Invasion science, ecology and economics : seeking roads not taken

As members of the editorial board of Neobiota who, for various reasons, didn’t get our names on the original editorial (Kühn et al. 2011), we would like to add a coda to it. Even though there were 38 bullet points listing areas in invasion science where more work is needed, we would like to mention additional areas that we hope would be addressed in future issues of Neobiota. Like the other editors, we would like this innovative and exciting new journal to lead the way in all areas of invasion science. As the graphs in Gurevitch et al. (2011) and Kühn et al. (2011) show, the literature on invasions has been increasing almost exponentially since the early 1980s and so we cannot expect any list of areas of interest to stay complete and up to date for very long. Three areas that we would like to stress are the interaction between invasion science and economics and the role that invasion science should play in advancing pure ecology in two areas, population dynamics and ecosystem ecology. Neither ecology nor economics appears as a word in the original bullet list, but many of the topics are obviously ecological while none are obviously economic. For economics, we want to point out its relevance to invasion science and the feedback between the two disciplines, particularly in a rapidly changing world with powerful new emerging economies. For ecology, we want to emphasise not what ecology tells us about invasions but what invasions reveal about ecology and evolution at two scales

Roads not taken

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UMA: Some Roads Not Taken, The

I do not want to overstate my claim. There is nothing in the UMA that precludes conducting a mediated conversation in a manner consistent with what I frame below as a robust vision of the mediator\u27s role. The Act, however, does not provide sustained support for it and, more seriously, appears to license the type of intervener that I believe is inconsistent with basic process goals. Hence, I am conjecturing - though I do not believe it is idle conjecturing - as to how parties, representative, and the mediator shall conduct their mediation conference under the vision of mediation embedded in the Act; it is a vision, I believe, that diminishes rather than promotes mediation\u27s salient values

The Roads Not Taken: Why the Bank of Canada Stayed With Inflation Targeting

Sticking with the status quo was only one option under debate among monetary experts in the lead-up to renewal of the Bank of Canada’s inflation-targeting mandate, which was announced this week. Several other routes were available. Two of them – namely, targeting nominal GDP or targeting full employment – were arguably non-starters. Two other approaches, however, held more promise: (i) moving to a price-level targeting regime, or (ii) sticking with inflation targeting but with a lower, say 1 percent, target. Nevertheless, the renewal of the status quo keeps in place a coherent monetary policy regime that has served Canadians well.Monetary Policy, Canada, Bank of Canada, inflation targeting

Roads Not Taken on Affirmative Action

The law of affirmative action is a mess. In the short term, legal doctrine is constrained by path dependence, but its long-term future is murkier due to the many unforeseen contingencies. To regain a sense of the possible, this Article looks forward to the future of equality jurisprudence by looking backward. It recovers three roads not taken. First, the Supreme Court could have kept expectations minimal by hewing closely to the methods and rhetoric of fairness rather than ratifying a consumerist model of entitlement by deploying an individualistic vision of equality. Second, the justices might have endorsed a robust right to higher education. Doing so would finally tell us about the nature of this social good as well as the scope of judicially enforced access to it. Third, they could have showed consistent respect for universities and colleges as distinctive communities by embracing their collective right to self-expression. Instead of taking any of these roads, the Supreme Court has used the Equal Protection Clause to protect something of uncertain social worth and deepened suspicion of educational institutions. Ultimately, how long this current quandary will remain-aggressive judicial supervision of university admissions and an impoverished conception of higher education as a social good-will depend on whether judges tire of the status quo and the rest of us perceive the real stakes and demand something better

The \u3ci\u3eExxon Valdez\u3c/i\u3e Reopener: Natural Resources Damage Settlements and Roads Not Taken

The 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill caused extensive natural resource damage to the Prince William Sound. Lawsuits addressing this natural resource damage resulted in a settlement that required Exxon to pay $900 million over time to trustees charged with spending this money to restore the damaged environment of the Sound and nearby areas. The settlement included a “Reopener Clause,” which pledges Exxon to spend an additional$100 million to fund restoration or rehabilitation of resources whose injuries were not foreseeable in 1989. This Article urges the State of Alaska and the United States to seek enforcement of the Reopener Clause, to restore natural resources and Native subsistence uses that were not addressed in the initial settlement and have not recovered from the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Alternatively, this Article urges Native entities to intervene in the case and seek enforcement of the Reopener Clause. To date, neither Alaska nor the federal government have requested any of the $100 million Exxon may be required to pay to compensate for additional damages resulting from the oil spill. We offer extended comment on this most famous of all natural resource damage cases. Special attention will be paid to legal roads not taken

Restorative justice without a victim: Rise and the roads not taken

The utility of restorative justice for victimless crimes-specifically, drink driving-was tested as part of the Canberra Re-Integrative Shaming Experiments (RISE), one of the earliest systematic trials of restorative justice. The researchers envisaged two mechanisms whereby restorative justice might lead to reduced reoffending even in the absence of a victim: a victimless variant of reintegrative shaming, and the mobilisation of the offender’s friends and family to exercise informal coercion over the offender. Reviewing the literature on the RISE trials, this paper analyses the reasons for the failure of both these mechanisms to have the desired effect, identifies the ways in which restorative justice would need to change-both as a practice and a philosophy-in order for the two mechanisms to function as anticipated, and considers the implications for contemporary restorative practice