I’m reading John Cassidy’s remarkable book How Markets Fail (2009), which includes a brief aside on economist Kenneth Arrow‘s fundamental work on “‘social’ ordering” – the problem of “converting individual preferences over a set of [possibilities]…into a consistent ordering for society as a whole” (p. 62, in Cassidy’s paperback edition). To paraphrase Cassidy’s eloquent summary,…
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Ghost research: taking stock of work that disappears
I recently discovered a citation (in Breen, 1990) referring to a short article my father wrote for National Fisherman, in 1988, in which he reported on a new kind of lobster trap with a “catch escape panel”, aimed at reducing bycatch. My dad had a steady freelance gig at the time with National Fisherman, and…
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A writing exercise: manually mapping one draft onto another
Scott Armstrong & I just tried this writing exercise: Required materials include two different drafts of the same manuscript (here, let’s call one “early” and one “final”), several sheets of flip-chart paper, scissors, tape, and a handful of coloring markers. Make sure there are line numbers in the margins of both manuscripts, and print them…
Read MoreThinking in (human–environmental) systems – a research triptych
Three papers were released into the wild this winter, making for exciting times at the Lab. Walking to and from the office the past few days, I’ve been thinking about where and how their themes overlap. Seems to me these three papers are connected by a process of argumentation: the work of sketching out the…
Read MoreWriting season (another Top Five list)
It’s been an autumn of writing. Maybe not enough in these blog pages – apologies, readers – but plenty of writing, all told: manuscripts for the long road to publication (or not); grant proposals; new content for the departmental Website. The variety of problem solving – broken introductions, unravelled middles, empty-handed conclusions, all capped under…
Read MoreBombturbation – a Technocene sediment-transport process
Since reading Roger Hooke’s work on humans as agents of quantifiable geomorphic change (Hooke 1994, 2000; Haff 2003; Hooke & Martin-Duque 2012), I’ve wondered about bombs. (To keep from sounding glib about or oblivious to the very real and very human implications of mechanized warfare, for the purpose of this discussion I’ll “wonder about bombs”…
Read MoreFollowing up: #Capitalocene reading (with thanks to Dr MD)
Better late than never? A follow-up here to my Anthropocene reading “Top Five” list, by way of Dr Michael Dorsey, a member of the Environmental Studies faculty at Dartmouth College, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 2010 Global Sustainability Summer School (hosted that year by the Santa Fe Institute). After seeing my…
Read More#Anthropocene reading (a Top Five-or-so list)
Sometimes the rabbit hole of the Internet leads back to one’s own bookshelf of hard copies. Over the weekend, Ken Caldeira (@KenCaldeira) circulated a link to an interview with journalist Caspar Henderson on FiveBooks: “Caspar Henderson chooses books on Growing Up in the Anthropocene.” I’ve always been envious of other people’s Top Five lists, and…
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The Environmental Dynamics Lab (EDL) 