Brownfields: Risk, property, and community value

Brownfields have been the subject of intense interest across the United States. This paper attempts to look at some of the conceptual goal-oriented aspects of brownfields through the lens of risk to determine if it could serve as another way of exploring property use and community value. As such the paper is focused not on developing a theoretical framework to apply risk assessment techniques but rather on exploration of concepts. The context of brownfields is examined from several viewpoints: urban policy, federal/state government, city, property owner, redeveloper, community and individual. It is not a complete story but each viewpoint adds another dimension to the portrait of overall risk, which is composed of economic, environmental, social, health and political aspects.     

Food Law,Ethics, and Food Safety Regulation: Roles,Justifications, and Expected Limits

Recent food emergencies throughout the world have raised some serious ethical and legal concerns for nations and health organizations. While the legal regulations addressing food risks and foodborne illnesses are considerably varied and variously effective, less is known about the ethical treatment of the subject. The purpose of this article is to discuss the roles, justifications, and limits of ethics of food safety as part of public health ethics and to argue for the development of this timely and emergent field of ethics. The article is divided into three parts. After a short introduction on public health ethics, all levels of food safety processes are described and the role that ethics play in each of these levels is then analyzed. In the second part, different models describing the function of food law are examined. The relationship between these models and the role of ethics of food safety is assessed and discussed in the final part, leading to some relevant comments on the limits of the role and effect of ethics of food safety.     

Community gardening: cultivating subjectivities,space, and justice

Community gardens have been lauded for being inherently resistant to neoliberalism and criticised for underwriting it. To move beyond this either/or debate, we need to employ more focused lenses and specify both the processes of neoliberalisation at play and the outcomes they can produce. This paper explores the ways in which neoliberal processes of privatisation, state entrepreneurialism, and devolution intersect with community gardens, and the subjectivities that may be cultivated, the spaces that may be created and the types of justice that may be advanced as a result. It argues that certain characteristics and orientations of gardens are more conducive to resisting neoliberalism. These include the cultivation of producer, citizen, and activist subjectivities (over those of consumer, entrepreneur, and volunteer); the elevation of the use value of shared lived space (over a site’s potential exchange value) and the advancement of spatial justice through community access to non-privatised space; and food justice, through non-commodified means of obtaining food. Holding these ends in mind can help ensure that proponents of community gardening sow the seeds of the fruits they most wish to reap.     

Ecometrics' stakeholder subjectivity: Values,issues, and effects

Stakeholder groups, defined according to their transcendent values, have different concepts of sustainability. Their prioritizations of individual, family, collective, and local and global environmental issues also differs. Given this, the metrics required for a given sustainable development path are subjective. Therefore, the questions of who should define ecometrics, their transparency, number, state of aggregation, standardization, and benchmarking are questions that require an enfranchised multi-stakeholder debate. At present, corporations have been asked to bear the burden of environmental reporting and eco-indicators have been established to account for material intensity, energy consumption and waste or toxic releases, among other factors. However, the links among these local-, product-, or service-based microecometrics and global states such as temperatures or atmospheric concentrations have yet to be established. The relationship of macroecometrics to individual definitions of sustainable development also has not been addressed. This article summarizes four plenary lectures given at ECOMETRICS '98 in Lausanne, Switzerland. The workshop involved forty participants from industry, academic and government organizations representing seven countries and three continents.     

Compliance,commitment, and competition: Improving environmental performance

A series of terms has been used to describe corporate environmental activities: waste management/waste minimization, pollution prevention, environmental excellence. Each has a different definition and comprises different activities, yet they represent a continuum of environmental response and improvement. This article considers the characteristics of each activity and the necessary balance among internal and external concerns that corporations seek as they progress toward environmental excellence in a competitive business climate.     

Learning,participation, and adaptation: exploring agri-environmental programmes

This paper explores the perceptions of policy makers and rural agricultural producers in respect of policy framing and adaptation to climate change, social learning and stakeholder input (participation) surrounding two successful agri-environmental programmes in Saskatchewan, Canada. Given the record of success of these two programmes in reducing vulnerability to climate change, this study provides an opportunity to explore certain attributes of adaptive management, including: what attributes make policy and programmes responsive; how government can frame programmes facilitating adaptation to climate change; what types of mechanisms can or should be used to engage with producers; and perhaps most importantly, what producers expect of government, government policies and programmes in relation to adaptation to climate change.     

Expertise,safety, reliability,and decision making: practical industrial experience

This paper presents our practical experience of expert opinion deduced from concrete field applications, concerning mainly safety and reliability modeling. First, expertise is defined and the approach used for eliciting expertise is shortly described. Quality and value of information from experts are important challenges for decision making from risk analysis. Expertise is very useful for supplying data when not enough field observations are available for estimating parameter uncertainties and quantifying risk analysis models, which are inputs to a decision-making process. Applications presented herein concern mainly the role of expert judgment in reliability.     

Consumer Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Indicative, Legitimation, and Regulatory Role in Agricultural and Food Ethics

Disputes over agriculture and foodproduction have occurred against a background ofdisputed authority with regard to governments,experts, and single issue pressure groups. Consumershave intervened in quite significant ways with manyaltering their buying patterns. The conventionalassessment of consumer ``preferences' throughaggregated purchases fails to reflect the ethicalnature of significant numbers of purchase decisions.Nevertheless, consumers seem to offer a wider basis onwhich to consider ethical issues. The author proposesthat a valuable inclusion of consumer opinion in thedebates would require a move away from neo-classicaleconomics and the selective inclusion of consumeropinion to unravel the complexity of (aggregated)consumer behavior. It is argued that Hirschman'sframework of ``exit, voice, and loyalty' is a moreappropriate tool for the understanding of ethics infood consumption.     

