Keith G. Tidball

Cornell University | CU · Department of Natural Resources & Environment

In disaster recovery situations, including the post-Katrina recovery in New Orleans, greening behavior (i.e., the planting of trees, flowers and other plants) is thought to play an important role in social, ecological and economic recovery. In this paper, we use agent-based modeling to investigate and understand the roles of green attachment (which...

Human relationships with trees can result in widespread citizen-led reforestation projects that catalyze social–biological-reinforcing feedback loops and set in motion virtuous cycles that restore perturbed social–ecological systems. These virtuous cycles confer resilience in such systems that counterbalance the tendency for vicious cycles to be tr...

The role of community-based natural resources management in the form of “greening” after large scale system shocks and surprises is argued to provide multiple benefits via engagement with living elements of social-ecological systems and subsequent enhanced resilience at multiple scales. The importance of so-called social-ecological symbols, especia...

Creation and access to green spaces promotes individual human health, especially in therapeutic contexts among those suffering traumatic events. But what of the role of access to green space and the act of creating and caring for such places in promoting social health and well-being? Greening in the Red Zone asserts that creation and access to gree...

This contribution builds upon contemporary work on principles of biological attraction as well as earlier work on biophilia while synthesizing literatures on restorative environments, community-based ecological restoration, and both community and social-ecological disaster resilience. It suggests that when humans, faced with a disaster, as individu...

Did the COVID-19 pandemic bring people together or push them apart? While infectious diseases tend to push people apart, crises can also bring people together through positive interdependence. We studied this question by asking an international sample (N = 1,006) about their inclinations to cooperate, perceptions of interdependence (i.e., shared fa...

Wild-caught foods including game and fish can be part of a local, sustainable food system. Beneficial environmental, personal health, and nutrition claims are often linked to locally-sourced foods. Yet, because many species of wild game and fish that are legal to hunt or catch do not have nutrient data in the USDA food composition database these cl...

Despite the effectiveness of face masks in reducing the spread of COVID-19, many people refused to wear them. Previous studies have shown how a variety of demographic and individual difference factors (e.g., political orientation, stress, perceived risk of infection) predict use of masks. However, people’s health protective behavior can vary depend...

What explains differences in attitudes towards wearing protective face masks to limit the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus? We investigated potential drivers of attitudes about mask wearing as part of a longitudinal study during the COVID-19 pandemic (N-participants = 711, N-countries = 36), focusing on people’s perceptions and feelings about seeing...

Describes how field sports, particularly hunting, contribute to reductions in feelings of isolation, disconnection, and disassociation among returning veterans, due to ancient but evolving cultural contexts, meanings, and rituals of field sports, which eventually become entangled in tribe-like individual and group identities, rituals, and symbols.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, wearing protective facial masks has become a divisive issue, yet little is known about what drives differences in mask wearing across individuals. We surveyed 711 people around the world, asking about mask wearing and several other variables. We found that people who reported greater perceived risk of i...

The notion that fly-fishing can be therapeutic is not new. According to Gierach, "They say you forget your troubles on a trout stream, but that's not quite it. What happens is that you begin to see where your troubles fit into the grand scheme of things, and suddenly they're just not such a big deal anymore." A quick search on the internet of the p...

Did the COVID-19 pandemic bring people together or push them apart? We asked an international sample (N = 1,006) about their inclinations to cooperate, perceptions of interdependence with others, and perceived risk of COVID-19 infection on fourteen different occasions from March 6, 2020 to August 22, 2020. We found that willingness to cooperate dec...

Introduces an alternative interpretation of Appalachian serpent handling focused on media sensationalization and celebrity-making of serpent handlers.

In "Greening in the Red Zone: Disaster, Resilience, and Community Greening," Tidball and Krasny make the case that creation of and access to green spaces promotes individual human health and community healing, especially in therapeutic contexts among those suffering traumatic events, asserting that making and being in green spaces confers resilienc...

In the early 1990s land grant universities worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) to develop a disaster education program to be coordinated via collaborations among U.S. state cooperative extension systems. Given that this Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) is funded directly and indirectly via USDA funding, and given that t...

Addressing participatory, transdisciplinary approaches to local stewardship of the environment, Grassroots to Global features scholars and stewards exploring the broad impacts of civic engagement with the environment. Chapters focus on questions that include: How might faith-based institutions in Chicago expand the work of church-community gardens?...

