Re-thinking rural-amenity ecologies for environmental management in the Anthropocene

The migration of lifestyle-orientated landholders (amenity migrants) to rural landscapes is resulting in the production of new rural ecologies. To date, the future implications of these ecologies for environmental management have been framed largely in ‘traditional’ conservation biology terms, focusing on how we can conserve or restore natural environments to a past ecological benchmark. However, the Anthropocene provides an opportunity to critically examine how we can progress environmental management in a way that locates ecologies as emergent products of human–environment interaction through time. We extend from Tim Ingold’s work on wayfaring to position people and plants in environmental management as cohabitants who are traversing a world that is continually in the making. We conducted qualitative research in the hinterlands of Melbourne, Australia, involving narrative interviews with landholders and walking their property with them, using a form of participant observation called the ‘walkabout’ method. We found that the conservation aspirations of amenity migrants were mediated by the landscape histories that were embodied in the plants they engaged with on their property. These embodied landscape histories served to structure the trajectory of ecological emergence in which landholders were a part. We develop the concept of ‘landscape legacy’ to explain how past actions and future aspirations come together in management practice to produce novel and often unanticipated ecologies. Landscape legacy grounds the Anthropocene in everyday environments, capturing the need to progress environmental management as a wild experiment in rural-amenity landscapes, focusing on ecological form, function, relationship and process.     

Social agency and networked spatial relations in sustainable agriculture

Agriculture in the USA is in social and economic crisis, but sustainable agriculture is gaining unprecedented popularity among producers and consumers. This article examines the agency articulated by farmers and activists in the sustainable agriculture community in Pennsylvania to exploit ruptures in the conventional food system and develop new forms of food provisioning in local economies. Actor-network theory offers roads out of structure/agency dialectics and proposes new possibilities for understanding structure as a network, and agency as the outcome of networking. The research shows agency to be an outcome of collectivities, but is also contingent on leadership, partially distributed throughout the network and not necessarily emancipatory for all enrolled actors.     

Hazard and risk assessment for sinkhole formation on dolomite land in South Africa

 A method is proposed to assess the risk for sinkhole formation in dolomitic areas where changes in land use are envisaged. Data from geotechnical site investigations are used for the zoning and characterization of sites in terms of the hazard (maximum size of sinkhole that can form), while the inherent risk for this hazard to occur is assessed by assuming that the site may be developed or treated incorrectly (abused). By considering both the hazard and the inherent risk, it is possible to select appropriate types of development and precautionary measures to reduce the final (development) risk to an acceptable level. Received: 15 September 1996 · Accepted: 12 May 1998     

“Finding their way”: the negotiation of the city by low-skilled service sector migrant workers in Dublin

The city has become the context for a dialectical relationship not only between the global and the local but also between migrants and the host society. Whilst there is considerable work on migrant integration, integration is rarely examined from the perspective of the workplace, or from a geographic perspective, which problematizes the spatiality of migrant workers’ experiences. This article studies migrant workers in low-skilled jobs, with a focus on Temporary Service Sector Providers in catering, cleaning, and security, in order to understand how they negotiate their position in the city and are active agents of this negotiation. The study, based upon a survey of 60 migrants complemented by 20 in-depth interviews, questions how integration should be understood: in particular it suggests that—in some respects—integration may be difficult for all low-wage precarious workers, whether migrants or not. The study also highlights how migrant workers retain agency—the capacity to act, to make decisions, and appropriate certain places—even in challenging circumstances.     

大都市旅行社业空间分布及其演化——以上海市为例

通过对上海市旅行社长期数据的收集与整理,运用GIS 地理空间分析方法,分析大都市旅行社空间分布格局及其演化,探讨旅游产业空间分布及其演化的影响因素。结果显示：上海市旅行社空间分布由初始的“单核心集聚中心,两次级集聚中心,各集聚中心分散”的分布格局,发展到当前的“环形核心集聚区,C 型次级集聚环,各集聚中心连接”的总体空间分布格局。旅行社空间扩张方向上,由市中心不断向西、向西南的扩展趋势更加明显,向东、东北方向扩展较弱。旅行社空间扩张趋势上,向各级商业区、景点景区、人口聚集区等周围不断扩散。旅行社空间集散的总体演化特征呈现出由分散―低集聚―高集聚的演化态势,并且集聚程度不断加强。旅行社产业空间布局及其演化受到城市空间格局、人口分布、区域开发、旅游资源、接待能力、交通等综合作用的影响。     

