Finding Reconciliation

1) What direction do you plan on going with your intern(s) research project to continue with it after this summer is over? 

I’m very excited about the research my team is doing this summer because it connects to my previous research about how rural America is changing as farmers face continuing economic challenges and increasing numbers of people from urban areas move into rural recreational areas (like lake country in Northern Wisconsin). I’m interested in how people decide what rural spaces should be used for and hope to encourage what are often called “multifunctional” landscapes.

Multifunctional landscapes are used for multiple things including farming and recreation. I’m hoping that my research will encourage us to diversify how we think about rural spaces, including use our lakes and rivers to include things like wild rice harvesting. We hypothesize that native aquatic plants like wild rice can help mitigate levels of phosphorus pollution over the summer when they are most likely to result in blue-green algae blooms. At the same time, wild rice beds provide habitat for many species of wildlife including fish, waterfowl and food that people can harvest. We can’t restore our lakes and rivers to the way they were 200 years ago, but we can pursue what is called reconciliation ecology, that is we can find ways to work with nature to create landscapes that support us economically while also supporting biodiversity and making space for the ecosystems that we rely on for recreation, food, flood control, and other services.  

But to build these kinds of multifunctional landscapes we need to work with the people that live, work, and play here to understand how they use and care for these places, what problems they are facing, and what solutions they see as workable. The best solutions to our problems will come from the grassroots, from working with people rather than telling people what the answers are. This summer Tara and Lucia have been talking to farmers and lakeshore owners about what conservation practices they are already working on and what challenges they are to further progress. I plan to interview more farmers and lakeshore owners this year as well as doing landscape analysis of current land uses and archival research into past land uses in order to find clues from the past and present that will help us build sustainable landscape for our children and grandchildren.

  

2) If you could research anything in the world, what would it be and why does it interest you? (Imagine you have unlimited time and resources for this research.)

Harvesting cork

I’m very happy with the research I’m doing now and I’m committed to working with local communities to find sustainable solutions for the future. But there are some eco-social systems I would really like to study so we can learn lessons that could be applied to other places. For example, I would love to study the cork oak forests of the Mediterranean. These forests have sustainably provided cork for wine bottles, shoes, and other uses for hundreds of years. I want to learn about how the forest supports both biodiversity and human economies.

Harvesting rubber

Similarly, I would love to study and visit the extractive rubber reserves in the Brazilian rainforests. These areas are reserves set aside for growing and extracting rubber from rubber trees. The creation of these reserves keeps the forest from being cut down for timber and cattle ranching and allows rubber tappers to continue making a living from the forest while also supporting indigenous tribes who use the areas.

There are many other examples of these reconciliation ecosystems around the world that I would love to visit and learn from.