Risk-taking and environmental perception

This paper investigates the relationship between pupils' environmental perception (in terms of preservation and utilisation of nature) and personality (in terms of risk-taking). 713 secondary school pupils in Switzerland were investigated. Environmental perception was assessed via three factors: Preservation, Utilisation of Nature and Consideration for Conservation. Risk-taking was evaluated via six factors: Positive Risking, Ambivalence, Thrill in Gambling, Ineffective Control, Effective Control, and Anger Reaction. Analysis of the correlation matrix between Risk-taking and Environmental perception revealed three profiles (types): the high scorer on Preservation is the controlled and cautious gambler. The Utiliser (anthropocentric) profile is essentially a mirror image of the first: the Utiliser does not enjoy unpredictable risks, reacts with anger when risks fail and has little control over his/her own risk-taking behaviour. The Consideration for Conservation (ecocentric) profile assumes a position between these two profiles.     

Environmental management systems in further and higher education institutions

Many people within the further and higher education sector in the United Kingdom (UK) have now accepted that responsible environmental management of their day to day site operations is necessary, but they are still unclear as to what lengths they need to go to obtain marketplace credibility. Many people in other sectors believe that the only way to achieve real credibility in this area is to become accredited by the new British Standard BS7750 Specification for Environmental Management Systems. Others are expressing concern that such systems are cumbersome to operate and generate a needless level of bureaucracy and additional unwelcome paperwork.This paper briefly discusses the responsibilities of further and higher education institutions with regard to environmental management and outlines one possible alternative to the BS7750 approach, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) Environment Initiative. It also outlines the approach taken by the University of Strathclyde over the past three years in the development of an environmental management manual for the Estates Management Department and the development of a system to control university-wide environmental management.In conclusion this paper will focus on the suitability of BS7750 systems within further and higher education institutions in comparison with the approach adopted in the CBI Environment Initiative.This paper was first presented at Global Forum '94 Academic Conference Towards a Sustainable Future: Promoting Sustainable Development, Manchester, UK.Mr K. McDonach is a research assistant and Dr P. Yaneske is Director in the Safety and Environmental Management Unit of the University of Strathclyde.     

A national strategy for environmental education: an approach to a sustainable future?

Chapter 36 of Agenda 21 called on each nation to bring together a widely cross-sectoral group of people to prepare a national strategy for environmental education and training. In Scotland this process had already begun and the Secretary of State's Working Group on Environmental Education presented him with its recommendations for a strategy in April 1993, which he accepted in a statement of intent in June, 1995. The process itself, the comments received on the report since publication and continuing developments in the field, have demonstrated the importance of adopting broad definitions for both environment and education, spreading involvement in production of the strategy to all sectors and as wide a range of individuals as possible, dividing up the work so as to focus on all the main contexts in which learning takes place, working with the main potential implementers and not depending entirely on the availability of new resources. The process was in itself rewarding and its importance should not be underestimated. The approach adopted and the issues which it raised appear to have wide applicability to similar programmes elsewhere. This paper describes the process adopted in preparing the strategy, reviews some of the subsequent developments in Scotland, and assesses the factors which may have contributed to its success so far.Professor John C. Smyth, OBE is Emeritus Professor of Biology at the University of Paisley. He is President of The Scottish Environmental Education Council and he presented this paper at the Global Forum '94 Academic Conference Towards a Sustainable Future: Promoting Sustainable Development, Manchester, UK.     

