Science and Intractable Conflict

Using illustrative examples, this article describes how science and other types of information often are used in an attempt to settle Conflict. Expectations for science to arbitrate differences may be misplaced, however, and such misuse of science can aggravate and exacerbate Conflict. Instead, effective resolution may be facilitated by focusing on facts that matter, acknowledging the value of varied sorts and sources of information, and recognizing scientific uncertainty

Consensual procedures and the role of science in public decision making

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1988.Bibliography: leaves 262-270.by Connie Patricia Ozawa.Ph.D

How Well has Land-Use Planning Worked Under Different Governance Regimes? A Case Study in the Portland, OR-Vancouver, WA Metropolitan Area, USA

We examine land use planning outcomes over a 30-year period in the Portland, OR-Vancouver, WA (USA) metropolitan area. The four-county study region enables comparisons between three Oregon counties subject to Oregon’s 1973 Land Use Act (Senate Bill 100) and Clark County, WA which implemented land use planning under Washington’s 1990 Growth Management Act. We describe county-level historical land uses from the mid-1970s to the mid-2000s, including low-density residential and urban development, both outside and inside of current urban growth boundaries. We use difference-in-differences models to test whether differences in the proportions of developed land resulting from implementation of urban growth boundaries are statistically significant and whether they vary between Oregon and Washington. Our results suggest that land use planning and urban growth boundaries now mandated both in Oregon and Washington portions of the study area have had a measurable and statistically significant effect in containing development and conserving forest and agricultural lands in the Portland-Vancouver metropolitan area. Our results also suggest, however, that these effects differ across the four study-area counties, likely owing in part to differences in counties’ initial levels of development, distinctly different land use planning histories, and how restrictive their urban growth boundaries were drawn

Genetic Variation in the Proximal Promoter of ABC and SLC Superfamilies: Liver and Kidney Specific Expression and Promoter Activity Predict Variation

Membrane transporters play crucial roles in the cellular uptake and efflux of an array of small molecules including nutrients, environmental toxins, and many clinically used drugs. We hypothesized that common genetic variation in the proximal promoter regions of transporter genes contribute to observed variation in drug response. A total of 579 polymorphisms were identified in the proximal promoters (−250 to +50 bp) and flanking 5′ sequence of 107 transporters in the ATP Binding Cassette (ABC) and Solute Carrier (SLC) superfamilies in 272 DNA samples from ethnically diverse populations. Many transporter promoters contained multiple common polymorphisms. Using a sliding window analysis, we observed that, on average, nucleotide diversity (π) was lowest at approximately 300 bp upstream of the transcription start site, suggesting that this region may harbor important functional elements. The proximal promoters of transporters that were highly expressed in the liver had greater nucleotide diversity than those that were highly expressed in the kidney consistent with greater negative selective pressure on the promoters of kidney transporters. Twenty-one promoters were evaluated for activity using reporter assays. Greater nucleotide diversity was observed in promoters with strong activity compared to promoters with weak activity, suggesting that weak promoters are under more negative selective pressure than promoters with high activity. Collectively, these results suggest that the proximal promoter region of membrane transporters is rich in variation and that variants in these regions may play a role in interindividual variation in drug disposition and response

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead

Science in Environmental Conflicts

Science plays a major part in environmental conflict. How that role is defined is determined by the human actors engaged in the conflict and the legal and institutional constructs that structure discourse. This article begins by tracing the authority invested in science to ideological assumptions about scientific methodology. Then, four common roles for science in environmental conflict (discoverer, mechanism of accountability, shield, and toql of persuasion), are described. These roles are increasingly unproductive in resolving environmental conflict, partly due to the misfit between the actual conduct of science and its ideal. This article proposes that a new role, one that is more consistent with a social constructionist view of science, has been crafted as a byproduct of decision-making innovations that prescribe explicit negotiations among representatives of groups engaged in an environmental dispute. As a tool offacilitation, science may be used more constructively to resolve environmental disput

