Privatizing conditions of production: trade agreements as neoliberal environmental governance

Recent multilateral trade agreements are among the major manifestations of neoliberalism. They are also emerging as some of the most important sites of environmental governance in the 21st century. I argue here that these trade agreements, particularly the sweeping new protections they provide for investors, are redefining property rights and environmental governance in fundamental ways. I suggest that in addition to furthering the centuries-long process of the enclosure of nature under capitalism, the neoliberal agenda of NAFTA and similar trade agreements also involves something new: the privatization, or primitive accumulation, of conditions of production as an accumulation strategy. I explore these dynamics through examination of two cases, one in the United States and one in Mexico. I also explore the roles of social movements in these dynamics.     

Urban environmental services and the state in East Africa; between neo-developmental and network governance approaches

Although governments are generally expected to provide environmental services such as sanitation and solid waste collection for their citizens, most (municipal) governments in Sub-Saharan Africa seem hardly able to take up this task. Without ignoring the lack of material resources resulting from poverty, there are other structural causes for this failure as well and related to the role of the state. Since independence, the state in Africa has been debated in political as well as in academic circles and opposing views can still be discerned today. While some promote a strong interventionist state which can effectively enhance development, others consider introducing network governance by involving various societal actors in combination with different levels of government a more promising alternative. After presenting an historical overview, in this paper I will summarize this debate and discuss future options for East African authorities for providing more effective and sustainable urban environmental infrastructures and services.     

Neoliberalism and environmental justice in the United States environmental protection agency: Translating policy into managerial practice in hazardous waste remediation

In response to the failings of the aggressive neoliberalism of the Reagan era, the Clinton administration sought new ways to promote and deepen the neoliberal project. One of its strategies was to develop “neocommunitarian” programs to support political empowerment and economic self-sufficiency in marginalized communities. Its environmental justice policy became an important vehicle for delivering these programs. This paper examines ways in which one regional office of the US Environmental Protection Agency translated the Clinton administration's environmental justice policy into practical guidelines for its managers. It investigates how these guidelines affected the work of personnel in the EPA's program to clean up hazardous waste sites. It asks how the Clinton administration's approach to environmental justice--emphasizing data analysis, managed public participation, and economic opportunity--helped both to deepen the neoliberal project and to transform the geography of risk and remediation. Although the EPA was unable to “normalize” the environmental justice community--to make it a standardized target for the Clinton administration's empowerment programs--its environmental justice policy both contributed to subtle changes in the distribution of hazardous waste risk and made the delivery of neocommunitarian programs an important part of the work of remedial personnel.     

Campus sustainability at the edges: Emotions,relations, and bio-cultural connections

The university campus is often considered a key site for the development of environmental sustainability initiatives. At the same time, the concept and practice of sustainability has been critiqued for its lack of conceptual clarity and its proneness to co-optation by neoliberal institutions and organizations. Using a just sustainabilities framework, this article strives to respond to this tension by exploring the possibility of a campus sustainability at the edges, one that is interested in engaging the broader socio-spatial context of a university as well as in tapping into the emotional and relational realms of fostering more sustainable socio-ecological assemblages. Through a case study analysis of the Philadelphia Urban Creators (PUC), a youth-led organization operating within the Temple University-North Philadelphia interface, I find that grassroots sustainability actors possess important knowledge for understanding how sustainability can be a tool for restoring emotional affinity with the environment as well as for enacting transformative socio-ecological change in the urban university context and beyond. Through these explorations, my purpose is twofold: (1) to envision a more diverse, inclusive, and meaningful campus sustainability model that seeks to confront urban crises such as gentrification, racialized poverty, and mass incarceration, and (2) to incorporate emotion and affect geographies into the just sustainabilities research agenda.     

Local environmental action plans and the `glocalisation' of post-socialist governance: The Macedonian experience

Local Environmental Action Plans (LEAPs) are a useful starting point for the theoretical and empirical unravelling of the global post-Fordist socio-economic drive, within the framework of environmental policy devolution in Transition. Accordingly, this paper aims to identify the interconnected economic, social and political specifities involved in the formulation and institutionalisation of such projects in the Republic of Macedonia. Seven LEAPs - broadly representative of the immense micro-scale physical and social diversity of the country - have been selected for detailed review, so as to provide more fine-tuned insights that should be relevant for the wider LEAP process in Macedonia and beyond. Preliminary evidence about the realisation of these initiatives indicates that comprehensive implementation is highly dependent upon the realistic political and economic abilities (and interests) of local and national elites, plus international organisations. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Rethinking the nature of urban environmental politics: Security, subjectivity, and the non-human

