Paradox

Have you ever come across a new idea or concept which hasn't been part of your thinking before, and then in the following weeks, found it cropping up in everything you read? Paradox is one of those for me. First it cropped up in an article by James Proctor which I found useful in forming the conclusion to an essay about the role of Geography in the field of Political Ecology. Proctor cites Kierkegaard's view that be ability to "retain paradox is the mark of good inquiry" (1998) in calling for a geography which does not flatten reality under a forced nature-culture dualism, and this clarified for me the argument that I had formed to argue a similar point.

Having thought about this, the notion of paradox suddenly started to seem central to other aspects of my reading - particularly in work questioning the meanings of 'nature', for example Cronon's edited book Uncommon Ground. And again in literature about happiness, which I was using to explore how the economic concept of utility has failed to produce outcomes which maximise human happiness. Much of the happiness literature described how a paradoxical notion of self/the individual as divided and separate from society has tended to produce flawed understandings of happiness.

And most recently, one of the two comments posted in response to posts on this blog has been from Geoffrey Edwards, for whom paradox forms a central interest and subject of two blogs. The suggestion there is that we are in the middle of a paradigm shift from a dominance of orthodoxy to one of paradoxy. Read more here.

Anyone else have anything else to say about paradoxes?

Recurring Tree Metaphor

An element of the last post about potential futures resembling branches of a tree must have stuck in my mind over the past week - now in planning a review piece about political ecology I find myself using the same metaphor to describe the role of geography in drawing together thinking about human-environment interaction.

This time the roots of the tree are a range of factors affecting an event or situation - political, socio-cultural, economic, biophysical, leading to the contemporary expression of that event or situation - the trunk of the tree. This event could be any aspect of human-environment interaction - environmental degradation, global climate change, the HIV/AIDS epidemic - all of which are complex issues affected by a range of factors and studied by specialists from a range of disciplines. The suggestion is that geography has the ability to draw together these diverse range of inputs (from a range of different epistemological positions), and to map a range of possible future scenarios - the branches of the tree.

The original idea behind this came from a UNAIDS document entitled Aids in Africa: Three Scenarios to 2025 which uses the tree metaphor as a scenario building and storytelling device - drawing on scenario methodology promoted by the Royal Dutch Shell corporation (not a common source of inspiration for me...)