text:
Rethinking Community-Based Conservation
Article first published online: 10 MAY 2004
DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2004.00077.x
Conservation Biology
Volume 18, Issue 3, pages 621–630, June 2004
- adaptive management;
- comanagement;
- common property;
- community-based conservation;
- participation;
- scale;
- social-ecological systems;
- traditional ecological knowledge
- cogestión;
- conocimiento ecológico tradicional;
- conservación basada en comunidades;
- escala;
- manejo adaptativo;
- participación;
- propiedad común;
- sistemas socio-ecológicos
Abstract: Community-based conservation (CBC) is based on the idea that if conservation and development could be simultaneously achieved, then the interests of both could be served. It has been controversial because community development objectives are not necessarily consistent with conservation objectives in a given case. I examined CBC from two angles. First, CBC can be seen in the context of paradigm shifts in ecology and applied ecology. I identified three conceptual shifts—toward a systems view, toward the inclusion of humans in the ecosystem, and toward participatory approaches to ecosystem management—that are interrelated and pertain to an understanding of ecosystems as complex adaptive systems in which humans are an integral part. Second, I investigated the feasibility of CBC, as informed by a number of emerging interdisciplinary fields that have been pursuing various aspects of coupled systems of humans and nature. These fields—common property, traditional ecological knowledge, environmental ethics, political ecology, and environmental history—provide insights for CBC. They may contribute to the development of an interdisciplinary conservation science with a more sophisticated understanding of social-ecological interactions. The lessons from these fields include the importance of cross-scale conservation, adaptive comanagement, the question of incentives and multiple stakeholders, the use of traditional ecological knowledge, and development of a cross-cultural conservation ethic.
Resumen: La conservación basada en comunidades (CBC) se fundamenta en la idea de que si la conservación y el desarrollo se pueden alcanzar simultáneamente, entonces se pueden servir los intereses de ambos. Ha sido controversial porque los objetivos de desarrollo comunitario no siempre coinciden con los de la conservación en un caso determinado. Examiné la CBC desde dos ángulos. En primer lugar, la CBC puede verse en el contexto de cambios en paradigmas en ecología y ecología aplicada. Identifiqué tres cambios conceptuales (la visión de sistemas, la inclusión de humanos en el ecosistema y los métodos participativos para la gestión de ecosistemas) que están interrelacionados y que corresponden a una concepción de los ecosistemas como sistemas adaptativos complejos en los que los humanos son una parte integral. En segundo lugar, investigué la factibilidad de la CBC, usando información proveniente de campos interdisciplinarios emergentes que han estado analizando varios aspectos de los sistemas acoplados de humanos y naturaleza. Estos campos (propiedad común, conocimiento ecológico tradicional, ética ambiental, ecología política e historia ambiental) proporcionan nuevas percepciones para la CBC. Pueden contribuir al desarrollo de una ciencia de conservación interdisciplinaria con un entendimiento más sofisticado de las interacciones socio-ecológicas. Las lecciones de estos campos incluyen la importancia de la conservación trans-escala; la cogestión adaptativa; el tema de incentivos e intereses múltiples; el uso del conocimiento ecológico tradicional y el desarrollo de una ética de conservación trans-cultural.
What are the prospects for community-based conservation? The question is of concern to a broad range of conservationists, social scientists, and resource management professionals. On one hand, there have been increasingly greater efforts and investment in community-based conservation. On the other hand, there has been increasingly greater concern that community-based conservation is not working and that the emphasis on "community" and "participation" is diluting the conservation agenda.
More inclusive, people-oriented and community-based approaches to conservation are in part a reaction to the failures of exclusionary conservation, in a world in which social and economic factors are increasingly seen as key to conservation success (Ghimire & Pimbert 1997). Community emphasis is motivated by the idea that "if conservation and development could be simultaneously achieved, the interests of both could be served. Thus the old narrative of 'fortress conservation' was largely displaced by the counter-narrative of development through community conservation and sustainable use" (Murphree 2002:2). Such is the popularity of the concept that it soon may "be difficult to find a rural conservation project that does not define itself as community-based" (Hackel 1999:730).
However, the results of community-based conservation experiments have been mixed at best, and the performance of many has been well below expectations (Kellert et al. 2000; Barrett et al. 2001). This has led to various debates in the conservation literature over the merits of community-based conservation (Agrawal & Gibson 1999) and to critical evaluation from a number of different perspectives (Redford & Sanderson 2000; Brosius & Russell 2003). Two positions have been emerging. One holds that the failure of community conservation is not due to the weakness or impracticality of the concept, but rather to its improper implementation, especially with regard to the devolution of authority and responsibility (Songorwa 1999; Murphree 2002). The second holds that the conservation and development objectives, both important in their own right, should be delinked because the mixed objective does not serve either objective well (Redford & Sanderson 2000).
This dilemma is part of the larger debate of preservation versus sustainable use and the participation of rural populations in decisions that affect their lives. The debate has its counterparts in other environmental fields such as resource management and development, with respect to the merits (or lack thereof) of centralized resource management (Holling & Meffe 1996), participatory development planning (Chambers 1983), and the significance of local perspectives and knowledge in environmental management in general (Berkes & Folke 1998).
I approached the question of community-based conservation from two different vantage points. First, community-based conservation can be seen in the context of larger, historical conceptual shifts (paradigm shifts) that have been occurring in ecology and applied ecology. These changes are not specific to conservation ecology but have implications for it; they provide context and benchmarks for all areas of applied ecology. Second, in light of this "bigger picture," I examined community-based conservation with an eye to lessons from emerging new interdisciplinary fields that deal with coupled systems of humans and nature. Researchers in several fields, such as common property and traditional ecological knowledge, have been pursuing various aspects of social-ecological system relationships. These interdisciplinary fields provide insights into the community-based conservation debate and may contribute to the development of a fuller understanding of social-ecological interactions, providing firmer ground for a truly interdisciplinary conservation science.
Conceptual Shifts in Ecology
Community-based conservation has emerged at a time when the science of ecology and the various fields of applied ecology seem to be in the midst of three conceptual shifts: a shift from reductionism to a systems view of the world, a shift to include humans in the ecosystem, and a shift from an expert-based approach to participatory conservation and management (Levin 1999; Bradshaw & Bekoff 2001; Ludwig 2001). I expand on each.
Systems View of the Environment
A complex adaptive system often has a number of attributes not observed in simple systems, including nonlinearity, uncertainty, emergence, scale, and self-organization (Levin 1999; Gunderson & Holling 2002). These characteristics of complex systems have a number of important implications for conservation and environmental management, as can be seen from a consideration of nonlinearity and scale.
The issue of nonlinearity comes up with respect to management institutions. The older, conventional emphasis on centralized institutions and command-and-control resource management is based on linear cause-effect thinking and mechanistic views of nature. It aims to reduce natural variation in an effort to make the ecosystem more productive, predictable, and controllable. But the reduction of the range of natural variation is the very process that may lead to a loss of resilience in a system, leaving it more susceptible to crises (Holling & Meffe 1996). Nonlinearity is also an issue with respect to specific relationships and processes. Nonlinear effects have been documented in conservation biology—for example, in the interactions of elephants and people. The two coexist up to a certain threshold of human population density, beyond which elephants disappear (Hoare & du Toit 1999).
The issue of scale has implications for the match between institutions and ecosystems and for perspectives that may be held by different agents. Take the question of match. Can a given conservation problem be managed by a centralized agency or are there more appropriate structures of governance in which the scale of management institution is matched to the scale of the ecosystem? Often, one-size-fits-all kinds of management ignore scale issues. Such mismatches of scale may be one of the key reasons for the failure of environmental management regimes (Folke et al. 2002).
One of the insights from complexity thinking is that a multiplicity of scales prevents there being one "correct" perspective in a complex system. Phenomena at each level of the scale tend to have their own emergent properties. The system must be analyzed simultaneously at different scales. In biodiversity conservation, for example, different groups of conservationists focus on different levels of biological organization: they may use different research approaches and principles at the genetic, species, and landscape levels. All these levels are the "correct" level to consider at the same time. Similarly, a number of agents or actors may hold different but equally valid perspectives on a conservation problem. Redford and Sanderson (2000:1364) allude to this phenomenon: "they [forest peoples] may speak for their version of a forest, but they do not speak for the forest we want to conserve" (emphasis added).
Including Humans in the Ecosystem: Social-Ecological Systems
There is general agreement that we can ill afford to consider humans separately from nature, especially in today's heavily human-dominated world (Kates et al. 2001; Gunderson & Holling 2002). It has become increasingly important to incorporate the dynamic interactions between societies and natural systems, rather than viewing people merely as "managers" or "stressors." There is little agreement, however, on how this can be accomplished, conceptually or methodologically.
In our work, we use the term social-ecological system to refer to the integrated concept of humans in nature (Berkes & Folke 1998; Berkes et al. 2003). A number of different terms are in use to denote the idea of humans as part of ecosystems. One of them is the dwelling perspective of Ingold (2000), which refers to the " … practical engagement of humans with others of the dwelt-in ecosystem." This practical engagement, building knowledge and ecological relationships, is the basis for putting humans back into the ecosystem. It involves the "skills, sensitivities and orientations that have developed through long experience of conducting one's life in a particular environment" (Ingold 2000:25).