Ethics and the Genetic Engineering of Food Animals

Biotechnology applied to traditional foodanimals raises ethical issues in three distinctcategories. First are a series of issues that arise inthe transformation of pigs, sheep, cattle and otherdomesticated farm animals for purposes that deviatesubstantially from food production, including forxenotransplantation or production of pharmaceuticals.Ethical analysis of these issues must draw upon theresources of medical ethics; categorizing them asagricultural biotechnologies is misleading. The secondseries of issues relate to animal welfare. Althoughone can stipulate a number of different philosophicalfoundations for the ethical assessment of welfare,most either converge on Bernard Rollins principle ofwelfare conservation (Rollin, 1995), or devolve intodebates over the ethical significance of animaltelos or species integrity. The principle of welfareconservation prohibits disfunctional geneticengineering of food animals, but would permit alteringanimals biological functions, especially when (as inmaking animals less susceptable to pain or suffering)do so improves an individual animals well being.Objections to precisely this last form of geneticengineering stress telos or species integrity asconstraints on modification of animals, and thisrepresents the third class of ethical issues. Most whohave formulated such arguments have failed to developcoherent positions, but the notion of species being,derived from the 19th century German tradition,presents a promising way to analyze the basis forresisting the transformation of animal natures.     

The search for the sustainable city in 20th century urban planning

Summary A new city has emerged in the 1990s, designed to achieve urban sustainability. The notion of sustainable urban form has its roots in the Garden City movement at the turn of the century. The garden cities of the 1900s and the ecological cities of the 1970s were proposed as alternatives to the pathology of modern urban form. Just as cities provide a place for humans to live, so they destroy ecosystems and become unfit habitats for the human spirit. The city must be made more vital, humane, efficient, beautiful, self-sufficient, and natural through a return to a more compact form, its impact on the environment must be decreased. These themes have re-emerged in the sustainable cities of the 1990s, advanced on behalf of future generations and planetary ecology. The sustainable city is a compact city. Calthorpe's Transit-Oriented Developments (1989) are hailed as sustainable because their walkable streets free residents from reliance on automobiles and their high density preserves surrounding wildlife habitat. The European Commission (EC) rests a sustainable future for Europe (1990) on the twin pillars of urban compactness and urban regeneration. Nash (1991) believes that sustainable global urbanization would consist of 1.5 billion humans living in 500 compact cities. He calls his vision Island Civilisation. The sustainable city is also a city of regenerative processes. Girardet (1990; 1992) thinks it has a circular metabolism, as distinguished from the linear metabolism of contemporary cities. McDonough (adviser to President Clinton on sustainable development) theorizes inThe Hannover Principles (1992) that in order to make civilization sustainable, urban form will have to be based on the principles of nature, which makes no waste, maximizes biodiversity and is sustained by the sun. The urban form designed by McDonald (1993), conceptualized with ideas from chaos theory, contemplates a sustainable city within a sustainable watershed and a form holistic, diverse, fractal and evolutionary. Lyle (1994) believes that the sustainable cities of the next century will be based on the green infrastructure of regenerative systems. The commonality linking these landmarks of sustainable urbanization is the ideal of bringing the city into a vital symbiosis with nature. The sustainable city is a green or living city. The search for the sustainable city in the 20th century has not been Utopian buttopian, a quest to create a form of city suited to optimal development of the Earth island.Andrew D. Basiago, an American lawyer and city planner, was a scholar in land economy at Cambridge. He is currently writing a book on solar cities.     

Sewage as a resource: a case study of afforestation using sewage irrigation in Jaipur,Rajasthan, India

Summary Human beings use huge quantities of water every day for drinking, cleaning and various cultural functions and dispose of it as wastewater within sewage. With increase in population, the magnitude of this waste is multiplying enormously and beyond the recycling capacity of local ecosystems to become a major health and environmental hazard. Re-use of wastewater for afforestation purposes in the form of sewage silviculture combines the dual benefit of water conservation with environmental sanitation. Such experiments are being carried out at the World Forest Arboretum in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India. Biological treatment of the sewage before application, to improve its irrigational quality, to remove harmful chemicals and to prevent the risk of these passing into the human food chain is being undertaken. The aquatic weeds Lemna and Eichhornia are being used to purify the wastewater. The technique is both economically viable and ecologically sustainable.Dr Rajiv K. Sinha is assistant professor in Human Ecology at the University of Rajasthan.     

