Restoration Goes Wild: A Reply to Throop and Purdom

Throop and Purdom’s proposal for virtues based restoration is consistent with my concept of focal restoration, but their interpretation conflates focal restoration with participatory restoration. We disagree on the meaning of wilderness and on the appropriate underlying relationship between nature and culture, which affects how each of us regards the role of restoration in so‐called wilderness. I prefer the term “wildness” over wilderness precisely because the former locates the power of meaning in process rather than place. The primary metaphors we used to describe the proper role of restoration differ, too. Throop and Purdom prefer “healing,” whereas my preference is for “design” as a way of acknowledging the moral implications of restoration interventions in natural processes.     

生物化学与分子生物学课程思政教育的探索与实践——以成都医学院为例

在全面推进高校课程思政建设的背景下,为落实立德树人的根本任务,各高校纷纷开展专业课程思政建设。以成都医学院的《生物化学与分子生物学》课程为例,文章深度挖掘该门课程所蕴含的思政元素,最终确定了7个典型的思政元素,并进行了相应的课程设计,采用案例式教学方法将其在实践中教学。课后,对成都医学院2019级临床医学、麻醉学、儿科学、医学影像学、药学和中药学等6个专业的888名学生发放调查问卷,检测其实施效果。结果表明,所开展的案例式思政教学能够较好地增强学生对该门课程的认可度,帮助学生树立良好的价值观念,初步达到了专业课思政教学的目的。最后,结合实施效果,本文从教学内容和方法的改进、课程思政教学团队的打造和思政教学评价机制的完善等方面展开了积极的探索,以期为专业课程全面实施课程思政提供借鉴。     

Participation in a Gendered Environment: The Case of Community Forestry in India

Women are important stakeholders in natural resource policies since rural women in developing countries are responsible for most of the collection of food, fuel, and firewood for commercial and domestic use. When it comes to the management of these natural resources, gender inequality due to societal traditions could limit the ability of women to participate in policy-making, even when they are not formally excluded. This paper analyzes the effect of gender stratification on women's participation by undertaking an empirical study of a participatory environmental policy program in Indian villages. It endeavors to answer the question of how gender stratification affects participatory environmental policy-making. Using the case study of a community forestry program, it finds that women are still marginalized in decision-making, even in participatory environmental policies. Gender stratification continues to impinge upon forms of democratic decision-making in developing societies. Using facilitating policy tools that seek to empower such marginalized groups would be one way of making participation meaningful for all groups in society.     

Political ecology: a synthesis and search for relevance to today's ecosystems conservation and development

Africa is facing problems of deforestation, desertification, loss of soil fertility, loss of wildlife habitats and biodiversity, and the deterioration of aquatic ecosystems and lack of accessible, good quality water. Governments have formulated policies, enacted legislation and established various institutions addressing these issues. African countries are yet to arrest the environmental problems they are facing, due to, among others, the ineffectual theoretical analysis of the problem of ecosystems degradation. This study argues for the adoption of the political ecological framework in the analysis of sociopolitical sources, conditions and ramifications of ecosystems change and also highlights the explanatory power of this conceptual framework as far as the explanation of the problem of ecosystems degradation is concerned, and shows how it can enable us deal with the multi-layered causality rather than the symptoms of the problem of ecosystems change.     

Methodological Reflections on the Use of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Science in Human Ecological Research

Environmental analysts increasingly utilize remote sensing (RS) and geographic information science (GIS) techniques to study the relationship between human societies and their biophysical environment. This paper considers the influence these techniques have had on environmental research. Using the case of the Sahel, the paper first relates contemporary applications of RS/GIS to the history of the environmental scientific practice in the region. While facilitating an expansion of spatiotemporal scales, applications of these new techniques continue the methodological failings of the past by relying on visual measures of environmental change and problematic indicators of human land-use pressures. The human ecology fields (human, cultural, and political ecologies), by emphasizing the causal connections between local management and environmental change, can address the problems inherent with the spatial analytical turn in environmental science. Using the author's experience with the use of GIS in a political ecology study of grazing management in western Niger, ways of more closely integrating RS/GIS techniques into human ecological research are discussed.     

