Dr. King and the Role of (Social) Scientists in the Civil Rights Movement

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From the Honest Broker Newsletter.
In Roger Pielke, Jrs.’ , Honest Broker Newsletter, he talks about Dr. King’s encouragement for folks working in the behavioral sciences at a speech he gave to the American Psychological Association in 1967.

Dr. King observed, astutely, that the social sciences often deal in uncomfortable knowledge: “These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”

In a clear understatement, he noted that there were many opportunities for social science research “to assist the civil rights movement.” Three examples he cited were research on leadership in the Black community, the effectiveness of political action of the civil rights movement, and psychological and ideological changes within the Black community as societal change occurs.

Ultimately, Dr. King asked social scientists to help gauge progress, including assessments of direction and pace: “Are we moving away, not from integration, but from the society which made it a problem in the first place? How deep and at what rate of speed is this process occurring? These are some vital questions to be answered if we are to have a clear sense of our direction.”

Roger adds “Such questions are fundamental to all policy research.”

If we thought that justice for disadvantaged communities is one of the most important needs of our country, what would that budget and research priorities look like? What would it take to make sure that research is co-designed and co-produced with representatives of those communities?”

It’s not that hard to imagine. When I worked on the Fund for Rural America, we gave a research grant to a rural community group to do exactly that. This was highly unpopular with the Science Establishment and the universities. Can we imagine, say 100 million to start, each for representatives of Black, Native American, Latino/Hispanic and Asian-Americans to co-design and co-produce social science research? I’d think we could afford it, simply by establishing coordinating groups for policy-relevant research that would ride herd on duplication across agencies and downright “not all that useful for policy but claim to be” proposals.

Fifty years ago, perhaps we thought “if we just hired more diverse people, the research would naturally change to their interests.” Well, it seems to have been harder than we had thought to hire more diverse people, and federal research priorities and budget have their own momentum and vested interests.

While the social sciences have diversified significantly since the 1960s in terms of both scholars and scholarship, the various disciplines that comprise the social sciences still have a long way still to go. For instance, top university social science departments continue to be overwhelmingly populated by white males, and Black and Latino students continue to be under-represented on our leading campuses.

And while we can look at the Forest Service and see that females are heavily represented among researchers and practicing social scientists, this study from 2019 says:

Most faculty are male, although there appear to be critical masses of women in political science and sociology. Blacks and Hispanics are underrepresented among faculty relative to their shares of the population. Within each racial-ethnic group examined, there are more male than female faculty members, with a smaller gender gap for Blacks than for other racial-ethnic groups. In general, the higher the rank, the greater the proportion of males than females, especially for Whites and Asians.

According to this January 16 AP Story, President Biden announced his appointment of a Science Advisor and others.

The president-elect noted the team’s diversity and repeated his promise that his administration’s science policy and investments would target historically disadvantaged and underserved communities.

I hope President-Elect Biden means “co-create” a new body of scientific information with underserved communities as full partners in funding, design, and production, with open peer review and open access to research results.

Vegetation Change and Vegetation Management: A Potential New National Forest Report Format

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I remember Chris Iverson, noted expert in wildlife and forest planning, saying something once about forest plans like “if you don’t do much, you shouldn’t spend as much time planning.” As I recall, he was talking about the Chugach compared to the Tongass forest plans. But what exactly is “doing much”? What seems to be most controversial and widespread is vegetation management for forest management.

I thought it would be interesting to see where the Rio Grande (with a recent plan revision) fell on that scale, and many thanks to them for their help in collecting this information. I think it would be great to have this information available for all forests. First, the total acres of the Rio Grande is 1.83 million acres to give context. You could easily do this table with percentages and be able to compare the acres impacted by management across different National Forests, as well as vegetation changes due to human and other factors.

What we got from the Forest was total acres of all vegetation treatments, not duplicating the same acres with different treatments (double counting).

According to the forest, the average timber harvest has been around 3100 acres per year. All of that has been insect salvage except for 120 acres in 2017. So that’s about 2% of the forest per year. Of course, salvaging spruce beetle trees that are dead may have different impacts than green sales, but this table is about all acres impacted by vegetation management and other vegetation change.