The social-ecological system has many levels. The links between social and environmental systems are different at the level of the community than they are at the level of the nation state. For example, Gibson's 1999 book, Politicians and Poachers, deals with the political economy of conservation in four African countries. It shows that the forces operating at the level of the nation state (many of them related to the peculiarities of postcolonial governments) are quite different from those at the levels of region and community.
Putting humans back into the ecosystem requires using all possible sources of ecological knowledge and understanding as may be available. Using knowledge and perspectives from the community level can help build a more complete information base than may be available from scientific studies alone (Berkes et al. 2000). The partnership of local communities with scientists is not an unusual phenomenon. Details of such research collaboration, and its positive outcomes for ecosystem management, have been documented, for example, by Olsson and Folke (2001), from Sweden and by Blann et al. (2003) from Minnesota (U.S.A.).
A word of caution is appropriate here. The term community in community-based conservation is gloss for a complex phenomenon because social systems are multiscale and the term community hides a great deal of complexity. Idealized "images of coherent, long-standing, localized sources of authority tied to what are assumed to be intrinsically sustainable resource management regimes" (Brosius et al. 1998:165) are just that—idealized. As many conservationists know, it is often difficult to find a cohesive social group to work with in the field. Communities are elusive and constantly changing. A community is not a static, isolated group of people. Rather, it is more useful to think of communities as multidimensional, cross-scale, social-political units or networks changing through time (Carlsson 2000).
Hence, it is more productive to focus not on communities but on institutions, defined as the set of rules actually used, the working rules, or rules-in-use (Ostrom 1990). Institutions are humanly devised constraints that structure human interaction, made up of formal constraints (rules, laws, constitutions), informal constraints (norms of behavior, conventions, and self-imposed codes of conduct), and their enforcement characteristics. I have specifically examined those institutions that mediate between social and ecological systems (Berkes & Folke 1998) and have focused on the dynamics of these institutions: their renewal and reorganization, learning and adaptation, and ability to deal with change (Berkes et al. 2003).
End of Management by the Expert-Based Approach?
Many of our environmental problems, including those related to conservation, do not lend themselves to analysis by the conventional, rational approach of defining the problem, collecting data, analyzing data, and making decisions based on the results. There is too much uncertainty; targets keep shifting, and the issues must often be redefined (Kates et al. 2001).
These make a class of problems that Ludwig (2001) and others have called "wicked problems," those with "no definitive formulation, no stopping rule, and no test for a solution," problems that cannot be separated from issues of values, equity, and social justice. Ludwig (2001) argues that where there are no clearly defined objectives and where there are diverse, mutually contradictory approaches, the notion of an objective, disinterested expert no longer makes sense. Hence, a new kind of approach to science and management must be created through a process by which researchers and stakeholders interact to define important questions, objectives of study, relevant evidence, and convincing forms of argument. This kind of research, referred to by Kates et al. (2001) as sustainability science, requires place-based models because understanding the dynamic interaction between nature and society requires case studies situated in particular places.
To deal with the implications of complex systems, working partnerships can be built between managers and resource users. This is done, for example, in adaptive management, which recognizes, as a starting point, that information will never be perfect (Holling 2001). The use of imperfect information for management necessitates a close cooperation and risk-sharing between the management agency and local people. Such a process requires collaboration, transparency, and accountability so that a learning environment can be created and practice can build on experience. This approach, bringing the community actively into the management process, is fundamentally different from the command-and-control style.
These three conceptual shifts in ecology—toward a systems view, inclusion of humans in the ecosystem, and management by participatory approaches—are related. They all pertain to an emerging understanding of ecosystems as complex adaptive systems in which human societies are necessarily an integral part. We can abandon Enlightenment assumptions of predictability and control; we should at least be very skeptical of them. We need to recognize the limits of expertise and the advantages of participatory conservation and management. Along with the conventional biological science of conservation, there is an emerging social science of conservation that may provide a more nuanced understanding of social systems. To move toward an interdisciplinary science of conservation, we need to learn from the lessons emerging from several new interdisciplinary fields.
Toward an Interdisciplinary Conservation
Asking whether community-based conservation works is the wrong question. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not. Rather, it is more important to learn about the conditions under which it does or does not work. A number of interdisciplinary subfields have in fact been pursuing elements of this question and have contributions to make to the conservation dilemma. These include common property, traditional ecological knowledge, environmental ethics, political ecology, environmental history, and ecological economics (Table 1).
|Area of Interest
|Common property
|Examines the links between resource management and social organization; analyzes how institutions and property-rights systems can deal with the "tragedy of the commons."
|Traditional ecological knowledge
|Refers to a local or traditional knowledge base built not by experts but by resource users. Questions expert science and argues for diverse kinds of knowledge.
|Environmental ethics
|Recognizes a wide diversity of spiritual and ethical traditions in the world that offer alternatives to current Western views of the place of humans in the ecosystem.
|Political ecology
|Analyzes power relationships among actors in the way decisions are made and benefits shared; interprets events with reference to the behavior of actors in pursuit of their own political agendas.
|Environmental history
|Interprets landscapes in terms of their history and analyzes their dynamics, making ecological sense of resource-use practices that have created these landscapes.
|Ecological economics
|Promotes an integrated view of economics within the ecosystem, viewing the economic system as a subset of the ecological system; concerned with a wider range of values and a longer time horizon.
These subfields have a number of characteristics in common. All are recent, dating largely from the 1970s and 1980s. All are "bridging" fields, spanning different combinations of natural- and social-science thinking. Each of them developed in response to needs or gaps in understanding the linkages between social systems and ecological systems. All provide insights relevant to the conservation dilemma.
For example, one of the first questions to ask in the common-property approach to conservation is who controls a given area or resource. In the winter of 2000, I was heading out to Misali Island Conservation Area in Zanzibar, East Africa, with a group from the Ford Foundation and the Zanzibar Department of Natural Resources. On the way, we ran into a make-shift processing plant in which a worker was boiling some marine product in a large vat. The worker explained that he was processing sea cucumbers for Japanese buyers (and probably for Chinese markets). We were witnessing, on an outlying island in Zanzibar, in the middle of nowhere (by our standards), an example of global market integration, with local divers responding to East Asian market demands.
For all we knew, these sea cucumber species were not locally used resources and did not come under local controls or common property institutions. Hence they were prime candidates for open-access exploitation and depletion, as common property theory tells us (Ostrom 1990). By contrast, locally used resources are rarely open-access or freely available to all; rather, there are often local rules about how resources should be used. These sets of "rules-in-use," or institutions, as common property researchers often use the term, may facilitate or constrain conservation (Becker & Ostrom 1995). If local common property institutions are consistent with conservation objectives, as in the case of traditional sacred areas (Ramakrishnan et al. 1998), that is an ideal situation. Then the conservation task is to strengthen these institutions and not to undermine or replace them (Brosius & Russell 2003).
More commonly, however, local rules are about use, allocation, and conflict management and not about preservation per se. Conservation planning becomes considerably more difficult when local institutions are not in line with conservation goals (Becker 1999). The choice of action follows the lines of our conservation dilemma. Either we pursue conservation independently of local resource use and livelihood needs (Redford & Stearman 1993) or we deal with local resource users as potential conservation allies and look for common objectives that would serve conservation while producing community benefits (Alcorn 1993).
In many cases, local common property systems do not exist or are not adequate for the conservation task. If resource users lack rights or incentives to design and enforce rules that control the use of a resource, and government rules are not enforced, open-access exploitation may ensue (Becker & Ostrom 1995). In other cases, local institutions may exist, but the scope of the resource or conservation problem may be beyond the ability of local institutions to deal with effectively (Ostrom et al. 1999). This brings us back to the question of complexity and scale.
Barrett et al. (2001) observed that the current fashion for community-based conservation overemphasizes the role of local communities, much as the previous command-and-control, government-driven model underemphasized it. In discussing tropical biodiversity conservation, they noted that local, community-based institutions are only one level in a complex system, one that is often ill-equipped to deal with the issues. Government agencies in many of these countries also tend to be weak, leaving biodiversity conservation in an environment of weak institutions. What is the alternative? Barrett et al. (2001:497) suggest that the best management designs may "involve distributing authority across multiple institutions, rather than concentrating it in just one," not an easy task, given the weakness of existing institutions at all levels.
Where institution building is needed, institutions may be "crafted" using the elements of rule-making and self-organization, or institutional capital, that exist in any group or society (Ostrom 1990). The literature on the fields of common property and participatory development suggests that institution building at the community level may take on the order of 10 years for simple, local-level institutions. In the case of institutions that span the scale from local to regional and national levels, as in various comanagement regimes, there is relatively little data on which to base conclusions. This is a current area of research in the common-property field, and preliminary indications are that a decade is certainly not an overestimate for the time required to develop effective cross-scale institutions (Berkes 2002).
The literature on common property and some of the other fields highlighted in Table 1 provides a number of lessons and insights. A full discussion of these insights is beyond the scope of this paper, but I focus on five conceptual themes: the importance of cross-scale conservation, adaptive comanagement, the question of incentives and multiple stakeholders, the use of traditional ecological knowledge, and development of a cross-cultural conservation ethic.
Cross-Scale Conservation: Grappling with Complexity
A major change in the science of the last few decades is the recognition that nature is complex (Levin 1999). Natural processes are seldom linear and predictable. Ecosystems and social systems tend to be organized hierarchically. Each level in the hierarchy is independent, to some degree, of the levels above and below, and each level operates under somewhat different principles. Hierarchies make sense to conservation biologists, for example, because they know that one can work at the genetic, species, and landscape levels of biodiversity. Each level is partially dependent on the levels above and below; each level shares some of the same principles with other levels but also follows principles that are specific to itself.
