Rights & Nature

Due to the significant and often careless human impact on the natural environment, there are serious problems facing the people of today and of future generations. To date, ethical, aesthetic, religious, and economic arguments for the conservation and protection of the natural environment have made relatively little headway. Another approach, one capable of garnering attention and motivating action, would be welcome. There is another approach, one that I will call a rights approach. Speaking generally, this approach is an attempt to address environmental issues via the language and theory of legal and moral rights. Ultimately, it is our duties to our fellow humans that explain why we have duties regarding the natural environment. There are three main contenders among theories that can be called rights approaches to environmental issues. The first identifies the (alleged) human right to a healthful environment as the source of our obligations to conserve and protect nature. The second approach has it that our duties to nature arise from the rights of the constituents of nature themselves, its flora and fauna. The third approach to addressing environmental problems via rights is, I argue, the best path to environmental conservation and protection. This approach—which grounds duties toward nature on the human right to health—has the benefits of being a straightforward, uncontroversial, and simple approach to issues and problems that desperately need to be resolved.     

Book reviews

Sustainable Cities and Sustainable Development Sustainable Cities. G. Haughton &; C. Hunter, 1994, Jessica Kingsley/Regional Studies Association, London

Sustainable Cities in Europe. P. Nijkamp &; A. Perrels, 1994, Earthscan, London ISBN 185383, £12.95

Toward Sustainable Development Concepts, Methods and Policy. J. C. J. M. van den Bergh &; J. van der Straaten, 1994, Island Press, Washington, DC, ISBN 1 55963 3492, £30.00

Just Environments: intergenerational, international and interspecies issues. David E. Cooper &; Joy A. Palmer (Eds), 1995, London, Routledge, ISBN 0 415–10336–3, pp. 199, index, £11.99

First Steps: Local Agenda 21 in practice. Stella Whittaker (Ed.), 1995, London, HMSO, 251 pp. ISBN 0 11 701871 6, £29.95

Beyond the Car: essays on the auto culture. Sue Zielinski &; Gordon Laird (Eds), 1995, Toronto, Steel Rail Publishing/Transportation Options, 191 pp. ISBN 0 88791 042 4, pbk, C$ 19.95, US$15.95     

Access for all? Barriers to accessing woodlands and forests in Britain

This paper presents results from research that identified and analysed barriers to accessing British woodlands and forests. This paper aims to contribute to an understanding of access and accessibility and to inform the design of policy and management interventions to encourage increased access by under-represented social groups. A brief review of policy and academic literature places the issue of inclusive woodland and forest access in the context of contemporary debates surrounding public health, well-being, diversity and the perceived role of public green space. There follows an analysis of quantitative and qualitative research findings, informing the presentation of a working typology of barriers. The typology is structured around the access needs of various social groups, allowing an analysis of the social distribution of barriers. The findings indicate the deep-seated psychological, emotional and socio-cultural nature of some barriers and highlight the need for carefully designed interventions that may lie outside the conventional remit of woodland management. This paper will be of particular interest to decision-makers and practitioners and to those involved in the design and delivery of policies, programmes and projects aimed at encouraging inclusive use of woodlands, forests and other types of green space.     

Source identification and groundwater health risk assessment of PTEs in the stormwater runoff in an abandoned mining area

Environmental Geochemistry and Health - Xikuangshan antimony mine in Lengshuijiang, China, has been developed for many years, and stormwater runoff contains high levels of potentially toxic...     

Comparing safety climate factors as predictors of work-related driving behavior

INTRODUCTION: Research suggests safety climate (SC) is a strong predictor of safety-related outcomes in organizations. This study explores the relationship between six SC dimensions and four aspects of work-related driving. METHOD: The SC factors measured were "communication and procedures," "work pressures," "relationships," "safety rules," "driver training," and "management commitment." The aspects of self-reported occupational driving measured were traffic violations, driver error, driving while distracted, and pre-trip vehicle maintenance. RESULTS: Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that the SC factors accounted for significant amounts of variance in all four aspects of work-related driving, over and above the control factors of age, sex, and work-related driving exposure. However, further investigation indicated certain SC factors (particularly safety rules, communication, and management commitment) were more strongly related to specific aspects of work-related driving behavior than others. Together, the SC factors were better able to predict self-reported distraction from the road than the other aspects of driving behavior measured. Implications for occupational safety, particularly for the management of work-related drivers are discussed.     

