Nov 13, 2013 | Investigative Justice

SJRC Visiting Scholar Sally Lehrman (Knight Ridder/Mercury News Professor in Journalism and the Public Interest, Santa Clara University), speaks about what constitutes responsible practices of investigation in journalism, and what might we learn from and with journalism about the challenges of constituting responsible practices of investigation in science?

Sally Lehrman, an award winning journalist and our first Science and Justice Professor, will speak to us about how questions of responsibility in investigative journalism relate to questions of responsibility in science. We look forward to thinking with Sally about how to create more responsible science reporting, particularly in the area of race, gender and genomics. We will ask what these efforts in journalism might reveal about efforts to create more responsible natural and social sciences. While many people think of journalists as distorting responsible science, Sally's work will challenge us to think in a more nuanced way about the relationship between science and journalism, and about how public knowledge about science is produced.

Sally Lehrman, "Investigative Justice"
SJWG Rapporteur Report
13 November 2013
Rapporteur Report by Lizzy Hare
Sally Lehrman, an award winning journalist and the first Science and Justice Professor, spoke to the working group about responsibility in investigative journalism and how it relates to questions of responsibility in science. Lehrman is especially interested in matters of justice and diversity in journalism and science, and wants to work with Science and Justice to think about how science, and journalism can intersect towards the idea of justice.

Lehrman began her presentation with a video of a white supremacist whose DNA ancestry is revealed to him on a British talk show. The test results show that he is 14% sub-Saharan African, and he rebukes, claiming that this is simply statistical noise. Lehrman wanted to show this video because it raises questions about what genomics does, and by extension, what science can do. She then asked us to think about the following questions: Can science solve social problems? Can journalism assist? Should it? How well is it doing? Could it be done better?

Lehrman then gave a brief overview of the ambitions of journalism and some of its historical problems. In some ways, these ambitions and problems are shared with the field of science. Journalists see their duty as informing the public and providing the public with information so that the public may address the issue. The information provided to the public should be truthful, fair, and comprehensive. These ambitions are not always easy to obtain. Journalism as a field is disproportionately white and male, and both journalistic sources and the subjects of coverage reflect racial and gender bias as well. The underrepresentation of groups in the newsroom and as sources and subjects can lead to stereotyping.

According to Lehrman, journalism’s goal is to seek truth and report it. The trouble with science reporting is that because many journalists see scientists as holding the truth, and because scientists typically agree, journalists think that they can take a shortcut when reporting on science. This leads to science being presented as if it holds the solution to social woes without further discussion or debates about how society should use that information. Lehrman suggests that science writers need to be attentive to their own social conditioning and the structures within their field that shape the way they conduct their investigations. Just like with other types of reporting, science journalists need to remember to question the newsworthiness, usefulness, credibility, and framing of scientific stories. Practically speaking, her proposed intervention can be summed up as “question the questions and question the interpretations.”

The final slide in the presentation was an image that she hoped we could discuss. It is from an exhibit on genomics, and she is hoping that our expertise and interest in matters of science and justice could provide useful thoughts on the image. The image shows a female mannequin-like figure with genetic code imprinted on her. She’s dark brown, and lacks facial features and hair. The question next to her reads: “Can genes tell us who we are?” We discussed this image in small groups and then convened to share our thoughts. The working group thought that the image was supposed to seem futuristic, which prompted additional comments about why future people are so often portrayed as hairless
and of indeterminate ancestry and culture (depicted here with light brown skin tone and without hair or clothing to provide clues). Others were troubled by the use of a female body. Was this a conscious attempt not to reproduce the gender bias in medical research? Or does it perpetuate the female body as an object for the scientific male gaze? Or was it because the female form is considered more approachable in our culture?

After the discussion of the image, audience members shared their responses to and questions for the presentation. One person commented that perhaps there should be more burden of responsibility on the informant to help get the story right. Lehrman’s response to this was that typically the journalist has a better understanding of the general audience than the scientist does. That said, she takes serious issue with journalists who write directly from press releases, which are intentionally sensational and might gloss over important points in the research. Working from press releases also adds in the trouble of time, because the turn around time between press release and publication is so short that investigations become truncated and dots aren’t connected. Heidi asked about the problem of “balance as bias” which is especially problematic in reports on climate change, which often grossly over represent the position of skeptics. Lehrman suggests that scientists can be helpful to journalists by pointing out where the debates actually lie within the field. These debates are likely to be much less sensational, but will more accurately reflect the status of mainstream science.

