3 Things I learned in Grad School This Week - Sept 10 2016

This week was the first where I got into my schedule fully. 55 hours of classwork, research, and studying. I'm in it fully. The three this week are Standard Deviation, Ecosystem People and Biosphere People, and the intertwined concepts of Community, Social Capital, and Social Value.

Standard Deviation
A friend’s family member asked me earlier this summer what I would be, what I would do, if I wasn’t in conservation and if there were no limitations keeping me from that career. I was stumped. I choose conservation for specific reasons: it’s one of the only things that keeps my interest, I see conservation as having global importance and meaning, not very many answers are known in the field, it has the ability to be adventurous and exciting. Nothing much else meets these criteria for me (plus, I’m not really good at anything else). After a couple weeks of thought on that whole “no limitations” thing however, it occurred to me that I would be a Theoretical Physicist. Oh my goodness, how amazing would that be?! I’m fascinated by simple ideas like velocity, gravity, and light let alone dark matter, black holes, and subatomic physics.
 
But then there is the math, the arcane and obscure markings on the wall, the incantations that explain the natural world. I’ve never been inclined towards numbers. I’m more of a colors and shapes and shiny objects person. The scrawl upon the blackboard in those old Einstein photos are a terrifying bouncer at the physicist club.
 
The concept of a Standard Deviation is basic for anyone past high school math. However, to someone who studied art but has been fascinated by the wizards who can manipulate numbers this is an idea that has confused me. In working with the environment you hear it occasionally: well, this population is within one standard deviation. Well, why is it standard? What are you deviating from? How does deviating standardly from anything tell you anything meaningful?
 
In statistics we’ve been moving at a breakneck speed (for me). We covered standard deviation around day 4 and have moved on and are approaching week 5 quickly. But wait a second, I’m still staring at this equation trying to figure out how the magician pulled the doves out of his sleeves.

I’ve asked questions in class and stared meaninglessly at the textbook but it just didn’t make sense. I put some YouTube videos on and found the exercises at the end of the chapter. Four hours later a sense of enlightenment that had gradually enmeshed my brain peaked into understanding and transcended into a larger connection: the language the wizards use is … knowable. I think the larger connection was not much more than a dissolving of my preconceived assumptions that math is unknowable but still it was huge for me (although, now that I figured it out it looks easy – so it goes).
 
I figured out how to calculate a Standard Deviation. While the stats professor went over it I still feel I taught it to myself. The idea that I could do that caught me off-guard – I didn’t know I could teach myself this stuff. I’m still struggling with probability, null hypothesis equations, and Z tables but after conquering this concept I feel empowered to undertake these other ideas. Maybe Theoretical Physics isn’t as far off as I had believed (or didn’t even know I believed)…
 
 Ecosystem People and Biosphere People
This is a simple concept and almost not even worth elaborating on but it is both new vocabulary to me and vocabulary that frames the narrative new. Ecosystem people are those who are dependent on their local environment for basic needs (e.g. burning gathered wood for your food, trekking to the local water hole and carrying it back, etc). Biosphere people are “urban dwellers of the industrialized societies and people engaged in high-input agriculture and animal husbandry…They do not depend on local ecosystems for their basic needs; the catchment area for their resource needs is the whole biosphere.”
 
I like this binary better than first-world/third-world or developed/underdeveloped. It speaks to the usage and the material engagement better. I’m going to continue to under this paradigm when looking at conservation issues.
 
Social Capital, Social Value, and Community
In my philosophy course we’re reading about Community, Social Capital, and Social Value and how people respond to these ideas through everyday life and through their leisure. As someone on the introverted end of the scale but also as someone who deeply appreciates quality relationships and a community that is stronger than the sum of its parts, I resonated with these readings.
 
The researcher Troy Glover comments that “community is ironically one of the most palpable comforts and anxieties of our time.” He distinguishes between the various terms stating that “community and social capital are different, albeit complementary. Community is a source of social capital, and social capital represents the value of community.”
 
Basically, “social capital is premised upon the notion that an investment (in social relations) will result in a return (some benefit or profit) to the individual…” We have this belief that the more you put in to a community (be it your neighborhood, church, colleagues, etc) it will give you something tangible. But that return of profit is rarely tangible. The result you get from “investing” in a community is seen through emotions, through a sense of safety, or a sense of purpose. A type of neurosis occurs when normal concepts of “capital” are conflated with social capital. You can’t withdraw your investment at any point because “social capital is not embodied in any particular person, but rather is embedded in social relationships, even though it is realized by individuals. If the relationship fails to endure, social capital, presumably, diminishes, perhaps even disappearing altogether.” When you withdraw your investment, you demolish the investment, the currency, and potentially future earnings.
 
In trying to relate them to conservation I am reminded that conservation is a social study, a values-based field, and dependent upon human decisions and interactions. Conservation, in the end, isn’t about how conservationists view the world; it’s about developing positive relationships between humans and nature that benefit both individually and mutually. This manifests itself through working to benefit humans through increased market and labor opportunities, benefitting nature through increased ecological structure and function, and benefitting them both mutually through an intersection of creative solutions to develop both. Once you withdraw the investment you collapse the relationship.
 
I’m wondering if we can reverse the paradigm from exploitation of nature to one of “additionality” (another concept I learned that will be shared later) for humans and nature? I’m wondering if we can do that through a social capital framework?