The morality of attitudes toward nanotechnology: about God, techno-scientific progress, and interfering with nature

Using survey data, we examine public attitudes toward and awareness of nanotechnology in Germany (N = 750). First, it is shown that a majority of the people are still not familiar with nanotechnology. In addition, diffusion of information about nanotechnology thus far mostly seems to reach men and people with a relative higher educational background. Also, pro-science and technology views are positively related with nanotech familiarity. Results further show that a majority of the people have an indifferent, ambiguous, or non-attitude toward nanotechnology. Multinomial logit analyses further reveal that nanotech familiarity is positively related with people’s attitudes. In addition, it is shown that traditional religiosity is unrelated to attitudes and that individual religiosity is weakly related to nanotechnology attitudes. However, moral covariates other than religiosity seem of major importance. In particular, our results show that more negative views on technological and scientific progress as well as more holistic views about the relation between people and the environment increase the likelihood of having a negative attitude toward nanotechnology

Farmers' attitudes and landscape change: evidence from the abandonment of terraced cultivations on Lesvos, Greece

Agricultural landscapes are the product of the interaction of the natural environment of an area and the practices of its farmers. In this paper, farmers' practices are examined in order to describe and understand processes of landscape change in terraced fields on the island of Lesvos, Greece. We examine the changes of the terraced fields of each farmer and the reasons for these changes, practices concerning the maintenance of terraces and how farmers view this landscape change. The concept of farming systems is used to link farmers' practices at the farm level with changes at the landscape level. Data come from research via questionnaires to farmers in order to record their practices, to explore changes in land use and the landscape elements and the reasons behind these changes, and finally to record their opinions on the landscape change that result. Findings indicate that although farm households in the case study areas depend on farming incomes by very different degrees, they employ similar cultivation and landscape management practices. At the same time, "hobby" farm households may be more prone to abandonment of fields and negligence of landscape elements (here terraces)

Networking Our Way to Better Ecosystem Service Provision.

The ecosystem services (EcoS) concept is being used increasingly to attach values to natural systems and the multiple benefits they provide to human societies. Ecosystem processes or functions only become EcoS if they are shown to have social and/or economic value. This should assure an explicit connection between the natural and social sciences, but EcoS approaches have been criticized for retaining little natural science. Preserving the natural, ecological science context within EcoS research is challenging because the multiple disciplines involved have very different traditions and vocabularies (common-language challenge) and span many organizational levels and temporal and spatial scales (scale challenge) that define the relevant interacting entities (interaction challenge). We propose a network-based approach to transcend these discipline challenges and place the natural science context at the heart of EcoS research.The QUINTESSENCE Consortium gratefully acknowledges the support of Départment SPE and Métaprogramme ECOSERV of INRA, and the French ANR projects PEERLESS (ANR-12-AGRO-0006) and AgroBioSE (ANR-13-AGRO-0001).This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Elsevier via http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.12.00

Enlisting Supervised Machine Learning in Mapping Scientific Uncertainty Expressed in Food Risk Analysis

Recently, both sociology of science and policy research have shown increased interest in scientific uncertainty. To contribute to these debates and create an empirical measure of scientific uncertainty, we inductively devised two systems of classification or ontologies to describe scientific uncertainty in a large corpus of food safety risk assessments with the help of machine learning (ML). We ask three questions: (1) Can we use ML to assist with coding complex documents such as food safety risk assessments on a difficult topic like scientific uncertainty? (2) Can we assess using ML the quality of the ontologies we devised? (3) And, finally, does the quality of our ontologies depend on social factors? We found that ML can do surprisingly well in its simplest form identifying complex meanings, and it does not benefit from adding certain types of complexity to the analysis. Our ML experiments show that in one ontology which is a simple typology, against expectations, semantic opposites attract each other and support the taxonomic structure of the other. And finally, we found some evidence that institutional factors do influence how well our taxonomy of uncertainty performs, but its ability to capture meaning does not vary greatly across the time, institutional context, and cultures we investigated

