Keith G. Tidball, Ph.D.Department of Natural Resources

Cornell University

Invited Panel on Mapping Urban Stewardship across Space and Place

Mapping?

• Concept mapping• Mind mapping• Systems mapping… but no spatial mapping

What is Civic Ecology?

Civic Ecology … by the book

Civic Ecology is the study of the interactions, including feedbacks, among four components of a social-ecological system:• community-based

environmental stewardship (civic ecology practice);

• education and learning situated in these practices (civic ecology education);

• the people and institutions involved; and

• the ecosystem services produced by the people, their stewardship, and educational practices.

Conceptualizing and understanding stewardship over space?

• Rather than spatial mapping, stewardship activities in particular kinds of spaces/places

LOCATION RED ZONE TYPEAfghanistan Ongoing wars in the Middle EastBerlin, Germany Post-Cold War divisionsCharleston, South Carolina 1989 Hurricane HugoCameroon and Chad Mid 2000’s civil unrest in Central AfricaCyprus Demarcation between Greek and Turkish

CyprusEurope 1940’s WW II Nazi internment campsGuatemala Ongoing post-conflict insecurityIraq Ongoing wars in the Middle EastJohannesburg, South Africa Early 2000’s Soweto, Post-Apartheid violenceKenya Early 2000’s Resource scarcity conflictLiberia 1989- 2003 civil warMadagascar Costal vulnerabilityNew Orleans, USA 2005 Hurricane KatrinaNew York City, USA 2001 September 11th terrorist attacksRotterdam, Netherlands Ongoing urban insecurityPort-au-Prince, Haiti 2010 earthquakeRussia Post-Soviet Cold War urban insecuritySarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1996 conflictSouth Korea Demilitarized Zone South Korea 2002 Typhoon and coastal vulnerabilityStockholm, Sweden Urban insecurity in times of warTokyo and Hiroshima, Japan WW II bombingsUnited States WW II involvement United States Violence and prison populations

How does stewardship evolve over time?

• Explanations for the source and role of change in adaptive systems, particularly the kinds of change that are transforming.

• Focused on social-ecological systems – not simply linked or coupled systems of people and nature, people IN nature

• Found at multiple scales, from the scale of a farm or village, through communities, regions, and nations to the globe.

Resilience - the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organize and still have the same identity. It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance. Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5

“…there will be social mechanisms behind management practices based on local ecological knowledge, as evidence of a co-evolutionary relationship between local institutions and the ecosystem in which they are located.” Berkes & Folke 1998

“…systems that demonstrate resilience appear to have learned to recognize feedback, and therefore possess mechanisms by which information from the environment can be received, processed, and interpreted.” Berkes & Folke 1998

Explore the means, or social mechanisms, that bring about the conditions needed for adaptation in the face of disturbance (eg. disaster and war) fundamental to social-ecological system resilience.

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sms Tidball, KG. (2012). Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and

Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience. Ecology and Society. 17(2).

Tidball, KG & RC Stedman. (2013). Positive Dependency and Virtuous Cycles: From Resource Dependence to Resilience in Urban Social-Ecological Systems. Ecological Economics. 86(0): 292-299.

Tidball, KG, ME Krasny, E Svendsen, L Campbell, & K Helphand. (2010). Stewardship, Learning, and Memory in Disaster Resilience. “Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education,” Special Issue of Environmental Education Research, 16(5): 341-357.

Tidball, KG (2014). Seeing the forest for the trees: hybridity and social-ecological symbols, rituals and resilience in postdisaster contexts. Ecology and Society 19(4): 25.

Tidball, KG, RC Stedman, & CA Aktipis. Social-ecological feedback enhances greening during disaster recovery: A model of social and ecological processes in local ecological investment. Submitted to Ecology & Society.

Urgent Biophilia

Restorative Topophilia

Memorialization

Ritualized Recovery Symbols

Discourses of Defiance (Feedbacks)

• Foundational mechanism

• Affinity we humans have for the rest of nature, the process of remembering that attraction, the urge to express it through creation of restorative environments, and the consequent benefit we receive from acting upon the urge.

• Creating restorative environments may also restore or increase ecological function, and may confer system resilience across multiple scales.

• So, when we are faced with violence as presented by shocks and surprises (like disasters and wars), and we seek engagement with nature to summon and demonstrate resilience in the face of a crisis, we are demonstrating an urgent biophilia, an urge to affiliate with other life.

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Tidball, KG. (2012). Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience. Ecology and Society. 17(2).

Mec

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• Draws upon Tuan’s notion of topophilia, literally ‘love of place’.

• Emphasis is on a social actor’s attachment to place and the symbolic meanings that underlie this attachment

• In contrast to urgent biophilia, restorative topophilia is thought of, and acted out, as more experiential and ‘constructed’ by how we are socialized or enculturated, rather than innate, coming from our biological origins.

• Serves as a powerful base for individual and collective actions that repair valued attributes of place.

• So, civic ecology practices in war and disaster contexts are based not only on attachment—people fight for the places they care about—but also on meanings, which define the kinds of places people are fighting for.

Tidball, KG & RC Stedman. (2013). Positive Dependency and Virtuous Cycles: From Resource Dependence to Resilience in Urban Social-Ecological Systems. Ecological Economics. 86(0): 292-299.

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• Begins right after a crisis via spontaneous and collective memorialization of lost family members or community members (or even iconic green or built elements) through gardening, tree planting, or other civic ecology practices .

• Community of practice emerges to act upon and apply these memories to social learning about greening practices.

• May lead to new kinds of learning, including about collective efficacy and ecosystem services production, through feedback between remembering, learning, and enhancing individual, social, and environmental well-being.

Tidball, KG, ME Krasny, E Svendsen, L Campbell, & K Helphand. (2010). Stewardship, Learning, and Memory in Disaster Resilience. “Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education,” Special Issue of Environmental Education Research, 16(5): 341-357.

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• From the previously described mechanisms.

• Rituals - storehouses of meaningful symbols.

• Performance of rituals helps perhaps previously hidden or forgotten information to be revealed and regarded as legitimate, as dealing with the crucial values of the community.

• Transformative for human attitudes and behavior, and therefore the handling of tree symbols in ritual exposes the power of tree symbols to act upon and change the persons involved in ritual performance.

Tidball, KG (2014). Seeing the forest for the trees: hybridity and social-ecological symbols, rituals and resilience in postdisaster contexts. Ecology and Society 19(4): 25.

Mec

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• Focused specifically on the importance of the use of memorialization , symbols and rituals, restorative topophilia, and urgent biophilia to resist or reshape the conversation about the changed/damaged space where one resides, and the people living there.

• First explored in research conducted in New Orleans, as residents resisted initial reports by the news media essentially ‘writing off’ New Orleans as a failed city.

• Residents used many of the mechanisms above to reframe the discourse to reflect a more hopeful, more optimistic, recovery and rebirth oriented conversation.

• Contagion effect - The reframed discourse, and practices reflecting and reinforcing it, spread via formal and informal networks

Thank you!