EMERGY SOCIETY NEWS
Look for the Emergy Newsletter in two sites:
http://www.unicamp.br/fea/ortega/ISAER/
http://isaer.org/EmergySociety/Websitecontent/Inthenews.html
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This bulletin will present information about the emergy research groups. Main topics
Please send your
information to the ISAER Newsletter Editor Enrique Ortega |
ISAER President Address in January of 2016
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I am quite
honored to serve as the current ISAER President and I hope that in the coming years the society can have a
real impact in promoting emergy to the wider scientific community. Dan Campbell tells me that this
little speech is my opportunity to put my personal spin on the goals of the
society. If I have a spin in mind, it goes something like this. We’ve heard in the 2016 conference about some beautiful
advances in emergy research, especially about technical improvements to
emergy analyses. My suggestion would be that it might be time for
society members to return a little to the roots of the society and of
emergy. |
For the newer members, emergy may seem to
be a sophisticated accounting project, aimed to replace naïve economic analyses
of engineering and economic practice. So it is. But
emergy is first and foremost, in my mind, a product of an even more
sophisticated systems science, originally developed Dr. Odum and his
earlier students, and as part of the scientific milieu of the 60s and 70s, and
given new life in the 80s and 90s by the many strands of science now lumped
under labels like complexity or complex systems science.
Dr. Odum’s systems science
revolves around the concept of maximum power, of course, but also hierarchy,
scale, energy dissipation, and on and on. Systems diagramming, for instance, is
not only a precursor to emergy analysis, but it is a way of thinking. It is an exercise that forces users to understand problems in
specific ways, again related to energy and its transformation. When we
use the systems language, every problem or question that we ask is automatically placed in those terms. We are forced to think about the world in ways that incorporate
fundamental systems principles.
For the newer emergy researchers,
this may be news. Therefore, I will make a suggestion. Especially for new
emergy researchers, we need to develop more training opportunities for
learning the very sophisticated systems theory that underlies the accounting of
emergy analysis. Emergy analysis is a great tool. However, without a deep
understanding of its intellectual roots, there is the potential for researchers
to wonder off course, to miss the implications of their research, or worse, to
struggle unnecessarily with designing research projects of your own. So that is one that I think is important.
I’ll
list a few other initiatives, and these are not my ideas for the most part, but
I want to put them all together here. There are things that I think the society
should support or is already taking steps to promote. These are all part of the
new website, most in preliminary form, or they could be added
to the website. Dan will give us a thorough tour of the beautiful new website
in a minute. But here’s the way I describe these
pieces and how they could be incorporated in the website.
1. Promote ‘emergy foundations’
scholarship
§ Odum 1988 etc.
§ Brown and Ulgiati 1997, 1999 etc.
§ Others
2. Promote the production of ‘emergy
tools’
§ UEV Database
§ NEAD Database
§ Emergy LISTSERV
§ Dr. Brown’s excel file simulations
§ Enrique’s simulation website
§ Tom´s newly revised simulation environment
3. Promote ‘alternative channels’ of
emergy information dissemination
§ PWD website
§ Enrique’s Emergy Society Newsletter (to be improved)
§ Torbjorn´s Clearinghouse idea
4. Promote ‘scientific conference
participation’
§ Emergy Synthesis 10
§ EcoSummit 2016
§ The International Conference of Environmental Accounting in Beijing
5. Promote and encourage younger
scholars with various ‘awards’
§ Poster awards
§ Travel awards
6. Promote ‘emergy scholarship’
What is ‘emergy foundations’ scholarship?
Rather than write a great deal of new content for the website, it could be
better to showcase a few foundational papers,
with citations and links possibly. It would include, of course, a few of HTs
papers. It could include review papers that cover existing scholarship to create
summaries. It could include some true meta-analyses, which have
become extremely popular and highly valued in most disciplines. Some of these
things have already been done. I’m
trying to encourage more people to take on these kinds of projects.
Next, ‘emergy tools’. The NEAD
website and the UEV database might be the top tools created so far
(though they need more visibility and better procedures for updating). The
listserv is another valuable but underused tool. Mark’s website has Excel
files for simulations. Enrique has a website with a short course on
Ecosystem Modelling and Simulation with software that can run minimodels simulations. This year, my
simulation environment is undergoing a re-write, and it’s
going to be good, I think.
Next, ‘alternative channels’
of information dissemination on emergy. The good example here is Mary’s PWD
website. Another is the online meeting ‘Forum’, which
apparently is a feature for holding meetings online. There is Enrique’s
proposal for a newsletter, and Torbjorn´s Clearinghouse idea for
linking potential students with researchers.
