退田还湖后替代生计的经济评估研究——以洞庭湖西畔山洲垸为例

分析了“湿地保护项目是如何改善民众生计的”这一问题。采用2000～2005年1 474个农户调查问卷作为基本数据，其中964个农户位于洞庭湖西畔山洲垸。得出6个结论：①WWF在西畔山洲垸的替代生计示范项目增加了农户的收入和福利，降低了脆弱性，增强可持续利用的自然资源基础；②妇女、老人以及低收入群体从项目中获益；③参加项目的农户比未参加项目的农户拥有更多的收入和财产；④与2000年项目开始时相比，生计水平有了持续的改善；⑤生计改善的原因是当地社区的积极参与、国家政策机遇、伙伴关系的建立、社区基层组织建设以及适应性管理方法的应用；⑥鱼类和水鸟等返回已恢复的湿地。表明该示范项目达到了自然保护目标。     

Economics-Oriented Discourse Strategies in Environmental Advocacy

Scholars and practitioners are engaging in a fierce debate over the implications of using market-based discourse in communicating environmental problems and solutions. However, there has been less attention to exactly who is using such economic discourse and how it is combined with other discourses. Prior researchers have proposed tripartite frameworks for categorizing discursive strategies around pro-economic, anti-economic, and non-economic metaphors, which are here applied to eight U.S. environmental advocacy organizations’ press releases. An original text-analytic dictionary of pro-economic, anti-economic, and non-economic discourse is used to distinguish between the proposed discourse strategies. This analysis indicates that economics-oriented discourse strategies are more complex and varied than previously suggested. A more nuanced framework is proposed.     

Sporting Nature(s): Wildness,the Primitive,and Naturalizing Imagery in MMA and Sports Advertisements

This essay examines two Nike commercials, a TapOut commercial, and the proliferation of mixed martial arts (MMA) t-shirt visual culture, all of which symbolically link wildness and “nature” as primitivity to their particular sport contexts. MMA in particular, it is argued, is more symbolically available to symbolic discourses of the “natural” and the “primitive” because of the sport's technological minimalism. The MMA t-shirt is posited as a safe, masculine primitive performance, functioning as an expressive personal substitute (or supplement) to the analogous tattoos “worn” by many fighters and fans. Additionally, this paper reviews and connects several disparate bodies of literature, moving from a discussion of eco-critical principles for critiquing the cultural production of nature / the natural, to an assessment of “nature” as primitivity, and finally to highlight how critical analyses of sport and MMA implicate related categories. While environmental communication has addressed the place of “nature” in advertising, little has been written about how discourses of nature, gender, and the environment intersect with the highly mediatized culture of sports. This article adds to the subfield by initiating just such a critical discussion. Finally, I contend that one of the main ideological functions of the employment of nature imagery here is to implicitly authorize notions of wildness or the “primitive” in close association with a male animal ideology, and also to symbolically reinforce existing narratives which naturalize aggression. These advertisements posit, I argue, a metaphysical rather than realist ecological discourse, enabling an unsustainable narrative of the naturalness of human-on-human violence and aggression.     

Beasts,Burgers, and Hummers: Meat and the Crisis of Masculinity in Contemporary Television Advertisements

This paper examines three recent television advertisements that symbolically link meat not only with masculinity, but specifically with the “crisis in masculinity.” Using an ecofeminist lens, I engage in an intersectional analysis of these advertisements to demonstrate how they articulate the eating of meat with primitive masculinities as a response to perceived threats to hegemonic masculinity. These advertisements demonstrate that scholars interested in the status of masculinity must pay attention to the “threats” to masculinity posed by environmental and animal rights movements, and that scholars interested in environmental movements must pay attention to the role of masculinity in resisting moves toward sustainability. This analysis demonstrates the utility of ecofeminism in understanding the relationship between hegemonic masculinity and environmentalism while also pointing to the need for ecofeminism to continue to explore the implications of intersectionality for ecofeminist theory and criticism.     

The Impact of Global NGOs on Japanese Press Coverage of Climate Negotiations: An Analysis of the New “Background Media Strategy”

This article assesses the success of WWF Japan’s “Background Media Strategy” in influencing Japanese mainstream news outlets’ coverage of climate change negotiations. WWF Japan adopted this “Background Media Strategy” after the Bali COP in 2007; instead of lobbying, it aims to build journalists’ expertise. This article examines its success after seven years through three research approaches: the analysis of participant lists; two surveys (conducted in 2009 and 2015); and a content analysis of climate change articles that appeared in four large mainstream newspapers between April and July 2015. Based on these different data, the author concludes that the new media strategy was successful: Japanese journalists increasingly rely on information provided by WWF Japan and less on information provided by the government and industry. This experiment suggests that a new relationship between global NGOs and the media can improve environmental communications—an approach that could help advocacy groups around the world.     

