Desert knowledge: integrating knowledge and development in arid and semi-arid drylands

Globalisation presents particular challenges for deserts given that their sparse populations, which are amongst the world’s poorest in an absolute economic sense, tend to be remote from major markets and have only a distant, marginal voice in political and policy decision making. Here we are defining deserts as the arid and semi-arid drylands that encompass 70% of Australia and 25% of the world’s land surfaces. The value of the knowledge that local traditions and science have generated about living sustainably in deserts is being promoted and extended through the ‘desert knowledge’ movement in Australia. The Australian research reported here, together with a contribution from Niger that offers a contrast and some lessons for Australia, is largely underpinned by a neopopulist paradigm of development stressing respect for local knowledge, participatory practice and empowerment. Research in partnership with desert Aboriginal groups is contributing to their engagement with new livelihood opportunities. The local knowledge of livestock graziers is also being engaged to support sustainable management of desert water sources and landscapes for multiple values. The research reported here also addresses opportunities and challenges for local norms, identities, knowledge systems, governance and livelihoods from broader scale processes and institutions. In doing so it contributes to a ‘neo-ideographic approach’ wherein desert people might better harness their locality, knowledge and diversity in adaptations that shape their encounters with globalisation. It also points to considerable scope to mature such an approach.     

Making a reservoir: Heterogeneous engineering on the Kemi River in Finnish Lapland

This article tells the story of long-lasting and ongoing struggles surrounding the construction plans for a major reservoir on the headwaters of the Kemi River in the Finnish Province of Lapland. A point of contention since the beginning of hydropower development on the river in the mid twentieth century, the reservoir project has been promoted and abandoned multiple times in waves of land purchasing, legal procedures, opposition campaigns, and the delineation of nature reserves. Despite a Finnish Supreme Administrative Court ruling officially setting an end to the project, it never entirely left public discourse and is currently being re-negotiated in slightly adapted form. Articulating voices and documenting practices of riverbank inhabitants, activists and hydro electricity managers, this article presents the struggle as multiple modes of heterogeneous engineering, where both proponents and opponents work towards creating different realities. The article develops the metaphor of heterogeneous engineering by drawing attention to three temporal dimensions central to the reservoir struggle: moments, which refer to the situated emergence of practices and strategies; futures, which speak to the attempts to build and contest expectations regarding conflicting projects; and durations, which consider the cumulative aspects of a decades-long struggle on people and landscapes. Thereby, the article contributes to discussions on making, planning and environmental management, and illustrates ways of studying these processes as situated practices in relation to time.     

‘They took our beads,it was a fair trade,get over it’: Settler colonial logics,racial hierarchies and material dominance in Canadian agriculture

Canada is in a liminal space, with renewed struggles for and commitments to indigenous land and food sovereignty on one hand, and growing capital interest in land governance and agriculture on the other. While neoliberal capital increasingly accumulates land-based control, settler-farming communities still manage much of Canada’s arable land. This research draws on studies of settler colonialism, racial hierarchy and othering to connect the ideological with the material forces of settler colonialism and show how material dominance is maintained through colonial logics and racially ordered narratives. Through in-depth interviews, I investigate how white settler farmers perceive and construct two distinctly ‘othered’ groups: Indigenous peoples and migrant farmers and farm workers. Further, I show the disparate role of land and labour in constructing each group, and specifically, the cultural and material benefits of these constructions for land-based settler populations. At the same time, settler colonial structures and logics remain reciprocally coupled to political conditions. For instance, contemporary neoliberalism in Canadian agriculture modifies settler colonial structures to be sure. I argue, however, that political economic analyses of land and food production in Canada (such as corporate concentration, land grabbing and farm consolidation) ought to better integrate the systemic forces of settler colonialism that have conditioned land access in the first place. Of course, determining who is able to access land—and thus, who is able to grow food—continues to be a territorial struggle. Thus, in order to shift these conditions we ought to examine how those with access and control have acquired and maintained it.     

