Group items tagged

Under what conditions do people sharing a common resource develop sustainable ways of cooperating? Vollan and Ostrom (Nobel eonomics prize winner) provide an overview of recent experiments with people involving the forests of Ethiopia. Many different factors affect the outcomes, e.g., group's distance to markets--do not expect a simple counter-picture to Hardin's simple model of the tragedy of the commons. P.S. You can get access to the full text by signing into Science magazine via the UMB library, but here's the summary of the article: Sustainably managing common natural resources, such as fisheries, water, and forests, is essential for our long-term survival. Many analysts have assumed, however, that people will maximize short-term self-benefits-for example, by cutting as much firewood as they can sell-and warned that this behavior will inevitably produce a "tragedy of the commons" (1), such as a stripped forest that no longer produces wood for anyone. But in laboratory simulations of such social dilemmas, the outcome is not always tragedy. Instead, a basic finding is that humans do not universally maximize short-term self-benefits, and can cooperate to produce shared, long-term benefits (2, 3). Similar findings have come from field studies of commonly managed resources (6-7). It has been challenging, however, to directly relate laboratory findings to resource conditions in the field, and identify the conditions that enhance cooperation. On page 961 of this issue, Rustagi et al. (8) help fill this gap. In an innovative study of Ethiopia's Oromo people, they use economic experiments and forest growth data to show that groups that had a higher proportion of "conditional cooperators" were more likely to invest in forest patrols aimed at enforcing firewood collection rules-and had more productive forests. They also show that other factors, including a group's distance to markets and the quality of its leadership, influenced the success of cooperati

The site explains what Endangered Species Day is and when it occurs. There are resources for teachers of all grade levels and resources for other groups including Girl Scouts. Looks like lots of information.

This website offers assistance in teaching children about nature. There are resources listed and curriculum.

"n "the science of success," Charles Koch highlights the problems created when property owners "don't benefit from all the value they create and don't bear the full cost from whatever value they destroy." He is particularly concerned about the "tragedy of the commons," in which shared resources are abused because there's no individual accountability. "The biggest problems in society," he writes, "have occurred in those areas thought to be best controlled in common: the atmosphere, bodies of water, air. . . ." But in the real world, Koch Industries has used its political might to beat back the very market-based mechanisms - including a cap-and-trade market for carbon pollution - needed to create the ownership rights for pollution that Charles says would improve the functioning of capitalism. In fact, it appears the very essence of the Koch business model is to exploit breakdowns in the free market. Koch has profited precisely by dumping billions of pounds of pollutants into our waters and skies - essentially for free. It racks up enormous profits from speculative trades lacking economic value that drive up costs for consumers and create risks for our economy."

This link will allow you to register for a Boston Public Library ecard. This ecard will give you access to all of BPL's electronic resources. It will also allow you to use Google scholar to a greater capacity

The idea arose in the second section that the cycle of soil erosion and restoration in the case from Oaxaca might continue into the future. I was skeptical about future restoration, but this article (from a village 200km away) shows that positive change can happen. It also speaks to the issue of how common resources can get managed.

"Current debates about the integration of traditional and academic ecological knowledge (TEK and AEK) struggle with a dilemma of division and assimilation. On the one hand, the emphasis on differences between traditional and academic perspectives has been criticized as creating an artificial divide that brands TEK as "non-scientific" and contributes to its marginalization. On the other hand, there has been increased concern about inadequate assimilation of Indigenous and other traditional perspectives into scientific practices that disregards the holistic nature and values of TEK. The aim of this article is to develop a practice-based account of the epistemic relations between TEK and AEK that avoids both horns of the dilemma. While relations between TEK and AEK are often described in terms of the "holistic" nature of the former and the "mechanistic" character of the latter, we argue that a simple holism-mechanism divide misrepresents the epistemic resources of both TEK and AEK. Based on the literature on mechanistic explanations in philosophy of science, we argue that holders of TEK are perfectly capable of identifying mechanisms that underlie ecological phenomena while AEK often relies on non-mechanistic strategies of dealing with ecological complexity. Instead of generic characterizations of knowledge systems as either mechanistic or holistic, we propose to approach epistemic relations between knowledge systems by analyzing their (partly mechanistic and partly holistic) heuristics in practice."

Encyclopedia of Earth

I thought this site as a general resource might be helpful to others

SKYTRUTH is a bit like GoogleEarth plus science. It is of interest to me because it has material on gold mines and their impacts on the surrounding environment. In its own words, SKYTRUTH focuses on "our changing environment to stimulate changes in habitat protection, biodiversity conservation, and sustainable resource management."

This website explains force field analysis and helps you create a diagram.

"profiles ten dialogue methods in depth, and another fifteen more briefly. The methods covered conceptually and in case studies include Deep Democracy, Open Space Technology, Scenario Planning, World Café, the Israeli-Palestinian School for Peace and many more."

A resource for anyone wanting to bring diverse stakeholders into discussion and resolution of an environmental issue