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“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
—Margaret Mead
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Aloha Colleagues and Partners,
This is a brief update on our research collective’s plans for the next three months, and an invitation for you to join these efforts. Our next Consilience Think Tank session will be held on March 25 (1:00–3:00 p.m. HST). On this date last year, our state memorably went into COVID-19 lockdown. With this conversation, entitled “The Covid-19 pandemic and knowledge workers: Lessons learned and lessons unlearned,” we’d like to engage in a collective reflection on what you have discovered about yourselves and the world(s) you study.
We’d like to know which epistemic commitments you may have started to question based on your 12-month observations, as well as which lines of inquiry you intend to deprioritize and which new ones you would like to pursue. Also, as you observed the meltdown of Hawai‘i’s brittle one-trick-pony economy, what knowledge did you wish Hawai‘i’s academia had had to ensure higher community resilience from an all-hazard perspective?
To orient this conversation toward a meta-disciplinary dialogue, we’d like to suggest the following readings:
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Varoufakis, Y. (2020, 29 December). The seven secrets of 2020.
Common Dreams. URL: https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/12/29/seven-secrets-2020
Karp, A. (2021, February 12). Lessons from the pandemic: Mass education and the climate crisis.
Freedom and Survival. URL: https://freedomsurvival.org/mass-education-and-the-climate-crisis-lessons-from-the-pandemic/
Cegarra-Navarro, J.G., & Wensley, A. (2019). Promoting intentional unlearning through an unlearning cycle.
Journal of Organizational Change Management, 32(1), 67-79.
Klammer, A., & Gueldenberg, S. (2019). Unlearning and forgetting in organizations: A systematic review of literature.
Journal of Knowledge management, 23(5), 860-888.
Colville, I., et al. (2012). Simplexity: Sensemaking, organizing and storytelling for our time.
Human Relations, 65(1), 5-15.
Gidley, J. M. (2012). Futures of education for rapid global-societal change In:
There’s a future: visions for a better world, 395-419. BBVA, Spain.
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As always, access to our discussions is free, but optional donations to support the production of our transdisciplinary bulletins and compendia as listed in the next section are always helpful as we remain a volunteer-driven scholarly society, with no funding from Hawai‘i’s academia. These donations are applied toward the initiative’s digital infrastructure costs, research repository subscriptions, licensing fees, content acquisition, and publication-distribution services. To receive a videoconferencing link to our March 25th session, send a quick note to Justin at eco@hawaii.edu.
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CALL FOR COLLABORATION IN THE COPRODUCTION OF TRANSDISCIPLINARY E-PUBLICATIONS
Our heartfelt mahalo to those of our colleagues who in the past two months have provided constructive feedback on our newest bulletins, Ag Hoc Insights and Island Oikonomia, and the CTAHR’s Strategic Pivot blueprint. The full portfolio of our
2021/22 Knowledge in Service of Society Series includes:
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Consilience Notes (Socioecological transformation; knowledge support for policy innovation; assessment of progress toward environmental sustainability; collaborative governance for a complex, uncertain, dynamic, and ambiguous world).
Bounce Forward Guide/Civitas Solis (Community resilience-building; knowledge-empowerment of civil society; social solidarity and collective action in times of crises; solutions to tackle wicked problems; bioregional planning; disaster preparedness and antifragility capacity building).
Climate Emergency Digest (Climate and sustainability research updates; climate crisis mitigation; energy transition; environmental stewardship; climate activism and citizen science).
The IWA Report (Knowledge democratization; advancement of societally relevant academic innovation; integrative research and mode 3 knowledge production; fostering the development of an equitable knowledge society in Hawai‘i; cultivating a regional ecosocial innovation system).
Island Oikonomia (Means and ends of a green society’s economy; heterodox economics and alternative economies for social provisioning in island bioregions; path creation through ontological design; economic localization; ownership democratization).
Ag Hoc Insights (Sustainable transitions to local organic foodscapes and fibersheds, nutrition education, ecosystem restoration, and environmentally sustainable household consumption).
POIesis (Artistic and literary creation celebrating ecological civilization values; sensemaking through storytelling; artivism for ecological solidarity and biodiversity; countering the forces of disimagination).
