Faculty News

Dr. David Ciplet receives AB Nexus award for research related to AI and climate change

Elizabeth Sprout — Mon, 19 Aug 2024 17:35:03 +0000

Dr. David Ciplet receives AB Nexus award for research related to AI and climate change Elizabeth Sprout Mon, 08/19/2024 - 11:35

The AB Nexus program announced its 2024 seed grant awards to interdisciplinary research teams from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and the University of Colorado Boulder. Collectively, the seven winning teams will receive $713,000 in funding to advance cutting-edge research that improves human health and well-being.

David Ciplet (CU Boulder) and Katherine LeMasters (CU Anschutz) were part of these winning teams for their research project: "Investigating Extreme Health Risks at the Nexus of Climate Change, Incarceration and Societal Re-entry in Colorado".

This project is investigating how climate change could have a disproportionately negative effect on Colorado’s prison population—and how to mitigate those impacts and improve inmate health in the face of rising temperatures.

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ENVS Welcomes new Teaching Assistant Professors: Warren Cook and Dr. Nirav Patel

Elizabeth Sprout — Fri, 16 Aug 2024 17:05:20 +0000

ENVS Welcomes new Teaching Assistant Professors: Warren Cook and Dr. Nirav Patel Elizabeth Sprout Fri, 08/16/2024 - 11:05

As the Fall semester approaches, we are pleased to officially announce that Warren Cook and Nirav Patel have just joined our CU Boulder ENVS community as Teaching Assistant Profess.

Warren Cook (he/him) is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Environmental Studies and a PhD Candidate of Communication (Rhetoric and Culture) in the College of Media, Communication, and Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. Warren’s research and teaching focuses on the rhetoric of environmental politics, especially water justice in the U.S. American West. His work has been published in Environmental Justice and the Quarterly Journal of Speech. He received his BA in History and Interdisciplinary Honors from Westminster University and his MA in Communication (Rhetoric and Culture) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dr Nirav S. Patel is a trained natural and social scientist with a PhD from Cornell University and possesses expertise in human dimensions and has been involved in issues of sustainable development, with emphasis on the linkages between environmental and socio-economic systems. As the inaugural Civic Education and Engagement and Civil Discourse Fellows (2024-25) appointed by the Chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), Dr Patel has engaged local/state and international partners through research and education initiatives that yield collaborative experience which deepens engagements on integrative environmental science. He has developed and led novel course(s) which utilize experiential learning to teach civic engagement at the confluence of Food-Energy-Water (FEW) nexus, Global Health, and Urban Ecology. He has been successful in creating science-based community engagement to engage in building collaboration for PFAS testing in food packaging linking consumer preferences and its effect on waste streams to ecological corridors. Dr Patel is recipient of multiple fellowship awards as well as teaching excellence awards over the last decade.

Welcome Warren and Nirav!

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On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence

Elizabeth Sprout — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 17:53:28 +0000

On World Elephant Day, PhD student and researcher Tyler Nuckols emphasizes that both groups are important in human-elephant coexistence Elizabeth Sprout Tue, 08/13/2024 - 11:53

repost of article by Rachel Sauer

Almost every night, Tyler Nuckols can hear fireworks and shouting—not celebrating a holiday or marking an occasion, but trying to drive elephants back into the forest.

In Ruam Thai, Thailand, where Nuckols is conducting socio-ecological fieldwork as he pursues a PhD in the University of Colorado Boulder Department of Environmental Studies, elephants emerge from the trees of Kui Buri National Park almost every night in search of pineapple.

Over many years, elephants have learned that an easy and accessible meal is in farmers’ fields—to the detriment of those fields and farmers’ livelihoods. As farmers lose their source of income and means of supporting their families, elephants risk injury or worse as farmers—also risking injury or worse—try to deter them.

For a lot of people—mainly those who don’t coexist with elephants—this may not seem like much of a problem. Elephants, after all, are among the world’s most beloved and charismatic animals, credited with an emotional range that some claim matches or even exceeds that of humans. People visit a zoo and return home daydreaming about backyard elephants.

