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.     

Access to fisheries in the maritime frontier of Palawan Province,Philippines

Globally, capital investments are intensifying extraction and contestation over resources in frontier spaces, yet most discussion has focused on terrestrial frontiers. This paper shifts this focus to bring a scaled political ecology approach to examine the access dynamics of fisheries trade in the maritime frontier of Palawan province, the Philippines. We adapt the linked concepts of access and exclusion to highlight how access dynamics unfold at multiple scales. At the local scale, social relations of class and ethnicity serve as important markers of difference that inform control over access to fisheries resources. At the regional scale, we show how engagement in fisheries trade is also shaped by broader historical and geographical contexts of migration and land use change. Access dynamics unfold at multiple inter‐related scales to heavily influence the differentiated social outcomes of expanded fisheries trade.     

CULTURAL VALUES OF WETLANDS IN BIODIVERSITY CONSERVATION IN NEPAL

Traditional culture bears a dynamic,cosmologi-cal vision in the wetland ecology and its biodiversityconservation in Nepal.The role of culture and rela-tionship in wetland biodiversity protection and wiseuse has not well been documented yet.Wetlands likeri…     

Health Seeking Behavior: Q‐Structures of Rural and Urban Women in India with Sexually Transmitted Diseases and Reproductive Tract Infections

I use a gender framework to examine why women need to utilize social networks to discover and resolve problems related to reproductive tract infections (RTI) and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). In India, women's health is linked with social status and perception of their health needs. This paper provides insight on how social networks are gender‐, location‐, and context‐specific and how they are linked to STD issues. This paper examines why social networks are integral to women. The health‐seeking behavior of rural and urban casual sex workers is examined via Q‐analysis, a language of mapping relationships. Results from Q‐analysis reveal women's use of four systems—kinship, belief, traditional medical, and western medical services. Finally, I conclude with important implications for research on gender relations and social networks.     

地貌学的基本范式及其在教学科研中的作用

自吉尔伯特和戴维斯的时代开始,地貌学的研究即已遵从理论优先的观察背负模式。从以描述为主的侵蚀循环学说、强调定量分析的地表过程、水力几何学到目前系统地貌学的研究,此中充盈着大量的范式、原理和基本概念,它们是地貌学作为一门科学存在和发展的理论基础。在课堂教学与课程发展层面上,从地貌学史的角度注重对基本范式的归纳和讲授,是培养与激发学生学习兴趣和专业素养的主要途径。通过对经典文献的研读,学生可以从中直接学习到详尽地描述和思辨方法,同时还会意识到对地貌学思想的传承和理论的接受应该批判地进行。在学科建设和科学研究方面,基于范式研究是利用共同的学术语言融入国际地貌学界的前提,凝练学科整体关心的科学问题,开展有组织持续有效的基础理论研究,是复兴国内地貌学的最佳途径。     

Policy Contestation over the Ecosystem Services Approach in Sweden

Ecosystem services (ES) is an important approach to biodiversity protection in political rhetoric and policy practice, but it is also highly contested. This paper analyzes the introduction of ES in Swedish environmental policy and how it is contested by key stakeholders and discusses its implications for biodiversity governance. The results show that although ES is widely accepted on an abstract and conceptual level, critical features and functions are highly contested. These primarily concern the valuation of nature, appropriateness of different policy instruments, and institutional structures. The paper concludes that while the controversy surrounding ES fills an important role by reinvigorating debate and stimulating reflections on biodiversity loss, it also illustrates how ES is used to further particular values and beliefs and to challenge traditional biodiversity-protecting strategies. Understanding these policy controversies is central to addressing the challenges of transforming the promises of ES into practical policies.     

