The Power of Environmental Knowledge: Ethnoecology and Environmental Conflicts in Mexican Conservation

Theory in political ecology emphasizes the role of competing interests in shaping resource use. Although supportive of these approaches, this article draws on the importance of meanings assigned to ecological systems to question how epistemological differences also contribute to environmental conflicts. Following calls to examine the interface between environmental knowledge and action, consideration is given to ethnoecological constructs of forests on Mexico's southern Yucatan peninsula, home to the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve. To quiet opposition to the Reserve, government agents increased financial aid to the region in the form of conservation development projects. With the counsel of a Reserve director, local residents effectively used these projects to press for an environmentalism based on sustainable resource use. This position has associations with a local ethnoecology of land as a place of work. In examining how ethnoecologies played out in contests surrounding conservation, possibilities for a localized, alternative environmentalism are discussed, as well as the importance of environmental constructs for research in political ecology.     

Contested Knowledge, Contingent Classification: Animals in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea

New Guinea highlanders appear to conceive of animal taxonomy in a way that is simultaneously familiar to a scientist, yet different. This is often attributed to interaction between natural ecology, which constrains content, and cultural context, which conditions the structure of any taxonomy. The evidence presented here confirms this view, although the considerable, and initially disconcerting, disagreements between persons over taxonomic issues raise the question: To what extent is Wola classification of natural phenomena analogous to Western hierarchical classification? The stateless political environment conditions the Wola constantly to challenge hierarchy, obfuscate boundaries, and think in terms of "fuzzy sets," confounding the assumption of agreed classes and threatening intellectual anarchy. However, their taxonomic regime offsets this, facilitating discourse in the absence of authorities to adjudicate in disputes. No formal classificatory scheme devised so far can adequately represent such an oral tradition's ever negotiated ordering of animals; whatever framework we adopt will somewhat distort it. [Keywords: Papua New Guinea, ethnozoology, taxonomy]     

People and wildlife: Conflicts arising around the Bia Conservation Area in Ghana

Human–wildlife conflicts have drastically increased around conservation areas in Africa over the last decades. Underlying causes are similar across regions and can most often be attributed to land-use changes and increasing human populations. However, wildlife species composition involved in conflicts can vary tremendously across sites. Conflict assessment often focuses on prominent species such as elephants or other large mammals, and information on smaller wildlife species involved in conflicts is often lacking. We conducted 100 interviews in 10 communities around the Bia Conservation Area (BCA), Ghana, to address the type and extent of damage as well as possible factors influencing the risk of crop-raids. We assessed wildlife presence and relative densities through indirect observations on transects and spoor-plots in the transition zone between BCA and agricultural land. Crop-raiding was present across all communities interviewed but was more than twice as high in the north compared to the south. Squirrels (Sciuridae spp.) were the most frequent crop-raiding species (92% of farmers experienced damage), but elephants (Loxodonta africana cyclotis [Matschie, 1900]) were nevertheless the major conflict generating species (84% of farmers experienced damage). Squirrel signs were 75 times as frequent as any other species recorded in the farmland. Cocoa (Theobroma cacao) was most frequently raided (99%), followed by cassava (Manihot esculenta) and yam (Dioscorea spp.). Raiding might have been promoted through inappropriate agricultural practices while only few current mitigation strategies have been successful so far. Promising strategies include chili fences and buffer zones, in which less susceptible crops such as chili pepper are planted. Further education of farmers on mitigation measures is needed, including training on improved farming practices.     

Resolving the Conflicts Between Biodiversity Conservation and Socioeconomic Development in China: Fuzzy Clustering Approach

Resolving the conflicts between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic development is a global pursuit for the long-run prospects of the human species. Based on Wenchuan County, a typical county in southwestern China, a group of 20 indicators quantifying regional biodiversity and socioeconomic development was established to classify and evaluate the county area spatially. A fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) algorithm was used as the classification method. Three indices including BD, DL and DR characterizing the value of biodiversity, the level and rate of socioeconomic development of the delineated regions were formulated. The results indicated that Wenchuan County was optimally classified into 4 types of regions (region I to IV). The area percentages of the regions vary widely from 4.3 to 65.7%. The sequences of the regions on biodiversity, socioeconomic development level, and socioeconomic development rate were, respectively, IV > II > III > I, I > III > II > IV and III >I >II >IV. The spatial strategy on coordinating biodiversity conservation and regional development is to develop mainly from the east(I, II, III) and to conserve mainly in the west(IV). Eco-industry, such as eco-tourism and eco-agriculture, need to be emphasized in the process of regional development. The quantitative methods used here may have a wide applicability.     

