Escargots, anyone?

I live in an urban area, without a proper garden, but every year I attempt to grow some token food crops in my Tyneside backyard: runner beans, herbs, lettuce and, if I’m feeling really optimistic, I might risk some chilli peppers and tomatoes.  It’s an endeavour that requires hope to triumph over experience, particularly after the past few dire summers.  My crops are never lavish and each runner bean probably costs more than a pack of frozen ones from the supermarket, but they do bring a sense of achievement and a brief connection with the process of food production.  This year I begin to doubt whether I will even achieve this small harvest, while the snail population explodes.  Our neighbours can probably hear my unrepeatable comments as I pick these pests off my runner beans and crunch them underfoot each evening.  No amount of culling seems to make any difference.  For many farmers, of course, snails are the least of their problems.  The unprecedented amount of rain during the summer has ruined crops in many parts of the country.  This morning, on Radio 4, I heard a farmer from Worcestershire describing the effects on his vegetable plantings.  Pea plants have been battered to the ground and potatoes are under water.  He added, however, that consumers are unlikely to see effects in the supermarkets.  The farmer has to supply at the price agreed in the original contract, and if their own crops are washed away they must buy in from elsewhere, whatever the cost.  This seems like good news for consumers, many of whom are feeling the pinch at the moment.  But it does seem to remove us even further from food production, with its inevitable ups and downs and I do wonder whether this can really be sustainable.  It seems likely that some farmers will go out of business, but will the rest of us even notice?  Increasingly, food is something we take for granted in so many ways.  The average family no longer spends a substantial proportion of its income on food (I heard 9% quoted recently, down from around 30% fifty years ago) and yet we think food is expensive.  Advertisers sell us ready meals that “save time”, implying that time spent on preparing food is time wasted.  I think that if we all attempted to grow some of our own food we would begin to value it more.  That’s why I struggle on with my containers of runner beans and my pots of herbs, in spite of the continuous battle with the snails.  This year I have even wondered whether I shouldn’t adopt a more win-win “Mediterranean” attitude, whip up some garlic butter and serve escargots for dinner!

It's just a bit of rain......

It's nearly a week now since last Thursday's "Great Flood" but everywhere in Newcastle and Tyneside people are still talking about it.  Everyone has their flood story, generally about how they managed to struggle home against all the odds, often wading through knee-high water or worse, crawling along in grid-locked traffic and sometimes having to abandon their cars.  This was exactly the moment when we arrived home from a wonderful holiday in Provence (lovely, thank you: sunshine, good food and wine and even the opportunity of fame as we were asked to appear as extras in a new film - though that's another story).  After a flight delayed by "les orages a Newcastle", we landed in rain, lightning and chaos at Newcastle Airport.  Insufficient numbers of immigration officers were trying to process the backlog of increasingly angry passengers, but this was a minor problem compared with what came later.  We soon had our own flood story, as we attempted to drive home to Tynemouth, only to get stuck in often stationary traffic and then find every potential route flooded and roads closed by the police.  There were police cars, ambulances and fire engines trying to push through the queues and attempting to deal with the flooded roads and distressed families.  Desperate parents were leaving their cars and walking miles with babies and small children.   We got home safely in the end, many hours later, but it was a very stark reminder of the power of the elements and their ability to disrupt our everyday lives.  As everyone has been telling one another in the days that followed, this was an unprecedented event in our lifetimes.  Is it attributable to environmental change and will it happen again?  I'm not a climate scientist and I wouldn't attempt to speculate on that, but we do seem to be experiencing some extreme climatic events.  Scientists tell us that environmental change is happening, and whether or not we can attribute this particular heavy rainfall to a shift in our climate, or to human activity, there may be more such incidents in the future.  So it does feel like a wake-up call for many of us.  Maybe we really do need to be more prepared, both individually and as a society.   Just as many parents now will be packing their cars with baby food and warm clothing before every journey "just in case", we may need to think much more carefully about how we develop our infrastructure and how we organise our lives, "just in case".