After collecting this information, I realized that a 10 year timespan may have been better. In 2013, the West Fork Complex Fire burned 87,662 acres of the Rio Grande. Then there’s the spruce beetle outbreak itself over time, accumulating to 617,000 acres. I didn’t fill in that row in the table, but the information is available from the aerial survey folks.

It would be interesting to see at least 10 years with the acreage by type plotted over time, including large events like bug and fire acres, for each National Forest. I think it would be very informative to compare forests, both in total acres of different kinds of human and other vegetation changes, and percentages of the total acres impacted.

I’m not saying that this is the perfect formulation for people to get a grasp of “relative vegetation management” I’m just asking “doesn’t this way of looking at it tell us something of value”?

What would you add or change?

Also circling back to the forest planning question, if some forests, say in R5, have had up to 80 % of their forest affected by wildfires over the past 5 to 10 years, should everyone else stop planning so that they can go into revision? And if “fires are going to get larger due to some combination of fire suppression, increased ignitions and climate change” should then the amount of vegetation modeling done during plan revision be scaled back for fire-prone Forests as not a great investment? Perhaps less energy on modeling and more energy on responding to fire and other changes via amendment?

Can Addressing Cultural, Moral and Spiritual Dimensions Help With Protracted Conflicts (Yellowstone, Owl, Wilderness, etc.)?

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Let’s start the discussion of Justin Farrell’s book The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. It’s a long book, and is written with some academic-ese, and there are treasures throughout. I’ll start with a quote from the Introduction on page 9 in a section called “Toward a Theory of Morality and the Environment.” Thanks to the Princeton University Press and Justin Farrell for permission to reprint.

I’ll let Farrell speak for himself as to the purpose of his book.

Thus, environmental conflict in Yellowstone is not—as it would appear on the surface—ultimately all about scientific, economic, legal, or other technical evidence and arguments, but an underlying struggle over deeply held “faith” commitments, feelings, and desires that define what people find sacred, good, and meaningful in life at a most basic level. The current and allegedly most important resources relied upon by actors and observers of the conflict do not, and cannot, ultimately define for different people why one should care about Yellowstone
in the first place, why an intact ecosystem is better than a fragmented one, why aesthetic beauty should or should not be protected, why some animals should be venerated while others are considered pests, why some land is “too special” to drill while other land is drilled with indifference, or why people might view their old-west labor, recreation, and heritage as profoundly meaningful, perhaps even sacred. Answers to these questions are only possible and made meaningful in the context of larger moral orders and spiritual narratives that shared human cultures
are built upon.

To be clear, my sociological approach in this book focuses less on the individuals themselves, and more on the cultural, moral, and spiritual contexts in which stakeholders are embedded, shaping their beliefs and desires. Somewhat implicit in my argument is that, for a variety of reasons, these deeper moral and spiritual meanings are often ignored, muted, and misunderstood. But only as we engage these sorts of questions at a much deeper level can we begin to understand why the mountains of technical evidence marshaled in the Yellowstone conflict have done little to solve disputes that are, finally, not about the facts themselves, but about what make the facts meaningful. Further, this book shows that when we glimpse beneath the cultural context of the Yellowstone conflict, and bring these deeper moral and spiritual dimensions to the surface, we often learn what conflict is really about—and in some cases discover roadmaps leading beyond the thick pines of technorational policy stalemate.

To translate:(1) seeking more data and research cannot help if the disagreements are really about something deeper, cultural, moral or spiritual (I’ll abbreviate as CMS). This reflects the work of sts scholars (science and technology studies, or sociology of science) that at some point science doesn’t help, but becomes another weapon in a more fundamental disagreement. Off the top of my head, I can cite Roger Pielke, Jr.. (Here’s a summary of Roger’s distinction between “tornado” and “abortion” politics. There are many others in the sts field who have written on this.