An Evaluation of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s (ODOT) Environmental Streamlining Efforts: A Focus on CETAS

The Oregon Department of Transportation responded to the federal call in the late 1990s to streamline the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by (1) implementing organizational and procedural changes internal to the agency, (2) funding ODOT-dedicated staff positions in state and federal resource agencies, and (3) convening regular meetings with state and federal agencies with NEPA-related regulatory responsibilities. This latter effort evolved into the CETAS (Collaborative Environmental and Transportation Agreement for Streamlining) process that includes a management and a technical team element. This document reports an assessment of the effectiveness of these efforts. Phase I of the study was designed to document the perceptions and behaviors in ODOT employees at the onset of ODOT organizational and procedural changes and to compare the responses to ones obtained from ODOT employees after some passage of time. The time period covered in this section is roughly Fall 2001 to Fall 2003. Phase II of the study was designed to assess the effectiveness of the CETAS process and documents factors that affect project timelines in Oregon state highway projects for pre-CETAS projects. The third section of this document includes an analysis of the CETAS process based on interviews conducted in the spring and summer of 2004

Strengthening Your Community by Tackling Challenges Together: Lessons from the High Desert Partnership

The people of Harney County, Oregon, have a story to tell about healing decades of conflict and coming together to ensure their community survives and thrives. Harney County, located in the southeast corner of the state, is the largest and one of the least populated of Oregon’s counties. It is a place of wide open spaces, with sagebrush deserts, rich wetlands, expansive alkali flats, stark mountains, and stately ponderosa pine forests. The economy relies heavily on the land for farming, ranching, and forestry. Yet the majority of Harney’s land is publicly owned. Historically, that was a recipe for heated disagreements around public land management, private land use, and environmental preservation. A few visionary thinkers in Harney County saw a way around the conflict by bringing community members, government, and environmental groups together to help them discover they had more in common than they had that divided them. What developed was a community-wide commitment to working together to make Harney County better. The High Desert Partnership (HDP) formed to support a wide range of local collaborative projects from managing wetlands to improving opportunities for youth. This guide shares the HDP’s formula for getting things done. Their hope is that other communities that are ready to create a lasting approach to tackling tough issues will benefit from what Harney County has learned

Changes in Riparian Vegetation Buffers in Response to Development in Three Oregon Cities

Riparian vegetation buffer loss was investigated for three cities with contrasting local regulatory controls in urbanizing northwest Oregon. The cities examined were Hillsboro, Oregon City and Portland, all having experienced high rates of population increase in the 1990s. All cities are covered under Oregon’s land use law that provides goals for the protection of open space and natural resources. On the municipality level, regulatory controls in Portland included a system of environmental zoning for riparian area protection, while regulatory controls on development in riparian areas in Hillsboro and Oregon City were less stringent. Digital aerial photographs covering buffer areas within 200 m of all permanent streams for these cities were digitized for the years 1990 and 1997 using criteria including minimum inter-patch distance of 5 m for adjacent classes and minimum patch area of 20 m2. Cover classes were divided into vegetation areas adjacent to stream and total, as well as woody and unmanaged vegetation areas. Banding analysis was performed for these vegetation coverages for several buffer widths out to 100 m from streams. Results for the 1990 to 1997 period showed larger losses for unmanaged adjacent vegetation 100 m from stream for Hillsboro and Oregon City (≥1.5 percent/year) than for Portland (/year). For adjacent tree vegetation within a 100 m buffer width, again Hillsboro and Oregon City had higher rates of loss (\u3e1 percent/year), while Portland lost trees in the 100 m buffer at a lower rate (/ year). Factors explaining these lower rates of riparian buffer loss for Portland may include both a higher amount of riparian area in public ownership and more stringent local regulatory controls on development in riparian buffers. These results also demonstrate that vegetated riparian buffers continue to be lost due to development in growing Oregon municipalities regardless of the level of regulatory protection