Cows versus rubber: Changing livelihoods among Amazonian extractivists

The livelihood strategies of former rubber tappers in the Amazon region are rapidly shifting from extraction of non-timber forest products to mixed systems based on agriculture and small scale cattle ranching. Using a combination of participatory methods and Geographical Information Systems, a case study in western Acre, Brazil explores how rubber tapper livelihood strategies may be changing, and the implications of these changes for land use and forest cover. Field (cattle pasture and agriculture) expansion and the decline of forest extractivism present challenges to many regional conservation and development projects such as sustainable settlement projects and extractive reserves seeking to develop forest-based livelihood alternatives to limit deforestation. Sustainability goals require researchers and policy makers to address the still experimental status of these forest-based organizational units, the heterogeneity and dynamism of extractivist livelihoods, and the necessary importance of small-scale cattle ranching for insurance and income generation among many former and current extractivists.     

关于煤炭预测的资源量(334)?问题的讨论

通过对煤炭预测的资源量(334)?问题产生的原因以及煤与非煤矿产资源差异化管理的历史和现状进行梳理和分析,认为煤炭预测的(334)?资源量从《煤、泥炭地质勘查规范》的工程控制要求来看,与《固体矿产资源/储量分类》、《固体矿产地质勘查规范总则》中推断的内蕴经济的333基本相当。建议在现有固体矿产资源储量相关标准、规范不变的前提下,对煤炭资源实行差异化管理,由国家资源储量管理部门行文,明确规定将煤炭预测的资源量(334)?纳入查明矿产资源之中,对其按查明资源储量进行管理。     

Pasture, profit, and power: An environmental history of cattle ranching in Colombia, 1850-1950

This article examines the expansion of cattle ranching from 1850 to 1950 into lowland forests of Colombia. Although most attention to ranching as a source of deforestation in Latin America has focused on the second half of the 20th century, in Colombia it has a much longer history. The article also examines the role of introduced African grasses in the process of pasture development. While it discusses their ability to suppress secondary-forest regeneration, it underscores their contribution to productivity gains to help explain their wide diffusion. Lastly, the article suggests that paying greater attention to the costs and labor of pasture formation can serve as a springboard to reexamine a number of common stereotypes about ranching: that the logic of livestock was not about producing beef; that cattle were primarily a means to control territory; and that ranching ‘profits’ stemmed from extra-economic sources. Although there is some truth to these explanations, the dominance of cattle throughout the countryside cannot be explained without taking the economic and productive logic of ranching into account. This, in turn, should also help push us to better understand the nature of landed power and the dynamics of agrarian change in Colombia.     

EIAs,power and political ecology: Situating resource struggles and the techno-politics of small-scale mining

Academics across disciplines are increasingly employing political ecology lenses to unpack conflicts related to resource extraction. Yet, an area that remains under-researched and under-theorised is how environmental impact assessments (EIAs) are embedded in politics and imagined as sites of power relations. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in Zimbabwe engaging small-scale gold miners, EIA consultants and government officials, this article examines the changing social significance of EIAs during and after a nationwide police operation that was framed by authorities as targeting non-compliance with environmental policy, illegal mining and illicit trading. Among other articulations of dissent, small-scale miners associations protested that EIA enforcement rhetoric served unjustly as a rationale for halting livelihoods and extracting rent from miners in times of economic difficulty. The article challenges EIA narratives that focus narrowly on risk management or governance failure, exploring technocratic obfuscations and how enforcement rhetoric was perceived in relation to criminalisation and coercion, expert environmental consultancy cultures and adapted legacies of colonial practice in contemporary dynamics of rule. Heavy-handed policing under the banner of enforcing order impinged on livelihoods and had counterproductive effects in addressing environmental problems, while complying with expensive EIA report-producing requirements was far beyond the means of most small-scale miners. The article rethinks how technical EIA rhetoric becomes entangled in spaces of contentious politics, the perils of looking only at particular scales of relations to the exclusion of others, and what it means to re-engage Donald Moore’s notion of “shifting alignments and contingent constellations of power.” Suggesting future directions in political ecology theorising in relation to extractive sectors, it calls for careful attention to the situated politics of EIAs – situated in time and space, amid varying relations of power – and how multiple hegemonic practices are conceptualised and challenged.     

