Univ. of Maryland Program for Society & the Environment

1. Keith G. Tidball, Ph.D.
Department of Natural Resources
Cornell University
Invited Panel on Mapping Urban
Stewardship across Space and Place

2. Mapping?
• Concept mapping
• Mind mapping
• Systems mapping
… but no spatial mapping

3. What is Civic Ecology?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3uxZnV3Tj0

4. Civic Ecology … by the book
Civic Ecology is the study of the interactions, including
feedbacks, among four components of a social-ecological
system:
• community-based environmental stewardship (civic
ecology practice);
• education and learning situated in these practices (civic
ecology education);
• the people, cultures, and institutions involved; and
• the ecosystem services produced by the people, their
stewardship, and educational practices.
Introduction to Civic Ecology “MOOC”
https://www.edx.org/course/reclaiming-broken-places-introduction-cornellx-envsci1500x#.VF0E6clDFon

5. Civic Ecology – 10 Principles
The Ten Civic Ecology Principles Brief Name for Principle
Emergence: Where and Why do civic ecology practices happen?
1. Civic ecology practices emerge in broken (Keith prefers lost ) places. Broken (too much like ruined) places
2. Because of their love for life and love for the places they have lost, civic
ecology stewards defy, reclaim and re-create these broken places.
Biophilia/Topophilia
Bricolage: Piecing the practice together
3. In re-creating place, civic ecology practices re-create community. Learning
4. Civic ecology stewards draw on social-ecological memories to re-create
places and communities.
Community
5. Civic ecology practices produce ecosystem services. Memories
6. Civic ecology practices foster well-being. Ecosystem services
7. Civic ecology practices provide opportunities for learning. Health
Zooming Out: A systems perspective
8. Civic ecology practices start out as local innovations and expand to
encompass multiple partnerships.
Governance
9. Civic ecology practices are embedded in cycles of chaos and renewal,
which in turn are nested in social-ecological systems.
Resilience
Policy Makers: Understanding and enabling
10. Policy makers have a role to play in growing civic ecology practices. Policy

6. Conceptualizing and understanding stewardship over
space?
Rather than spatial mapping, stewardship activities in particular
kinds of spaces/places
LOCATION RED ZONE TYPE
Afghanistan Ongoing wars in the Middle East
Berlin, Germany Post-Cold War divisions
Charleston, South Carolina 1989 Hurricane Hugo
Cameroon and Chad Mid 2000’s civil unrest in Central Africa
Cyprus Demarcation between Greek and Turkish Cyprus
Europe 1940’s WW II Nazi internment camps
Guatemala Ongoing post-conflict insecurity
Iraq Ongoing wars in the Middle East
Johannesburg, South Africa Early 2000’s Soweto, Post-Apartheid violence
Kenya Early 2000’s Resource scarcity conflict
Liberia 1989- 2003 civil war
Madagascar Costal vulnerability
New Orleans, USA 2005 Hurricane Katrina
New York City, USA 2001 September 11th terrorist attacks
Rotterdam, Netherlands Ongoing urban insecurity
Port-au-Prince, Haiti 2010 earthquake
Russia Post-Soviet Cold War urban insecurity
Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1996 conflict
South Korea Demilitarized Zone
South Korea 2002 Typhoon and coastal vulnerability
Stockholm, Sweden Urban insecurity in times of war
Tokyo and Hiroshima, Japan WW II bombings
United States WW II involvement
United States Violence and prison populations

7. How does stewardship evolve over
time?
• Explanations for the source and role of
change in adaptive systems, particularly
the kinds of change that are transforming.
• Focused on social-ecological systems –
not simply linked or coupled systems of
people and nature, people IN nature
• Found at multiple scales, from the scale
of a farm or village, through communities,
regions, and nations to the globe.
Resilience - the ability to absorb disturbances, to be changed and then to re-organize
and still have the same identity. It includes the ability to learn from the disturbance.
Walker, B., C. S. Holling, S. R. Carpenter, and A. Kinzig. 2004. Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social–ecological systems. Ecology and Society 9(2): 5. [online] URL:
http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol9/iss2/art5

8. “…there will be social mechanisms behind management practices
based on local ecological knowledge, as evidence of a co-
evolutionary relationship between local institutions and the
ecosystem in which they are located.” Berkes & Folke 1998
“…systems that demonstrate resilience appear to have learned to
recognize feedback, and therefore possess mechanisms by which
information from the environment can be received, processed, and
interpreted.” Berkes & Folke 1998
Explore the means, or social mechanisms, that bring about the
conditions needed for adaptation in the face of disturbance (eg.
disaster and war) fundamental to social-ecological system resilience.

