Communicating natural resource sustainability issues using an interactive group game.
Proceedings of the AWRA/UCOWR Symposium on Water Resources Education, Training and Practice, 29 June - 3 July, 1997. Keystone, CO.
Author: Michael D. Lee Ph.D.
ABSTRACT: A key and growing issue in natural resources management is sustainability. No natural resources course, at any educational level, is complete without addressing the question of sustainable resource use strategies. Any conditionally renewable resource may be used unsustainably if it, or the factors which control it, is exploited past the point at which the ability of that resource to regenerate is compromised and it subsequently yields diminishing returns that fall below our demands. Many problems of unsustainable water resource use stem from our inability to sufficiently plan ahead, to understand resource interrelationships and limits, and to develop strategies that avoid conflicting behavior. To help communicate these concepts to students of all ages and levels, an interactive, participatory game was devised using the popular game of blocks known as jengaâ . This paper presents an explanatory and illustrative guide to using this game to explore resource sustainability issues based on experiences with farmer, professional and student groups in Honduras and California. It summarizes some of the major issues of sustainable development, with specific reference to the water field, and links both of these to the various exercises and strategies that can be simulated through this game of blocks.
KEY TERMS: Water resources, management, renewable, sustainability, game, teaching.
Water has long been considered to be a perpetually renewable resource, like wind or solar energy, one which will always exist in relatively constant or at least predictable supply regardless of how we use it. However, in many important ways, water is increasingly falling into the conditionally renewable resource category, its future availability in both the quantity and the quality that we need a function of the steps we take to manage it and the watershed system from which it is derived. Any conditionally renewable resource may be used unsustainably if it, or the factors which control it, are exploited past the point at which the ability of that resource to regenerate is compromised and it subsequently yields returns that fall below our demands upon it.
The renewable nature of key natural resources like water is an important factor for the sustainability of our economic, social and environmental systems, each of which depends upon the continued availability of an adequate water supply. A water resource is truly sustainable if it can meet our multiple needs today, tomorrow and for future generations. This is dependent on two factors.
On the one hand, it is a function of our ability to maintain the natural environmental conditions on the supply side that will ensure current and future availability of water of sufficient quality to support and satisfy our various needs. This requires both the careful management of the environmental system (the watershed), and the built and institutional components (the delivery and treatment system) that make the water available to users. The two are closely interrelated, with failures to adequately care for the environmental side of the equation leading to greater expenditure of resources on the built side to compensate for any productivity or quality loss from a given source.
On the other hand, the sustainability of our water resources also depends on our ability to maintain user needs in check so that at any point in time, users are not demanding more from the natural environment and the institutional system than they can provide. The nature and efficiency of our water demands to be met by the natural and built components of the water supply system must be carefully controlled. As a public good, users have long considered water as a gift of nature with limitless renewability. As a common resource, many users access the water source, each acting independently and in their own interests in an effort to maximize the utility that they each derive from it. With specific parties looking out for their own interests, often in a highly localized manner (for example within the area served by a regional aquifer or along the length of a large river), insufficient attention has been given to safeguarding the long-term interests of the user group as a whole and thus sustainability is compromised for those adjacent to or downstream of destructive or less thoughtful users.
Loss of sustainability does not usually just happen all of a sudden, but is often a chronic situation in which over a relatively long period of time we adopt behavior that brings us to a situation in which critical thresholds are passed. As thresholds are exceeded, the costs associated with our unsustainable behavior are increasingly felt in both acute and chronic fashion. An acute example would be the need to build a multi-million dollar water treatment plant or storage dam to meet incremental needs, whereas a chronic example might be the gradual increase in treatment plant chemicals and filter-bed maintenance costs or the increasing frequency of customer dry season shortages and rationing over time.
