Effect of the Israeli “Green Schools” Reform on Pupils’ Environmental Attitudes and Behavior

The objective of this study was to explore the mechanism through which a reform in environmental education (EE) programs affects pupils’ relation to the environment. We surveyed 589 pupils aged 9–12 years in three types of Israeli elementary school: regular schools, schools that implement an EE program (designated “green schools”), and schools that implement a more intensive EE program (designated “persistent green schools”). Analyzing the results obtained from our questionnaire, we found that both EE programs had a positive effect on environmental attitudes. Importantly, however, only persistent green schools showed a direct positive effect on environmental behavior. In addition, we assessed the influences of various demographic and other factors on pupils’ relation to the environment. Of note, we found that students who spent their leisure time watching TV or engaging with other electronic media expressed less concern about the environment.     

Media Institute on Geographic Concepts

Abstract

A new political geography has emerged that stresses the political conflict behind the production of space. This orientation in the subdiscipline constitutes a turn away from traditional political geography, where the emphasis had previously been on the spatial distribution of political phenomena. The “new” political geographic theory has been applied to the study of environmental issues, turning the attention of scholars to the political struggle behind the construction of nature as well as space. This article reviews how the new political geography of the environment (NPGE) perspective has impacted the study of such environmental phenomena as hazards, siting issues, human-land relationships, resources, development, and international environmental governance. It concludes by suggesting how the NPGE perspective can inform pedagogy in environmental education.     

社会变革和制度文化制约下的“多尺度嵌入”——以缅甸莱比塘铜矿项目为例

“一带一路”倡议的深入推进加速了中国企业对外投资的步伐。而对于这些“走出去”的企业而言,往往面临着东道国社会环境及治理结构变革、制度制约、文化冲突等多重挑战。此前经济地理学提出的“主动嵌入”和“被动嵌入”,并不能完全解释“一带一路”倡议背景下中国企业在“走出去”过程中所呈现的“外资”与东道国治理结构、地方制度文化环境之间的复杂相互作用关系。本研究构建了“全球-国家-地方”多尺度嵌入的分析框架,以缅甸莱比塘铜矿为例,阐释企业如何通过多样化制度创新,顺应东道国的社会变革,突破制度和文化的制约,从而取得政府、企业、当地社区“多赢”局面的合作模式,从而从新的视角理解制度的多尺度性和尺度之间的相互作用。研究发现：尺度要素之间存在耦合关联作用,且作用模式有不同的组合,同时多个尺度要素的嵌入和影响过程也存在时序效应。最后,结合莱比塘案例,为中国企业“走出去”提出了政策建议。     

Public opinions on biological diversity in Norway: Politics,science, or culture?

Loss of biological diversity is among the most pressing environmental problems facing modern societies. Whereas today much is known about peoples' opinions on climate change, there is still a lack of knowledge regarding how people asses the issue of biological diversity. The article represents a step towards a better understanding of public opinions on the issue of biodiversity, and hence also of the prerequisites and possibilities for a more or less vigorous or legitimate policy on this issue. The analyses show that social background matters for concern about biodiversity, but only to a certain extent: women are less negative towards biodiversity protection than men, the older segments of the population, at least in Norway, are less concerned with biodiversity, and education has only a marginal effect. Hence, to a large extent, political attitudes matter and indicate that concern for biodiversity seems to work by various types of available heuristics whereby a given case is linked to political understandings of other and similar and/or familiar issues. The inclusion of other political variables (local decision-making) and what the authors label ‘cultural variables’ (e.g. view of nature and trust in science) seem also to matter decisively for attitudes towards biodiversity.     

Current Convenience,Desperate Deforestation: Ghana's AdjustmentProgram and the Forestry Sector

Since the early 1980s, most Sub-Saharan African countries have resorted to structural adjustment programs to reform their ailing economies. Adjustment, however, may provide a convenient means for governments of the adjusting economies and international capital to meet their current economic and political interests, usually by sacrificing the physical environment, with huge environmental costs for the adjusting country. This paper uses Ghana's forestry sector, which has been characterized by a dramatic increase in woodexports since adjustment, to demonstrate a direct link between adjustment and environmental destruction. Ghana's dramatic increase in wood exports, involving a rapid and extensive deforestation, results from the government's need to meet its increasing external debt service obligations, and is exacerbated by the series of massive local currency devaluation required under adjustment “to get prices right.” The systematic reduction in government revenue from devaluation to amortize the increasing debts, keeps the government and indebted wood processing firms on a treadmill of export-based extraction/deforestation.     

