Reflections of an Online Geographic Information Systems Course Based on Open Source Software

This SSCORE report summarizes our experience offering an online introductory course on Geographic Information Systems that utilizes available free/libre and open source software (FOSS). Two primary objectives were to (1) reach students in developing countries, and (2) to help move forward the development of an “open content” GIS curriculum as part of the “Open Source Geospatial Foundation” (OSGeo.org) educational effort. Course design, key software (QGIS, GRASS, PostGresql/PostGIS) and online delivery methods are described. Results and factors leading to a low course completion rate and discussed. Contributing factors include: (1) a for-credit versus no-credit decision; and (2) technical issues. Recommendations for others considering online offerings and for the OSGeo educational effort are provided

Toward Dangerous US Unilateralism on Solar Geoengineering

As social scientists, we are concerned about the impact of the National Academies Report on solar geoengineering. It has already set into motion a major, federally coordinated national research program in the United States to develop this dangerous technology. We emphasize that scientists and researchers are not the ones who will be making decisions on deployment, so research and development should not proceed without integrating broader international perspectives. If the US government does not pause to establish effective international governance and public participation before investing more in solar geoengineering, then the NAS report will have–regardless of the intentions of the committee–opened the door for the US to unilaterally shape and advance the global development of solar geoengineering

The Dangers of Mainstreaming Solar Geoengineering:A critique of the National Academies Report

The U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) 2021 report on solar geoengineering research is a political intervention in global climate politics. Although the NASEM report explicitly acknowledges the risks of unilateral research without broad-based public participation and global governance, the report minimizes these concerns by recommending that the U.S. act swiftly to establish a publicly funded national research program. By providing details for how the research program should be designed, the report contradicts its own recommendations for an inclusive and international process. By mainstreaming solar geoengineering, the report risks increasing the likelihood of international conflict and unilateral deployment, and further exacerbates delays in prioritizing other climate actions. Instead of expanding research on global manipulation of the earth’s climate, the United States, like other countries around the world, should commit to multilateral, coordinated efforts to phase out fossil fuels, advance global climate action, and invest in climate justice. © 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

From racialized neocolonial global conservation to an inclusive and regenerative conservation

The recent antiracist movement in the United States and beyond inspired the Sierra Club, one of the oldest and most prestigious global conservation organizations, to distance itself from its founder John Muir’s racist views. In a statement issued in July, 2020, Sierra Club’s Executive Director, Michael Brune, said, “As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”1 However, the legacies and consequences of the racist history of American environmentalism extend far beyond the words and actions of the founding fathers of European and American environmentalism.In this essay, we show that the effects of colonialism and racism are etched in the dominant philosophy, models, and institutional apparatus of global conservation. While some scholars and practitioners have offered significant critiques of the dominant approaches to global conservation, the institutional apparatus that upholds the colonial and racist legacies of conservation continues to hold tight. We show that in recent decades global conservation nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have contributed to further strengthening of this exclusionary and repressive institutional apparatus, especially with the emergence of the phenomenon of “militarized conservation.” Moreover, the arguments about the rights of indigenous peoples and rights-based approaches to conservation are increasingly being appropriated to serve exclusionary protected-area-based approaches to conservation. We suggest that the debates over competing models of conservation demand a newer emphasis on political and institutional reforms, coupled with public accountability of major international conservation NGOs

What is a land grab? Exploring green grabs, conservation, and private protected areas in southern Chile

Discussions of land grabs for various purposes, including environmental ends, have expanded in recent years, yet land grabbing remains inconsistently defined and poorly understood. Our ability to assess the extent to which land grabs are occurring, and to identify the mixture of factors driving land and resource acquisition, is limited. This paper assesses whether a land grab for conservation is happening in southern Chile, and identifies the various driving forces that combine to drive land acquisitions in the region, based on a detailed exploration of the recent massive growth in privately owned protected areas in the region. This paper finds that the various dominant definitions of land grabs each apply only partially to southern Chile, that land grabs for conservation need to be understood as the latest stage in a longer process by which the region's natural resources are incorporated into the Chilean and the global economy, and that green grabs interact in various ways with broader resource grabs, particularly for forestry and hydroelectricity. This case study demonstrates the limitations of some definitions of land grabs, particularly their focus on capitalist accumulation within land grabs, their international nature and their emphasis on legal processes

Estimating resist parameters in optical lithography using the extended Nijboer-Zernike theory

This study presents an experimental method to determine the resist parameters at the origin of a general blurring of a projected aerial image. The resist model includes the effects of diffusion in the horizontal plane and image blur that originates from a stochastic variation of the focus parameter. We restrict ourselves to the important case of linear models, where the effects of resist processing and focus noise are described by a convolution operation. These types of models are also known as diffused aerial image models. The used mathematical framework is the so-called extended Nijboer-Zernike (ENZ) theory, which allows us to obtain analytical results. The experimental procedure to extract the model parameters is demonstrated for several 193-nm resists under various conditions of postexposure baking temperatures and baking times. The advantage of our approach is a clear separation between the optical parameters, such as feature size, projection lens aberrations, and the illuminator setting on one hand, and process parameters introducing blur on the other