The Deliberative Landscapes Wanderer

Bricklayers and Boiling Frogs

You may be familiar with the parable of the three bricklayers, but in case not, here it is in brief. A traveler came upon a construction site and saw a bricklayer at work.  He asked the bricklayer what he was doing.  “I’m laying bricks,” the man replied. The traveler...

Environmentalism as Cultural Change

Structural change and individual behavior change Social action for sustainability and the protection of nature often aims, in one way or another, at changes to social structures.  Whether the actions are led by researchers, activists, or technocrats, the goal of...

House on Fire

The house where I grew up was perpetually catching on fire. It wasn’t all bad.  Although I fought with my brothers and sisters sometimes, we really had a beautiful family.  Sunday dinner was especially nice.  Dad always asked each of us what we did that week.  If one...

Land Governance Lenses

There are multiple factors that influence the way we as human beings see the world.  Education, culture, and particular disciplines, professions, and institutions all provide us with narratives, conceptual frameworks, and biases.  These become lenses through which see...

Causal pathways in environmental governance

Regular readers of this blog will have noticed that I’ve been silent for several months. I’m hoping that in the new year I can get back to a regular monthly schedule.   In an earlier post, I argued that formal land tenure systems—including policies and laws aimed at...

In Defense of Community

In conservation, natural resource management, disaster risk reduction and various other fields, community-based approaches have been very popular, bathed in a glowing light of all that is participatory, bottom-up and democratic.  But they have also attracted a widely...

Four virtues for landscape approaches

In the fields of natural resource management and environmental governance, programs, projects, and advocacy often address structural factors at the community level, the landscape level or the national level, but tend to focus much less on individual behavior, except...

The webinar pandemic

The downside of virtual meetings The COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions have forced people to make more use of virtual meeting technologies.  People are organizing workshops, meetings and other kinds of interactions that in the past would have only happened by...