Honors Interdisciplinary Seminar Syllabus (Letters & Natural Sciences/Math)

This syllabus outline is for an interdisciplinary, upper-division Honors course to be taught in Spring 2021. The team-taught course will include two Reacting to the Past games: (1) Building the Italian Renaissance: Brunelleschi\u27s Dome & the Florence Cathedral and (2) The Trial of Galileo: Aristotelianism, the New Cosmology, and the Catholic Church, 1616-1633. The course will culminate with the design, development and enactment of a student-created Reacting game. An detailed list of student learning out is included

Adaptive Management in the Courts

Adaptive management has become the tonic of natural resources policy. With its core idea of “learning while doing,” adaptive management has infused the natural resources policy world to the point of ubiquity, surfacing in everything from mundane agency permits to grand presidential proclamations. Indeed, it is no exaggeration to suggest that these days adaptive management is natural resources policy. But is it working? Does appending “adaptive” in front of “management” somehow make natural resources policy, which has always been about balancing competing claims to nature’s bounty, something more and better? Many legal and policy scholars have asked that question, with mixed reviews. Their evaluations, however, have rested on theory, program-specific surveys, and isolated case studies. This article provides the first comprehensive review of adaptive management from the perspective that likely matters most to the natural resource agencies practicing adaptive management - how is it faring in the courts? Part I of the Article examines the theory, policy, and practice of adaptive management, focusing on the experience of the federal resource management agencies. The end product in practice is something we call “a m-lite,” a watered down version of the theory that resembles ad hoc contingency planning more than it does planned “learning while doing.” This gap between theory and practice leads to profound disparities between how agencies justify decisions and how adaptive management in practice arrives at the courthouse doorsteps. In Part II we review how these disparities have played out in courts considering claims that agency practice of adaptive management has not lived up to its theoretical promise or to the legal demands of substantive and procedural environmental law. We extract three key themes from the body of case law in this respect. Part III extends from the existing case law to draw lessons for agencies and Congress about the future practice of adaptive management. Our ultimate message to agencies is that a m-lite can be an effective decision method - and one that survives judicial scrutiny - but agencies must be more disciplined about its design and implementation. This includes resisting the temptation to employ adaptive management to dodge burdensome procedural requirements, substantive management criteria, and contentious stakeholder participation. If faithfully followed and enforced, this model, despite its flaws, could serve as an important component of natural resources policy to confront problems of the future as daunting as climate change

Collaborative Governance Under the Endangered Species Act: An Empirical Analysis of Protective Regulations

Recent conservation and administrative law scholarship emphasizes the need for potential legal adversaries to work together. Stakeholders and regulators can pool their political capital, money, property, expertise, and legal leverage to achieve more than could be accomplished through mere mechanical implementation of statutory commands. Most commentators associate collaboration with programs promoting fuzzy objectives to engage the public and advisory groups. The Endangered Species Act (ESA) is a polarizing statute that imposes seemingly uncompromising mandates. But this Article demonstrates that the ESA actually provides rich opportunities for collaborative governance. In exploring this underappreciated success story, we document how conservation collaboration adapts otherwise strict, generic prohibitions to the recovery needs of individual species on the brink of extinction. We identify conditions under which collaboration arises. This Article examines the nearly two hundred ESA protective regulations that tailor federal restrictions to the ecological and social circumstances of particular extinction threats. Our original empirical study explores how the rules manifest collaborative governance, as well as the extent to which they foster imperiled species recovery. We focus on provisions in which parties agree to constrain activities in exchange for limited statutory liability. Almost threequarters of the protective regulations substitute practice-based limitations for difficult-to-detect, proximate-effect prohibitions. Our results show that collaborative governance transforms the ESA from a statute prohibiting certain outcomes (such as harm or jeopardy to a species) to a regulatory program implementing collaboratively crafted best practices, along the lines of pollution-control statutes. Paradoxically, this shift may improve the prospect for species recovery, even with regulations that are less stringent than the standard statutory prohibitions. This insight allows us to recommend mechanisms for constructing better regulations and suggest avenues for future research

Toward an ecological aesthetics: music as emergence

In this article we intend to suggest some ecological based principles to support the possibility of develop an ecological aesthetics. We consider that an ecological aesthetics is founded in concepts as “direct perception”, “acquisition of affordances and invariants”, “embodied embedded perception” and so on. Here we will purpose that can be possible explain especially soundscape music perception in terms of direct perception, working with perception of first hand (in a Gibsonian sense). We will present notions as embedded sound, detection of sonic affordances and invariants, and at the end we purpose an experience with perception/action paradigm to make soundscape music as emergence of a self-organized system