Can Science Writing Collectives Overcome Barriers to More Democratic Communication and Collaboration? Lessons from Environmental Communication Praxis in Southern Appalachia

Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and the communities within which they work. Addressing community-generated topics and written by a collective of social and natural scientists, the column is meant to foster public dialog about socio-environmental issues and to lay the groundwork for the coproduction of environmental knowledge. Our collective approach to writing addresses some major barriers to public engagement by scientists, but the need to insert ourselves as intermediaries limits these gains. Overall, our efforts at environmental communication praxis have not generated significant public debate, but they have supported future coproduction by making scientists a more visible presence in the community and providing easy pathways for them to begin engaging the public. Finally, this research highlights an underappreciated barrier to public engagement: scientists are not merely disconnected from the public, but also connected in ways that may be functional for their research. Many field scientists, for example, seek out neutral and narrowly defined connections that permit research access but are largely incompatible with efforts to address controversial issues of environmental governance.     

Who is the Adolescent Environmentalist? Environmental Attitudes,Identity, Media Usage and Communication Orientation

There has been an increase in scholarly attention to adolescents’ environmental attitudes; however, only a small number of empirical studies address the Adolescent Environmentalist’s (AE) personal and collective identity, media usage, and communication orientation. In this study, we investigate differences in young people (aged 12–17) who identify themselves as environmentalists, or the AEs, and those who do not drawing from a national sample of 1096 youth. Results show AEs significantly differ from their peers. The AEs have a different environmental value set, report greater self-confidence and influence among peers, support the stronger display of citizenship behaviors, follow certain news topics more, use and discuss the news more with a variety of others, and report engaging in more dialogue and persuasion.     

Common Values and Themes for Grazed Open Spaces: “Plant Diversity” and “Watershed” as Communication Intersections for Agriculture and Conservation Groups?

ABSTRACT

Communicating about the use and management of open spaces occurs within a complex social environment replete with diverse stakeholder opinions and meta-narratives. For western US rangelands, production-based enterprises have been the traditional use but increasingly they are valued for ecosystem services such as water, recreation, biodiversity, and aesthetics which have led to additional conflict. We surveyed Wyoming-based members of six agricultural (Ag) and four environmental/conservation (Env/Con) groups to determine grazing-centric mutual exclusivity of special interests, common values, and emergent themes. We assessed 197 survey participants; 150 from Ag groups and 47 from Env/Con groups. Of 10 values assessed, “watershed” and “plant diversity” were similarly valued by both group types. These naturally dichotomous groups also agreed that communication and reliance on science are needed. Communication and conflict resolution about the use of open spaces can benefit from addressing social presuppositions and meta-narratives of broader audiences to facilitate effective dialogue and solutions.     

“The End of the Ice Age?”: Disappearing World Heritage and the Climate Change Communication Imperative

Rapid environmental change in vulnerable destinations has stimulated a new form of travel termed “last chance tourism” (LCT). Studies have examined the risks of LCT, while leaving potential opportunities within this new tourism market largely underexplored. Results of survey (n?=?399) research in Jasper National Park, Canada reveal that a LCT motivation influences decisions to visit this iconic Canadian destination, and suggest that this motivation is linked to a desire to learn about the impacts of climate change on the Athabasca Glacier. Findings suggest there may be short to medium term opportunities associated with LCT, including promoting climate change ambassadorship through management interventions. This paper discusses a range of possible education, interpretive, and outreach activities that might be employed at LCT destinations. It outlines the relative merits (or what we refer to as “uneasy benefits”) of promoting the glacier and other LCT destinations within a protected areas management and climate change adaptation context.     

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.     

Just Blowing Smoke? Residents’ Social Construction of Communication about Wildfire

This study uses social constructionism as a basis for understanding the effectiveness of communication about wildfire risk between agency officials and wildland–urban interface (WUI) residents. Risk communication literature demonstrates a well-documented difference in the way land managers and stakeholders conceptualize risk. This is especially true of fire because management of these hazards have changed so drastically in past decades; fire managers have typically struggled to clearly articulate the current management policy to the public or integrate their specific knowledge in the risk management process. This study contributes to an understanding of how WUI residents construct communication about wildland fire and agency effectiveness in communicating the new era of fire inclusion. Specifically, we explore the personal and professional sources of information residents’ use to understand their fire risk and the subjects they would like more information about. We also explore the continued viability of Smokey Bear, the most enduring symbol of fire management.     

