Factoring Humans into the Environmental Picture
Instead of Seeing Local People as Poachers or Polluters,
Social Scientist Lisa Campbell Views Them as Part of the Landscape
p.4
“With a lot of conservation work, we have good
data about the biology and then anecdotal data—as in ‘my thoughts
on spending time in the field’—about human communities,” she
says. “I think it’s really dangerous if you develop a management
plan based on your impressions of what’s going on.”
So Campbell is a strong advocate of interdisciplinary
teams that can do both the biology and the social science.
She is currently a member of such a team, contributing the
socio-economic piece to a study on Caribbean turtles. Led
by a researcher from the University of Wales, the group is
evaluating the status of the marine turtle populations in
the United Kingdom’s five Caribbean “overseas territories,”
and Bermuda. In addition to studying turtle populations, the
team is looking at the role of legal and illegal turtle harvests
in local communities. So they needed someone like Campbell,
says Brendan J. Godley of the University of Wales and the
project leader.
“When I was assembling the team, it was apparent
that although we had great expertise regarding marine turtle
monitoring, genetics, environmental education and the promotion
of community participation in research, we did not have a
sufficiently strong grounding in the socio-economic approaches
to marine turtle use,” he says. “We needed to find an expert,
and Lisa was our first contact. We were most delighted that
she was able to join us. She brings a suite of scientific
disciplines into the project’s portfolio.”
In addition to her turtle work, Campbell also
has branched out in other directions. She spent much of the
past four years looking at the human impact of water supply
policies in Malawi. In coming to Duke, she hopes to focus
her work on turtles once again and the marine environment.
Since moving from Canada, Campbell says she’s
been enjoying the relatively mild Carolina weather and the
beach sunsets. She brought a family of sorts with her when
she moved from Canada to North Carolina—three of her graduate
students. She says they’ve taken a team approach to moving
to a new place. And lest anyone think she takes herself too
seriously, she admitted at press time that she was reading
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Campbell says she enjoys teaching and her students
and colleagues speak fondly of her. Godley notes her "vitality
and good humor,” while graduate student James Abbott values
Campbell as a mentor.
“Lisa’s strongest and most important quality
is her committment to making her students believe in themselves,"
says Abbott, who is studying the fishing livelihoods in Southern
Africa. "She is absolutely committed to helping her students
in the considerable academic and personal challenges that
come with a graduate degree."
Not that she coodles them. In both her previous
and current teaching experiences, she finds that many of the
students that come to her research design class are well-versed
in quantitative methods, but not the kind of qualitative research
she also conducts. Others come to her conservation and development
class with strongly held notions about how best to protect
the environment that she doesn't always agree with. So it
is a learning process for both the student and the teacher.
“It’s interesting to see them open up to issues,”
she says. "They have very well defined objectives. Getting
them to say you can still be committed to environmental issues
without being an extreme preservationist has been an interesting
exercise."
Tinker Ready is a health and science writer
based in Cambridge, Mass
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