Environments Past: Nostalgia in Environmental Policy and Governance

A variety of factors shape environmental policy & governance (EPG) processes, from perceptions of physical ecology and profit motives to social justice and landscape aesthetics concerns. Many scholars have examined the role of values in EPG, and demonstrated that attempts to incorporate (especially) nonmarket values into EPG are loaded with both practical and conceptual challenges. Nevertheless, it is clear that nonmarket values of all types play a crucial role in shaping EPG outcomes. In this paper, we explore the role of nostalgia as a factor in EPG. We examine literatures on environmental values, governance, and affect in light of their relationships to environmental policymaking, first as a means to decide whether or not nostalgia can be rightly described as an ‘environmental value.’ We suggest that, from a philosophical perspective, nostalgia is by itself environmentally neutral, and is not usefully described as a ‘value’. However, as an emotional state that longs to preserve or recover something of the past – whether fading or no longer present – that is fondly remembered, nostalgia does represent a potentially strong ‘motivator’ for EPG decisions. Despite this somewhat ambivalent assessment of nostalgia-as-environmental-value, we argue that nostalgia and nostalgic longing to return to the ‘better’ or ‘cleaner’ environments can lead to potentially significant impacts on ecosystems and landscapes, both positive and negative depending on what it is that people want to preserve or restore. Thus we conclude that we neglect understanding the role of nostalgia in EPG at our peril: first, because preservationist goals have always been an important part of environmental responsibility and second, because many people will be swayed regarding environmental action through a mobilization of nostalgia by political leaders and interest groups alike. We end our article with suggestion of avenues for further empirical investigation

A 3D cellular context for the macromolecular world

We report the outcomes of the discussion initiated at the workshop entitled A 3D Cellular Context for the Macromolecular World and propose how data from emerging three-dimensional (3D) cellular imaging techniques—such as electron tomography, 3D scanning electron microscopy and soft X-ray tomography—should be archived, curated, validated and disseminated, to enable their interpretation and reuse by the biomedical community

Rigorous and thorough bioinformatic analyses of olfactory receptor promoters confirm enrichment of O/E and homeodomain binding sites but reveal no new common motifs

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Mammalian olfactory receptors (ORs) are subject to a remarkable but poorly understood regime of transcriptional regulation, whereby individual olfactory neurons each express only one allele of a single member of the large OR gene family.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We performed a rigorous search for enriched sequence motifs in the largest dataset of OR promoter regions analyzed to date. We combined measures of cross-species conservation with databases of known transcription factor binding sites and <it>ab initio </it>motif-finding algorithms. We found strong enrichment of binding sites for the O/E family of transcription factors and for homeodomain factors, both already known to be involved in the transcriptional control of ORs, but did not identify any novel enriched sequences. We also found that TATA-boxes are present in at least a subset of OR promoters.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>Our rigorous approach provides a template for the analysis of the regulation of large gene families and demonstrates some of the difficulties and pitfalls of such analyses. Although currently available bioinformatics methods cannot detect all transcriptional regulatory elements, our thorough analysis of OR promoters shows that in the case of this gene family, experimental approaches have probably already identified all the binding factors common to large fractions of OR promoters.</p

What's Syria Got to Do With It?: The Rise of Sectarian Violence in Lebanon and the Syrian Civil War

Violence in the Middle East has been increasingly discussed in sectarian terms over the past few years. In Lebanon, academics and experts alike have been quick to cite the rise in sectarian violence plaguing the country as spillover from the civil war in neighboring Syria. In this thesis, I reevaluated this assumption by looking at the role of domestic stability, proxy intervention, and conflict spillover as causes for the rise in sectarian violence in Lebanon. A comparative case study approach is used to divide the country's post-Syrian occupation history into three distinct time periods in order to better isolate each of the three categories of analysis. Through the use of International Crisis Group’s Crisis Watch Database, I quantitatively analyzed the number of violence incidences, the type of violence, the frequency of incidences, and the number of fatalities to determine that violence had indeed increased in frequency and that the nature of the violence had evolved over time. By using this approach, I was able to deduce that the relationship between the rise in violence and conflict spillover is not as clear-cut as many scholars have made it out to be. Instead, the rise in sectarian violence can be attributed to the rise of Hezbollah as a major political player since 2005 and its decision to enter into the Syrian conflict on the side of President Bashar al-Assad

Environments Past: Nostalgia in Environmental Policy and Governance

A variety of factors shape environmental policy & governance (EPG) processes, from perceptions of physical ecology and profit motives to social justice and landscape aesthetics concerns. Many scholars have examined the role of values in EPG, and demonstrated that attempts to incorporate (especially) nonmarket values into EPG are loaded with both practical and conceptual challenges. Nevertheless, it is clear that nonmarket values of all types play a crucial role in shaping EPG outcomes. In this paper, we explore the role of nostalgia as a factor in EPG. We examine literatures on environmental values, governance, and affect in light of their relationships to environmental policymaking, first as a means to decide whether or not nostalgia can be rightly described as an ‘environmental value.’ We suggest that, from a philosophical perspective, nostalgia is by itself environmentally neutral, and is not usefully described as a ‘value’. However, as an emotional state that longs to preserve or recover something of the past – whether fading or no longer present – that is fondly remembered, nostalgia does represent a potentially strong ‘motivator’ for EPG decisions. Despite this somewhat ambivalent assessment of nostalgia-as-environmental-value, we argue that nostalgia and nostalgic longing to return to the ‘better’ or ‘cleaner’ environments can lead to potentially significant impacts on ecosystems and landscapes, both positive and negative depending on what it is that people want to preserve or restore. Thus we conclude that we neglect understanding the role of nostalgia in EPG at our peril: first, because preservationist goals have always been an important part of environmental responsibility and second, because many people will be swayed regarding environmental action through a mobilization of nostalgia by political leaders and interest groups alike. We end our article with suggestion of avenues for further empirical investigation