Group Work

Although I have been to several different coferences during my short graduate career, today we did something different at the sustainability conference - we split into small discussion groups to tackle issues and topics that we (as a participant group) posed to one another. The morning sessions concentrated on graduate training in sustainability (focusing on interdisciplinarity) and the afternoon on sustainability science. I am seriously beginning to believe that there's no room left for any other information in my brain - so this is my way of trying to empty a few thoughts from those discussions.

I think one of the more thought-provoking discussion groups I was in today talked about the disconnect that often exists between scientists in their 'ivory tower' and people who have to work in the 'real world' on sustainability issues. We had a fantastic discussion about why that divide exists and how we can better communicate our findings (as scientists) to decision-makers and people who have to implement policies on the ground, without compromising our research and our desire to do objective work. In another session we talk about interdisciplinary graduate education and whether students working on sustainability issues should be trained as interdisciplinary scientists or to work in interdisciplinary teams. And perhaps one of the most interesting, but mentally exhausting discussions was on mapping epistemologies - in other words, how we view the world and which aspects of the environment (or cultures) we choose to value shapes sustainability science. From the discussion many of us agreed that we often don't talk explicitly about our viewpoints within interdisciplinary teams, but that communication between scientists is important when working on interdisciplinary issues.

Phew - still a few more days to go here in Fairbanks. Tomorrow is going to be a wrap-up day to discuss how all of these themes on sustainability science fit together and where we'd like to take what we've done in this conference.