From ‘criminals of the earth’ to ‘stewards of the environment’: The social and environmental justice of Fair Trade gold

The recent emergence of the Fairtrade certification of gold in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa promises a radical new direction for the environmental governance of artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM). In doing so, it aims to tackle the longstanding environment and development challenges of the sector which mainstream policy has failed to alleviate. The move towards more responsible ASM practices is premised on the strategic deployment of a Fair Trade discourse that argues for its operators to be recognized not as criminals, but as valued and formalized parts of their broader economies. It is argued in this paper that this development intervention should be read within a social and environmental justice framework, one which directly answers the call from political geography for ‘compelling accounts’ of positive representations of the sector.Through a discourse analysis of 10 years of media reports, interviews and recorded life histories of key ASM and Fair Trade stakeholders in Tanzania, it shows how three strands of justice (conceptualized in terms of fairer distribution, procedure and recognition) are articulated by the Fair Trade gold movement and critically assesses the politics behind such a deliberate strategy. In particular, it argues that recognition is a key part of justice that has been underplayed by erstwhile analyses of Fair Trade. Through a case study of Tanzania, it is concluded that although significant progress has been made in terms of arguing for greater recognition for ASM operators, there remains a need to better link discourse with practice in establishing greater distributional justice.     

The neighborhood council: Where ‘top-down’ engages with ‘bottom-up’

The paper examines the neighborhood council from the perspective of its contribution to town planning. Within the context of planning in Israel, two distinct models of neighborhood council and their relationship to the municipal planning administration in two different towns are considered. Their potential as a new arena of planning at the neighborhood level is evaluated, including the ability to mediate between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ planning processes, and to offer a planning framework that combines local with professional knowledge.     

Making journal articles ‘live’: turning academic writing into scientific dialog

Web 2.0 services and social networking offer possibilities to transform academic publishing to facilitate scientific dialogue. We present ‘The Live Paper’ in this editorial as a concept to consider how to leverage existing web technologies to produce rich, omnidirectional, and interactive narratives on research. Following the format of a traditional research report we describe and discuss how to enrich research reports utilizing various types of analytical tools, data, and web services in a published paper embedded in evolving scientific discourse. We also consider how the live papers would influence the practice, culture, and economy of academic research. We conclude that geospatial researchers have an opportunity to lead this development towards richer and more open ways of communicating our findings. The technology and infrastructure to do so exist today, but several barriers remain.     

The relationship between the Neoproterozoic Noonday Dolomite and the Ibex Formation: New observations and their bearing on ‘snowball Earth’

The Neoproterozoic Ibex Formation (Death Valley region, California) is commonly interpreted as a coeval basinal facies to the Noonday Dolomite carbonate platform. However, in some areas (e.g., the Black Mountains, Death Valley), the Ibex Formation is found to rest on the eroded surface of the lower Noonday Dolomite and older units. Sediment-filled grikes root from the top of the eroded lower Noonday Dolomite, followed by the subsequent deposition of the Ibex Formation. Thus, the lower Noonday Dolomite is not considered coeval with all of the Ibex Formation as they are separated by a significant unconformity.At the type section in the Ibex Hills, the basal Ibex Formation commonly consists of polymict conglomerate and laminated mudstone; the upper surface of the mudstone is pierced by large angular clasts of underlying units, including distinctive lower Noonday Dolomite tubestone lithotypes. Here, a finely-laminated pink dolostone that records negative δ¹³C values caps the basal Ibex conglomerate.Several interpretations of the new observations are possible. The erosional unconformity upon which the Ibex is deposited may be glacio-eustatic in origin, the basal conglomerate would represent glaciogenic ice rafted debris, and the overlying dolostone is a classic cap carbonate (noted atop many Neoproterozoic glacial deposits worldwide). Combined with the record from underlying units, the Death Valley succession would then unambiguously record three discrete Neoproterozoic ice ages with cap carbonates in a single succession. Alternatively, the sequence boundary could represent local tectonic activity rather than glacioeustacy.