Policy and law: the case of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer

Agriculture occupies more than a third of the world’s land with many, large-scale impacts on the environment and human health. This article investigates the failure of policy to manage these impacts, asks whether private law can fill the gap, and what this means for policymakers. The investigation takes the form of a case study of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (SNF) in English policy and law. The SNF industry has been chosen because, by its own account, it underpins the modern food system, which is recognized as needing urgent transformation. The article first assesses the damage caused by SNF to health and the environment and the potential legal remedies. It then assesses industry claims that SNF (a) provides food security, (b) is beneficial to soil and water, and (c) reduces greenhouse gas emissions. If misleading, these representations could amount to unlawful ‘greenwashing’. While private law can never replace good policy and regulation, the article concludes that there is evidence to enable private law to supplement policy, and that this role is made possible as well as necessary by the absence of effective regulation and enforcement. Private litigation could catalyze policymakers to implement the robust regulatory regime that agriculture demands. As the law must focus on scientific evidence and causation, it can also help elucidate and publicize the science on which policy is based. Finally, because of the strict constraints within which private litigation must operate, it can direct policymakers towards strategic interventions (or tipping points) that could catalyze systemic change

The Paradox Test in Climate Litigation

The common law and natural law traditions have both sought authority in ‘reason’ and the ‘laws of nature’. Pollock applied this logic in explaining judicial development of negligence: the application of reason to emerging science and technology. The equivalent today is a growing body of scientific evidence that humans are destroying their own habitat through climate change, biodiversity destruction and pollution. Humanity depends on its habitat for survival and therefore each step in this direction increases the risk of its extinction. The courts are already being asked to declare as unlawful governmental decisions that breach human rights and statutory or constitutional protection of the environment. This perspective article proposes that when presented with scientific evidence of habitat destruction in judicial review cases, the courts could examine whether a decision is unlawful and/or irrational. This ‘Paradox Test’ would ask: (1) will the decision contribute to the destruction of the human habitat and (2) if so, is it justified on the ground of necessity? It is proposed that a decision that failed such a test would be unlawful and irrational as contrary to what is arguably the most fundamental law of nature: species survival. The essay defines the Paradox Test, sets it in an historical context and positions it as implicitly inside the boundaries of current English doctrine of judicial review, where it would need to be judicially recognized. Consequently, practitioners are invited to apply the test in court and to share their experience

How academic entrepreneurs can bridge the gaps in the green economy

In a brief Q&A, Adam Parr says that instead of focusing only on content, they should think about process - how they are going to build an enterpris

Active inference, stressors, and psychological trauma: A neuroethological model of (mal)adaptive explore-exploit dynamics in ecological context

This paper offers a formal account of emotional inference and stress-related behaviour, using the notion of active inference. We formulate responses to stressful scenarios in terms of Bayesian belief-updating and subsequent policy selection; namely, planning as (active) inference. Using a minimal model of how creatures or subjects account for their sensations (and subsequent action), we deconstruct the sequences of belief updating and behaviour that underwrite stress-related responses – and simulate the aberrant responses of the sort seen in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Crucially, the model used for belief-updating generates predictions in multiple (exteroceptive, proprioceptive and interoceptive) modalities, to provide an integrated account of evidence accumulation and multimodal integration that has consequences for both motor and autonomic responses. The ensuing phenomenology speaks to many constructs in the ecological and clinical literature on stress, which we unpack with reference to simulated inference processes and accompanying neuronal responses. A key insight afforded by this formal approach rests on the trade-off between the epistemic affordance of certain cues (that resolve uncertainty about states of affairs in the environment) and the consequences of epistemic foraging (that may be in conflict with the instrumental or pragmatic value of ‘fleeing’ or ‘freezing’). Starting from first principles, we show how this trade-off is nuanced by prior (subpersonal) beliefs about the outcomes of behaviour – beliefs that, when held with unduly high precision, can lead to (Bayes optimal) responses that closely resemble PTSD

HARMLESS DISCRIMINATION

ABSTRACTIn Born Free and Equal: A Philosophical Inquiry into the Nature of Discrimination, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen defends the harm-based account of the wrongness of discrimination, which explains the wrongness of discrimination with reference to the harmfulness of discriminatory acts. Against this view, we offer two objections. The conditions objection states that the harm-based account implausibly fails to recognize that harmless discrimination can be wrong. The explanation objection states that the harm-based account fails adequately to identify all of the wrong-making properties of discriminatory acts. We argue that the structure of a satisfactory view cannot be outcome-focused. A more promising family of views focuses on the deliberation of the discriminator and in particular on the reasons that motivate or fail to motivate her action.</jats:p

The accuracy of intramedullary femoral alignment in total knee replacement in the prescence of ipsilateral hip replacement