But on World Elephant Day, being celebrated today, Nuckols emphasizes that the challenges and successes of human-elephant coexistence encompass significant issues of sustainability, economic equity, environmental justice and agricultural adaptation that communities and populations worldwide are tackling as climate change fundamentally reshapes how humans coexist with wildlife.

“We’re interested in supporting and partnering with local communities to look at solutions to human-elephant conflict beyond the predominant approaches of ‘Where do you farm? What do you farm? How much money do you make farming?’” Nuckols explains.

"Our research and community-based conservation approach looks to explore a more complex focus related to factors like identity, access to resources and historical and political factors, among many more layers that may shape how households can engage in solutions to human-elephant conflict and participate in the first place."

Studying coexistence

Nuckols has been working with elephants for more than 10 years, starting with the Elephant Valley Project in Mondulkiri, Cambodia—an ethical sanctuary and retirement home for elephants that had worked in tourism or logging. After earning a master’s degree at Colorado State University, and after COVID curtailed his plans to return to Cambodia to study mitigation techniques to prevent elephants from entering agricultural fields, he began working with Karen Bailey, a CU Boulder assistant professor of environmental studies who leads the WELS (well-being, environment, livelihoods and sustainability) Group.

Bailey completed postdoctoral research in southern Africa with communities living outside protected areas “who were living with the threats of climate change and the impact of sharing the landscape with wildlife,” she says. “Some of the impacts of crop raiding by elephants in southern Africa were significant predictors of potential food insecurity. When that’s combined with the threats of changing seasons and changing climate as well, the realities of human-elephant coexistence in communities in and outside of conservation areas become really pronounced.”

As part of the Human Elephant Coexistence Through Alternative Agricultural Research (HECTAAR) working group with the human-elephant coexistence research organization Trunks & Leaves, Bailey and Nuckols partner with researchers and conservation groups from around the world to study the reasons for conflict between agriculturalists and elephants, as well as develop and test interventions that support livelihoods and work to rebuild community resilience and landscapes in different countries and cultures.

Nuckols began researching in Thailand in 2022, partnering with NGO Bring the Elephant Home to study human-elephant conflict and how elephants interact with different types of agricultural crops. Nuckols’ research also focuses on environmental justice and resilience, and how communities define ecological justice for both humans and elephants.

The community where Nuckols’ research is based is not only a human-elephant conflict hot spot, but also a success story for conservation and community-based tourism.

“But despite the positive impacts of tourism and some grassroots efforts, conflict occurs every night,” Nuckols says. “You can hear fireworks and shouting and people trying to get elephants back into the forest every night. So, one of the ideas that community members are evaluating is crop transition. Research has shown that elephants won’t eat lemongrass, ginger, chili, citronella, so farmers are interested in growing these crops, but the community is asking how to ensure it’s sustainable and equitable.

“Changing crops is a high-risk decision, when they know they can sell monocrop pineapple that they’ve been growing for decades.”

Risk vs. reward

A significant challenge in human-elephant coexistence is the disconnect between people actually living with or near elephants and the rest of the world that is watching and loves elephants, or at least the idea of elephants.

“Even in Thailand, there’s a huge disconnect between major urban centers like Bangkok and rural provinces,” Nuckols explains. “These farmers are often villainized or portrayed as invaders. They’ve been told they should just pack up and give elephants back their habitat, but that’s not feasible or tenable or just for those people who are being told to leave. It’s very grim, but we’ve had people die in our community from negative encounters with elephants, victims who’ve been attacked in the night while they were guarding their crops.”

Bailey notes that while the world may be watching and feeling invested in the plight of elephants, “there’s an inherent framing of environmental justice that we more equally share the costs and benefits of the environment. We as people globally benefit from elephants existing—we get a warm feeling when we think about them—but we have to remind people that there are costs. We have to think about how to more equitably share the costs and benefits. Anyone who loves elephants and might call themselves an elephant person should know and should be clear that elephant conservation simply will not work if we don’t think about those humans and elevate the human components.”

A complicating factor in some climate change discourse is the argument that humans caused it and animals are blameless in it, so animals should be prioritized in human decision making. “The important nuance is that the rural farmers in Thailand didn’t do this,” Bailey says.

“It’s the wealthy individuals all over the world who are, per capita, emitting many more tons of carbon. There’s an inherent inequity in who is causing the environmental problems, and often the people and communities experiencing the realities of environmental change aren’t key drivers of this change.”

