Gregory L Simon

University of Colorado | UCD · Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences

While adapting to the impacts of climate change will require massive human efforts across landscapes, economies, and everyday social life, adaptation is rarely conceptualized as work conducted by laboring people. In this intervention, we suggest that the conditions under which this largely invisible adaptation labor is currently carried out – in wh...

In the context of discipline‐wide efforts to produce more inclusive, just, and equitable norms of geographical knowledge production, section editors for Geography Compass identify five concrete practices by which to address systemic inequities, injustices, and exclusions through their editorial work.

In this paper I examine our current post-truth politics and use the concept ‘disingenuous natures’ to describe the intersecting knowledge constructs, management practices and material conditions that enable authoritative knowledge of human-environment interactions to take hold and persist. These conditions are disingenuous because they are both art...

There is growing scholarly engagement with the role of uncertainty in questions of environmental decision-making. Yet ignorance, while prevalent in the STS literature, has received less attention in geography and cognate disciplines. In our introduction to this special collection, we review the literature on ignorance and uncertainty to make two co...

Counter-narratives to dominant development discourses are made possible using research methods designed to elicit marginalized voices. In this article, we propose a new analytical framework called the interpretive schema for drawings for analyzing visual narratives. The interpretive schema for drawings consists of five themes or interpretive lenses...

The economic empowerment of women remains a central feature of development projects worldwide. This article explores these empowerment aspirations by examining various temporal complexities related to two development projects in South India targeting individual cooking and fuel‐collection routines. It argues that three temporal considerations of ho...

Affluence and vulnerability are often seen as opposite sides of a coin—with affluence generally understood as reducing forms of vulnerability through increased resilience and adaptive capacity. However, in the context of climate change and an increase in associated hazards and disasters, we suggest the need to re-examine this dynamic relationship—a...

Pandemics have accelerated in frequency in recent decades, with COVID-19 the latest to join the list. Emerging in late 2019 in Wuhan, China, the virus has spread quickly through the world, affecting billions of people through quarantine, and at the same time claiming more than 800,000 lives worldwide. While early reflections from the academic commu...

Much of India contains complex and ambiguous post-colonial environmental histories. Within the international clean cookstove development discourse, it is assumed that fuelwood collection for cooking is a significant factor in the overexploitation of forest biomass. This brand of storytelling is certainly applied in India where a series of programs...

A decade – more or less – past the publication of the edited collection Neoliberal Environments and Neil Smith’s ‘Nature as an Accumulation Strategy’, this forum aims to revisit and reflect on neoliberal natures, both out in the world and in the scholarly literature. In this time, there have been a number of advances in our conceptual apparatus for...

In this intervention, I introduce two concepts – stealth unknown–knowns and disingenuous nature to animate and clarify key research and policy developments at the nexus of environmental governance, neoliberalism and environmental change. I use these concepts to (a) briefly distill important insights from geographers, political ecologists and other...

This intervention suggests the need to closely examine uncritical uses of 'regions' in both geographical research and resource management contexts. In particular, I argue that regions are frequently leveraged in a manner that is often indistinguishable from, and thus analytically similar to, other concepts connoting connections and relationships ac...

Flame and Fortune in the American West creatively and meticulously investigates the ongoing politics, folly, and avarice shaping the production of increasingly widespread yet dangerous suburban and exurban landscapes. The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is used as a starting point to better understand these complex social-environmental processes. Th...

This chapter provides a more nuanced depiction of vulnerability in the Tunnel Fire area. The Oakland Hills like many suburban and fire-prone areas of the West comprises residents that may not appear at first glance to be very vulnerable. The oftentimes affluent nature of these communities raises questions about what it actually means to be vulnerab...

This concluding chapter begins by using the Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona to illustrate the real risks and human tragedies that arise when fighting fires that threaten residential communities. The disaster reminds us that civil society, politicians, city planners, and private developers among others should no longer conform to fiscal pressures and i...

