Testing objective measurements in monitoring land value towards a bottom-up advocacy for individual,
self-reliant evaluation of best practices in ecologic and economic sustainable land use in semi-arid rural
areas in communities of the northern hemisphere on the PanEurAsian continent.
Contaminacion Rio Mantaro y propuesta de soluciones
Measurements towards best practices in land use (spanish)
1. Medidas de “buenas
prácticas” en el uso
de la tierra
(traducción español)
Tabea Hirzel, MBA
SMC University, Switzerland
Lilit Hirsch, S.L., Spain
Mediterranean Conservation Science Conference
Tour du Lavat, Arles, France
8-10 December 2011
www.medconservationsciences-conference.org
4. Lo que hago:
•Gestión empresarial (desde 2004 en sector agroalimentario)
•Diplomacía/ política económica (ética discursiva, sociología Schutziana,
psicología Vygotskiana, economía Áustríaca)
•Aprendizaje comunitario/ Meta-linguística y pedagogía linguística
Liderázgo en comunidades de aprendizaje
Trabajo:
•Cooperativas agrícolas (Castilla-La Mancha, Spain)
•UICN Hungría (Aprendizaje communitario / Huella ecológica)
•Gestión de proyectos (cooperación internacional en el medio rural)
Creación de comunidades de aprendizaje
Investigación:
•Aprendizaje comunitario (originalmente del mundo de negocios; MIT, EEUU)
Diálogo entre cultura (humana) & medioambiente como comunidad de
aprendizaje
Tecnología: el lenguaje que conecta la humanidad con el mundo
Objetivos:
Cambiar el modo en el que miramos el mundo con el fin de cambiar el
acercamiento a los problemas actuales.
Herramienta & meta/ el problema del observador observado
CONTEXTO PERSONAL
Métodología: Aprendizaje comunitarioMétodología: Aprendizaje comunitario
Teoría: Los Tres Pilares de SostenibilidadTeoría: Los Tres Pilares de Sostenibilidad
IUCN
Peter Senger
5. A) EL IMPULSO
• Soluciones conocidas de
repente no dan resultados
(desastres medioambientales)
• Problemas (o regalos) no son
previstos (sorpresa y milagro)
• Divergencia en significado
(sciencia o metafísica)
• Conflictos de interéses (falta
de valores y normas
comúnes)
March 2011 Göncöl Alapitvany 5
Eseña conceptos ecológicos tras la alegría
compartida que nos ofrece la naturaleza (Joseph
Cornell)
Fuente de imágen: Sparkleland.net
Dar vida a la sciencia a través
comunicación, educación y
conciencia pública (resp.
comunitaria)
6.
7. B) CÍRCULO HERMENÉUTICO
March 2011 Göncöl Alapitvany 7
Qué? Porqué?
Conocimiento Comprensión
Finito,
estructuralista,
observación.
Pensamiento
sistémico
Abierto, creativo,
applicación.
Hermenéutica
Crea datos, informa,
resuelve problemas
Crea significado,
Interpreta información,
investiga
En un proceso de illuminación sólo puede haber participantes. (Habermas)
8. C) CONSTRUCCIÓN DE SIGNIFICADO
• Comunidad como afirmacin de
identidad
• Educación como promoción y
transformación de identidad
• El lugar que materializa visiblemente
la identidad como constante en el
tiempo
March 2011 Göncöl Alapitvany 8
Basado en:
“Re-indigenizing curriculum: An eco-hermeneutic approach to learning” (Kulnieks, Longboat & Young, 2010)
9. “In nature's economy
the currency is not
money, it is life.”
“C’est lorsqu’on est
privé des choses qu’on
les apprécie, et quand
on a rien, on apprécie
tout.”
Waris Dirie
Vandana Shiva
«Education is life»
John Dewey
11. METAS & OBJETIVOS
• Metas
• Declaración del Milenio de Naciones Unidas
(Desarollo)
• Economía ecológica
• Autonomía alimentaria
• Uso sostenible y biocapacidad de la biosphera
• Objetivos estratégicos
• Desde la base
• Científicamente validado
• Individual, evaluatión autónoma e independente
• Comprensible para todos los participantes
14. O2
soilsoil
Paradoja de Jevons
Falta de equilibrio
entre ciclos
naturales y ciclos
de la demanda
humana
Falta de equilibrio
entre ciclos
naturales y ciclos
de la demanda
humana
15. Economía/ Tecnología
Ámbito humanoMedioambiente
Comunicación
Technología
Economía
Valores
Cultura
Physiología
Ecología
Biocapacidad
Biosphera
El ser humano con su cultura
es un sujeto que actua
intencionadamente
formando su entorno y a sí
mismo como herramienta
tras la ayuda de tecnologías.
Así que es también formado
por estas acciones, este
entorno adaptando a ello
como un objeto o resultado.