Scalar thickening: Wildlife management areas and conservation scales in southeast Tanzania

The debate on scale in geography has yielded nuanced concepts that have enhanced scale analysis and methodologies for scale‐related research. Despite this advancement, questions still linger on the value of scale as a geographical vocabulary, partly because scalar analyses remain predicated on hierarchies, which have limited explanatory power. In this paper we draw on insight from political ecology to affirm and expand on the usefulness of scale for geographical inquiry and for engaging with contemporary people–environment relations. In particular, the paper appreciates that ecology is at the core of methodological questions pertaining to the explanation of these relations and is increasingly involved in the construction of biodiversity discourses and strategies that rely heavily on conceptions of, and pronouncements on, scale. We use the concept of scalar thickness as a way of thinking about how spaces of conservation are organized and the propensity of scales to coalesce at various stages of scale‐producing processes. We argue that wildlife management areas in Tanzania have played a pivotal role in the thickening of the micro scale in the southeast region. These areas constitute the scale at and though which global conservation agendas are implemented and natural resource rights and benefits are contested.     

景观生态结构与生物多样性保护

论述了景观结构及干扰对生物多样性的影响,景观结构主要考虑斑块大小,形状,边缘,廊道这些景观要素,干扰主要指人类干扰;阐明了这些要素对生物多样性的影响及在生物多样性保护中的意义。为指导保护区设计、物种管理及土地开发提供科学依据。     

The state and its agencies in coastal resources management: The political ecology of fisheries management in Pattani, southern Thailand

Various stakeholders contribute to the current state of resource management in the inshore fisheries of Pattani, southern Thailand. Taking the state, empowered by national legislation, as the main agent of enforcement, this paper uses an actor-oriented approach derived from political ecology to evaluate how key agents in state agencies at provincial and district levels translate Thai political and legal systems at the local level; more specifically, how cross-scalar institutional linkages and translations affect coastal resources management and the access of village-based, small-scale fishermen to coastal resources. The paper shows that trans-scalar interpretations have created a space of contestation and negotiation in resource governance at the local level that reveals intrastate tensions. Based on extensive fieldwork, the paper demonstrates that access to environmental resources at the local level is highly influenced or regulated by the unequal power relations between different actors at various levels.     

Reliving off The Swamp: A Cajun Tourism Commodity

The development of ethnic tourism involves a process of community‐ and individual‐level objectification and commodification. To be attractive to outsiders, planners and tourism professionals often present local lifeways as unique and local while and contrasting them to an external globalized world. Using a political economic approach, this paper shows that this process of self‐commodification may give tourism professionals some control over how ethnic cultures are is presented, but does so within the parameters of state oversight and consumers’ desires. A case study of Louisiana Cajun tourism reveals how a specific narrative of swamp subsistence is deployed by individual tour guides and through the tourism planning process. This “heritage ecology” is used to romanticize a Cajun cultural ecology as “living off of the swamp” despite the fact that swamp commodities have almost always been produced for external markets. Similar to past commodities, swamp tourism still involves the production of Cajun‐swamp culture for outside consumers. This type of tourism paradoxically presents the image of a physically and socially disconnected ethnic group by fostering connections with outsiders while in the swamp.     

西北干旱区生态重建与人地系统优化的宏观背景及理论基础

本文在系统分析全球干旱区生态重建与人地系统优化宏观环境的基础上,分析了我国西北干旱区生态环境恶化形势和面临的生态重建机遇及挑战。认为生态威胁已上升为全球最大的安全威胁,生物多样性退化速度惊人,许多物种频频告急,诸多脆弱生态区域先后沦为生态灾难区,国家与地区之间的跨国生态掠夺仍在继续,惊人的生态破坏加剧着生态贫困与经济贫困,生态重建引起国际社会关注,生态安全战略成为全球战略重要组成部分。进而把区域可持续发展理论、恢复生态学理论、社会生态学与地生态学理论作为西北干旱区生态重建与经济可持续发展的理论基础。     

Singled Out: Scaling Violence and Social Groups as Legal Borderwork in U.S. Asylum Law

Through legal interpretation of immigration categories, such as the refugee definition, signatories to the UN Refugee Convention restrict access to political asylum. This paper examines how scalar logics are used in legal interpretation to filter out particular people from national space and control the number legally entitled to enter and remain in the U.S. Scalar logics shape access by requiring asylum seekers to prove they have been ‘singled out’ for persecution and by steering the meaning of the ‘particular social group’ provision of the refugee definition. The restrictive effects of these scalar logics are analyzed in relation to case law involving Central American asylum seekers fleeing gang‐related violence. These cases are often rejected on the basis that the asylum seekers possess identities and experiences exceeding the limited protection offered by asylum. Through analysis of these scalar logics, the paper highlights how interpretations of the refugee definition are an ongoing site of struggle over the scope of asylum protection.     

