"Unlike other rich nations such as the US and Australia, Europe has embraced the reality of climate change and is blazing a trail in preparation for what is to come. "

NEW NATURES Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies

"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."

syllabus with many many live links

"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

The original text of Larry Summers' memo on underpolluted countries--"shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]" Summers went on to become treasury secretary under Clinton, Harvard U. president (until he was forced out), and chief economic advisor to Obama.

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.

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

All diagrams simply; many do so in a way that makes it hard to depict the way the situation has developed and the way further influences can move the situation into new places. Some of the diagrams cataloged here, e.g., the force-field diagram, allow for a more dynamic sense of competing influences and possibilities of change.