October 11, 2013
Every once in a while, it is worth reflecting on concepts that have become so central to discourse that they are repeated ad nauseum but without any novelty. So it goes with ‘interdisciplinarity’, a pet term of any university or research administrator. It is widely desired or required, without much thinking about what it means. For there can be multiple interdisciplinarities, or competing interdisciplinary approaches (as I show for political ecology and resilience, see below). Interdisciplinarity can be a practice, a goal, a tool, or an outcome; it can be individual or team-based; it can be ‘deep’ or ‘shallow’; it can be a spirit of enquiry or a formal requirement.
These were some of the inspirations I gained from attending, this first week of October, an intimate conference on Interdisciplinarités entre natures et sociétés, in Cerisy-la-Salle, France. Read the rest of this entry »
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Political ecology, Research | Tagged: conference, disciplinary boundaries, Interdisciplinarity, political ecology | 
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Posted by christiankull
September 25, 2013
The team of our current ARC-funded project on local knowledge and uses of environmental weeds recently assembled in Kununurra, far northwest Australia. The project will compare local people’s views of “weeds” across four case studies in four countries around the Indian Ocean – India, South Africa, Madagascar, and Australia. My Monash colleague Priya Rangan and I are collaborating with Charlie Shackleton (Rhodes University, South Africa) and Ramesh Kannan (ATREE, India), supported by Tom Bach (doctoral student on our previous ARC grant) and Pat Lowe (Kimberley-based author and environmentalist). Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Acacia, Conservation, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: research, weeds | Permalink
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September 10, 2013
How did forty years of rural development, population growth, and conservation action transform the landscapes of highland Madagascar? My recently published [1, 2] analysis of a region-wide sample of air photos from circa 1950 and 1991 document several key trends: crop fields, settlements, and exotic trees are replacing open grassland, while irrigated rice is expanding at the expense of wetland and riparian vegetation.
Farmhouse among the intensively cultivated rice terraces of Betafo, west of Antsirabe
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2 Comments | Development, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research, Smallholder farming | Tagged: aerial photography, afforestation, agrarian change, agricultural development, land use change, Madagascar | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
August 31, 2013
Indonesia‘s courts recently recognised community forests (or customary ‘adat‘ forests) as distinct from state forests (i.e., government land). This is a landmark decision, as shown in an excellent analysis by Elizabeth Kahurani [1]. It overturns a presumption that the state is first and foremost the guardian and manager of forests, and vests more rights in local communities. In the context of south-east Asia, where states have a poor history of protecting forests (especially in ways that respect local indigenous people), this is an important victory. In contrast, here in Fiji and in much of the rest of the Pacific, the situation is quite different: most land (and hence forest) is ‘native land’ and belongs to traditional village structures. Revenue from logging goes to the iTaukei land board and the villages (the forest service just overseas licences), also two state owned companies grow pine and mahogany on leased native and crown land [2]. In Madagascar, the situation is different again. The presumption of unoccupied land (hence, forests) as state domain comes first, and most significant areas of forestland have been demarcated as parks, reserves, or classified forests. Since the mid-1990s, neighbouring communities may gain use and management rights to some forest areas, but the forest is still fundamentally the state’s [3]. Rural social movements are much weaker than in Indonesia, and the conservation lobby (which usually tends to favour state control) is stronger, in relative terms.