(2) There is a possibility worth exploring, that going deeper into understanding the real differences would get us farther in conflict resolution than scientific or legal battles. I’d even add a possible corollary (3) we have thousands of years of experience with people disagreeing about ideas and moral values (religious history). Many of the early European settlers to this country had explicit ideas about how religion should or should not order society based on their recent religious warfare. Perhaps we could learn something from the ultimate resolution of these conflicts that could apply to our environmental disputes?

Of the many topics we discuss here, it seems like Wilderness might lend itself to this approach. Maybe if we started with moral values, and then built land use designations we might arrive in a place of agreement. It might be worth a try, and think how much money we could possibly save on studies of relative hiker, bike, horse, burro and llama environmental impacts in different parts of the country with different intensities, soil types and so on?

“Interior Strips Protections for Spotted Owl”.. How Worried Should We Be?

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FWS Decision: It seems to me that for the owl to be hurt, the BLM or the FS would have to propose, and actually do something on the ground with owl impacts. How likely is that in a Biden Administration?

From the New York Times:

Trump Opens Habitat of a Threatened Owl to Timber Harvesting
Going far beyond expectations, the Trump administration eliminated protection from more than three million acres of northern spotted owl habitat in the Pacific Northwest.

The plan, issued by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, grew out of a legal settlement with a lumber association that had sued the government in 2013 over 9.5 million acres that the agency designated as essential to the survival of the northern spotted owl. The federal protections restricted much of the land from timber harvesting, which companies claimed would lead to calamitous economic losses.

But rather than trim about 200,000 acres of critical habitat in Oregon, as the agency initially proposed in August, the new plan will eliminate protections from 3.4 million acres across Washington, California and Oregon. What is left will mostly be land that is protected for reasons beyond the spotted owl.

“These common-sense revisions ensure we are continuing to recover the northern spotted owl while being a good neighbor to rural communities within the critical habitat,” Aurelia Skipwith, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, said in a statement.

Wildlife biologists expressed shock at the decision.

“I’ve gotten several calls from wildlife biologists who are in tears who said, ‘Did you know this is happening? The bird won’t survive this,’” said Susan Jane Brown, a staff attorney at the Western Environmental Law Center, a conservation group that advocates on behalf of the northern spotted owl.

From Roll Call:

The Interior Department said it will eliminate from federal protection more than 3 million acres of land in California, Oregon and Washington vital to the northern spotted owl, a species considered endangered under federal law.

In a draft rule published Wednesday as much of the nation was glued to impeachment proceedings, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a division of Interior, said it was excluding about 3.5 million acres of “critical habitat” established for the owls. Environmental groups warned that the move could spell the extinction of the species and immediately threatened lawsuits to block the action.

There’s a new Administration next week, whom we can imagine won’t want to “clearcut the last remaining fragments of old growth land.”

“Here in southern Oregon this is a death sentence for owls,” said George Sexton, conservation director for Klamath-Siskiyou Wildlands Center. “This decision is intended to speed the clearcutting of the last remaining fragments of old-growth forests on Bureau of Land Management public lands.”

In the spirit of journalism analysis, I note that the Times story has a paragraph about the timber industry, and the Roll Call story has none. And yet, any projects proposed will be in a Biden administration or thereafter. I understand that writers can’t understand all the steps before a project is approved, but they could interview people who do.

Study: Wildfires produced up to half of pollution in US West

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Hayman Fire 2002 from Colorado Springs. Wildfire smoke isn’t new, but measuring it has definitely ramped up in the last 20 years.

I like how this the author of this AP story sought out different scientific points of view. Thanks for sending, Rebecca!

Some scientists say: Wildfires are all about climate change, study in PNAS:

The findings underscore the growing public health threat posed by climate change as it contributes to catastrophic wildfires such as those that charred huge areas of California and the Pacific Northwest in 2020. Nationwide, wildfires were the source of up to 25% of small particle pollution in some years, the researchers said.

“From a climate perspective, wildfires should be the first things on our minds for many of us in the U.S.,” said Marshall Burke, an associate professor of earth system science at Stanford and lead author of the study.

“Most people do not see sea-level rise. Most people do not ever see hurricanes. Many, many people will see wildfire smoke from climate change,” Burke added. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Other scientists say: Wildfires are not ALL about climate change, and why pick 10 years if you have satellite data?