Restoration,stewardship, environmental health,and policy: understanding stakeholders' perceptions

In recent years there has been considerable interest in the health of humans and the environment, restoration of contaminated or otherwise degraded lands, and in long-term stewardship of public lands. Unfortunately, it is unclear whether governmental agencies and the public hold similar views about the meanings of these concepts, making policy decisions about restoration and stewardship difficult. In this paper, I explore how the public conceptualizes restoration and stewardship by examining the relative rating of several attributes of restoration, stewardship, environmental health, ecological health, environmental restoration, and ecological restoration. People were interviewed in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA, near the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. The ratings of attributes of environmental health and ecological health reported in this paper can be used to understand how the public understands these concepts. The attributes rated most highly by the subjects were more similar to definitions in the scientific literature for these terms than they were to those used by the Department of Energy. For environmental health, the highest rating related to human sanitation, while for ecological health the highest rating was for maintaining functioning ecosystems. Reduction of exposure to hazardous substances was rated the second highest for both environmental and ecological health. The wise use of natural resources, preservation of natural resources, and hazardous waste site cleanup were rated the highest attributes of stewardship. These data suggest that both expert and nonexpert perceptions about restoration and stewardship should be incorporated into environmental management decisions.     

Woodland restoration in Scotland: ecology, history, culture, economics, politics and change

In the latter half of the 20th century, native pine woodlands in Scotland were restricted to small remnant areas within which there was little regeneration. These woodlands are important from a conservation perspective and are habitat for numerous species of conservation concern. Recent developments have seen a large increase in interest in woodland restoration and a dramatic increase in regeneration and woodland spread. The proximate factor enabling this regeneration is a reduction in grazing pressure from sheep and, particularly, deer. However, this has only been possible as a result of a complex interplay between ecological, political and socio-economic factors. We are currently seeing the decline of land management practices instituted 150-200 years ago, changes in land ownership patterns, cultural revival, and changes in societal perceptions of the Scottish landscape. These all feed into the current move to return large areas of the Scottish Highlands to tree cover. I emphasize the need to consider restoration in a multidisciplinary framework which accounts not just for the ecology involved but also the historical and cultural context.     

Ethanol fuels: Energy security,economics, and the environment

Problems of fuel ethanol production have been the subject of numerous reports, including this analysis. The conclusions are that ethanol: does not improve U.S. energy security; is uneconomical; is not a renewable energy source; and increases environmental degradation. Ethanol production is wasteful of energy resources and does not increase energy security. Considerably more energy, much of it high- grade fossil fuels, is required to produce ethanol than is available in the energy output. About 72% more energy is used to produce a gallon of ethanol than the energy in a gallon of ethanol. Ethanol production from corn is not renewable energy. Its production uses more non- renewable fossil energy resources in growing the corn and in the fermentation/distillation process than is produced as ethanol energy. Ethanol produced from corn and other food crops is also an unreliable and therefore a non-secure source of energy, because of the likelihood of uncontrollable climatic fluctuations, particularly droughts which reduce crop yields. The expected priority for corn and other food crops would be for food and feed. Increasing ethanol production would increase degradation of agricultural land and water and pollute the environment. In U.S. corn production, soil erodes some 18- times faster than soil is reformed, and, where irrigated, corn production mines water faster than recharge of aquifers. Increasing the cost of food and diverting human food resources to the costly and inefficient production of ethanol fuel raise major ethical questions. These occur at a time when more food is needed to meet the basic needs of a rapidly growing world population.     

Forest products and traditional peoples: Economic, biological, and cultural considerations

Conservationists and environmental economists have promoted the extraction of non–timber forest products (NTFP) as an alternative to forest conversion and as a means to benefit forest peoples. This article discusses the development of NTFP economic analyses and some economic, biological and socio–cultural constraints on the use of forest resources and methodological limitations of NTFP investigations. Several case studies document the importance of the forest in both North and South America. While studies differ in their conclusions regarding the sustainability of NTFP extraction, most researchers agree that sustainable harvesting is rare. The article argues for additional considerations that transcend the biological and economic concerns. While forests provide the basis of material culture for peoples that inhabit them, they are also linked intrinsically to the religion, mythology, and psyche of native peoples. Conservationists have an ethical obligation to consider the needs and desires of these people in conjunction with conservation and management plans.     

Iran's Water Crisis: Cultural, Political, and Ethical Dimensions

By the summer of 2001, most of Iranhad been suffering a three-year drought, theworst in recent history. Water rationing was inplace in Tehran and other cities, and largeproportions of the country's crops andlivestock were perishing. Yet many academicsand other experts in Iran insist that the watercrisis is only partly drought-related, andclaim that mismanagement of water resources isthe more significant cause. Underlying thisdiscussion is a complex of overlapping yetoften conflicting ethical systems – Iranian,Islamic, and modernist/industrialist – whichare available to inform water policy in Iran. Areview of the various arguments about thenature of the crisis and the range of solutionsthat have been proposed, including precedentsfrom traditional Iranian water management andthe ethics of water use in Islamic law,suggests that Iran's own cultural heritageprovides alternatives to wholesale adoption ofWestern models.