Narratives and practices of environmental justice

This editorial provides an overview of the roots of environmental justice movement and scholarship. It identifies emerging frontiers of environmental justice research and introduces the contributions of this special issue. Finally, we call for further research on the role of the state in environmental justice struggles and for more participatory methodologies in environmental justice research

Political Ecology of REDD+ in Indonesia

Indonesia’s commitment to reducing land-based greenhouse gas emissions significantly includes the expansion of conservation areas, but these developments are not free of conflicts. This book provides a comprehensive analysis of agrarian conflicts in the context of the implementation of REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and forest carbon offsetting in Indonesia, a country where deforestation is a major issue. The author analyzes new kinds of transnational agrarian conflicts which have strong implications for global environmental justice in the REDD+ pilot province of Jambi on the island of Sumatra. The chapters cover: the rescaling of the governance of forests; privatization of conservation; and the transnational dimensions of agrarian conflicts and peasants’ resistance in the context of REDD+. The book builds on an innovative conceptual approach linking political ecology, politics of scale and theories of power. It fills an important knowledge and research gap by focusing on the socially differentiated impacts of REDD+ and new forest carbon offsetting initiatives in Southeast Asia, providing a multi-scalar perspective. It is aimed at scholars in the areas of political ecology, human geography, climate change mitigation, forest and natural resource management, as well as environmental justice and agrarian studies

Challenging the imperial mode of living by challenging ELSEWHERE: spatial narratives and justice

This article frames imperial lifestyles as a problem of global justice and discusses the spatial logic that engenders the actual discrepancy between this moral standard of equal rights and reality. It claims that the notion of ELSEWHERE, as Brand and Wissen (2022) put it, plays a central role in understanding the conditions that allow this grossly unjust global separation between responsibility and effect to be stable. In doing this, it establishes the concept of communities of justice that determine the boundaries of moral responsibility and analyses the global spatial logic that underlies the course of these boundaries, as they are experienced in everyday life. The Westphalian system of sovereign nation states is its main component but certainly not the only one. Finally, it sheds light on current attempts to challenge this spatial logic as well as their potentials and limitations

Numerical Study of Bottleneck Flow with Varying Corridor Width and Motivation Using a Speed-Based Model

In this study a simple speed-based model is employed to simulate an experiment of pedestrian bottleneck flow. The experiment revealed that the density near the bottleneck is influenced by the motivation of the pedestrians and the corridor width. In narrow corridors, distinct lanes are formed for pedestrians with low motivation. These lanes can disappear when the pedestrians have a high motivation to reach their target. We show that a speed-based model is - despite its relative simplicity- capable to reproduce the observed phenomena to a high degree

Protection of rabbits against enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) using an intimin null mutant

BACKGROUND: Diarrhea and mortality resulting from infections with enteropathogenic Escherichia coli (EPEC) are of major economic importance in the rabbit meat industry. There is a growing need for an effective vaccine to cope with these problems and to reduce the use of antibiotics. EPEC are characterized by an attaching and effacing virulence mechanism. This is partly mediated by the intimate binding between an adhesin, called intimin, and a translocated receptor (Tir) of prokaryote origin. We constructed an intimin deletion mutant of the rabbit EPEC (REPEC) wild-type strain 97/241.6 (bio-/serogroup 3-/O15) and examined its protective capacity. RESULTS: After verifying its complete loss of virulence, we used the attenuated strain in vaccination-challenge experiments in which complete protection against a homologous, but virulent, strain was observed. The attenuated strain was able to persist in the intestinal lumen, where it elicited an immune response against EPEC-related virulence proteins, as was shown using an EspB-specific ELISA. Despite the priming of an immune response and the generation of specific antibodies, the intimin mutant was not able to fully protect rabbits against challenges with REPEC strains of other bio-/serogroups. CONCLUSION: These data indicate that protection against REPEC infections is at least partly bio-/serogroup dependent and a multivalent vaccine may be needed for protection against the full range of REPEC types. Such a combination vaccine may be developed using intimin null mutants, as the latter were clearly shown to be safe and effective against homologous infections

A political ecology of green territorialization: frontier expansion and conservation in the Colombian Amazon

After decades of civil war, the Colombian government has recently declared the Amazon as a model region for green growth and low carbon development. The Amazon Vision programme, launched by the Colombian government in 2016, seeks to contribute to forest conservation, climate mitigation, poverty reduction and peace building. The Amazon Vision fundamentally reframes the Colombian Amazon from a ‘narco frontier’ that needs to be liberated from guerrilla influence, organized crime and peasants destroying forests for coca cultivation, to a net CO2 sink with enormous potential for green growth and poverty reduction. Drawing on historical and empirical qualitative research in Guaviare and complemented by a quantitative land cover classification, this article builds on the concept of ‘green territoriality’ to investigate the extent to which the shift towards conservation affects property rights and the ability of indigenous groups and peasants to access land and natural resources. We illustrate how the reframing of peasants from protagonists of development and frontier expansion to villains, and of indigenous communities from underdeveloped forest dwellers to environmental guardians, has created land conflicts and affected the legitimacy of their respective property rights. In both cases, the Amazon Vision strengthens conservation policies and challenges existing land rights but also creates new windows of opportunity for the land claims of indigenous communities while reinforcing conceptualizations of social differentiation among dwellers of the Amazon

atTRACTive: Semi-automatic white matter tract segmentation using active learning

Accurately identifying white matter tracts in medical images is essential for various applications, including surgery planning and tract-specific analysis. Supervised machine learning models have reached state-of-the-art solving this task automatically. However, these models are primarily trained on healthy subjects and struggle with strong anatomical aberrations, e.g. caused by brain tumors. This limitation makes them unsuitable for tasks such as preoperative planning, wherefore time-consuming and challenging manual delineation of the target tract is typically employed. We propose semi-automatic entropy-based active learning for quick and intuitive segmentation of white matter tracts from whole-brain tractography consisting of millions of streamlines. The method is evaluated on 21 openly available healthy subjects from the Human Connectome Project and an internal dataset of ten neurosurgical cases. With only a few annotations, the proposed approach enables segmenting tracts on tumor cases comparable to healthy subjects (dice=0.71), while the performance of automatic methods, like TractSeg dropped substantially (dice=0.34) in comparison to healthy subjects. The method is implemented as a prototype named atTRACTive in the freely available software MITK Diffusion. Manual experiments on tumor data showed higher efficiency due to lower segmentation times compared to traditional ROI-based segmentation