Nov 02, 2013 | Workshop: Transacademics: Making Use of Interdisciplinary Research Methods Outside of the Academy

Third Meeting of the Bay Area Intercampus Workshop on Interdisciplinarity

This workshop will consider how interdisciplinary research methods and knowledges can be used outside of specialized academic venues, with a particular focus on the importance of collaboration. Scholars who are drawn to interdisciplinary inquiry are often in search of knowledge that has more purchase on ‘real world’ problems. We will discuss how to accomplish this from positions that are both inside and outside of the traditional university setting, sharing insights from our own work, our institutions, and from experts who are now applying interdisciplinary training outside of the university.

Attendees are encouraged to prepare a 5 minute Lightning Talk that very briefly describes their research project and shares an insight, challenge or question about interdisciplinary collaboration that has arisen from their experience. Lightning talks are allowed a maximum of 3 slides. Attendees who do not want to give a lightning presentation are also welcome for the entire day.

 

Agenda:

10:30-11:00 Gather

11:00-11:15 Opening Remarks and brief introduction to the Science & Justice Research Center (Reardon and Metcalf)

11:15-12:45 Guest Speakers:

Natalie Purcell (Director of Collaborative Patient Care, Veterans Administration in San Francisco)

Karen Andrade (Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management and The Science Shop, UC Berkeley)

12:45-1:15 Lunch

1:15-2:00 Optional walk and chat (dress for walking on moderate hills)

2:00-3:45 Lightning Talks

4:15-4:30 Break

4:30-5:00 Open Discussion

The UCSC Science & Justice Research Center | UCSC, College 8, Room 301 | Saturday, November 2, 2013

"Transacademics: Making Use of Interdisciplinary Research Methods Outside of the Academy"
Third Meeting of the Bay Area Intercampus Workshop on Interdisciplinarity
SJWG Rapporteur Report
2 November 2013
Rapporteur: Lizzy Hare, Anthropology
The goal for this workshop was to consider how interdisciplinary research methods and collaborations can be used outside of academic venues. Natalie Purcell, Director of Collaborative Patient Care at the Veterans Administration in San Francisco, CA and Karen Andrade, founder of the Berkeley Science Shop and Ph.D. candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, spoke about their experiences applying interdisciplinary training to their work outside of the university. Workshop attendees also gave 5-minute Lightning Talks to briefly describe their research and share an insight, question, or challenge from their own experience in interdisciplinary collaboration.

The workshop began with introductions and participants offered questions that they hoped would be addressed over the course of the day. Workshop attendees were concerned with making transacademic work that is research done outside of traditional academic settings, legible as valid contributions to research and in career development, with issues of translation across audiences, disciplines and different degrees of specialization and expertise. There was also significant interest in being involved in research that can address real world problems and help to build a more equitable and just world.

In her introduction, Jenny Reardon talked about the importance of institutional recognition and support. Quality work ought to be recognized both financially and through certification on transcripts, and this is something that requires the involvement of the university. Funding for the Center for Science and Justice, for example, initially came from the National Science Foundation, but the NSF supports research, not institutions. In order to receive additional funds from the NSF that money will need to go towards research that supports the institution.

Natalie Purcell talked about her experience at the Veterans Administration in San Francisco. She began working at the VA through a fellowship program and was surprised to find that she would not be working on sociological research, but instead was tasked with administrative duties. While this was frustrating at first, she realized that many who leave academia face similar challenges and that the assigned tasks provided an opportunity to apply education in unexpected ways. One of the examples Purcell used was the customer service classes that she was asked to lead. She was able to incorporate sociological principles by expressing them using in the language of the people in charge. She said that her graduate training fostered a suspicion of pragmatism, and a distrust of people who work within compromised institutions and frameworks, but that these expectations weren’t realistic in her current position. She cautioned that adhering to a sense of purity in one’s research simply displaces the problem and forces others to compromise.

