Additional Papers Associated with Science-Conservation Case Study Assignment, Science and Value Systems, Parasitology and the Male Species

Okay, I'm being a bit repetitive here, particularly with the "iceberg model." There is one part of this "perception" that I do not agree with... tremendously. And this would be the notion that the "scientific value system" is completely dichotomous from the "public and political value system." I mean, even the metrics of measurement and monitoring systems are dichotomous. I think that is 100% bullshxt to dichotomize our world (the scientific world) versus the "outside world."

I talked to Julia and Karl about this--how the underlying ways of human thinking in science are shaped and framed by our value systems. Dr. Ed Keller in the preliminary Goleta Beach video that was displayed in UCSB's Shoreline Preservation website--Dr. Keller stated that no matter what type of science we do, our overarching decisions in management ultimately reflect our value systems, which is not necessarily science. He didn't say this exactly the way how I said it, but it was nice for a scientist to admit this. I specifically told Julia (my upcoming roommmate) that to consider the course in parasitology that I took with Dr. Armand Kuris in winter of 2003. There were three philosophical approaches to parasites: negative (obviously), neutral, and positive. Humans have learned much about parasites and the human body throughout history due to the concept of our own survival, ailing, and sickness due to those little bastards draining our bodies of nutrients and energy. Our knowledge of parasites are largely medical driven, even today. But Armand takes a unique approach. He (as well as Dr. Kevin Lafferty in the US Geological Survey) specializes in "ecological parasitology" in which parasites are studied in a "distant, detached" version. For example, the study of primitive cestodes (tapeworms) in the guts of sharks. All the scientists due is study the system as is, with no interventionist approach. We may study the life cycle of the rosette-like parasite in the shark gut, but with no intention of playing vetenarian and trying to kill the parasite in the shark. We do not imply that the shark is even in great pain! It's totally absurd to think about.... And, now beside the distant, neutralist, stand-offish approach is the "positive approach." I have seen Kevin Lafferty in particular work on how to assess "ecosystem health" by counting the number of parasites found in certain hosts, like the number of digene trematodes found in Cerithidea horn snails in our Pacific Coast salt marshes (hopefully I'm saying this right, I am mentally rusty with my parasites). Armand and Kevin have also worked on the "enemy release hypothesis," such that certain invasive species (at least in the invertebrate world, and even the plant world) display their "invasive" success, particularly because in the new region they are becoming compatible, chummy, and "virulent" (beside their high "frequency of encounter" in the region), is largely due to the lack of parasitic enemies to control their population levels. There are typically more parasites found in the invasive species in their habitat of origin. You can even apply this knowledge to humans who have traveled from the "Old World" to the "New World." Not only, these pilgrims escaped religious and political persecution, but they also were free from a high density and diversity of old-world diseases. Unfortunately, several of these old-world diseases were brought over to America, and the native Americans paid the price for that.... Anyway, in parasitology, there are negative, neutralist, and positive value systems and approaches, which ultimately govern what types of scientific questions we ask, and how we apply this scientific knowledge to the management and innovation of ecological systems, whether this ecological system is a salt marsh, a shark gut, or the human body itself.

One more aside, Armand and Kevin also study how parasites engage in "behavioral alteration" of its host to increase the likelihood of the parasite being transferred to its next "habitat," such that the parasite can continue its life cycle. It's total Alien-movie mind games. Just like guys. Guys, man. Like parasites to poor female brains. You can make an entire philosophical analogy of parasites and the male species. Chance encounter. Developing Compatibility. Total random chance. Huh, Matt? I have written quite a bit about this actually. More to come....

Favorite Powerpoint Slides for the Coastal Baja California Conservation Presentation in Ben Halpern's Class

If you happen to know and care, Matt. Sorry, I'm beating a dead horse. I am getting used you just being a mental thought experiment once again. Just an abstract concept in my mind. Not a tangible reality. So, above are three powerpoint presentation slides I converted to jpegs. The official title of my powerpoint presentation is "Case Study in Progress: Marine Vital Signs Monitoring in the Tijuana-San Quintin Coastal Corridor: Laying the Roadmap for a Cooperative Public-Private Conservation Partnership." I gave the presentation on July 23, 2007. It went rather well, though some of my slides, I do admit, were unaesthetic and seeminly crammed with too much information, though the case was I was just trying to show to the class my basic role involved in the conference, like editing the draft "Conceptual Model" for the region, and showing how species lists were being formed. And what existing scientific papers were already in existence that shaped the organization of the conference I attended. I believe I was the only graduate student there. Thanks to Dr. Ernesto Franco for letting me get into the conference through the back door. I am glad I had an opportunity to talk to the class about this experience. It was draining some old demons I acquired at UC Riverside.

Milton Love made comments on how I went to grad school at UCR for one year when BOTH of my parents work there. Pretty incestuous. No one was taking me seriously. And as a result, I was not taking them seriously. I felt I didn't have a right to say anything simply because I might get "preferential treatment" due to my parents circumstance. I felt my voice was suppressed and I had no say about what can be done and how things can be changed. I couldn't voice what I thought and what I felt... to a point I could only vent to my "outsider" psychologist: Ann Aasen through the UCR Student Health Center. I don't want prefential treatment. I want to just be Victoria, and I want to be known and respected out of my own intrinsic abilities and contributions and merit, not simply because, "Oh. You're Rich Minnich's daughter." Barry, a botanist at UCLA, at one point said, "Oh. You're the daughter of that famous fire ecologist. I see." Okay, fine, that's pretty cool for someone to say that, but overall I'm tired of that bullshxt. That's why when I write, my pen-name is just "Victoria" and not "Victoria Minnich." I heavily identify with my father philosophically, holistically, "spiritually" in terms of who I am and what I have been shaped to be, but sometimes it's a bit much to acquire relationships with people merely because of our biological relationship. This is beside the point, but it seems like everything I am writing is beside the point. I guess that's what happens when I am attempting to mentally recooperate myself from a temporary mental divorce from a male specimen....