云南黄铁矿床地质特征及开发探讨

云南黄铁矿床探明上表储量居全国第五位,其中单一黄铁矿床占总保有量的58.70%,有色金属伴(共)生黄铁矿占41.30％,分布集中,开发外部条件良好。若能使滇中与滇东北磷、硫优势资源结合,兴建昭通15万t/a磷酸厂,既满足云南发展磷铵与三元高效复合磷肥对磷酸的需求,又可向东南亚出口,将在滇东北形成云南唯一硫资源开发-加工的最大基地。     

Land Reserves in Southern Sumatra/Indonesia and their potentialities for agricultural utilization

In contrast to overpopulated Java the neighbouring island of Sumatra still provides huge unused land reserves. However, by far not all of these reserves can be regarded as real agricultural potentials, e.g. for resettlement projects. Especially the poor soils often prove an agricultural handicap. Besides soil fertility the existing vegetation has to be conidered. Thus, for example, the so called “alang alang grass savannas” in general show better potentialities than forest areas, while most of the swamps prove rather unsuitable for agricultural development. With regard to the already existing landuse types the cultivation of perennial bush- and tree crops, for instance rubber, seems to be best suited for further expansions. An expansion of annual food crops would be feasible too, however only be applying heavy capital inputs; here wet rice cultivation would be more appropiate than the permanent cultivation of annual upland crops like cassava, maize, etc. The traditional shifting cultivation does not serve as an alternative any longer. Animal breeding will have its difficulties, with the exception of certain highland areas. Taking into account all ecological, social, and economic reservations it is concluded that, in spite of considerable restrictions, a good part of the land reserves in southern Sumatra could still be opened and used successfully for agricultural purposes.     

Factors useful for predicting future mineral-commodity supply trends

The analysis of various factors influencing mineral availability documents future short-and long-term mineral-commodity supply trends. The lifetime of reserves, the development of the relative importance of production centres and the forecasting of the depletion of a resource base are mainly geological factors, although the category “reserves”, in contrast to “resources”, is determined by technical and economical aspects. These three factors govern the short-and long-term supply of mineral commodities. The intensity-of-use factors and the growth rate of consumption are variables related to the demand of mineral commodities. They influence the decision of companies for certain commodities as targets for exploration and investment in production centres. Both factors control the short-to medium-term mineral supply. Finally, the lead time to production is a technical variable, although influenced by ore deposit type, and controls short-term mineral availability.     

Underground political ecologies: The second Annual Lecture of the Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers

Based on the 2011 Annual Cultural and Political Ecology Specialty Group Lecture, this paper makes the case for a political ecology of the subsoil. Arguing that subsoil resources have received comparatively little attention within the wider corpus of political ecological writing, the paper explores several ways in which the extraction of mineral and hydrocarbon resources is constitutive of, and constituted by, wider capitalist political, economic and institutional arrangements. Drawing on material from El Salvador and the Andean countries, the paper explores the contemporary governance of extractive industries, and points to significant convergence among the approaches taken by neoliberal and ostensibly post-neoliberal regimes alike. The intersections between the extractive economy, livelihoods and patterns of social protest are also explored. Through these examples, the paper also highlights the ways in which “activist political ecologists” play important roles in counter-movements seeking to re-govern the extractive economy. These countermovements are found in both civil society and different parts of the state. Such activist political ecologists are central to the broader enterprise of an “underground political ecology” and are often vital to the success of scholarly interventions in such political ecologies.     

连云港海洋牧场综合管理可视化系统的设计与实现

基于江苏连云港海洋牧场建设管理业务需求，系统收集、整合连云港海洋牧场综合信息资料，综合运用GIS技术、三维可视化技术及数据库搭建技术，建立连云港海洋牧场综合管理数据库，设计了可视化系统的总体架构，实现了海洋牧场综合信息“一张图”管理、人工鱼礁投放全流程管理、地形地貌三维展示等功能，为相关管理工作提供技术支撑平台。     

Ranching and the new global range: Amazônia in the 21st century

This paper seeks to understand how the Brazilian Amazon, which many thought unsuitable for agricultural development, has yielded to a dynamic cattle economy in only a few decades. It does so by embedding the Thunian model of location rents within the regime of capital accumulation that has driven the Brazilian economy since the mid-20th century. The paper addresses policies that have created location rents in Amazônia, the effect of these rents on land managers, and the spatial implications of their behavior on forests. Thus, the paper connects macro-processes and structures to agents on the ground, in providing a political ecological explanation relevant to land change science. The policy discussion focuses on reductions in transportation costs, improvements in animal health, and monetary and trade reforms. To illustrate the impact of policy, the paper presents data on the geography of Amazonian herd expansion, on the growth of Amazonian exports, and on the profitability of the region’s cattle economy. It follows the empirical presentation with more abstract consideration of the spatial relations between cattle ranching and soy farming, and implications for deforestation. The paper concludes on a speculative note by considering the likelihood of forest transition in the region, given the transformation of Amazônia into a global resource frontier.     

