1
Mickey Glantz Purpose Prize narrative (DRAFT: May 5, 2010)
As clouds gather over the short grasses of the plain, a young Mongolian pastoralist turns from his herd and notices the shadows encroaching. He glances to the sky, and then, unconcerned, turns his attention back to his stock. It’s late in the season, but still several weeks before the first storms of winter are expected. By that time, he will already have moved on with his herd and his family to overwinter on available pasturage elsewhere in the country,as he and his father and his grandfather before him has done forcountless generations. He has spent his life tending stock upon this plain, and his two sons will likely do the same after him. Though he seems to have few possessions, neither he nor his family has known deprivation. His true wealth, like the wealth of many herders worldwide, lies in his way of life and family, his livestock, and his folk wisdom, which has become highly attuned to the patterns and variations of the interplay between the climate and the natural environment. His family has prospered in utilizing these Mongolian plains. Within a few hours of this scene, however, a too-early severe winter storm, well out of the range of expected natural variability, will have generated over three feet of snow—and with it, decimating his family’s primary wealth, his herd; for the first time in those countless generations of prosperity deprivation will have descended.
Unfortunately, as a result of the rapidity of change in both the physical environment and climate and of geopolitical realities across the worldin the 21st century, stories like this one, in industrialized countries as well as in developing ones, are becoming increasingly common. People and societies are becoming increasingly vulnerable to changing weather and climate patterns, to the intensification of storms, and to the erratic fluctuations in temperature that have become more frequent as a result of those changing patterns. They are becoming more vulnerable to fluctuations in the demands for their commodities in an increasingly globalized world. They are becoming more vulnerable to the encroachments of development specialists whose projects often work perfectly only on paper and in PowerPoint presentations. Such specialists often foster a top-down approach to preparing local peoples to cope with the uncertainties of their climate futures. Having researched and collaborated for over fifty years with people in situations like the one described above, however, situations like those encountered by typical herding or farming or fishing folk around the world, I understand very clearly that increased vulnerabilities to change are not the result of any fundamental incapacity of such people to respond effectively to change. No, increased vulnerability among such peoples can in many cases be related directly to their capacity to accessinformation that is current, reliable and relevant to their specific contexts, information that would empower them to adapt more resiliently to the intensity and rapidity of contemporary change.
I have come to realize another important factor: access to information is as much a technological issue as it isan issue of top-downdistillation of policies to be enforced at the local level, policies grounded in the dynamics of economic, political and cultural power. Such grounded constructions indicate what portions of experience are to be regarded as ‘usable knowledge’ and what experiences, through those top-down distillations of power, are to be dismissed and displaced by expertise from elsewhere. Such a narrowly defined view of what constitutes usable knowledge challenges the realities of marginalized peoples, whether they are in urban slums, on the steppes, in the mountains, in arid and semiarid environments or in other locations with harsh climates—in fact, in all the spaces of the lives and livelihoods of local peoples around the world. In such spaces, usable knowledge that provides relevant and actionable information for practice, whether generated through long-term local experience or generalized from science research, can mean the difference between prosperity and deprivation, especially in such times of adverse change as people around the world face today. Hindrance to information access, regardless of thecause, therefore, can be said to underlie the disempowerment and marginalization of many peoples around the world today.
I embraced the opportunity provided by the unanticipated but, in retrospect, timely ending of my fifty-year career in late 2008 to redirect my life’s work to formulating an enhanced approach to information access that empowers people in just about any circumstance by providing greater access to locally usable information about how best to interact with their changing natural and socio-economic environments. This approach is called SpareTime University (STU).The potential beneficiaries of STU, as unrealistic as it may sound,include anyone who could improve their circumstances with relevant climate-related information that expands their climate-society-environment working knowledge base. In its first applications, we are focusing on marginalized peoples and countries struggling in the least-developed peripheries of the world. Such peoples include relatively isolated populations (e.g. tribal peoples in the central Amazon and high elevation communities in Nepal and Ethiopia), mobile populations (e.g. Mongolian and West African pastoralists) and disparate or minority populations embedded within larger state structures (e.g. the Philippines and Native Americans).
