[Sci-tech-public] kudos, thanks, & further conversation?

[michael fischer]

Many thanks and kudos to everyone who made the Disruptive Environments  
conferences such a success.  The collection of panelists were great  
and in many cases got some novel engagements going.  Nancy, Debbie,  
Chris, Candis, Sara, Laurel, Rebecca, Nick, Etienne, and whoever else  
did the conceptualizing, organizing, inviting, networking, logistics,  
framing, timing, etc., many thanks, and you all should feel really good.

Might  we keep the discussion going?  Kim Fortun suggested to Candis a  
follow up conference in two years: the panel foci and the debates  
might be well worth following out as the public discussions continue  
to evolve.  But in the meantime, maybe a wiki or even a simple  
discussion list might collect some of the corridor talk that was  
started.  For whatever they are worth, I offer a few reflections in  
thanks, and as a token to those in the community who missed the event.

Panel 1 (Climate Change).  For me, the corridor talk with Kerry  
Emanuel and Kevin Conrad was particularly stimulating.  Emanuel did a  
really nice piece on what (and how) we do and don’t know about  
modeling climate change in the Boston Review, that could be a model  
for scientists targeting niche audiences of opinion leaders.  That  
issue of the Boston Review was organized somewhat like this  
conference, placing Emanuel as scientist amongst policy types, social  
scientists and others.  He of course is primarily identified (in  
policy terms) with the call not to build so much on vulnerable  
coastlines, but it turns out he has some sharp things to say about  
geothermal ideas proposed by the "so we'll just adapt" folks.  I was  
bemused at the laughter when someone mentioned houses that float: this  
is an emerging technology that deserves serious attention, not single  
houses but perhaps floating cities, not as the solution but as part of  
a tool-kit.  Again the emerging discussions about the use of markets  
for debt-nature swaps and carbon trades might be well worth following  
not only at the macro state-to-state level, but more importantly at  
the level of mechanisms for getting new modes of employment to the  
local and regional level.  Conrad had some sharp observations about  
how the single country model case of Costa Rica needs an alliance such  
as his to really be able to make the benefits more productive. Kerry's  
comment about how MIT education, with its focus on reductionism, is  
not good at dealing with complexity seems like something worth pursuing.

Panel II (Endocrine disruptors and other industrial pollutants).  This  
was a really wonderful panel.  Bringing Laura, Terra and Theo together  
was a kind of para-ethnographic module  all in itself.  (Para- 
ethnographic modules are teaching devices that George Marcus has been  
experimenting with at UC Irvine, in which people in mid dissertation  
bring to campus elements of their field site in a micro social drama  
of how the larger field site works to help focus or generate new  
questions.)  It furthermore set the stage for what would explode in  
the next panel, not least the need for Terra to introduce Laura  
because Laura is legally restrained from talking about her personal  
case (and this raises some truly important constitutional questions  
for democratic governance: the 1st Amendment and the common law  
recognitions that contract law does not, cannot be allowed, to always  
trump, especially in cases where there is permanent damage to bodies  
and environments – recall Veena Das’ thoughtful short essay on  
contract law and organ donation).  Michael Dorsey’s elegant  
presentation on Ecuador did two things, I thought: it provided a  
global frame, and it flagged questions of how one does short, multi- 
faceted, and targeted accounts of complex situations, something Cathy  
Clabby also addressed in her account of the use of diagrams,  
undercutting and showing how threadbare were the defensive discussions  
in the opening panel about the need to simplify for the public.  She  
also provided an example where the press was able to help people in  
the bureaucracy do the right thing.  (Laura and Terra also  
demonstrated how threadbare is the argument that the public is too  
uneducated to become what Joe Dumit calls expert-patients, or more  
generally expert-citizens; the problems as the next panel somewhat  
unexpectedly illustrated are more deep seated and need to deal with  
what Kim Fortun called the "invisible on-going" risks (as opposed to  
catastrophes like Bhopal), and the organized and financed “will not to  
know”).

Panel III.  The clash of perspectives.  In week-long conferences,  
there is often a social dramaturgical form to the emotional  
engagements: on Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning there is an  
explosion.  In this conference, the explosions came in panel 3 over  
risk models, precautionary principles, and incentive structures (and  
bad faith) of high profit extractive corporations.  The roles of Theo  
Colborn, Devra Davis, and Nick Ashford were really important at the  
corporate and policy end, and Cheryl Johnson’s story picked up nicely  
on Dorsey and Amons’s bottom up accounts.  Theo and Nick were valiant  
in their stress on constructive alternatives to ever fancier  
mathematical models based on a series of faulty premises about  
exposures, cumulative effects, developmental processes, and misuse of  
claims about uncertainty.

Panel IV.  Restoration, and intelligent use.  Ecologists and field  
biologists such as Daniel Janzen long ago taught us that nature is  
rarely in equlibrium and is always changing (against the older  
ideologies of preservation, keeping humans away from disturbing nature  
or restoring ecosystems to some mystical purity), and what is  
important therefore is exploring the interactions that allow us to use  
less pesticides, allow habitats to intersect, and so on.  Kat Morgan  
and Brian Donahue’s talks were in this mold and opened some nice  
perspectives on growing food and living amidst forests in suburbia  
(Donahue), as well as making estuary ecologies for fish and farming  
more robust (Morgan).  In both cases, economic constraints were  
acknowledged and ways to begin dealing with these put on the table.   
Donahue and Jarid Manos also were able to expand towards urban-rural  
integrations. It might have been nice to have tied these threads back  
to Kevin Conrad’s talk in the opening panel.  It also might have been  
good to explore Kat’s passing comment about the differences between  
the communities of biologists such as herself and ecologists.
             The two art-science projects by Jae Rhim Lee and Dale  
Joachim, I found  tantalizing, and particularly since they are on  
campus, hope to explore more: neither had enough time to develop their  
work beyond a taste.  Jae Rhim Lee’s use of genetics and chemistry  
(recyling) and Dale’s use of cell phones as a device for contacting  
and counting owls . . . The latter made me think of the fabulous  
musical “Symbiosis”  CD by Manuel Obregon who took his piano into the  
Monteverde (Costa Rica) rain forest and improvised a concert with  
black-faced solitaires, oreopendula, bartbets, bellbirds, wood quail,  
quetzals, tinamou,  howler and Capuchin monkeys, among others, with  
the Arenal volanco on bass.