Karen Andrade spoke about developing the Berkeley Science Shop, an organization that connects UC Berkeley graduate and undergraduate students with research projects that benefit local non-profits, businesses and governments. By connecting students who wish to do research and organizations that could benefit from scientific research, the organization hopes to foster innovative solutions for local social and environmental problems. The Science Shop connects undergraduate students with graduate research mentors, and allows them to engage in research that has real-world impacts.

In the afternoon, conference attendees gave brief “lightning talks” about their experiences working collaboratively both inside and outside the academy. More than one talk questioned the assumption that collaboration is inherently good. Attendees were concerned that collaboration might be seen as a quick and easy solution to issues of credibility or a lack of diversity, but it can just as easily reproduce silences and impose limitations on ideas. Instead, collaboration needs to be done for the purpose of coming together around a common concern. Stopping to thinking of collaboration as co-labor-ation might be one way to remind ourselves of what is entailed in the act of engaging in collaboration. We should also be attentive to when and how interdisciplinarity and collaboration is good and why it is good in those situations. It can be helpful in exposing the normally invisible theoretical, methodological, and organizational assumptions that are a part of the collective sociality of disciplinary training, but we must be careful not to reproduce those in our collaborative, interdisciplinary work.

Sibyl Diver, a PhD Candidate from UC Berkeley, explained that presenting technical language as a gift might be one way to avoid alienating people with academic jargon. Instead of thinking and acting as though people should be familiar with technical words, she has tried to present them as a tool that could be used by people if they want to, if they find it useful. Several attendees said they liked the idea of using technical language as a gift in this way, rather than as a tool to exclude people.

One theme that ran through the entire day was that the divisions that are invoked to keep research “pure” and inside of the academy can also make it much more difficult to make a difference. Working to enact change outside of an academic context might require the provisional acceptance of logics that we might want to critique within the academy. Natalie’s talk provided an example of this, and Emily York offered an example from her own research as well For Emily, attempts to instantiate changes in the undergraduate nanoengineering curriculum at UCSD might require that she works within capitalist and humanist frameworks that she critiques in her more traditional academic work. Instead of seeing situations like this as a compromise, they could be considered successful in bringing attention to social and ethical issues that would have otherwise been ignored. Transacademic research is one way of being more attentive to these different research products for different intended audiences.

The day ended with concluding thoughts from Jenny. The problem of translation is recurrent, and we talked about the use of translate as a metaphor in this context. In linguistics, translation implies a slight slippage. Do we mean to suggest that, or are we using it differently? It seems we are using translation to describe the process of making research appeal to multiple audiences, but maybe we could find a more productive metaphor that doesn’t suggest incommensurability.

Future meetings will continue to work towards the goal of intercampus collaboration and research that benefits people outside of the academy. This process will require being humble and carefully listening to each other. Jake Metcalf will be working on the UCOP multi-campus research initiative to try to gain institutional and monetary support for our efforts.

Oct 03, 2013 | Thawing Justice?

Wednesday October 16, 2013

4:00-6:00PM

Engineering 2, Room 599

Joanna Radin (Yale, Department of History)  will join us to discuss what happens when biological tissues in freezers take on different ethical meanings over time.  What are our responsibilities towards the life immortal?  Who is responsible?  At this session, we will also discuss the recent NIH decision to give the Henrietta Lacks family the right to oversee uses of the HeLa cell line derived from Henrietta Lacks. See here for a recent magazine article by Radin on these topics.

Joanna Radin, "Thawing Justice?"
SJWG Rapporteur Report
16 October 2013
Rapporteur: Lizzy Hare, Anthropology
Joanna Radin, Assistant Professor in the History of Medicine and of History at the Yale School of Medicine, presented her research on the changing ethical meanings of frozen biological samples. Radin researches the consequences, intended and otherwise, of freezer technology that enables scientists to “stopping the biological clock” (a quote from an advertisement for early cryo equipment that she showed in her presentation). The International Biological Program (IBP), which ran from 1964-1974 included early researchers in cryobiology, who hoped the freezers could work as a kind of time machine, a way to collect and preserve information about indigenous populations before they went extinct.

The samples collected by those researchers are now being used in ways that were wholly unimaginable at the time when the samples had been collected. For example, the samples were collected well before it was possible to cheaply and quickly sequence DNA. One specific example of new uses for old samples is what Radin calls “mosquito anthropology”. Some of the samples in the IBP collections contained both human DNA and malaria plasmodia. Malaria researchers are interested in the samples because the malaria contained within them predates chloroquine resistance. Sequencing the pre-resistance malaria genome might help researchers discover alternative compounds that would be effective against the parasite. In coopting the samples for malaria research, the malaria researchers effectively transform a human blood samples into nonhuman samples. This presents interesting questions and thoughts about the boundaries of ecosystems.