9. Tidball, KG. (2012). Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and
Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience. Ecology and Society. 17(2).
Tidball, KG & RC Stedman. (2013). Positive Dependency and Virtuous
Cycles: From Resource Dependence to Resilience in Urban Social-
Ecological Systems. Ecological Economics. 86(0): 292-299.
Tidball, KG, ME Krasny, E Svendsen, L Campbell, & K Helphand. (2010).
Stewardship, Learning, and Memory in Disaster Resilience. “Resilience
in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education,”
Special Issue of Environmental Education Research, 16(5): 341-357.
Tidball, KG (2014). Seeing the forest for the trees: hybridity and social-
ecological symbols, rituals and resilience in postdisaster contexts.
Ecology and Society 19(4): 25.
Tidball, KG, RC Stedman, & CA Aktipis. Social-ecological feedback
enhances greening during disaster recovery: A model of social and
ecological processes in local ecological investment. Submitted to
Ecology & Society.
Urgent Biophilia
Restorative Topophilia
Memorialization
Ritualized Recovery Symbols
Discourses of Defiance
(Feedbacks)

10. • Foundational mechanism
• Affinity we humans have for the rest of nature, the process of
remembering that attraction, the urge to express it through
creation of restorative environments, and the consequent benefit
we receive from acting upon the urge.
• Creating restorative environments may also restore or increase
ecological function, and may confer system resilience across
multiple scales.
• So, when we are faced with violence as presented by shocks and
surprises (like disasters and wars), and we seek engagement with
nature to summon and demonstrate resilience in the face of a
crisis, we are demonstrating an urgent biophilia, an urge to affiliate
with other life.
Tidball, KG. (2012). Urgent Biophilia: Human-Nature Interactions and Biological Attractions in Disaster Resilience. Ecology and Society. 17(2).

11. • Draws upon Tuan’s notion of topophilia, literally ‘love of place’.
• Emphasis is on a social actor’s attachment to place and the symbolic meanings that
underlie this attachment
• In contrast to urgent biophilia, restorative topophilia is thought of, and acted out, as
more experiential and ‘constructed’ by how we are socialized or enculturated, rather
than innate, coming from our biological origins.
• Serves as a powerful base for individual and collective actions that repair valued
attributes of place.
Tidball, KG & RC Stedman. (2013). Positive Dependency and Virtuous Cycles: From Resource Dependence to Resilience in Urban Social-
Ecological Systems. Ecological Economics. 86(0): 292-299.

12. • Begins right after a crisis via spontaneous and
collective memorialization of lost family
members or community members (or even
iconic green or built elements) through
gardening, tree planting, or other civic ecology
practices .
• Community of practice emerges to act upon
and apply these memories to social learning
about greening practices.
• May lead to new kinds of learning, including
about collective efficacy and ecosystem
services production, through feedback
between remembering, learning, and
enhancing individual, social, and
environmental well-being.
Tidball, KG, ME Krasny, E Svendsen, L Campbell, & K Helphand. (2010). Stewardship, Learning, and Memory in Disaster Resilience.
“Resilience in Social-Ecological Systems: the Role of Learning and Education,” Special Issue of Environmental Education Research, 16(5): 341-
357.

13. • From the previously described
mechanisms.
• Rituals - storehouses of meaningful
symbols.
• Performance of rituals helps perhaps
previously hidden or forgotten information
to be revealed and regarded as legitimate,
as dealing with the crucial values of the
community.
• Transformative for human attitudes and
behavior, and therefore the handling of
tree symbols in ritual exposes the power of
tree symbols to act upon and change the
persons involved in ritual performance.
Tidball, KG (2014). Seeing the forest for the trees: hybridity and social-ecological symbols, rituals and resilience in postdisaster contexts.
Ecology and Society 19(4): 25.

14. • Focused specifically on the importance of the use
of memorialization , symbols and rituals,
restorative topophilia, and urgent biophilia to
resist or reshape the conversation about the
changed/damaged space where one resides, and
the people living there.
• First explored in research conducted in New
Orleans, as residents resisted initial reports by the
news media essentially ‘writing off’ New Orleans
as a failed city.
• Residents used many of the mechanisms above to
reframe the discourse to reflect a more hopeful,
more optimistic, recovery and rebirth oriented
conversation.
• Contagion effect - The reframed discourse, and
practices reflecting and reinforcing it, spread via
formal and informal networks

15. Thank you!