by Justin Farrell, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University

What should social scientific research look like in this so-called age of “big” data, where everything is connected, and seemingly everything is digitized? Here I want to briefly reflect on some of the promises of new data and research methods, and consider the ways that we might integrate these computational approaches with traditional qualitative fieldwork. My main claim is that while the Internet has certainly transformed the world, our methods for understanding and explaining social life have not kept pace.

We live our life in a huge connected network. We check emails, make cell phone calls, text our friends, swipe our credit cards, communicate on social media, post videos, send money, or purchase our goods. Almost every transaction is recorded digitally, as doctors create digital records of our health, stores log our buying patterns, and so on, and so forth. Until recently, these behaviors—such as a simple phone call or simple store purchase—were not easily traceable. These digital “breadcrumbs” were not gathered. There were no digital timestamps or digital text duplicates of a handwritten note, or a cash exchange. Of course, this raises ethical concerns about privacy, of which certainly need to be front and center as scholars working outside of the private sector figure out how to incorporate this data into research for the public good.

In addition to the things we use everyday, such as cell phones, tablets, and computers, there is also a burgeoning “Internet of Things” that provides opportunities for data collection to inform social scientific study. Examples might include environmental monitoring commonly used in other fields, such as sensors for water quality, atmospheric and soil conditions, movements of wildlife, earthquake and tsunami sensors, gas and wind turbine sensors measuring efficiency and cleanliness of energy. All of these (can and should) be of use for social research. Or consider human health, such as heart monitors or movement monitors, all of which provide real-time streams of data and can be monitored and collected remotely. All of these types of data are much more accurate than conducting a survey to ask for self-reports.

On top of all of this new data that is created and recorded every day is the digitization of old information, such as books, newspapers, photographs, speeches, television programs, websites, and any other written or spoken word. For example, Google is currently archiving all books ever written. They write, “Our ultimate goal is to work with publishers and libraries to create a comprehensive, searchable, virtual card catalog of all books in all languages that helps users discover new books and publishers discover new readers.” Google has now scanned more than 25 million books, available to read, search, and analyze.

Or consider the Internet Archive, where you can search this history of more than 286 billion historical web pages (!!!), 3.3 million movies, or 200 terabytes of government material. Still more, consider the HathiTrust, a large-scale collaboration between dozens of universities and libraries, who has archived tens of millions of books and articles that are all full-text searchable.

This flood of new data is exciting, and must be taken advantage of by folks in academia. Our methods training must adapt—especially to include text analysis and network analysis—not because of an obsession with the shiny new objects, or because it is trendy, but because it is our responsibility as researchers to use the best data available in service of our research questions, theories, and applied solutions.

To conclude, I want to provide a few concrete examples. The first is a study I conducted to map out in great detail, and at full-scale, the climate change counter-movement. Drawing on some of the sources described above, I collected every text ever written from every climate contrarian organization (more than 39 million words), as well as mapping out the entire social network of organization and individuals with ties to the movement. You can read these papers here:

Farrell, Justin. 2016. “Network Structure and Influence of the Climate Change Counter Movement”, Nature Climate Change 6(4), 370-374.

Farrell, Justin. 2016. “Corporate Funding and Ideological Polarization about Climate Change”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(1), 92-97.

The second is from my recent book on environmental conflict, where I paired the data and methods described above with in-depth qualitative fieldwork. My goal was to discover something new about the nature of conflict over environmental science, as well as to show how traditional ethnographic fieldwork can provide ground truth, working in tandem with computational methods.

Farrell, Justin. 2015. The Battle for Yellowstone: Morality and the Sacred Roots of Environmental Conflict. Princeton University Press.

In the end, we must use all the tools at our disposal in order to continue to move forward to creatively address the problems at the intersection of society, politics, and environmental science.

by Elizabeth Koebele

The Colorado River weaves through the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico, providing water for over 40 million people, 5.5 million acres of irrigated farmland, and countless environmental and recreational assets along the way (United States Bureau of Reclamation 2012). Images of the mighty Colorado rushing through steep desert canyons and filling massive storage reservoirs can make the river’s flow seem limitless.