There’s little doubt air quality regulations helped decrease other sources of pollution even as wildfire smoke increased, said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard University. But it’s difficult to separate how much of the increase in smoke pollution is driven by climate change versus the forest fuel buildup, she added.

Mickley and researchers from Colorado State University also cautioned that fires can vary significantly from year to year because of weather changes, making it hard to identify trends over relatively short periods such as the decade examined in the new study.

Yet other scientists say:

The new study matches up with previous research documenting the increasing proportion of pollution that comes from wildfire smoke, said Dan Jaffe, a wildfire pollution expert at the University of Washington. Jaffe added that it also raises significant questions about how to better manage forests and the role that prescribed burns might play.

“We have been making tremendous progress on improving pollution in this country, but at the same time we have this other part of the puzzle that has not been under control,” Jaffe said. “We’re now at the point where we have to think about how to manage the planet a whole lot more carefully than we’ve done.”

While looking at some historic documents about air quality, I ran across this:

On 28 July 1994, dry-lightning storms started multiple wildfires across the Eastern Cascades of central Washington State. Conditions were extremely dry in the national forests. The 1994 water year was the third in a row in which annual streamflow had been well below average at various long-term gaging stations (USGS 2004; Robison 2004). Water years 1993 and 1994 were more than one standard deviation below period of record average values for the Wenatchee, Stehekin and Methow Rivers. The largest of the fires burned 185,000 acres (74,867 ha) on the Wenatchee National Forest. At that time, it was the largest wildfire complex within a single national forest in the history of the Forest Service (FS). The fires caused many weeks of impaired air quality in all five cities of Chelan County. This paper discusses the evolution of two resource management programs, the Healthy Forests Initiative, relying heavily on prescribed fire, and the Air Quality Management Program, both of which have evolved since the fires of 1994. The subject area is the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forests (Forests) of central Washington State (Figure 1).

Folks have obviously been trying to ramp up prescribed fire since the mid-90’s- even before climate change developed as the umbrella issue.

Will framing it as a climate issue instead (as promoted by some scientists) help or hurt these efforts that have struggled for at least thirty years to get attention and support? Not to pick on Jaffe but the quote says “we have to think about how to manage the planet a whole lot more carefully than we’ve done.” I think there’s been quite a bit of thinking, since Biswell in the 40’s. The problem to me is about actually doing something that’s been adequately thought out, but has a host of well-documented difficulties in implementation. Will the energy of defining it as a climate issue bring it more attention and push us over the hill of difficulty? Or just more words and studies?

Chief Thomas and Taking up the Quest for a Land-And-People Ethic

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While on the timely topic of Administration transitions, we were remembering Chief Jack Ward Thomas, and as I said yesterday, I ran across this classic speech he gave in 1992, an Albright lecture at Berkeley.

This call by JWT provides a nice lead-in to our soon-to-be discussion of The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict by Justin Farrell (note: any book links I use from now on will be affiliated with Amazon. I’m not affirming Amazon in any way, nor encouraging you to buy from them, but if you do buy from them, The Smokey Wire will get something. I hear this is a thing nowadays.).

JWT again..

Our society, at long last, seems to be moving toward the implementation of a land ethic. Leopold (1949:224-225) suggested an ethic in which:

“…a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”

The land ethic is still emerging (Linnartz et at. 1991). Such an ethic must be developed and applied with Clawson’s question of, “forests, for whom and for what?” ringing in our ears.

The most vexing of the problems to be faced in developing a useful ethic will be linking all that is implied in the “forests-for-whom-and-for-what” question with the biological capabilities of the land in determining forest policy and management.

The evolving ethic, a human concept after all, must include the needs and desires of people. That implies the provision of goods, products, and services from the land in addition to requirements for the retention of the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. Leopold’s vision of what such an ethic might entail must be expanded to account for conserving biodiversity, attention to economic stability, preservation of productivity, and sustainable provision of good and services – simultaneously.