In Radin’s terms “The project that collected the samples was looking to find the role of the humans in the ecosystem, but it ended up finding the ecosystem within the human”. As there is increasing interest in the human microbiome project, the use of human blood and tissue samples to understand nonhuman DNA will likely become more common. Does this change the ethical considerations given the samples and research on them?

Ultimately, the time machine quality of freezers becomes a problem for researchers who have to live within the constraints of their own mortal existence. Radin asked the audience “What happens when scientists reach the end of their careers and they have samples they’ve been the overseer of, but then they pass?” Freezers make it possible for samples to outlive their collector. Many collections are well curated and cared for, and are finding new purchase as new technologies make them relevant to new questions. But collections are also expensive to maintain, may be physically unwieldy, and contain people’s genetic information that may or may not have been collected in an ethical manner.

During the discussion, Donna Haraway remarked, “nothing gets to die”. She says this issue makes a case for why we need to have productive conversations about death, mourning and senescence. Can we start to think of best practices for allowing things to disappear, decay, or simply be left out of the database? She asked us to imagine what we would do if there weren’t freezers that allow us to keep things for as long as possible, to exploited to the very end. This led to James Battle’s question about salvage politics. The collection of many of these samples are linked to colonial politics and the idea that scientists need to extract information quickly before things disappear. This collect now, think later mentality works to defer discussions about ethics into an ever-receding future horizon.

Several comments were related to matters of profit and ownership. How much control can we or should we have over our genetic and biological materials after they have left our bodies? Some participants suggested that scientists should be able to claim a sort of ownership or intellectual property of information that comes from biological tissues, because it is the work of the scientists that make that information legible. However, others are concerned that informed consent cannot adequately handle the possibility that technologies change and that biological tissues may be used differently in the future. With the help of freezer technology, biological samples gathered in the 1950’s have now come to represent something different. In Radin’s words “it may just be blood until someone makes a massive profit”. The samples and their meanings are dynamic.

Micha Rahder asked if the scientists working with cryo technology believe they are creating the future they imagine. Radin said that they work through what she calls “planned hindsight”. The goal of planned hindsight is to plan for a future inhabited by people that look back and think these scientists planned well for the future. Though they recognize that predicting the future has inherent limitations, these scientists try to anticipate the consequences of their plans as best as they can. Radin said that the problem with this is that it is at odds with the salvage conditions under which many of the samples are originally collected, and the trouble with the freezer as technology is that it allows the difficult discussions to be displaced into the future. As the final comment, Haraway reminded us that the person who tries to save everything loses everything.

May 28, 2013 | When does science become justice? Scientific evidence, pesticides and food system justice

Tuesday May 28, 2013

4:00-6:00PM

Engineering 2, 599

Panel guests:

Tyrone Hayes, UC Berkeley

Jill Harrison, Colorado-Boulder

Emily Marquez, Pesticide Action Network of North America

At the heart of disputes over pesticide use in agriculture are questions of evidence. Whose evidence is to be trusted? When causal relations between pesticides and human illness or ecological harm are disputed, who decides on their continued use? Is it appropriate for regulators to take into account matters of political economy and social justice when regulating agricultural practices or are there plainly empirical criteria of risk for regulators to use? This panel will bring together a social scientist, an activist organization, a natural scientist, and a pesticide regulator. We will search for shared insights into the meeting of scientific knowledge and democratic governance of food systems, giving credence to the positions of the many stakeholders in food systems—farmers, workers, neighbors and eaters alike.

