Waypoints on my path of discovery
Systems can’t be controlled, but they can be designed and redesigned. We can’t surge forward with certainty into a world of no surprises, but we can expect surprises and learn from them and even profit from them. We can’t impose our will upon a system. We can listen to what the system tells us, and discover how its properties and our values can work together to bring forth something much better than could ever be produced by our will alone.
— Donella Meadows
In my work, I use a design lab approach to test assumptions and develop new strategies to address questions facing the environment and society. The point is not to build institutions, but to build solutions that, in turn, are communicated through my writing and outreach. Solutions I hope others will mimic, refine, and expand on.
Explorations Using Alternative Valuation Strategies to Preserve Intact Landscapes Chiriquí Province, Panama
One of the crucial challenges facing conservation is the scarcity of mechanisms to finance the preservation of intact landscapes. The development of a cloud forest preserve in Chiriquí Province, Panama, in a crucial corridor on the continent's spine at the junction of North and South America, serves as a model for applying alternative valuation methods. In a landscape that not only has high levels of biodiversity, but also a crucial pathway for indigenous populations to follow their traditional lifeways.
Adapting to the Pyrocene
Re-envisioning Landscapes and Communities in the Face of a Warming and Drying Climate
Since the 1990s, I've worked with communities and scientists to reintroduce fire, research the interactions between climate and fire and their effects on rural communities, and help re-create fire-adapted landscapes to improve ecosystem diversity and the durability of the communities that rely on them. In recent years, many landscapes in the Southwest and across the West have crossed a threshold at which repeated fire is no longer merely a possibility; it is a near certainty. This challenge represents a threat and an opportunity for landscapes and communities. Cycles of fire can destroy the social and economic fabric of landscapes or present an opportunity to rethink land stewardship to empower disadvantaged communities and increase ecological assets.
My work reflects a cycle of learning and action through network creation. After decades of on-the-ground action, I stepped back and researched governance structures and the development of circular regenerative economies. As a learning organization, we began in 2019 to examine sustainable ways to thin forests to reduce fire risk, increase ecological diversity, and provide well-paying local jobs. This was to be done by developing biomass energy systems that provide income through carbon-negative technologies. Yet massive fires in 2022 led us to shift to landscape recovery. A lack of long-term planning and the capacity to address changing fire cycles led us to include partnership building, educational outreach, and the creation of a science advisory panel to oversee the action. Since 2023, we have developed an international team of specialists spanning conservation and ecology, rural development, and alternative finance, with a focus on biochar and ecosystem revival in upland systems, while addressing groundwater loss, renewable energy, and hydrogen production through rapid anaerobic digestion on the Great Plains.
Fisheries Governance and Policy
From my years of work with ranchers in the Southwest, it become apparent that one of the biggest impediments to effective conservation and other forms of societal change was poor governance.
Marine policy working with lobster and trawler fleets was a great way to experiment with, and better understand how to undertake the large-scale adaptive governance of landscapes and seascapes. The Down East Initiative focused on integrated policy development across 750,000 square miles of the Gulf of Maine with a focus on applying commons theory to cooperative governance. There are remarkable parallels between marine and terrestrial systems, and often I learned the most about terrestrial systems by watching how dynamics played out in their marine counterparts. While self-funded anadromous fish restoration efforts on the coast of Maine were early experiments in developing conservation coops that devised circular economic systems to sustain ecological and communal benefits from the environment.
Cross-Continental Conservation Exchanges and Learning Networks
Our environment and society are transforming so fast we cannot afford to keep re-inventing the wheel.
In what my Kenyan colleague David Western termed “over the horizon learning,” for years, I have collaborated to bring diverse groups from across the globe together to learn from their future through experiencing another’s present and past.
This has included the Two Cowboys Project, that over the years, brought together pastoralists from Kenya and the US to learn from each other and work with the Quebec-Labrador Foundation to organize US State Department supported conservation exchanges in the Middle East.
Collaborative Conservation and Climate Change Mitigation in Rangelands
When I finished my graduate studies in the mid-1990s, I was interested in undertaking the sorts of large-scale on-the-ground science that, then as now, are needed to address such pressing issues as climate and landscape change. However, I quickly found that much of conventional science was better adapted to helping people obtain tenure - than addressing society’s pressing challenges. At the same time, the primary funding sources, such as the National Science Foundation, were organized around disciplinary boundaries that do not map well onto the reality outside of academia.
So I left academia and formed the Arid Lands Project and, in partnership with the rancher-led Malpai Borderlands Group, crafted a collaborative community co-led science program that rivaled the scale and scope of federally funded research programs.
For over a decade, I coordinated experimental science programs in the million-acre Malpai Borderlands and developed the McKinney Flats Project, the largest replicated study on the continent that examined climate change, and interactions with plants and animals to transform arid environments.
The borderlands programs ended prematurely due to a collapse in funding following the 2007 - 2009 recession. But in my time in the borderlands, I learned invaluable lessons about the power of collaborative approaches, and the need to build the social institutions to sustain science and policy.
Overview of Research and Place-Based Projects
Restoration studies of sub-alpine ecosystems, Colorado.
Studies of latitudinal responses of species to climate change.
Partnerships with the Malpai Borderlands Group - collaborative ecosystem conservation.
.McKinney Flats - Landscape-level studies of complex interactions in arid environments.
Advising and co-leading the United Nations global grasslands program.
Two-cowboys project - Cross-continent learning networks between US ranchers and Maasai.
Adaptive management program development at MIT and teaching at Harvard and elsewhere.
Collaborative policy design - fisheries conservation in the North Atlantic.
Cross-cultural conservation exchanges in the Middle East.
Anadromous fisheries restoration on the coast of Maine.
Conservation coop development with farmers and ranchers, watershed alliance establishment.
Conservation program management in Montana, including the Network for Landscape Conservation and the Blackfoot Challenge.
Regenerative conservation projects- biomass energy, wildfire recovery, and mitigation.
Developing self-sustaining conservation of Panamainan cloud forest.