The rhetoric of participation re-examined: The state,NGOs and water users at Varanasi,Uttar Pradesh,India

Summary People's participation is usually regarded as a sine qua non for the success and sustainability of development projects. Yet in practice, it raises a number of questions. Who are the people? Why is their participation sought, and how or at what level, is such participation desired? This paper seeks to examine the rhetoric of participation in the implementation of the Ganga Action Plan (GAP) at Varanasi, in the north-eastern State of Uttar Pradesh, India. Launched in 1985, the GAP is the first major attempt to systematically control and monitor the pollution of a significant river in the country. In addition, it claimed to be a people's programme because of the powerful and deep-seated cultural and religious meaning associated with the Ganga. Varanasi, however, is indicative of its failure to deliver this promise — the GAP is only acceptable to authority because it does not challenge the existing institutional order, and its participatory content is symbolic rather than substantive. Non-govemental organisations, traditionally viewed as intermediary actors between the micro and macro levels, work within the socio-political framework of the city. In the process, water-user groups such as the washermen who derive an economic livelihood from washing clothes in the Ganga, are literally excluded from the definition and process of participation.She obtained her PhD, the basis of the current research, at the University of Cambridge, UK.     

Desertification Control and Management of Land Degradation in the Thar Desert of India

India has 2.34 million km² of hot desert called Thar located in the north-western part of Rajasthan between latitudes 23°3 and 30°12 North and longitudes 63°30 and 70°18 East. The Indian desert is spreading annually over 12000 ha of productive land degrading it and slowly advancing towards the national capital New Delhi at the rate of 0.5 km per year. The Indian desert is characterised by huge shifting sand dunes; high wind speed; scarce rainfall; and intense solar radiation. Tremendous efforts have been made since the 1960s to arrest desertification and for ecological restoration of the Thar desert. An Ambitious afforestation programme including stabilisation of shifting sand dunes and creation of micro-climates through tree-screens and shelter-belt plantation was launched by the forest department of Rajasthan. A huge canal, 649 km long was also introduced to the Thar desert for ecological restoration.     

Two paradigms of professional development in environmental education

Summary In environmental education in this information age, it is particularly important to adopt the approach of enquiring critically into the environmental, educational and social values informing environmental, educational and social actions when and where required, rather than to simply adopt the approach of emphasising the acquisition and retention of information of an alleged universal type — information drawn from the stockpile of objective knowledge collected by others. This paper argues that to achieve this aim, environmental education in an information age requires aparadigm shift in the areas of professional development — a shift from a paradigm of information technology to a paradigm of information critique. A perspective on the form of this paradigm shift in the particular field of professional development in environmental education is the subject of this paper.Dr Ian Robottom is Senior Lecturer in the Curriculum Studies Centre of the School of Education, at Deakin University, Australia. His main interests lie in teacher education, educational enquiry, and environmental education. He conducts an off-campus environmental education course (B.Ed level) for practising teachers studying at a distance, is a member of the Council of the Australian Association for Environmental Education., and Editor of theAustralian Journal of Environmental Education.     

Educating for our environment: an Australian experience

This paper examines how some of the principles of environmental education have been taken up in environmental strategies and activities in Victoria, Australia. The focus is upon the efforts of the State Government-funded Victorian Environmental Education Council (VEEC) to encourage the development of environmental education in sectors and organizations outside the formal education sector and not usually associated with either the environment or education. The relative success of initiatives fostered in marginalized community sectors and in the private industry sector are discussed. Following the abolition of the VEEC (late 1993) with a change of government, questions are raised about the sustainability of environmental reform agendas in the public political domain. In view of the fragility of sympathetic political environments, it is argued, that for environmentally sustainable development a broader commitment to social justice and social change must be fundamental to environmental education principles and processes to both include all sections of the community and, also, to actually change who makes decisions and how and where they are made.Jeannie Rea lectures in environmental policy and polities at Victoria University of Technology, Victoria, Australia. She was the Trades Hall Council representative on the Victorian Environmental Education Council and worked with others, on a publication chronieling exemplary environmental education projects in Victoria.     

