Selling Rosen to the University

[John Kineman <***>]

Hi Tim and others,

I am trying to introduce some Rosen concepts to the Environmental
Studies Dept. and a Cooperative Institute for Research in the
Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It is a
very conservative group and strongly biased toward physical science, but
there are some ecologists who would like to create a focus. I'm
wondering if any of our Rosen colleagues would have some advice.

I'm thinking that we have a chance in ecosystem management and
informatics (including remote sensing, GIS, modeling, databases, etc),
where complexity is fairly openly acknowledged as important in both the
science and management picture (but few clues on what to do about it). I
had great success introducing it to a coastal working group this last
year of the Global Terrestrial Observing System. We were brainstorming a
coastal observing system implementation plan, which will be out soon. I
suggested that we take a functional / relational approach to defining
and mapping ecological services. That was unanimously accepted, and Dan
Baird (also working with Bob Ulanowitz) added the idea of functional
clusters. The group felt it was somewhat novel, since most
classifications focus on defined stratifications rather than functional
models, so I'm excited about that. The need for ecosystem informatics
related to biodiversity has been formalized in an NSF-NASA-USGS
document.  As we begin to propose a university research group focused
similarly, I'm now wondering (not totally naively) what difficulties to
anticipate.

I don't think there's any deep work going on here in cybernetics or
semiotics, although probably some aspirants. I suppose physiologists and
molecular biologists should be interested, but not sure where they are
at (how typical is interest like Don M's? I'm guessing not very). Most
biologists here would be a tough nut to crack -- mostly Darwinian
fundamentalists except for a few who take animal consciousness
seriously, but most of that is on a moral dimension dealing with ethics,
animal rights, and environmental activism. The policy group should take
it seriously as a social model but is too locked up in the idea of
literary debate to take any causal view at all. Already I ran into some
strong resistance from policy and philosophy; two areas that I think
could benefit most. It seems that the few true system ecologists are
very much interested, except for fears of comitting some kind of
epistemological sin (fears borrowed from positivist traditions, to be
sure). We have the ear of the Dean of Libraries, and while that may not
seem highly relevant at first glance, he is quite interested in the
whole emerging field of informatics and information complexity.
Geography may have some interests, although I doubt anyone there would
really get into the theory much.

The recommendation we are pushing is to start a research theme in
"ecological informatics" but I will have to get past a number of
physical scientists, chemists, and molecular biologists in the target
institute.

Anyway, I have so little experience with University politics I wondered
if anyone could give me some hints or success/horror stories..