This chapter illuminates how the production of vulnerability proceeds through—and is supported by—interconnected economic development and resource use activities across city and regional scales. It explores the connection between lucrative resource extraction, realty speculation, reforestation, and home construction activities in the Tunnel Fire ar...

This chapter presents two debates that illustrate how key decision-makers become mired in ideologically contentious disagreements, and how these issues distract nearly all parties from directly addressing the systemic causes of fire risk at the wildland-urban interface. A first example explores contemporary debates over eucalyptus management in the...

The 1991 Oakland Hills Tunnel Fire is perhaps the most significant urban wildfire in United States history. Located in northeastern Oakland, California, and stretching northward into the city of Berkeley and east into neighboring Contra Costa County, the Tunnel Fire destroyed more than three thousand dwelling units and killed twenty-five people ove...

This chapter focuses on government retrenchment, conservative homeowner politics, and state tax restructuring spanning the 1950s to 1980s. It highlights the scalar dimensions of vulnerability-in-production. In the face of a postwar suburban growth politics—culminating in the overthrow of conventional structures of taxation—metropolitan core areas l...

This chapter presents three cases that illustrate how the underlying drivers of wildland-urban interface (WUI) wildfires frequently mischaracterize the relative role of ecological and social structures of influence. The first case explores the rather unscientific origins of the term firestorm and the credibility it is afforded as a legitimate fire...

This chapter establishes a conceptual justification for the implementation of an affluence-vulnerability interface analytic approach to manage current and prospective suburban landscapes—indeed a major characteristic of the West is the immense amount of land currently still eligible for suburban and exurban conversion. Along with this important lan...

This chapter continues the discussion of post-disaster reconstruction and fire mitigation efforts by presenting two examples that illustrate the continued extraction of profits from these high-risk areas. First, home reconstruction data in California and Colorado reveal that rebuilt homes are both bigger and more proximate to one another than prefi...

This chapter uses radio communication transcripts from the Tunnel Fire to illuminate specific challenges experienced by residents and responders alike at the time of the event. Based on these first-hand accounts, several important issues emerge concerning water, road, and power infrastructure. A review of reconstruction efforts in each area of conc...

Free download (Open Access) http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0308518X16669511. This paper examines vulnerability in the context of affluence and privilege. It focuses on the 1991 Oakland Hills Firestorm in California, USA to examine long-term lived experiences of the disaster. Vulnerability is typically understood as a condition besettin...

Across the globe wildfires are increasing in frequency and magnitude under a warming climate, impacting natural resources, infrastructure, and millions of people worldwide every year. At the same time, human encroachment into fire-prone areas has increased the potential for ignition, as well as risks and damages to human communities. In an era of i...

As human interactions with Earth systems continue to intensify, understanding the complex relationships among human activity, landscape change, and societal responses to those changes becomes increasingly important. Interdisciplinary research centered on the theme of “feedbacks” in human-landscape systems serves as a promising focus for unraveling...

Vulnerability-in-production is offered as a theoretical construct to highlight two interrelated aspects of vulnerability: a process where landscapes are altered and developed in a manner that retains their productivity for property owners and other stakeholders and a recursive and relational process that is always in production and inscribed uneven...

This paper examines the recent integration of cookstove dissemination activities into the global carbon economy. The concepts mutually supported impediments and obligatory passage points are used to advance our understanding of win–win outcomes at the climate–technology–development interface. Focusing on the recent integration of cookstove dissemin...

The international clean cookstove sector has undergone considerable growth over the past decade. We use this critical juncture – where program priorities and strategies are formalized and converted into institutional norms and practices – to review current debates and areas for future research. We focus our review on four important areas and sugges...

A recent opinion piece rekindled debate as to whether geography's current interdisciplinary make-up is a historical relic or an actual and potential source of intellectual vitality. Taking the latter position, we argue here for the benefits of sustained integration of physical and critical human geography. For reasons both political and pragmatic,...

As our understanding of complex environmental issues increases, institutions of higher education are evolving to develop new learning models that emphasize synthesis across disciplines, concepts, data, and methodologies. To this end, we argue for the implementation of environmental science education at the intersection of systems theory and service...

