How I became an environmental economic geographer

By Julia Affolderbach

When asked professionally, I will say I am an economic geographer. Yet, this doesn’t feel right as I don’t specialize in the central topics of the discipline. Supply chains, international division of labour, clusters, innovations, and the quantitative analysis of these trends are not my domains. When attending economic geography conferences, I sometimes struggle to find sessions relevant to my work. This is why after stating that I am an economic geographer, I usually specify that I am interested in how the natural environment and environmental values impact and change economic development. Since childhood, I have identified as being an environmentalist. I grew up worrying about and criticising nuclear power plants, acid rain, deforestation in the Amazon, pollution levels in Germany’s river Rhine and other environmental problems driven by economic activity. This is why I would never have expected to go from environmentalist to anything related to economics.

When I started my studies in Germany at the University of Cologne in 1995, the only degree programs offered were combined undergraduate and postgraduate programs through which you would gain a degree comparable to a British MA or MSc degree. Although I enrolled in Geography, Geology and Botany, I also took courses in Zoology and Spanish. I enjoyed learning and was thirsty for diverse experiences. This exploration led me to an introductory economic geography course. I struggled to wrap my head around the concepts but I enjoyed it. Despite getting by far the lowest mark I ever received during my studies, I caught the attention of my economic geography professor who would later become my mentor, as I was one of only three students who passed the course.

Half way through my degree program, I won a scholarship to study at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver (Canada) for one year. During my two semesters there, I mapped and analysed geological landforms along the coast and within the Rocky Mountains and in Washington State in the US. I learned to identify 300 of British Columbia’s endemic plant species and their ecosystems, saw black bears, moose and the famous salmon runs. It was fantastic!

Upon my return to Cologne, I had to take one last course before I was able to move on to my dissertation – a two-week field school. The field schools on offer varied from year to year. I had originally signed up for a hiking trip through central Sweden but wasn’t able to attend due to my studies in Canada. Left with very few options, I signed up for an economic geography fieldtrip to the old-industrial district at the German-French-Luxembourg border. The economic geography professor who had supported my studies since the economic geography course was running the fieldtrip. During the trip my mentor convinced me that studying the environment was fine but that environmental issues could not be fully understood without considering the role of humans. He argued that I would never be fully satisfied focusing simply on geomorphology or plant ecology.

Following field school, my mentor introduced me to a colleague at Yale School of Forestry who was conducting a comparative case study on forest certification schemes. He was looking for a collaborator to conduct a survey on the German wood and paper industry – my MSc dissertation topic. While working on my dissertation, my mentor also introduced me to a Canadian visiting professor named Roger Hayter, who had a similar interest in environmental economic geography. At the time, environmental aspects were rarely taken into consideration within economic geography. Prof. Hayter asked me whether I would be interested in joining a research project on the restructuring of the forest industry and, as I had been considering doing a PhD, I accepted.

Logging operations at Arve Loop, Tasmania, Feb. 2006.

I finished my German degree, spent half a year in South America practicing my Spanish, passed my English language certificate at 4000m in elevation at the British consulate in La Paz, and then left for Vancouver to start a PhD on forest conflicts and the role of environmental activism in the restructuring of the forest industry in Canada and Australia. My PhD research led me to Tasmania where I spent three months in and around the native forests interviewing environmental activists, logging contractors, saw millers and other forest workers, tourism operators, politicians, policy makers, Indigenous representatives and many more to better understand the nature of the forest conflict.  

I have worked on a number of different research projects since, all focused in one way or another on environmental aspects linked to the economy. I have also broadened my interests to aspects of urban and social sustainability. For example, I spent two months in 2013 in Massachusetts studying environmental justice organisations and their campaigns to address environmental, social, and economic inequalities in urban settings. Currently, I am working on a project that explores the role of green building in urban strategies to reduce carbon emissions. The GreenRegio project (greenregio.uni.lu) includes not only technological aspects of green building but also policy, institutional and other changes based on case studies in Brisbane, Freiburg, Luxembourg, and Vancouver.

I am an environmental economic geographer.

Taking the long route - how I got here...

by Kirstie O'Neill

(@KirstieJONeill)

As you can see from reading through this GEESology blog, geography is indeed a broad discipline covering all manner of exciting areas.  The ways which each of us GEESologists have come to this are equally varied – so here’s my version as a social geographer! 

1970s singer Kenny Loggins
(Source: www.last.fm)

I always loved geography, and reading maps – I had great teachers at school which really helped, although sometimes the singing was a drawback (‘footloose’ by Kenny Loggins sticks in my mind!).  

I knew I wanted to do geography at A-level and did better than expected so was able to study it at University too. I got a place (unexpectedly) at Newcastle University.  Studying geography at University was different to school, and we got to specialise in areas that hadn’t even come up at school – rural geography appealed to me, I just seemed to enjoy and ‘get’ it.  But, I couldn't believe our first fieldtrip was back to West Cumbria and my old school's barn (below) - no exciting field trips anywhere exotic unfortunately!

Bakerstead Barn, Eskdale, West Cumbria - on a rare sunny day!

After university I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do, but knew it would be geography and rural based – luckily, the rural community council in Cumbria, Voluntary Action Cumbria, had Lottery funding to train up rural community development workers.  The interview was a baptism by fire, a whole day with the other candidates and being ‘interviewed’ by the staff and trustees all day.  But, I got the job and needed to quickly buy my first car to do the job, and enjoyed a few years back in my native Cumbria doing rural community development.  But all good things must come to an end.