These different types of costs function as important indicators, a notion that is fundamental to efforts to achieve or maintain sustainable resource use systems. Indicators tell us what is going on and where we are at any moment in time with respect to our resource base. They are descriptors of some component or process related to the degradation, maintenance or enhancement of sustainability (Bellows, 1994). They are best used when they provide clear signs that the desired conditions are being maintained and/or improved over time. Often we seem to use the absence of warning signs that conditions or risks are worsening, which some have called indicators of unsustainability (Jodha, 1994), as proxies for sustainability - i.e. if we don’t see them or if they don’t get any worse, we assume we have a sustainable situation. This may or may not be the case. Some common indicators of unsustainable water resources include:
Failure to balance the supply-side and demand-side of water resources management provokes a number of negative links in our society - links to public health problems, environmental degradation and economic loss (Serageldin, 1995) - that are associated with the water shortages and/or water contamination that results. Being able to define these economic, environmental and social consequences through appropriate indicators and use them to move towards a more sustainable strategy for water resources management is an important goal. One way to achieve this is through effective education of sustainability concepts to actors and decision-makers in the water resources sector. A better appreciation of resource use strategy options, indicators and consequences gives the individual a clearer view of their resource-use behavior, where it could be leading and why. The future will require water supply professionals to have a greater ability to plan sufficiently ahead, to understand resource interrelationships and limits, and to help develop strategies that avoid conflicting, individualized behavior that leads to resource depletion and contamination. In general, formal environmental education needs to be extended and better ways found to train individuals in the skills of sustainable development (IUCN, 1991). A main reason why "sustainable development" has become one of the hottest issues of the 1990s is because our global systems are littered with examples of failed or failing social, economic and environmental systems, a fact that raises enormous concern for the future given projections of population growth and rising demands on limited resource stocks and environmental systems (Brown et al, 1996).
In light of this situation, and as part of water resources training given to a variety of different recipients from campesino farmers in charge of the management and maintenance of rural water supply systems in Honduras, to American university students taking advanced classes in resource management, a simple yet highly effective participatory game has been devised to illustrate many of the important aspects of sustainability using the popular game of blocks known as Jenga.
Jenga is a game in which polished, uniform wooden blocks are stacked up in layers of three blocks facing in alternate directions (see Figure 1) to produce a tower of blocks 18 layers high. In its recreational format, players are required to take blocks out (Figure 2) and place them on top of the tower, the goal being to build it as high as possible without toppling it over. The game was first witnessed being used in an educational setting as an ice-breaker in community development workshops run by anthropologist Mario Ardón in Honduras in 1994, its purpose being to encourage a given group of people to feel more comfortable with each other, diffuse nervous tension and self-consciousness, and open up conversation and discussion. After observing the reactions of the players and thinking about how the blocks could be used in more formal educational contexts, the author subsequently adapted the game to teaching sustainability issues as part of water resources management classes at the Pan-American School of Agriculture at Zamorano, Honduras, as well as in the training of community watershed management paratechnicians working in rural Lempira and later in natural resource classes at California State University, Hayward.
The rules of the game were changed somewhat to accommodate the educational objective. Instead of placing extracted blocks back on to the top of the tower, they are put to one side by the players, emphasizing how the blocks are extracted and the subsequent effects on the stability of the original 18 layer tower, rather than the balancing skills of players. In order to prevent players simply stripping the layers off one by one, at least one of the blocks from the top layer must be left in place. Since the game is meant to represent a stock of conditionally renewable resources like water, rather than non-renewable resources like fossil fuels, removal of a block is considered analogous to placing an additional demand or use upon the resource stock the tower represents, as opposed to the actual extraction and consumption of the resource. Clearly the greater the demands placed upon the stock of resources (as represented by their removal in ever greater numbers) and/or the less coordinated and more careless the modes of resource use (as represented by the order in which the blocks are extracted and with what delicacy), the less sustainable the stock of resources will be to continue satisfying the demands made upon it (as represented by the stability of the tower).
The game of sustainability blocks focuses attention on the needs for and types of resource use practices open to us. In theory, if we know or care little about our resource uses and their effects on our future uses and the uses of others, our practices will be isolated and self-seeking and give rise to situations known collectively as the tragedy of the commons in which there is little incentive to act sustainably, and in the most perverse of cases, actual disincentives to doing so. However, the more we know and think about resources and their future costs and implications, the more strategic, thoughtful and deliberate these practices should become. Moreover, the more we know about other people’s resource use strategies and about the resources themselves, and their limitations, advantages and disadvantages, the more planned and integrated our collective resource use should be.
The idea that unsustainable behavior is something we should recognize and consciously avoid, and that sustainability is something we must define or visualize ahead of time and work towards is important. The sustainability block game can be used as a valuable and enjoyable first step in getting these ideas across to a wide range of recipients. As in the real world, the sustainability block game presents a number of permutations for sustainable exploitation of a given stock of resources:
1. Players can be encouraged to act independently without a coordinated strategy by extracting blocks with no particular order or method, leading to a sub-optimal exploitation of the resource stock below the theoretical sustainable maximum. This will usually result in the tower’s premature collapse if it is unbalanced and made susceptible to toppling.