In reality, however, the Colorado River is largely over-allocated, meaning that more water has been promised to users than typically flows down the river each year (Kenney 2009). Now, climate change and a rapidly growing human population are exacerbating water shortages in the region, making the development of effective strategies to manage the Colorado River one of today’s most pressing challenges.

Conversations about water management in the American West tend to start from the same premise: here, “whiskey is for drinking, and water is for fighting” (United States Bureau of Reclamation 2017). As there’s less of the Colorado River to go around for the diverse users that depend on it, greater conflict seems imminent. Threats of impending “water wars” over the Colorado have become so forged into the region’s collective mindset that they’ve started to show up as plotlines for popular dystopian fiction novels, like Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.

Fortunately, a core group of public and private water professionals, academics, journalists, and river enthusiasts have started to push back against these narratives of insurmountable conflict. In an attempt to find a more sustainable answer to the region’s water woes, these folks are promoting management approaches that help stakeholders find common ground and incorporate the flexibility necessary to cope with greater water supply variability. Although their specifics vary, these approaches hold a core tenet in common: any good solution must incentivize people to share, collaborate, and negotiate creatively rather than divisively (Fleck 2016; Limerick, 2016).

Called collaborative governance processes by academics, such approaches typically convene diverse stakeholders to build trust, share knowledge, and develop consensus-oriented management actions (Ansell and Gash, 2008; Emerson et al., 2012; Gerlak et al., 2013). While these approaches may require more time and financial resources than traditional, top-down policymaking processes, scholars and practitioners alike claim that they can generate more legitimate management strategies that result in greater resource sustainability with widespread benefits.

Collaborative governance experiments have begun to crop up across the Colorado River Basin. For instance, the state of Colorado recently led a 10-year “Basin Roundtable” process in which diverse stakeholders collaboratively assessed their water needs and potential solutions, leading to the production of Colorado’s first statewide water plan. Across the Basin, four water providers and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation collaboratively developed and funded the Colorado River System Conservation Pilot Program, which financially incentivizes voluntary water conservation actions to raise water levels in the region’s major reservoirs. Collaboration has even caught-on internationally: in 2012, the U.S. and Mexico signed a landmark agreement that outlined pilot collaborative actions for better managing the transboundary river while also reviving the desiccated Colorado River Delta.

Determining the effects of these programs and policies will ultimately require a test of time. For now, however, they suggest that collaboration is a promising—and necessary—alternative to the “water is for fighting” mindset that has dominated Colorado River management for so long.

This post is based on research conducted by Dr. Elizabeth Koebele for her dissertation project “Collaborative Water Governance in the Colorado River Basin: Understanding Coalition Dynamics and Processes of Policy Change.” Please contact Elizabeth at elizabeth.koebele@colorado.edu for more information and related publications.

Photo caption: Lake Mead’s “bathtub ring” demonstrates the effects of long-term drought and increased demand on the Colorado River. Photo Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.

References

United States Bureau of Reclamation, 2012. “Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study: Executive Summary.”

Kenney, Douglas, 2009. “The Colorado River: What Prospect for “a River No More”?” In River Basin Trajectories: Societies, Environments, and Development, ed. F. Molle and P. Wester. Wallingford, U.K.: CAB International. 123-46.

United States Bureau of Reclamation, 2017. “Whiskey Is for Drinking, Water Is for Fighting!”, (January 23, 2017).

Fleck, John, 2016. Water Is for Fighting Over: And Other Myths About Water in the West. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 2016. Ditch in Time: The City, the West and Water. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.

Ansell, Chris, and Alison Gash, 2008. “Collaborative Governance in Theory and Practice.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 18 (4):543-71.

Emerson, Kirk, Tina Nabatchi, and Stephen Balogh, 2012. “An Integrative Framework for Collaborative Governance.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory 22 (1):1-29.