Conservation of arboreal herbivores: The Australian scene

Abstract A common global issue in biological conservation, that of land use allocation and subsequent management practice, is also at the core of the problem of conserving arboreal herbivores in Australia. The problem is caused by a number of biological and cultural factors. Many populations of Australia's terrestrial vertebrate fauna species of forest and woodland environments, including notably the arboreal herbivores, are concentrated in habitats on soils relatively rich in nutrients. Such habitats are limited due to (i) Australia's general aridity and its naturally poor endowment of soils of reasonable quality, and (ii) the extent to which habitats on the better soils have been cleared to service Australia's social and economic development. Land clearing has focused on these better soils because of cultural traditions in agriculture, and society's recognition of the importance of ‘good’ soils to a nation's development. As a result, Australia has legislation and numerous government policies and programmes that aim to identify and make maximum use of the productive potential of Australia's land. For example, the Crown Lands Alienation Act of 1861 was enacted expressly to transfer land from public to private or leasehold tenure and to develop those lands best suited for agriculture and pastoralism. As a result, from 1861 to the end of the nineteenth century, large areas were extensively cleared and potentially commercial forests were destroyed. The remaining uncleared land in private tenure today carries a major part of the woodland and forest resource on the better soils. Woodland and forest associations on these soils are generally poorly represented in reserves. Furthermore, the Australian constitution, and laws concerning the rights of the private landholder and the use of forest resources on leasehold land, indirectly or implicitly encourage or otherwise act to minimize the constraints on continued land clearing. From the above facts and because human populations are expected to increase, the prognosis for Australia's woodland and forest fauna, including the arboreal herbivores, is one of ongoing loss of important habitats. This paper suggests the following measures for ameliorating this loss: identify strategically important habitats, and encourage private philanthropic purchase or government purchase of timber rights, or subsidize the management of these habitats; examine possible trade-offs in public expenditures on forest administration and management in return for public purchase of privately held forests; establish educational programmes that encourage a conservation ethic and a better community understanding of the realities and the extent of the difficulties to be addressed.     

Evaluation of the Q-method as a method of public participation in the selection of sustainable development indicators

The complexity of sustainable development means that it is often difficult to evaluate and communicate the concept effectively. One standard method to reduce complexity and improve communication, while maintaining scientific objectivity, is to use selected indicators. The aim of this paper is to describe and evaluate a process of public participation in the selection of sustainable development indicators that utilised the Q-method for discourse analysis. The Q-method was utilised to combine public opinion with technical expertise to create a list of technically robust indicators that would be relevant to the public. The method comprises statement collection, statement analysis, Q-sorts and Q-sort analysis. The results of the Q-method generated a list of statements for which a preliminary list of indicators was then developed by a team of experts from the fields of environmental science, sustainable development and psychology. Subsequently members of the public evaluated the preliminary list of indicators, to select a final list of indicators that were both technically sound and incorporated the views of the public. The utilisation of the Q-method in this process was evaluated using previously published criteria. The application of the Q-method in this context needs to be considered not only by the quality of the indicators developed, but also from the perspective of the benefit of the process to the participants. It was concluded that the Q-method provided an effective framework for public participation in the selection of indicators as it allowed the public to discuss sustainable development in familiar language and in the context of their daily lives. By combining this information with expert input, a list of technically robust indicators that resonate with the public was developed. The results demonstrated that many citizens are not aware of sustainable development, and if it is to be successfully communicated to them, then indicators and policy need to be couched in terms familiar and relevant to citizen and communities.     

Warfare,terrain, and political expansion

Very little explicit attention has been paid to the determinants of political borders and why they form at one location rather than another. With a statistically significant frequency, the political borders on the island of Tahiti at contact coincided with ridge formations that radiated from the island's interior and crossed the coastal plain to meet the sea in steep cliffs or bluffs. Since warfare had become the primary means of political expansion by contact, the determinants of this striking correlation appear to have been the strategic problems these features posed to the extension of armed might. These same processes were at work on many other Polynesian islands with the result that contactera variations in the degree of political unification and even sociopolitical development can be traced in considerable part to variations in island topography.