Hawai‘i Low-Tech Inquirer (From ecstatic techno-optimism to responsible technorealism, contributing to the creation of a life-affirming island economy).
Traveling Fugue (The needs and wants of human mobility in the age of a climate crisis; transition to environmentally sustainable and climate-just travel and transportation; decommodified tourism and recreation).
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To help you better understand our approach to knowledge-production and -curation, as well as our expectations from interdisciplinary collaboration, we’d like to employ the following visual quote (a modified schema from Donella Meadows’ seminal “Leverage Points”). Our research, system design, and science-policy communication efforts predominantly address the area denoted by the upper half of the depicted pyramid. |
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WHAT ELSE IS NEW?
As part of our RESET Initiative (Research and Education for Social-Ecological Transformation) conceived at the end of 2020, we are enhancing our knowledge-translation and -intermediation outreach by launching two event series, Research Intelligence Briefings (RIBs) and Citizen-Science Hour (CSH).
The topic of the first 90-minute RIB scheduled for April 14 is “Policymaking Under Complexity.” We will explore the complex nature of policymaking from a systems perspective. Public policies are non-linear and emergent, while the thinking behind the standard approach to policymaking follows the reductionist view that dominates much of science.
The inaugural CSH confab is tentatively planned for April 2 and is titled “Does My Elected Official Understand The Precautionary Principle?” For this and future discussions in the series, we are looking for co-hosts and co-presenters among fellow academics and community leaders who wish to volunteer their intellectual potential to this intersectoral learning effort. Please let us know if you’re interested at third@hawaii.edu.
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The IWA Initiative (Innovate Within Academia), our Critical University Studies cluster, will hold three collective-thought exercises this spring:
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i. Examining the causes of epistemophobiae and willful ignorance in Hawai‘i’s academia: Lack of imagination, opportunism, academic cowardice, or something else?
ii. Material consequences of the phantom discourse: A look from 2025 at the updated UHM campus mission
iii. Toward a knowledge society in Hawai‘i: Can UH lead the way?
The first discussion is scheduled for April 23 (at 1 p.m. HST); the times of the second and third discussions will be confirmed in a separate email announcement sent out by the IWA Initiative in early April.
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Our Tourism Futures Collaboratory seeks inquisitive minds to contribute to the collective investigation of the prospects of regenerative tourism in Hawai‘i. From a
sustainability perspective, it seems like a worthwhile strategy adjustment within the scope of proximity tourism (think Larry Ellison or Pierre Omidyar biking every other weekend from their local residences across the island(s) or canoeing to a neighbor island to spend a weekend volunteering for a food bank in a poor community, picking up trash in a major beach clean-up project, or teaching a digital literacy class to the elderly at a local community center, and then—out of the goodness of their heart and/or as a token of gratitude for being allowed to catch a glimpse of real life—maybe even leaving a donation check for the organization that provided the experience).
However, if it’s international and mainland visitors to Hawai‘i that are viewed as candidates for regenerative tourism, we want to understand how its local proponents plan to reconcile its benign intent with the staggering quantity of GHG emissions that the average air traveler generates on a roundtrip flight to Hawai‘i… Please send your insights to Lilo at tourism@hawaii.edu. |
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NB: Gmail may clip the displayed part of this bulletin. To enjoy the full issue, click on the “view entire message” link at the bottom of this message or select the “view this email in your browser” option at the top. |
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SUSTAINABILITY THIS, SUSTAINABILITY THAT: CLARIFYING THE NOTION
On March 2, the International Energy Agency released its Global Energy Review that shows that after a steep drop in early 2020, global carbon dioxide emissions have rebounded strongly, which effectively means humanity is back on its mindless march toward the precipice of a global ecological disaster. Does the uncritical push to restart mass inbound tourism need to be understood as the Hawai‘i tourism sector knowingly choosing to remain a major contributor to the worsening climate crisis and environmental injustice?
Dear public servants, media professionals, industry captains, and green-growth enthusiasts! Our academic institution may be partially responsible for your lack of understanding of how sustainability works. We hope that you understand that it is the environmental pillar of sustainability that fundamentally allows for all kinds of socioeconomic activities, and not the other way around.
