Sustainability is Important

This Friday the Colloquium consists of two parts. In the first part, Dr. Ivar Svare gave a speech about the fish farming in Norway. In the second part, Dr. Stjernstorm gave a speech about the importance of sustainability.

Dr. Ivar Svare gave a speech on how to balance the spatial needs of multiple stakeholders for using the limited marine recourse in Norway, especially for fish farming. I did not learn much about from his speech since his speech is too short.

Dr. Stjernstorm gave a speech about the importance of sustainability. He used the mining activities in Sweden (Kiruma and Golivare) as an example to show the importance of human sustainability. Although mining activities cause some issues of the environment, the human sustainability is more important. The mining activities contribute largely to the economic growth; it brings a large amount of income to people and the local government. Thus balance the environment and the economic growth is important in human sustainable development.

Dr. Stjernstorm also talked about the aspects about categories of things, which means categorize the objects of study into groups. This increases the risk for stigmatization of one to another. He also talked about the language is a major tool in social science. We need to communicate to each other by language.

I think the approach that he used for analyzing the impact of the mining activities for human sustainability is effective. He used a huge dataset the Swedish population, geo-referenced data and data on individuals (education, income, age, etc.) to analyze the wage effect related to the mining industries. The results showed that there is a clear effect of incomes. However I think this approach is not applicable to my research.

I think Dr. Stjernstorm respond well to the questions. When he was asked more details regarding to the housing price and the relocation of the people of the mining activities, he gave us a detailed explanation.  The question that I would like to ask is that how can we do to minimize the environment impact induced by the mining activities.