Lessons Learned

Energy is one of the key needs and ways to measure cultures. Cultures are organized by the types of energy they use–foragers, farmers, factories that use hand tools, animal power, and fossil fuel energy. Some are hypothesizing a future wind, solar, and hydrogen driven economy. The growth of population energy shows huge differences in land area and energy use. Culture rather than energy imposes the limits on growth.

• Renewable Hydrogen Economy?
• Growth in Population and Energy Consumption shows conditions in 1980. While the dates are different, the difference in energy uses by nation persist into the future.
• Assessing the Limits to Growth

• When interpreting data, values are often less important then facts. Here is an example of what students thought were facts and values in a letter meant to be factual.
• Coast residents and their leaders often see different opportunities for the coastal environment.

Salmon are limited by their ecosystems. Salmon users are limited by the number of salmon available. When more salmon are taken than the resource can sustain, the number of salmon users will decline with them.

• Salmon Fisheries of the Columbia
• Salmon Abundance and Diversity in Oregon: Are We Making Progress?

Studying communities shows all have differentions in material well being that measure wealth. Wealth inequity becomes much greater as the hierarchy increases in the social system. Very large nations, cities, and companies have much more wealth inequality than small and homogeneous ones. Each level of hierarchy multiplies inequality. Social systems can create principles to make the wealth inequality fairer. Unfair systems lose innovative talent.

• Evolution of Wealth Inequality
• Distributive Justice Principles
• Measures and Meaning in Comparisons of Wealth Equality
• Community Wealth Concentration: Comparisons in General Evolution and Development

People fish because they love the lifestyle. The they get satisfaction from fishing the is more important to many than income. When resource levels decline, those who continue to fish support fishing with other activities.

• Satisfaction Bonus from Salmon Fishing: Implications for Economic Evaluation
• Sailing the Shoals of Adaptive Management
• Courses to the 1984 Pacific Northwest Coho Salmon Closure
• Measuring Fleet Capacity and Capacity Utilization
• Insights On Adaptive Capacity: Three Indigenous Pacific Northwest Historical Narratives
• Coastal Contrasting Views of Coastal Residents and Coastal Coho Restoration Planners

Like people fisheries tend to have life cycles. The most common pattern is an initial fishing down of the resource. As more and more join the fishery, the fish population declines. If the fish caught is important as a food resource, capturing fish changes to fish culture–much as in the case of land animals like chickens, pork, and beef. The salmon fishery is a prime example of this process.

• The Life Cycle of Fisheries
• Introduction: Culturing Capture Fisheries: Lessons from Salmon Culturing and Cultures

Models are very useful tools for helping people understand real processes. Models, however, are not reality. Models represent the logical patterns of reality. A model can never represent the completeness of reality. Thus, any effort to describe reality can be criticized for being either incomplete or logically inconsistent.

• Policy Research Using Agent-Based Modeling to Assess Future Impacts of Urban Expansion into Farmlands and Forest
• Logical Consistency and Completeness

Getting action requires social organization such as governance, a group of people wanting that action such as a self-interest group, or people who specialize in making change. Most action is started by a leader who has a vision and the trust of a group of followers. Combined with this are social networks to broaden the group of followers, gaining power and resources to get the action, and the knowledge to design the action.

• Assets for Moving from Assessment to Action
• Self-Interest Groups and Human Emotion as Adaptive Mechanisms
• Specialist and Generalist Roles for Coping with Variability
• Sailing the Shoals of Adaptive Management
• Economic Development: Panacea or Perplexity for Rural Areas
• Influences on Residential Yard Care and Water Quality: Tualatin Watershed, Oregon
• The Salt River Project Water Users Association

We learn about ourselves from learning about how other cultures handle ways of living the we encounter. The Tasaday are a peoples living on the Island of Mindanao in the Philippines. They show the difficulty of entering into a new external setting.

A Klamath woman who experienced life as Klamath, termination of the Klamath, and then fought for restoration, Marie Norris wrote with the goal to describe describe Klamath culture to future generations.

• Knowing the Tasaday
• Klamath Knowledge of Marie Norris

Cultures, communities, and neighborhoods are tied to ecological systems. Watersheds are suggested as the unit to connect salmon and those seeing salmon important to their culture.

Cranial capacity is closely correlated with the coldness of the climate, not intelligence. The explanation is simple–colder climates favor the smallest surface area. Skulls become rounder and larger for peoples living in cold climates.

• Connecting Biological and Cultural Diversity
• Cultural Correlates with Cranial Capacity
• Brain Size, Cranial Morphology, Climate, and Time Machine