Exploring the scale issue further in community-based conservation, centralized management is a poor fit for complex systems: it works neither at the level of the central government nor at that of the community—and it creates mismatches in scale (Folke et al. 2002). If conservation issues are complex-systems problems, they have to be addressed simultaneously at various scales. That is, a cross-scale approach to conservation is necessary, addressing governance and "community" at the various scales appropriate for the conservation problem in question.
The cross-scale interplay of institutions involves horizontal and vertical linkages (Ostrom et al. 2002; Young 2002). Hence, cross-scale conservation requires linking institutions horizontally (across space) and vertically (across levels of organization). Horizontal linkages may include, for example, networks of communities involved in community-based wildlife conservation initiatives, comparing experiences and learning from one another. Such linkages may include multistakeholder bodies and networks of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), learning networks, and various kinds of civil science networks (Gadgil et al. 2000; Olsson & Folke 2001; Blann et al. 2003). They may include networks of government agencies dealing with problems that cut across their mandates or international networks focusing on a shared problem, as in the case of epistemic communities (Haas 1990) and policy networks (Carlsson 2000).
Linkages across levels of organization can take a number of different forms. Comanagement involves vertical linkages; in some cases, so do multistakeholder bodies, development organizations, citizen science organizations, policy communities, and social movement networks (Berkes 2002). There is growing interest in different arrangements of institutional interplay (Young 2002) and in special groups that can enhance vertical links between local and global levels, called boundary organizations (Cash & Moser 2000).
Even though linkages are key, the community level is still singularly important because long-term conservation objectives are easier to achieve with the cooperation of local people than without (Ghimire & Pimbert 1997; Brown 2002). Cross-scale conservation has to be planned bottom-up, rather than top-down, because it makes sense to start solutions at the lowest organizational level possible. The relevant principle, sometimes called the subsidiarity principle, may be phrased thus: the goal should be as much local solution as possible and only so much government regulation as necessary.
Adaptive Comanagement: Dealing with Dynamics
The term comanagement, or the sharing of management power and responsibility, usually refers to a two-link partnership between community and government. But this conception of comanagement does not fully capture the complexities of cross-scale interaction that may include multiple horizontal and vertical linkages. Judging by the conservation-development cases compiled by the Equator Initiative (2002) for the Johannesburg Summit, a typical conservation case may involve (1) three levels of organization, community, regional or national, and international; (2) a number of local groups at the intra-community level; (3) a variety of NGOs and government agencies; and (4) one or more international groups. Hence, comanagement in practice is often a linkage of multiple parties, involving both horizontal and vertical dimensions.
Detailed and long-term studies of comanagement reveal that there is another dimension to be considered. Comanagement is an evolutionary process requiring mutual learning and trust-building. The term adaptive comanagement may be used to denote a concept that combines the vertical linkage characteristic of comanagement with the dynamic learning characteristic of adaptive management.
Folke et al. (2002:20) define adaptive comanagement as a process by which institutional arrangements and ecological knowledge are tested and revised in an ongoing process of trial–and-error. Ruitenbeek and Cartier (2001:8) define it as a long-term management structure that permits stakeholders to share management responsibility and to learn from their actions. These definitions are useful because they highlight two key processes: (1) sharing of management power and responsibility through multiple institutional linkages that may involve government agencies, NGOs, and other communities and (2) feedback learning and building of mutual trust among the partners.
Ruitenbeek and Cartier (2001) advance the interesting notion that adaptive comanagement may be an emergent property of a complex system of management; that is, it can evolve over time from simple systems through feedback learning. This can happen with little or no external intervention; conversely, policy intervention to introduce adaptive comanagement could lead to system failure. Contrast this with the emphasis on deliberate institution building in the work of Ostrom and colleagues (Ostrom 1990; Ostrom et al. 1999; Barrett et al. 2001).
Paradoxically, both arguments may be partially correct. Community-based management systems have spontaneously emerged through self-organization in various parts of the world (Berkes et al. 2003), and management systems do evolve over time (Olsson & Folke 2001; Blann et al. 2003). Although adaptive comanagement cannot be imposed from the top down, its emergence can be assisted by creating a favorable environment through such measures as enabling legislation to recognize local rights over land and resources. Not only can local institutions be assisted by capacity building, but appropriate government institutions also need to be developed and put into place.
Questions of Incentives and Multiple Stakeholders
The logic of the original integrated conservation-development projects (ICDPs), and community conservation in general, was to create a stake for the local community in conserving a particular resource (Brown 2002). There is little debate on the question of whether incentives for conservation are important—they are. The parallel finding in the commons literature is that incentives for management through the creation of property rights are important for the management of commons (Ostrom et al. 1999).
In the case of community-based conservation, there has often been a mismatch between what conservationists have thought of as community benefits (e.g., the sharing of financial benefits from ecotourism) and what multiple stakeholders in communities may have considered benefits (Songorwa 1999; Brown 2002). One of the conclusions emerging from this literature is that the conception of local incentives purely in terms of community economic benefits is too narrow, too simplistic, and potentially counterproductive. There are two reasons for this.
First, just as "the community" is complex and elusive, the distribution of benefits from any conservation or management project is also complex and elusive. Kellert et al. (2000) used six social and environmental indicators to study cases of community resource management and found that these projects rarely resulted in the more equitable distribution of power and economic benefits. It is a well-known phenomenon that local elites tend to capture the benefits from development interventions, so a conservation-development project that starts with the aim to provide community benefits often ends up resulting in a less equitable distribution of power and assets.
Second, rural communities in the developing world rarely equate benefits with simple monetary rewards. Various kinds of social and political benefits are also likely to be important. Key considerations include equity—fairness in the distribution of benefits—and empowerment, defined by Chambers (1983:11) as "the process through which people, and especially poorer people, are enabled to take more control over their own lives, and secure a better livelihood, with ownership of productive assets as one key element." Because many rural livelihoods are based on mixed strategies of wage employment and resource use, what people value is going to vary from case to case. Access to resources is almost always important; hence, any conservation measure that closes access to an area or a resource is likely to be opposed, at least by some members of the community.
Community-based conservation projects need to pay more attention to questions of equity and empowerment. They can start by asking some of the questions political ecologists ask: What is the distribution of benefits and costs? How do different actors relate to the resource in question? How do power relations at the local level derive from differences of class, ethnicity, and gender? (Brosius et al. 1998; Brosius & Russell 2003). If equity and empowerment issues can be addressed, livelihoods can drive conservation rather than simply being compatible with it (Brown 2002).
Use of Local and Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Different actors define knowledge, ecological relations, and resources in different ways and at different geographic scales. For example, a forest-dwelling indigenous group may see the value of the forest (source of fruit, medicinal plants, game) quite differently from a forest company or a conservation agency. Their forest knowledge and ecological relations may also be defined quite differently. In some cases, the objectives of the indigenous group and a conservation agency may be consistent, even though their environmental perceptions and world views may be quite different, as in the case of sacred areas (Ramakrishnan 1998). In other cases, however, such as the management of protected areas in New Zealand, both objectives and world views may be different (Roberts et al. 1995).
Indigenous knowledge may be used as a generic term to refer to knowledge systems of indigenous peoples, and traditional ecological knowledge may be defined as "a cumulative body of knowledge, practice and belief, evolving by adaptive processes and handed down through generations by cultural transmission" (Berkes 1999:8). As a complex of knowledge, practice, and belief, traditional knowledge tends to be experiential and closely related to a way of life. It is multigenerational and is passed on orally, rather than through book learning. Hence, it is different from scientific knowledge in a number of substantial ways. Although many community-based conservation projects attempt to use local and traditional ecological knowledge, the relationship between scientific knowledge and local knowledge is not always comfortable.
The use of traditional knowledge in the last decade or so indicates that indigenous peoples and local communities have become more guarded about their knowledge and have started to use it politically and strategically for territorial claims. Numerous cases in North America, Central America, South and Southeast Asia, and Oceania indicate that this is the case (Berkes 1999; Ford & Martinez 2000). The trend is toward research projects based on traditional ecological knowledge that are participatory in nature, with the community becoming a partner in the cooperative process of knowledge creation and sharing, as opposed to being the object of research (Berkes 1999).
Research based on participatory approaches is important for civil society because it helps empower indigenous peoples and community groups. It also provides place-based case studies for the interaction of researchers and stakeholders, who can define research questions and assess evidence through these case studies (Kates et al. 2001). Science and local knowledge can interact to improve the understanding of both parties of the need to conserve, as in the case of Ecuadorian garua forests (Becker 1999). Collaborative research projects that involve local people from the outset generate possibilities for complementary use of scientific and traditional knowledge (Berkes & Folke 1998; Berkes et al. 2000).
Developing a Cross-Cultural Conservation Ethic
Conservation programs often need to encompass a broader view of the livelihood needs of local people and their knowledge and interests. Further, they may need to consider broader definitions of conservation. Our definitions of conservation have perhaps been too simplistic and too Western. Local support for conservation remains weak in many countries because conservation is often regarded as a concern of elites who are insensitive to rural people and their livelihood needs. We need to diversify the base of people who speak for the earth and build constituencies for conservation (Brosius & Russell 2003).