Model-based Conservation Decision Aiding in the Presence of Goal Conflicts and Uncertainty

Goal conflicts and uncertainty are two major problems in decision-making for conservation and species protection. Conflicts can often be found between ecological goals on the one hand and socio-economic goals on the other, but also among different ecological goals. They can be formally analysed by methods of multi-criteria analysis. As the solution of a multi-criteria decision problem usually depends on the weights put on the individual criteria (objectives), sensitivity and robustness analyses are necessary to understand the decision problem, concentrate on the essential aspects, and support actual decision processes fully. Uncertainty in the decision problem is often caused by scarcity of information needed to predict the consequences of management actions. The so-called outranking concept proved very useful in the consideration of such uncertainty. Based on a simple fictitious case study the paper demonstrates how multi-criteria decision analysis (in particular the PROMETHEE outranking method) in combination with population model analysis can assist in conservation biological decision-making.     

Disclosure of Financial Conflicts of Interests in Interventions to Improve Child Psychosocial Health: A Cross-Sectional Study

Academic journals increasingly request a full disclosure of financial conflict of interest (CoI). The Committee for Publication Ethics provides editors with guidance about the course of action in the case of suspected non-disclosure. No prior study has examined the extent to which journal articles on psychosocial interventions disclose CoI, and how journal editors process requests to examine suspected undisclosed CoI. Four internationally disseminated psychosocial interventions were examined. 136 articles related to an intervention, co-authored by intervention developers and published in health sciences journals were retrieved as requiring a CoI statement. Two editors refused consent to be included in the study. COI disclosures and editor responses were coded for 134 articles. Overall, 92/134 (71%) of all articles were found to have absent, incomplete or partly misleading CoI disclosures. Disclosure rates for the four programs varied significantly between 11% and 73%. Journal editors were contacted about 92 published articles with no CoI disclosure or a disclosure that was considered problematic. In 65/92 (71%) of all cases the editors published an ‘erratum’ or ‘corrigendum’. In 16 of these cases the journal had mishandled a submitted disclosure. The most frequent reason for non-publication of an erratum was that the journal had no disclosure policy at the time of the publication (16 cases). Consumers of research on psychosocial interventions published in peer-reviewed journals cannot currently assume that CoI disclosures are adequate and complete. More efforts are needed to achieve transparency.     

Knowledge Transfer on Complex Social Interventions in Public Health: A Scoping Study

Objectives

Scientific knowledge can help develop interventions that improve public health. The objectives of this review are (1) to describe the status of research on knowledge transfer strategies in the field of complex social interventions in public health and (2) to identify priorities for future research in this field.

Method

A scoping study is an exploratory study. After searching databases of bibliographic references and specialized periodicals, we summarized the relevant studies using a predetermined assessment framework. In-depth analysis focused on the following items: types of knowledge transfer strategies, fields of public health, types of publics, types of utilization, and types of research specifications.

Results

From the 1,374 references identified, we selected 26 studies. The strategies targeted mostly administrators of organizations and practitioners. The articles generally dealt with instrumental utilization and most often used qualitative methods. In general, the bias risk for the studies is high.

Conclusion

Researchers need to consider the methodological challenges in this field of research in order to improve assessment of more complex knowledge transfer strategies (when they exist), not just diffusion/dissemination strategies and conceptual and persuasive utilization.     

Discrete Model of Opinion Changes Using Knowledge and Emotions as Control Variables

We present a new model of opinion changes dependent on the agents emotional state and their information about the issue in question. Our goal is to construct a simple, yet nontrivial and flexible representation of individual attitude dynamics for agent based simulations, that could be used in a variety of social environments. The model is a discrete version of the cusp catastrophe model of opinion dynamics in which information is treated as the normal factor while emotional arousal (agitation level determining agent receptiveness and rationality) is treated as the splitting factor. Both variables determine the resulting agent opinion, which itself can be in favor of the studied position, against it, or neutral. Thanks to the flexibility of implementing communication between the agents, the model is potentially applicable in a wide range of situations. As an example of the model application, we study the dynamics of a set of agents communicating among themselves via messages. In the example, we chose the simplest, fully connected communication topology, to focus on the effects of the individual opinion dynamics, and to look for stable final distributions of agents with different emotions, information and opinions. Even for such simplified system, the model shows complex behavior, including phase transitions due to symmetry breaking by external propaganda.     

