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  • Journal Article
    The Co-Evolution of Sustainable Development and Environmental Justice: Cooperation, Then Competition, Then Conflict
    (1999) Ruhl, J.B.
    From Introduction: "Part I of this Essay outlines the most important complex systems concepts for purposes of analyzing the sustainable development/ environmental justice co-evolutionary system. Co-evolutionary systems exhibit basic behaviors such as cooperation, competition, and conflict as strategies for coping with complex positive and negative feedback effects between systems. Because what one system does affects both the others and itself, the success of any participant in a co-evolutionary system depends in large part on the adaptability of its "design"--how it is set up to respond to "moves" by its co-evolutionary kin. When legal policies co-evolve, each vying for prominence, legitimacy, support, and other real-world indicia of legal significance, they undoubtedly execute and respond to the basic co-evolutionary strategies of cooperation, competition, and conflict. "Part II of the Essay grounds that theme of legal policy co-evolution in the practical context of sustainable development and environmental justice. To begin that discussion, I use an example from the recent past to illustrate how a similarly-situated pair of environmental policies have co-evolved. The modern environmental movement in the United States emerged in the 1970s under a broad umbrella of environmentalism, which replaced resourcism as the dominant theme of environmental policy. An important component of environmentalism as it emerged out of the euphoria of the first Earth Day was the Deep Ecology movement - an ardent, ideological, fervent, yet ultimately small movement of deeply committed preservationists whose intensity fueled the early advancement of environmentalism. Over time, however, the cooperation between environmentalism and Deep Ecology waned, yielding eventually to competition and then "the current state of affairs" to open conflict. Deep Ecology helped environmentalism get off the ground, energized its early victories, and then was left in the dust. Today, mainstream environmentalism has little tolerance for the extremism of Deep Ecology. "After that retrospective case study, Part II of the Essay turns attention to the future of co-evolution between environmental justice and sustainable development. My working thesis is that environmental justice is to sustainable development what Deep Ecology was to mainstream environmentalism. Sustainable development policy feeds off of the intensely focused rhetoric of environmental justice, incorporating equity concerns as a key leg of sustainable development's environment-economy-equity policy triad. But this cooperation will not last. Environmental justice, as a discrete policy agenda, is simply too narrow, too ideological, and too unyielding to survive intact in the more adaptive sustainable development agenda. As environmentalism did relative to Deep Ecology, sustainable development will eventually win a dominant position through strategies of competition and open conflict directed at more narrowly-constructed policies such as environmental justice. Along the way, of course, sustainable development will have adopted many key items in the environmental justice agenda--i.e., the cooperation strategy of successful adaptation--but those components will appear as part of the sustainable development lexicon and toolbox, not as environmental justice policies."
  • Journal Article
    Forest Peoples in the Central African Rain Forest: Focus on the Pygmies
    (1996) Dembner, Stephen
    "This article describes the life of the central African pygmy people and highlights their relationship with neighbouring farmers as being valuable for the economic, social and sustainable use of the rain forests. It points out that the nomadic lifestyle of the indigenous peoples is potentially compatible with the sustainable exploitation of the forest, often more so than are 'sedentarization' programmes. The authors affirm that biological al diversity exists in central Africa because of human habitation and that excluding human beings from large areas of forest will not conserve the present biological al diversity."
  • Journal Article
    Two Cultures: Not Unique to Ecology: A response to: Holling. 1998. 'Two Cultures of Ecology'
    (1999) Saner, Marc A.
    "Using examples from different disciplines, I show that the dualism between 'analytical' and "integrative" approaches to scientific investigation is not unique to ecology. I argue that the resolution of (1) the apparent conflict between the two cultures of ecology and (2) the problem of finding a sound direction during the transition of ecology would benefit from a transdisciplinary approach. Candidate disciplines are any science within which complex systems are being investigated, as well as philosophy of science and environmental ethics."
  • Journal Article
    Incentive Systems that Support Sustainability: A First Nations Example
    (1998) Trosper, Ronald L.
    "Prior to contact with European settlers, the incentive and governance systems used by First Nations peoples of the Northwest coast of North America provided more sustainable use of the fisheries and other resources of that region than did subsequent systems. This paper explores the major reason for that success: the requirements of the potlatch system that chiefs share their income with each other. Because chiefs controlled well-defined territories and subjected each other to review, the potlatch governance system embodied the characteristics of negative feedback, coordination, resiliency, and robustness that political scientist John Dryzek identifies as means to support ecological rationality in the management of ecosystems. This ecological rationality occurs because the sharing of income made chiefs aware of the effects that their actions had on the income of other chiefs. In addition, public discussions that occurred at feasts would allow chiefs to coordinate their actions as needed. The paper concludes with proposals for application of the potlatch system to modern circumstances. Such application means changing the rules for the distribution of income from using ecosystem resources so that all entities share their surplus income with each other. The potlatch system can be applied to modern organizations by noting that chief executive officers are like chiefs, that profit is like surplus income, and that corporations can be viewed as similar to the houses of the traditional Northwest systems. One major change is that profit is no longer privately owned, and must be shared with other organizations that use an ecosystem. Although controls on behavior mandated by state power would be reduced, a modernized potlatch system would still need to operate within a context provided by governments and international agreements."
