Day 2 -- Happier Camper

June 10, 2008 -- Kingston RI

Day Two of Coastal Summer Camp saw the internet get fixed, the temperature go down and I got food before I got quite so cranky. No whining today.

I don't know what the temp was today but it felt soooo much better than yesterday. It's good that the temp was down 'cause we were in the same room (still no AC)as yesterday since the alternate room in another building lost AC yesterday too. We had doors open and fans on and a nice sea breeze kept us comfy. Maybe tomorrow I'll remember to bring both the camera and its battery so I can take some pictures of the bay from the Bay Campus of URI.

It was the heat that did in the internet yesterday. The room with the machine that authenticates wireless login connections overheated and the system was shut down prior to melting down. tonight it is up and running again.

Classwork today focused mainly on climate change. Early in the day we got a presentation from Kate Moran on the science of climate change. She has done some really cool polar expeditions to collect ice cores from the arctic to reconstruct climatic records for that part of the world. She gave an overview of the status of climate science today, focusing on the 2007 report from the International Panel on Climate Change. Some other points she made:
-- what we don't know is an important part of what we need to communicate;
-- there are 6,673,277,921 people living on this blue marble in space (see the world pop clock)
-- Summer sea ice may disappear in the arctic within 15 years so solar radiation will be absorbed by the sea rather than being reflected.
-- sea level rise so far has been caused by the thermal expansion of the water in the oceans. Now land-based ice is beginning to melt and contribute to the rise.
-- If the ice on Greenland melts, it has the potential to raise sea level by 7.5 meters or about 25 feet!

She also recommended a report by an insurance giant called Climate Change: adapt or bust. It's encouraging that industry leaders are getting with the picture.

Later in the day we had another good presentation on Climate change impacts by Pam Rubinoff. She lead an interesting discussion about how we need to change our behavior and our infrastructure in response to changing conditions due to climate. She mentioned a guidance manual published by USAID on adapting to changing climate that I need to check out.

Just before lunch, Stephen Olsen, the Director for CRC talked about what needs to change in the 21st century for "Integrated Coastal Governance". He talked about how whatever we do needs to: 1)forge links across current vertical/horizontal/temporal barriers; 2) be learning-based (adaptive management); 3) be science based; and 4) be collaborative/collective. He says "Integrated Coastal Management is not rocket science; It's much more complicated."

He went on to describe the current epoch of history as the "anthropocene". We have left the Holocene and are into a new epoch of planetary history where one species is rapidly changing the planetary ecology. He also talked about how we need to move from ICM (management) to ICG (governance) wherein our work needs to include integration of market forces, and civil society as well as governmental institutions. The focus must be on managing human activities, not managing species like fish or birds or trees.

Stephen presented a concept called "Orders of Outcome Framework" (see also this article). What I like about the concept is that it places the various goals that we talk about in a context of what can be accomplished at different stages of social and institutional readiness. We can't achieve long-term sustainable development without reaching some other milestones first. We have to include both human and environmental considerations (social sciences with the physical/biological/ecological sciences). We have to change 1) behaviors, 2) institutions/processes, and 3) investments. We need to grow capacity for coastal ecosystem governance. Unfortunately, there has been little connection between the ideas that Stephen and his colleagues have been developing here at CRC and the recent efforts to Envision the future of Coastal Management through re-authorization of the Coastal Zone Management Act. I think some of the framework ideas would also be useful in the development/revision of the coastal programs' performance measures system.

At lunch Stephen recommended a book by HT Odum that I need to check out. It is titled "A prosperous way down". I also ran across a summary from a lecture in 2000.

The other topic of the day was leadership and how to strengthen our leadership skills. We did a little exercise, took a leadership assessment (I came out with a collaborative style preference), and talked about leadership versus management. My observation of the difference is that "managers have authority, leaders have influence."

We wrapped up the day with a dinner gathering with participants in the Metcalf Institute for Marine & Environmental Reporting's annual workshop for journalists. I got to talk with Kelly, a reporter with a paper in the Daytona Fl area. She deals a lot with city issues but also gets to work on environmental topics from time to time.

It was a good day, filled with lots of new information and perspectives.