
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Notes
- 1.
We do not comment on or evaluate the success or failure of environmental studies/science programs at other colleges and universities. We talked about MUSIC specifically because it was a federal agency/university partnership that involved the four editors in various capacities. MUSIC was part of the USGS Science Impact Program; that program has ended.
- 2.
“How many universities have relabelled [sic] old boxes with ‘Faculty of Environmental Studies?’ How many governments have recycled existing activities into ‘Departments of the Environment?’ Such steps might lead to new panaceas that are more disastrous than the old because they are more global” (Holling and Chambers 1973, 13).
- 3.
Every field scientist knows this. It is not to say that definitive answers come from only observations in the field and not from scholarly research. Perspectives different from those of the scholar are arrived at. If scholarly analysis could be combined with practical experience, new insights would be gleaned through integration of scholarship and practice beyond those attained by the scholar and practitioner alone. This would, of course, require not only communication between the scholar and practitioner but also mutual respect. It is a laudable scholarly trait to be aware of the relevant literature and to cite it extensively. It is impossible, however, to have critically examined each article and book when many score and even hundreds are cited, particularly when research assistants are relied upon to cull through and summarize the literature. And without critical analysis there is danger of perpetuating dogma (the peer review system is not fail safe and most books are not blind peer reviewed). Far better to cite fewer references that are thoroughly analyzed and vetted than many that are by-and-large taken on face value as authoritative. In this way a system of checks-and-balances is set up to the advantage of both the scholar and practitioner communities; our understanding and interpretation of complex issues is more nuanced and knowledge, not dogma, more likely to be advanced.
- 4.
Kent, Preister, McVicker, and Karl were instructors in the BLM Community-based Ecosystem Stewardship course. One of the workshops was held in McLaughlin, Nevada. Most of participants were coming from Bullhead City, Arizona a small ranching town just across the Colorado River from McLaughlin, a casino town. We had an advance registration of about 45. The first morning of the workshop only 8 participants showed up. We had to cancel the workshop. Kent and his colleagues had mapped a cultural boundary through the Colorado between Bullhead City and McLaughlin. We can only speculate that the Bullhead City participants did not cross the cultural boundary to attend a workshop in a Nevada casino. Had the workshop been held in a community center, or school, or firehouse, the usual places for the workshops, in Bullhead City we suspect that those registered would have participated. But we can only speculate.
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Karl, H.A. (2012). Introduction: People and Action (Stewardship, Community, and Implementation). In: Karl, H., Scarlett, L., Vargas-Moreno, J., Flaxman, M. (eds) Restoring Lands - Coordinating Science, Politics and Action. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2549-2_16
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