Next, ‘promote scientific conference
participation’. This refers to both organizing our own conferences, of course,
but also producing sessions in other conferences. We are doing this, of course,
with these upcoming conferences.
Next, promote and encourage
young scholars with various awards. We are doing so.
Last but not least, ‘promote emergy scholarship’.
What do I mean, how could we do that? As a society of scholars, scholarship is
our #1 occupation. Personally, I don’t have any
idea how many new papers have been published in recent years. If you are a
Resilience researcher, all you need is notification of a new edition of Energy
and Society. But the emergy community has chosen to
publish widely, to try to talk to other research communities. This has clear
advantages, I believe, but also the one main disadvantage that we all miss the
publication of valuable research. The website can be the place to pull all
that together and announce it in one place. You will see that there is the
beginnings of this type of feature in the new website. I think that this should
be a running list of all emergy or systems papers produced by our community,
most recent papers on the top of the list. Maybe in bibliography form, perhaps
with an abstract that expands if selected. Now I say, ideally, we should be
able to use the UEV database as the source for such a list. When someone
updates the UEV database, this list would be updated
automatically, and the same information would not need to be kept in two
different places. That would probably require some small changes to the website
to allow it to hold all papers by the community, not just those that contain a
new UEV, but that could be discussed. To me, this
accomplishes two things. Essentially this feature gives
authors a chance to show off, a chance to announce what they’ve done. A
way to inform us all about their hard work. To me, this should
be highlighted on the website. Everyone wants and needs to hear about
scholarship. The other thing that it does, as I said, is to provide a
single place where we, and others, can see all emergy and systems research
together.
Again, what ties all these
pieces together? That would be the website. I see a website as a place to
talk to ourselves (with perhaps outsiders listening, if we do a good job). To
my mind, we need a website that features these types of categories, and you
will see that it already does, for the large part. Furthermore, the website
needs to talk to us, as does the PWD website. If you choose to be notified of changes, it will automatically email an
announcement to you when something changes. When someone creates a new tool, it
is added to the tool category, and it is ‘featured’ at
the top of the category, until it is replaced by something new. When someone
develops a new program, same thing. ‘New scholarship’, same thing. Each update
triggers a notice.
Ok, that would be my spin, or my
wish list. Again, you will see how the website is doing much of this, or is on
the way to doing it.
I do have one last comment
that more directly regards the society. When I was an undergrad, I had a
sign over my desk that really annoyed some of my upper classmates. They had
sent out a flyer that had said something like ‘Stamp out Apathy! Join us in
this club something-or-other!’ I had cut out the word ‘Apathy’ and taped it
over my desk in my dorm. I was too busy studying, I thought, to be
involved in extra-curricular silliness, as I saw it, and I disliked the typical
group ra-ra politics which it seemed gave too much
attention to personal self-promotion, etc. The point of that story is to say, the
emergy society is a service society intended to promote emergy science.
Personally, if you don’t care much about the
activities of the society, I understand. I really do. Your research is what
matters. That is everybody’s focus. We are academics or practitioners; we are
pushing science, which is what we should do. As for the society, some of you
really enjoy getting involved. Please, please continue to do so. However, for
others of you, follow your hearts. Choose as much or as little involvement in
the society as you wish. But do stay tuned! We will be making efforts to do useful
things. Use the website and join the listserv to stay informed, and
do make use of the services that we provide that fit your needs. The society is
fortunate to count this wonderful scientific community as members, and we will
continue to do what we can to serve it.
Thank you. TA
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New
information
World Summit of Environmental Accounting. Beijing (BNU), July 2-4, 2016,
http://www.weasummit2016.com/page/cts/index.php
Deadline for submission of paper
and poster abstracts 15 June 2016
EcoSummit 2016 (29 August - 1 September) Le Corum,
Montpellier, France
Ecological Sustainability - Engineering Change http://www.ecosummit2016.org/
Advances
in Energy Studies, Biennial
International Workshop. Parthenope University, Naples, Italy, 2017
Past
information
July 14th 2012 The objectives of ISAER Newsletter
July 25th 2012 Ecological
Engineering and Applied Computing Lab, Unicamp, Brazil
July 28th
2012 Ecosystem
Engineering Design Lab at the University of Maryland, USA
September 17th 2012 Prosperous Way
Down Committee
January 22nd 2013 The book “A Prosperous Way Down” in Portuguese
March 10th 2013 JEMA:
Journal of Environmental Accounting and Management
April 8th 2013 Emergy
Accounting Summer Course, in Venice, June 17-21, 2013