-
Climate Science and National Security
If the nation is to prepare for, prevent and respond to global climate change, climate science and national security professionals will have to find a new way of doing business or risk having valuable science lost in translation.
readmore -
Premises for a New Economy: An Agenda for Rio+20
A new economy will need a new economics, which goes beyond the calculating, self-interested, individual to take account of community, compassion, and cosmos.
readmore -
Harvey Brooks: Science and Society
One does not have to be a cynic about democracy to believe that broad public participation is not necessarily the best way to resolve technically complex issues.
readmore -
Matthew Nisbet: Science Communication
Disparate disciplines must work together to bring many sources of specialized knowledge and experience to bear on societal engagement and solutions to climate change and other environmental problems.
readmore -
Benjamin Barber: Functions of Political Talk
The functions of talk in the democratic process fall into at least nine major categories. The first two are familiar to liberals and encompass most of what they understand as the functions of talk. The next six are muted and undervalued in liberal theory.
readmore -
Paul Stern and Harvey Fineberg: The Analytic-Deliberative Process
Risk characterization should be a decision-driven activity, directed toward informing choices and solving problems. The view of risk characterization as a translation or summary is seriously deficient.
readmore -
Foodsheds: Examining Local Food Capacities
Could our region feed itself? To what extent could or should food needs be supplied from local or regional production?
readmore -
Thomas Dietz: Democracy and Science
We must improve our ability to answer two questions. One is descriptive: How does the world work? The other is prescriptive: What should we do?
readmore -
Energy Innovation and Military Procurement
For two main reasons, government R&D by itself, almost regardless of its scale, cannot foster innovation on a broad front.
readmore -
Enhance Rural Prosperity and Manage for Resilience | USDA
The Forest Service has issued a national road map for responding to climate change, along with a performance scorecard to measure how well each individual forest implements the strategy.
readmore -
Measures of Human Well-Being | Urban Institute
Based on a review of the literature and an analysis of major arguments and rationales for moving beyond GDP as a measure of national well-being, this report identifies 14 categories of national well-being.
readmore -
Sheila Jasanoff: Climate, Experience and Understanding
Climate change detaches global fact from local value, projecting a new, totalizing image of the world as it is, without regard for the layered investments that societies have made in worlds as they wish them to be.
readmore -
Organic Agriculture Improves Natural Pest Control
Ecologists have been challenged to provide evidence that the increased biodiversity on organic farms actually leads to a better ecosystem service in the shape of better pest control.
readmore -
Myles Allen: Embracing Uncertainty
The notion of a single 'flagship' climate model, which for a given set of initial conditions simulates a single climate trajectory, will look increasingly anachronistic. Forecasts may converge, but only on the same range of uncertainty, which users will still have to live with.
readmore -
Allan Schmid: Social Learning, Evolution, and Emergence
People learn to see things as variables that they once took as part of nature. They change their expectations and imaginations of the future and the possible.
readmore -
Philip Kitcher: Epistemology of Climate Change
In countries that have long taken anthropogenic climate change as a settled question, agreeing on the expected consequences and the appropriate response has not proved easy. American discussions are likely to be haunted by the long denial, so that suspicions about alarmism linger.
readmore -
Huitema and Meijerink: Water Policy Entrepreneurs
This article presents the results of 16 in-depth analyses of the role of policy entrepreneurs in realizing major change in national water policies. For each of these transitions, we assess whether or not radical policy change was indeed affected by individuals, and if individuals did play a role, which strategies they have used to affect change.
readmore -
Local Food Systems | USDA
Empirical studies suggest that local foods can have a positive impact on local economic activity through import substitution and localization of processing activities.
readmore -
U.S. Forests and Carbon | Issues In Ecology
U.S. forests and forest products currently offset 12-19% of U.S. fossil fuel emissions, largely owing to recovery from past deforestation and extensive harvesting.
readmore -
Elinor Ostrom: Institutional Change
For rule configurations to evolve, there must be processes that: (1) generate variety, (2) select rules based on relatively accurate information about comparative performance in a particular environment, and (3) retain rules that perform better in regard to criteria such as efficiency, equity, accountability, and sustainability.
readmore -
Sustainability Transitions: From Niche to Mainstream
There are three ways in which niches can influence the regime. They can replicate, bringing about aggregative changes through many small initiatives; they can grow in scale and attract more participants and actors; and they can translate their ideas into mainstream settings.
readmore -
David Johns: Conservation-Compatible Societies
Conservation is as much a political endeavor as a scientific one. Research will continue to be vital, but it will never be enough. Scientific findings and conservation values become policy through organizing and action.
readmore -
Rob Hopkins: Transition as a Pattern Language
I am taking the original Transition model and throwing it up in the air, using A Pattern Language as a way of recommunicating and reshaping it.
readmore -
Mary Houghton: Community Development Financial Institutions
Investing in the field called community development financial institutions would be one action that I would recommend.
readmore -
Private Interests, Public Assets and Risk | Solutions
The fundamental problem is that while private interests are ultimately liable for damages to public assets, they are only held accountable long after the fact and only partially. This gives private interests strong incentives to take large risks with public assets – far larger than they should from society’s point of view.
readmore -
The European Carbon Trading (EU ETS) Experience
Adverse economic effects have been "imperceptible."
readmore -
John Hagel on Richard Florida
The increasing spikiness of our world is driven at least in part by the growing importance of flows of tacit knowledge that typically flourish with physical proximity.
readmore -
Quota Shares for the West Coast Trawl Fishery | Ecotrust
When creating a new market, design matters. A proposal under consideration by the Pacific Fishery Management Council to assign quota shares in the West Coast groundfish trawl fishery would set an important precedent for U.S. fisheries regulation.
readmore -
Communities of Practice and Place
Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.
readmore -
Fikret Berkes: Community-Based Conservation
The very nature of complex environmental problems requires a participatory approach.
readmore
volume 01 issue 02
