3 Things I Learned in Grad School This Week ~ October 9, 2016

Everything (mostly everything) in my life revolves around conservation. Duh. But this week I made poverty, conflict management, and structuralism revolve around conservation. Below are my reflections on Vernacular Conservation, Framing, and the 6 Types of Poverty. And here's a picture of a flower I found.


Vernacular Conservation
I read a summary of the book Social Change and Conservation: Enviornmental Politics and Impacts of National Parks and Protected Areas edited by Ghimire and Pimbert. I can’t wait to read the book. In it though, they discuss the idea of Vernacular Conservation. They describe it as “based on site-specific traditions and economies; it refers to ways of life and resource utilization that have evolved in place and, like vernacular architecture, is a direct expression of the relationship between communities and their habitats.” They later go on to say that “local empowerment and popular participation can generate more productive means of livelihood and, through local control and co-management agreements, maintain ‘protected areas’ that the state currently manages inefficiently or can no longer afford.” I’ve seen this described as ‘place-based conservation’ or site-specific or regional conservation (as opposed to landscape-scale conservation) but I’m intuiting that using the local ‘vernacular’ creates the relationships between the people and the land.
 
Vernacular means “the language or dialect spoken by the ordinary people in a particular country or region” and ‘vernacular architecture’ is focused on the specific domestic and functional built environment. The spirit of this terminology though reminds me of what I learned in literary theory as Structuralism as championed by de Saussure, Levi-Strauss, and then Chomsky in Linguistics. The (mostly Marxist and existentialist) philosophers (Lacan Foucault, Barthes, Althusser, Derrida, Wittgensttein) took it further to understand how we interact with our environment, our material environment, and how our language creates a ‘structure’ in which we interact. I’m assuming that vernacular conservation is the idea that the axiomatic perception of a piece of land determines your view of it and literally creates the world in which the relationship you develop with it occurs.
 
This sounds a little heavy but it is basically that your values dictate where you spend your time and money. This sounds good but is exceedingly difficult to do in practice with conservation for the next reason that I learned about….
 
Frames and Framing
Spotted Owl and Timber in the Pacific Northwest. Snail Darter and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Wolves and Ranchers. These are examples of intractable environmental conflicts. These are conflicts sometimes decades-long, center around a polarizing flashpoint, and divide otherwise neighborly community members around ideology. Right now I am reading Making Sense of Intractable Environmental Conflicts edited by Lewicki, Gray and Elliot and all I can do is think of the development/oil industry and wetland projects I worked on or was most familiar with in southern California. Trying to mix Oil and Water was difficult. The problem as I saw it was that it was possible and metrics valued by both sides could be achieved. I don’t think anything was resolved while I was working on the projects I did and I still don’t think too much progress has been made since I left two years ago. And the fight had been occurring for at least two decades before I arrived on the scene. It is exhausting.
 
What I am learning from this book and from some other conflict management things I’ve explored is the that ideas of Frames and Framing are integral in understanding your own perspective, the other’s perspective, and the context that your conflict is within. Framing is the organization of things that make the perspective on how people, groups of people, society integrate and communicate reality – in essence, it becomes their reality. There are many places to go with this. One of the ways is when someone is in a particular frame, they are more likely relate new information in regards to that frame. This can also lead to not accepting things unless they correspond to your frame. The other way that I am thinking is in regards to Daniel Kahneman’s work and how a particular problem is framed reflects the probability how it will be solved.
 
In regards to intractable environmental conflicts, framing develops a perimeter that we think and work within. As shortcuts to help us understand a situation, frames can develop a center in which the gravitational pull of the topic circles around. To re-frame the conflict is to clarify or redesign a perception, to sharpen an understanding from both sides of the conflict, to identify the subject and objects within the parties’ frames, and to identify differences- those that can be bridged and those that can’t.
 
6 Types of Poverty
In researching how poverty and conservation area management are related I discovered this theory by Eric Jensen, an education specialist who wrote the book Teaching With Poverty in Mind. In it he identifies 6 types of poverty (situational, generational, absolute, relative, urban, overcrowding, and rural). I have yet to fully understand  how conservation and poverty are connected but below is an excerpt from this website describing his theory (https://blog.udemy.com/types-of-poverty/)
Situational: This particular type of poverty is usually temporary as it involves a crisis or loss occurring. Events connected with situational poverty include environmental disasters, divorce, or severe health problems. A good example of situational poverty caused by an environmental disaster would be the destruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Many people were homeless, lost their jobs, and had nothing to their name. The fall of the economy can also be considered an event that could cause situational poverty. Learn economics to have a better understanding of how the economy affects everyone.
Generational: This type of poverty involves the birth of two generations into poverty. Because they were born into this situation, they usually don’t have the tools to help get themselves out of it.
Absolute: This particular type of poverty is actually rare in the United States. People in absolute poverty don’t even have basic necessities like a roof over their head, food, and water. Their only focus is on surviving each day as it comes.
Relative: This type of poverty is known as relative because it is relative to the average standard of living in that person’s society. What is considered high income in one country could be considered middle or low income in another. If a family’s income isn’t enough to meet the average standard of living, they are considered to be in relative poverty.
Urban: This particular type of poverty is only for metropolitan areas with populations over 50,000. Overcrowding, violence, noise, and poor community help programs make it even more difficult for people suffering of this type of poverty to get out of it.
Rural: Like urban poverty above, rural poverty occurs only in specific area types. These areas are nonmetropolitan with populations below 50,000. The low population limits services available for people struggling financially, and a lack of job opportunities only compounds the problem.

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