无居民海岛资源环境承载力动态评估——以福建平潭大屿岛为例

通过对无居民海岛自然资源与生态环境等综合评价,分析无居民海岛的资源禀赋、环境本底和生态条件,构建资源环境承载力的评估方法,评估无居民海岛——平潭大屿岛开发前(2014)和开发后(2019)的资源环境承载力的动态变化.研究结果表明,2014年大屿岛整体的资源承载力分布面积最广的是"较高承载力",2019年大屿岛整体的资源...     

Spatial Patterns of Migration and Income Change in the Mountain West: The Dominance of Service-Based,Amenity-Rich Counties

One of the most recognizable and important changes occurring in the West is rapid population growth. This article intends to address questions associated with whether patterns of population growth and income migration are associated with “new” and “old” West economies. Rural restructuring in the U.S. has created a group of counties with service-based economies. In the Mountain West, a number of counties with service-based economies are located in areas with high levels of environmental or natural amenities, creating what has been termed the “New West.” Migration to the rural parts of the Mountain West, and the income transfers associated with migration, are increasingly concentrated within these New West counties. Rapid population growth, the changing characteristics of in-migrants, and their spatial concentration in New West counties provide a basis for conflicts over what the rural West is becoming.     

Feeling the pulse of the city: racial liberalism and the political geographies of tension in postwar Detroit

Recent work in urban and political geography has explored how affective life is becoming intertwined with security apparatuses. This paper situates this interest within a longer history by exploring how affect–specifically “tension”–emerged as an object of political concern and intervention in US cities during the postwar era. Focusing on Detroit, we trace how northern liberals responded to an escalation in racial unrest by developing programs that sought to detect and locate a change in the city’s atmospheric charge. They also created various measures to try and combat a rise in tension or aggression before it led to violence. However, while these efforts were framed in terms of collective security, we argue that they actually reproduced racialized differences across the city. They also helped to construct material and ideological support at the local-level for the national backlash against racial liberalism marked by the election of Nixon in the late-1960s     

BAROQUE DISRUPTIONS IN VAL DI NOTO,SICILY*

Two earthquakes that struck Sicily nearly three centuries apart provide the basis for an interpretation of subsequent events. After the 1693 earthquake, local inhabitants rebuilt their towns in a version of baroque architecture that is unique to the region. After the 1990 quake, their descendants mounted a campaign to restore the crumbling landscapes and then, years later, to unite in opposition against an oil company that threatened the newly restored sites. Michel Serres's theory of the “parasite” informs a reading of the earthquakes and the events that followed them as agents that disrupted the flow of human‐environment relationships and produced hybridized landscapes and political alliances. In this way the Sicilian baroque is both a style of architecture and a mode of social and political mobilization.     

Spatial Patterns of Migration and Income Change in the Mountain West: The Dominance of Service‐Based,Amenity‐Rich Counties

One of the most recognizable and important changes occurring in the West is rapid population growth. This article intends to address questions associated with whether patterns of population growth and income migration are associated with “new” and “old” West economies. Rural restructuring in the U.S. has created a group of counties with service‐based economies. In the Mountain West, a number of counties with service‐based economies are located in areas with high levels of environmental or natural amenities, creating what has been termed the “New West.” Migration to the rural parts of the Mountain West, and the income transfers associated with migration, are increasingly concentrated within these New West counties. Rapid population growth, the changing characteristics of in‐migrants, and their spatial concentration in New West counties provide a basis for conflicts over what the rural West is becoming.     

Sustaining the “Societal and Scriptural Fence”: Cultural,Social, and Political Topographies of Same-Sex Marriage in Alabama

In June 2006, voters in Alabama overwhelmingly approved a statewide referendum that added a prohibition against same-sex marriage to the state's constitution. This research examines the Alabama vote by “placing” the politics of sexuality within the state's multifaceted web of cultural and social space. We fuse a traditional electoral geography approach with an overall postpositivist cultural and social perspective, beginning with an assessment of the politics of place by situating Alabama as a place with a long history of battles over the so-called culture wars. The cultural politics of the legislative debate and the geographic distribution of the actual vote are also examined within a socio-demographic context, drawing some comparisons from a similar vote in Georgia in 2004, another state in the American Deep South. Those opposed to same-sex marriage in Alabama made effective use of various social constructions that are deeply embedded within a “moral” geography, situating the state as a fenced-off bastion of “religious traditional values,” a common theme throughout the American South. In this vein, social boundaries and territory were demarcated as a powerful political act in Alabama, a strategy that situated the state as hetero-normatively “in place,” while deeming sexual minorities as “out of place.”     

