Attitudes and behaviors of undergraduate students toward environmental issues

The studies carried out throughout the world have indicated that there are differences between environmental attitudes and environmentally responsible behaviors of undergraduate students. In what ways the environmental attitudes and behaviors of the students who will protect and manage the resources of the country in the future have changed is an important issue? This study was aimed at determining the environmental attitudes and environmentally responsible behaviors of the undergraduate students of Abant Ýzzet Baysal University toward environmental issues. In addition, the effects of the faculty in which the students are enrolled, locality and gender on the determined environmental attitudes and environmentally responsible behaviors of the students were investigated. The data were gathered from 507 students in 2005. To explain the environmental attitudes and environmentally responsible behaviors of undergraduate students toward environmental issues, factor analysis was used with Varimax Rotation method. To determine the changes of the environmental attitudes and environmentally responsible behaviors of the students with regard to the faculty, locality and gender, one-way analysis of variance was used. According to the results, students highly support the environmental attitudes and highly participate only in consumerism behaviors. Finally, it was determined if faculty and gender had an effect on the environmental attitudes and behaviors of the students.     

The Jurassic Coast Story Book: An approach to geoheritage interpretation from the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site

The World Heritage status of the Jurassic Coast has important implications for how the geoheritage of the site is communicated to audiences. UNESCO defines World Heritage Sites as places with Outstanding Universal Value to all people that must be preserved for future generations. Building relationships between people and place is key to conservation and on the Jurassic Coast that is delivered by providing audiences with physical, intellectual and emotional access to the Site. Heritage interpretation offers an effective way to develop these connections and create diverse ways for people to engage with the unique Earth Science stories that underpin the World Heritage Status of the Dorset and East Devon Coast. This paper reflects on the approach to interpretation taken by the Jurassic Coast Team and explores the ways in which geoheritage is a challenging subject to interpret. Practitioners on the Jurassic Coast have more recently developed an interpretive approach to help overcome these difficulties. Three categories of geoheritage stories were identified (Landscape, Cultural geology and Earth History) and three interpretive principles were devised (perspective, intimacy and imagination) as a way of scoping out a relevant emotional context for interpretive content. This approach laid the foundation for the development of a new interpretation framework for the Jurassic Coast – The Jurassic Coast Story Book, which will be subject to ongoing testing and evaluation by the new organisation leading on the protection and promotion of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site; Jurassic Coast Trust.     

Interpreting amenities,envisioning the future: common ground and conflict in North Carolina’s rural coastal communities

This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the implications of rural change and amenity migration for members of diverse rural communities. We engage with recent amenity migration and political ecology literature that focuses on social constructions of nature and landscapes, and how these constructions affect the attitudes and opinions of community members. We use our case study of a mail-based survey in Down East, North Carolina to suggest that the ways in which people conceptualize the particular ‘natures’ and landscapes of a place matters in terms of shaping people’s attitudes with respect to ongoing processes of change. We find that people’s opinions about environment, culture, and land use are often superficially similar but that when conflicts arise or particular actions are considered, substantial differences in people’s underlying conceptual frameworks are revealed. In particular we find that despite widespread shared appreciation of the environment and culture Down East, differing interpretations of these key terms lead to potential misunderstandings and land use planning challenges.     

Politics of critique: Understanding gender in contemporary Middle East

This paper explores the implications of spatial production of academic knowledge on the Middle East, through the critiques of Orientalist discourses on the “Muslim woman.” It begins with an examination of the success of postcolonial studies and scholarship on democratization in challenging racist perceptions and politics in the West. Then it reflects on the ways in which this knowledge production travels and is reconfigured in places where power inequalities are different. This requires a consideration of the regional consequences of either an over-emphasis on differences in agencies of “Muslim women” or a relative silence on issues of gender inequality. The paper’s suggestion is to shift the focus from representation and discourse to the structural circumstances in which ordinary men and women’s agencies play out; various political mechanisms which participate in the production of acceptable cultural practices; and patterns of resistance, which may defy arguments about culturally specific definitions of agency. This is a quest for making the “exotic” familiar, without exoticizing the familiar.     

Landscapes, places and geographic spaces: Texts of Betrix Potter as cultural communication

This paper highlights connections between literature, culture and society. As a form of cultural communication, literature may shape social relationships and foster particular landscape meanings, attitudes and values. Thus, taking the example of juvenile fiction, specifically Beatrix Potter's illustrated anthropomorphic stories, links between literary images and cultural meanings and practises are explored. Texts of place are encountered in diverse ways; not least through literary tourism. In considering such aspects of reader response, processes of textual appropriation and transformation are also scrutinized. Finally, in assessing the research interface between geography and literature, the paper raises questions about context, textual interpretation, and written and visual narratives.     