Arsenic levels in the marine ecosystem off the Kuwait coast, Arabian Gulf

Arsenic levels in seawater, microplankton (diatoms and dinoflagellates), shrimp (Penaeus semisulcatus), mollusc (Cerithium scabridum) and five types of fish (Maid, Nakroor, Nuwaiby, Suboor and Sheim) in five sampling stations (I–V) off the Kuwait coast were determined during the years 1995 to 1999. The maximum mean concentration of arsenic was observed in the order; the five fish (0.50–0.78 g g^–1)> mollusc (0.26 g g^–1)> shrimp (0.23 g g^–1)> particulate matter (0.03 g g^–1)> water and phytoplankton (0.02 g g^–1) from all the sites of the Kuwait coast. Station II possessed the maximum arsenic levels. In comparison with the arsenic levels in other parts of the globe, low arsenic levels were observed in most of the marine organisms off the Kuwait Coast. However, an increasing trend in arsenic concentrations was anticipated due to rapid local industrialization and on account of recent spills of arsenic compounds.     

Global environmental change: the contribution of social science research to policy in the UK

Research into global environmental change in the United Kingdom, has sought to influence public policy. It has also served to refashion the social sciences themselves, forcing them to consider sustainability as a dimension of all social and economic behaviour. This paper describes the way in which the principle of enhanced sustainability might become a point of reference in social science research. It discusses, some of the lessons that have been learned from the Global Environmental Change Programme and then considers the relationship between this work and research on the environment undertaken within the natural sciences.This paper was presented as a keynote delivery at the Global Forum '94 Conference Towards a sustainable Future: Promoting Sustainable Development, Manchester, UK.     

Environmental knowing and action

Environmental knowing includes the very many bodies of formal theory which have some relevance to the environment, as well as the knowing which comes from experience in the environment. This knowing can be seen as informing action both conceptually and instrumentally. This paper presents a multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary approach which can inter-relate these many knowings in a way which is relevant to and contingent on definition of particular environmental problems. This problem-focused approach involves application of a set of questions which are implied by a taxonomy of ignorance. The paper shows how the approach can inter-relate knowings as diverse as Taoism and energy-efficiency standards, with the purpose of informating environmental action.     

The challenge of sustainable tourism

The paradigm of sustainable tourism is discussed in terms of analysing what it actually means. Certain questions are raised and these include the means of its measurement, the question of intergenerational impacts and how these may be assessed, the determination of what exactly is meant by environment, the aspect of tourism as an industry and, with specific reference to tourism in the developing world, the potential for neocolonialism. It is argued that, although sustainable tourism may be a worthwhile goal, inherent problems in the definition and measurement of its success make it an elusive if not academic target. The challenge of sustainable tourism is to see it in a broader context as but one tool of development and to ensure that it is examined in the context of the local community as well as a global perspective.     

Environmental perceptions of Irish and Bavarian pupils: an empirical study

The present study deals with the evaluation of environmental/ecological perceptions of secondary school pupils. It has two major objectives. Firstly, to administer a measurement instrument to explore ecological/environmental perceptions for a sample of approximately 900 Irish secondary school pupils aged between 12 and 16 years. The operation and use of three subscales, environmental behaviour, utilization of nature and consideration for conservation, was based on a previous study undertaken in Bavaria, but its structure, dimensionality and reliability was further assessed using psychometric procedures. Secondly, the study monitored the differences in these dimensions between Irish and Bavarian pupils. Common items within the subscale structure were selected from both samples to form a truncated item selection and to function subsequently as the basis for the final factor analysis applied to the combined Irish–Bavarian sample. Comparisons on this basis indicated substantial differences in attitudes and environmental behaviour between pupils from both regions: the Irish sample favoured less conservational values, but more patronage for the utilization of nature and it revealed less willingness to take and plan action in individual environmental behaviour. In addition, the Irish sample disclosed a significantly greater gender difference in the two subscales.     