Farming is one of the oldest professions, probably about as old as soldiering. Historically, the two were often interlinked, even in the recent story of the birth and development of the United States. It's no wonder that soldiers returning from the last ten plus years of warfare in the Middle East are turning to farming as a route to reintegration...

The field of human-dimensions of wildlife management has traditionally not engaged in social-ecological system (SES) resilience thinking and adaptive management in a systematic way. This essay focuses on the resilience of mountain forest social-ecological systems in Japan by focusing on three interacting megafauna; sika deer (Cervus nippon), grey w...

Concerns within the conservation community about declining hunting participation and associated conservation consequences have catalyzed hunter recruitment and retention strategies targeting nontraditional hunting populations. One emerging group of interest includes individuals motived to eat food that is grown, raised, produced, or harvested local...

Motivations for seeking local food include eating foods for quality, nutritional value, ethics and environmental concerns. Wild foods, such as wild game and fish, are increasingly included as a local food source, yet many legally procured species of wild game and fish lack knownnutrition information in the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standa...

Social-ecological traps are theorized to be present when human actions affect feedbacks and drivers in social-ecological systems, which, in turn, lead to regime shifts that may alter ecosystem capacity to generate services on which human wellbeing depends, and this, in turn, triggers societal responses, where actors and institutions interact with e...

The interconnections between community resilience and vulnerability are complex and fraught. They are also different in kind and scope from aspects of ecological resilience described in earlier chapters. Building on interviews conducted with community leaders and experts in 2014 and reported in chapter 6, this chapter highlights best practices that...

The challenges and opportunities for resilience for urban estuaries such as Jamaica Bay come from the people who live, work, and visit there. Soils, rocks, and the weather; birds, fish, and salt marsh grasses, may or may not be resilient on their own terms, but what human beings do and how we think is where resilience practice by people begins. Thr...

The view from Rulers Bar Hassock in the center of Jamaica Bay is at once wild and urban. You can watch shorebirds hunt for the eggs of horseshoe crabs, and lift your eyes to Wall Street skyscrapers on the horizon. Rulers Bar is an amalgamation of human and nonhuman processes in its own right. Having decayed in recent decades due to increasing pollu...

Brief review, to be a part of a larger document provisionally titled Grand Challenges for Military Behavioral Health, resulting from a summit held at the Center for Innovation and Research on Veterans and Military Families (CIR) USC School of Social Work, University of Southern California in early 2015.

Community gardens have historically played an important role in the social-ecological resilience of New York City (NYC). These public-access communal gardens not only support flora and fauna to enhance food security and ecosystem services, but also foster communities of practice which nurture the restorative and communal aspects of this civic ecolo...

Marvin Gaye Park in Washington DC wasn’t always a nice pathway along Watts Branch Creek. Not long ago, it was a “broken place” – strewn with litter and frequented by drug addicts. Still today, trash abounds in the creek, and young people from nearby neighborhoods wade into the water to extract the trash from a weir called a Bandalong trap. The tran...

In communities across the country and around the world, people are coming together to rebuild and restore local environments that have been affected by crisis or disaster. In New Orleans after Katrina, in New York after Sandy, in Soweto after apartheid, and in any number of postindustrial, depopulated cities, people work together to restore nature,...

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) funds the Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) through the Food and Agriculture Defense Initiative (FADI) to improve the nation’s ability to mitigate, prepare for, prevent, respond to, and recover from disasters. As such, EDEN provides the U...

This chapter takes a reflective approach in exploring hunting as a form of outdoor recreation with benefits to the returning combatant. This is explored in a few sequential steps, by first introducing the author's own intertwined military and outdoor recreation story, moving into the transition of that history into scholarly interests, and finally...

We conducted an exploratory study to determine the motivations of volunteer oyster gardeners in New York City (NYC), and the memories, meanings, and sense of place they associate with their work. Oyster gardeners are volunteers who place cages with young oysters at agreed upon locations, and monitor the oysters’ growth and survival. Open-ended inte...

*Addresses linkages between sustainability, transition and sustainable peace *Focuses on peace, environmental education, community-based ecological restoration and ability expectation *Underlines the need to combat trafficking of women and children by transnational crime rings in Nigeria, a national security threat This book has peer-reviewed chapt...

A growing network of social and ecological scientists argue that change is to be expected and planned for, and that identifying sources and mechanisms of resilience in the face of change is crucial to the long-term well-being of humans, their communities, and the local environment. This ‘change’ can include armed conflict and civil unrest, especial...