Participation constrained: Generating buy-in and rationalizing carbon forestry labor through participatory mapping in Southern Mexico

In recent years diverse actors have hailed participatory practice as an effective means to empowering people in payment for ecosystem services (PES) work. In Chiapas, Mexico participation is a central component of the Scolel’ Te carbon forestry program, the cornerstone of which includes Plan Vivo participatory mapping. Plan Vivo mapping is used by the managing NGO, AMBIO, to build trust relations between participating farmers and program managers so as to ensure the successful production of carbon credits. However, I argue that it is also used to instill in farmers a series of behavioral and attitudinal transformations designed to align farmer land-use activities and attitudes with the program’s carbon credit production objectives. Yet, despite these ambitions, the ability of the mapping activity in Scolel’ Te to achieve its stated goals is challenged on the ground. In order to explain this discrepancy between the aspirations tied to the mapping activity and the mapping experience, I assess Plan Vivo mapping as a situated discourse and as a labor process. Taking the former perspective, I show how the managing NGO uses a paternalistic discourse to justify participatory mapping, one that presents farmers as misguided resource managers in need of external intervention. Then, using a labor process approach, I show how PVM acts to reorient farmer relationships to their land and to development organizations by intervening in farmer land-use practices and by establishing trust relations. It is, however, a process that consists of inequalities that stand to potentially limit the effectiveness of the activity.     

Characterization of clastic rock using a biconcave bond model of DEM

This paper presents a biconcave bond model to investigate the effect of the cementation between grains on the mechanical behavior of rock. The proposed model considers the shape of the bonds among particles that have a biconcave cement form, based on observations of microscopic rock images. The general equations of the proposed model are based on Dvorkin theory. The accuracy and efficiency of the bond model is improved in three ways. After the biconcave bond model is implemented in the discrete element method software Particle Flow Code in 2 Dimensions, a series of numerical uniaxial compression tests were performed to investigate the relationships between the micro‐ to macro‐parameters. The simulations revealed that the biconcave bond model reflects the effect of micro‐parameters, such as the elastic modulus and Poisson's ratio of the cement, on the macroscopic deformation of cemented granular material. Variations in the bond geometry caused extremely diverse macro‐mechanical behaviors. Experimental results concerning rock demonstrate that the biconcave bond model accurately captures the mechanical behavior of intact rock and supports an innovative method for investigating the relationships between the micro‐ and macro‐parameters of cemented granular material. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Bushfire and everyday life: Examining the awareness-action ‘gap’ in changing rural landscapes

In this paper we use the notion of ‘everyday life’ to critically examine an apparent ‘gap’ between bushfire risk awareness and preparedness amongst diverse landholders in rural landscapes affected by amenity-led in-migration in southeast Australia. Landholders were found to bring their own agency to bushfire preparedness in the relationships between everyday procedures, dilemmas, and tradeoffs. Consequently, regardless of landholders’ awareness levels, attitudes towards bushfire and natural resource management influence if, how, and to what extent landowners prepare for bushfires. We argue that not only is the ‘gap’ complex but also paradoxical in that it is both evident in, and constituted by, landholder attitudes and action and simultaneously dissolved in their practices and decision-making in everyday life. Three dilemmas of everyday life in particular were found to underpin these attitudes: costs (in terms of monetary and time values), gender roles, and priorities. Using a mixed-methods research approach, this simultaneous cultural construction and material nature of bushfire in everyday life is mapped out through landholders’ narratives and actions that embody living with fire on the land. The place of bushfire in landholders’ everyday life has direct relevance to recent international discussions of the vulnerability of the growing number of people living in bushfire-prone rural-urban interface areas.     

上海市工程地质层层序厘定及工程地质条件分析

本文在已完成的上海市三维工程地质结构调查项目基础上,简要总结了所取得的成果,主要包括工程地质层厘定的新认识、统一全市工程地质层、各工程地质层空间分布规律、工程地质问题及地面建筑工程建设适宜性评价等.     

