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Microconsignment | NYT
In the hills of rural Guatemala, a different kind of microfinance, one that doesn’t involve loans, is doing something microcredit can’t.
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Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi: Wind, Water and Solar
There are at least seven ways to design and operate a WWS (wind, water, solar) energy system so that it will reliably satisfy demand.
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Data Sharing as Science's "Unobtainium"
Long before the film Avatar popularized it, I learned from engineering colleagues the whimsical but useful term 'unobtainium' — used to describe something perfect but elusive. A perfect data-sharing system is science's unobtainium.
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European Fisheries Subsidies | OCEAN2012
The reform of the EU Common Fisheries Policy is an opportunity to phase out subsidies that are not only environmentally but also economically and socially harmful.
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Adaptive Co-Management in Fisheries
Co-management presupposes that parties have, in a formal or semi-formal way, agreed on a process for sharing management rights and responsibilities. But getting to co-management involves institution building, the development of trust and social capital, and generally a long voyage on a bumpy road.
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The Co-Production of Science and Society
The book’s main argument is that, in broad areas of both present and past human activity, we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together.
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Transdisciplinary Inquiry
Transdisciplinarity requires a focus that is inquiry-driven rather than discipline driven. This does not involve a rejection of disciplinary knowledge, but the development of pertinent knowledge for the purposes of action in the world.
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Sally Duncan and Denise Lach: Mapping Ideas and Landscapes
Exchange of ideas and knowledge with the assistance of a technology that is both analytical and visual draws participants into new kinds of inquiry, calling upon broader kinds and definitions of knowledge and experience. In such a setting, GIS technology lends itself to the mapping of ideas as well as landscapes.
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Resilient Marine Protected Area Networks
An MPA network is also a network of people managing the components of individual MPAs and promoting the network’s viability and longevity.
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Joseph Stiglitz: Geonomics, the Land Tax
One of the general principles of taxation is that one should tax factors that are inelastic in supply, since there are no adverse supply side effects. Land does not disappear when it is taxed.
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Peter Eisenberger and Graciela Chichilnisky: Carbon Negative Air Capture
Peter Eisenberger and Graciela Chichilnisky are cofounders of Global Thermostat, which seeks to commercialize carbon negative air capture technology.
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Farming amid a Changing Climate
Minnesota’s state climatologist, Jim Zandlo, has concluded that no fewer than three “thousand-year rains” have occurred in the past seven years in our part of the state.
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Mean Trophic Level as a Metric of Fisheries Health
We find that catch MTL (mean trophic level) does not reliably predict changes in marine ecosystems.
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Spencer Beebe's Cache: Sandy River, 1974
"In a new autobiography, renowned Portland conservationist Spencer Beebe charts his 40 years of balancing civilization and the natural world."
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The Failure of General Equilibrium and Laissez-Faire Economics
The guaranteed optimality of market outcomes and laissez-faire policies died with general equilibrium. If economic stability rests on exogenous social and political forces, then it is surely appropriate to debate the desirable extent of intervention in the market in part, in order to rescue the market from its own instability.
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David Sloan Wilson: Evolution and Economics | NSF SBE 2020
Evolution can help decision makers understand the large-scale and long-run consequences of economic policies, particularly environmental and social policies.
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Bruno Latour: Five Advantages of "Design"
The decisive advantage of the concept of design is that it necessarily involves an ethical dimension which is tied into the obvious question of good versus bad design.
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Andrew Pickering: Cybernetics and Modernity
Cyberneticians rejected both aspects of modernity: people and things are not so different after all, and rather than cause-and-effect prediction, reality evolves temporally – it emerges.
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An Ecology of Mind - The Film
There are times when I catch myself believing there is such a thing as something — which is seperate from something else.
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Architecture of the Commons | Heinrich Boll Foundation
The idea of the commons is inconceivable without it being linked to people engaged with each other to manage a resource in specific social milieus.
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Design for Dialogue | National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation
I found it instructive to see how this group of practitioners designs their own event for interaction among attendees.
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Etienne Wenger: Competence and Experience
In a social learning system, competence is historically and socially defined. How to be a physicist or how to understand the position of the earth in the universe is something that scientific communities have established over time. Knowing, therefore, is a matter of displaying competences defined in social communities.
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Mark Reed: What is Social Learning?
Social learning is a change in understanding that becomes situated within social units or communities of practice through interactions between actors in social networks.
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James Fallows: The Basics of Carbon and Climate
This material will be elementary for some readers and controversial for a few others, but laying it out helps clarify the problem to be solved and the real options from which to choose.
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Rob Hopkins: Defining Localism and Localisation
Localisation argues for a different relationship between consumers and producers, localism has no such critique.
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Peter Taylor: Cities in the World-System
The specific purpose of this study is to provide a geohistorical empirical description and analysis of the modern world-system as a mega-process led by dynamic urban economies.
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Towards a New Economics of Human Development | UNDP
A vast array of evidence supports this view that people care about much more than income or consumption. Theoretical and empirical models that assume that people aim only to maximize consumption are clearly deficient for studying human development.
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Dan Kahan: Cultural Cognition
Communicators must attend to the cultural meaning as well as the scientific content of information.
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Andrew Haden: Biomass and Heat
The conversation about sustainable energy is really three related conversations about transport, electricity and heat.
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Urban Climate Change Research Network | Nature
It is becoming ever more common for scientists and policy-makers to consider adaptation and mitigation side-by-side, to help see the synergies between them.
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volume 01 issue 03