Fire on the horizon: contemporary Aboriginal burning issues in the Tanami Desert,central Australia

As part of a collaborative research project created to promote the coexistence of fire, people and biodiversity in central Australia, a case study was conducted on Aboriginal perceptions of fire and its management in the southern Tanami Desert of Central Australia. The Tanami was chosen due to consecutive wildfire events and reported fire conflicts between Aboriginal and pastoral (cattle station) landholders on fire issues. This paper addresses fire issues from the perspective of Warlpiri Aboriginal people in this region. It shows that many Warlpiri hold strong views concerning the use of fire and its management. Elders, in particular, have retained tradition-based knowledge about fire and its effects on the environment. The complex cultural protocols that structure decisions about who burns, when and where are discussed. It is shown that, although there have been dramatic changes to their subsistence economy, Warlpiri still burn for cultural and economic reasons. At the same time, social change has given rise to new fire-related issues, including lack of access to remote areas in order to undertake burning and a decrease in fire knowledge among younger generations. The paper argues that Warlpiri perceptions of fire management, needs and skills must be incorporated in a regional fire management strategy if the cycle of wildfire that follows above average rainfall periods in the Tanami is to be broken. Proper resourcing of Aboriginal people to fire their land in customary ways will enhance Aboriginal livelihoods as well as benefit other stakeholders in the region.     

Bushfire and everyday life: Examining the awareness-action ‘gap’ in changing rural landscapes

In this paper we use the notion of ‘everyday life’ to critically examine an apparent ‘gap’ between bushfire risk awareness and preparedness amongst diverse landholders in rural landscapes affected by amenity-led in-migration in southeast Australia. Landholders were found to bring their own agency to bushfire preparedness in the relationships between everyday procedures, dilemmas, and tradeoffs. Consequently, regardless of landholders’ awareness levels, attitudes towards bushfire and natural resource management influence if, how, and to what extent landowners prepare for bushfires. We argue that not only is the ‘gap’ complex but also paradoxical in that it is both evident in, and constituted by, landholder attitudes and action and simultaneously dissolved in their practices and decision-making in everyday life. Three dilemmas of everyday life in particular were found to underpin these attitudes: costs (in terms of monetary and time values), gender roles, and priorities. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this simultaneous cultural construction and material nature of bushfire in everyday life is mapped out through landholders’ narratives and actions that embody living with fire on the land. The place of bushfire in landholders’ everyday life has direct relevance to recent international discussions of the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural-urban interface areas.     

Environment as datascape: Enacting emission realities in corporate carbon accounting

Ecological modernist approaches to climate change are premised upon knowing carbon emissions. I ask how corporate environmental managers know and do carbon, i.e., shape the reality of emissions. I argue that for managers’ practical purposes carbon exists as malleable data. Based on ethnographic fieldwork over a period of 20 months in a Fortune 50 multinational corporation, I show that managers materially-discursively arrange heterogeneous entities – databases, files, paper, words, numbers – in and between office spaces, enabling them to stage emission facts as stable and singular. Employing Annemarie Mol’s work on multiplicity, I show that multiple enactments of carbon hang together not by an antecedent body (CO₂) but through ongoing configurations of data practices. Disillusioning promissory economic discourses of ‘internalisation’, I demonstrate: Management is materially premised upon preventing purportedly internalised carbon realities from entering capitalist core processes. This undermines carbon economics’ realist promises. Staging some carbon realities as in control is premised upon managers’ ongoing, reflexive, partial and always situated configuration of, e.g., standards, formal meetings or digital data practices in which humans do carbon-as-data. Carbon practices are materially-discursively aligned, forming a configuration. This configuration effects carbon as a malleable and locally configurable space rather than as a closed fact. Reconstructing managers’ practices as configuring carbon-as-dataspace, I argue, allows grasping adequately the contingency and constraints of managing carbon as a particular material-discursive form of environment. In conclusion I generalise the environmental management office as a space that can be configured to stage, beyond carbon, other global environments as well.     

Memorial landscapes: analytic questions and metaphors

Over the past two decades, geographers have probed the intersection of collective memory and urban space. Their sustained interest in the subject reflects an understanding of the social condition of commemoration and the important role that space plays in the process and politics of collective memory. Along with other critical social scientists, geographers envision these public symbols as part of larger cultural landscapes that reflect and legitimate the normative social order. A review of the extant literature indicates that geographers scrutinize memorial landscapes through three conceptual lenses that may be understood via the metaphors of ‘text,’ ‘arena,’ and ‘performance.’ These metaphors are in turn mobilized through a series of analytic questions that serve to identify the interests served and denied by landscape ‘texts,’ the ‘arenas’ in which they are produced, and the ways in which they are enacted via ‘performance.’ This article’s synopsis of the subfield’s predominant metaphors and its attendant questions contributes to the ongoing cultural geographic project of articulating and implementing methods for interpreting landscapes as open-ended symbolic systems.