Everyday human (in)securities in protected urban nature – Collaborative conservation at Macassar/Wolfgat dunes nature reserves,Cape Town,South Africa

The diverse residents of the urban global South experience insecurities in everyday, immediate and subjective ways. Lemanski argues these insecurities relate not only to physical concerns like fear, crime, and violence but also to stressors like insecure tenure and financial situations, and threatened and contested lifestyles and cultures as cities rapidly change. This paper considers how diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ manifest through urban nature and shape collaborations around nature conservation. The focus is on protected coastal dunes in Cape Town and collaborative conservation participants, including municipal nature conservators and community representatives from the adjacent apartheid-era ‘townships’. The diverse ‘everyday human (in)securities’ perceived and experienced by these participants manifest variously in physical threats to bodies and biodiversity, but also in relation to the insecure tenure and financial situations experienced by residents and conservators alike, alongside differing cultural values of nature. Through attention to diffuse power relations and everyday experiences, divergent perceptions of (in)security are shown to be frictional and sometimes paradoxical in nature. Yet identifying these (in)securities also holds potential for exploring hopeful and productive negotiations around what ‘security’ might mean, and how it might be realised through the collaborations – bringing into dialogue contested spaces of urban nature in cities of the global South and North.     

玄武岩微生物分解过程中的矿物表面效应

通过玄武岩微生物风化的模拟实验,探讨了造岩矿物表面特征对微生物风化的影响,发现在细菌Paeni-bacillus polymyoca(多粘芽孢杆菌)及其代谢产物的作用下,玄武岩的分解作用显著增强,其中橄榄石最易分解,辉石次之,长石则相对最稳定.根据实验溶液的成分变化,认为橄榄石在初始阶段的分解主要受控于表面化学特征,随着比表面积的增大,表面控制作用进一步增强,分解更为快速.     

Differential impacts of climate change on communities in the middle hills region of Nepal

There is a growing understanding that the impacts of climate change affect different communities within a country, in a variety of ways—not always uniformly. This article reports on research conducted in the middle hills region of Nepal that explored climate change vulnerability in terms of exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity across different well-being groups, genders of the head of household and household location. In the study region, dry land farming has increasingly experienced climate-induced changes to farm productivity and natural resources. The experience of vulnerability to decreased livelihood options and natural resource hazards due to a changing climate varied according to household wealth and well-being status, with very poor and poor households more vulnerable than medium and well-off households. The research indicates that the climate change adaptation would benefit by considering: (i) differential impacts of vulnerability mainly based on well-being status of households; (ii) understanding of the local socio-political context and underlying causes of vulnerability and its application; and (iii) identifying vulnerable populations for the units of vulnerability analysis and adaptation planning.     

The political ecology of ecosystem services

The dominance of “ecosystem services” as a guiding concept for environmental management – where it appears as a neutral, obvious, taken-for-granted concept – hides the fact that there are choices implicit in its framing and in its application. In other words, it is a highly political concept, and its utility depends on the arena in which it is used and what it is used for. Following a political ecology framework, and based on a literature review, bibliometric analyses, and brief examples from two tropical rainforest countries, this review investigates four moments in the construction and application of the ecosystem services idea: socio-historical (the emergence of the discourse), ontological (what knowledge does the concept allow?), scientific (difficulties in its practical application), and political (who wins, who loses?). We show how the concept is a boundary object with widespread appeal, trace the discursive and institutional context within which it gained traction, and argue that choices of scale, definition, and method in measuring ecosystem services frustrate its straightforward application. As a result, it is used in diverse ways by different interests to justify different kinds of interventions that at times might be totally opposed. In Madagascar, the ecosystem services idea is mainly used to justify forest conservation in ways open to critique for its neoliberalization of nature or disempowerment of communities. In contrast, in the Brazilian Amazon, the discourse of ecosystem services has served the agendas of traditional populations and family farm lobbies. Ecosystem services, as an idea and tool, are mobilized by diverse actors in real-life situations that lead to complex, regionally particular and fundamentally political outcomes.     

高山冰缘植物粗脂肪、可溶性糖和类黄酮的含量变异与环境适应关系的研究

以乌鲁木齐河源区3个植被垂直分布带的22种主要冰缘植物花期叶片为实验材料,分析了叶片的粗脂肪、可溶性糖和类黄酮的含量.研究结果表明:同一植被带有些植物之间的这3种生理抗性物质含量接近,有些植物的含量却存在显著差异,与植物自身的遗传特性和采取的生态对策有关.从样品平均含量值的统计分析看,高山流石堆植被的粗脂肪、可溶性糖和类黄酮含量高于垫状和高山草甸植被的含量,3个分布带植物的可溶性糖平均含量存在显著差异,类黄酮平均含量不存在显著差异.多数高山冰缘植物积累高含量的粗脂肪、可溶性糖和类黄酮,提高了植物的抗冻和抗紫外线辐射的能力,是植物适应冰缘环境的物质基础,这些生理抗性物质在含量上的差异说明可溶性糖是增加冰缘植物抗冻性的关键物质.     