Bearing Witness? Polar Bears as Icons for Climate Change Communication in National Geographic

This article investigates how polar bears were established as icons of climate change in the popular science magazine National Geographic. In a multistep process, anthropomorphized depictions first established polar bears as subjects of identification. Then, polar bears were visually connected to the endangered Arctic. Finally, they emerged as ambassadors of a threatened ecosystem and icons of climate change. I highlight the wider political contexts of this process of iconization and the semiotic and cultural resources on which it draws, showing what kind of climate change communication the polar bear icon enables or inhibits. The icon lends itself to being deployed in visual communication strategies creating personal concern and public awareness for climate change. At the same time, the icon fosters an individualized, emotionalized, and localized account of climate change but does not make its wider causes visible.     

Citric and Oxalic Acids Effect on Pb and Zn Uptake by Maize and Winter Wheat

A pot experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of citric and oxalic acids effect on Pb and Zn uptake by corn and winter wheat. The experiment was employed with citric acid (CA) applied at 3 rates (0, 1.5 and 3.0 mmol kg-1 soil), oxalic acid (OA) at 3 rates (0, 1.5 and 3.0mmol kg-1 soil) and citric acid combined with oxalic acid (1.5 mmol citric acid combined with 1.5 mmol oxalic acid kg-1). Two types of soil were chose in the experiment. One was collected from the agricultural soil near a battery-recycling factory in Anhui province, China (site A) and the other was collected from a Pb-Zn mine residues in Hunan province, China (site B). The results showed that soil pH varied with the different treatment of citric and oxalic acids. However, there were no differences in all the treatments. 3.0mmol CA kg-1 soil addition significantly increased the concentrations of the CaCI2-extractable Pb and Zn and other treatments have no significantly increased. The highest shoot concentrations of Pb and Zn     

Farmers'''' Willingness-to-Pay for Environment and Human Health and Adoption of IPM

Although chemical control of pests increases crop production, it brings a lot of damage to environment and human health. There exist a number of alternative methods that are not so harmful to environment and human health. However, whether and how much in extent these technologies adopted are plausible depends on the comparison of benefit-cost between chemical control and the alternative control methods (such as Integrated Pest Management, IPM) and farmers' willingness-to-pay (WTP) for envirorment and human health. Using contingent valuation method (CVM), the author investigates farmers' WTP for environment and human health, recognizes the factors influencing WTP, and accordingly points out the importance of pest control technology extension and government regulation of pesticides.     

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.     

Holistic well-being and sustainable organisations – A review and argumentative propositions

Abstract

This article discusses holistic well-being in a balanced work system theory framework. Holistic well-being is a combination of well-being in both work and non-work domains. Theories of balanced work systems and balanced organisations are retold in light of holistic well-being to show how different individuals in organisations can contribute to achieving desired outcomes at different process levels. Further, this article provides new insights and research challenges to the balanced organisation theory by including a sustainability aspect and by proposing a new concept of balanced value networks.     

Land-users’ perceptions and adaptations to climate change in Mexico and Spain: commonalities across cultural and geographical contexts

Comparing agricultural management practices across scales and in different cultural settings can reveal shared insights into the capacity to adjust and respond to change and uncertainty. Differences make comparisons in environmental risk perceptions and responses particularly interesting and valuable, with obtained similarities being in many ways more interesting than found differences, which might be readily expected in places with remarkable geographical and demographic differences. People’s perception of climatic risks and hazards appears to be important to understand the context in which adaptation strategies to climate change emerge. Our intention, rather than compare the two case studies at the local scale, one in Mexico and one in Spain, is to identify existing common mechanisms to perceive climate change and to address adaptation among two very different geographical and cultural contexts. The study aims first to explore people’s perceptions of climate change and its outcomes; second to analyse the adaptation measures that they have developed and develop some preliminary ideas about their strategies; and third to consider the capacity of people to cope and adapt endogenously, in terms of the measures that people think that their governments should take to enhance/strengthen them at the local scale.     