Progress on Process and Mechanism of Sand and Dust Emission on Gobi

Gobi is one of the most important landscapes in northwest China, and it is also one of the dust sources in north China and even in central Asia. Based on the different land surface characteristics on the gobi surface, sand and dust emission process and mechanism are obviously different with other landscapes, such as sandy desert. Dust emission process and mechanism on the gobi surface were analyzed in this paper. Wind power system, geomorphology pattern and underlying characteristics were considered for their effect on the sand and dust emission process. Then, the mechanism of land surface characteristics on threshold wind velocity was analyzed. Finally, based on the previous studies on dust emission and mechanism, and in combination with the regional and global requirement, we suggested that the land surface characteristics parameterization, identification of the dust sources and sediment emission mechanism should be the main issues in the future gobi sand and dust research.     

Change trends for desertified lands in the Horqin Sandy Land at the beginning of the twenty-first century

The dynamics of desertification in the Horqin Sandy Land between 2000 and 2005 were analyzed using Landsat TM/ETM images and the data-processing function of geographical information software. The results showed that the extent of desertified land decreased at a rate of slightly more than 0.1 km² year⁻¹, from 22,423.1 km² in 2000 to 22,422.4 km² in 2005, indicating that desertification has been controlled in this area and that desert areas may be approaching a steady state. The dynamics of desertification differed among land types. Desertification decreased most obviously in areas of previous desert land. The area in which desertification was ameliorated was higher than the area that underwent further degradation, but non-desertified land (113.3 km²) deteriorated at a rate of 22.7 km² year⁻¹ during this period. This significant change requires careful attention by managers in the study area.     

Pragmatic localism uncovered: The search for locally contingent solutions to national reform agendas

This paper analyses the complexity and attempted pragmatism of current practices surrounding the management of current local government policy reform in England. In particular, it focuses on the tensions and contradictions between a national policy dynamic which seeks to encourage locally contingent solutions to be developed for localised problems, and the centralising tendencies of the national state which result in ‘blueprints’ and ‘models’ being developed for local policy delivery and a requirement to meet centrally derived targets. These assumptions are explored through the experiences of local government attempts to introduce innovative and experimental praxis in line with the complex cultural and political changes of ‘modernisation’ agendas advanced by the UK government. This is being rolled out by an overarching project of ‘new localism’ - an attempt to devolve power and resources from the central state to front line local managers, sub-local structures and partnerships and to deliver ‘what works’. It is argued that new attempts at subsidiarity should be more flexible to local conditions rather than directed by national policy and that greater discretion and freedom should be given to local managers to achieve this task. Using the concept of ‘pragmatic localism’ and grounded examples from a recent initiative - Local Area Agreements - it is highlighted that there are signs that local state management of national policy could be becoming increasingly adaptable, enabling managers to deal with the fluid nature of ongoing public policy reform, although this is far from a completed project with many factors still constraining this change process.     

Estuarine Biotope Mosaics and Habitat Management Goals: An Application in Tampa Bay,FL, USA

Many types of anthropogenic stress to estuaries lead to destruction and conversion of habitats, thus altering habitat landscapes and changing the “arena” in which the life history interactions of native fauna take place. This can lead to decreased populations of valued fauna and other negative consequences. The Tampa Bay Estuary Program (TBEP) pioneered a system-wide management framework that develops estuarine habitat restoration and protection goals based on supporting estuarine-dependent species and the habitat landscapes they require (for example, the extent of seagrass beds, mangrove forests, oyster reefs, or oligohaline marshes) within an estuary. We describe this framework and provide related statistics as methods to help managers set system-wide ecological goals using larger conceptual approaches that are easily communicated to stakeholders and the public; we also discuss applications of the approach to existing and evolving paradigms of estuarine management. The TBEP and partners used this framework to combine a simple and unifying vision with a diverse and complex set of management tools, resulting in greatly improved environmental conditions within Tampa Bay.     