Geographical Research about African Americans: A Survey of Journals, 1911–1995

This paper surveys research about African Americans in six geography journals between 1911 and 1995. 176 journal articles about African Americans were identified. A chronological analysis of a subset of these articles shows that it was not until the 1960s that African Americans were studied to any appreciable degree by geographers. Since that time, geographers have continued this research, but unevenly; annual output varies widely. Popular topics have included considerations of spatial distributions, social problems, political participation, the development of black residence areas, and historical and cultural studies of African Americans. Recent research in this area has problematized the concept of “race” and investigated the mutual constitution of racial identity and place.     

ELECTRONIC COMMUNICATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN RUSSIA AND ESTONIA*

ABSTRACT. The use of e-mail by a grassroots activist group that straddles the Estonian-Russian border transcends political boundaries and provides ready connections to people in distant places. Activists create a perceived space of resistance in a supportive network that is stretched across space. This network of concern, defined by the physical space in which these activists work and by the strong communicative connections among them, was created to overcome continued environmental mismanagement and remove cultural barriers to cooperation. E-mail communication has enabled an ongoing influence on environmental policy in Estonia and Russia. This circumstance of a collaborative e-mail network created by grassroots activists to aid political work is a testament to how communication technology has expanded for the purpose of strengthening previously silenced voices in a regional and political context.     

The Excess of Modernity: Garbage Politics in Oaxaca,Mexico

In the last several decades, garbage strikes have taken place around the world. In this article, I examine the case of garbage strikes in Oaxaca, Mexico, a rapidly growing city. Here, garbage, which is normally considered a hazard, is revealed also to be an effective political tool for people demanding “rights to the city.” Processes of modernization that have produced an expectation of cleanliness in modern cities have, at the same time, relied on production and consumption patterns that create more and more garbage. It is this inherent contradiction that provides a space for marginalized people to use garbage as a political tool.     

Earth,Wind, and Fire: Wildfire Risk Perceptions in a Hurricane-Prone Environment

Wildfire is one of several potential disturbances that could have extraordinary impacts on individuals and communities in fire-prone areas. In this article we describe disturbance risk perceptions from interviews with residents in three Florida communities that face significant wildfire and hurricane risk. Although they live in areas characterized by emergency managers as having high wildfire risk and many participants have direct experience with wildfire, residents tended to share high hurricane and low wildfire risk perceptions. The different perceptions of risk seem linked to several factors: direct hurricane experience, different scales of impact, the local “hurricane culture,” effectiveness of local ordinances and development patterns, perceived predictability of the event, and perceived ability to control the event. This study shows that residents may perceive and act to reduce risk for one disturbance in relation to their perceptions, concern, and actions for another.     

CIVIL SOCIETY PARTICIPATION IN THE DECENTRALISATION OF BRAZIL'S WATER RESOURCES: ASSESSING PARTICIPATION IN THREE STATES

Decentralisation, the transfer of powers to a lower level of government, is thought to encourage more efficient and equitable management of natural resources. Participation of civil society organisations (CSOs) is considered critical to create positive outcomes of decentralisation. Here we examine aspects of civil society participation in decentralised management using the case of Brazil's water resources management. Several Brazilian states have enacted reforms mandating watershed committees in which the participation of civil society is either encouraged or required. However, actual participation of civil society is not yet well understood. To assess participation, we collected qualitative data on watershed districts in three Brazilian states (Bahia, Paraná and São Paulo). Our findings reaffirm the importance of the state in establishing a transparent legal framework to encourage participation and in defining “civil society”. The ability of civil society leaders to obtain and deploy local environmental knowledge, which frames environmental issues in new geographical scales, is useful to achieve the efficiency and efficacy objectives of decentralisation. However, by “upscaling” political activities beyond decentralisation's new territories, CSOs could make decentralisation irrelevant to local environmental issues.     

Coloring the Field: Gender, “Race,” and the Politics of Fieldwork

My experiences combining research and activism within the Japanese-Canadian community reflect a growing concern among feminist and anti-racist scholars with the politics of work among people marginalized by racism and sexism. This concern arises within a context where “other voices” are being heard, but the legitimacy of one individual or group to represent another is being challenged. Such challenges require that essentialism and naturalism be addressed politically and theoretically, a difficult irony given the need to utilize essentialist categories to address the oppressive conditions under which they emerged. To do so, a critical theory of political construction is required.