In the community where Nuckols is studying, which is in the rain shadow of a mountain range, drought is a very serious concern. During the last dry season, the reservoir that supplies water to the community nearly dried up. Many farmers in the area grow pineapple for many reasons, one of which is that it’s considered a crop that can survive in high-heat and low-water conditions.

“In the past few years, though, temperatures in the field can soar to 43, 44 (Celsius) and so even now pineapple is struggling to survive,” Nuckols says. “Those conditions are also driving elephants more and more to the edge of the national park, where a lot of the habitat restoration has been funded by large corporate subsidiaries that don’t have time to trek into the forest and dig a water hole.

“So, you get a concentration of elephants on the edge of the forest, and as climate change gets worse, as resources get more sparse in the forest, elephants are going to go for high energy, high reward crops like pineapple. In a short hour they can devour an entire patch of pineapple that gives them the nutrients and sugar they would spend days foraging for in the dry forest. It’s basic risk versus reward.”

Just listen

In researching the complex factors influencing human-elephant conflict and coexistence, Nuckols emphasizes that a foundational principle of the work is that it’s community-driven and community-led.

“We’re involved in study and data collection, but we do everything in a framework of participatory action research,” Nuckols explains. “We pilot everything we do with focus groups in the local community, we run everything by a group of trusted stakeholders like the village chief and elders working with our organization. We ask them, ‘Is this appropriate?’ and a lot of things were thrown out the window because they’re like, ‘No way.’

“The whole group that’s growing and testing alternative crops now, which is 16 people, are community members who created a collective and are working together. We as researchers act as a bridge to help support the trial, to help find funding. We use our skills to elevate the work that this community is already doing.”

Bailey adds that the lessons learned in researching human-elephant coexistence—though the details can vary broadly between cultures, countries and regions—may inform human-wildlife coexistence in other areas, including Colorado.

“There are tons of parallels and tons of lessons to be learned that we can apply more broadly,” Nuckols says. “One of the biggest is just to listen to community members and help empower those community members. Don’t ever go in assuming you know best. Spend time in the community and pilot your work before you go in and think anything is going to work within a community. Make sure community members feel heard, have a meaningful seat at the table and feel empowered to solve these problems.”

Tyler Nuckols (second from left, blue shirt) and colleagues from Bring the Elephant Home in Thailand. (Photo: Tyler Nuckols)

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Dr. Lambert and Rosie Sanchez interviewed featured in film about the Colorado wolf reintroduction initiative

Anonymous — Sat, 20 Jul 2024 18:24:18 +0000

Dr. Lambert and Rosie Sanchez interviewed featured in film about the Colorado wolf reintroduction initiative Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 07/20/2024 - 12:24

Dr. Joanna Lambert and current PhD Student, Alma "Rosie" Sanchez have been working for years on the Colorado wolf reintroduction initiative. Now, a film series tells the success story of this initiaitve, which is the first time a federally protected endangered species has been reintroduced via a democratic vote/ballot initiative. The first film of the series features both Dr. Lambert and Rosie! It premiered on July 18, and was followed by a speaker panel in which Dr. Lambert participated (as shown in image).

See the film trailer below and learn more about this incredible iniative here.

[video:https://vimeo.com/979366728]

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ENVS Chair, Dr. Max Boykoff interviews for World Economic Forum podcast

Anonymous — Tue, 16 Jul 2024 18:47:25 +0000

ENVS Chair, Dr. Max Boykoff interviews for World Economic Forum podcast Anonymous (not verified) Tue, 07/16/2024 - 12:47

Dr. Max Boykoff, ENVS Chair, and Dr. Beth Osnes, who is the Director of Graduate Studies in Theatre & Performance Studies at CU were interviewed by the World Economic Forum's Radio Davos podcast about how they’ve been immersing students in the use of comedy to communicate the realities of climate change for about a decade now, and studying the results. Their findings point to a happy conclusion. “This can help break down defenses,” Boykoff said. “This can help us come together.”

Read more about Dr. Boykoff and Dr. Osnes' work to incorporate comedy in climate change communications in the World Economic Forums' blog here or listen to their intereview here.

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