“This is the mess that we are living in”: residents everyday life experiences of living in a stigmatized community

This paper is part of a larger community health study aimed at delineating the determinants of health in Sarnia. The paper specifically investigates Sarnia residents’ daily lived experiences, perceptions of and responses to living within the St. Clair River “Area of Concern” (AOC) as designated by the federal government based on the hypothesis that relatively high levels of environmental pollution in the region are negatively influencing human health. Results from in-depth interviews (N = 27) show that residents of Sarnia are conflicted by the elevation of awareness about environmental health threats by being labelled within an AOC. Residents use their emotional and sensual experiences to adopt appropriate coping strategies to live within a contaminated community. In contextualizing their everyday lived realities, residents argued that living in an AOC demands personal acceptance of the conditions in Sarnia and awareness of “bad air days” to cope with pollution exposure. Yet, residents were not willing to abandon Sarnia because of their cultural, social, and economical attachments to the place they call home. These findings suggest the need for local health policies that incorporate local concerns and perceptions of how environmental pollution affects people’s experiences and well-being. There is a necessity to involve community members as central participants in the process of policy making.     

Landscape care paradoxes: Swedish landscape care arrangements in a European context

Contemporary European agriculture has a number of additional aims beside of food production, such as safeguarding environmental services and conservation values. Substantial efforts at official levels are aimed towards sustainable development but also towards maintaining values of what may be termed vanishing landscapes. Selected areas and landscape features are set aside for protection or restoration. Individual efforts of this type have a long history in Sweden, and the issue has recently received increased attention, primarily due to more ambitious government goals concerning biodiversity conservation and Sweden’s ratification of the European Landscape Convention. This has resulted in an increased scientific and official interest in vanishing values in the rural landscape, where parts of Eastern Europe, such as the Maramures district in Romania, have been used as model examples of land use regimes which in the past was common in Sweden. In this context, the dilemma of romanticizing peasants’ use of land is highlighted and discussed more than has hitherto been done. This paper sheds light on some paradoxes inherent in official policies in relation to land use practices concerning the management of rural landscapes in Sweden, and relates the Swedish situation to a contrasting example of landscape practice in Romania. We discuss the concept of landscape care in relation to the construction and perception of landscape values and valuable landscapes through the lenses of rural realities and official policies. When Swedish authorities engage in the promotion of landscape care, they tend to work with slices of land, specific predefined values and individual farmers, and they often disregard the need to treat the landscape as a socio-ecological complex dynamic in space and time. We discuss how environmental policy generally could be improved through the adoption of a more inclusive and flexible approach towards aiding the different aims inherent in multifunctional rural landscapes.     

Formation of Ulan Buh desert and its environmental changes during the Holocene

Extensive investigations and studies on topography, sedimentary and chronology show new evidence for the formation and evolution of the Ulan Buh desert during early Holocene. Evidence on clay-sand strata and plant roots under interdune lowlands, lake shorelines covered by plenty of Corbicula largillierti and large amounts of dry salt lakes in the central region of the desert prove that many megalakes existed in the hinterland of Ulan Buh desert. Several OSL samples collected from Aeolian sands overlying lacustrine sediments in profiles around Jilantai Salt Lake and interdune lowlands in the southern Ulan Buh desert suggest that the desert began around 7 ka B.P.. The formation of Ulan Buh desert may have resulted from the shrinking of Jilantai megalakes and sands blown from exposed loose sediments. __________ Translated from Journal of Desert Research, 2007, 27(6): 927–931 [译自: 中国沙漠]     

Signatures of Restoration and Management Changes in the Water Quality of a Central California Estuary

Coastal managers and policy-makers are concerned with tracking improvements to water quality linked to management changes. Long-term water quality data acquired from two wetland areas in the upper reaches of the Elkhorn Slough estuary in central California were analyzed for signatures of land restoration or water control structure management. Post-restoration averaged NO₃, NH₃, and PO₄ concentrations were 50–70% less than before-restoration concentrations. Assessment of watershed-scale effects revealed that proximity of restoration to sampling locations had almost as strong an effect on water quality as the percentage of land restored relative to watershed size. Results also suggest that restoration of even 1% of an agriculturally intensive watershed such as that of the Elkhorn Slough may result in improvements to water quality. Finally, results indicate that tide gate function can dominate water quality in managed wetlands and must be carefully tracked and managed in the context of estuarine conservation targets.     