Some pitfalls of ‘manstream’ environmental theory and practice

Summary Radical environmentalists consider the environmental crisis to be ultimately one of culture and character. However, in analyses and strategies for social transformation, non-feminist greens have generally accepted the Patriarchal conception of human motivation, which is based on a rational, impersonal (read Masculine) model of Man. Thus, it is implicitly assumed that the motivations underlying the environmental crisis are greed or self-interest (deemed rational motives in Western Patriarchal culture). Owing to this male-centred perspective on human nature, green strategies have ultimately relied on an appeal to reason. This, at least, has failed relative to the accelerating pace of environmental destruction.It is argued that a focus on the abuse of power leads to a more useful analysis of the causes of human oppression and environmental exploitation. The abuse of power can be understood as an attempt to overcompensate for unmet emotional needs (e. f. for love, recognition, and a sense of belonging) through an excessive drive for gratification in other dimensions of life. In Patriarchal thought, emotional needs are largely denied, being non-rational and non-masculine, and hence have also been largely ignored in social policy. This realisation suggests new strategies.Dr Janis Birkeland was an attorney, architect and planner San Francisco, USA, and now teaches at the Department of Architecture, University of Tasmania. A more extensive discussion of these points can be found in Birkeland (1993a).     

The terms genetic resource, biological resource, and biodiversity examined

The definitions of genetic resource, biological resource, and biodiversity show the existence of degrees of innacuracy, according to the versions considered. The increasing acceptance of inappropriate concepts in the realms of plant genetic resources and biological conservation prompts re-examination of the subject. The argument raised is that the establishment of defective concepts may undermine the foundations of scientific thought itself.     

Abatement systems for SOx,NOx, and particles — Technical options

Summary This technical paper summarizes the various systems currently available for the removal of SO_x, NO_x and particles from possible acid rain emission sources associated with industrial processes. Preferred systems are outlined in the conclusions.This paper was first presented at the Institution of Environmental Sciences Seminar An Update on Acid Rain which took place in London during November, 1984. Stanley Wallin is a Principal Scientific Officer at Warren Spring Laboratory. He is an engineer working in the environmental field, and his main interests and research are in the measurement and control of pollution from stationary sources. He acts as a consultant for the European Economic Community, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the UK's Health and Safety Executive.     

The evolution of sustainability

Six separate but related strains of thought have emerged prominently since 1950 in discussions of such phenomena as the interrelationships among rates of population growth, resource use, and pressure on the environment. They are the ecological/carrying capacity root, the resources/environment root, the biosphere root, the critique of technology root, the no growth/slow growth root, and the ecodevelopment root.Each of these strains of thought was fully developed before the word sustainable itself was used. Many of the roots are based on fundamentally opposing assessments of the future of mankind. Many of the roots, such as the ecology/carrying capacity root, are based on physical concepts, and they exclude normative values. Others, such as the ecodevelopment root, include such values as equity, broad participation in governance, and decentralized government.When the word sustainability was first used in 1972 in the context of man's future, in a British book,Blueprint for Survival, normative concepts were prominent. This continued to be the case when the word was first used in 1974 in the United States to justify a no growth economy.Sustainability was first used in a United Nations document in 1978. Normative concepts, encapsulated in the term ecodevelopment, were prominent in the United Nations publications.After about 1978, the term sustainability began to be used not only in technological articles and reports but also in policy documents culminating in the use of the term in the report of the summit meeting of the Group of Seven in 1989.The roots of the term sustainability are so deeply embedded in fundamentally different concepts, each of which has valid claims to validity, that a search for a single definition seems futile. The existence of multiple meaning is tolerable if each analyst describes clearly what he means by sustainability.     

Interpreting countryside recreation: The urban - rural dichotomy

Summary Noting a paucity of sociological research investigating countryside recreation from an experiential perspective, this paper reports on a study aimed at exploring the meaning of such terms as the countryside, rural and natural as they are understood by the person-in-the-street. A typification of countryside recreation is constructed which suggests that individuals have an essentially simple understanding of the environment in this context which centres upon an urban-rural dichotomy. The urban setting is generally associated with negative experiences while the rural setting is regarded more positively. These attitudes suggest that the countryside represents a form of refuge from many stresses commonly associated with modern, urban lifestyles. An implication of this conclusion is that attempts to educate people into recognizing the links between their everyday behaviour and the degradation of the countryside will be met with considerable resistance since this would entail them in reconstruing their relationship with the environment.