Gerlak, Andrea K., Tanya Heikkila, and Mark Lubell, 2013. “The Promise and Performance of Collaborative Governance.” In Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy, ed. S. Kamieniecki and M. E. Kraft. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. 413-34.

Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO)
April 2017 Summary

April 2017 coverage of climate change and global warming decreased compared to the previous month, as coverage across all sources in twenty-eight countries showed an approximate 7% decrease compared to March 2017. Coverage of political, scientific, ecological/meteorological, and cultural dimensions of climate change decreased most prominently in Oceania, which saw more than a 20% decrease compared to the previous month. Asia, Europe, the Middle East, North America and South America all saw modest month-to-month decreases in coverage, while Africa (140%) was the only region to increase its coverage of climate change compared to March 2017. Overall, coverage across all sources in twenty-eight countries decreased approximately 25% compared to April 2016.

Despite an overall decrease in coverage, political themes in April 2017 focused on the Trump Administration’s dispositions towards the Paris Climate Agreement. Coral Davenport of The New York Times reported that Mr. Trump intends to make a decision before the Group of Seven (G7) meeting in May 2017 on whether or not the US will follow through with its commitments under the Agreement. Ms. Davenport suggested that Mr. Trump’s policy advisors are urging him to keep the US committed, while Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis at The Washington Post reported on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Chief Scott Pruitt’s recent comments suggesting the U.S. should withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. Both articles highlighted the uncertainty surrounding the US President’s forthcoming decision and the conflicting advice coming from different parties within the Administration.

Coverage of scientific and ecological dimensions of climate change in April 2017 centered on a number of new and recurrent reports of environmental degradation attributed to global climate change. As examples, several articles (see The Guardian and The New York Times) highlighted the recent and drastic changes to the Slims River in Northern Canada, which lost its water source to another nearby river during a period of intense melting affecting one of Canada’s largest glaciers. Jeremy Hance of The Guardian also summarized three recent academic studies that describe and document the negative impacts of climate change on Earth’s ecological processes and living organisms.

Spanning the boundaries of cultural, scientific, and political dimensions of climate change, both the ‘March for Science’ and the ‘People’s Climate March’ garnered significant coverage in April 2017. The ‘March for Science’ included a large demonstration in Washington D.C., but similar protests took place in hundreds of cities across the U.S. and around the world (see The New York Times). The Bangkok Post reported that Australia, New Zealand, and Germany also saw large turnouts as part of the ‘March for Science’. Another article in The Hindu by D. Balasubramanian described the important role of science and technology in India’s continued development and called for similar marches in India to support rational, evidence-based decision making.

Coverage also focused on the ‘People’s Climate March’, which took place April 29th, 2017. While the ‘People’s Climate March’ differed in topics, strategies and scope compared to the ‘March for Science’, there was some undeniable overlap between the two events (see The Washington Post). Nonetheless, each event garnered significant coverage in April 2017 that further underscored the dimensional intersections of science, culture and politics.

Figure Caption: Word frequency in climate change and global warming coverage in April 2017 from four Indian newspapers (left) and five US newspapers (right). For India: The Indian Express, The Hindu, the Hindustan Times, and The Times of India. For US: The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, and the Los Angeles Times.

– report prepared by Kevin Andrews, Max Boykoff, Gesa Luedecke, Meaghan Daly and Ami Nacu-Schmidt

by Abigail Ahlert, CSTPR Science Writing Intern

Decisions about wildlife management are often framed as scientific conflicts instead of political ones. In the case of Colorado’s mule deer, this is ineffective. It misrepresents science and keeps policymakers from making informed decisions.

Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) says that the state is about 110,000 mule deer short of a healthy population size. In an experimental effort to recover the deer population, CPW is moving ahead with predator control plans that would sanction the hunting of 15 mountain lions and 25 bears in the Piceance Basin and the Upper Arkansas River, despite widespread public opposition. Researchers have published multiple open letters criticizing the scientific foundation of the predator control plans. Environmental and animal rights organizations such as the National Wildlife Federation and the Humane Society of the United States have come out against CPW’s actions. On April 12^th, the conservation non-profits WildEarth Guardians and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services, one of CPW’s predator control collaborators.

Science as a weapon or a shield

Critics say that the predator control plans are a poor application of scientific research. One opposition letter points out specific problems with their experiment design and statistical approach. Others claim that CPW’s scientific integrity is corrupted by their financial dependence on hunting licenses. Opponents of CPW are using science as a weapon against policy decisions.

CPW maintains that scientists don’t fully understand why the deer population is falling. They say that monitored predator culling is a way of gathering more information. “We’re in the business of learning,” said Jeff Ver Steeg, CPW’s Assistant Director for Research, Policy and Planning. “We are proposing to act in the form of research. We haven’t assumed [that the cause of the declining deer population] is predation. We haven’t assumed it isn’t.” They responded to the above-mentioned opposition letter by pointing out areas of scientific uncertainty in the critiques of the authors. CPW is using science as a shield to defend their choices.

The downfalls

One of CPW’s commissioners, Chris Castilian, said, “Our main motivation is to get to the bottom of the deer declines we’ve seen. … More science is always better.” Experience suggests that this hope is not only false but also exploitive of scientific research.

Science is not effective as a weapon or a shield. For example, both sides are trying establish themselves as the objective part of the story; this is clear from the accusations of corruption and the response of a CPW researcher (“We’re biologists. We don’t think about things in terms of economics — to a fault”). We assume that impartial science can provide infallible guidance. But science alone, no matter how objective, will never be able to show us the right choice. Science provides information, but it doesn’t answer the question, What should we do?

Additionally, both CPW and those against the predator control plans are targeting scientific uncertainties as weaknesses in the other’s argument. This will not settle the debate because science will always come with uncertainties. As science policy author Daniel Sarewitz writes in reference to climate change, “…more research and more facts often make a conflict worse by providing support to competing sides in the debate, and by distracting decision-makers and the public from the underlying, political disagreement.” Waiting for perfect scientific consensus on how human interventions impact mule deer populations only hinders our ability to make informed decisions with available data.

That available data, even with its uncertainty, is necessary in the decision-making process. But it can only be used productively after the social and political framework of a problem is addressed.

Changing the approach

When we draw back the curtain on scientific disagreement, we see how values are an unavoidable part of the problem. Some believe that culling is an inhumane practice. Killing predators betrays their idea of ethical environmental protection. Some think that living amongst undisturbed nature is a fundamental part of what it means to live in Colorado, and that killing predators degrades this authenticity. Others may accept culling as means to an end in our current wildlife conservation approach. It and other environmental interventions maintain Colorado’s hunting opportunities, and many people have built family traditions and social groups around this aspect of Coloradoan culture. These are differences in values, not scientific understanding.

The mule deer controversy also draws in one of Colorado’s largest value conflicts: oil and gas development. This is a divisive topic, which intersects issues of economic growth, land rights and the gaping political divide between Colorado’s urban centers and rural parts of the state. Critics of the predator control plans suggest that habitat degradation associated with oil and gas activities could be negatively affecting the deer population more so than predators. Connections between energy development and environmental decisions, such as mule deer population control, will almost always present a tangle of competing financial and social priorities.

This tangle can be manageable but not when veiled behind science. Two steps must be taken before science can contribute to the problem of the declining deer population. To begin, we must collect a transparent record of mule deer stakeholders and their values. Who has a vested interest in mule deer? Why? The answers to these questions will help us better understand the mule deer issue without first dragging science through the political dirt.

Next, we must formulate concrete goals. There should be frank policy discussions of options to meet stakeholder needs. The political system is made for these kinds of fights. Only after the moral punches have been thrown can science inform decision-making, because the question will have changed from What should we do? to How can we do this?