Transitioning to Sustainability
(Section Summary)

Societal desires to achieve sustainability goals often require significant changes in behavior and use of resources, causing huge challenges that can deflate original good intentions. In the middle of all the concern and hypothesizing about taking actions that will promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability therefore, another term needs to be included, recognized, and applied where appropriate. That term is transitional – the process of moving from one state of being to another or one material, resource or practice to a different, less negatively impacting an alternative material, resource or practice. Although not a substitute for the real thing, transitional suggests a lesser barrier to changing our ways. If we feel bad about our circumstances and yet have no clear idea what is best to do next, thinking of transitional options is useful and may be easier to adopt.

To assist in identifying specific goals and defining action strategies, including describing transitional steps toward sustainability, sustainability practitioners are beginning to rely upon the participatory, transparent, and all-inclusive advantages offered by the application of citizen science and adaptive management strategies. In order to help anticipate and avert the impacts of unintended outcomes, it is essential to interject community perspectives into science and technology decisions. And this requires the application of citizen science. Community-based research, within the context of citizen science, differs fundamentally from mainstream research in being coupled relatively tightly with community groups that are eager to know the research results and to use them in practical efforts to achieve constructive social change. But experts, mostly unwittingly, have created a conceptual gulf between the information they gather and the social values people cherish, making it very difficult for participants in policy discussions to see the relationship between ecological and socio-economic science and public values. Science has to meet the real needs of real people, respecting individual rights and empowering communities, to win public and political support (Bernard and Young, 1997).

An effective means to accomplish this goal of full public involvement, awareness, and integrated discourse is through the application of citizen science that supports an adaptive management strategy. Adaptive management is a search for community practices that maintain the options important to a culture living in a place – a process by which new information about the health of a particular system is incorporated into a management plan. Adaptive management is a challenging blend of scientific research, monitoring, and practical management that allows for experimentation and provides the opportunity to “learn by doing.” And adaptive management represents a philosophy of management assisted by the application of citizen science. The same philosophy that governs the search for scientific understanding also governs the search for better management solutions and guides revisions of values and evaluations when observation and experience indicate the need for such revisions. Adaptive management can result in social learning, in the emergence of shared goals and policies, and in greater environmental protection and economic security. Adaptive management describes a strategy that starts where we are and struggles toward better policies through social learning, providing a very simple model for conceiving the difference between sustainable and unsustainable communities. .......... read more!

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