El medio ambiente es una
fuente de medios y a la vey el
medio para la actividad
humana siendo al mismo
tiempo el resultado de
ambos.
Medio para comprensión,
explotar y desarolla el
medioambiente y resultado de
la experiencia humana con su
entorno y otros humanos.
PROCESO DE APRENDIZAJE DISURSIVO
16. SOLUTION
- Objective terms understandable and accepted by all discoursive partners
- Common language between human sphere and other species (environment)
• From tecnological solutions towards discourse:
- Tools (signs and symbols)
- Tecniques (language grammar)
- Discourse (learning by communicative interaction – CLIL / discoursive or dialogical learning)
- Science as an inquiry-based teaching approach to humans (from the planet’s perspective)
- Theory of practice (lier, 1996)
- The world as a learning community
• Objective measurements:
- Triple crop approach for economic-ecologic cycles (Ecological footprint)
- Livelihood approach (Human subsistence needs)
- Balance and diversity of biosphere
- Self-defined happiness and cultural wealth
18. Research Framework
Approach Footprint Livelihood Community Learning
Measurement
Quantitative
(facts)
Biocapacity (Footprint) Basic human needs (FAO,
Manfred Max-Neef)
Tools (Vygotsky)
«Grammar» (Habermas)
Objectification of facts
(Schutz)
Qualitative
(phenomena)
Biodiversity (Living Planet
Index, Biodiversity
Indicators Partnership)
Culture (UNESCO) Results (Vygotsky)
Synchronicity (Schutz)
Discourse
(theory)
Material cycles
(The meaning objects
have in nature)
Social interaction (Alfred
Schutz)
(The meaning others and
nature have for human
beings)
Lifeworld (Schutz)
(The world that surrounds
us and which we are part
of)
19. Balances and cycles of processes
at elementary level (energy,
water, carbon), complex
structural level (systems) and
species level in:
1.Land produces (crops &
animals)
2.Animal work potential
3.External inflows through
caption (solar, water, geothermic)
4.Losses & win in soil capacity
5.Conversion efficiency
6.Outflow through unused energy
& trade
1. Biodiversity inventory
(number of species)
2. Key stone species
3. Depth of food pyramid
(magnification)
4. Other natural phenomena
1. Soil
a. Localization (GIS, Cadaster)
b. Climatic & Geologic
Geography
c. Soil type category
d. Concrete soil characteristics
e. Soil degradation
f. Biomass
2. Water quality & produce
3. Air quality & produce (GHG
etc.)
4. Other-than-human species
health & produce
5. Human health & produce
Bio capacity1 Biodiversity2 Material
cycles3
Footprint Approach
20. • Understanding
• Participation (community,
politics, language, trade)
• “Objective” values
• Definitions
(“objectified/communicated
identities”)
1. Tools
2. Identity (definition,
differentiation, history/
genetic)
3. Property/ creation
(characteristics, tools,
culture)
4. Believes
5. Values
6. Leisure
7. Freedom/ Self-definition
8. Diversity
1. Subsistence (food energy
demand)
2. Protection
3. Affection
4. Community size
5. Social distribution (sex, age,
activity)
6. Work capacity (energy
output)
7. Space (Requirements,
transformation and
consumption of private, built
or natural space.)
Basic
Human Needs1 Culture2 Social3
Livelihood Approach
21. 1. Discursive relations
(lifeworld)
2. World making
3. Becoming
1. Understanding
2. Awareness
3. World view (time, space,
meaning)
= why, reason, purpose
1. “Grammar for a common
language”
2. Technology for
communicating knowledge
3. Facts which can be objectified
4. Causal relations (systems)
5. Networks
= what, how, when, where
Tools1 Results2 Discourse3
Community Learning
23. LEARNING CONTENT
• A Community: self-defined
• Learner’s question: what is wealth?
• Place: a communities land
Standards
Interdisciplinary & interspecies discourse
Energy & food efficiency
24.
25. • Diversity
• Health
• Fertility
• “Happiness” of
human beings
Products of human beings
(results):
Uncertain ?
Key stone species
• Diversity
• Healthy
• Fertility
• “Happiness” of
other-than-human species (animals
and plant)
Products of other species (result):
Balance
Affection
Participation
• Soil
• Water (quality, floods)
• Air (GHG, storms)
Products of the biosphere (result):
Balance (defined in terms of
human beings and species
valued by humans)
Biosphere1 Other
species2 Human
community3
Wealth of the biosphere
29. Industrial
agriculture1 Organic farming
2 Permaculture
3
Community learning tool
“Community-based best
practices” on a defined piece of
land …
… for highest energy product
designated to human
(subsistence) needs…
…within smallest ratio…
…over longest time (ideal
indefinitely)
31. 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016
Development of research framework,
measurements and plan.
Initiation of monitoring.