Purported growth in the number of people who are motivated to eat food that is grown, raised, produced, or harvested locally (“locavores”) has catalyzed efforts to understand the mechanisms fueling the locavore movement. To date, much of this research has focused on local, small-scale agricultural producers and consumers. However, growing emphasis...

A growing number of environmental educators have become interested in urban environmental education practice – in practice that is specifically tailored to the unique needs and characteristics of urban social-ecological systems. A clear conceptualization of the defining characteristics of healthy urban social-ecological systems can make an importan...

Discursive traps exist, and they are a unique type of either rigidity or poverty traps.Anthropocentric discursive traps act as barriers to transformation and must therefore be understood in order to be able to mitigate, dismantle, adapt to or ameliorate. What we say and think about our selves within Social-Ecological Systems matters .

We highlighted gaps in nutritional data for wild game meat and wild caught fish that have a regulated harvesting season in New York State, and examined the possible role that wild game and fish play in current trends towards consumption of local, healthy meat sources. This project is part of larger study that examines family food decision-making, a...

The locavore movement presents an opportunity to educate citizens about the nutritional and culinary benefits associated with consumption of wild fish and game, as well as demonstrate the benefits and value of hunting and fishing activities. An integrated research and extension program focused on procuring, preparing, and eating wild fish and game...

This introductory chapter reviews the conceptualization of peace and ecology and the efforts in the scientific literature to link both areas. The authors expand upon the conceptualization of peace since the 1980s and the widening of the ecology concept from the natural to the social sciences, and then discuss linkages between peace and different ec...

Wildlife conservation is an activity in which humans make conscious efforts to protect plants and other animal species and their habitats. Wildlife conservation is very important because wildlife and wilderness play an important role in maintaining the ecological balance and contribute to human quality of life.

Civic ecology practices are community-based, environmental stewardship actions taken to enhance green infrastructure, ecosystem services, and human well-being in cities and other human-dominated landscapes. Examples include tree planting in post-Katrina New Orleans, oyster restoration in New York City, community gardening in Detroit, friends of par...

We are entering a new urban era in which the ecology of the planet as a whole is increasingly influenced by human activities (Ellis 2011; Steffen et al. 2011a, b; Folke et al. 2011). Cities have become a central nexus of the relationship between people and nature, both as crucial centres of demand of ecosystem services, and as sources of environmen...

A move towards better appreciation, operationalization, and integration of outdoor recreation, education, and restoration as a means to assist veteran transition from combat deployments back into society needs to happen at two levels. The first level is about learning and related outcomes, about the value of outdoor recreation, education, and resto...

Although not generally recognized in policy and research agendas, cases where humans who face disaster, conflict, or stress turn to greening as a source of resilience abound. Such examples cut across organizational scales, as demonstrated by the greening efforts of individuals and of groups of youth and adults who plant gardens and trees under the...

‘Greening in the red zone’ refers to post-catastrophe, community-based stewardship of nature, and how these often spontaneous, local stewardship actions serve as a source of social-ecological resilience in the face of severe hardship. In this introductory chapter, we provide the reader with the fundamentals needed to understand our argument for why...

Following from earlier work on ‘memorialization mechanisms in disaster resilience’, I posit that tree symbols and rituals, and how tree symbols and rituals are remembered, re-constituted, and reproduced, represent a cluster of social mechanisms that can be viewed as ‘tangible evidence of social mechanisms behind social-ecological practices that dea...

Stress associated with overseas military service is a major concern for soldiers, their families, and communities. Whereas actual deployment is the most obvious disruption, pre-deployment (preparing to go overseas) and post-deployment (re-integration into family and community) also cause significant stress. Several authors have suggested that when...

The authors posit that the critical question for the post-disaster and post-conflict policy-making community may be whether their actions foster or inhibit individual and societal expressions of urgent biophilia and restorative sense of place. The authors argue that inhibiting such expression may aggravate a disaster or conflict scenario, whereas t...

This contribution builds upon earlier work on the concept of biophilia while synthesizing literatures on restorative environments, community-based ecological restoration, and both community and social-ecological disaster resilience. It suggests that when humans, faced with a disaster, as individuals and as communities and populations, seek engageme...

We argue that purely deficit-based perspectives regarding urban social-ecological systems (SES) and the human populations within them represent barriers to these systems' ability to move from undesirable system states into more desirable, sustainable ones. We characterize issues such as individual ecological identity, human exemptionalism, anthropo...