In Flanders Fields: De/politicization and Democratic Debate on a GM Potato Field Trial Controversy in News Media

In May 2011, a highly mediatized direct action in the form of a “field liberation” took place in Flanders, Belgium, against a field trial of genetically modified potatoes. This direct action and its aftermath revealed the conflictual and antagonistic nature of the genetically modified organisms debate in Flanders. Consequently, it serves as a particularly suitable case to investigate the post-political thesis with regard to environmental discourse and politics. The aim of this paper is to investigate in what ways news media in their reporting contribute to processes of depoliticization and, resultantly, impede a democratic debate on the issues at stake. This paper attempts to provide an answer to this question based on a critical discourse analysis of the reporting by Flanders’ two generalist, elite newspapers, De Standaard and De Morgen and the alternative online news site DeWereldMorgen. The findings reveal the existence of three ideological cultures, which are characterized by different degrees of de/politicization. We conclude by discussing how this study adds to our understanding of the relation between the depoliticization of environmental discourse, democratic debate and twenty-first-century news media.     

Examining User Comments for Deliberative Democracy: A Corpus-driven Analysis of the Climate Change Debate Online

The public perception of climate change is characterized by heterogeneity, even polarization. Deliberative discussion is regarded by some as key to overcoming polarization and engaging various publics with the complex issue of climate change. In this context, online engagement with news stories is seen as a space for a new “deliberative democratic potential” to emerge. This article examines aspects of deliberation in user comment threads in response to articles on climate change taken from the Guardian. “Deliberation” is understood through the concepts “reciprocity”, “topicality”, and “argumentation”. We demonstrate how corpus analysis can be used to examine the ways in which online debates around climate change may create or deny opportunities for multiple voices and deliberation. Results show that whilst some aspects of online discourse discourage alternative viewpoints and demonstrate “incivility”, user comments also show potential for engaging in dialog, and for high levels of interaction.     

Beyond the money shot; or how framing nature matters? Locating Green at Wildscreen

ABSTRACT

Natural history films use technological mediations to frame aspects of nature so as to communicate information, in part through engendering particular viewer affects. As an entertainment industry embedded in capitalist social relations and concerned with competition for finance and ratings, natural history film-making is also a search for “the money shot” – associated with extremes including rarity, sensational behavior, and otherwise un(fore)seen views. I highlight this sensationalizing impetus through ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the biannual UK Wildscreen film festival in 2010. Here, wildlife films were frequently presented as action dramas with a rhythm of anticipation, climax and satisfaction. I argue that, through stimulating significantly disconnective affects, such framing may work against composition of a caring ecocultural ethics that entwines human with more-than-human natures and futures; and that this tendency parallels the similarly disconnecting effects documented for pornographic film. In contrast, I engage with the differently constructive frames guiding the low budget, open access, activist film Green, which, perhaps paradoxically given the thrust of much of the natural history film industry, won the prestigious WWF Gold Panda Award at Wildscreen 2010. I follow framing theorist George Lakoff to emphasize that since cognition is both embodied and embedded in diverse inter-relationships, affective registers generating mimetic connection are as significant in communicating information regarding “the environment” as the text and words by which nature might be framed. I conclude that attention to affective registers and embodied (dis)connections in natural history film may enhance a turning of capitalist spectacle against itself, so as to work more effectively in service to the composition of abundant socionatural futures.     

Discourses of Place: Environmental Interpretation about Vermont Forests

Motivated by a lack of scholarly attention to the substance of interpretive messages and materials, this study examines discursive aspects of interpretative brochures available at forest recreation and tourism sites in Vermont, United States. Directive statements that instruct and guide visitor experiences—and the discourses to which they contribute—were analyzed for content, form, and meaning. Across the interpretive brochures, four broad discourses were identified: the natural forest, the recreational forest, the productive forest, and the dependent forest. Consideration of intertextuality revealed a fifth, hybrid discourse that linked forests to meanings of Vermont as a distinctive place. The convergence of these discourses across the set of brochures gives insight into the ways interpretation serves to both direct individual visitor experiences at particular sites, and to influence the development of larger-scale place meanings.     

Resilience as Discourse

Resilience as a frame is increasingly appearing in grant funding, news stories, academic journals, and organization missions. Across these sites, resilience is positioned as an ability to cope, characterized by bouncing back, regaining control, and reducing vulnerability to change. How did resilience come to be understood in these terms? What are the problems with resilience's frames and the practices that produce them? How might we become resilient differently? Using a Foucaultian archaeology, I examine sites and practices that produce resilience as discourse. I analyze resilience's origins in biophysical sciences, systems perspectives that define ways of knowing, visual models that constrain the emergence of new ideas, and persistent dialectics that narrowly order relationships within the world. I propose changes in the discourse for more affective and ecological modes of becoming resilient.     