2. When players do not act independently but seek to develop a coordinated and systematic strategy for removal there are two obvious and very different options possible:
a. systematically take out the middle blocks from each level leaving four balanced corner points of contact between each layer (Figure 3) - the most stable but least productive configuration. This creates the least risk of collapse but many potentially exploitable resources will be left untouched (18 out of 54 blocks could be extracted).
b. systematically take out the outside blocks of each level leaving one centered point of contact between each layer (Figure 4) - the most productive, but risky configuration. The maximum amount of resources will be exploited but the manner of exploitation and the precision required, will create the possibility that the whole system will collapse (36 out of 54 blocks could be extracted).
3. A third option would be to practice some combination of the above in an effort to boost productive yield over the conservative option a. while minimizing the risk of instability brought on by the resource maximizing strategy of option b. For example, the players could extract the middle block first from the bottom half of the tower, providing a stable double-contact base, and then extract the outer blocks from the upper half, which, because of the smaller number of layers with only single block contact, will have less potential energy for toppling than if this were done for the whole tower (this 50/50 strategy would yield a resource total of 27 out of 54 blocks and is illustrated in Figure 5).
How the blocks are extracted is also important. Whichever of the strategies selected, there always exists the possibility of a clumsy act toppling the tower over. In one case, the game was used with a group of students and before even a block was removed, the first player knocked the table on which the tower stood, bringing the whole system crashing down. Another important factor is that even with the factory-made Jenga game, the blocks are not perfectly uniform nor equally textured and so players often have a little trouble extracting blocks, in some cases making it impossible to remove a block or blocks from a particular layer and therefore adhering to a planned strategy. Some of the more innovative players will realize that one’s fingers are not the best tools with which to safely extract particular blocks due to nervous shaking or general ham-fistedness, and so they bring technology to bear by using the point of a pencil or pen or some other precise poking and pushing instrument. Others start to extract a block and find that it pulls another out of alignment, or else seems to be leading to the onset of dangerous instability and so they end up carefully coaxing it back into place and moving on to another block.
Each of these factors - the clumsy accident, the resistance to removal, the productive use of technology, and the remedial attention required to restore blocks to a more stable condition - are all events in the game that can be used to great advantage in observations, commentaries or discussions about the issue of sustainability and how we deal with it:
In each case, these types of resource management issues can be referred to as the sustainability block game progresses and an instructor should lose no opportunity to get beneficial points across that relate the player’s experience with the blocks to resource issues in general and water resources in particular. Clearly, each professor, teacher or instructor will find their own ways of handling the group dynamic associated with the playing of this game and will pick their own pertinent examples, local or otherwise, to best make connections between the experience with the blocks and the real world. However, based on the author’s experience, the following represents the sequence of activities and dynamic that brings out the best debate and awareness on the part of a group of players in an educational setting.
It is recommended that the game be started by creating a dynamic in which the group reproduces the tragedy of the commons. This helps prime the participants to be receptive to later thinking about planned and rational resource management options. Participants act as individuals accessing a common resource stock with little or no information as to what the rest of the users will do and their only objective being to obtain their particular block at any cost. This ultimately leads to the premature collapse of the block tower and thus the inability of subsequent users to meet their needs. To ensure that this tragedy of the commons takes place, it is important that participants are not given anything more than the basic rules of the game and are left to act as individuals. In every instance in which a group has played the game to date, the end result has been the same for this first round; each individual sees the tower from the point of view of where best and easiest to extract their own individual block. As the block removal continues, the difficulty of safely taking out blocks increases, but even though the pressure placed on each subsequent player rises, each player will try until the blocks finally fall. Moreover, the manner in which blocks are extracted under this scenario is usually very haphazard with little attention given to the effect that taking a particular block has on the ability of subsequent users to extract blocks (Figure 6). Lack of a balanced strategy usually results in the early fall of the tower as some participants take from the bottom first or too many blocks are taken from one side.
When the tower finally succumbs to the pressure of the demands upon it and falls, the instructor then analyzes the experience with the group and gets them to explain its significance. It should be concluded that while none of the players wanted the tower to fall and each did their best to prevent it, for lack of a coordinated strategy and full information of what fellow users would do, blocks were taken sub-optimally, i.e. there would have been the potential to exploit a lot more blocks without the tower falling if done in a different way.
The tragedy of the commons should be followed by a division of the players into different teams. The exact number and composition will depend on the overall group size, but it is recommended that the number of groups not exceed four or five, with three to five members per group. This will give each team a turn in a reasonable amount of time without the process getting too repetitive or boring, and also promotes meaningful in-group discussion while planning and executing individual block/resource strategies.