We argue that purely deficit-based perspectives regarding urban social-ecological systems (SES) and the human populations within them represent barriers to these systems' ability to move from undesirable system states into more desirable, sustainable ones. We characterize issues such as individual ecological identity, human exemptionalism, anthropo...

In an increasingly urban society, city residents are finding innovative ways of stewarding nature that integrate environmental, community, and individual outcomes. These urban civic ecology practices – including community gardening, shellfish reintroductions, tree planting and care, and “friends of parks” initiatives to remove invasive and restore...

In an increasingly urban society, city residents are finding innovative ways of stewarding nature that integrate environmental, community, and individual outcomes. These urban civic ecology practices -including community gardening, shellfish reintroductions, tree planting and care, and "friends of parks" initiatives to remove invasive and restore n...

This chapter examines how citizen science can contribute to community resilience in situations of human vulnerability within the context of civic ecology. Drawing from the disaster, conflict, natural resource management, and resilience literatures, and from examples of participatory data collection linked with environmental restoration in postcrisi...

Biodiversity conservation has increasingly gained recognition in national and international agendas. The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has positioned biodiversity as a key asset to be protected to ensure our well-being and that of future generations. Nearly 20 years after its inception, results are not as expected, as shown in the latest...

In 2011, our research team successfully competed for grant funds from the TKF foundation to explore "Landscapes of Resilience: Understanding the creation and stewardship of open spaces and sacred places in Joplin, MO and Detroit, MI." Within this work we proposed to conduct a preliminary analysis of TKF Open Space Sacred Place (OSSP) journal entrie...

Background/Question/Methods Scott Peters, an historian of the land-grant university system, presents three contrasting narratives used to describe university outreach: the “heroic meta-narrative” in which scientists solve technical problems; the “tragic counter-narrative” in which scientists provide technocratic solutions that lead to environment...

A variety of environmental education practices are emerging to address the needs of an increasingly urban population. Drawing from social-ecological systems and social learning theory, we propose a conceptual framework to stimulate research questions in urban environmental education. More specifically, our conceptual framework focuses on environmen...

In 2007 the authors presented a view of planning to confront the challenges for post-conflict and developing environments called Environment Shaping. In 2008, under contract to the US Army Corp of Engineers, the authors and their colleagues set about advancing the Environment Shaping concept into a detailed but practicable systems-based methodology...

Environmental education traditionally has focused on changing individual knowledge, attitudes, and behavior. Concern about environmental education's lack of effectiveness in instilling an understanding of human's role within ecosystems has led us to an exploration of the relationship of learning and education to the larger social-ecological systems...

Background/Question/Methods Within the disaster and conflict response communities, concern about lack of effectiveness of outside responses has led to a debate about the role of local people in developing the capacity to prepare for a crisis and to respond after calamity has struck. Pelling (2007) points out the potential for participatory disaster...

Keywords: commentary, community gardening, community gardens, development, ecology and environment, botany and plants, urban anthropology

In light of globalising trends toward urbanisation and resettlement, we explore how agricultural knowledges may be adapted and applied among relocated people. Although indigenous and related forms of practice‐based knowledge may be temporarily lost as people adopt commercial agricultural practices and switch to non‐agricultural livelihoods, they ar...

PARTICIPATION: The cost of an asset-based approach is the increased participation of stakeholders in all aspects of assessment, planning and evaluation. Sustainability is one by-product of resilience. We can only understand resilience through an asset-based approach We cannot be aware of assets without participation. "Participation" must be genuine...

In this contribution, we propose and explore the following hypothesis: civic ecology practices, including urban community forestry, community gardening, and other self‐organized forms of stewardship of green spaces in cities, are manifestations of how memories of the role of greening in healing can be instrumentalized through social learning to fos...

The ecology education community has focused on the suite of knowledge and competencies that constitute environmental literacy, including self-knowledge, evidence-based habits of mind, and ecological concepts and connections (Jordan et al., 2009). Whereas the environmental education (EE) community also is concerned with knowledge, it further embrace...

In this paper, we address the challenge of translating the concept of resilience into effective educational strategies. Three different cognitive dimensions (ontological, epistemological and axiological) that underpin assumptions held about the nature of nature, the nature of knowing and the nature of human nature are identified. Four case studies...

Civic ecology refers to the philosophy and science of community forestry, community gardening, watershed enhancement, and other volunteer-driven restoration practices in cities and elsewhere. Such practices, although often viewed as initiatives to improve a degraded environment, also foster social attributes of resilient social-ecological systems,...