Over the next six years, I moved to Durham County Council, Yorkshire Rural Community Council and finally North Yorkshire County Council all doing rural development stuff.  I was working for North Yorkshire County Council when I saw a PhD advertised – I’d been thinking of doing one for a while, although didn’t realise you could actually get funding to do one.  The one advertised was funded, and was a collaborative research project with the local council – so I had a chat to the people at Hull University.  It sounded really exciting – local food was an area I was really interested in, and the opportunity to learn Italian and getting to do research in Italy didn’t sound so bad either!

               Researching rural development and local food in the Abruzzo region of Italy

So, in 2007 I also gave up my job and went back to University full-time (fieldtrips have improved!), I passed my PhD viva in 2012 (my thesis is available here) and have been lucky to get postdoc positions after the PhD too – I’m about to start a new job at Lancaster University looking at food and whether peoples’ decisions about what to buy include any consideration of sustainability.  This brings my PhD work (food) and my post-doc work (low carbon, green entrepreneurs, sustainability) together and hopefully I’ll get to write something about it soon...

I’d like to continue researching green building (here) and food (here), both of which are really important in relation to sustainability, but as ever, it all depends on what’s around at the end of the next short-term contract!

Building green homes – what does this mean?

By Kirstie O'Neill (@KirstieJONeill)

Most people are probably already aware of the benefits of making small changes around the home like fitting low energy bulbs (which last longer than ordinary bulbs, use less energy and therefore cost less to run), buying A-rated washing machines or cookers, and most people probably recycle things like bottles and newspapers at home.  However, as energy becomes more expensive and oil-based fuels become scarcer, there are more significant actions that can be taken to make our homes more ‘green’ or environmentally friendly – but the best way to achieve this is not agreed and a range of different approaches exist.

We have spent the last two and a half years researching ‘green entrepreneurs’ and businesses working in green building and construction.  Such businesses are working with straw-bale building, growing hemp for construction and as a source of biomass, as well as providing products and services for green homes and buildings (e.g. architects specialising in a range of green building designs or ‘green’ builders merchants where sheep wool insulation or triple glazed windows can be purchased).  While change is happening within the mainstream construction industry, with technologies like solar panels becoming more common, we need a step-change in the way we build and use our homes.  As new products become available which could make our homes perform better in terms of carbon emissions, it is essential that we have skilled people able to install such products effectively and to explain these clearly to home-owners and tenants.  Ensuring the availability of such skills would mean that our homes are more environmentally friendly and cost less to run – at the moment, such new technologies are not widely available so knowledge about their installation and use is limited, but evolving.

What might a green home look like?  In the future we will have to rethink our expectations of our homes’ appearances so that we can live comfortably and affordably in a changing climate.  Below are some images indicating the degrees of difference between what can be argued to be a ‘green’ home:

The solar settlement, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany (designed by architect Rolf Disch)

The buildings in the ‘solar settlement’ have roofs which face south and have solar panels to provide electricity, they are connected to a district heating scheme (which heats water in one place and then channels this out to individual homes within a given district, so that separate boilers are not needed), and the homes are oriented to take best advantage of sunlight so that the buildings towards the rear of the development are higher than the others in order to still have sunlight hitting their solar panels.

 Straw bale holiday cottage, East Yorkshire (photo: Carol Atkinson)

This building is built using straw and other natural materials like wood (different building materials have different amounts of carbon 'embodied' within them).  The building is oriented to make the most of natural light for heating and avoiding the use of artificial light.  The building is heated by a wood-burning stove and there is no central heating – the thermal mass of the straw walls means that heat generated is stored and released slowly.  The building is fitted with low energy equipment such as a low-flow shower and water-saving toilet.

More radical designs are also being experimented with, which look significantly different from most homes at the moment.  It is likely that such experimental designs won’t be built in great numbers, but they help to challenge our thinking about how houses should or could look and be built in the future.  The following photos illustrate this:

Low-cost straw bale house in southern Scotland (see * below)

The same material, straw bales, is used in this house which looks markedly different to the straw bale holiday cottage in East Yorkshire (above).  While straw bale building can be a low cost approach there are certainly differences in construction costs – the one pictured here cost the owner just £4,000 to build (Hill 2008).  Affordability is a key concern for green buildings as some new technologies (biomass boilers, solar panels and so on) are expensive to purchase.

  

 The ‘Heliotrope’, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, Germany – a rotating, cylindrical building designed to maximise exposure to the sun for generating heat and power.

As these images suggest, ‘green’ building is of great interest in a range of countries where governments are trying to encourage a more environmentally-friendly building stock in order to reduce emissions, improve energy security and reduce resource consumption.  Many of the UK green entrepreneurs we have spoken to suggested that Germany was a forerunner in such environmentally friendly buildings and associated technologies – the British Academy funded a short piece of research where we looked at green building entrepreneurs in Germany, and we will report on the results of this research in a future blog post.

At a time when more conventional building and construction companies have been in recession, we've been surprised that the businesses we've interviewed are doing so well and expanding.  However, a clear message that we've been getting is that these businesses are particularly concerned about the lack of direction and inconsistency from the UK government which is seen to be stifling investment and growth.  Another core concern has been access to finance, especially as banks look to avoid risk and other sources of money dry up.  The time is ripe to encourage and support these green businesses and ensure that we make the most of the available opportunities so that our homes have lower emissions, running costs and are, above all, comfortable, pleasant places to live.

See Jenny Pickerill’s excellent Natural Build blog (http://naturalbuild.wordpress.com) for a further discussion of such issues.

Research results from a research project with Professor David Gibbs, University of Hull.

* http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/how-i-built-my-house-for-4000-784278.html