Performing a wine quality market : the GI debates in and around France

Texte intégral avec PowerpointTexte intégral avec PowerpointThe wine market is a pretty paradoxical research object for the economical and marketing studies. In France alone, every year, hundreds of thousands of new brand-differentiated products are marketed. How can so many brands survive to any rationalization process? One could think this situation to be tied to a kind of French paradox, but the number of wine brands is also increasing in all wine producing countries whether “old”, like Spain or “new” as US. The winemarket helps us revise some of our most widely shared hypothesis on the empirical functioning of the markets. Which are the market procedures sustaining the happy encounter between a drinker and a wine? Is it the wine quality? Is it it’s a good product signalisation? Are there social distinctive processes? Is it a general opacity of the market? Is it the good adjustment to the consumers taste?“Wine choice must be grounded on quality” was the clear answer chosen by AOCs1, which continuously, during the whole 20th century, claimed that they conveyed information about the quality of the wines. But this claim never stopped to be challenged and debated. Grounding on the empirical study of the quality wine market, this communication will show how a variety of actors struggled to help for the recognition of the quality of the wines. From this stubborn will an original quality differentiated market shape arose.Indeed, the variety of the judgements about the wines quality deserved several interpretations:quality, and therefore AOCs, was said to be a multi-influenced intrinsic product characteristic or a pure illusion proceeding from psychosocial or economical construction mechanisms.Accusation after accusation, debate after debate, the authors acknowledged as able to define quality changed, such as quality itself and the role devoted to AOCs, and new market organisations appeared. Nevertheless, far from sweeping away the old procedures, the new solutions cohabited with them making the wine market appear today as a complex multilayered sandwich of market procedures that fostered the development of a market of hundred of thousands of wine brands

Des vins sans pesticides?: Une analyse de la prescription à la consommation. Tome 1: synthèse; Tome 2: le bio, un double principe de précaution; Tome 3: L’agriculture raisonnée: Tome 4: les vins de Terroir + annexes, Paris, Rapport du Volet 3 du programme Vins et Pesticides

L’étude menée dans le cadre de ce programme pour but de répondre à la question suivante : « dans quelle mesure le marché peut-il aider la diffusion de pratiques viticoles respectueuses de l’environnement ? »Elle ne s’appuie sur aucune définition a priori du respect de l’environnement. La ou les manières dont on peut le protéger sont un enjeu de l’action collective. Elle dépend du but et des limites que les acteurs fixent à l’action, des définitions qu’ils se donnent. Ce sujet fait controverse, les réponses sont nombreuses. Ce rapport rend compte de façon aussi complète que possible des différentes manières de concevoir la protection de l’environnement et de commercialiser les produits qui en sont issus. Nous n’avons surtout pas cherché à dire à la place des acteurs quelles étaient les bonnes et les mauvaises manières de protéger l’environnement, mais au contraire tenté de rapporter la manière dont eux s’assuraient que leur choix était le bon. Ce sont parfois des décisions appuyées sur des choix intellectuels, parfois économiques, mais souvent également le résultat de tests et d’expérimentations. Et ce rapport rend compte de façon aussi complète que possible des différentes manières de concevoir la protection de l’environnement et de commercialiser les produits qui en sont issus.Ensuite, elle s’appuie sur plus de 200 entretiens et 270 personnes interrogées dans deux régions viticoles aux situations assez différenciées, le Languedoc-Roussillon et les Pays de la Loire. Ces personnes ont été sélectionnées de manière à représenter l’ensemble des acteurs engagés d’une manière ou d’une autre dans la commercialisation de produits associés à des pratiques respectueuses de l’environnement. Nous avons identifié 3 « lieux » ou organisations commerciales mettant en jeu des questions de qualification environnementales : le bio, l’agriculture raisonnée, et les vins « de qualité ». La description de chacune de ces situations fait ressortir dans le détail la structure de son organisation de marché et analyse la manière dont les interactions marchandes peuvent aider ou faciliter ou non une diffusion des pratiques respectueuses de l’environnement

Assessing the sustainability of activity systems to support households' farming projects

Partie 2 "Multiple aspects to develop methodologies for sustainability assessment of farming systems"This chapter aims to introduce the setting up of an evaluation tool assessing the sustainability of activity systems and supporting farming households' projects at the establishment stage. This chapter analyses three methods used to appreciate the farm sustainability and identifies not only their limits but also their contributions to our own methodology, at the level of complex activity systems in which farming production is combined with transformation, sales or outside activities. We propose to recognise two different contributions to sustainable agriculture: a farm-focused sustainability and an extended sustainability, which means a contribution to the sustainable development at a regional scale. These theoretical elements were regularly confronted with the analysis of advisors' practices and comprehensive surveys with households in Southern France, where an analysis was carried through a partnership with researchers and local actors. It produced a tool to appraise agricultural projects, with pluriactivity or without, distinguishing farm-focused and extended sustainability