Although the proverbial “three-legged stool” of sustainability is a respectable legacy of humanity’s quest for sustainability, it’s not a very helpful device outside of certain economic perspectives and practices because it is expressly an anthropocentric social construct devoid of deep ontological substance. It equalizes the “pillars” signifying the entities, which cannot be equalized in the real world, where living and nonliving matter is subject to ever-increasing complexity and the laws of thermodynamics. Humanity’s pursuits are both afforded and constrained by the biogeophysical realm of the ecosphere.
Allow us to illustrate the more realistic ontology at play, offered by the field of ecological economics.
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HAWAI‘I’S MEDIA AND HAWAI‘I’S HYPOCOGNITION
Our Mediascape Scanner Initiative will hold its quarterly Reality Check Series meeting on May 3 (3:30 p.m. HST). The event entitled “Exploring the challenges of Hawai‘i media’s cognitive decolonization” will look into how balanced, comprehensive, and science-informed local media output is, and whether the time is ripe to pursue the creation of commons-based media infrastructure to optimize Hawai‘i’s knowledge metabolism. (As a matter of trivia, the Associated Press falls into a knowledge-commons category).
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OUR CONTRIBUTION TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF TOWN/GOWN COMMUNICATIONS AND COMMUNITY RELATIONS
As an intersectoral, boundary-spanning knowledge-translation vehicle, we are dedicated to harmonizing the relationship between Hawai‘i’s academic ecosystem and the community at large. Among other things, this requires raising awareness among the government and civil society regarding what can be legitimately expected of land-grant institutes of thought such as UH (in a university
qua university sense) to complement the narratives offered by UH leadership.
With that in mind, we’ve upgraded our knowledge-sharing capacity by arranging a personalized delivery mechanism that ensures that no public servant or civic activist in Hawai‘i is deprived of access to the critical knowledge sets curated to facilitate green transformation of our island society.
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A NOTE TO THE GSO MEMBERS
Do not be afraid of engaging with us despite the lack of encouragement from your professors. The critical capacity to confront your own biases and question indoctrination, dogmatic thinking and harmfully obsolete bodies of knowledge should be the central accomplishment of your university studies and will define the integrity of your intellectual pursuits. Those who wish to apply their energy to the betterment of Hawai‘i’s regional knowledge system, email your free-form statement of interest to Scott at innovate@hawaii.edu.
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NOAM CHOMSKY: EDUCATION FOR WHOM AND FOR WHAT? |
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Noam Chomsky, a world-renowned linguist, cognitive scientist, social critic and political activist, spoke at the University of Arizona on February 8, 2012. His lecture, “Education: For Whom and For What?” featured a talk on the state of higher education, followed by a question-and-answer session.
Chomsky, an Institute Professor and a Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he worked for more than 50 years, has been concerned with a range of education-related issues in recent years. Among them: How do we characterize the contemporary state of the American education system? What happens to the quality of education when public universities become more privatized? Are public universities in danger of being converted into facilities that produce graduates-as-commodities for the job market? What is the role of activism in education? With unprecedented tuition increases and budget struggles occurring across American campuses, these are questions that are more relevant than ever.
[Chomsky’s talk starts around 9:00 in the recording.]
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Post scriptum
We believe that the production of critical knowledge for Hawaiʻi’s green transformation can be more effectively realized by members of an independent knowledge commons sustained by those academics, practitioners and community activists who do not need extrinsic incentives or management approval to understand their epistemic and civic responsibilities at this critical junction in human history and are willing to share commitment to cultivating and stewarding actionable knowledge for the prevention of ecological and societal collapse.
As a collective intelligence initiative, the IMUA Scholarly Society (a.k.a. IMUA Labs) welcomes a diversity of ideas and epistemic pluralism. Thus, the arguments expressed in our knowledge syntheses do not necessarily reflect the views of IMUA Labs or the Hawaiʻi Institute for Socioecological Transformation (HISET).
Should you spot a data error, a missing critical topic or issue, or an instance of faulty reasoning in our transdisciplinary publications, please submit your feedback to our intellectual disaster prevention specialists at think@hawaii.edu.
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