Out of administrative control: Absentee owners, resident elk and the shifting nature of wildlife management in southwestern Montana

This paper describes the historical roots of an ongoing wildlife management dilemma involving decreasing opportunities for elk management via public hunting on private land in the context of an expanding elk presence on private land in southwest Montana. Our main focus is on the role of private ranchland in elk ecology, and the ability of land owners to set elk migration in new directions through cumulative decisions about hunting and tolerating elk. This takes elk management, traditionally the purview of the state, out of administrative control. We document connections between the region’s historical and emerging land tenure patterns, and analyze associated changes in hunter access. Elk numbers expanded rapidly in the Upper Yellowstone Valley at a moment of significant transition in ranchland tenure. New owners more interested in natural amenities than in livestock production encouraged the elk and discouraged hunting. This reinforced the spread of elk, and further weakened the ability of the state and other ranchers to manage elk (which interfere with livestock production in numerous ways). Though elk and cattle use the landscape in similar ways, elk became more effective agents of landscape change in a reflexive relationship with ideas of land that stress natural amenities over production.     

Constraints to smallholders production of frankincense in Metema district, North-western Ethiopia

Frankincense, an aromatic exudate obtained from several Boswellia species, is an important commodity with the potential to invigorate economic development of the drylands of Ethiopia. Local people have been producing and trading frankincense for centuries to diversify their income sources. However, local people's involvement in the production of frankincense varies considerably among the producing dryland regions of the country. The objectives of this study were to investigate: (i) the potential of frankincense production, (ii) socio-cultural, economic and policy factors affecting the involvement of local people in the production of frankincense, and (iii) the current status of Boswellia woodlands in Metema district, which is one of the major frankincense producing areas in Ethiopia. The results showed that Boswellia papyrifera comprised 51% of the species composition of the vegetation of the district with 253.5 kg/ha/year production potential. The total annual frankincense production potential of the district was estimated to be 79,168 tons. However, almost all inhabitants do not benefit economically from the species due to: (i) cultural influence (67%), (ii) unattractiveness of income from frankincense compared to other economic activities in the area (38%), property tenure (27%), government policy on incense production (20%), poor knowledge on frankincense production (19%) and unawareness of the potential of frankincense as a source of income (5%). The absence of direct economic benefits for the local people from the woodlands is triggering their widespread degradation mostly from human induced fire, improper forest use and agricultural land expansion.     

桂北沸石矿开发应用方向探讨

介绍了桂北天然沸石的资料情况，理化性能和研究开发现状等，从高白度矿物材料，沸石分子筛和高纯度，高活性硅铝酸盐化工作原料等三方面深入探讨了其利用价值，并对其在洗涤剂，农用品，干燥剂等生产中的应用技术进行了初步开发。     

Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end

This article uses the case of anti-eviction politics to examine the urban land question. Following the ideas and practices of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign and its global interconnections, it traces the potentialities and limits of poor people’s movements as they battle displacement and enact a politics of emplacement. In doing so, it seeks to expand existing understandings of dispossession. Drawing on critical race studies and postcolonial theory, the article pays attention to the relationship between property and personhood in the context of long histories of racial exclusion and colonial domination. It asks: what politics of home and land is possible outside the grid of secure possession and sovereign self? The work of the Chicago Anti-Eviction Campaign points to how various modes of collectivism can be asserted through practices of occupation as well as through global frameworks of human rights. Challenging the secure categories of property and personhood through which liberalism is constituted, such politics is attuned to the present history of racial banishment but is also subject to aspirations of resolution and possession.     

Conservation planning in the west, problems, new strategies and entrenched obstacles

The United States is often considered the progenitor of conservation planning in the world, the first to establish a vast public domain, for example. But with continued population growth, conservation planning on private lands—rural and at the urban fringe—continues to be a substantial challenge due to a tradition of local home rule in land use planning and strong private property protection afforded by the US Constitution. New “bottom-up” collaborative approaches, as well as other innovative strategies seem to be emerging. How effective these will be given pressures for growth and high property values remain to be seen without a rethinking of ideas of nature, a rebalancing of the role of property in American local fiscal regimes, and of private property rights.