To do so may involve linking conservationists with indigenous groups and local associations. Experience from the Amazon area, for example, shows that the expulsion of local communities from protected areas may result in their replacement by powerful economic groups and large-scale resource developers. The activities of communities of small-scale farmers, fishers, and forest users may not fit well with the narrower definitions of conservation (Redford & Stearman 1993), but in many cases they are the best natural allies for conservationists (Alcorn 1993).
Brosius and Russell (2003:55) call for "a social definition of conservation that validates and encourages small-scale local conservation efforts, that links conservation with issues such as soil fertility degradation and loss of traditional food crop varieties, and that entails a new kind of relationship between grassroots groups and international organizations." Examples of such socially defined conservation include shade-grown coffee, which conserves some components of biodiversity, and a host of environmentally friendly local-level development projects documented in the Equator Initiative (2002) and elsewhere. Such practical examples of local conservation are easy to support and appreciate, but developing a cross-cultural philosophy of conservation is much more difficult.
For example, New Zealand's Conservation Act of 1987 directs the Department of Conservation to establish comanagement arrangements with the Maori, in accordance with the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. The problem is that the conservation ethic adopted by the act involves "the preservation and protection of … resources for the purpose of maintaining their intrinsic values … ." This conservation ethic is at odds with the Maori conceptualization of humans "as part of a personified, spiritually imbued 'environmental family' … . Earth's bounty is considered to be a gift, necessitating reciprocity on the part of human users in order to maintain sustainability" (Roberts et al. 1995:14). Sustainability requires maintaining stewardship (kaitiaki) over land and resources. Hence, the imposition of the Western concept of a dichotomy between humans and nature and the setting aside of land for preservation serve to alienate Maori from their stewardship responsibilities (Roberts et al. 1995).
The attitude that "we respect the land because we use it" is common in North and South American aboriginal traditions and in many other parts of the world. This stewardship ethic does not fit well with the conventional Western conservation ethic. Accommodating a diversity of perspectives and developing a pluralistic cross-cultural conservation ethic remains a challenge.
I have focused on community-based conservation, but perhaps the larger issue is not whether or not communities conserve. The larger issue is rethinking conservation at a time when there is a historical shift in ecology and applied ecology toward a systems view of the environment, a perspective that sees humans as part of the ecosystem, and an emerging practice of participatory management. Many leading ecologists, such as Levin (1999) and Holling (2001), see ecosystems as complex adaptive systems characterized by historical dependency, complex dynamics, inherent uncertainty, multiple scales, and multiple equilibria. Such integrated complex systems do not divide along disciplinary lines; they are integrated social-ecological systems.
Conservation has become participatory for two reasons. First, there has been a rise of stakeholders and civil society in general throughout the world. Some would say this is an inevitable development of the postmodern age, like globalization. Second, participatory approaches have come to dominate management because the very nature of complex environmental problems requires a different, participatory approach; as Ludwig (2001) puts it, the age of management is over.
It is useful to consider this larger picture in rethinking community-based conservation. As conservation scientists, we need to come to grips with these new realities. "Community-based conservation," as a fad (Hackel 1999), has not been very helpful. After all, "communities" do not conserve or despoil; at least, they do not act as simple, isolated agents. Rather, they are embedded in larger systems, and they respond to pressures and incentives. It may be more useful to rethink community-based conservation as shorthand for environmental governance and conservation action that starts from the ground up but deals with cross-scale relations. To ground conservation effort, we need a more nuanced understanding of the nature of people, communities, institutions, and their interrelations at various levels.
There is little evidence that community-based conservation has benefited from the last two decades of findings from fields, such as common property, that investigate integrated social-ecological systems. There have been many lessons and insights, of which I address a selected few. They go a long way toward conceptualizing an interdisciplinary science of conservation and include the following.
1 The cross-scale approach to conservation alerts us to the notion that the scale at which we view a complex system affects what we see (Levin 1999). Matching the scale of management to the scale of the system to be managed and implementing solutions at the local level first are both important principles to follow.
2 Adaptive comanagement captures two key elements to making community-based conservation work: sharing of management power and responsibility—as opposed to token consultation and passive participation—and creating a context that encourages learning and stewardship and builds mutual trust.
3 Incentives are multidimensional. Equity and empowerment are often more important than monetary incentives for community-based conservation. A workable conservation project helps implement decision making processes that are legitimate, accountable, and inclusive and that take into account multiple stakeholders and interests (Agrawal & Gibson 1999).
4 Knowledge is power, and the use of local and traditional ecological knowledge is a mechanism for comanagement and empowerment. Traditional knowledge is not another resource to be mined by outsiders. Rather, traditional knowledge projects can be partnerships for the cooperative process of creating and sharing knowledge.
5 Our definition of conservation is Western-centric. Is this the right time to start looking seriously at some time-tested traditions of resource use and to develop a cross-cultural pluralistic definition of conservation? This may be an important question to ask if the challenge is to broaden the base and build more inclusive, robust constituencies for conservation.
This paper was originally presented as a keynote address at the Conference of the Society for Conservation Biology, July 2002, Canterbury, United Kingdom. I thank the conference chair, N. Leader-Williams, for challenging me to communicate the larger picture to the SCB audience. For helpful comments and suggestions, I thank A. Diduck, S. Grant, the Equator Initiative study group, K. Redford, and an anonymous referee. My work has been supported over the years by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and a Canada Research Chair.
Literature Cited
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- Barrett, C. B., K. Brandon, C. Gibson, and H. Gjertsen. 2001. Conserving tropical biodiversity amid weak institutions. BioScience 51 : 497–502.
- Becker, D. 1999. Protecting a garua forest in Ecuador: the role of institutions and ecosystem valuation. Ambio 28 : 156–161.
- Becker, D., and E. Ostrom. 1995. Human ecology and resource sustainability: the importance of institutional diversity. Annual Reviews of Ecology and Systematics 26 : 113–133.
- Berkes, F. 1999. Sacred ecology: traditional ecological knowledge and resource management. Taylor & Francis, Philadelphia .
- Berkes, F. 2002. Cross-scale institutional linkages: perspectives from the bottom up. Pages 293–321 in E.Ostrom, T.Dietz, N.Dolsak, P. C.Stern, S.Stonich, and E. U.Weber, editors. The drama of the commons. National Academy Press, Washington , D.C.
- Berkes, F., and C.Folke, editors. 1998. Linking social and ecological systems: management practices and social mechanisms for building resilience. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , United Kingdom .
- Berkes, F., J. Colding, and C. Folke. 2000. Rediscovery of traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management. Ecological Applications 10 : 1251–1262.
- Berkes, F., J. Colding, and C. Folke, editors. 2003. Navigating social-ecological systems: building resilience for complexity and change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , United Kingdom .
- Blann, K., S. Light, and J. A. Musumeci. 2003. Facing the adaptive challenge: practitioners' insights from negotiating resource crises in Minnesota. Pages 210–240 in F.Berkes, J.Colding, and C.Folke, editors. Navigating the dynamics of social-ecological systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , United Kingdom .
- Bradshaw, G. A., and M. Bekoff. 2001. Ecology and social responsibility: the re-embodiment of science. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 16 : 460–465.
- Brosius, J. P., A. Tsing, and C. Zerner. 1998. Representing communities: histories and politics of community-based resource management. Society & Natural Resources 11 : 157–168.
- Brosius, J. P., and D. Russell. 2003. Conservation from above: an anthropological perspective on transboundary protected areas and ecoregional planning. Journal of Sustainable Forestry 17(1/2):39–65.
- Brown, K. 2002. Innovations for conservation and development. The Geographical Journal 168 : 6–17.
- Carlsson, L. 2000. Policy networks as collective action. Policy Studies Journal 28 : 502–520.
Direct Link:
- Cash, D. W., and S. C. Moser. 2000. Linking global and local scales: designing dynamic assessment and management processes. Global Environmental Change 10 : 109–120.
- Chambers, R. 1983. Rural development: putting the last first. Longman, London, United Kingdom.
- Equator Initiative. 2002. United Nations Development Programme Equator Initiative, Longman, London. Available from http://www.undp.org/equatorinitiative/ (accessed August 2003).
- Folke, C., et al. 2002. Resilience for sustainable development: building adaptive capacity in a world of transformations. Rainbow series 3. International Council for Scientific Unions (ICSU) , Paris . Available from http://www.sou.gov.se/mvb/pdf/resiliens.pdf (accessed August 2003).
- Ford, J., and D. Martinez, editors. 2000. Invited feature: traditional ecological knowledge, ecosystem science and environmental management. Ecological Applications 10 : 1249–1340.
- Gadgil, M., P. R. Seshagiri Rao, G. Utkarsh, P. Pramod, and A. Chhatre. 2000. New meanings for old knowledge: the People's Biodiversity Registers programme. Ecological Applications 10 : 1251–1262.
- Ghimire, K. B., and M. P. Pimbert, editors. 1997. Social change and conservation. Earthscan, London .
- Gibson, C. C. 1999. Politicians and poachers: the political economy of wildlife policy in Africa. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , United Kingdom .
- Gunderson, L. H., and C. S.Holling, editors. 2002. Panarchy: understanding transformations in human and natural systems. Island Press, Washington , D.C.
- Haas, P. M. 1990. Saving the Mediterranean: The politics of international environmental cooperation. Columbia University Press, New York .
- Hackel, J. D. 1999. Community conservation and the future of Africa's wildlife. Conservation Biology 13 : 726–734.
Direct Link:
- Hoare, R. E., and J. T. Du Toit. 1999. Coexistence between people and elephants in African savannas. Conservation Biology 13 : 633–639.