Dusty roads and disconnections: Perceptions of dust from unpaved mining roads in Mongolia’s South Gobi province

South Gobi province is at the center of Mongolia’s mining boom, where companies began exporting minerals over dirt-track roads in the early 2000s. This paper examines recent controversies surrounding road dust near the Oyu Tolgoi copper–gold mine, the so-called coal road from Tavan Tolgoi mines, and the Chinese border. At the time of the research, local residents, particularly nomadic herders, were concerned that dust produced from unpaved mining roads was coating the pasture, causing illnesses among livestock, and endangering their livelihoods in the region. The presence of dust rendered mining an uncomfortably intimate experience as state and corporate actors negotiated responsibility for infrastructure development. The paper builds on the concept “technologies of distantiation” to reveal the complex ways that dust from unpaved roads creates distances and disconnections between people, livelihoods, and landscapes, representing an enclosure of the pasture. Methods for the paper include interviews, focus groups, and participant observation conducted in South Gobi province and Ulaanbaatar in 2010, 2011, and 2012 as well as follow-up research carried out in spring 2015.     

底板突水预测与评价的专家系统方法研究

突水预报是一个涉及到水文地质、工程地质、开采条件、岩石力学等诸多因素的复杂问题,借助于防治水领域知名专家的实践经验和防治水知识,运用合理的推理方法,考虑影响底板突水的多方面因素,建立一种底板突水预测与评价的专家系统方法,一方面可以总结、运用和推广现场实践经验,另一方面,采用规则的形式来表示预测专家的判断性知识,运用可信度值来反映专家经验的不确定性,又能提高预测预报的成功率与准确性,为受底板水威胁矿区的安全生产提供保证.     

The “unrevealed casualties” of the Irish mortgage crisis: Analysing the broader impacts of mortgage market financialisation

Since 2008, extensive research has examined the impacts of mortgage market financialisation, particularly the socio-spatial patterns of mortgage defaults and foreclosures. However, these standard statistical indicators of mortgage difficulty only capture the ‘overt casualties’ of the crisis, overlooking the mass of households who meet their mortgage commitments, but do so at considerable cost to quality of life. The impacts of the crisis on these ‘unrevealed casualties’ has received insufficient attention within the literature. As such, this article develops a framework to assess mortgage stress levels using standard and atypical indicators of mortgage payment difficulty. This framework differentiates between the ‘overt’ and ‘unrevealed’ casualties and is applied through a case study of suburban Dublin mortgagors to examine the characteristics of these groups, determine the key factors driving their mortgage stress and assess how their attitudes towards homeownership are being reshaped. The results suggest the impact of the mortgage crisis is much larger than previously considered, affecting a more diverse range of suburban households, many of whom may be one financial or non-financial trigger event away from developing a more serious payments problem. Banks’ reckless lending practices are among the strongest predictors of mortgage stress, demonstrating how the failure to adequately regulate banking practices has had detrimental financial impacts for households at the suburban scale. Attitudes toward homeownership and its investment function are increasingly negative, demonstrating how the primary rationale for homeownership expansion (i.e. its potential for wealth creation) is being revaluated by mortgaged households in the wake of the crash.     

Rethinking representations of the space in human-environmental relationships in Uruguay

The aim of this paper is to discuss the representation of spatiality in the interaction between humans and the environment. The work focuses on the movement and relations involved in these past and present interactions. Theoretical reflections are based on the study of the human use of Butiá palm trees in Uruguay. A variety of techniques were used to carry out an ethnographic work that proposes an exercise for the representation of spatiality. The dialogue among these different ways of representing diachronic spatiality in human-palm relationships aims to critically analyse the use of participatory mapping in land management. We propose a non-aerial representation of the spatiality of human-palm relationships with implications on the discussions on the hegemonic ways of representing space.     

即墨市耕地后备资源调查的做法及建议

根据山东省第二次土地调查实施方案的要求,即墨市在全市范围内开展了耕地后备资源调查工作,查清耕地后备资源的类型、数量、质量和分布情况,该文介绍了即墨市耕地后备资源调查的组织实施,技术依据,适宜性评价及其成果,并对存在的问题提出合理化建议。     

试论石灰岩地区地下水的寻找方法

本文根据多年工作经验,总结性地论述了石灰岩地区地下水的寻找方法,具有一定的指导作用。