  • Journal Article
    On the Nature of Keystone Species: A response to: Khanina. 1998. 'Determining Keystone Species'
    (1999) Vanclay, Jerome K.
    "There is an unfortunate tendency to nominate large and conspicuous creatures as likely keystone species playing pivotal roles in ecosystems. Particular favorites in the tropics include fig trees (Ficus spp.), large apes, and colorful birds, but such claims are rarely supported by empirical evidence. Khanina (1998) follows this trend, suggesting that 'only trees can be considered as keystone species of forest communities (detritus ecosystems).'"
  • Journal Article
    Sustainability for the Planet: A Marketing Perspective
    (1999) Whiteman, Gail
    "This perspective presents a case for environmental scientists to mobilize their communication efforts and to develop a systematic approach to marketing scientific knowledge to a range of key target audiences. Examples of environmental marketing are presented, and a call to action is presented in the spirit of discussion."
  • Journal Article
    Power to the People: The Role of Electronic Media in Promoting Democracy in Africa
    (1998) Ott, Dana
    "This paper presents an analysis of the role of electronic media in promoting the formation of democratic political regimes in Africa. With the dramatic expansion of various forms of electronic interchange, including electronic mail and the Internet, opportunities for communication across national boundaries, and cross-fertilization of ideas are greater than ever before. This article argues that access to electronic information can have a positive impact in promoting democracy in Africa, by providing civil society with greater leverage vis-a-vis the state and political elites. However, without parallel efforts to insure that access to the Internet is not restricted to urban, elite populations, political instability may result. The paper is structured as follows: Section I makes the theoretical case for the role of increased information access and communication in the promotion of democratic political regimes. Section II presents an overview of the state of electronic access in Africa, including indigenous and international donor supported initiatives to promote African connectivity. Section III presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between access to electronic media and political participation and democratization in Africa. Section IV considers methods to increase usage of electronic media as a tool for increased participation and democratization in Africa."
  • Journal Article
    Community Resources in Borneo: Failure of the Concept of Common Property and Its Implications for the Conservation of Forest Resources and the Protection of Indigenous Land Rights
    (1995) Appell, George N.
    "Western thought since the time of Aristotle has been muddled by the lack of conceptual clarity over the ownership of land and productive resources. It has tended to focus on the false contrast between private property and common property, without clearly distinguishing what either of these mean."
  • Journal Article
    Cooperative Participants Discriminate (Not Always): A Logic of Conversation Approach to the Minimal Group Paradigm
    (1997) Blank, Hartmut
    "The basic finding in minimal group studies is that merely categorizing people into groups leads them to discriminate against the outgroup and favor their own group on a subsequent resource allocation task. Based on Grice's (1975) logic of conversation, it is argued that participants use this group membership information for discrimination because they obey the cooperative principle and assume that the presented group membership information must be relevant for the allocation task. In a variation of the standard design, the group membership information was made explicitly relevant for a second task (without denying its relevance for the allocation task). Consistent with the logic of conversation approach, discrimination was strongly reduced in this condition, compared to the standard design."
  • Journal Article
    Modern Food Sharing Networks and Community Integration in the Central Canadian Arctic
    (1998) Collings, Peter; Wenzel, George; Condon, Richard
    "From June 1992 to July 1993, research on wildlife harvesting and subsistence relations was conducted among a sample of householders in the Inuit community of Holman. In an earlier paper, the authors examined the involvement of younger Inuit in subsistence hunting, noting that despite the sweeping political, social, and economic changes that have been experienced in Holman and across the Canadian North, hunting remained an important sociocultural and economic activity for some members of the sample group. This paper focuses specifically on the informal socioeconomic aspects of subsistence in Holman. Using primary data from the 1992-93 sample, we examine the range of economic mechanisms employed by Holman Inuit for the distribution of wild resources and compare the present range of such activity to that observed by Stefansson, Jenness, Rasmussen, and Damas in their work on Copper Inuit food sharing. These data indicate 1) that the sharing form most frequently cited ethnographically, obligatory seal-sharing partnerships, is more irregular than formerly; and 2) that voluntary, nonpartnership based sharing remains an important element in the contemporary economic system."