“The Long View, Part II”
Prof. Marian Chertow, Industrial Environmental Management Program, Yale University School of Forestry & Environmental Studies
E-mail: marian.chertow@yale.edu
View the accompanying PowerPoint presentation (4.2 MB)
In the course of our three-year partnership with The Kohala Center and with the County of Hawai‘i government, we have come to know so much more about this beautiful island. Our partnership has flowed remarkably smoothly so far, and my colleagues and I at Yale University are encouraged by the success of our collaborative work here. The Long-Term Industrial Ecosystem Model of Hawai‘i Island (LIEM-Hawai‘i) project will take this collaboration to a new level.
There are currently 26 sites which are officially being monitored as part of the U.S. Long-Term Ecological Research Network. A great deal of environmental data is being collected at each of these 26 sites. The concept of the LIEM-Hawai‘i project is to include Hawai‘i Island in this sort of group, by collecting data on the island’s environmental, economic, and social systems over the next two to four decades. We also hope to identify best practices in the bio-fuels, tourism, and construction industries, and take a closer look at these practices over time. As a foundation for this work, we rely on methods and tools from the new field of industrial ecology, with its resolute attention to flows of materials and energy through systems at different scales.
Classical long-term environmental research sites focus primarily on changes in natural ecosystems over time. Ecologist C. S. Holling has shown that natural ecosystems are always changing. They follow a cycle which includes distinct phases: colonization/exploitation, conservation, release (through fire or other means), and reorganization.
In a nutshell, what we want to do here is study the changes on the island and add socioeconomic factors to biophysical ones to generate a more complete picture of how these systems interact. We hope to establish Hawai‘i Island as a long-term socio-ecological site or LTSER (as described in the talk by Professor Helmut Haberl), which means that we will also look at how humans impact the resources of island systems. We recognize that the systems we are studying overlap. They are complex, self organizing systems which evolved over time with no central plan.
One example of the kind of research we are proposing for Hawai‘i Island and the LIEM project comes from our study of the region of Barceloneta, Puerto Rico, where we examined the composition of the industrial community from 1950-2005. What we saw was that the collapse of one industry, in this case sugar cane, freed up resources in the form of labor and land which resulted in the growth of new industries. If we track industrial cycles over time, maybe we can foresee the pending collapse of a particular industry. By discerning what is coming to Hawai‘i, we may be able to avoid some of the negative consequences of “black swan” events – those low probability, high impact events that make islands so vulnerable.
Another benefit of an industrial ecological approach is that it can help to identify possibilities for industrial symbiosis – that is, when several companies cooperate with one another by exchanging each other’s by-products. For example, when we looked carefully at the dynamics of the Campbell Industrial Park in Honolulu, we saw that there are 11 different enterprises exchanging nine different resource flows including steam, waste oil, and ash. These players self organized into an industrial community because they needed each other: the by-products from one entity serve as valuable inputs for another entity. The Campbell Industrial Park example can help us to think in terms of industrial ecosystems that take care of their inputs and generate limited waste.
The LIEM-Hawai‘i study will help us to discover other such examples and what sustainable communities might look like here, on Hawai‘i Island.