That seems a tall order, but we are further down that trail – intellectually, ethically and technically – than ever before. And, the path not yet taken stretches ahead.

(my bold).

And yet, here we still are, with the path apparently still not taken. Or it it there and the entrance is overgrown?

Thirtyish years later, I (recently) received an email from the Yale Forest School.

“Our School was originally founded in 1900 as The Yale Forest School, during the time when the American conservation movement began. The land ethics of founding individuals, such as Gifford Pinchot and Aldo Leopold, have been core to the School ever since. In what ways do you think their land ethics are or are not relevant in today’s environmental space? Moving into the future, how would you like The Forest School to approach and embody these and/or other land ethics?”

Here’s the beginning of my answer:

I see three sets of ethics involved in what The Forest School students might learn.
(1) Traditional, old-fangled people ethics- for many, this comes out of a religious or spiritual background. AKA How we treat people. Ideas like social justice, equity, subsidiarity, attention to indigenous/local people, and so on.
(2) Land ethic such as articulated by Leopold. AKA How we treat the land. (But there is also the broader environmental ethic, including animal rights and so on, that are found in a standard environmental ethics class.)
(3) Professional and scientific ethics. AKA How we behave at work.

What we seem to be missing is a vocabulary for discussing these different kinds of ethics, and the cultures and history that influence them, at the same time. And how social and biological sciences might be relevant. Chief Thomas pointed out the need and I don’t think we’ve actually done it. Maybe someone has already figured this out (please link to other efforts); if not we’ll have to tackle it ourselves. Justin Farrell’s book give us some clues and vocabulary and may help point the way. More tomorrow.

RMRS: Spotted Owls, Wildfire, and Forest Restoration

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New report from the Rocky Mountain Research Station: “Through the Smoke: Spotted Owls, Wildfire, and Forest Restoration”. Lots of focus on Mexican spotted owls, but also their cousins.

KEY FINDINGS

  • Wildfires are likely to increase in extent or severity, or both, throughout most of the range of the spotted owl, indicating a potential for large-scale habitat loss in the future.
  • Within the range of the Mexican spotted owl, a 13-fold increase in area burned is expected by the 2080s.
  • High-severity fire can decrease habitat suitability considerably for nesting Mexican spotted owls. For example, mean habitat suitability decreased by 21.9 percent 3 years after the Wallow Fire in Arizona.
  • Mexican spotted owl occupancy decreased by more than 50 percent 14 years after the Rodeo-Chediski fire in Arizona in 2002.
  • Areas with suitable nesting habitat may be more prone to high-severity fire.
  • Some types of fire can result in improved habitat for prey and food resources for the Mexican spotted owl, but that improvement may not compensate for the loss and degradation of nesting habitat.

Quote from Joe Ganey, research wildlife biologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station:

“There’s a high potential for rapid loss of the highest quality owl habitat due to increasing wildfire extent and severity,” Ganey says. “That’s kind of the crux of the issue. Everything that we know from 40 years of research on spotted owls across their entire range suggest that this could be the case.”

MANAGEMENT IMPLICATIONS

  • Protecting remnant patches of mixed conifer and pine-oak forest with large trees and high canopy cover is important to conserve Mexican spotted owl nesting sites.
  • Long-term monitoring is essential to understanding spotted owl population trends and response to fire.
  • Integrating the beneficial roles of fire and restoration thinning into spotted owl conservation in the West may be critical for maintaining habitat, especially with a changing climate.

 

EPA Files Objection on BLM Decision?

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Pronghorn seen here graze near natural gas operations in the Upper Green River Basin of Wyoming. Credit: Jeff Burrell, Wyoming Conservation Society
I ran across this story today in Wyofile. It brought back memories of disagreements about BLM’s air quality models as discussed by lawyers and judges during FS/BLM litigation. According to this story, EPA objected to a BLM decision. Isn’t there some kind of interagency disagreement resolution method other than objecting? I’m not sure I’ve seen that within the federal government, is this something new? Can we expect to see it in FS decisions?

The Bureau of Land Management improperly used an “alternative approach” to predicting air pollution from a 5,000-well oilfield, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said as it joined a chorus of critics blasting approval of the Delaware-sized development near Douglas.

