Grassvasion: The Potential of Board Games in Environmental Education with Liz Baldwin
Delaney Jacobs
Liz Baldwin is an associate professor at the School of Government and Public Policy and conducts research on environmental, water, and energy policy in the U.S. and abroad.
Recently, she has helped to develop Grassvasion, a board game based on Buffelgrass management in Tucson designed to illustrate concepts of interest in managing environmental issues and encouraging cooperation.
Here we sit down with Baldwin to learn about what the board game is, how it came about, and the potential of board games generally as tools for environmental education and broadening perspectives for different actors.
How are you involved with Grassvasion?
Liz Baldwin
I never really expected to be doing research on invasive species policy and management, but not long after I arrived in Tucson, over 10 years ago now, I learned about the Buffelgrass issue and was eventually successful in applying for a grant from the National Science Foundation that gave me about $1.6 million to study Buffelgrass from a socio-ecological perspective with an interdisciplinary team including plant demographers and social scientists.
We really dug in, and Grassvasion kind of came out of that project. My colleague Adam Henry had an idea to see if we could model Buffelgrass within an agent-based modeling framework, where the Buffelgrass has its agency to respond ecologically to different stimuli. Then humans have agency to respond to the buffelgrass according to different resources, constraints, and motivations that they would have.
At some point along the way, Adam said, "Oh, you know what? I think I'd like to do this as a game where people could kind of try to figure out how to manipulate the actors.”
That sparked something in me. I thought, "Oh, while he's working on that, we could make a tabletop board game that would illustrate these principles.” It sounded like a lot of fun.
My son-in-law happens to be an aspiring board game designer, and a fairly serious one, so we've been working together, where I've been teaching him about the natural and social sciences, and he has been translating that into a board game that is fun to play and well-designed.