Community Recovery Following the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill: Toward a Theory of Cultural Resilience

Culture plays an important role in communities’ abilities to adapt to environmental change and crises. The emerging field of resilience thinking has made several efforts to better integrate social and cultural factors into the systems-level approach to understanding social–ecological resilience. However, attempts to integrate culture into structural models often fail to account for the agentic processes that influence recovery at the individual and community levels, overshadowing the potential for agency and variation in community response. Using empirical data on the 2010 BP oil spill’s impact on a small, natural-resource-dependent community, we propose an alternative approach emphasizing culture’s ability to operate as a resource that contributes to social, or community, resilience. We refer to this more explicit articulation of culture’s role in resilience as cultural resilience. Our findings reveal that not all cultural resources that define resilience in reference to certain disasters provided successful mitigation, adaptation, or recovery from the BP spill.     

贫困区旅游地社会-生态系统恢复力时空分异研究——以安徽境内大别山区12个贫困县（市）为例

基于可变模糊识别模型分析 2008—2017年安徽境内大别山区12个贫困县（市）社会-生态系统恢复力的时空演变过程,采用障碍度模型揭示恢复力影响因素和特征。研究表明：① 时序变化上,社会-生态系统恢复力呈现稳步上升趋势,但总体仍处中低阶段。其中,社会子系统恢复力整体微升,局部年份有突变;经济子系统恢复力发展逐年提高;生态子系统恢复力“上升-下降-上升”反复波动,整体呈下降趋势;② 空间变化上,社会-生态系统恢复力总体上呈“极低-较低-中等”递进发展,各县（市）由分化到趋同,中部最快,南北均衡并进。其中,社会子系统恢复力空间关联性相对较弱,部分相邻区域阶段一致,总体北部快于南部;经济子系统恢复力空间关联性较强,连片提升,进度相似,总体南部快于北部;生态子系统恢复力空间关联性居中,部分区域短时间内步调一致,总体南慢北快。③ 旅游发展、人地关系、生态环境是贫困区旅游地社会-生态系统恢复力的主要影响因素。各县（市）越临近,影响因素相似度越高,但随地势复杂性增加,相似度由北至南递减。     

The End of Sustainability

It is time to move past the concept of sustainability. The realities of the Anthropocene warrant this conclusion. They include unprecedented and irreversible rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, exponential increases in per-capita resource consumption, and global climate change. These factors combine to create an increasing likelihood of rapid, nonlinear, social and ecological regime changes. The recent failure of the Rio + 20 provides an opportunity to collectively reexamine—and ultimately move past—the concept of sustainability as an environmental goal. We must face the impossibility of defining—let alone pursuing—a goal of “sustainability” in a world characterized by such extreme complexity, radical uncertainty and lack of stationarity. After briefly examining sustainability's failure, we propose resilience thinking as one possible new orientation and point to the challenges associated with translating resilience theory into policy application.     

Assessing aquatic macrophyte community change through the integration of palaeolimnological and historical data at Loch Leven,Scotland

Submerged macrophytes have a critical role in lake ecosystems affecting nutrient cycling, sediment stability, and community composition across multiple trophic levels. Consequently temporal changes in the composition of submerged plant populations can have profound ecological implications and key significance from the perspective of lake conservation. By focusing on macro-remains of aquatic macrophytes and extensive historical plant records spanning the last approximately 180 years, this study seeks to evaluate a combined historical-palaeolimnological approach for establishing pre-disturbance macrophytes communities in Loch Leven, Kinross, Scotland and to provide new information regarding temporal trends in its macrophyte vegetation as well as potential drivers of change. Some 81% of the species historically recorded for the core site (east side of St. Serf’s Island) were found as macro-remains. Potamogeton taxa were underrepresented, whereas remains of Elatine hexandra, a small species never recorded historically were found. The core sequence showed good agreement with known floristic changes including an early (pre- ca. 1850) loss of Isoetes lacustris and Lobelia dortmanna and a more recent (post-1910) shift to dominance by Potamogeton and Chara taxa associated with eutrophic conditions. A clear pattern in the relationship between macrofossil principal component analysis (PCA) and loss on ignition suggested a key control of sediment conditions on macrophyte community structure. In particular the major macrophyte community change of the mid-nineteenth century was concurrent with a substantial increase in organic matter, likely linked to a historic lake lowering (early 1830s) which would have beached the former gravel-sand shoreline leading to a much siltier lake littoral. Although recent monitoring data show signs of ecological recovery our study illustrates that Loch Leven remains a long way from its reference state as a lake with characteristic soft-water macrophytes. To achieve a full recovery, sediment properties would need to change in addition to nutrient reduction. Consequently restoration strategies will need to compromise between the desirability of achieving the pre-disturbance state and what is feasible and practicable. Our study shows the clear potential role of a combined palaeolimnological-historical approach for informing lake management decisions.     