The federal environmental watchdog filed its objection to the agency’s decision along with 13 stakeholders that either objected to or protested against the final study.

If BLM ignored Audubon on grouse, it did provide the EPA with its reasoning for allowing more air pollution. EPA engaged the land and minerals agency from the start of the analysis providing a “detailed explanation” of why the BLM should use EPA methodologies in predicting whether air pollution will violate federal standards.

BLM first said EPA, which sets National Ambient Air Quality Standards, employed an inaccurate approach to gauge impact. EPA’s estimates are based on “impacts for stationary sources that remain in a given location for multiple years,” BLM contended. Instead, drill rigs and such usually don’t operate in a single location permanently.

EPA countered, saying that while a rig might move, it could, essentially, continue working all year. BLM’s “alternative approach” to predicting air pollution “did not align with EPA’s methods,” EPA wrote. That departure from standards makes it impossible to compare model results to the air standards, EPA said.

Operators sided with the land and minerals agency, which said it, the BLM, lacked authority “to require application of the air quality mitigation measures.”

BLM had the final word. It “may rely,” on Wyoming’s DEQ “to ensure permitted activities do not exceed or violate any state or federal air quality standards under the Clean Air Act,” the agency said.

Wyoming’s DEQ, would be the agency that would patrol for any violations, BLM said. That state agency, BLM said, “is subject to oversight by the EPA.”

Chief Thomas on NFMA Planning and Paid Gladiators: Has Thirty-ish Years Brought Progress?

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While on the timely topic of Administration transitions, we were remembering Chief Jack Ward Thomas. I ran across this classic speech he gave in 1992, an Albright lecture at Berkeley (30-ish years ago, now can you believe it?), and thought I’d place it in conversation with Carrie Menkel-Meadow’s thoughts from yesterday.

His thinking appears to be that because plan revisions drag on for so long, and the documents are so long and technical, that the process leads inexorably to more conflict. People without professional funding can’t effectively participate, so it’s left to interest groups. And the psychology of representing an interest group may lead to different options than with members of the public. Here’s a history of interest groups and how political scientists think about them, from James Madison onward.

Participation by interest groups in forest planning has proven difficult to organize, receive, evaluate, and act upon. Clearly, average citizens can not or will not devote the time necessary to participate effectively over the long haul. And, as the planning process dragged on for over a decade, many of the initial enthusiastic participants dropped out exhausted by the time required for meeting after meeting and review after review of documents that were increasingly technical and mathematical and evermore voluminous.

Some of the “hard cores” with abiding interest formed well-organized groups that grew and were molded into organizations with the aim of providing resources – political, technical, legal and financial – necessary to ensure increased effectiveness in the forest planning game over the long run. As these involved individuals formed themselves into organized advocacy groups, the professional gladiators came to dominate the arena of natural resource politics and planning, resource allocation, and management.

The process of exerting influence over the management of the public’s forests has became steadily more adversarial, sophisticated, and expensive. Amateurs faded more and more into the background save for providing the resources for the gladiators.

JWT’s observations are fascinating placed in conversation with Carrie Meek-Meadow from yesterday. Interest groups are an important part of our political system. What are the pros and cons of designing large-scale and notably infrequent processes that necessarily (or not?) depend on interest groups’ “paid gladiators”? I read some of the objections to the Colville plan, and ability of the people to participate, as JWT spoke of in 1992, was apparently still an issue. I read one comment from a person hired to represent a certain viewpoint where he stated that even he couldn’t make his way through the documents. My experience with the development of the 2012 Planning Rule was that it was considered a success because interest groups were behind it (at least the more influential ones during that Administration). But in pleasing them, somehow, perhaps, JWT’s concern was overlooked.

I’d really like to hear from some folks who worked collaboratively, or as individuals, on recent forest plans.