Sustainable Development and Health:Recent International Developments,Policies and Projects

Environment and health have been more and more jointly addressed in recent years,thanks to the efforts of several public and private institutions.In this scenario,a leading role has been played by the World Heath Organisation(WHO).A specific attention was devoted to the issue by the European Union(EU)EU institutions and the WHO Office for Europe,which lists 52 countries(including Europe,Eastern European Countries and Turkey, former Yugoslavia and part of the former Soviet Union).The objectives of the present paper are to give an overview of the main developments in this area,and to underline the progress made towards a common understanding of health and environment issues,the advantages and limits of these developments and the challenges for the future,to be tackled at a global level.     

Environmental and health effects of nanomaterials in nanotextiles and façade coatings

Engineered nanomaterials (ENM) are expected to hold considerable potential for products that offer improved or novel functionalities. For example, nanotechnologies could open the way for the use of textile products outside their traditional fields of applications, for example, in the construction, medical, automobile, environmental and safety technology sectors. Consequently, nanotextiles could become ubiquitous in industrial and consumer products in future. Another ubiquitous field of application for ENM is fa?ade coatings. The environment and human health could be affected by unintended release of ENM from these products. The product life cycle and the product design determine the various environmental and health exposure situations. For example, ENM unintentionally released from geotextiles will probably end up in soils, whereas ENM unintentionally released from T-shirts may come into direct contact with humans and end up in wastewater. In this paper we have assessed the state of the art of ENM effects on the environment and human health on the basis of selected environmental and nanotoxicological studies and on our own environmental exposure modeling studies. Here, we focused on ENM that are already applied or may be applied in future to textile products and fa?ade coatings. These ENM's are mainly nanosilver (nano-Ag), nano titanium dioxide (nano-TiO(2)), nano silica (nano-SiO(2)), nano zinc oxide (nano-ZnO), nano alumina (nano-Al(2)O(3)), layered silica (e.g. montmorillonite, Al(2)[(OH)(2)/Si(4)O(10)]nH(2)O), carbon black, and carbon nanotubes (CNT). Knowing full well that innovators have to take decisions today, we have presented some criteria that should be useful in systematically analyzing and interpreting the state of the art on the effects of ENM. For the environment we established the following criteria: (1) the indication for hazardous effects, (2) dissolution in water increases/decreases toxic effects, (3) tendency for agglomeration or sedimentation, (4) fate during waste water treatment, and (5) stability during incineration. For human health the following criteria were defined: (1) acute toxicity, (2) chronic toxicity, (3) impairment of DNA, (4) crossing and damaging of tissue barriers, (5) brain damage and translocation and effects of ENM in the (6) skin, (7) gastrointestinal or (8) respiratory tract. Interestingly, some ENM might affect the environment less severely than they might affect human health, whereas the case for others is vice versa. This is especially true for CNT. The assessment of the environmental risks is highly dependent on the respective product life cycles and on the amounts of ENM produced globally.     

Sustainable Development and Strategic Thinking

From an economic point of view, the industrial economy is efficient to overcome situations of a scarcity of goods. From a technological point of view, the resource efficiency of the manufacturing processes of the industrial economy has been permanently improved during the last 200 years. In addition, cleaner processes have been developed. However, from an ecologic point of view, an increasing world population with increasing consumption has produced a ＂global footprint＂ which approaches the carrying capacity of the planet. A circular economy and its high-value spin-offs-a lake economy and a performance or functional service economy-can fulfil customers＇ needs with considerably less resource consumption, less environmental impairment in production and considerably less end-of-life product waste, especially in situations of affluence, when a considerable stock of physical goods and infrastructures exists. Also, in situations of a scarcity of natural resources, both energy and materials, often characterised by rapidly rising resource prices, the economic actors of a circular economy have a high competitive advantage over the actors of the industrial economy, due to much lower procurement costs for materials and energy. From a social point of view, a circular economy increases the number of skilled jobs in regional enterprises. However, the shift from a linear manufacturing economy to a circular or service economy means a change in economic thinking from flow （throughput） management to stock （asset） management： in a manufacturing economy with largely unsaturated markets, total wealth increases through accumulation as resource throughput （flow） is transformed into a higher stock of goods of better quality （but in a manufacturing economy with largely saturated markets, wealth represented by the stock of goods will no longer increase）; in a circular or service economy, total wealth increases through a smart management of existing physical assets （stock） that are adapted to changes in both technology and customer demand. This second approach not only applies to physical capital but equally to social capital, such as health and education and green GDP. To measure the social wealth of a population, it is not the amount of money spent on schools and hospitals that matters, butif this expenditure has led to a better education of the students, and a better health of the people.     

