Scientists, farmer share land management know-how
By Anna Carr* Sydney's water problems, over-flowing land-fill sites in Asia and contaminated agriculture in Europe - everyday there are examples of environmental crises which occur around the world. Science has not resolved many, however, because they are not purely scientific problems. Typified by decreasing soil fertility, water quality and biodiversity, these problems are being addressed by scientific experts and technologists. But most ecological pathologies afflict both humanity and non-human lives and are symptomatic of broader sociocultural ailments affecting our society. To begin to comprehend the complexity of ecological problems requires experience from both the culture of science and the culture of the everyday. We need the objective, rational kind of science produced in universities. We also need what André Gorz in his 1993 article from New Left Review labels the "collection of intuitive knowledge or vernacular know-how... that enable individuals to interpret, to understand, and to assume responsibility for the way they inhabit the world that surrounds them". Many people point to the need for partnerships between scientific knowledge and local knowledge. Scientific knowledge typically abstracts knowledge from specific situations and applies it universally, using impartial and objective logic. Local knowledge, on the other hand, is more context specific. It has become popular largely in the developing world because it recognises local and oral traditions of knowledge acquisition. Hybrid knowledge is contested and constructed. It thrives on and draws freely on traditional, modern and post-modern claims about the nature of reality. It allows both the farmer and the scientist to question each other's methods and philosophies and encourages interaction both in the laboratory and in the shearing shed. The current work of several PhD students illustrates the extent to which this hybrid knowledge is being applied. Fayen D'Evie is conducting a critical inquiry into the assumptions, biases and contentions of decision support systems (DSS). The study takes place within an integrated catchment management context in the northern highlands of Thailand. She is drawing on knowledge generated by hydrologists, economists and sociologists, and is acting as a catalyst to have experts incorporate the concerns and fears of local people in the development of a DSS for the area. Catherine Mobbs is investigating the potential for regional environmental planning processes to accommodate stakeholder collaboration in settings which have significant scientific inputs. The participants are drawn from many walks of life and the science is often complicated. Her work is innovative in its attempt to interlace theory from (strongly science-based) adaptive management with participatory processes. Each of these students draws upon an eclectic array of disciplines and ideas in attempting to synthesise knowledge claims from both traditional and new paradigm research. In their efforts they are building hybrid epistemological foundations to environmental studies and do not make artificial distinctions between modernist and other claims to knowledge production. In this way, the sort of work conducted at CRES contributes to "sustainable knowledge" or what Murdoch and Clark defined in 1994 as "a mixture - of the social, the scientific, the local, the technical, the natural and perhaps even the magical - that refuses a priori to privilege science". Sustainable knowledge is, after all, what universities should be promoting in their bid to provide students with sufficient skills from a variety of disciplines to deal with ecological crises. * Dr Anna Carr is a Post-doctoral Fellow at CRES. Her research into community-based environmental management entitled "Grass roots and green tape" will be published later this year by Federation Press. She is currently working on community science - the convergence of voluntary and agency-based efforts to improve natural resource management.