Secondary school student perspectives on community resilience in Grey District

For a national competition supported by the New Zealand Board of Geography Teachers, secondary school students in years 10–13 were asked to identify and investigate factors that were building community resilience in their home areas, and the entries provided young people's perspectives on how well individuals, families and communities ‘bounce back’, adapt, change and become stronger following an adverse event. This article concerns the findings of students at Greymouth High School. Their entries showed that community resilience in Grey District depended on individual and collective capacity for action. The greater their involvement in community affairs and projects, the more likely individuals and families were to form networks and participate in communal activities. In Greymouth, as elsewhere in New Zealand, membership of voluntary organisations and participation in planning for, and responding to, catastrophic events has helped residents respond effectively in times of adversity and has enhanced community resilience.     

Support for,and Impacts of Publishing in the Annals of the AAG: The Authors and and Editor Speak

A survey of 176 authors who published in the Annals between 1988 and 1993 provides insights into why authors submitted their research to the journal, what support they received, and the impacts of the publication on their careers. Most decided themselves to submit their work, and one-third received support from research grants; cartographic assistance and graduate assistants were less important. The major benefits of publishing in the Annals were visibility in one's department, contact with other geographers, and requests for reprints. Most authors presented their ideas at professional meetings prior to submission. Promotion and salary Inc.reases were benefits for women, assistant professors, associate professors, and physical geographers. Authors considered their articles as original examinations that yielded new results, contributed to theory, stimulated debate, and helped bridge gaps inside and outside of geography. These results are useful in helping individual authors and for administrators in identifying the kinds of research support needed by authors publishing in the Annals.     

Urban Identities and Catastrophe: Izmir and Salonica at the End of the Ottoman Empire

Two huge fires dramatically influenced the urban development of Salonica and Izmir, in 1917 and in 1922, respectively. These catastrophes occurred after the Ottoman Empire fell, and Salonica and Izmir had shifted into new national contexts. The fires mainly destroyed the districts that were transformed during the late‐Ottoman period. These districts became the cosmopolitan façades of modern Izmir and Salonica. The post‐fires' tabula rasa provided an opportunity for Greek and Turkish politicians and European planners to change the urban identity of both cities. Moreover, the Lausanne Treaty of 1923 transformed their multicultural societies also. Reconstruction plans had been thought to de‐Ottomanize and remove the previous idea of the towns and their multiplicity, interpreting new cultural and nationalist feeling. Here, I emphasize how modernity was interpreted before and after the fires, and point out contradictions between ideological aspects of planning and how the first urban districts were built during the 1920s.     

Simion Mehedinţi's Contribution to Modern Romanian Geography

Armed with a scholarship to find an answer to the question “What is geography?” Simion Mehedin?i's studies took him to continental Europe's three main centers of geographic thought: Paris, Berlin, and Leipzig. We explore how his innovative ideas flourished, especially in Leipzig under Ratzel. The first Romanian geographer, Mehedin?i, must be credited with having defined geography as a science of mutual relationships between geospheres. This thinking reached its pinnacle in two complex books, Terra and Ethnos, the contents of which we synthetically explore. We also trace the unfavorable historical and geopolitical conditions that led to this pioneering work being little recognized worldwide.     

On Geographic and geography

New Zealand Geographic is one of a number of geographical magazines published in the English‐speaking world that make little or no reference to work by academic geographers. It recently launched a New Zealand Geographic Trust to promote research into ‘New Zealand's life, culture and sciences’ and collaborated with four other publishers of geographical magazines to raise awareness of climate change: the work of academic geographers is again ignored. This exclusion of academic and school geography from such enterprises raises important issues regarding the discipline's public profile in New Zealand and suggests the need for greater public engagement activity by the country's geographers.     

Obfuscating spatial point tracks with simulated crowding

ABSTRACT

Spatial point tracks are of concern for an increasing number of analysts studying spatial behaviour patterns and environmental effects. Take an epidemiologist studying the behaviour of cyclists and how their health is affected by the city’s air quality. The accuracy of such analyses critically depends on the positional accuracy of the tracked points. This poses a serious privacy risk. Tracks easily reveal a person’s identity since the places visited function as fingerprints. Current obfuscation-based privacy protection methods, however, mostly rely on point quality reduction, such as spatial cloaking, grid masking or random noise, and thus render an obfuscated track less useful for exposure assessment. We introduce simulated crowding as a point quality preserving obfuscation principle that is based on adding fake points. We suggest two crowding strategies based on extending and masking a track to defend against inference attacks. We test them across various attack strategies and compare them to state-of-the-art obfuscation techniques both in terms of information loss and attack resilience. Results indicate that simulated crowding provides high resilience against home attacks under constantly low information loss.     