Direct Link:
- Holling C. S. 2001. Understanding the complexity of economic, ecological, and social systems. Ecosystems 4 : 390–405.
- Holling, C. S., and G. K. Meffe. 1996. Command and control and the pathology of natural resource management. Conservation Biology 10 : 328–337.
- Ingold, T. 2000. The perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. Routledge, London .
- Kates, R. W., et al. 2001. Sustainability science. Science 292 : 641–642.
- Kellert, S. R., J. N. Mehta, S. A. Ebbin, and L. L. Lichenfeld. 2000. Community natural resource management: promise, rhetoric and reality. Society & Natural Resources 13 : 705–715.
- Levin, S. A. 1999. Fragile dominion: complexity and the commons. Perseus, New York .
- Ludwig, D. 2001. The era of management is over. Ecosystems 4 : 758–764.
- Murphree, M. W. 2002. Protected areas and the commons. Common Property Resource Digest 60 : 1–3.
- Olsson, P., and C. Folke. 2001. Local ecological knowledge and institutional dynamics for ecosystem management: a study of Lake Racken watershed, Sweden. Ecosystems 4 : 85–104.
- Ostrom, E. 1990. Governing the commons: the evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge , United Kingdom .
- Ostrom, E., J. Burger, C. B. Field, R. B. Norgaard, and D. Policansky. 1999. Revisiting the commons: local lessons, global challenges. Science 284 : 278–282.
- Ostrom, E., T.Dietz, N.Dolsak, P. C.Stern, S.Stonich, and E. U.Weber, editors. 2002. The drama of the commons. National Academy Press, Washington , D.C.
- Ramakrishnan, P. S., K. G.Saxena, and U. M.Chandrashekara, editors. 1998. Conserving the sacred for biodiversity management. Oxford and IBH, New Delhi .
- Redford, K. H., and S. E. Sanderson. 2000. Extracting humans from nature. Conservation Biology 14 : 1362–1364.
Direct Link:
- Redford, K. H., and A. M. Stearman. 1993. Forest-dwelling native Amazonians and the conservation of biodiversity. Conservation Biology 7 : 248–255.
Direct Link:
- Roberts, M., W. Norman, N. Minhinnick, D. Wihongi, and C. Kirkwood. 1995. Kaitiakitanga: Maori perspectives on conservation. Pacific Conservation Biology 2 : 7–20.
- Ruitenbeek, J., and C. Cartier. 2001. The invisible wand: adaptive co-management as an emergent strategy in complex bio-economic systems. Occasional paper 34. Center for International Forestry Research , Bogor , Indonesia . Available from http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/ (accessed August 2003).
- Songorwa, A. N. 1999. Community-based wildlife management (CWM) in Tanzania: are the communities interested World Development 27 : 2061–2079.
- Young, O. 2002. The institutional dimensions of environmental change: fit, interplay and scale. MIT Press, Cambridge , Massachusetts .


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New, free downloadable content will be coming to Batman: Arkham Asylum on Sept. 17, according to the Playstation 3's in-game news ticker.
I don't have a copy of the game for the Xbox 360 or PC, so I haven't been able to see if the same news is popping up on those games. If you have either, feel free to check it out and let us know in comments.
Since it's the PS3 version, which already has a limited playable Joker in it, what sort of content do you think gamers may be getting next week?
My money is on new challenge rooms.
We've contacted Warner Bros. to see if they can enlighten us.
[Thanks Kweenie]

subset: commoncrawl


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Learn about play products
Worldwise is an industry leader of smart, stylish and environmentally-responsible pet products. The company has a portfolio of pet brands with product offerings ranging from dog and cat toys to pet bedding and carriers.
In 2015, Worldwise expanded into the dog product market and was looking to quickly increase their offerings and differentiate themselves. Through a licensing deal, One World Play Project helped Worldwise create an innovative, durable product line based on our unique formulation and design of EVA-foam products. Worldwise launched the ultra-durable dog toys under the new RhinoPlay name as part of their popular goDog® brand.
The RhinoPlay product line leverages One World Play Project's proprietary technology and features "dog-durable" toys suited to withstand the roughest play and the most aggressive chewers. In addition, One World Play Project worked closely with Worldwise to develop a "give back" component for the RhinoPlay toys to further differentiate the brand. Every purchase of a RhinoPlay toy supports animal charities that enable and promote the benefits of the human-animal bond through companionship and play.
"RhinoPlay is truly unlike anything else in the pet toy marketplace…"
Neil Werde
managing director of canine toys and accessories at Worldwise, Inc.


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doForms has a public form library where everyone can publish and share their own forms. In order to access this library, go to the Build Forms tab and under File, click on Open.
In the 'Open Form' window, click on "Select a form from the doForms Public Library".
You can search by the form name or category, as well as filter the language.
Click on a form name and then click Open.
To publish your own forms to the doForms Public Library click on File, then "Make Form Public". Your form may take about 24 hours to appear in the library, as it needs to be reviewed by our team.


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The best first step to a perfect plastering or painting is to avoid the temptation to do it yourself. Often times, we have this sort of DIY mentality for what we think are simple tasks. However, tasks like plastering are not easy at all. It needs skill and experience. Plasterers Sydney expert say that, if you don't have these two, then you better leave the job to the experts.
Professional plasterers are called professionals for a reason – they spent good amount of time in learning and doing the work in different applications. Different plastering projects and portions of the establishment require different strategies. And only an expert plasterer can build and improve ceilings, floors, walls, and even decorate and improve its features. But how do you really find plasterers Sydney offers? Below are some tips.
Through word of mouth
The best way to get a good plasterer is to ask for recommendation from your family, friends and of course, neighbors. Ask about their experience and the contact number of the person or his company.
Online search
Almost everything in life today can be found online, surely there are a couple or more plastering companies in your area. A quick online search can give you a page of good results to choose from. Check for these companies online, visit their websites and check out their portfolio or profile photographs of their previous works.
Observe how similar their previous project to yours. Do you think they are fit for your specific needs? Are they qualified and certified to provide such service? How long have they been in the industry? Also, if you wish to use a specific type of plastering, such as coving, lime plastering or rendering, make sure the company is fully capable of providing such service.
Examine the reviews
Online reviews are just as important as word of mouse. People online can provide good explanation as to why they love or they don't like the services of a particular plasterer or his company. Make sure you read enough reviews, and consider people's comments about the company's customer relation skills. Are they professional and friendly? Were they comfortable having plasterers working on their property? Do they really provide what they brag to have?
Getting a plastering estimate
Many plasterers Sydney companies can provide good quote through the phone. All you have to do is supply the information and try to describe the task you need as detailed as possible, and include the size and nature of the job. Of course, until they actually see the task, it is impossible for their telephone personnel to give you a fixed quote over the phone.
Ask for a visit
Good plastering company will send a representative to actually see your place before they can give you a detailed quote. This helps them see the condition of the area you want to be plastered and tell you about your further options. Of course, when asking for a quote, you should aim to get some that are directly comparable, something that includes all the aspects of the work, from removal of the existing plaster, waste disposal, scaffolding for outside rendering jobs, and of course, travel and parking.
Once you have the detailed quote, you can now hire the plasterer. Just make sure both of you are on the same aim about the work you want to be carried out, the cost for the job, and the estimated time of completion. Good luck!


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A message from my good friend Steven Hanna yesterday about heading out to shoot the night sky prompted me to whisper ever so nicely into my girlfriends ear about heading down because I've no car after selling it for my trip to Finland. Of course after she huffed and puffed for an hour about going down she finally gave in said yes. Success, it was off to The Giants Causeway we went.
A quick stop off at the shop on the way down for some coffee and we were all set for a few hours of shooting.
We arrived shortly after 8pm and for the first hour I was messing about with some LED lights extending the wire, bunching all the LED's up so that we could create a device to make some LED orbs. If the police had of landed they would of thought I was making some sort of bomb as I was cutting wires, adding new wires and duct taping things together ha!
Georgie had seen a picture over on Instagram over the weekend and really wanted to try it out and to be honest, I was quite excited to try something new as well. I can really see me creating a collection of images with the orbs in the future, just to do something new and different.
When it comes to astro-photography ideally it's best to be shooting the sky when its at its darkest point and that's during the new moon. I would agree completely with this but this also brings it's own set of problems and that is a dark landscape. You're then having to shoot at higher ISO's to lighten your foreground which in turn creates more noise in your image. The other way to do it is to shoot multiple exposures. Your normal 500 rule exposure for the sky, and then a longer exposure for the foreground which you can then blend together during post. Another way of lighting the foreground is to paint your foreground using a light source of some form, but unless you're doing this right, it just makes the images fake.
What if ye didn't want to take multiple exposures, you didn't want to light paint because you're like me and hate it's absolute fakeness. Well just use an already available natural tool and that is the moon!
Personally I prefer shooting astro-photography around when the moon is at waxing crescent or the first quarter. It lights up my entire foreground evenly and naturally, it turns the sky a nice blue color but you're still retaining a lot of the stars in the sky. So yes the moonlight will wash out a lot of stars, and the milkyway, and pretty much any chance of seeing and photographing the Aurora Borealis from Northern Ireland, but the images you get with the moon are just so much more cleaner, nicer, less noise and better all round.