Indonesia’s decision can be read through the Nancy Peluso and Peter Vandergeest’s ideas about “political forests”. Their article in Journal of Asian Studies [4] traces the history of the idea of state forests, and how it was constituted dialectically with customary rights: Read the rest of this entry »
Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Fiji, Madagascar, Political ecology | Tagged: community forests, Fiji, forestry, Indonesia, land tenure, Madagascar, state forests | Permalink
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August 7, 2013
An exciting archaeological find by Bob Dewar [1] and colleagues suggests the presence of hunter-gatherers on Madagascar around 4000 years ago, which essentially doubles the length of the history of Madagascar’s human settlement. Their discovery, published in PNAS [2], suggests four thousand years of people living, burning, cultivating, shaping, transforming, and developing the island’s environment, instead of around two thousand [3]. From a pyrogeography perspective, Dewar and colleagues make an important point towards the end of their paper: Read the rest of this entry »
1 Comment | Fire, Madagascar, Research | Tagged: archaeology, environmental history, fire, fire regimes, Madagascar, pyrogeography | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
July 11, 2013
Imagine two 9 year-old children. One gets driven across town to a school that his parents find best fits his learning needs, or social values, or cultural community. He barely knows the kids on the street where he lives, as they all go to other schools. He sits in traffic everyday, contributing carbon to the atmosphere and pollutants to the city air. The other child walks to the local primary school, joining friends along the way, kicking stones down the sidewalk, plucking leaves from the hedge, learning to avoid dangerous street crossings and engaging in little mischiefs. Obviously, I exaggerate and simplify. But the point I wish to make is that the impacts of school choice (or school vouchers, or proliferating private schools) on traffic, air quality, carbon emissions, health, family time, and neighbourhood cohesion are far from sufficiently discussed in debates over school choice.
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2 Comments | Schools, Sustainability | Tagged: carbon emissions, school choice debate, sustainability | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
May 10, 2013
As the international development community gears up to renew a global plan for improved ‘disaster risk reduction’ from 2015 (the ‘post-Hyogo’ framework), it is striking to reflect on how central the idea of disaster risk reduction has become in the development industry. Boosted in no small measure by attention to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and in tandem with efforts at climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction has been a dominant theme over the past decade. In my own world, it appears everywhere I look
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March 20, 2013
What happens when you combine human labour, introduced plants, and particular societal histories and structures in a certain tropical landscape? You end up with anthropogenic or cultural landscapes – the “matrix” in current ecological jargon – such as the domesticated forests1 of southeast Asia, the tree gardens of Caribbean or Pacific islands, the shambas of Africa, the rice terraces of Madagascar. Despite their aesthetic and cultural attractions, these smallholder farming landscapes are directly or implicitly critiqued by many – for not being as productive as modern industrial agriculture, for trapping people in rural poverty, and for taking up space at the expense of natural habitats. In two recent papers with French collaborators, I argue instead that such landscapes can be sustainable sources of useful products, can facilitate vibrant and resilient rural communities, and can be resilient contributors to the functioning of local and global biophysical systems.
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Leave a Comment » | Conservation, Development, Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research, Smallholder farming, Sustainability | Tagged: agriculture, biodiversity, hotspots, invasive alien species, sustainability, tropics | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
March 9, 2013
A few weeks ago I attended a workshop by this name in Wollongong, organized by Lesley Head, Jenny Atchison, and Nick Gill. With keynote papers by Richard Hobbs, known for the ‘novel ecosystems‘ concept, and by Brendon Larson, known for his book Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability, and with presentations by participants as diverse as uniformed state Noxious Weeds Inspectors, indigenous rangers, government scientists, and historians of science, we kicked off a fantastic conversation on how weeds in the landscape are already a ‘new normal’. The threat of invasion is old news; the challenge of living with invasives is the new. In this respect, managers of environmental weeds could learn from those who have focused on cropfield or pasture weeds – they have been ‘living with’ weeds for a long time, and don’t see the world in such black and white terms. For more information and comments, see this Blog by the workshop organisers.
Leave a Comment » | Introduced and Invasive Plants, Research | Tagged: conference, invasion biology, invasive alien plants, weeds | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
January 8, 2013
Who controls Madagascar’s flora, fauna, and landscapes? How, and for whom, are its forests, grasslands, and waters governed? Over the past three decades, Madagascar’s local environments have become more and more internationalized – subjected to western worldviews and gazetted into protected areas with foreign funding.
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3 Comments | Book Review, Development, Madagascar, Political ecology, Research | Tagged: conservation, environment, geopolitics, Madagascar | Permalink
Posted by christiankull
Christian Kull 