Applying Resilience Thinking to Natural Resource Management through a “Planning-By-Doing” Framework

Natural resource management (NRM) organizations are increasingly looking to resilience thinking to provide insights into how social and environmental systems interact and to identify points of intervention. Drawing on complex systems analysis, resilience thinking emphasizes that landscapes constantly change from social and ecological interactions, and focuses NRM planners’ attention on identifying key variables, feedbacks, and thresholds that can help improve intervention strategies. More deliberative approaches are being developed to use resilience thinking in ways that engage and build human capacity for action. This article documents experiences shared with NRM agencies in rural Australia as we developed new approaches to link resilience thinking with collective learning principles. We present an emerging framework through which heuristics associated with resilience thinking is being used as part of a planning-by-doing process. The framework is being tested to assess whether and how it can enable change agents to advance their capacities for adaptation and transformation.     

A Plan to Push Limits? Investigating the ecologically sustainable development dimensions of Melbourne's Central Region sustainable water strategy

Drawing upon theory from the field of urban political ecology, we analyse a major strategic water plan for Melbourne, Australia—the Sustainable water strategy for the Central Region, published in 2006. We assess the extent to which the strategy identified and addressed ecological sustainability in terms of: cultural frames; ecological context; social equity; and engagement processes. We identify that the strategy's framing of water was largely separate from its social and ecological context. This framing resulted in the importance of issues such as environmental flows, social equity and cultural values being diminished, thus avoiding the inevitable confrontation with environmental limits needed to ensure long-term ecological sustainability. Our analysis shows that the discursive dominance of economics limited the response to persuasive scientific arguments for greater ecological consideration in the strategy. Our findings suggest that broadening engagement with the diverse ways in which water is valued is likely to contribute to more equitable and ecologically sustainable water futures.     

Gender and local soil knowledge: Linking farmers' perceptions with soil fertility in two villages in the Philippines

Scientists often turn to farmers to understand soil management. This process reveals differences and overlaps between local and scientific soil knowledge but rarely considers women and gender issues. This paper examines men's and women's local knowledge of soils in upland, smallholder farms in two villages in Mindanao, the Philippines, using focus group discussions, semi‐structured household interviews, field visits, GIS and soil testing. Farmers' field areas were calculated and delineated based on their perceptions of the different types of soils on their land. Men and women chose the same plots for what they considered their best soil but differed on what they felt were their worst. The fertility of the soils that women considered to be the best and worst was not significantly different from that of the men's respective choices. There was a difference in fertility, however, between the best and worst soils regardless of gender. Although soil fertility analyses showed that the women's chosen soils were similar to men's, analyses of qualitative data showed that their knowledge of soils was different and was based in part on a gendered division of labour. A multidisciplinary approach helped bridge the gap between sociocultural and physical research.     

Representing environments in flux: case studies from East Africa

The dominant view in the ecology and anthropology of the 1950s saw populations harmoniously interacting in self-regulating systems; climax forests and stable societies were the ruling hypotheses. Now, however, ecology and social sciences are investigating nature and culture in flux. The flux paradigms of nature and culture describe a human–ecological relationship that is non-equilibrial, historically contingent and constantly negotiated at both material and ideological levels by unequal actors. In this paper, we examine the effect of changing ecological and cultural paradigms on interpretations of environmental change in three areas of East Africa: the North Pare Mountains, Tanzania, the Mkomazi Game Reserve, Tanzania and the Tsavo National Park, Kenya. We explore how discursive and materialist approaches can complement one another, by expanding the domains of ecological inquiry and demanding that analysts cross-check their data for unquestioned assumptions regarding stability, variability and spatial and temporal scales. Rather than testing a ruling hypothesis, we suggest that ecologists and social scientists work with multiple hypotheses, with the aim of understanding the interplay between ecological, environmental and social influences.     