Leave No Trace (LNT) is a United States government educational program guiding outdoor recreationist behavior on public lands. The program consists of seven principles imploring outdoor enthusiasts to “enjoy the outdoors responsibly.” This essay employs a political ecology framework, comprised by critical consumption research and political economic...

Bringing together an interdisciplinary team of scholars, this book illustrates how and why cities are comprised by a mosaic of vulnerable human and ecological communities. Case studies ranging across various international settings reveal how "urban vulnerabilities" is an effective metaphor and analytic lens for advancing political ecological theori...

In 2010, California fell nearly 300,000 acre-ft per year (AFY) short of its goal to recycle 1,000,000 AFY of municipal wastewater. Growth of recycled water in the 48 Northern California counties represented only 20% of the statewide increase in reuse between 2001 and 2009. To evaluate these trends and experiences, major drivers and challenges that...

Fuzzy and investigative ecological boundaries are reconstituted as absolute and tangible when used to inform natural resource management policies. The process of treating symbolic representations of ecological discontinuities as if they were authentic reflections of reality represents a process of reification and may lead to inappropriate policy pr...

Achieving win-win outcomes in environment-development programs is a laudable goal, but frequently difficult to realize. In this paper we review the possibilities for win-win climate and development outcomes in programs that distribute improved efficiency cookstoves (ICS) with the use of carbon finance. We show that ICS technologies form an importan...

Domestic cookstoves in rural India have long been targeted by development programs dedicated to solving a diverse range of problems from deforestation and indoor air pollution to global warming and rural market inefficiencies. Theories on how technologies are mobilized in these design and diffusion innovation projects and what this presages for dev...

The ‘era of interdisciplinarity’ heralds collaborative inquiry as effective for addressing complex issues at the nexus of disciplinary interests. Geographers have long argued that they are particularly well-suited to contribute to interdisciplinary endeavors because of the breadth and depth that the discipline enfolds. However, within the literatur...

This paper argues that field courses can improve college students' interest and engagement not only in the environmental sciences, but also in the environmental humanities—including environmental history, philosophy, and literature. We base this argument on five years of experience teaching an environmental studies field course through the Wildland...

In this progress report we call for nature-society geographers to give greater attention to indoor environments as active political-ecological spaces. Nature-society geographers often treat such spaces as fixed and unnatural. Yet a growing body of research attests to the active role played by sites ranging from homes to factories to shopping malls...

This paper argues that field courses can improve college students' interest and engagement not only in the environmental sciences, but also in the environmental humanities—including environmental history, philosophy, and literature. We base this argument on five years of experience teaching an environmental studies field course through the Wildland...

This paper explicates the role of community-level intermediaries in post-liberalized economic sectors. Focusing on nascent commercial markets for improved, smokeless cookstoves in southwestern Maharashtra, I describe how development is encountered by three analytic groups – artisans, female stove users and NGO field officers. This study highlights...

Leave No Trace (LNT) has become the official education and outreach policy for managing recreational use in parks and wilderness areas throughout the United States. It is based on seven core principles that seek to minimize impacts from backcountry recreational activities such as hiking, climbing, and camping. In this paper, we review the history a...

This research responds to calls from within the field of urban ecology to explicitly incorporate humanities-based research in order to achieve robust interdisciplinarity. Our research provides an example of a place-based urban ecological analysis. We use this framework to analyze over a century of park planning and development within the city of Se...

A widely held belief is that only through interdisciplinarity can academics effectively address today's complex ecological problems, because these problems demand cross-disciplinary efforts and specialized knowledge from natural and social scientists. Innovative interdisciplinary research and curricula have been created to train a new generation of...

An Evaluation of the Los Angeles REgional CLean Air Incentives Market By Jacob Hawkins, Scott Lowe, Gregory Simon, and Nina Suetake The Los Angeles REgional CLean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM), is an emissions trading program implemented by the South Coast Air Quality Management District in 1994 to reduce emissions of nitrogen and sulfur oxides (...