The concept of STU is based on the belief that regardless of circumstance most people have moments in their days that are unoccupied—times that are “spare”—and that those moments can and will be spent accessing information if such information is readily available in dynamic, user-friendly formats and is relevant to local scales and conditions. Although several non-traditional mechanisms for disseminating knowledge exist in the world, STU promises a new flexibility, portability and locally-oriented usability that fills a remaining gap in access. Recognizing this gap, STU utilizes those now-basic, “cheap” technologies that have become and are becoming more and more readily available in even the most marginal localities. For example, most rickshaw-wallahs in Khulna, Bangladesh now have mobile phones; many pastoralists across West Africa, most of whom were unknowing of Meteorological Service warnings that flash flooding was probable in their areas in 2008 and suffered major losses because of it, have MP3 players loaded with music from around the world; and some areas of rural India now have Internet access through limited but regular connections. STU is innovative foremost because it recognizes that these widely available, inexpensive technologies can be used alternatively in peoples’ ‘spare time’ as a means of overcoming that access-to-information gap that is so central to the continued disempowerment and chronic marginalization of such peoples around the world.
In Mongolia, for example, where pastoralists are being pinched by both the hard reality of their now discontinuous traditional knowledge (a result of their Soviet past and the uncertainty of their globalizing future), there is great concern. From the remote grasslands to the offices of government in Ulaanbaatar, traditional pastoral systems are recognized as quickly eroding, increasing the vulnerability of millions of people who rely on such systems for their livelihoods. The prolonged, extremely cold and snowy winter (locally called dzud)that descended this past winter and which decimated at least ten million head of livestock, has made the situation catastrophic. Hoping to stave offthe onset of a chronic humanitarian disaster, a group of Mongolian educators recently consulted with me about how a SpareTime University can be mobilized in their country. The belief is that STU can provide a framework, based on the concept of “sustainable mobility” as applied to traditional pastoralist practices, through which not only can technically relevant information that was “lost” to many pastoralists during the 70-year long Soviet era be re-learned but also inter-generational connections can be reinforced, thus reestablishing the continuity in knowledge that is so vital to the long-term viability of such pastoral systems. In this case, therefore, STU will provide not only an immediate mechanism for relief through access to vital information upon which livelihood success and even basic survival might depend but will also provide a long-term mechanism of cultural resilience. The possibility of such cross-temporal redundancy is a key strength of the STU concept. The following paragraph, taken from an email from a Mongolian researcher to whom I had recently explained the goals and approaches to developing a SpareTime University, is illustrative:
We have gaps in areas like traditional knowledge in pastoral system management … I can picture [with STU] that herders from the pastoral community get complimentary education like in rangeland management, animal science, environmental science (including climate change), marketing, social skills for leadership of the community . . . I am thinking how to build sustainable livelihoods [and] STU seems to me an excellent opportunity for such sustainable futures.
Over the past year and more, my colleagues and I have presented the concept of STU at international conferences in countries like Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Nepal and Bangladesh, and this email is representative of the response we have received.
STU was also a key aspect at the First International Undergraduate Conference on Climate, Water, Weather and Societyin Shanghai, China(July 2009). A similar conference focused on Greater South Asia, with base support from the Asia Pacific Network (APN) already secured, is to be held in Kathmandu in November 2010. I have also recently been invited by the American Indian Higher Education Council (AIHEC) to submit a joint proposal to foster the integration of the concepts of Climate Affairs[1] and SpareTime University in Native American contexts, especially among youth and teens but also among people already in the workforce. The intention is to inspire younger people to stay in school by focusing their attention on climate-related issues that have local meaning to their lands and cultures. The point illustrated by these initiatives is that well-implemented, effective concepts can change behaviors in and interactions with locally delineated realities of the world. SpareTime University is such a concept, engaging people in a process of “social invention” whereby their individual behaviors and cultural models can be transformed through increased easy access to usable information, to knowledge that helps improve understandings of and interactions with local as well as analogous social and natural environments.
Innovation is actually the operative term in fulfilling the promise of SpareTime University because fundamental to its methodology is a highly responsive dynamism oriented to catalyzing interactions at local to regional scales. This dynamism enables individuals, empowered by the knowledge they have gained through their own experiences and complemented by shared information accessed through STU, to respond in a way that befits their aspirations and needs at specific times and in specific circumstances. The knowledge produced from this blending of information means that each person within each locality becomes a spark of innovation, regardless of their levels of literacy or types of vocation. Such innovation initiates a bottom-up process of diffusion both within and between communities; and through the trials and errors of different individuals thus interacting with information, more successful herders, for example, become carriers of essential and usable knowledge, providing not only a new reason for cultural interconnectivity but also a renewed sense of cultural security. Importantly, STU is framed as a ‘university’in recognition of the prestige associated with this word across the world. SpareTime University becomes, therefore, not only a means of accessinginformation and creating knowledge but also a means by which those who engage with this process also acquire a highly regarded form of authority that is based on knowledge usable at local scales. In this way, universities are shown to be wherever people seek, receive and share knowledge.