The task for each team should be to seek to maximize the resources that can be extracted from the tower by deciding upon and carrying out a specific strategy of block removal. Each group of players should be asked to study the tower of blocks and to privately discuss a strategy and write it down. At random, they should be asked to execute the strategy as written, watching each other but not changing their approach. They should be asked to explain what their strategy is and why they are doing it as they proceed. The experience has been that unless explicitly instructed not to allow the tower to fall, the competitive spirit of individuals leads each group to take blocks until the tower collapses even though they see indicators (in the form of the wobbly response of the remaining blocks) showing that the system is getting close to its sustainable limits. On very rare occasions, a group will stop and announce that they can go no further with their strategy but must be content with a particular level of resource development because to continue to demand more will lead to an unsustainable situation that will prejudice existing resource demands.
Once each group has completed their effort, the instructor has the opportunity to analyze the different strategies, and depending on time limitations and the willingness of players to participate in, point out the various resource use options and the various analogies and relevance suggested previously. The first point to be made is to question why each of the groups persisted in continuing with their strategies even though the indicators were clear that the system was close to unsustainability. It should be concluded that a major problem is that no one assumes the authority to bring the process to a halt before collapse occurs. While indicators were there to be seen - in the form of a tottering tower and increasing difficulty in selecting and extracting exploitable blocks - no decision was made by the individuals concerned to forego the resources in favor of the resource needs already being satisfied. An analogy should be made to real-life situations such as aquifer depletion and saline intrusion or stream withdrawals and minimum in-stream flow requirements for habitat preservation.
If clumsy behavior caused the tower to prematurely topple or if any of the teams used tools or had to shore up the tower with some artful poking and realigning of the blocks, the real world significance of these events should be pointed out. If groups have not already done so, the instructor can point out the various resource options open to the groups. In particular, the conservationist, play-safe approach of extracting only the center block from each layer (option a. above) and the go-for-broke resource maximization approach of extracting all outside blocks (option b. above) can be demonstrated and the relative advantages and disadvantages of each pointed out. The groups will then hopefully conclude that a middle-ground approach is generally the most appropriate in which we respect the limits to sustainability yet recognize that to be too cautious and conservationist in our approach can be equally damaging from a societal point of view since while we may prevent certain environmental damage, we may forego economic and social benefits that would otherwise have accrued if more resources had been exploited.
Following these discussions and demonstrations, the instructor and players can progress more detailed levels of discussions and try out different resource strategies (e.g. middle blocks low down, outer blocks higher up in the tower, etc.) in an effort to illustrate that it is not just how many blocks you take out but how you take them out that is important for sustainability and resource productivity, all the time trying to make useful analogies to real world resource situations.
During the course of the game it is likely that one or more participants will raise relevant issues or examples that the instructor must be flexible enough to incorporate into the discussions. Some observations made by players in activities carried out by the author include:
The sustainability block game is simple and tactile and can be used where more sophisticated computer modeling programs (which deal in a much more complex way with sustainability issues) are not feasible - for example in certain classroom and community situations, particularly in developing countries. Players get an enjoyable and highly visceral experience from participating in the game and experiencing the tension created as the resource system approaches the limits of its sustainability and finally crashes with a lot of noise and drama of wooden blocks spilling down onto the floor and around the feet of the players.
If desired, blocks of different colors may be used to represent different aspects of an overall resource system such as the watershed from which water resources are derived. This color coding can help the instructor make a particularly forceful point concerning the interconnectedness of our natural resource base, for example in relation to integrated watershed management and the need to balance the multiple and often competing needs for grazing land, forestry, farming, urbanization and water use. Blocks could be strategically placed and show that, for example, extracting just the blue blocks, if done in a careful fashion does not affect the stability of the system (which can be defined in terms of water quantity and quality), but that the extraction of forestry products (green blocks) and the presence of agriculture and the erosion that often accompanies it (removal of brown blocks representing soil loss and soil fertility reduction) can quickly lead to the destabilization of the system which begins to topple and even fall long before all the blue blocks have been extracted.
Since the Jenga game costs over $20, instructors may wish to make their own. A total of 54 to 60 blocks (18 to 20 levels) should be made. The best material is hardwood so that they are heavier and not easily knocked over by sudden movements nor dented and chipped in the process. The different blocks should be as homogeneous as possible in terms of the length, width and depth of each block and the uniformity of these dimensions for each block. Ideal dimensions are 3*1*3/4 inches. They should be well sanded to be completely smooth and where possible should be polished and shined to allow smooth removal from their sandwiched location between surrounding blocks. If a color coding is desired for the blocks, it is best to paint almost but not quite to the block edge so the paint does not interfere with the movement of the blocks. Alternately, colored self-adhesive stickers could be placed on the ends of blocks to provide the same color coding.
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