 

May 28, 2013 | Putting Earthquake Prediction on Trial: Lessons from the 2009 L’Aquila Earthquake

In spite of recent advances, predicting earthquakes remains difficult and uncertain, challenging scientists both to predict and to communicate the probability of earthquakes to policymakers and to the general public. In October, 2012, seven Italian earthquake scientists were found guilty of manslaughter for their role in failing to communicate the risk of a possible earthquake, shortly before a powerful 2009 earthquake killed more than 300 people in the city of L’Aquila, Italy. This trial has become an international cause celebre; in today’s event, Professor Susan Schwartz (Earth and Planetary Sciences, UCSC) will talk about the state of current knowledge in earthquake prediction, and about her experience of communicating this to multiple audiences in Costa Rica. Professor Massimo Mazzotti, (History, UC Berkeley) will talk about the political and institutional context which led to the seven scientists’ being put on trial, and how their conviction was affected by popular understandings of what scientists and the Italian state should have done.

Following the event, there will be a reception in the Science & Justice Research Center with refreshments and featuring works from our artists in residence.

Tuesday, May 21, 2013 | 4:00-6:00 pm | Oakes Mural Room

Apr 10, 2013 | Bruce Ames — Nutritional deficiencies and trace synthetic chemicals: Putting health risks into perspective

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Humanities 1, Room 210

Bruce N. Ames (Senior Scientist, Nutrition and Metabolism Center, Children’s Hospital of Oakland Research Institute (CHORI) and Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, UC Berkeley)

Bruce Ames’ research in nutritional biochemistry has examined exposure to health risks from a number of perspectives. Early in his career he developed the Ames test, an inexpensive method to measure the mutagenic and carcinogenic potential of chemicals which has become an essential tool of contemporary biochemistry. Although it contributed to public fears about synthetic chemicals, the common carcinogenic effects of ‘natural’ chemicals led Dr. Ames to assert that these fears were largely unfounded or exaggerated. More recently, his research has focused on the hidden biochemical costs of vitamin deficiencies, which are widespread even in wealthy nations. His triage theory posits that the human body protects against short term consequences of essential vitamin deficiencies by reducing the production of longevity proteins that are markers of long term health. This discovery led to his lab’s creation of CHORI-Bars, nutritional food bars that provide high densities of essential vitamins and minerals with very few calories. Preliminary research indicates that resolving nutritional deficiencies in this fashion can have positive effects on a wide range of health problems in wealthy and poor economies alike.

In this presentation, Dr. Ames will discuss the triage theory and what it means for the relative risks of competing nutritional strategies. Have food system reformers significantly over-stated the risks of synthetic chemicals to human health? Does the emphasis on reducing synthetic chemicals actually lead to more negative health outcomes, such as cancer, by making fresh fruits and vegetables more expensive? Can highly-engineered foods such as CHORI-Bars provide the least expensive solutions to a wide variety of negative health outcomes?

Mar 08, 2013 | Critical Nutrition Symposium

March 8, 2013

9:00AM-5:30PM

261 Social Sciences I

Advice about what to eat for health and well being is pervasive in the modern world, and such advice is delivered as if it were uncontroversial, universally applicable, welcome, and effective. When it appears not to work, rather than reflection on the scientific, cultural, and sociological underpinnings of the endeavor, the response has been for more informative food labels and more emphasis on food education. What’s wrong or missing in conventional nutritional practice? What are its effects in terms of human health and social justice? What other approaches might work better? This symposium will bring together scholars from multiple disciplines and perspectives to comment on the content and delivery of nutritional science. Invited guests include Charlotte Biltekoff (American Studies and Food Science, UC Davis), Jessica Hayes-Conroy (Women’s Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges), Adele Hite (Public Health, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill), Aya H. Kimura (Women’s Studies, University of Hawai’i-Manoa), Hannah Landecker (Sociology and Center for Society and Genetics, UCLA), and Jessica Mudry (Center for Engineering in Society, Concordia University). UCSC food scholars Julie Guthman, Melissa Caldwell, Nancy Chen, and Jake Metcalf will provide commentary.

This event is sponsored by the Multi-campus Research Program on Food and the Body and the “Knowing Food” Research Cluster of the Center for Global, International, and Regional Studies. Additional support has been provided by the Community Studies Program, the Science & Justice Research Center, the Department of Environmental Studies, and the Department of Sociology.

Please RSVP to Lisa Nishioka (global@ucsc.edu) if you plan to attend.