Dispersal, competition, and shifting patterns of diversity in a degraded oak savanna

Diversity is a balance between processes that add and limit species (e.g., dispersal vs. competition), but reconciling their contributions remains a challenge. Recruit-ment-based models predict that dispersal barriers are most limiting for diversity, while competition-based models predict that dispersal matters only when competition is minimized. Testing these models is difficult because their influence varies with scale and site productivity. In a degraded oak savanna, we used plot-level (seed additions, burning) and site-level (proportions of regional functional groups found locally) analyses in areas with variable soil depth to examine how dispersal and competition influence diversity. At the plot level, added species persisted where they were formerly absent, but few established naturally despite fire-induced resource enrichment and nearby populations, revealing the importance of dispersal limitation for diversity. This result did not vary with soil depth or standing crop. Although competition could not prevent establishment in unburned plots, it significantly lowered survival, indicating that resource limitations exacerbate dispersal inefficiencies. At the site level, the concordance between regional and local diversity for native species was associated with soil depth heterogeneity, not dispersal or competition. This suggests that persistence is determined primarily by the influence of the environment on population demographics. Given that the formation of new populations is unlikely, those remaining appear to be confined to optimal habitat where they resist competitive or stochastic displacement, possibly explaining why species loss is rare despite substantial habitat loss and invasion. For exotics, there was no relationship between diversity and soil depth heterogeneity. Annuals with presumed dispersal capabilities were significantly overrepresented in all sites while perennial forbs, the largest regional functional group, were significantly underrepresented. We interpret the native-exotic discrepancies as reflecting the recent arrival of exotics (150 years ago), suggesting that local establishment occurs slowly even for species with regional prevalence. The accumulation lag may be explained by the need for founder populations to be demographically stable; otherwise persistence requires continual immigration favoring overrepresentation by dispersers. Our findings support the view that dispersal limitation restricts diversity within plant communities, but suggests that the impacts of environment on demographic performance ultimately determine the pattern and rate of community assembly.     

Habitat loss, trophic collapse, and the decline of ecosystem services

The provisioning of sustaining goods and services that we obtain from natural ecosystems is a strong economic justification for the conservation of biological diversity. Understanding the relationship between these goods and services and changes in the size, arrangement, and quality of natural habitats is a fundamental challenge of natural resource management. In this paper, we describe a new approach to assessing the implications of habitat loss for loss of ecosystem services by examining how the provision of different ecosystem services is dominated by species from different trophic levels. We then develop a mathematical model that illustrates how declines in habitat quality and quantity lead to sequential losses of trophic diversity. The model suggests that declines in the provisioning of services will initially be slow but will then accelerate as species from higher trophic levels are lost at faster rates. Comparison of these patterns with empirical examples of ecosystem collapse (and assembly) suggest similar patterns occur in natural systems impacted by anthropogenic change. In general, ecosystem goods and services provided by species in the upper trophic levels will be lost before those provided by species lower in the food chain. The decrease in terrestrial food chain length predicted by the model parallels that observed in the oceans following overexploitation. The large area requirements of higher trophic levels make them as susceptible to extinction as they are in marine systems where they are systematically exploited. Whereas the traditional species-area curve suggests that 50% of species are driven extinct by an order-of-magnitude decline in habitat abundance, this magnitude of loss may represent the loss of an entire trophic level and all the ecosystem services performed by the species on this trophic level.     

