THE 1996 FARM BILL: IMPLICATIONS FOR FARMERS

Agricultural and Food Policy,

Ghost Towns and Zombie Mines: The Historical Dimensions of Mine Abandonment, Reclamation, and Redevelopment in the Canadian North

In the past two decades a new approach to mining history has emerged to ask, in effect, what happens after the gold rush. Authors such as Richard V. Francaviglia, Ben Marsh, William Wyckoff, and more recently David Robertson have all extended their narratives beyond the demise of mining towns to question what they consider to be the “mining imaginary,” the idea that the historical end-point for mining activity is inevitably community collapse and ecological destruction. They provide valuable case studies where communities have survived past the end of mining, diversifying their economies through industrial activity or the development of tourism. Historical memory often provides a sense of continuity for these communities, as mining heritage landscapes and museums become touchstones of tourist activity, and ecological restoration activities reveal a deep sense of attachment to the mining landscape. For this loosely defined community resilience school of mining history, mining is not an ephemeral economic activity but offers communities a long-term sense of deep intimacy with their history of labour within the local landscape

Joseph Keeling and Ronald Hibbs Interview

Transcript of an oral history interview with Joseph Keeling and Ronald Hibbs by John Ernst on her experiences during the Vietnam War on February 7, 1998

Transparency, Transparency:Comparing the New Lobbying Legislation in Ireland and the UK

his paper analyses the strength of the new laws regulating lobbying in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK). This examination was conducted using the Centre for Public Integrity’s (CPI) ‘Hired Guns’ quantitative method for assessing the stringency of lobbying legislation. These laws were introduced, after years of unfulfilled promises and scandals, in an effort to increase the public’s trust in their representative institutions. We find that the Irish Regulation of Lobbying Act 2015 offers a slightly higher level of transparency than the UK’s Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. Additionally, using the CPI’s index allows our findings to be compared with those from other jurisdictions around the world with lobbying regulations in place

4040C Universal Tester Backup

The 40 Series valve is one of Swagelok\u27s highest volume part families of which 60,000 parts per year shipped are multi-ported. The multiport configuration requires a unique tester to ensure proper assembly and quality of upstream processes. Due to the multiport configuration of these valves no alternate testing option exists, resulting in a high rate of customer disappointments per day should the equipment fail. In addition to the tester\u27s criticality, it has also been ranked as one of Swagelok\u27s most unhealthy assets and is probable to experience extended downtime in the future. This project proposes to design and build a manually actuated test station to maintain the flow of multi-ported 40 series parts in the event of tester downtime

Toxic Legacies, Slow Violence, and Environmental Injustice at Giant Mine, Northwest Territories

For fifty years (1949–99) the now-abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife emitted arsenic air and water pollution into the surrounding environment. Arsenic pollution from Giant Mine had particularly acute health impacts on the nearby Yellowknives Dene First Nation (YKDFN), who were reliant on local lakes, rivers, and streams for their drinking water, in addition to frequent use of local berries, garden produce, and medicine plants. Currently, the Canadian government is undertaking a remediation project at Giant Mine to clean up contaminated soils and tailings on the surface and contain 237,000 tonnes of arsenic dust that are stored underground at the Giant Mine. Using documentary sources and statements of Yellowknives Dene members before various public hearings on the arsenic issue, this paper examines the history of arsenic pollution at Giant Mine as a form of “slow violence,” a concept that reconfigures the arsenic issue not simply as a technical problem, but as a historical agent of colonial dispossession that alienated an Indigenous group from their traditional territory. The long-term storage of arsenic at the former mine site means the effects of this slow violence are not merely historical, but extend to the potentially far distant future

Pollution, Local Activism, and the Politics of Development in the Canadian North

This article addresses the often ignored history of Indigenous responses to environmental pollution. Focusing on resistance to arsenic pollution from Giant Mine in Canada’s Northwest Territories, Sandlos and Keeling explore how Indigenous communities mobilized knowledge around environmental pollution, conducting their own studies when government research minimized or ignored their concerns about the health impacts of pollution, participating in public hearings, and continuing to push for research into the long-term health effects even after the mine closed. The authors show how this resistance to environmental racism is connected to other Indigenous struggles over industrial development and to issues such as land claims, sovereignty, and colonial dispossession

Canine Rabies Ecology in Southern Africa

Understanding the persistence of rabies in multiple canine hosts in southern Africa requires applying the principles of metapopulation biology

Modelling the impact of local reactive school closures on critical care provision during an influenza pandemic

Despite the fact that the 2009 H1N1 pandemic influenza strain was less severe than had been feared, both seasonal epidemics of influenza-like-illness and future influenza pandemics have the potential to place a serious burden on health services. The closure of schools has been postulated as a means of reducing transmission between children and hence reducing the number of cases at the peak of an epidemic; this is supported by the marked reduction in cases during school holidays observed across the world during the 2009 pandemic. However, a national policy of long-duration school closures could have severe economic costs. Reactive short-duration closure of schools in regions where health services are close to capacity offers a potential compromise, but it is unclear over what spatial scale and time frame closures would need to be made to be effective. Here, using detailed geographical information for England, we assess how localized school closures could alleviate the burden on hospital intensive care units (ICUs) that are reaching capacity. We show that, for a range of epidemiologically plausible assumptions, considerable local coordination of school closures is needed to achieve a substantial reduction in the number of hospitals where capacity is exceeded at the peak of the epidemic. The heterogeneity in demand per hospital ICU bed means that even widespread school closures are unlikely to have an impact on whether demand will exceed capacity for many hospitals. These results support the UK decision not to use localized school closures as a control mechanism, but have far wider international public-health implications. The spatial heterogeneities in both population density and hospital capacity that give rise to our results exist in many developed countries, while our model assumptions are sufficiently general to cover a wide range of pathogens. This leads us to believe that when a pandemic has severe implications for ICU capacity, only widespread school closures (with their associated costs and organizational challenges) are sufficient to mitigate the burden on the worst-affected hospitals