Acquisition of knowledge and
technologies for measurements.
First lessons learnt.
Acquisition of knowledge and
technologies for improvement of the
study.
First relevant data. Evaluation and first
findings.
Possible adaption of the framework.
On-going research.
Extension of research groups towards
more regions and communities.
Evaluation, comparison and conclusions.
Recommendations for future studies.
community learning in land strategies if
findings are positive.
32. Thank you for sharing
your time!
TABEA HIRZEL
UGSM MONARCH BUSINESS SCHOOL
Professor of Trade & Negotiation
Flurstrasse 1
6332, Hagendorn-Zug, Switzerland
http://www.ugsm-monachr.com
tabea.hirzel@ugsm-monarch.com
SMC UNIVERSITY
Doctoral Student Diplomacy
Bahnhofplatz
6300 Zug, Switzerland
http://www.swissmc.ch
http://swissmc.academia.edu/TabeaHirzel/
tabea.hirzel@student.swissmc.ch
LILIT HIRSCH, S.L.
General Manager
Calle Oasis 14
13700 Tomelloso (Ciudad Real), Spain
http://www.lilithirsch.com
thirzel@lilithirsch.com
All background images from Wadi Rum and Destinos Manchegos.
Notas del editor
Good morning. We might all get hungry. Thank you for resisting here anyway.
I will propose you in the following a framework for deciding on best practices in land use. Being a farmer myself, the question which of the current paradigms between industrial agriculture, ecologic farming and permaculture, is most benefial is an essential question.
Most subsidies and global measurements in agriculture and agribusiness are determined in monetary terms and we felt that this was insufficient. This is, how the following research was started last April as an Open Source Research Network between friends in the relevant sectors and university departments.
In the following seven short points, I will give you a short overview about my background and the theory of community learning on which this research is based (1).
I resume general assumptions and questions (2) and will present you the research framework (3) and the chosen approaches to answer these questions (4). In the second part I introduce the theory and methods, that lie behind this research (5) and state which are the proposed measurements I consider relevant to monitore. The last point gives you an overlook over the research process (7).
Community Learning
A few word on the background.
I am a business manager, actively doing projects in agribusiness and related sectors. I study at the SMC University in Switzerland Diplomacy and Political Economy and I am currently writing my doctoral dissertation in the field of Discourse Ethis. My personal approach is based on Habermasian discourse ethics, Schutzian sociology, Vygotskian psychology and Menger’s Value theory, which you will also se reflected in here. Most of these theories are also reflected in the programmes of the European Community and highly valued by international organizations like UNESCO and the United Nations.
In the academic field, I approach states and societies as learning communities and I am most interested in leadership and management of its constitutional process.
In the business filed, I understand business much broader than just exchange of goods, rather I see business networks and markets as learning communities.
The role of technology in these processes is conceived as “tool & result” in the Vygotskian sense.
At the right side you see the conceptual spheres of the three pillars of sustainability as defined by the IUCN and the community learning process based on MIT professor Peter Senger.
The impulse in community learning comes from doubt about common solutions, failures in prediction and conflicting interests.
The approach aims to focus on science as a tool to communicate problems and create awareness in the larger community.
Today we just have to turn on the radio and we are invaded with disastrous news in the economical, political, social and environmental field. All these relate in one way or the other with the way we use our land.
Once an impulse is given, in community learning we intent to find new solutions through a communicative circle. Current knowledge has not suddenly lost validity. Usually, the measures and data are right, but they are not longer understood under the existing paradigms.
According Habermas enlightment, i.e. new solutions and a new understanding of the «truth» is only found within a participatory process.
This leads us to consider that problems with the environment require an approach in which nature becomes a participant and not a mere object.
In a last step within the community learning process, helped by a physical place as a constant throughout time, mutual asertion of identities and their transformation can be made visible and factible.
This place is the farm land, or just land.
“In nature's economy the currency is not money, it is life.” (Vandana Shiva)
“C’est lorsqu’on est privé des choses qu’on les apprécie, et quand on a rien, on apprécie tout.” (Waris Dirie)
“Education is life” (John Dewey)
These are some of the statements that lead us to the following resaerch questions.
Goals, Assumptions & Research Question
Aims
UN development goals
Green economy
Food autonomy
Sustainably use of biocapacity and biosphere
Strategic goals
Bottom-up
Scientifically validated
Individual, self-reliant evaluation
Understandable to all stakeholders
Assumptions are:
a) Measurement in monetary terms insufficient.
b) Measurements must account for all the three pillars of sustainability.
c) Monetary currencies are not a common language between ecology & economy
From this result questions like:
a) How is life measured
b) What have the three pillars in common?
c) How to measure life objectively?
Research Framework
This graph shows the carbon cycle, which is one of the central systems within the environmental balance of our planet. In the outer circle we see the production circle in agribusiness as part of the socio-economic system in human life. A central point of both cycles is the soil.