Sparking new initiatives

I had assumed that as most of the Relu research projects have finished things might quieten down a bit at the Relu Director's Office.  Although this is the case from an administrative point of view, communications seem as busy as ever.  This is gratifying as we did make an argument for extending my role until March next year on the basis that there was more value to be extracted from the programme.  But as I have been starting to put together our next newsletter I have been particularly struck by the amount of activity now being sparked off by Relu, with plenty of news still to tell.  Researchers who dipped their toes into interdisciplinarity, often for the first time, via a Relu project, are moving on to new ventures.  These often build on Relu research.  We are also seeing real impacts coming through as ideas from the research emerge as mainstream thinking.  It's a subtle process and one that we have tried to pin down during the recent evaluation work carried out for ESRC.  It certainly feels as though Relu lives on and has had effects both in academia and the wider world.  A recent meeting with the heads of the research councils was very encouraging, if probing at times, and once again I felt that this is an initiative I'm glad to be part of.

Having fun in Rufshire

The highlight of my week was a trip to Birmingham to an event put on by Relu's Managing Environmental Change at the Rural Urban Fringe project.  They really came up trumps at our Relu conference in November at The Sage in Gateshead.  Asked to put on an interactive activity rather than giving the usual academic paper and powerpoint presentation, they designed a game - Rufopoly - to help people involved in the planning process to think about the competing demands on land.  It's a key challenge at this meeting place of the urban and the rural.  At Wednesday's event Principal Investigator Alister Scott confessed that on its first outing in Gateshead they hadn't really worked out how the game would be played.  I should have realised this as the Rufopoly board had only just arrived from the printer.  There had been some considerable anxiety about its arrival and the team hadn't actually seen the final product.  But nobody would have guessed this as they quickly got everyone involved in playing out their ideas on how Rufshire should approach its planning dilemmas.  The game is a good example of how being forced out of one's comfort zone can prompt creativity.  Since then the idea has developed considerably.  It has been trialled with planning professionals, councillors, students and policymakers from the Welsh Assembly Government.  Wednesday's workshop brought some more key stakeholders together to evaluate rufopoly's usefulness and look at how it might be used more widely.  People attending included local authority representatives, policymakers and third sector organisations.   They were bursting with ideas about different ways in which the game could be developed - for engaging residents in debates, for 6th form geographers, a training tool for elected members on planning committees.  Could versions be developed that showed real planning areas?  What about a computer version on the lines of Sim City?  Rufopoly is just one tool to emerge from the huge Relu programme but for me it represents one of our major objectives: to do science more creatively, in a way that can engage people in unfamiliar processes, and to encourage more fun! 

Reflections on Twitter and timing

Earlier this year I overcame my remaining technophobia and launched Relu into the Twittersphere.  I had been putting it off, conscious of the time commitment.  But as everyone now seems to have this kind of virtual presence it seemed that we could no longer avoid joining in.  I was right of course, it has the potential to take up most of one's time, scrolling through other people's messages, clicking onto the funny pictures and even reading relevant articles from time to time.  Research programmes, organisations and government departments are generally making good use of Twitter to get their messages out with an immediacy that could never have been achieved just a few years ago.  But I have also been struck by the numbers of individuals who have taken to using Twitter to generate discussion and to build networks around topics that interest them.  I even have individual farmers "following" us at Relu.  This does seem to be a tool that allows us to communicate directly with stakeholders in a way that would otherwise be almost impossible.  It also means of course that we have to be prepared for more direct feedback, both good and bad.   Twitter has become notorious for spats, generally involving celebrities.  I don't think any of our Twitter exchanges will make it in to the headlines but I can see that this kind of two-way open communication makes it much easier for disagreements to arise.  As we have always taken the view that feedback is good, whether positive or negative in tone, I don't think this should be seen as a problem.  It may be worth remembering however, that an immediate response isn't always the best response.  Also, I'm conscious that I'm less likely to read contributions from those who tweet constantly and unremittingly about everything.  The world of communication is changing and tools like Twitter form just one element of that.  When we email press releases out now or post them on news sites they pop up almost immediately on a huge range of web news feeds across the world.  I know, because I can search for our news using Google.  As I am old enough to remember the effort that used to go into stuffing hundreds of printed releases into envelopes to catch the last post of the day, and then the hours spent scouring all the printed media to see who had used them, this seems rather miraculous.  But some rules do still apply.   Constant communication can become no more than a background hum that is ignored by the target audience, so there's a lot to be said for keeping one's power dry until there is something worth communicating.  Timing is important too, and now may not always be the best time.    Most of all, whatever tools we use to convey the messages, the content of our communication has to be right.