For questions regarding the program contact Julie Guthman (jguthman@ucsc.edu)

Feb 26, 2013 | Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires: Problems of Communicating Uncertainty about Landscape Change

Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires: Problems of communicating uncertainty about landscape change

 

Karen Holl (UCSC, Environmental Studies)

Maggi Kelly (Dept. of Environmental Sciences, Policy & Management, UC Berkeley)

Tim Forsyth (Department of International Development, London School of Economics)

Over the last few years the contribution of deforestation and forest fires to climate change has come to be of increasing interest, even as new technologies of remote sensing and modeling have made it possible to measure and predict landcover change with unprecedented accuracy. These technologies have made it possible to imagine environmental policies which compensate landowners for averted deforestation (known as REDD, Reduced Emissions through Degradation and Deforestation), or to support thinning forests in order to prevent forest fires. However, increased precision also introduces new problems of communicating uncertainty to policymakers and of gaining the trust of the general public. Professor Holl will talk about the challenges of including tropical forest restoration in proposed markets in carbon offsets, Professor Kelly will talk about her work with remote sensing technologies such as LIDAR in order to measure California forests and to inform the general public about forest conditions. Tim Forsyth is a specialist in political approaches to environmental change and international development, and will moderate a conversation about the challenges of communicating uncertain knowledge about forests to policymakers and other audiences.

February 26, 2013 | 4:00-6:00PM | Engineering 2, Room 599

"Measuring and Predicting Carbon Absorbed in Reforestation and Averted Forest Fires:
Problems of Communicating Uncertainty about Landscape Change"
SJWG Rapporteur Report
26 February 2013
Rapporteur: Martha Kenney, History of Consciousness
Maggi Kelly (Berkeley) spoke about her work on the Sierra Nevada Adaptive Management
Project, a collaborative partnership between a UC science team, federal and state agencies, and
the public with the goal of learning how to ensure long-term sustainability of the Sierra Nevada
forest system. Specifically they are looking into the role of fire in forest management. Firesuppression
policies have lead to fuel build-up. The Forest Service developed a “strategic fire
management” plan where fuel treatments would be used on the ground to control the fire.
However, this had only been modeled, not tested. Due to public concern UC scientists were
brought in as a neutral party to investigate the efficacy and impact of the fuel treatment plan.
Kelly was a member of the spatial team who used helicopter-mounted LiDAR (Light Detecting
and Ranging) to measure the efficacy of the treatments. Recent projects for the spatial team
include using LiDAR data to map Fisher (a medium-sized mammal of interest to environmental
activists) habitat and finding the best allometric equations to use LiDAR data to estimate the
forest biomass. One public initiative has been to introduce citizens to virtual forests rendered
from the LiDAR data. This offers one medium to communicate both the potential and
uncertainty of their forest models.

Karen Holl (UCSC) spoke about the opportunities and concerns of the UN’s REDD+ (Reducing
Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) initiative in the context of tropical forest
restoration. Under the REDD+ scheme local people are paid to participate in reforestation
projects. Holl expressed some logistical concerns about REDD+ including how to set a baseline
for how much carbon you have to begin with, monitoring, permanence, and respecting human
rights. In her own project in Costa Rica, Holl learned that it is important where you restore and
how you restore forests. Her team has been experimenting with creating “tree islands,” which
use fewer resources and stimulates natural recovery. Projects such as these help Holl investigate
why there is such variation in the rate of recovery in order to increase the predictability of active
restoration. However, Hall is still concerned about the efficacy of paying farmers for restoration
and that a focus on carbon obscures questions of biodiversity. Because of these misgivings, Holl
argues that forest policies should concentrate on preserving relatively intact forests and to value
carbon, biodiversity, and human livelihoods together.

Tim Forsythe acted as respondent for Kelly and Holl, drawing from his own experience in forest
policy in Asia. Agreeing with Holl he argued that REDD+ offers a strategy to increase forest
cover and reduce carbon, but it does not necessarily or directly address people’s livelihoods and
biodiversity. Other limitations to REDD+ he noted were that under many schemes only
indigenous people are protect, that plantation forests are acceptable for meeting carbon goals,
and that carbon does cost enough (10 dollars/ton) to encourage the kind of reforestation that is
necessary. Forsythe argued that we need new ways of using climate change policy to make better
livelihoods for the people who rely on the forests for income. One alternative he believes offers
a better model is the approach of Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security (CCAFS),
who ask rural people what they need and value in the context of global climate change.