Although there has been no third-party study as yet, the replication and growth of SpareTime University as a means of social invention and adaptive resilience to change is highly likely. I have actively pursued the development of STU since mid-2008, ramping up my efforts since the abrupt end of my first career in August of that year. Tangible results thus far have mainly come in the exceptionally positive unsolicited responses received upon presenting the STU concept in different forums around the world. Reinforcing these abstract tangibles are the financial support and commitments I have received from donors and potential donors excited about the initiative. Receiving a $1 Million,2-year bridging-funds grant in 2008 from the Rockefeller Foundation to foundthe Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Coloradois the most palpable example of such support. Designationof STU and other work at CCB as a 2008-09 Clinton Global Initiative is yet another example. Furthermore, Washington DC-based law firm Patton Boggs LLP, which took CCB as a pro bono client, has trademarked SpareTime University, and Toyota (North America)provided generous support for the Shanghai Conference mentioned above. The World Bank’s Asia and the Pacific Division has recently shown interest in the concept, and we are in ongoing discussions with program officers to pilot STU in Mongolia, which, as noted above, is at present a prime testing area because of the numerous temporal-spatial as well as cultural variables that are influencing its current crisis.
After giving the commencement address for the International Affairs Program at the University of Colorado in spring of 2009 (the semester I taught about Climate Change and Global Society), I attended the reception for the new graduates and their parents. I had spoken in my address to the graduating class of how societies have always had to cope with a changing climate, sometimes with success and sometimes not. I affirmed that this generation of graduates, which I have labeled the “eco-generation” as they have been immersed all their lives in news stories of how ecosystems around the earth are in trouble, must develop not only technologies and techniques but also the will to change the way societies of the future interact sustainably with their environments. These young graduates seemed quite interested in my address, which I attribute to their genuine interest in how climate, society and environment interact and how to further reduce the adverse consequences from these interactions.
At the reception a young woman in her cap and gown approached me. She thanked me for my commencement comments and then told me she had wanted to take notes but had had no paper. Instead, she took notes with a marker pen on the bottom of one of her shoes. I thought it was unbelievable until she showed me the bottom of the shoe. I took a photo of it. She said that some of the points I had made really resonated with her, especially as she was preparing to move off campus and into the workforce. Life is more than a single event, of course. But events in one’s life are analogous to the links that compose a chain, and I've come to realize, without being sure why, that in the chain of events that have composed my life so far, I have tended to inspire people. Maybe it has something to do with my enthusiasm for and belief in the issues I have studied for fifty years. Maybe it has to do with my faith in people’s latent and my passion for mentoring and encouraging their thirst for knowledge.
Ironically,considering that my focus over these many years has been on social issues, my first degree is actually in metallurgical engineering. This physical science background, however, is what secured for me, even after I had turned to the social sciences and completed my PhD in Political Science, a thirty-four year career as the only tenured senior social scientist among several hundred physical scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). At NCAR, however, management caredlittle about social issues, focusing only on physical science. My professional goal, in response to this neglect, became the development of a network of social and physical scientists around the globe to assess how climate science could be utilized to help societies cope with variability and change. Although I was very successful in meeting this goal, I was pressured to downplayfindings that could meet desperately needed social information at local scales in order to meet the NCAR physical science managers’ expectations of pure research and publication.
The most published scientist at the center, I was truly shocked—caught by surprised—in August 2008 when the new NCAR director informed me that my group and I were being terminated. At age 68+, I felt dismayed and betrayed, despite the groundswell of support for me and my life’s work that came from many continents following a New York Times article that questioned the political motives of the termination. I then came to another important understanding: for the first timeI was truly freeto pursue full timemy desire to foster usable science to meet social needs. The concept of STU was in a very early stage of development then, but this was my “ah-ha” moment that a new window of opportunity had been opened.I had become free to direct my energies full force into developing the STU concept to increase marginal peoples’ access to information and enhance their skill sets related to their own local interactions with climate, water, weather and society.