浅谈地勘单位如何走的困境

本文对地勘单位如何走出困境进行了论述，提出地勘单位必须要“转换经营机制，调整产业结构，强化内部管理，提高经济效益，合理配置人才资源，做到人尽其才”，才会走出困境，迎来经济振兴的春天。     

旅游地演进过程与旅行社营销行为关系的初步研究--以滇西北旅游区为例

旅行社作为联结旅游者与旅游目的地之间的重要纽带,其营销行为不仅直接影响旅游者的旅游行为,对旅游目的地同样具有不可忽视的现实的和潜在的影响力,在相当程度上关系到旅游地产品乃至旅游地的前途命运:旅行社追求利润最大化的市场营销行为以及规避“外部经济”的产品开发行为可直接导致旅游产品的大众化趋势,继而加速旅游地的发展、成熟乃至衰退过程;旅行社特殊的业务功能和行业地位,使其自身拥有旅游开发与促销的影响优势,对旅游市场和旅游目的地均具备可持续发展的诱导力。以滇西北旅游区为例,进行实证分析,指出遵循协作共生原则,实施“联合营销”举措是谋求旅游地持续发展的有效途径。     

Learning and earning: relational scales of children's work

There is an important dissonance in recent studies of children's work between the global efforts to eradicate abusive forms of child labour on the one hand and, on the other hand, local settings where children's work plays an important role in social reproduction, socialization and skill acquisition. This research explores the reasons for this dissonance by eliding both the global perspectives of children's rights and the local realities of children's daily geographies. By closing the gap between global knowledge about children (from above) and children's knowledge and agency in their own environments (from below), we seek to present a relational account of children's work within the context of their daily geographies. We draw on data collected with child workers in Tijuana, Mexico to demonstrate the complex role that children's work often plays in the daily geographies of young people.     

Climate displacement and resettlement: the importance of claims-making ‘from below’

Climate-induced population displacement and resettlement is an ongoing problem around the world, and one that is being exacerbated by climate change. To date, most attempts to address this problem have taken a top-down approach in which international justice, legal and humanitarian frameworks are extended ‘downwards’ by policymakers and governments to local populations. However, there has been limited systematic work that emphasizes the abilities of affected peoples themselves to develop and formulate their own justice-based solutions. This paper presents an analytical framework for thinking about ‘bottom-up’ claims-making that emphasizes naming, blaming, claiming and framing. The framework enables claims-making to be distinguished from other forms of community-based agency, such as adaptation. The paper also suggests a normative framework to support policymakers and practitioners in helping communities facing displacement to make claims. The normative framework focuses on the barriers to, and opportunities for, claims-making ‘from below’.     

Birds as lines: The production of alternative regimes of environmental management in the aftermath of a toxic disaster

This paper analyses how in the aftermath of one of the worst environmental disasters ever to occur in Spain – the Aznalcóllar Disaster – various environmentalist and conservationist groups mobilised migratory birds to bring new insights and the need for new precautions to the controversy elicited by the spill. The case study, thus, revolves around how environmentalists established a “hybrid collective action” to draw attention to unconsidered risks and impacts of the disaster and thereby make the case for open debate. Building upon this, I engage with two different, though interrelated, theoretical debates that contribute to a rethinking of environmental management (EM) as a social and materially situated practice. Drawing on the idea of “tactic” (De Certeau, 1984), I draw attention to the devices, actions and procedures that environmentalists carried out to resist attempts to minimise the spill and to undermine administrations’ assumptions of control, coherence and singularity associated the idea of management. Drawing on Tim Ingold’s latest work (2007, 2008, 2011), I analyse environmentalists’ most successful tactic: the enactment of migratory birds as “lines”. Together with other authors in this special issue, I will use this notion to make an argument against some of the assumptions of the “hybrid ontology”. In contrast to more essentialists and static notions of non-human agency and politics, the idea of line is particularly useful as a way of understanding how nature(s) can be effectuated differently and how this leads to the imagining of new regimes of cohabitation, human and non-human management and intervention.