Atgriešanās · the return
One argument, three places, thirty years.
In 1994 and 1995 a student ran line transects across the Suva Barrier Reef in Fiji and cut quadrats through the mangroves and seagrass of the Port of Honduras in southern Belize. Between 2001 and 2003, on a Fulbright in Latvia, he asked 260 people across seven groups what they believed about their environment and who they trusted to decide about it.
He wrote it up as a single integrated argument: that environmental management fails when it treats ecology and people as separate problems, and that you can measure both. Ten chapters, 74,407 words. His committee chair, the decision scientist Paul Slovic, read the whole thing and approved it. Almost no one else ever did.
Because it was never read whole. The Fiji and Belize field chapters were submitted at Hampshire College in 1996 for a Bachelor of Arts. The decision-science and Latvia chapters were the portion formally reviewed at the University of Oregon in 2005 for a Master of Science. A committee member asked for a shorter version covering only her part, and that abridgement — not this — is what circulated.
The abridgement is the lesser document. It renumbers the chapters, opens with a new abstract demoting the field studies to prior "other work," and drops the cross-case analysis that makes the three places into one argument. This edition restores the original, with a plain account of what belongs to which degree.
The second half of this project goes back. The reef, the river mouth and the country have each had thirty years of history since the fieldwork — bleaching events, a category-four hurricane, EU accession — and the thesis made claims that those decades can now be tested against.