After climbing up the cliff side to look for a different composition than the normal I heard what can only be described as a dog houling from near the points at the waters edge. Honestly it sounded like a dog was crying and naturally I had to go and have a look and see what the noise was. I came back down the cliff face carefully making sure that I didn't slip as I'm quite confident it would have hurt when I landed!
I walked out towards the point with my head torch expecting to find a dog lying hurt near the waters edge but I couldn't see anything. I did notice that there was an exceptionally low tide and you could get out further than normal, plus the very calm waters made it as safe as it could be at night, and I knew that it would be a great composition and make for a great photo of done right.
I headed back up towards the car again to grab my camera and tripod (I left it up there as I was down looking for that dog ye know) and I noticed an even better composition. There was a rock pool on the hexagonal columns and it was covered in green moss/seaweed and when the moon came out from behind the clouds it light it up just right. You could also see the reflection of the stars – this one was a sure winner!
A few quick test images, a few compositional changes and I really liked what the LCD screen was showing me. I waited for about 15 minutes until the moon came back out from behind the clouds so it could light up the foreground for me and voila I got what I wanted.
Anyway that's enough chit chat from me, here's a few of the images with settings that I took last night. I think the portrait one is probably the best one of the lot from last night.


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I think one of the hardest things about being a new mom… one of many… is learning new ways to … More
Tag: changes
Feeling Free. How to get there.
How does one act in order to feel free? What action does someone take or what habits might they need to build in order to feel free? It can actually be a lot simpler than it sounds. There are action opportunities everywhere.
Bravery and courage. How do we get there?
Bravery, courage and fearlessness. I've been thinking about it a lot. How does one become this way? To be brave and courageous?
8 things to do in your relationships
There a few things I know for sure, based on my own experience with the relationships in my life. It is these things that I'm going to share with you; perhaps there are a few you may want to look at and incorporate into your relationship life, too. Try it. Or don't. It's all good in the hood.I will tell you this, though… I experienced a beautiful blossoming effect once I started consciously making and working at these choices.
Goals and plans for the NEW year. Is it enough?
For whatever reason putting my goals and dreams neatly on a clean paper, in my new clean day planner, using different colored pens, marking with stars and hearts, makes it official.
Is this enough? Am I playing too small? Are these goals all truly mine? Can I do more?
Things I did in 2017 to change and alter the course my life
Ten random things I discovered that I did in 2017 that totally changed how my year unfolded. And how I know 2018 will unfold, as well.
Ending 2017 strong
End 2017 strong. Make your choice now to leave the crazy frantic energy of December behind and move forward into your new year powerfully and purposefully.
The shitty work
I've realized that with any struggles in life, we have to do the shitty work. We have to. There is no easy work. There are no easy buttons to our lives. To really get what we want, totally and completely, we have to do the shitty work.
Acceptance? Yah right.
The things we struggle with are most often the place where our biggest lessons lie dormant, waiting to be breathed to life… what are you struggling with?
Lessons from 2016, Hopes for 2017
I think that when we release and let go of something from our past, we energetically create space for something new to come in. When we look at our year, and let go of the experiences that moved or rocked us, all awhile keeping the lesson it taught us, we can propel ourselves into more life, more excitement, more love.
New year ahead – what do you need to let go of?
In a few days, 2016 will be upon us. There is a lot of excitement and liveliness that surrounds … More


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They Look Like People (Review)
United States/2015
Format Viewed For Review: Netflix Instant
Netflix Streaming: Yes
Amazon Prime: No
"The plot is thin, though, and it often feels like
there isn't much going on."
Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), a troubled young man, suspects the people around him are turning into evil creatures...
Look Like People feels like a short story that was unnecessarily
stretched into a feature length film. In other words, the plot is simple
and thin. Wyatt returns to New York City where he reunites with his
close friend, Christian (Evan Dumouchel). Christian invites Wyatt to
stay at his apartment, unaware of his psychotic tendencies. The first
hour or so of the film follows these characters as they essentially
bond. Occasionally, Wyatt experiences a peculiar hallucination –
usually in the form of a phone call warning him of an invasion. It
spends quite a bit of time developing its characters, but it never
really feels like the plot is moving. It leads to a tense climax, but
the ending doesn't leave an impression. It's like watching a fuse for
one hour, watching it speed up, then leading to a popper explosion.
Look Like People is an indie horror/drama film. So, I can't say I'm
surprised. I don't mean that as a jab, I think indie filmmakers are
wonderful, but they tend to follow a familiar trend – long scenes of
nothing, silence used to build suspense, and plots with deep meanings but
little action. (And I'm not talking boom-bang action, either.) The best
example of this, or perhaps the worst, is a film called Anguish. This
film suffers from many of the same issues, too. The slow-burn pace occasionally works; when it doesn't, you're left with a dreadfully slow
movie. The film is about mental illness, but the plot hardly builds on
that. It leaves everything to Wyatt's character, but it doesn't have a
bridge to push him to the end. It leads to a strong climax, but the
ending is underwhelming, especially considering the wait.
acting was good, though. MacLeod Andrews gives a dedicated performance.
Evan Dumouchel is also strong. The film is shot well. It doesn't use
music – at least, I don't remember any music. Some of the effects were
mediocre, but it doesn't use much anyway. The film was written and
directed by Perry Blackshear. I don't think this movie is great, but I
think Blackshear is talented. He pulled great performances from his
cast, he created some compelling characters, and he can create some
great suspense. In terms of writing, however, Blackshear's plot isn't
very strong. Compelling characters in an uneventful, by-the-books story
are damn-near wasted.
Overall, They Look Like People is a decent
film. I liked the focus on character, I liked the concept, and the
climax is strong. The plot is thin, though, and it often feels like
there isn't much going on. The slow pace doesn't help the uneventful
moments in the film, either. If you're looking for a similar film with
better execution, check out Take Shelter. If you have Netflix and don't
want to spend more money, this is a decent substitute.
Score: 5/10
Parental Guide: Some violence and blood.


text:
Sunflower Greetings
Price: $4.00
Whimsical card caddy with 3 adorable cards and pocket with tag. Perfect for making as a gift. Think of teachers, moms, girl friends...
Updated 9-21-2018 to add optional decorative
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Every design in AI, DXF, KNK, GSD, WPC and SVG cuts beautifully on your DIY electronic cutter. Printable PDF patterns for hand cutting with scissors also included.
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*Includes new svg cut files for Cricut Design Space™.


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edit: this is SLIGHTLY outdated. Though I've been back a few times, the feeling is mostly the same, check it out here
And it kind of sucks. I didn't know about the old Gretna location until this one was underway (and apparently there was a riverwalk location as well? I don't remember seeing one) but this one has nice juicy real estate on Decatur where Tower Records used to be.
I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt; I don't think they're quite done yet. The upstairs is completely untouched and the listening stations are blank. Not to mention there were construction workers inside. So I suspect the inventory will only be beefed up from here and hopefully it will feel a little less empty.
The inventory they currently have actually isn't that bad. For a mainstream oriented store they have a HUGE and prominent local section that's even subdivided by genre (brass etc.) The rock section was up to date and had most major releases you'd hope to see, but don't expect to find that one album you've been hunting down. The soul/R&B section was especially strong with a lot of older releases displayed prominently. However, I wasn't even able to find an electronic section, much to the dismay of a gay man* hassling an employee looking for Tiesto. I'm not really a tiesto fan but that's not horribly obscure or anything.
Vinyl? Mostly singles, mostly hip-hop. As it is now, this is definitely a CD-oriented store. While I'll buy either medium (vinyl over CD) it's a little disheartening to see a new store open with almost zilch for a medium that's gaining in popularity in favor of the medium people are singing the swan song for.
But really the main flaw was the price. Don't expect to find ANYTHING under $10 and expect to regularly see single disc albums retail for $20. Example: The Shepherd's Dog by Iron and Wine. I have no interest in that album but I can't fathom why it's retailing for that price other than the enourmous rent they must be paying for that spot. Most CDs retail for around $17 and given their good-but-sparse-and-unspectacular selection I found nothing to walk out with.
bottom line: Peaches records offers only a few things over buying CDs at Barnes and Noble: beefier local section, indepenedently owned and French Quarter location. And unfortunately, there are stores in the area that achieve all their draws better.
I hope they do improve but in the shape that I saw them there wasn't much for me to get excited about.
*I mention that he's gay because as I walked back to my car the guy leaned out the window of his sports car and purred something through his thick accent with a horrifying and swarmy "I want that" stare looking straight at me. While Peaches is in no way responsible for this incident it didn't leave me feeling good about the whole experience.


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Take a look at this handsome fellow.
Young, tall, slim, tanned, blond, healthy, well-dressed, adequately-funded, smart, funny, and kind, he got a lot of attention from women. It seemed like every time he went somewhere, women would come up and talk to him. This would happen not just at clubs and parties where that was expected behavior, but almost anywhere. At the grocery store, at the veterinarian's with his dog, at the dentist, visiting someone in the hospital, at the gas station, at McDonald's – he was hit on by women in all those places, and others as well. Women all but threw themselves at his feet and begged for his attention.
And he liked women. No pretty gay boy he, in fact he loved women. He loved everything about them. The way they looked, with their array of lovely shapes and their rainbow of beautiful colors. The way they acted, with their infinite variety of personalities, no two alike but each fascinating. The way they felt, the way they smelled, the way they tasted. To him, women were a feast for the senses, for the body, for the mind, for the soul. He loved women.