The growing field of urban political ecology (UPE) has greatly advanced understandings of the socio-ecological transformations through which urban economies and environments are produced. However, this field has thus far failed to fully consider subjective (and subject-forming) dimensions of urban environmental struggle. I argue that this can be overcome through bringing urban political ecology into conversation with both post-structural political ecology and critical geopolitics. Bridging these literatures focuses attention on practices of socio-ecological exclusion and attachment through which environmental subjectivities are formed. This argument is drawn out through a case study of the politics of local economic development and conservation within the watershed of the Big Darby Creek near Columbus, Ohio. This struggle was driven by a preservationist movement that coalesced around a shared understanding of socio-ecological hybridity as a source of metaphysical insecurity. Hybridity appears here as a site of political and ethical struggle over social and ecological exclusions produced in the pursuit of security. This case study demonstrates a paradox of environmental politics: the non-human is at once a site of constituent possibilities for identity and subjectivity as well as forces which seek to foreclose this radical openness. Recognizing the paradoxical nature of environmental struggle allows for a more complex and nuanced account of the multifarious forces that shape the formation of environmental subjectivities.     

Waste governance and ecological identity in Maui,Hawaii, USA

Recent scholarship examining environmental governance and solid waste management (SWM) in Hawaii has demonstrated the complexities of managing refuse in a remote, ecologically sensitive archipelago. Despite decades of calls for intensive recycling, composting, incineration, and other non-landfill disposal technologies, most islands of Hawaii continue to rely on sanitary landfilling. On Maui, a minor bureaucratic scandal centered on landfill permitting triggered the formation of an ad hoc entity intended to change SWM once and for all – the Solid Waste Resources Advisory Committee (SWRAC). I mobilize scholarship on waste governance, and in particular the ‘modes of governing’ framework to interrogate the decision-making processes of the SWRAC, evaluate their outputs, and consider the reasons for their ultimately limited impact on SWM governance on Maui. Based on a close reading of SWRAC meeting minutes and documents, I identify several factors, including the lack of clear goals or targets for SWRAC activity; a flawed, consensus-oriented decision-making process; and a failure to contextualize SWM within the broader environmental and cultural terrain of Maui. Taken together, I contend that these three problem areas underline the significance of seriously incorporating and harmonizing competing conceptions of ecological identity into both the ‘modes of governing’ framework and the scholarship of environmental governance more broadly.     

The neoliberalization of ecosystem services: wetland mitigation banking and problems in environmental governance

Wetland mitigation banking is an American neoliberal environmental policy that has created a functioning market in `ecosystem services', commodities defined using the holistic measures of ecological science. The development of this market is discussed as a project of environmental governance, defined as the nation-state's regulation of ecological relations within its territory towards stabilizing capitalist relations of power and accumulation. I argue that the wetland banking industry serves as a bellwether that presages problems that other strategies of neoliberal environmental governance will experience. Ethnographic, economic and ecological data from the Chicago-area wetland banking industry inform a discussion of two major obstacles to neoliberal strategy: the problem of relying on ecological science to define the unit of trade, and the problem of aligning the somewhat independent relations of law, politics, markets and ecosystems across an array of spatial scales. Theoretical guidance is sought from recent work on `social natures' and from the Regulationist approach to institutional political economics.     

Tradeoffs in carbon commodification: A political ecology of common property forest governance

Carbon markets have gained traction worldwide as an ostensibly win–win solution to climate change, providing low-cost emission reductions in the Global North and sustainable development in the Global South. However, sustainable development and livelihood co-benefits have largely failed to materialize in a range of carbon offset projects, particularly those in forest communities. While some scholars explain this failure as an outcome of fundamental tradeoffs between market efficiency and sustainable development, others argue that institutions of common property land tenure can resolve tradeoffs and generate important co-benefits for local communities. Using a political ecology approach, integrating insights of Karl Polanyi and Noel Castree on the commodification of nature and evidence from a carbon forestry project in Chiapas, Mexico, this article grapples with the ways in which carbon market requirements shape forest governance within common property tenure arrangements. I argue that the centralization of forest governance and decision making into the hands of project implementers and brokers, the necessity for legible land rights and boundaries, and the technical requirements for measurement, calculation, and monitoring of carbon have reshaped forest governance in ways that have undermined the social and ecological benefits often associated with common property management schemes. This research therefore demonstrates that so-called tradeoffs between market efficiency and equitable sustainable development goals may not be inherent to carbon forestry and calls into question the reliance on disembedding market mechanisms for climate change mitigation in forest ecosystems. As such, this work has important implications for REDD+.     

Global environmental sustainability: Intragenerational equity and conceptions of justice in multilateral environmental regimes

With specific focus on two environmental regimes (the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and the Climate Change Convention), this paper seeks to indicate the prospects and limitations of the aspirations for distributive justice by the political South within the context of sustainability in general, and the institutions for global environmental governance in particular. It is argued that while these aspirations have produced important normative shifts in the rule-structure of global environmental management, they have not proved momentous enough to generate policies outside of what the prevailing neoliberal socio-economic regime might permit. Hence, although the texts of global environmental agreements accommodate concepts that express egalitarian notions of justice, core policies remain firmly rooted in market-based neoliberal interpretations of justice, which mainly serve to sustain the status quo.     