Writing it how it is

Recently I have had a lot of emails and phone calls from other programmes wanting to know more about how we do communications in Relu and, in particular, how we produce our policy and practice notes.  It's always pleasing to receive positive comments about one's work and the PPN series in particular does seem to be very well received.  But I also feel slightly bemused that the idea of writing these kinds of accessible notes about research seems to be novel.  I know there are a lot of scientists out there doing great work on public engagement and making research accessible, but it still isn't something that happens routinely.  Many scientists who want to write in a more popular style find it very difficult.  I remember science lessons at primary school and even at that early stage we were instructed in how to set out the account of the experiment, with the method, results and conclusion in their proper order, all written in the third person.  I could understand the reasons for this but found the format rather off-putting.  I enjoyed science but my attempts were always, I suspect, a little haphazard.  The incident when my electrical circuit caught fire is particularly memorable so it's probably just as well that I ended up taking arts subjects at "A" level.  However, my degree is in archaeology and this probably gave me my first experience of interdisciplinarity, as it required some knowledge of a range of subjects, including history, geography and physics.  If I tried to explain the principles of carbon dating now they would probably sound rather garbled, but I would like to think I still have some basic understanding of them.  This rather eclectic background means that I have never felt constrained by the "scientific" writing style that is considered necessary for publication in top journals and which, in my opinion, hampers so many academics when they attempt to write for a wider audience.  So the most useful advice I can give to others who want to produce a publication similar to the Relu PPNs is to ignore their early training in science writing and think about explaining their research to someone who is interested in the science but isn't a scientist - someone like me, in fact.

Good badger, bad badger?

A friend recently confessed to me that when she discovered she had mice living in her kitchen she put cheese out for them.  She thought I would disapprove and she was right.  I wouldn't want to share a kitchen with animals that I regard as potential carriers of disease.  I also noted that when my friend thought a rat had moved in she immediately rang the local council's pest controller rather than leaving out larger portions of cheese.  But it did bring home to me how very selective we humans are in our attitude towards animals.   A vet was telling me that "house rabbits" are now commonly kept as pets, while personally I regard rabbit as rather a tasty ingredient for a casserole.  On the other hand, I do feel a slight shock at the idea of eating dogs, but in other parts of the world this would be commonplace.   So some research by one of Relu interdisciplinary fellows about the historical basis for public attitudes to badgers, it did ring a few bells for me.  I must confess that even now Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows is one of my favourite books and perhaps it has coloured my attitudes.  Certainly when I worked in a rural area where there were several badger setts I always felt rather privileged to see those mysterious black and white shapes in crossing the road in the the early morning, or disappearing into the woods at dusk.  At the same time I am all too aware of the problems faced by many farmers as a result of bovine TB.  So I was interested to read the article by Angela Cassidy about the "good badger" and the "bad badger" and how these conflicting images have polarised the debate, with negative consequences for policymaking .  Of course, on mature reflection, I realise that Mr Badger in The Wind in the Willows is in no sense a wild animal, but rather the wise adult we would all like to have on hand to advise us, whatever our age.  To endow the real badger with any of his human characteristics is ridiculous.  But perhaps that is why we need social science as well as natural science: to tell us about ourselves and our often illogical humanity.