Conservation planning, boundary-making and border terrains: The desire for forest and order in the Gran Sabana, Venezuela

Conflicts surrounding protected area management often emerge from contested processes of boundary-making. Such productions of bounded conservation spaces are contingent in part on processes of identity formation, where some social groups are legitimized as belonging to conservation units, while others are constructed as out-of-place. This article draws on the literature in postmodern geopolitics and the political ecology of fire to interrogate processes of boundary-making and identity formation in the savanna landscape of Canaima National Park, Venezuela. The institutional culture of the environmental management agency EDELCA is in part premised on narratives of history and indigeneity coupled with a desire for an imagined, forested landscape. Because of the social constructions shaping this institutional culture, the agency maintains an approach to fire management that emphasizes fire suppression. However, an ecological field study suggests that fire suppression is leading to increased fuel loads, especially in ecologically significant boundaries between grasslands and forest. Although these boundary zones are the focus of indigenous practices of prescribed burning, they fall in-between the state management categories of forest and ecotone. As a result, these interstitial spaces become theaters for performances of domination and resistance, leading to contradictory and inconsistent approaches to fire management that place gallery forests at risk.     

Are livestock a troublesome commodity?

Rather than making a uniform case for understanding the neoliberalization of ranching and pastoralism, the articles in this volume show how everyday practices are made through historically and geographically specific struggles over the characteristics of production, exchange and rule, in which livestock play a particularly important role. Collectively, I believe the articles in this volume highlight the significant relationship between cattle and capitalism, and make a compelling argument that to understand the material implications of neoliberalism we need to pay more attention to livestock as an important and rapidly changing medium of livelihood production and accumulation strategy around the world.     

Environmental management and open-air experiments in Brazilian Amazonia

In this article, I ethnographically examine “the biggest experiment in tropical conservation history,” an environmental management approach designed in Brazilian Amazonia. I focus on research conducted by scientists who support this approach using the results of their work at an open-air experiment. Drawing on this ethnographic study I critically revisit Bruno Latour’s deservedly influential ethnography of an open-air laboratory in Brazilian Amazonia. I also engage with his claim that open-air experiments constitute spaces in which scientists can avoid seeing the world as “Nature”—a gigantic collection of inert objects that experts sense they have to bring into order on their own. Latour shows that while working in their Amazonian open-air laboratory scientists perceived the forest as a network comprising human and non-human entities bearing creative capacities. He suggests that such experimentation enables humans to envision environmental management strategies based on human/non-human collaborations. In the open air, experts could thereby transcend the pervasive fatalism that plagues environmental policy circles and rekindle a more optimistic and enthusiastic stance toward environmental management. I argue that Latour’s is a visionary ethnography that anticipates contemporary trends in environmental management approaches. However, I also argue that his celebratory conclusions regarding open-air experimentation are misguided. I show that, while working in the open air, the scientists situated their work within capitalist experiments wherein humans and non-humans creatively collaborate in the construction of new, less inhabitable worlds.     

新疆柴窝堡盆地保湖供水方案优化设计

对乌鲁木齐河流域柴窝堡盆地的地下水资源进行科学管理，主要进行了保湖供水方案的优化设计，从技术角度提出了一个最佳的地下水资源开采方案，旨在为该地区水资源综合利用提供科学依据     

河南偃师二里头遗址1号巨型坑祭祀遗迹出土动物的饲养方式

高度互动性的宗教祭祀与仪式性活动是早期复杂社会维持与强化社会治理常用的手段,通过对仪式性活动使用消耗性祭品(如动物牺牲)的考察则可为探讨精英阶层的影响力与控制力提供参考.鉴于此,本文从动物饲养方式入手,采用碳氮稳定同位素分析方法,对二里头宫殿区东北部1号巨型坑内祭祀遗迹出土的35例动物骨骼、1例人骨碎块以及年代相近的其他单位出土的骨骼遗存进行分析,并结合相关资料探讨仪式性动物的饲养方式及来源,为认识二里头社会复杂化进程提供参考.研究发现,祭祀遗迹出土猪的δ13 C值与 δ15N值变化范围均比较大,暗示二里头猪群的饲养方式个体间差异较大,且还存在个别野猪.与此同时,狗与牛的食物结构基本以C4类食物为食,羊则C3与C4植物兼食.对比发现,祭祀遗迹猪、狗与羊的食物结构与灰坑、地层等其他单位出土的同类家畜基本一致.值得注意的是,尽管两类遗迹的牛均呈现出对粟作农业的高度依赖,但巨型坑牛骨的 δ15N值却显著低于其他单位的牛骨.结合二里头遗址对周边较大地理范围内同时期聚落的控制力,我们认为以巨型坑猪为代表的家畜的食物结构的多样性,暗示了它们有着多元化的来源.与此同时,仪式性用牛是否被特殊饲养仍有待进一步探讨.我们的研究支持二里头遗址存在高度互动的宗教祭祀等仪式性活动,即二里头遗址宫殿区祭祀活动所用动物牺牲的来源可能与动物资源由周边地区向二里头遗址的输入有关,这对于我们认识王权在二里头遗址资源流通与宗教活动等方面的控制力具有重要意义.     

