Student Research
Jean Evers – Rooms With a Pacific View: A Nineteenth-Century Pacific Landscape Sets the Scene
Anu Gupta – A multicriterion decision-making model for land-use planning in Palau: Incorporating multiple stakeholders, objectives, attributes, and preferences into planning
Jack Kittinger – Historical Ecology of Coral Reef Ecosystems in the Hawaiian Archipelago
Nicole Milne – The remains of agriculture: a case study of landscape change in Hamakua, HI
Alumni:
Anja Reissberg – PhD 2009 Catastrophic Hurricane Planning in Hawaii
Research Descriptions:
Jean Evers: Rooms With a Pacific View: A Nineteenth-Century Pacific Landscape Sets the Scene
A popular perception of the Pacific region envisions a landscape of a tropical paradise rarely questioned as to its origins and linked with broad strokes to ‘Western’ fantasies. This dissertation seeks to re-examine the regional landscape imaginary of the Pacific at its European origins during the late 18th and early 19th centuries just after published journals and voyaging tales ignited public curiosity. Through a case study of the French scenic landscape wallpaper, Les Sauvages de la Mer Pacifique (1805), the broad themes of regional geography and landscape representation frame an investigation of empire expansion, social consumption, and a concept of ‘natural’ origin. This early landscape representation is a visual emplacement of utopian existence onto an essentialized mythic Pacific island. Beyond the paradisal critique lies a more nuanced assessment as to why this particular scenic arrangement reached such popularity and has endured. The wallpaper drew on French sentimentalism, serving the commercial and political agendas of empire, while employing a particularly new use of visual space augmenting the Romantic experience of being in the scene. This illusion may have been sustained by desires to emulate aristocratic pleasures or to recall and bring forth a time when a more authentic self existed. However, what was being consumed was driven by commercial market design. That ‘view’ set a prototype for Pacific landscape representation, a durable perception of place that lingers today as a backdrop for consumer’s fantasies supporting regional misperceptions. In contributing to cultural geography, this research seeks to expose a ‘desirable’ commodity of orientalist framing still working to keep the people and places of Oceania invisible.
Anu Gupta: A multicriterion decision-making model for land-use planning in Palau:
Incorporating multiple stakeholders, objectives, attributes, and preferences into planning
As a tropical, small island developing nation, Palau faces challenges to long-term sustainable use of resources. There is currently no comprehensive land-use planning for the rapidly changing island of Babeldaob, partly due to conflicting objectives and a lack of specific information. However, there is observed need and demonstrated desire for land-use planning in Palau. This research proposal presents a project that will create a Multicriterion Decision-making model that incorporates multiple stakeholders, objectives, and attributes into the identification of decision alternatives. Methods will include structuring decisions into hierarchies, identifying and operationalizing objectives, and optimization. Once alternatives have been identified, preference-elicitation methods such as Analytic Hierarchy Process, ranking, rating, and Benefit-Cost Analysis will be tested and compared to help guide selection of a preferred alternative. Measurement of attributes, including water budget parameters, distribution of biodiversity, and perceptions of risk, are included in the research design. Various methods to parameterize uncertainty will also be included and tested. This research will be interactive with stakeholders, who will be identified using a tripartite framework of power, legitimacy, and urgency. The end result will be a decision-making model that helps inform land-use planning in Palau.
Jack Kittinger: Historical Ecology of Coral Reef Ecosystems in the Hawaiian Archipelago
My research interests include marine resource management and planning, social-ecological system dynamics, and conservation of marine ecosystems in the Hawaiian Archipelago and the Asia-Pacific region. Though my background is primarily in marine ecology, my PhD research is combining social and ecological methods to investigate the historical ecology of coral reef ecosystems in the Hawaiian Archipelago. In this research I am focusing on investigating the resilience of social-ecological systems in order to better understand the factors that contribute to sustainability.
Dissertation Research Abstract:
In a series of recent high-profile publications, the historical reconstruction of coral reef ecosystems has revealed that global declines have been attributed to a small set of proximate human impacts, including the primary threat of overexploitation of marine species. These studies revealed regional differences in the trajectories, timing and extent of ecosystem decline, highlighting the need for in-depth regional case studies in historical ecology. What remains largely unexplored in a historical context are the ultimate (underlying) social factors that underlie and are fundamental to proximate drivers of coral reef ecosystem decline. These include the social factors that contribute directly or indirectly to coral reef decline, including shifts in demography, technology, economy and the socio-cultural institutions that structure human-environment interactions for coral reefs. The objective of the proposed research is to examine the historical relationship between social change and coral reef ecosystem condition in a regional case study on the Hawaiian Archipelago. The proposed research will involve two phases, including, 1) reconstructing coral reef ecosystem condition over long time scales, and 2) analysis of the relationship between key social factors and ecosystem condition through time at two spatial scales (island level and archipelagic level). This methodological approach will elucidate the linkages between social systems and coral reef ecosystem condition (the coral reef social-ecological system), as well as the social elements and processes that underlie and are fundamental to proximate drivers of ecosystem degradation. The over-arching contribution of the proposed research is the identification of the elements and processes that comprise social-ecological resilience, which is critical in understanding how to achieve long-term sustainability of marine resources and prevent collapse. This will be achieved through an integrated, transdisciplinary approach to historical social-ecological systems analysis.
Nicole Milne: The remains of agriculture: a case study of landscape change in Hamakua, HI
On the island of Hawaii, when Hamakua Sugar Company closed its doors in 1994, a total of 34,560 acres of agricultural land became available and over 400 families were left without employment (Terry 1996). An influx of amenity migrants and efforts to diversify the economy led to competition over the future use of Hamakua’s prime agricultural lands. This project will examine how various stakeholders construct, negotiate, and contest competing visions of the place of agriculture in contemporary rural Hawaii. The objective of this research is to explore the social and ideological role agriculture plays in the lives of Hamakua’s rural residents, and how agrarian values are translated into contemporary rural landscapes.
Anja Reissberg: Catastrophic Hurricane Planning in Hawaii.
Since the risks and damage potential of natural events cannot be changed or managed, it is crucial that human-caused vulnerabilities be kept to a minimum. One way to achieve this is through an effective and efficient disaster management system, which my dissertation aims to explicate by critiquing and possibly redesigning current structures. This dissertation will assess the O’ahu disaster management system’s current ability to respond to a high-impact low-probability (HILP) event, a Category 4 or 5 hurricane striking the Hawai’ian island of O’ahu. It will investigate through a diagnostic tool, the Viable System Model (VSM), deficiencies of the existing disaster management system, through a hurricane scenario for the island of O’ahu. The VSM aims at enhancing effectiveness of the elements already in place, rather than proposing new disaster management elements. The existing system will then be redesigned or modified where appropriate to enhance resilience under future disasters. Lessons learned from this case will be applicable to the management of disasters of any type and size in Hawai’i.