西方政治生态学的地理学研究进展与启示

随着全球生态环境问题的日益凸显,政治生态学以关注造成环境问题的政治因素为研究内核,成为不同学科共同探索的研究领域。地理学以人地关系为立足点,深化政治生态学研究的空间性和政治性。论文首先通过对西方政治生态学理论脉络进行梳理,发现政治生态学根源于早期环境批判思想、西方马克思主义、后结构主义以及后人类主义理论,并与地理学的发展相辅相成。其次,对近30年西方地理学与政治生态学的相关研究成果进行分析发现,现有的研究议题主要聚焦于生态经济与绿色发展、生态治理与环境保育、生态身份与微观政治及生态客体与能动性4个方面。在此基础上,论文总结了相关研究对中国地理学进行政治生态学研究的借鉴意义,并进一步提出立足中国本土进行政治生态学研究未来需要关注的方向。     

Refugees in the IT Sector: Young Syrians’ Economic Subjectivities and Familial Lives in Jordan

This article explores refugee economic subjectivity in the context of restrictive asylum policies and disrupted transnational family lives. Drawing on fieldwork with young Syrian refugees pursuing IT training in Jordan, I focus on the “coding boot camp,” an emerging educational format in the field of refugee professional training. I thus explore how Syrian youths approach humanitarian policies in which, in the absence of full social and economic rights for refugees, the question of livelihoods is addressed through the paradigms of self‐reliance, creativity, and innovation. Reframing the refugee from a “protected” to a “productive” subject, and offering individual solutions to a structural economic impasse, these policies produce tensions between individual responsibilities and more‐than‐individual relations and identifications—with families, religious identities, and national communities—that remain unresolved. The findings contribute to geographical scholarship on economic subjectivity, familial relations, and the migrant and refugee condition, while shedding light on some of the effects of the encounter between technology‐centred, neoliberal approaches to humanitarianism and restrictive migration regimes in responses to the Syrian displacement.     

LINEAR MODELLING OF GLACIER LENGTH FLUCTUATIONS

In this contribution a linear first‐order differential equation is used to model glacier length fluctuations. This equation has two parameters describing the physical characteristics of a glacier: the climate sensitivity, expressing how the equilibrium glacier length depends on the climatic state, and the response time, indicating how fast a glacier approaches a new equilibrium state after a stepwise change in the climatic forcing. A prerequisite for the application of a linear model to a particular glacier is that length fluctuations over the period of interest are significantly smaller than the average length. The linear model is used to define and illustrate some concepts relevant to the study of glacier fluctuations. It is shown that glaciers are never in equilibrium with climate, and that a constant time lag between forcing and response cannot be expected. Next the linear glacier model is applied to real glaciers, showing how information on response times and a reconstruction of the climatic forcing can be extracted from length records. In the first application, two adjacent glaciers in the Oetztal Alps (Austria) are considered: Hintereisferner and Kesselwandferner. By optimizing the response times with a control method, reconstructed equilibrium‐line histories for these glaciers are almost identical. The corresponding response times are 31 years for Hintereisferner, and only 2.1 years for Kesselwandferner. In the second application, four glacier length records from the Oberengadin (Switzerland) are used to reconstruct equilibrium‐line histories. These appear to be mutually consistent, and the mean rise of the equilibrium line over the period 1894–2007 appears to be 1.4 m yr^?1. An equilibrium‐line history derived from data of a nearby climate station yields about the same trend over this period, but shows significant differences on the decadal time scale.     