From financialization to operations of capital: Historicizing and disentangling the finance–farmland-nexus

This largely programmatic paper offers a new way of thinking through the incorporation of farmland into financial markets. Building on the notion of “operations of capital”, it sketches analytical entry points for scrutinizing the inner workings of agri-finance capital formation. The concept of operations can make two useful contributions to the existing discussion. First, it helps provide a more nuanced historicization of the entanglement between finance and farmland. Finance has a long history of penetrating agriculture and the new quality of the contemporary coupling of finance and farmland only becomes fully visible when adopting a more nuanced historical perspective. Rather than imagining the history of capitalism as one where industrial capitalism gives way to financialized capitalism, the concept of operations sensitizes us for the situated modes, processes and practices of financial economization that have reworked economy, society and nature at specific historical conjunctures.Second, it allows us to move beyond simply treating “financialization” as explanans. Shifting attention to the situated practical activities of global finance, it eventually helps us explore central categories of financial economization (“capital”, “resources”, “property” and “value”) as practical accomplishments rather than taking them for granted. Only then can we come to terms with how finance works through farmland in different geographical settings. Empirical material from an ongoing research project will support my arguments.     

定陶县建立农村宅基地管理机制的思考

为解决超标准占用宅基地、一户多宅,“空心村”现象,以及擅自改变宅基地使用用途、非法转让宅基地使用权等宅基地使用中的突出问题,尝试将国有建设用地管理方式推广应用到农村宅基地管理中去;明确土地规划、土地储备、土地整理等土地管理职能部门的宅基地管理职责;将耕地开垦费用于宅基地整治,解决困扰宅基地整治的资金问题;将“问责制”、动态巡查制度等精细化管理手段应用于宅基地管理。     

An analysis of the drought in Yunnan, China, from a perspective of society drought severity

Drought disaster management entails not only understanding meteorological drought as a natural hazard but also evaluating the adverse societal impacts related to the economy and human lives. For the purpose of quantifying the drought severity from the perspective of society drought, a drought index, namely “Society Drought Severity Index” (SDSI), was put forward to analyze the drought in Yunnan Province of China. In SDSI for Yunnan, the drought severity was represented by the weighted discrepancy between the “appropriate” water needs and the total available water resources, inspired by the established Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI). Technically, the trend in historical water consumption records in agricultural, industrial, and domestic sectors was applied to represent the appropriate water needs; an apparent “runoff” was used to represent the available water resource in Yunnan. The SDSI of Yunnan revealed a trend toward increasing drought severity, which resulted from a combination of meteorological changes and water needs escalation. Moreover, the spatial center of the 2010 drought in Yunnan based on SDSI was different from that identified by PDSI, which exactly reflected the influence of water needs on drought severity. The SDSI was deemed to be a beneficial tool for drought disaster management and drought risk governance.     

Markets,religion, regulation: Kosher,halal and Hindu vegetarianism in global perspective

Most recent scholarship on moral economies or religious markets argues for the compatibility of economies/markets and religious practices in particular national or regional contexts. However, over the last couple of decades or so religious markets have entered a new phase characterized by new forms of regulation, certification and standardization on a global scale. Building on research on global kosher (a Hebrew term meaning “fit” or “proper”), halal (an Arabic word that literally means “permissible” or “lawful”) and Hindu vegetarianism this paper argues that these economies or markets to a large extent are conditioned by and themselves condition forms of transnational governmentality, that is, new and often overlapping practices of government and grassroots politics. I explore religious economies and markets at three interrelated levels of the social scale: state and non-state regulation, the marketplace and consumers. Epistemologically, comparison is used as a powerful conceptual mechanism that fixes attention on kosher, halal and Hindu vegetarian similarities and differences.     

甘肃省铜矿山接替资源找矿问题研究

学名:Xuwulong yueluni尤海鲁,李大庆,刘维昌,2011语源:属名叙五(Xuwu)、种名日伦(Yueluni)分别来自我国著名的地质学家、甘肃地质研究的先驱王日伦教授的字和名