DRIVING FORCES OF ISLAND BIODIVERSITY: AN APPRAISAL OF TWO THEORIES

The avifauna of three oceanic islands of the Revillagigedo archipelago in the eastern Pacific Ocean consists of 14 endemic landbird taxa and 3 recent continental colonists. This study analyzes the origin, areography of continental relatives, ecological characteristics, and role of immigration and extinction factors as regulators of the islands' species. Only two natural extinctions have been detected on this archipelago in more than 130 years. The endemic nature of the pristine avifauna is interpreted as an indication of high stability over thousands of years. The MacArthur–Wilson (1967) “equilibrium theory of island biogeography” cannot explain or predict the persistence of this avifauna adapted to stable and unique island ecosystems. Lack's (1976) “theory of ecological poverty” regulating island avifaunas, however, predicts stability and a resource-limited bird community. The Revillagigedo avifauna can be understood as an interactive community of a few highly adapted and competitive ecological generalists that have effectively filled all niche spaces and closed off the islands to further colonization. Catastrophic change or anthropogenic landscape degradation may, however, create novel niche spaces and open affected islands to new colonists. This appraisal lends support to the call for a shift away from application of the equilibrium model of island biogeography in conservation science. [Key words: island biogeography, equilibrium theory, island stability, island avifauna, MacArthur-Wilson, Lack, Revillagigedo Islands, Socorro Island.]     

黑河上游多年基流变化及其原因分析

利用递归数字滤波法分割黑河上游主要水文站点的基流量,用移动平均、曼-肯德尔（Mann-Kendall）突变检验,小波分析方法分析研究区多年基流变化特点,并对基流影响因子进行分析。结果显示：黑河上游祁连、扎马什克、莺落峡三站多年平均基流指数均大于0．4;祁连与莺落峡多年基流量呈上升趋势,二者都在1979年发生增加到显著增...     

Simulating artificial cities in a GIS environment: urban growth under alternative regulation regimes

This paper reports on an attempt to combine neo-classical urban economic theory with complex systems methods. The innovative feature of our model from the point of view of conventional economic theory lies in its explicit treatment of spatial relationships and time sequence. From the perspective of raster or cellular GIS models of urban processes, the work is innovative in that it replaces the more usual heuristic cell-transition rules with micro-economic theory. The mix of modelling paradigms is not unproblematic, however, and we discuss the challenges encountered at this research frontier. These notwithstanding, our hybrid model has the potential to be used as a GIS-based laboratory for exploring micro-economic propositions, particularly those relating to urban processes that are path dependent. The version of the model reported simulates spatially equilibriated path dependent futures of a city governed by local development decisions that are at partial equilibria in the neo-classical sense. Two simulations are described which permit visual and economic exploration of (a) an explicitly spatial version of the economic theory of externalities and (b) a new theory of densification. The dual paradigm (Cellular Automata-neo-classical economics) leads to an interesting class of simulations in terms of stability. Economically our simulated cities become increasingly efficient, in terms of private and social product. The long-run economic equilibrium is achieved by many individually efficient negotiations based only on local information. There is no parallel long-run spatial equilibrium however. The spatial configuration of land uses is constantly shifting as a result of randomness in the land use bidding process. The spatial instability is, however, limited by the self-organised drive for greater overall economic efficiency. In economic terms, the model's spatial instability represents random re-allocation of land-use within a set of Pareto-efficient spatial configurations - an intriguing result that we intend to follow up in future work.     

ODD VOLLAN: Ishavsfart. Selfangsten fra Suimmøre gjennem femti år

What is political geography?

Friedrich Ratzel is usually acknowledged as the father of political geography. His Politische Geographie was published in 1897. Reflections on the influence of geography on political events were, of course, made long before Ratzel's time. Herodot tells how the Persians wanted Cyrus to take them to a more fertile land, suitable for a Herrenvolk. The king declined, arguing that such a step might change them into a weak and decadent people. Similar ideas have often been expressed and are not unknown in our own time.

Herodot tells how the Persians wanted Cyrus to take them to a more fertile land, suitable for a Herrenvolk. The king declined, arguing that such a step might change them into a weak and decadent people. Similar ideas have often been expressed and are not unknown in our own time.

Ratzel's definition of political geography was:

Political geography studies and teaches the connection between spatial facts and political conditions, events and developments.     

国外弹性城市研究述评

城市如何在重重挑战与危机中, 因应各种变化, 保持自身发展活力, 是一个亟待解决的重要问题。本文梳理了国外弹性理论研究的4 个领域, 即生态弹性、工程弹性、经济弹性和社会弹性, 并归纳总结了它们各自的基本概念、内涵及代表性研究学者;在此基础上, 系统评述了国外相应的弹性城市研究的4 个领域的内涵与研究重点, 包括城市生态弹性、城市工程弹性、城市经济弹性和城市社会弹性;同时根据已有研究的发展脉络, 前瞻了未来弹性城市研究3 个趋势方向, 即社会平等的议题如何渗入到弹性城市的理念之中, 技术革新如何增强城市弹性, 跨学科、多领域的介入如何共同协作建设弹性城市。鉴于中国各地区自然社会经济差异较大, 不同地区的发展历史、发展阶段、社会文化背景不同, 因此弹性城市理论的应用更应考虑到中国特色, 使弹性理论本身更为“弹性”。