The Development of Wildlife Community Conservancies in Kenya: A Preliminary Review

The significance of biodiversity conservation has transformed from a concern for conservation of endangered species and landscapes into an increasingly diverse yet comprehensive set of conservation, social and economic development goals. Community conservancy, a powerful extension of the PA system, has great potential to support biodiversity conservation, poverty eradication and conflict mitigation. Based on its policy environment and development characteristics, Kenya has implemented community conservation practices, and established over 160 conservancies across the country in the past decades. This paper reviews the development and experiences of community conservancies, discusses how they have been implemented in Kenya, and looks at the management paradigm, efficacy and challenges to help better understand the community conservancy approach. The development trajectory and lessons these conservancies have to offer can contribute to the sustainable utilization of natural resources and the enhancement of community wellbeing in Kenya and other countries alike.     

An integrated approach to scaling issues in environmental change study

IntroductionOn the basis of our understanding of ecological principles, we can expect that global changes in climate, atmospheric composition and land use should affect the structure, function, productivity and the sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems[1-3]. It is crucial for scientists to gain capacity to obtain sufficient data and effective understanding of ecosystem behaviors at larger scales, to extent models developed from local experiments to large areas where ground truth data are s…     

Mining History: Mobilizing The Past In Struggles Over Mineral Extraction In Peru

This paper examines how the past is constructed and mobilized within contemporary Peruvian mining politics. Beginning with an exploration of tensions existing within the mining industry's relationship to its history, I analyze how mining proponents have sought to both naturalize today's mining expansion by locating it within a national history of extraction, while also working to break free from certain negative aspects of the industry's past. The paper then examines how the past is remembered and invoked within the context of on‐the‐ground struggles at a large‐scale gold mine in the region of Ancash. I address the contradictory ways in which local history is constructed in these struggles and document how memories of past experiences with mining inform how area residents understand and critique the “new” mining economy. This paper underscores the need to understand the complicated, selective, and often‐contradictory ways in which the past is made present in extractive industry conflicts.     

Geo–ecology and management of sensitive montane landscapes

Montane (alpine) areas are generally of high value for nature conservation. Such environments and the habitats they support are dynamic and often fragile. They are vulnerable to disturbance from a range of human activities and are responsive to climate changes over short and long timescales. Biodiversity and conservation values are closely linked to geological history, geomorphological processes and soils, and it is crucial that management systems are based on understanding these links.
There are many similarities between the Cairngorm Mountains (Scotland), the Giant Mountains (Czech Republic) and Abisko Mountains (Sweden) in terms of geology, geomorphology, ecology, links with biodiversity and high conservation importance. Comparable pressures and management issues involve, to varying degrees, a history of human use and impacts from deforestation, pasturing, grazing, recreation and atmospheric pollution. Landscape change therefore involves a complex interplay between natural and anthropogenic factors. Managing such change requires better understanding of the geo–ecological processes involved and the factors that determine landscape sensitivity. This is illustrated through a simple framework and examples from the three areas. Comparison of landscape sensitivity between similar montane areas, but in different geographic locations and climatic environments, should allow more informed management planning and a precautionary approach in advance of further changes in human activity and from predicted global warming scenarios.     

地理学区域研究与区域历史地理学的取向

地理学的区域研究传统由来已久,后形成了独立的分支学科——区域地理学,经历了古代地志的分区书写、区域差异的描述解释、空间关系的定量分析和社会过程的深度建构4 个阶段的发展过程。区域地理学演进中遭遇的计量革命与理论创新,实质上是对传统区域学派过分强调区域所导致的静止、孤立的研究僵局的打破与修正,是区域地理学不断总结和完善自身的发展之路。区域历史地理学的学科性质、研究范式与研究内容和方法深受区域地理学的影响和启发,并形成了连续的地理剖面复原研究、区域的景观文化生态研究、区位与结构—功能体系研究和分区分类分级的综合研究等多个分支。与西方相比,中国区域历史地理学的研究在研究内容和方法方面显得比较滞后,今后应加强对特定地方的社会、文化及经济空间的深度剖析,进一步深化人地关系理论及研究方法,不断拓展研究思维的深度和广度,争取有更多、更有影响力的区域历史地理研究成果问世。