The Gaelic tree alphabet is an ancient connection between trees and writing. In the Highlands of Scotland, it has recently been used as a structure for engaging people in interdisciplinary encounters at the boundary between forestry and literature, through a project called A-B-Tree. Poetic inquiry methods enabled exploration of how making a creative response to a tree can influence learning and attitudes. The A-B-Tree project has amassed evidence that tree-related wordplay is good for our well-being and stimulates and deepens thinking about trees. The poetic inquiry method has itself been a source of insights into the epistemological edge-zone between ways of knowing in poetry, folklore and forest ecology in particular and more generally between artistic practice and scientific knowledge.

Across Europe, ash trees are dying from infection by the fungus Hymenoscyphus fraxineus (also known as Chalara fraxinea). The loss of these magnificent trees from our landscapes has brought a wave ...

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is the most famous novel about the sea of all time. Its tale of Captain Ahab’s vendetta against the white sperm whale in the Pequod, and the journey and survival of the ...

This paper presents a meta-level framework for exploration of multiple knowledge bases in which conflicting opinions are expressed. In the first section, the usefulness of a meta-level approach to inconsistency handling is explained and comparisons made with other related work. In the second section a formal meta-level language is defined to allow arguments from knowledge bases to be reasoned about independently of their object-level representation. Four basic meta-level relations are introduced : disagreement, equivalence, justification and elaboration. In the third section, an example is given to illustrate the framework. The fourth section demonstrates how the four basic relations can be used to guide a user in exploring the range of opinion in a collection of knowledge bases. The notion of a conflict set is introduced to provide a focussed 'window' on the particular disagreements a user is interested in. A flavour is also given of how these primitive relations can be used as the basis of definitions of more complex argument constructs, such as those encountered in the literature on argumentation. These argument constructs may provide ways to automate comparison and evaluation of knowledge bases. An initial prototype has been implemented to evaluate the usefulness of this framework and to assess its computational feasibility. The results so far are promising. The paper concludes with a discussion of future directions.

The ‘push down’ of power through devolution and decentralization and the ‘pull down’ of power through action on the ground are reaching an exciting stage in Scotland. This is happening within a political context of devolution in the UK, with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999 and Scotland’s forest estate now in the hands of the Scottish Executive (the government in Scotland). This chapter describes the political ‘push down’ and the people’s ‘pull down’ of power and tells the story of the people’s movement to get access to land and natural resources. The movement has led to the Land Reform Act, which gives communities the right to acquire ownership of land, including woodlands, and to the establishment of more than 100 community woodland organizations. It has also strongly influenced cultural and organizational changes within the national forest and rural development institutions. Local and sometimes radical efforts to pull down power can shape the decentralization process at the national level. Six examples illustrate the range of options for communities seeking to manage local woodlands.

There are certain problems inherent in teaching in controversial domains. In this paper, we present a prototype of an intelligent tutoring system called OLIA which addresses some of these problems. We focus here on OLIA's Devil's advocate strategy which is a method for teaching through a debate between the user and the system. This paper takes advantage of existing work using a meta-level argumentation framework for knowledge representation in controversial domains. In this framework statements are linked by primitive relations such as disagreement, equivalence and justification, and higher order meta-level ones such as counter-arguments and corroborations. We investigate the use of this framework as the basis for the OLIA system.