Since around 200 years we know about the Jevons Paradox, that states that more efficiency will not solve (necessarily) problems of shortage in material resources.
If we want to use technologies in order to harmonize de imbalance between human needs and natural systems we must link them to human behavior.
This slide gives an overview about the three pillars of sustainability, which are elements of the discursive learning process. I will not go into details here.
But I want to show the well known complexity and how much interrelated these three pillars are with each other.
In our opinion, a posible solution must comply with the following requirements:
Objective terms understandable and accepted by all discoursive partners
Common language between human sphere and other species (environment)
From tecnological solutions towards discourse:
Tools (signs and symbols)
Tecniques (language grammar)
Discourse (learning by communicative interaction – CLIL / discoursive or dialogical learning)
Science as an inquiry-based teaching approach to humans (from the planet’s perspective)
Theory of practice (lier, 1996)
The world as a learning community
Objective measurements:
Triple crop approach for economic-ecologic cycles (Ecological footprint)
Livelihood approach (Human subsistence needs)
Balance and diversity of biosphere
Self-defined happiness and cultural wealth
Approach
For our measurements we wanted quantitative findings, because it is the only way we could interact with nature on a basis that all human societies would accept.
Qualitative facts, even about phenomena of the biosphere, are always subjective in the sense that they are always stated from a human point of view, an interpretation rather than the “voic of nature”. However, for social aspects and human needs, the subjective measurement is the more validated. We all know, that an objectively well fed human being can still commit suicide.
These two approaches should be weighted in a discoursive process.
To achieve this we chose three approaches: the Ecological Footprint for objective measurements about the biosphere, the livelihood approach for the social sphere and the community learning process for a combined evaluation.
Most of you are probably even more experience with the Footprint Approach than myself. As you know there are several elements like caring capacity of the soil, ecological health of water and air and biodiversity. The starting point in our project is the soil quality of a land and diversity and productivity of the living beings (including human beings) that live on and from this land.
The Livelihood Approachs has been developed for the proper self-management of autonome communties. It is the human focus on nature and what we take from it for subsistence and cultural tools and how we engage with nature as our living space, environment and in some cases also as a communicative other.
The third Approach is Community Learning, as already introduced above. The main goal in community learning is to find common standards, a language or a common grammar so to speak in order to communicate within a self-defined community with the aim to solve problems. This self-defined community should embrace very divergent parties like large cooperations in agribusiness (e.g. DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta and similar), local, regional global institutions, governments and interest groups and of course the rural communities and farmers living directly on agricultural land. On the other hand, the process should include nature in the way to give nature a participatory voice, through which we can learn what nature requires to prosper in order that we may have a prosperous live.
Theory and Method
As a starting point we focus on semi-desertic rural communities as a self-defined group of human persons that live and produce together. The central question is to learn what wealth is and how it is best controled.
The strucuturing place is the communities land, as a geographically defined space.
We will start with four measurements a quantitative and a qualitative for the requirements of the land and a quantitative and a qualitative for the requirements of the human community and compare their relative development.
Out of the the human needs we take fundamental subsistence needs as quantitative measurements of the human persons. These needs are water and calories for food, shelter and housing.
The other human needs regard qualitative measurements of the community which are measured according self-defined goals.
On the side of the land we measure energy balance of the biomass and land quality. Water and air may be monitored but are not the focus here.
Biodiversity and balance of the processes (energy cycle, water cycle, carbon cycle) serve as qualitative indicators. Key stone species are one possibility to monitor the healthiness of the ecosystem.
In order to decide which of the agricultural practices are best for us and our land we had first to define it. Based on a common use in American agribusiness we use the definition of crops for land products and categorized it into three different crops.
Food crop, which includes all land produce grown for food, feed and related products like energy for cooking.
Energy crop, required for clothing, climatizing the build environment, for machines, transport and similar.
Cash crop, is everything produced in order to be exchanged outside the community. Usually it is converted into monetary currencies which are later exchanged for goods that cannot be produced by the community or seems uninteresting to them.
Our framework or learning tool is resumed here again.
We have the choice between industrial agriculture, organic farming and permaculture. These categories may possibly be amended in the future.
We monitor quantitative and qualitative measurements about a defined space and a defined community and compare them over time.
We do not consider comparison between different communities and lands since we feel that this comparison is not possible based on the knowledge we have. But measurements should be scientifically valid.
As stated at the beginning, we planned this research on private iniciative of farmers in Spain, Switzerland and Turkey and do it as an Open Research Network, on own efforts.
This presentations is also a call for contribution to find critics, improvements and interested partners who want to participate and share our work.
A full research plan is developed and freely available open request. Hopefully, it will be improved through praxis and new contributions in the near future.
At the current stage we are selecting communities which serve as models for measurements in order to start the monitoring process.