The concept of ecological debt: some steps towards an enriched sustainability paradigm

In this paper, we elaborate on the concept of ecological debt. Starting from the enriching environmental justice perspectives, this grass-roots concept has to offer to sustainability discourse, a broad conceptual discussion is presented resulting in a working definition for ecological debt. In elaborating on this definition, we try both to accommodate these enriching perspectives and to offer a more robust conceptualisation that is applicable in international sustainability discourse. Also, a scientifically sound methodology is presented which allows quantifying different aspects of ecological debt. Finally, both the conceptual analysis as well as the quantification method is applied to the case of climate change.     

Green-Tinted Glasses: How Do Pro-Environmental Citizens Conceptualize Environmental Sustainability?

Recent research has shown that many Australians see pro-environmental behaviour as desirable and identify as being green. However when compared to other countries, Australians score poorly on pro-environmental behaviour measures, engaging mostly in tokenistic pro-environmental actions, and demonstrate low levels of concern for the environment. In this article, we examine this tension through exploring the meaning of the term sustainability to Australian participants who self-identify as pro-environmental. Twenty-six interviews were conducted and analysed using a causal layered analysis. Through the examination of participants’ environmental discourse and practices, some of the deeper socio-psychological processes influencing pro-environmental behaviour are revealed. While participants aspired to be green, their actions were bound by cultural traditions and world views that perpetuate environmental degradation. Participants struggled to define the term sustainability and held self-enhancing motives for adopting what they identify as a pro-environmental identity. These findings highlight the influence of collective cultural constructs in shaping how pro-environmental behaviours are understood and enacted.     

Being Skeptical? Exploring Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in Germany

This article explores climate-change communication by the German far right – spanning a continuum which ranges from anti-liberal democracy radical-right populists, to the extreme right and to anti-democratic neo-Nazis – and asks: how do these actors articulate the phenomenon of climate change? In responding to this question, we conduct a discourse network analysis which identifies relations between actors, objects, phenomena, and processes, and points out differences/similarities across a continuum of exemplary far-right sources. The investigated actors put forward a rather skeptical climate change narrative, even though differences exist as the significance attached to the Volk and its sovereignty, rooted in far-right ideology, sometimes overrides, and sometimes is in harmony with, their ideological-driven affinity with nature protection. We thus contribute to the growing body of knowledge on climate-change communication and, more specifically, on the link between ideology and climate-change skepticism.     

An approach to sustainable development: the case of Cuba

This paper analyzes the Cuban model of sustainable development and explains the causes that made Cuba the only country that meets the conditions of sustainability according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF). The Human Development Index has three main components: quality of life (health indicator measured as life expectancy at birth), knowledge (education indicator measured as adult literacy) and the standard of life (economic indicator measured by the Gross Domestic Income). This paper analyses the aspects of the educational and health system of Cuba and also of its energy policies that explain the excellent scores of the Human Development Index. Cuba shows a Human Development Index of 0.8 with an Ecological Footprint of 1.8?gha. This is achieved with a Gross Domestic Income lower than other countries with similar Human Development Index. The Ecological Footprint of Cuba is mainly determined by the CO₂ and the agricultural land footprint. The paper shows how the economic transition, after the economic crisis of the early 1990s, was realized without significantly increasing the Ecological Footprint.     

中国的生态足迹与绿色发展

从2008年开始,世界自然基金会(WWF)与中国环境与发展国际合作委员会(国合会)联合,通过与国内外智库的合作引入"生态足迹"理念,从自然资源消耗与"生物承载力"之间关系的角度来研究中国经济发展所面临的资源环境问题。研究表明,2007年人类在消耗着1.5个地球。过去半个世纪以来,中国的生态足迹总量2007年已经是1961年的4倍,尽管中国的人均生态足迹水平仍然低于世界平均水平,但是已经突破了1个地球的均衡水平。与全球平均类似,中国生态足迹中最主要的组成部分是碳足迹,占54%。解决中国的生态足迹超支问题,关键是降低碳足迹。目前,中国的能源供给仍然高度依赖于化石能源,超过一半的能源供给来自于煤炭,中国和世界其它国家一样将面临化石能源枯竭问题。中国作为一个处于经济快速发展过程中的能耗大国,应及时调整产业结构和基础设施供给模式,在积极应对气候变化的同时提前应对自身可能面临的能源问题。中国所面临的现实决定了中国不能重复发达国家的高增长高资源消耗的老路,需要转变经济发展方式,发展绿色经济,为全球走向可持续发展道路提供探索的机会。     

Nature,Crisis, Risk,Science, and Society: What is Our Ethical Responsibility?