During the question and answer period, questions centered around the uncertainty of scientific
modeling and problems with climate change policy. Kelly spoke about her role as a trusted
liaison (or neutral party) between the public and the Forest Service. Transparency and clear
communication of uncertainty are central to her team’s success, which includes destabilizing the
notion that a map or a model tells the truth. These uncertainties have lead to combining
approaches. For example the LiDAR data about Fisher habitat is correlated with the Fisher team
who monitor individual animals. However, how much the precision of the LiDAR data helps
resolve questions around fire remains to be tested. There are many equations and models and
they need to be checked against data on the ground. Holl explained that in tropical forests there
are so many species that the numbers you plug into equations for wood density require a lot of
guess work. She also explained that when a model is working it doesn’t necessarily represent the
reality of a situation but helps scientists to identify data gaps and to generate hypotheses.
Forsythe was concerned that these model-generated hypotheses don’t travel well and that, in the
context of REDD+, that these hypotheses have scientists and policy makers asking the wrong
questions. He wondered if REDD+ is helpful for the forests or a fast, cheap, and efficient
solution. Echoing the theme of “slow science” that the SJWG has been considering, he argued
that we should pause and ask more people what they would like to do with their landscapes.
From these discussions we got a real sense of the complex relationships between models, data,
policy, and on the ground efficacy happening within forest science in the context of climate
change.

Feb 23, 2013 | Seeding Sustainability: Hunger, BioTech, and the Future of Food Systems

Saturday February 23, 2013

7:00-10:00PM

UCSC Media Theater

Confirmed Speakers:

Miguel Altieri (UC Berkeley)

Eric Holt-Gimenez (Food First)

Kent Bradford (UC Davis)

Moderator: Jacob Metcalf (UCSC Science & Justice Research Center)

Registration (free) is kindly requested.

In collaboration with the UCSC Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, the Science & Justice Research Center will host a panel discussion on the role of genetically modified crops within sustainable food systems in the global South. Food and agroecology activist and scholar Dr. Vandana Shiva will headline a panel with diverse perspectives from crop science, philanthropy. This panel will cap the CASFS weekend-long gathering and seed exchange event Strengthening the Roots: Seeds and Justice Convergence.

Two decades of experience with GMO crops, including mixed assessments of environmental impact and increased yield, indicate that controversies about biotech agriculture is not just (or even primarily) about the modified plants themselves. Rather, a complex social system travels with the plants. This system includes intellectual property, legal and political regimes, chemical inputs, industrialized and centralized food processing, farmer debt and much more. As the debate over GMO crops has evolved, particularly in the global South, the controversies have shifted from genetic modification techniques to the appropriateness of that social system for providing environmentally beneficial and economically secure food systems. Thus, this panel seeks to investigate the question of under what conditions ag-biotech is capable of providing sustainable—in all its ecological, cultural, and economic connotations—food systems in the global South? And are achieving those conditions both plausible and worth whatever trade-offs may be made in pursuit of extending and improving upon more traditional modes of growing food?

Feb 19, 2013 | Mast Fruiting and Ectomycorrhizal Associates: How Looking Below Ground Reshapes Above Ground Ecologies and Politics

February 19, 2013

4:00-6:00PM

Engineering 2, Room 599

Lisa Curran (Woods Institute for the Environment/Department of Anthropology, Stanford University)

Respondents: Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC) and Andrew Mathews (Science & Justice Research Center and Anthropology, UCSC)

Lisa Curran is an anthropologist and tropical ecologist who, over the last twenty five years, has carried out extensive research on forest ecology and plant/mycorrhizal relations in Indonesian forests. Through her engagement in policy research and advocacy she has participated in key forest policy conversations, including through her criticism of oil palm plantations in Latin America and South East Asia. Lisa’s current interdisciplinary research programs examine the effects of land use change, climate, drought and fire on carbon dynamics and biodiversity; and impacts of governmental policies and industrial practices on ecosystems and rural livelihoods in Asian and Latin American tropical forests. Today she will talk to us about her research on the relationship between below ground ectomycorrhyzal associates and above ground mast fruiting by important dipterocarp tree species. In a public conversation with Anna Tsing (Anthropology, UCSC) and Andrew Mathews (Science & Justice Research Center and Anthropology, UCSC) she will talk about how this research has informed her engagement with and criticism of oil palm plantations, and about how it broadens competition models that have historically been dominant in ecology.