What We Can Learn from a Conflict Resolution Expert

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Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow of UC Irvine Law School

While we remain immersed in what some folks call “environmental” conflicts, there are other folks who are experts in the world of conflict resolution. Perhaps we can learn from them. One of these is Carrie Menkel-Meadow, a law prof at UC Irvine. Here are some excerpts from her 2010 paper “When Litigation Is Not the Only Way: Consensus Building and Mediation As Public Interest Lawyering“.

While Hampshire concludes that agreement on the substantive good is not possible in our modern, diverse, and pluralistic world/ he is optimistic that there might be one human universal: “fairness in procedure is an invariable value, a constant in human nature …. [T]here is everywhere a well-recognized need for procedures for conflict resolution, which can replace brute force and domination and tyranny.” Hampshire refers to several forms of conflict resolution, including both well-known forms such as adjudication, arbitration, and ”judging,,, as well as broader political processes such as deliberating, examining, discussing policy choices, diplomatic negotiations, and “hearing.” … When properly expanded from “hear the other side” to “hear all sides,” Hampshire provides a foundational principle from which to measure whether justice and the public interest are served in all political and legal decision making. Where Hampshire sees justice in the recognition that all conflict is inevitable and must be humanely tended to, those in the conflict resolution movement see the conflict resolution processes employed as at least one important measure of justice.

She goes on to say that there are seldom only two sides in public conflicts.

Environmental issues involve developers, local communities, who themselves may be split between pro-development employment seekers and environmental conservationists, a wide variety of disagreeing public interest groups, and federal, state, and local agencies. … Consider how often in litigation the “real parties in interest” include others besides those formally named as plaintiff or defendant in any given case. To the extent that multiple parties have claims, needs, interests and “rights” in a legal action, the concept of “hearing both sides” may be falsely reductionist in assuming that all parties can align themselves on one or the other side of the “v.” and that any resolution favoring one side over the other will solve the problem, conclude the litigation, or end the conflict

The environmental arena is an especially productive domain for these processes. Former Secretary of the Interior, Bruce Babbitt, frustrated by the legislative grid-lock on some forms of environmental regulation and wildlife protection, championed a process he denominated “quasi-legislative dispute resolution. Habitat Conservation Planning empowers the stakeholders in a particular region to engage in trades and negotiations and to set standards for preservation of species not protected by the binary approach of current legislation. Environmental problems over natural resource use cannot be solved in dichotomous terms and not with the time-consuming processes of litigation or legislation. ”New governmental processes, involve all the stakeholders and to manage a variety of targeted, and in some cases, unique, creative solutions to problems. Such solutions may themselves be contingent and revisited with an agreed-upon process as scientific conditions or facts change.

Sounds like structured adaptive management. (my bold)

Size Matters (?):

Consensus outcomes are more likely to focus on the future, as well as the past. They are supposed to be based on underlying interests and needs, rather than arguments and positions. As the popular parlance goes, they are intended to “expand the pie,” or look for additional resources or new ideas, rather than to divide a presumed limited sum of resources available to the parties. In more technical terms, different processes are more likely to produce “pareto optimal” solutions than the assumed compromises of negotiation or “split the baby” compromise verdicts or arbitration awards. In processes where all the “real parties in interest, participate, there will be more than two sides to each issue and very likely there will be more than one issue to be resolved. Expanding, rather than narrowing, issues will increase the likelihood of reaching good agreements, because as game theory and other quantitative theories propose, more solutions are possible when more “trades” are possible. Although it may seem counterintuitive to conventional legal reasoners, the more disagreement about what is important, the better. Oppositional or complementary “trades” allow each side to satisfy their most important needs by meeting the most important needs of other parties. With more complementary, rather than conflicting, desires, we can find more ways to share things, an elaboration of the Homans theory of complementary needs.

This makes much sense, and I can see how that might go back to why collaborative processes fit better with multi-activity large projects. However, following this along, it seems like forest plans would be even better for achieving agreement, but that doesn’t seem to be the way it works. Or is it?

Other ideas?

Here’s a link to the Bruce Babbitt paper she cites. But I couldn’t seem to get it for free. Also this one looks interesting. “Bruce Babbitt’s use of … A Mid-term Report Card” by Tom Melling. Maybe someone with access to a law library could help?