In his keynote address, Robert Cox raised key questions, many of which force us to consider the larger question of the role of academics in society. The authors respond by suggesting that environmental communication, like other communication studies, is inherently normative and that environmental communication scholarship is closely aligned to risk as a centerpiece to crisis analysis. The authors discuss the productive connections among science, communication and sound public policy that make society more fully functional, including the formation of effective public policy through science that is normative while seeking objectivity, evaluating and symbolizing motives in discourse, acknowledging uncertainty and acceptable uncertainty, and that material and symbolic dimensions of the environment are interdependent. Thus, such studies focus on the ethics of environment and must balance sound science and cultural considerations.     

Greenwashed sports and environmental activism: Formula 1 and FIFA†

ABSTRACT

Formula 1 motor sport and the Men's World Cup of association football, two major sporting events on our calendars, are indirectly and directly responsible for environmental despoliation. They serve as advertisements for heavy industry, are designed for elite as much as mass consumption, and provide sponsors with dubious social licenses to operate. This occurs through the very mechanisms of the events themselves (engines in Formula 1, tourism in the World Cup) as well as their promotional externalities. I look at greenwashing claims made about these two sporting events and examine counter-discourses, then investigate economic and ecological citizenship. I suggest that a progressive agenda can be forwarded if Greenpeace, which runs campaigns related to these sports, works with its fellow elites, in the case of Formula 1, and with fans in the case of football. Doing so may be more effective than business-as-usual direct action.     

The Dakota Access Pipeline and the Breakdown of Participatory Processes in Environmental Decision-Making

This article employs a close reading of documents related to the permitting process for the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) and ensuing legal battle in order to argue that extant regulatory frameworks for environmental decision-making are insufficient to promote environmental justice outcomes. By analyzing the US Army Corps of Engineer's responses to comments made during the public comment phase of the NEPA evaluation of the DAPL, I argue that regulatory frameworks may exacerbate environmental justice concerns by incentivizing decision makers to prioritize justification for their decisions and avoiding legal battles over meaningfully engaging with communities. This finding leads me to call for more engagement with energy democracy's orientation toward community-led processes as a corrective to current regulatory systems. This article expands on extant work in environmental communication by more thoroughly investigating the flaws in extant regulatory frameworks and calling for a perspectival shift in environmental decision-making.     

Involving local farmers in rehabilitation of degraded tropical forests: some lessons from Ghana

The role of community-based plantation development in forest rehabilitation and poverty alleviation is a pressing issue for the government of Ghana. In this paper, we present an analysis of the prospects of a community-based plantation using taungya systems and indigenous trees as means to forest rehabilitation and livelihood improvement in Ghana. The project management strategies, communication process and incentive mechanism and their impact on local participation are discussed with the aim to recommending a mechanism through which local farmers can best be involved in rehabilitation of degraded sites in the future in Ghana. Data were collected through a survey using personal interviews of 431 farming households and ten key informants from ten communities living in scattered hamlets in and around forests reserves. The results show a high rate of local participation in project tree planting activities. Four years after the project’s initiation, about 250 ha of plantations had been established using twelve priority indigenous and one exotic species and farmers had indicated improvement in their farming practices and availability of food and forest products. Restoring forest quality as a timber resource and associated values, getting money, food stuff and timber and non-timber for domestic use, and having access to fertile land for farming were the top three issues prioritised by respondents as motivational factors for engaging in the project activities. Overall, this project demonstrates that reversing tropical forest degradation is possible. For this we need local involvement in tree domestication combined with activities that addresses livelihood needs and environmental concerns. This case also demonstrates the prospects of utilising indigenous tree species, not only exotic species that dominated tree planting in the past, for plantations and landscape rehabilitation in Ghana. Readers should send their comments on this paper to BhaskarNath@aol.com within 3 months of publication of this issue.     

Renewable energy in Australia: a wider policy discourse

ABSTRACT

This paper assesses the evolution of generation technology-mix in Australia, with specific emphasis on understanding how such evolution has been shaped by wider political and socio-economic influences. This assessment is predicated on the argument that the contemporary, quintessentially techno-economic, policy discourse on renewable energy is deficient, as it ignores climacteric political and socio-economic influences on generation technology-mix. The methodological framework employed in this paper is informed by the core tenets of technological change theory. The assessment suggests that generation technology-mix in Australia has historically been overwhelmingly influenced by the underlying technological paradigm of the electricity industry; and that this technological paradigm essentially draws its imprimatur from the wider political and socio-economic contexts. By implication, it suggests that a rapid uptake of renewables will have widespread ramifications, extending into political, socio-economic and cultural realms of a society. Clearly, existing policy discourse – that tends to focus on technical potentials, cost competitiveness, externalities and risks of various renewable technologies – is deficient. A much broader discourse is needed. This paper also made an attempt to develop a basis for such a discourse by reviewing broader aspects of the Australian society that would be affected by a rapid uptake of renewables.