Atgriešanās · the return
One argument, three places, thirty years.
This site is two things. The first is my thesis, published whole for the first time: ten chapters and 74,032 words arguing that environmental management fails when it treats ecology and people as separate problems — built on two field studies I ran in Fiji and Belize and a survey of 260 people I ran in Latvia. Only parts of it were ever formally read. This is all of it, as written.
The second is a return. Thirty years have passed. The reef has been through Fiji's first mass bleaching; the river mouth has been through a category-four hurricane and become a marine reserve; Latvia has joined the European Union and lost its forest carbon sink. Alongside the text, this site sets out what the modern record says happened in all three places, and asks — carefully, and with the failures marked — whether the argument held.
Four ways in. The text itself is the centre of it; everything else exists to let you check the text against the evidence it was built from.
The work spans nine years and two institutions. The Fiji and Belize field chapters were submitted at Hampshire College in 1996 for a Bachelor of Arts — 243 pages written in three months. The decision-science and Latvia chapters were the portion formally reviewed at the University of Oregon in 2005 for a Master of Science. The framing, Chapter Eight and the Chapter Ten cross-analysis are what make the three cases one argument rather than three papers in a folder.
A committee member asked for a shorter version covering only her chapters, and that abridgement — not this — is what circulated. It 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 entirely. Paul Slovic, who chaired the committee, read the whole thing and approved it. Nobody else ever read it end to end.
So this edition restores the original, and says plainly which part belongs to which degree. No claim is made that the whole document was awarded either one. The point of publishing it is precisely that the whole was never read as a whole.
The three places have each had thirty years of history since I measured them, and the thesis made claims those decades can now be tested against. The answer is the same in all three, and it is a hard one — though not, I think, a refutation. The local layer of what I argued for really was built: village management, a co-managed reserve, standing and comment rights. Where the pressure on a place came from something that layer could actually decide, it held. Mangrove cover inside the Belize reserve did not move in thirty-two years. Fish and coral recovered inside a Fijian village closure.
What never arrived is the authority. The structure meant to sit above the village, nesting those communities upward into regional and finally ecological boundaries, exists in pieces in all three places — ecologically drawn river basins, a national network of village closures, corridors written into law. None of it can decide anything. And so nothing reached the pressures that came from outside: a warming sea, a sewage outfall, an irrigation intake upstream, a timber economy set at continental scale. Those indicators kept falling. The half of the argument that was tried behaved about as I said it would. The half that mattered most for these outcomes was never tried at all — which is a disappointment about what got built, rather than a correction to what was argued.