New forests, new forest people (video presentation)

February 2, 2021

I was recently invited to give a presentation at University College London’s “Human Ecology Research Group” seminar series, and was asked record it in advance. I thank HERG for the invitation and the very fruitful discussion! I’m pleased to share the presentation here.

Summary: Forest landscapes and forest lives are mutating rapidly in central Vietnam. Non-native acacia plantations have boomed, local people have refashioned their livelihoods around these trees, in a context of diverse state policies. What is ‘sustainability’ in the face of these dynamics? This presentation seeks to give an overview of the progress of the “FT Viet” R4D project. I start describing the empirical case, then address the sustainability question before finishing with some comments on interdisciplinarity.

New forests and new forest people in central Vietnam: questions for sustainability and interdisciplinarity from KullGeog on Vimeo.

Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Interdisciplinarity, Sustainability, Vietnam | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Middle-range theories of land system change

September 14, 2018

Patrick leading the reflections

New paper in Global Environmental Change, under the amazing leadership of Patrick Meyfroidt, bringing together and surveying a wide family of theories of land use and land cover change.

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Leave a Comment » | Interdisciplinarity, Research, Sustainability | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

When invasion ecology looks at cities and urban areas

November 10, 2017

The historical roots of urban invasion studies across the rural–rural-wild spectrum. Fig. 1 in Salomon Cavin & Kull 2017. Kindly drawn by Lionel Cavin.

The study of invasive plants and animals has started to pay attention to cities.  In a paper just out, written by my colleague Joëlle Salomon Cavin and me, we document this ‘urban turn’ and ask what its implications are.  Specifically, our paper does a few things. We review how the ecological sciences in general have long had blinders as far as matters urban go, but also the existence of alternative paradigms – notably in 20th century European circles and in diverse ‘urban ecology’ traditions. Then, we look in more detail at how invasion biology has dealt with (or ignored) cities. In doing so, we Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Interdisciplinarity, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Using the ‘regime shift’ concept to analyse society-environment change

November 8, 2017

What happens when you take a concept developed to describe lacustrine ecology or fire regimes and apply it to complex social-ecological phenomena involving politics, economics, culture, and more?  What challenges occur when concepts are borrowed from systems ecology or complexity science and applied to situations with people, power, perceptions, contingencies, and feelings?

I’m excited to announce a brand-new paper that addresses exactly these questions (official link; authors preprint PDF).  Published in Geographical Research, the paper does four things: Read the rest of this entry »

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Posted by christiankull

Announcing new project on forest landscapes in Vietnam (with PhD post)

April 25, 2017

Forest in Vietnam can mean many things. There are the dense, dipterocarp rainforests that have divulged mammal species previously unknown to science, like the saola. There are also the vast plantations of exotic acacias growing wood for industry, as I detailed in a previous blog entry. And these forests have changed rapidly in the past few decades in step with the country’s economy and politics. The country is often seen to have undergone a “forest transition”, whereby a previous history of deforestation transitions to a new phase characterised by forest stability and indeed regrowth (albeit largely with exotic plantations).  In a new research-for-development project (see PhD job ad here), we intend to investigate the exact nature of the forest transition and its feedback into sustainable development for the heavily peopled rural landscapes of Vietnam.

r4d photo - 4

Acacia mangium, forest plantations, and natural rainforest in A Luoi district, Vietnam

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2 Comments | Acacia, Conservation, Development, Interdisciplinarity, Research, Vietnam | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

What are the environmental humanities?

March 10, 2017

Among the most potent recent academic buzzwords must figure “The Environmental Humanities”. This bandwagon is clearly attractive: an ever-growing bouquet of new journals, positions, institutes, books, and networks carries this label.[*]

In this blog, I’d like to propose an alternative definition for what the environmental humanities constitute, one that goes a little bit against the standard definition. In short, instead of emphasising meta-discipline, interdisciplinarity, and knowledge domains, my definition emphasises modes of knowledge creation and communication. Let me explain.

The environmental humanities emerged in particular out of history and literature departments (environmental history, eco-criticism), with a number of other contributors from across a diverse spectrum of academia (Nye et al. 2013). Well-known figures like Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold are claimed as predecessors. Definitions of the environmental humanities, in my (perhaps naïve) reading, seem to coalesce around three points: Read the rest of this entry »

4 Comments | Book Review, Environmental History, Interdisciplinarity, Political ecology, Sustainability | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Invasive species: interdisciplinarity, ecosystem (dis)services, and aesthetics

February 21, 2017

Announcing a series of new publications on “invasive species”, all from the Socio-ecology of Acacia project in which I participated (funded by SESYNC and two German research institutes). Here’s why they are interesting: Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Interdisciplinarity, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Political ecology and resilience: competing ‘interdisciplines’

February 10, 2017

The study of environment-society interactions is widely acknowledged to demand inter-disciplinary knowledge production. Yet there are multiple ways of being interdisciplinary. Both “political ecology” and “resilience” (or socio-ecological systems) are research approaches that explicitly claim to be inter- or even post-disciplinary. Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Interdisciplinarity, Political ecology | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Arbres voyageurs et plantes invasives dans les pays du Sud

October 17, 2016

FGSE Unil ouverture des cours 2016-2017 Last month I gave the ceremonial first lecture of the academic year for our Faculty.  The video is now online (see below).  The presentation dips into a number of research projects I’ve contributed to in recent years in order to make a number of observations about the relationship between plants and people, notably with iconic ‘natural’ plants and problematic ‘invasive’ weeds.  These observations include: Read the rest of this entry »

Leave a Comment » | Acacia, Conservation, Interdisciplinarity, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Sustainability, Uncategorized | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

Political ecology and the Anthropocene

January 22, 2016

What does the Anthropocene mean for subsistence farmers Lele or Rakoto?  At first glance, nothing.  It is, after all, just a fashionable term amongst the intelligentsia; the latest jargon to adorn project proposals to do more of the same. But on second thought, for these already marginal farmers, the Anthropocene might concretely mean less rains, stronger cyclones, new weeds: new stresses, challenges, and perhaps opportunities.   Read the rest of this entry »

1 Comment | Interdisciplinarity, Political ecology, Sustainability | Permalink
Posted by christiankull

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