Response of sugar maple to calcium addition to northern hardwood forest

Watershed budget studies at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest (HBEF), New Hampshire, USA, have demonstrated high calcium depletion of soil during the 20th century due, in part, to acid deposition. Over the past 25 years, tree growth (especially for sugar maple) has declined on the experimental watersheds at the HBEF. In October 1999, 0.85 Mg Ca/ha was added to Watershed 1 (W1) at the HBEF in the form of wollastonite (CaSiO3), a treatment that, by summer 2002, had raised the pH in the Oie horizon from 3.8 to 5.0 and, in the Oa horizon, from 3.9 to 4.2. We measured the response of sugar maple to the calcium fertilization treatment on W1. Foliar calcium concentration of canopy sugar maples in W1 increased markedly beginning the second year after treatment, and foliar manganese declined in years four and five. By 2005, the crown condition of sugar maple was much healthier in the treated watershed as compared with the untreated reference watershed (W6). Following high seed production in 2000 and 2002, the density of sugar maple seedlings increased significantly on W1 in comparison with W6 in 2001 and 2003. Survivorship of the 2003 cohort through July 2005 was much higher on W1 (36.6%) than W6 (10.2%). In 2003, sugar maple germinants on W1 were approximately 50% larger than those in reference plots, and foliar chlorophyll concentrations were significantly greater (0.27 g/m2 vs. 0.23 g/m2 leaf area). Foliage and fine-root calcium concentrations were roughly twice as high, and manganese concentrations twice as low in the treated than the reference seedlings in 2003 and 2004. Mycorrhizal colonization of seedlings was also much greater in the treated (22.4% of root length) than the reference sites (4.4%). A similar, though less dramatic, difference was observed for mycorrhizal colonization of mature sugar maples (56% vs. 35%). These results reinforce and extend other regional observations that sugar maple decline in the northeastern United States and southern Canada is caused in part by anthropogenic effects on soil calcium status, but the causal interactions among inorganic nutrition, physiological stress, mycorrhizal colonization, and seedling growth and health remain to be established.     

Ancient manuring practices pollute arable soils at the St Kilda World Heritage Site, Scottish North Atlantic

The impact of ancient fertilization practices on the biogeochemistry of arable soils on the remote Scottish island of Hirta, St Kilda was investigated. The island was relatively unusual in that the inhabitants exploited seabird colonies for food, enabling high population densities to be sustained on a limited, and naturally poor, soil resource. A few other Scottish islands, the Faeroes and some Icelandic Islands, had similar cultural dependence on seabirds. Fertilization with human and animal waste streams (mainly peat ash and bird carcases) on Hirta over millennia has led to over-deepened, nutrient-rich soils (plaggen). This project set out to examine if this high rate of fertilization had adversely impacted the soil, and if so, to determine which waste streams were responsible. Arable soils were considerably elevated in Pb and Zn compared to non-arable soils. Using Pb isotope signatures and analysis of the waste streams, it was determined that this pollution came from peat and turf ash (Pb and Zn) and from bird carcases (Zn). This was also confirmed by ¹³C and ¹⁵N analysis of the profiles which showed that soil organic matter was highly enriched in marine-derived C and N compared to non-arable soils. The pollution of such a remote island may be typical of other ‘bird culture’ islands, and peat ash contamination of marginal arable soils at high latitudes may be widespread in terms of geographical area, but less intense at specific locations due to lower population densities than on Hirta.     

Multi-generational effects of four selected environmental oestrogens on Daphnia magna

The objective of this study was to determine whether vertebrate-type oestrogens have ecotoxicological effects on a crustacean species. The effects of 17beta-oestradiol (E2), diethylstilbestrol (DES), bisphenol A (BPA) and 4-nonylphenol (4-NP) on the freshwater invertebrate Daphnia magna were assessed over first and second generations. The acute EC(50) 48 h, based on immobilisation, for E2, DES, BPA and 4-NP were 2.87 mg/l, 1.55 mg/l, 7.75 mg/l and 0.13 mg/l, respectively. The impact of the test chemicals on moulting frequency was also assessed. The EC(50) 48 h, based on the inhibition of moult number for E2, DES and 4-NP were 2.04 mg/l, 1.87 mg/l and 0.14 mg/l, respectively. BPA was not observed to impact the moulting frequency of D. magna at concentrations tested. In a series of separate studies, the effects of the four selected test compounds on the survival, moulting frequency and reproduction of first and second generational D. magna were assessed over a period of 21 d. Exposure of D. magna to 4-NP decreased the number of offspring produced in both first and second generation testing. DES proved to have no significant (p0.05) inhibition of fecundity in first generation but when second generation daphnids were exposed to DES, a significant (p0.05) reduction in the number of offspring was recorded. When D. magna were exposed to E2 or BPA, no statistically significant (p0.05) inhibition in the number of moults or offspring produced was observed.