But he didn't know how to react when women hit on him. In fact, a lot of the time, he didn't even realize that was what was happening. The idea that women were attracted to him was scarcely conceivable to him. Because he thought he was ugly. He thought he was boring. He thought women had no reason to be interested in him.
I know all this because he was me. I was him.
Eventually, I got over those feelings. Mostly. They've never completely gone away. They lurk, somewhere in the depths of my psyche, but I didn't let them stop me from winning the girl everybody wanted. "Two hundred men sitting in that tiny social hall watching her dance. …I didn't speak a word of French, six weeks later she was my wife." Not exactly like that, but close enough. Out of all the men who wanted her, I was the one who took her home, forever.
Self-esteem. What is it?
An internet friend describes how youthful rejection by adults -- by one adult especially -- negatively colored his view of himself and of God for decades.
Self-esteem. Where does it come from?
Another internet friend describes herself in terms that to me seem grandiose and quite literally fantastic. When a man rejects her and turns to another woman, she ascribes his choice to a desire for mediocrity, even though by any measure I'm aware of, the preferred woman seems vastly more accomplished than she.
Self-esteem. Why do some have so much and others so little?
A third internet friend escapes an emotionally abusive relationship and slowly begins to realize that she is not, as her husband has told her for 20 years, ugly and stupid and unlovable, but is in fact smart, cute, fun, and attractive to men. Even over the internet, it's a delight to watch her as she learns this, as she discovers herself again.
Self-esteem. What does it mean? Tonight I have no answers, only questions.


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Cancellation/Refund Policy
Reservations maybe canceled but are subject to fees and penalties. Fees and penalties are based on the date the reservation was made and/or the date of your cancellation request. Any packaged that include any one day park tickets are non refundable. Any packages that include multiple day park tickets have a cancellation fee of $99.00. Packages that include hotel stay have individual cancellation fees and policies that will be combined with the ticket package cancellation policy mentioned above. If the package you had booked includes a stay at Celebration Suites at Old Town or Enclave Suites the cancellation policy for either property is the following: *Hotel Cancellation Policy Hotel cancellations or changes made 3 day/s prior to check in time (Noon local hotel time), will be subject to 1 night/s regular retail rate fee. No-show is subjected to 1 night/s regular retail rate fee We can process cancellations during normal business hours Mon-Fri by calling 1-888-406-2589. You will be emailed a cancellation confirmation that you must retain for your records and for any future inquiries. Emails and voicemails are not acceptable forms of cancellation and will not be processed without a conversation with a live agent.


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Two years ago, we started Growlabs with a simple vision: Helping B2B businesses grow faster. We've built one of the most powerful revenue engines by combining lead generation and outbound sales automation. Recently we've added even more functionalities with multi-channel campaigns and our Chrome extension. Our goal is to continue building world-class technology to help our clients reach the right buyer at the right time, through the right channels.
Ready for some fall-tastic new Growlabs features and updates?
When looking at your current clients, you probably wonder "How can I use Growlabs to generate more leads like them?" Our A.I. Audience report feature will allow you to do just that! It's as simple as 3 easy steps:
Looking for a personalized way to scale outreach efforts to top-tier accounts?
We've launched new sequence steps that allow engagement to be individualized for every single lead. Tasks allow you to add functionality to sequences that enable sales reps to reach out to important prospects in a high-touch, personalized way, while also keeping the process as efficient and organized as possible.
Making your sales process more efficient and successful is a top priority at Growlabs, so we're excited to introduce an integration with Orca: a LinkedIn automation tool.
You can now automate LinkedIn profile views and LinkedIn connection requests with all of your Growlabs leads before, or in parallel with, sending your email sequences. This integration can help your reps get noticed faster, without them opening a single LinkedIn tab. How cool is that??
I spy in the month of July, new Growlabs updates!
Our Rules tab got some TLC this month! There are two big updates for you to checkout:
Update #1: By default, when a lead gets marked as Stopped- Company Unqualified it will automatically stop emailing the other contacts that work at the same company. You can easily adjust this rule so that even if a lead gets marked as Stopped- Company Unqualified, you can continue engaging the other leads at that company.
June is a perfect month for sun, fun and a ton of Growlabs product updates!
We've updated our Zapier integration to include state changes! What does that mean for you? More ways to push Growlabs data to your favorite platforms.
For example- have you been using the BCC CRM integration and wanted more data pushed over? Now you can!
You can easily setup a Zap to create a new contact in your CRM when one of your leads moves from Pending to Ready- pushing any contact and company data available in your Growlabs account.
Founded in 1995 as one of the first digital agencies in the Chicago area, Trekk is a full-service marketing agency with a focus on emerging technology.
In July of 2017, Trekk CEO Laura Bennett received a well-timed email from a Growlabs sales rep and by August 2017, Trekk had started their first outbound campaign using Growlabs. They currently have seven email sequences running simultaneously and continuously A/B test their messaging to optimize as they go.
Since its inception in 1995, any of Trekk's resources not devoted to their clients have been spent on research and development, which is how they've become a leader in their industry when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality — and also why their own marketing and sales initiatives often come last.
Hey Team,
It's not your birthday but we decided to get you something anyways... Click Tracking is finally here!
And if that's not exciting enough, we've just launched Prospector, the ultimate prospecting tool, which comes free with your Growlabs account (see video below).
We've launched an updated version of our Google Chrome Connector - Prospector by Growlabs! Take a look at this quick clip and learn more here about how you can easily find contacts and their email addresses from a company's website with just one click.
Go to the Google Chrome Store and download the extension
Roses are red, April is grey, but in a few weeks, it's gonna be May!
Here's what's new with Growlabs this month.
Edit your leads' information before redemption
Looking to edit your leads' information before sending an email their way? You'll now find the edit feature in the Lead Gen tab prior to redeeming your leads.
Business is blooming! We've released some new features and updates that we think will help you March forward with your sales goals this Spring.
Alexa Rank Filter (Global Rank and Country Rank)
Wondering which prospects have the most visitors or page views on their website? Find out with the newly launched Alexa Rank search filter. Note: the website ranked #1 has the best traffic (with the highest combination of unique visitors and pageviews.)
Learn how Alexa Ranks are calculated here, and head to your lead gen tab to start running audience searches using the Alexa Rank Filter.
A solid sales team propels your business forward. That team builds relationships with customers and helps you focus on long-term growth.
It takes time to hire and onboard new sales talent. When you find someone with top-rated sales skills who meshes with your company culture, you want them to stick around.
Turnaround rates often soar in startups, especially for junior sales reps. Instead of constantly having to focus on replacing them, focus on retaining your top sales talent. At Growlabs, we work with some of the fastest-growing sales teams in the world. Here are four tips I've learned about how they retain their best talent.
As the most-seen face of your company, your sales team plays a pivotal role in the success of your brand. A startup's success typically relies on making a consistent number of sales, and increasing those sales over time, which is only possible if you have a strong sales team. However, finding the right people for the job can be a challenge, especially if you focus on traditional hiring tactics and competitive channels.
So how do you find these perfect salespeople?
Cold calling doesn't work because no one like to be on the receiving end. (and most likely, your sales reps hate it too). Are your sales reps cold calling hundreds of prospects a day without seeing much success? It's time to quit the old-school tactics.
Do you like being cold called? How often do you respond? When was the last time a cold caller got you to actually buy something? There is objective data proving that this tactic is one of the least effective ways your salespeople can spend their time.
It's happening everywhere in consumer sales. Have you ever added fries to your lunch order at the suggestion of the cashier, or bought five accessories to complement your new camera or phone because there was a great "limited time offer"? If so, you've experienced the receiving end of a successful upsell. While it's commonplace for products and goods, increasing your average sale size for software and services is a different ball game.
As an entrepreneur or business owner, increasing average orders is gravy: it allows you to work less, grow your revenue faster, or increase your margins. However, many professionals think that doubling their average sale size is impossible, or so difficult it isn't worth it. So, they spend all their efforts trying to increase the sheer volume of clients
It's true -- the pace of business is accelerating. However, while customers expect their products to be delivered immediately, that doesn't necessarily mean they're any faster at deciding whether to purchase them.
In fact, comparison shopping is easier than it ever has been before, which makes our job as salespeople an uphill battle. That doesn't mean you can't close deals faster -- it just means that your old strategies may not work, and you'll be leaving money on the table if you don't try out some new moves.
If you want your outbound emails to be effective, they have to connect with the people they're sent to.
A recent study from MailChimp showed that segmented campaigns get 14.64% more opens and 59.99% more clicks.
The results of a well-segmented campaign are:
- Increased conversion
More personalized messaging customized to each segment and their pain points results in higher engagement and ultimately conversion.
- Bigger deals
Offering the right product to the right type of customers, at the right price increases revenue. Also, it allows you to spend less time on less lucrative markets.
Outbound Email Sequence Tips: 13 Tips to Write the Perfect Email Cadence
- How to think about the perspective you'll write for
- How to determine the objective of your email
- How to build up enough momentum to persuade the reader to take action
- How to use copywriting and persuasive frameworks in your writing
- Tips for email copywriting in general
- A step-by-step process to put all this into practice
An A/B test is the easiest way to test your messaging and optimize your email sequences to produce better results on future campaigns to similar audiences.
A/B testing is a method to validate that any change to an email in your sequence is improving your open rate or reply rate before you send that sequence out to a larger group of leads.
For true A/B testing, you want to test either the open rate or the reply rate
Hi Team,
Happy February, the month of heart-shaped pizzas! (We're cutting down on chocolate, remember?)