Mixed Emotions and Coping: The Benefits of Secondary Emotions

The existing empirical literature suggests that during difficult situations, the concurrent experience of positive and negative affects may be ideal for ensuring successful adaptation and well-being. However, different patterns of mixed emotions may have different adaptive consequences. The present research tested the proposition that experiencing a pattern of secondary mixed emotion (i.e., secondary emotion that embrace both positive and negative affects) more greatly promotes adaptive coping than experiencing two other patterns of mixed emotional experiences: simultaneous (i.e., two emotions of opposing affects taking place at the same time) and sequential (i.e., two emotions of opposing affects switching back and forth). Support for this hypothesis was obtained from two experiments (Studies 1 and 2) and a longitudinal survey (Study 3). The results revealed that secondary mixed emotions predominate over sequential and simultaneous mixed emotional experiences in promoting adaptive coping through fostering the motivational and informative functions of emotions; this is done by providing solution-oriented actions rather than avoidance, faster decisions regarding coping strategies (Study 1), easier access to self-knowledge, and better narrative organization (Study 2). Furthermore, individuals characterized as being prone to feeling secondary mixed emotions were more resilient to stress caused by transitions than those who were characterized as being prone to feeling opposing emotions separately (Study 3). Taken together, the preliminary results indicate that the pattern of secondary mixed emotion provides individuals with a higher capacity to handle adversity than the other two patterns of mixed emotional experience.     

Plant Conservation in the Future: New Challenges, New Opportunities

Throughout the world, plant diversity is being reduced rapidly by the extinction of species and of local differentiated populations. In presenting possible solutions to this very serious problem Ⅰ will first briefly describe the factors that have led to the development of China's wealth of biodivenity; then examine the causes of extinction,with an emphasis on the situation in China; and conclude with recommendations on how to most effectively conserve plants in this huge and botanically diverse country.     

Ecological and Technological Knowledge of Fire: Aborigines Versus Park Rangers in Northern Australia

The attitudes held by Euro-Australians about bush fires are markedly different from those of Aborigines. These contrasting perspectives confront each other in different practices of prescribed burning employed by Aborigines and Australian National Parks and Wildlife Service (ANPWS) rangers at Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory. A large part of the problem that ANPWS personnel have in understanding Aboriginal knowledge and practice involves the perceptions that Euro-Australians have about simple technologies, aboriginality, and what is or is not traditional.     

Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place

Contested Landscapes: Movement, Exile and Place. Barbara Bender and Margot Winer, eds. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2001. 320pp.     

Contested boundaries: psychiatry, disease, and diagnosis

Since the 19th century, we have come to think of disease in terms of specific entities--entities defined and legitimated in terms of characteristic somatic mechanisms. Since the last third of that century, we have expanded would-be disease categories to include an ever-broader variety of emotional pain, idiosyncrasy, and culturally unsettling behaviors. Psychiatry has been the residuary legatee of these developments, developments that have always been contested at the ever-shifting boundary between disease and deviance, feeling and symptom, the random and the determined, the stigmatized and the value-free. Even in our era of reductionist hopes, psychopharmaceutical practice, and corporate strategies, the legitimacy of many putative disease categories will remain contested. The use of the specific disease entity model will always be a reductionist means to achieve necessarily holistic ends, both in terms of cultural norms and the needs of suffering individuals. Bureaucratic rigidities and stakeholder conflicts structure and intensify such boundary conflicts, as do the interests and activism of an interested lay public.     

Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity

Liquid Relations: Contested Water Rights and Legal Complexity . Dik Roth, Rutgerd Boelens, and Margareet Zwarteveen, eds. New Brunswick: NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. 313 pp.     

Medicinal Plants in the Atlantic Forest (Brazil): Knowledge, Use, and Conservation

This study focuses on knowledge of medicinal plants among the Caiçaras (rural inhabitants of the Atlantic Forest coast, Brazil). In particular, we examine the use of medicinal plants according to sex and age to reveal general patterns of Caiçara knowledge and use of plant resources. Data collected through 449 interviews at 12 Caiçara communities (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo coastal sites) include citations of 249 plants and identification of 227 species. We show the importance of introduced as opposed to native plants and of key individuals for the conservation of the Caiçaras-Atlantic Forest.