There are several things I have learned about the Baja California circumstance. As my father and I tend to theorize about how to re-construct human-environmental policy, my dad one night (in September of 2005, right before my year at UCR grad school started) stated that "The landscape is not a blank check." Oooh. Now, here's a fire ecologist getting into revamping theories of environmental economics! It's like saying that you have to re-map values and knowledge on landscapes, and re-assign economic values to everything (positive and negative) within a given region, simply because our existing economic systems are so skewed, incomplete, and unaccounting for so many factors.... I wonder how Dr. Linda Fernandez (UCR) or Dr. Chris Kostello of UC Santa Barbara would take such a comment? Good question to ask.... The other thins I learned through participation of this conference are listed in one of the power point slides. I was thoroughly amused at the novelty of perceiving several scientists and community agencies of various disparate disciplines all in once room, conversing with each other, benignly, all because they are concerned about one thing: the future of the human and environmental health of the rapidly developing, rampantly decaying coastal Baja California region. Ernesto Franco advised me to observe "the sociology of scientists," and how scientists of disparate fields tend to interact with each other. In the end, he stated that everyone was rather civilized. The other three points on the powerpoint slide I either talked about (how much knowledge scientists and policy-makers need to do some Theodore Roosevelt "big stick" swinging) or I am apathetic to discuss right now--the lack of "conceptuality" of the the Draft Conceptual Model, and how Gary Davis refrained scientists from discussing potential policy ideas and hyperfocused on what we needed to do enact systematic long-term monitoring of the region. It's tragic to think that there has been not much of a follow-up from this conference (held Spring of 2006). I guess things continue to slip and shift and slip down in Baja California. The appalling tragedy of all of this coastal development and change in Baja California is that I have been witnessing this in my own lifespan! 15 years! Sheesh!

Syllabus for My First Course in Marine Conservation with Dr. Ben Halpern, Blue Horizons, Summer 2007

It's kind of ironic. I am 26 years old. Technically I am "1" year old (considering that female species don't mature till age 25 and male species don't mature till age 50). Okay, so my dad is 11 years old, I believe. My sister is -1. My mother is by far the oldest. Perhaps around 25 years of age. But okay, given my existence of 26 earth revolutions around the sun, you would think that I would have taken some form of official "conservation" course. But the truth of the matter is I hadn't, until Ben Halpern's course this summer. Overall it was a great course. It made me think about things I want to think about, like invention and implementation of creative "adaptive management" bureaucracies for effectively solving management problems. But unfortunately, we received few lectures on such things, and the beginning of the class focused more on the typical "depress me" with doom-and-gloom components of "the world is going to hxll," and more particularly our oceans.... Ben is very to the point and gets to the meat of issues. He made us bring in ocean news articles, and we had brief discussions on such issues in the beginning of class. Not only that, Ben made us write a news article off of a scientific article, in which Paul Dayton of Scripps was one of the co-authors! Paul Dayton is one of my all-time heroes, and his lecture at UCLA in 2004 "The Loss of Nature and the Nature of Loss" was one of the "last straws" that made me go on leave of absence to write my philosophy of ecology book, Question Reality. I wanted to interview Paul Dayton for the science article, but there was not enough time. Plus the paper was actually 3 or 4 years old. "Old news," basically. I am thankful Ben made us write the paper, though I wished he had a formal lecture on how to go about systematically writing a science journal article, something he did not do. I know that many people in the class did not even know how to write a scientific article, let alone translate a scientific article in lay terms for the public. I think several students in the class were in great disadvantage. In addition, I added a level of critique in my journal article, mainly because of my one year of writing critiques of scientific papers for the UCLA Ecology and Evolution Department. The second big project Ben had us to do was a presentation on a hot topic in conservation... how scientific findings are being specifically applied to a suite of conservation and management issues. This allowed me to pull out some old demons in my two year mental rabbit hole: I revisited my experience at a conference in Tijuana addressing the threats of rapid development along the coast of Baja California, primarily from Ensenada to the United States border. I wished I could have done a better job in my presentation, though several people thought that what I did in class was quite thorough.

Though many people thought this conservation class would be review for me, it ended up not being so. It was close to "right where I left off" in terms of my own personal knowledge regimes of what I know and what I don't know of the world.

The marine conservation class on its own was very good, but in the context of the budding Blue Horizons Film Program, the class was a bit inappropriate. The primary goal of Blue Horizons is to create a film on a regional environmental issue, and it would be more important to transform Ben's class into a more guest-lecture seminar, inviting local representatives from several agencies to give talks about the issues they work with. In addition, local field trips should have been arranged such that we could become visually oriented to such regional issues. I honestly thought the course was going to be a spitting image of Dr. Miriam Polne-Fuller's epic, life-changing Shoreline Preservation Course that I took as an undergrad TWICE (yep, it's THAT good). If the course were structured as above, and students would have had direct access to the people and places that would be potentially filmed, I bet most of the students would have started their projects a LOT earlier... than instead of cramming within the last couple of weeks. I admit I crammed in terms of editing the film, but I started my project rather early, and racked up 25 hours of film by the time the course was close to being over!