Here's what's new at Growlabs:
We're super excited about the newest update to our Chrome Extension!
While you're browsing on the web and / or doing manual prospecting, Growlabs is here to help you out. You'll be able to easily view, redeem and apply leads to a sequence straight from a company's website.
Happy New Year! Our resolution is to continue to make your job easier (and also to eat less chocolate.)Here are some new features to kick off 2018:
Pick up your telephones ladies and gents, we've now added phone numbers to the data you have access to through Growlabs. Phone numbers are viewable from the leads tab under your leads contact info.
Lead generation and follow up is a time-consuming task for most sales representatives. Knowing who to reach out to, when to reach out to them, and what to say is daunting to those who don't have the right tool set.
Growlabs is a marketing and sales automation tool to help you identify, engage, and convert leads faster. You can use our lead generation tool to find key decision makers in your target markets, then nurture your newly found leads with highly personalized sales email campaigns and smart inbox filtering. Plus, a beautiful reporting interface makes it easy to optimize your campaigns and stay on top of valuable insights.
Now that Growlabs integrates with 1,000+ web tools via Zapier, you can save even more time and effort on your outreach.
B2B Sales Leads are qualified leads that sales people reach out and sell to. Being able to generate high-quality leads that will convert into clients is difficult. But, if done correctly, it will help your business beat the competition and grow significantly.
Quality is one of the most important criteria. If you simply increase the volume, but do not qualify these leads, then you will only end up spinning your wheels more. However, if you can increase your volume of leads by 20% without decreasing your quality then your business makes 20% more income.
Unfortunately, lead generation is tough.
Holiday cheer... new features are here! ☃
From your Reports tab you can now build an A.I. Audience Report to:
Giving Assistant needed to reach out to non-profit organizations in the US to partner with them and allow shoppers to donate to the organization of their choice. After manually reaching out to several hundred NGOs, they decided it was time to scale things up. They wanted a solution that would allow them to find contacts at the organizations they were targeting and send them customized emails and follow-ups.
After evaluating a dozen different tools, they selected Growlabs for its advanced lead generation and outbound email automation capabilities.
If you have a role in sales, business development, marketing, or PR, chances are that you send a lot of emails. If done well, outbound emails can be extremely effective in acquiring new customers, increasing sales or establishing key partnerships.
In the past seven years, I've analyzed over 10 million emails sent by hundreds of companies I've worked with to understand how to optimize email response rates. Here are tips and tricks that helped increase email response rate by over 320 percent.
Okay. Your business is growing at 10-20 percent per year. While this may be extremely impressive for a billion-dollar business like Amazon, this isn't enough for most small businesses. Not even close. Successful, high-growth companies typically have a triple-digit growth rate. So, how can your business grow 200 percent -- or even 500 percent -- next year?
A common problem for young companies is the inability to understand the specific needs of prospective clients and partners. This leads to unfocused go-to-market strategies. Ultimately, many companies are unable to efficiently allocate human and capital resources towards rapid expansion.
The key to achieving explosive growth is to implement a specific market segmentation early.
We are falling into October with a variety of exciting new features and platform updates. 🍂
Read about them all below:
You are now able to customize when you'd like your follow up emails to be sent. Smart pause will continue to be the default option but for those that would like more control over when emails are sent, customized sending times is the feature for you 😉
To adjust when you'd like your follow up emails sent, go to your engage tab, select a sequence and click on the gear next to the timing icon.
It's Novem-brrr, but as the weather starts to cool down, we're heating up with exciting new features, platform updates, and announcements
You can now set specific rules for your sequences that consist of a Trigger and an Action.
There are already many rules that Growlabs has automatically applied to your account since day one, (for example, we automatically stop emailing a lead once they respond in a sequence.)
Now we're introducing the ability for you to add additional customized rules, as well as the ability to disable one existing default rule that many of you have asked to be able to change.


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Terra has lived with stares her whole life. She was born with a port-wine stain on her cheek. Instead of receiving support from her family, they only make it worse. Her father is happy to point out how ugly she is every chance he gets, while her mother is constantly looking for new treatments to help remove or lighten her birthmark. Her two older brothers have all but abandoned her in order to escape their father's verbal abuse.
Every day in Terra's house involves fear and avoidance due to her father. He ridicules her mother endlessly about her weight, which has skyrocketed since the death of Terra's aunt. Instead of confronting her father, the family cowers and tries to protect each other. Due to her father's constant berating, Terra doesn't feel that she deserves happiness and love because of her birthmark. She is in a comfortable relationship with a jock because she thinks this may be the only boy who will ever go out with her.
Her life is scheduled to the minute between school and her job at the local art gallery where she works on her collages. Her planning and scheduling gets knocked off balance when she meets a boy with some baggage of his own. Jacob looks at life in a completely different way than Terra does. Jacob has a cleft palate and is adopted but he accepts his differences. He tries to help Terra see how her birthmark makes her beautiful. An unexpected trip to China with her mother, Jacob and his adoptive mother helps Terra and her mother believe that maybe they don't have to live by her father's rules and expectations forever.
The cruelty that Terra and her mother endure at the hands of her father is difficult to read. It is frustrating to someone who cannot relate to Terra's situation. Headly does an exquisite job allowing both Terra and her mother to blossom from the encouragement they receive from Jacob and his mother but it is ultimately their own realizations that allow them to see how strong they truly are.
Headly's descriptions of China put the reader right there with the characters as they travel throughout the country encountering its beauty. Terra's transformation started at home but once she's away from her father's verbal onslaught she is able to work through her feelings and just breathe appropriate. Her connection to Jacob is something she cannot describe but she knows that it's changing her life in ways she never could have imagined. Jacob goes through a life-changing event of his own in China that he wants Terra to be a part of. The trust that he feels with her is something that Terra has never felt with anyone before and it overwhelms her.
Headly's use of maps as a running theme throughout the book is completely original and always ties back to the heart of the story which is Terra's journey to find out who she is under all of her make-up. Terra is a character that the reader will root for and not soon forget and this book shows the reader what true beauty really is.
This is for ages twelve and up. There are sexual references.
© 2009 Amy Ridley
Amy Ridley received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology from Boston University
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Bureau Veritas Buys CKM to Deepen Construction Expertise and Expand Its Asian Presence
Bureau Veritas, one of the largest global testing, inspection and certification agencies, has bolstered its Singapore presence through the acquisition of a 70% stake in homegrown CKM Consultants Pte. Ltd.
The acquisition of CKM Consultants will enable the Euronext Paris-listed company to deepen itself into Singapore public sector construction projects as well as expand into private sector projects in the longer term. Bureau Veritas already has testing, inspection and certification expertise in the construction and infrastructure sectors globally.
Bureau Veritas has other core competencies in sectors like Marine, Oil & gas, Consumer products and Commodities.
The partnership is timely as CKM Consultants has just clinched a S$26 million contract to undertake comprehensive qualified person supervision (an industry term used to refer to an accredited service to conduct supervision) on four new stations on the upcoming Thomson Line (TSL). With connections to the North-South East-West Line, North East Line (NEL), Circle Line (CCL) and Downtown Line (DTL), the TSL is expected to open in phases from 2019.
"Bureau Veritas has a long and rich experience in helping clients in the construction industry to define their strategies, manage risk, monitor quality, improve performance and enhance their return on investment throughout the critical design, construction and transaction phases. This timely partnership with CKM Consultants will enable Bureau Veritas to bring some of the best global practices into our Singapore partner," said Serge Antonini, Bureau Veritas' Senior Vice President for Southeast Asia-Pacific.
"It is also an opportunity for Bureau Veritas to bring CKM's expertise to overseas markets, especially in Southeast Asia," he added.
Rakesh Kumar, Chief Executive of the company's Industries and Facilities Division, said that the new relationship with CKM Consultants is a strategic alliance because of the immense experience and track record it has in Singapore public sector construction market. "Bureau Veritas is already a diversified player in the testing, inspection and certification and we see this alliance as a marriage of global expertise and local networks to jointly seek private sector projects in the construction sector."
"CKM Consultants views the relationship with Bureau Veritas as part of its next phase of growth," said Abishek Murthy, a founding Director of the Singapore company. "We have been around for 25 years and have done enormous amounts of civil and structural work for numerous public projects. We see this alliance with a global MNC as a gateway to pitch for private sector projects and as a catalyst to spread our wings into the region," he said.
CKM was founded as a professional engineering services company in 1989 and has undertaken more than 150 projects with the likes of the Land Transport Authority, National Environment Agency, National Parks Board, Preservation of Monuments Board, among others.
Murthy said that the Singapore company has four core accredited offerings: Independent Design review and peer review; Periodic structural inspections; Structural investigation & feasibility studies; and Construction supervision.
In the past two decades, CKM Consultants has successfully completed more than 500 Accredited Checking/ Independent Design Reviews / Peer Reviews mainly in Singapore and in selected markets in Asia.
Murthy adds that CKM Consultants is one of the Singapore pioneers in the area of structural investigation and consultancy. "Full structural investigation is a specialization which few have, CKM being one of them. We are a pioneer of this kind of work when the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) started their efforts to conserve buildings in the late 80s," he added.
Bureau Veritas is a global leader in laboratory testing, inspection and certification services. Created in 1828, the Group has more than 64,000 employees in around 1,330 offices and laboratories located in 140 countries. The Singapore office, which functions as a regional headquarters for Southeast Asia and the Pacific, has 550 staff.