Forging New Directions in Science and Environmental Politics and Policy: How Can Co-operation, Deliberation and Decision be Brought Together?

Science, politics and environmental policy have for several years been encountering social and institutional as well as scientific challenges, national and international. The normative basis of all sciences is pressurised from three sides: by awareness of the public, who claims more transparency and sensibility from the scientific institutions regarding factual or possible impacts of science-based industrial progress; by the industries, which try to speed up and intensify the industrialisation of knowledge; and by the public policies, which want to see the sciences engaged in ways to mitigate unintended consequences of economic, ecological and social developments. At the same time, environmental policy is undergoing a tremendous sea change both in conceptual and practical matters. Since the Brundtland Report in 1987 and accelerated after UNCED 1992, environmental policy has been struggling to become a groundbreaking new paradigm for the capacity of resolving social and political issues as well. Any successful attempt to alter traditional institutional and mental structures in policy-making toward sustainability presupposes a renewed association of co-operation, deliberation and decision making. Results from theory of democracy, studies in science and technology, and evaluation studies in environmental policy and politics can be utilised for this context.     

Systematic Contradiction Between Heritage Conservation and Tourism Development： Cleaning the Temple and Cemetery of Confucius and the Kong Family Mansion in Qufu

In recent years, with the rapid development of the tourist industry, world heritage sites become more and more popular among tourists from home and abroad. Therefore, heritage tourism has become a new hotspot. However, while world heritage sites are making obvious economic benefit from tourism, they also bring various problems and contradictions, of which the most troublesome one is the contradiction between heritage conservation and tourism development. To discuss and analyze the root and the essence of the above contradiction and find a way to bring about harmony between them is an important program faced by our national heritage management practice and academic research. Based on the case of cleaning the Temple and Cemetery of Confucius and the Kong Family Mansion in Qufu, this paper analyzes the reasons why our national world cultural heritage sites bring about the above contradiction in the process of tourism development and points out that the improper system and stake-holders＇ benefit imbroglio are respectively the root and the essence of the contraction. Then, it also puts forward corresponding solutions.     

Arthropods and birds in the forest–tundra of Western Siberia and the edge effect

Over 2500 species of invertebrate macrofauna and over 177 species of avifauna live in the forest–tundra of the Lower Ob region and adjacent areas of the northern taiga and shrub tundra. About half of the invertebrate species of the study area are northern—mostly hypo- and hemiarctic—tundra species; the rest are boreal and arctomontane-boreal Holarctic and trans-Palearctic species. The anthophilic and aerobiont insect assemblages include many boreal forest forms. A total of 153 species have been observed nesting at the taiga–foresttundra boundary; 81 species have been observed nesting at the tundra–forest-tundra boundary. The avifauna of the forest–tundra becomes enriched with taiga species in floodplain forests and with tundra species on the flat interfluve, in areas of tundra and tundra-like wetlands. The forest–tundra of the Lower Ob region has no avifauna and entomofauna of its own and contains a mixture of taiga and tundra faunas. It has been found that the ecotone effect is not pronounced in the taxonomic composition of birds and insects in the forest–tundra, where only some particular groups (such as amphibiont insects) have increased abundance.     

Analysis on Temporal and Spatial Changes and Driving Forces of Poverty-Stricken Areas in Hebei Province

1 INTRODUCTIONPoverty is a social phenomenon accompanying the processof human development (Shen Hong, 2000),it is also oneof the Three Ps problems (poverty, pollution andpopulation),alleviating and eliminating poverty has beenone of the major concerns in many countries. Since Chinesegovernment has implemented the anti-poverty programin a planned way in 1986, the number of impoverishedpopulation has decreased year by year, especially after theimplementation of National Seven-Year Anti-p…     

Analysis on the Relationship between Socio-economy and Development of Science and Technology in Jiaxing City

Currently, the progress of science and technology has become a key factor in promoting economic development. And the backwardness of science and technology at the grassroots level has undoubtedly restricted the process of China＇s construction of socialist new countryside. Taking socio-economy and the development of science and technology in Jiaxing as a breakthrough point, and based on the related data of Jiaxing during 1998-2004, this paper analyzes thoroughly the interactive relationship between socio-economy and the development of science and technology. This paper strives to summarize the development track and model of the grassroots work of science and technology so as to provide local governments with references and grounds for drawing up policies for the local work of science and technology.