Kirchhoff型偏移理论的研究历史、研究现状与发展趋势展望——与光学绕射理论的类比、若干新结果、新认识以及若干有待于解决的问题

对Kirchhoff型偏移理论的研究历史、研究现状以及在今后一段时间内的发展趋势进行了简要的回顾和评述,并对加权函数、偏移孔径、子波拉伸、振幅畸变、垂向与横向分辨率等问题进行了相对详尽的讨论。还对若干有待于解决的问题进行了探讨,并对笔者在近几年内所取得的一些与Kirchhoff型偏移理论有关的新认识和新结果进行了介绍。为了充分地顾及反射地震成像和光学成像之间的渊源关系,采用了一种新的讨论方式,即首先对Kirchhoff绕射理论的主要内容进行概略的回顾,然后再通过类比的方式引入Kirchhoff型偏移成像的基本概念和基本方程。在过去的几十年中,在Kirchhoff型偏移理论研究方面已经取得了重大进展,一个完整的理论体系已经形成。尽管如此,仍有一些遗留的或新出现的理论问题有待于解决,例如加权等时面分布叠加偏移的输出场分析和模型空间中的最优偏移孔径等等。由于Kirchhoff型偏移理论的研究对象是加权绕射叠加而不是加权等时面分布,也由于GPU/CPU协同计算技术的出现已经使得加权绕射叠加的计算量问题不再形成瓶颈,所以在今后的发展中Kirchhoff型偏移在理论和实践上将达到统一,即将在实现上从加权等时面分布回归到加权绕射叠加。与此同时,在今后一个时期内的研究重点将会与Green函数的数学表述、局部相关反射信号（locally coherent events）的表示和处理、广义加权绕射叠加以及在模型空间中定义的最优偏移孔径等问题有关。     

基于环境地质问题分区的海峡西岸经济区环境地质图编图研究

在前人资料的基础上,全面总结了区内1999年地质大调查以来的水工环地质调查的最新成果,以环境地质问题分区作为普染色,运用GIS技术编制了海峡西岸经济区环境地质图,该图件能够反映海峡西岸经济区地质环境特征、地质资源、主要环境地质问题等内容。本文从编图的基本原则、编图范围、主要内容、图面表示方法等方面进行了阐述,研究发现,以环境地质问题分区作为环境地质图主要内容的编图方法,比以往采用环境地质背景分区的方式更能直观地反映区内的环境地质问题,可以更好地为国土资源规划、地质环境保护提供支撑。     

土体微观结构的研究现况评述

本文回顾了土体微观结构的研究历史,介绍并评述了微观结构研究中各个方面的研究技术和方法,指出了微观结构研究的最新进展和发展趋势。     

生物标志的环境含义及其应用

生物标志,包括生物的壳体构造、生态特征、地球化学和群落组合等,在地球科学研究中具有十分重要的理论意义和实用价值。本文首先论述了影响生物生存的环境因素,包括地球因素和宇宙因素。并根据西南地区晚古生代地层中主要生物门类,特别是微体古生物的古生态,论证生物标志的环境含义。在此基础上,指出生物标志在地学研究中的应用,包括划分和对比地层、判断沉积相、分析古气候变化、划分生物地理区、推断海（湖）平面变化、指示地质找矿和阐释宇宙演变。最后,探讨生物标志的研究方法,包括分类统计学方法、形态构造学方法、地球化学方法和沉积埋藏学方法。     

日本MW 9.0级大地震前后华北和东北地区现今构造应力作用调整过程与研究意义探讨

为了探讨日本M_W 9.0级大地震前后华北和东北地区现今构造应力作用调整过程与研究意义,对华北和东北地区进行原位现今地应力绝对测量与实时监测、GPS测量,结果表明：日本大地震在山东半岛、华北北部地区和东北地区所诱发同震位移引起的张性效应调整周期分别约为6个月(即调整结束时间大约在2011年9月)、15个月(即调整结束时间大约在2012年6月)和26个月(即调整结束时间大约在2013年5月),张性效应调整周期与同震位移大小成正比。在这种调整过程中,往往表现出区域现今构造应力作用方式和构造应力场转换,并可能伴随重大地质事件(如地震等)的发生。2012年5月28日和29日、6月18日、8月26日及2013年1月11日在唐山及其周围地区分别发生的4.8级、3.2级、4.0级、3.3级和3.0级地震与华北北部地区构造应力作用方式和构造应力场转换有关,而2013年10月31日以来在吉林省松原市发生的地震群应与东北地区构造应力作用方式和构造应力场转换有关,而非一个大地震前的小震群。