重庆南川区石漠化分布特征及其坡地利用模式分析

利用2004TM遥感影像,并结合地质、水文气象、土地利用图等,研究了重庆南川区石漠化的分布特征。结果表明,南川区石漠化分布具有如下特征:地层岩性上,石漠化集中发育在中生界三叠系嘉陵江、飞仙观、雷口坡组和下古生界奥陶系马家沟组碳酸盐地区的纯灰岩与其他灰岩和白云岩互层分布区中;气象水文上,石漠化集中分布在中部槽坝年均温为10~16℃、年降水量大于1200mm的地区;地形高程上,轻度石漠化和中度石漠化主要分布在海拔800~1200m之间,重度石漠化主要分布在600~800m之间,极重度石漠化主要分布在500~600m之间;土地利用上,轻度和中度石漠化主要分布于灌木林地中,重度以上石漠化则主要见于旱地。根据研究区石漠化的发育和分布特点,建议平缓坡地(<5°)推行稻田保护性耕作和加强无公害农产品基地建设;较缓坡地(5°~15°)发展农耕和种植园区;较陡坡地(15°~25°)种植藤本植物(金银花)、经济林果和生态林草;陡峻坡地(>25°)应长期封山育林,重点发展水源林和景观林。      

Nature–society and development: social, cultural and ecological change in Nepal

This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing human–environment issues that examines shifting, dialectical relationships between social and power relations, cultural beliefs and practices, and ecological processes to allow an interdisciplinary, complex assessment of social and environmental change in Nepal. The purpose of this analysis is to capture the complexity and non-static nature of environmental and social change in the context of uneven development. Drawing from political ecology and feminist geography, this framework brings together scholarship on aspects of human–environment issues that are often pursued in isolation, yet all three processes, social–political relations, cultural practices and ecological conditions, have been acknowledged as important in shaping the trajectory of social and ecological change. I argue that a consideration of the articulations between them is necessary to understand first, how specific land management regimes arise and are dominant over time in specific places. And second, I examine the extent to which these regimes distribute resources equitably within communities, promote economic development and sustain ecological resilience. In this analysis, ecological processes are conceptualised as co-productive of social and cultural processes to explore their role in land management regimes without resorting to environmental determinist or similarly reductive paradigms. I present this framework through the example of natural resource management, specifically community forestry in Nepal, as it offers a rich case study of the relationships between the political economy of land use and the ecological effects of natural resource extraction.     

Modification of the properties of salt affected soils using electrochemical treatments

In this project, an in situ soil treatment technique using the principles of electrokinetics was tested using laboratory experimental models in order to identify the potential of this approach in modifying and reinstating the physical properties of salt affected soils. Experiments were conducted in the laboratory using saline-sodic soils collected from two salt affected regions in central Victoria, Australia. Soil specimens were compacted in glass tanks to reproduce in situ density and in situ water content. Using mild steel electrodes inserted into the soil, a direct current was passed through the soil under a constant potential gradient of 0.5 V/cm for a period of 14 days. In separate experiments, distilled water and a saturated lime solution were introduced to the soil via the anode over this experimental period. It was observed that the soil dispersion, otherwise known as soil sodicity (measured as ESP—Exchangeable Sodium Percentage and SAR—Sodium Absorption Ratio) decreased by up to 90% in most regions of the soil between the electrodes. The compressive strength of the soil increased in excess of 100% with electrokinetic treatment alone while the lime-enhanced electrokinetic treatment led to an almost 200% strength increase. The liquid limit and plastic limit of the soil increased causing the plasticity index to decrease, indicating increases in soil compressive strength and workability. These results indicate the potential of this technique for improving the physical properties of salt affected soils both effectively and efficiently, and in particular gives hope for the remediation of salt affected land for infrastructure management and development.     

Coping with Complexity: Adaptive Governance in Desert Australia

Governance in Aboriginal settlements in desert Australia is changing at an unprecedented rate. Aboriginal leaders and community managers describe the change as bewildering, with ever-revolving agents and agencies and increasing quantities of administration. Governments are preoccupied with finding linear ‘solutions’ to new conceptualisations of the ‘problem’ and packaging these for top-down implementation. However, governance in practice involves multi-dimensional interactions of a complex system, which are difficult to predict, let alone to control for outcomes. Through the lens of complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory, this paper argues that there is potential to improve governance as an adaptive system through three principles that enhance local feedback: (1) application of the subsidiarity principle to different levels in the governance system would realise a better match between decentralised functions and local capacity; (2) connectivity would improve information flows and relationships between agents in the system, as a necessary precursor for informed decision-making; and (3) accountability, when taken beyond simplistic notions of financial reporting, would identify power relationships across the system and indicate where agents may exercise greater influence in the system. Consideration of these principles will help promote a shift from the perspective that assumes the system to be linear and manageable from the top-down to a perspective that embraces the notion of adaptive governance as a means of recognising the capacity of agents to influence the system that they inhabit.