Objectives: During total knee replacement (TKR) surgery, the most commonly used method for aligning the distal femur appropriately is via an intramedullary (IM) distal femoral alignment rod. The alignment of the rod itself is reliant on the isthmus which is used to most accurately place the rod in the correct anatomical axis. In the instance of something preventing the rod from entering the isthmus correctly, such as a hip replacement, then the degree of accuracy could be assumed to be even less. Mechanical-anatomical malalignment has been shown to decrease the implant (TKR) survival and so methods of increasing accuracy of alignment relative to the mechanical axis have been developed. At present the most accurate method intraoperatively is computer navigation and several studies have demonstrated improved alignment. An increasing number of patients year on year are having both knee and hip replacements and as the population ages the likelihood of having both a knee and hip replacement will also increase. We propose that the presence of a hip replacement within the isthmus of the femur may further decrease the accuracy of the IM alignment of the femur leading to incorrect implant positioning. Methods: The study was conducted on 10 cadaveric specimens (20 femurs). Computational navigation instrumentation was attached in turn to each femur and the ideal alignment data recorded in a standard fashion by a single operator (principal investigator). A standard entry port was then be made in the femur for the introduction of the IM rod. An IM rod was then inserted with the distal femoral cutting block in the accepted position recorded blindly on the computer navigation (both in terms of varus/valgus alignment to the mechanical axis and the degree of flexion). The process was then repeated at 3 levels to represent primary and revision hip lengths from the greater trochanter (replicating the changes that would occur in the presence of a hip replacement) The process was recorded three times at each level. Results: The resection angles between the cutting surface and the mechanical axis were measured and collected by means of computer navigation system. The results show that the IM alignment had mean Valgus of 0 degrees +/- 0.8 but with a hip replacement in situ this increased to 0.46 degrees +/- 1.49 (range 2.5 varus to 4.5 valgus), with a revision stem 0.825 +/- 1.68 (range 2.5 varus to 4.5 valgus)and long stemmed revision 1.325 +/- 2.09 (range 5 varus to 6.5 valgus). In terms of Flexion IM alignment had a mean flexion of 0.92 +/- 1.7 (range 3 extension to 4 flexion) but with a hip replacement in situ this increased to 1.88 degrees +/- 2.03 (range 2.5 extension to 8.5 flexion), with a revision stem 2.35 +/- 2.2 (range 2.5 extension to 8 flexion) and long stemmed revision 2.75 +/- 2.16(range 3.5 extension to 7 flexion). Conclusion: This Study concludes that the prescence of a hip replacement, in particular long stemmed prosthesis, further reduces the accuracy of IM alignment in the Femur for Total Knee Replacement. Consideration of an alternative method, such as navigation, should be considered insuch situations

An Analysis of Federal Policy on Public Access to Scientific Research Data

The 2013 Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) Memo on federally-funded research directed agencies with research and development budgets above $100 million to develop and release plans to increase and broaden access to research results, both published literature and data. The agency responses have generated discussion and interest but are yet to be analyzed and compared. In this paper, we examine how 19 federal agencies responded to the memo, written by John Holdren, on issues of scientific data and the extent of their compliance to the directives outlined in the memo. We present a varied picture of the readiness of federal science agencies to comply with the memo through a comparative analysis and close reading of the contents of these responses. While some agencies, particularly those with a long history of supporting and conducting science, scored well, other responses indicate that some agencies have only taken a few steps towards implementing policies that comply with the memo. These results are of interest to the data curation community as they reveal how different agencies across the federal government approach their responsibilities for research data management, and how new policies and requirements might continue to affect scientists and research communities.The authors wish to acknowledge the USDA National Agricultural Library for supporting this work through a Cooperative Agreement

N-representability and stationarity in time-dependent density functional theory

To construct an N-representable time-dependent density-functional theory, a generalization to the time domain of the Levy-Lieb (LL) constrained search algorithm is required. That the action is only stationary in the Dirac-Frenkel variational principle eliminates the possibility of basing the search on the action itself. Instead, we use the norm of the partial functional derivative of the action in the Hilbert space of the wave functions in place of the energy of the LL search. The electron densities entering the formalism are $N$-representable, and the resulting universal action functional has a unique stationary point in the density at that corresponding to the solution of the Schr\"{o}dinger equation. The original Runge-Gross (RG) formulation is subsumed within the new formalism. Concerns in the literature about the meaning of the functional derivatives and the internal consistency of the RG formulation are allayed by clarifying the nature of the functional derivatives entering the formalism.Comment: 9 pages, 0 figures, Phys. Rev. A accepted. Introduction was expanded, subsections reorganized, appendix and new references adde

Agricultural data management and sharing: Best practices and case study

Agricultural data are crucial to many aspects of production, commerce, and research involved in feeding the global community. However, in most agricultural research disciplines standard best practices for data management and publication do not exist. Here we propose a set of best practices in the areas of peer review, minimal dataset development, data repositories, citizen science initiatives, and support for best data management. We illustrate some of these best practices with a case study in dairy agroecosystems research. While many common, and increasingly disparate data management and publication practices are entrenched in agricultural disciplines, opportunities are readily available for promoting and adopting best practices that better enable and enhance data-intensive agricultural research and production

Functional compensation in a savanna scavenger community

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : Data are available from the Zenodo data repository https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8383092 (Walker et al., 2023).SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL : FIGURE S1. Variation in non-ant invertebrate abundances in ant suppression and control plots. FIGURE S2. Poison residue analyses of soil, grass and tree leaves in ant suppression plots.Functional redundancy, the potential for the functional role of one species to be fulfilled by another, is a key determinant of ecosystem viability. Scavenging transfers huge amount of energy through ecosystems and is, therefore, crucial for ecosystem viability and healthy ecosystem functioning. Despite this, relatively few studies have examined functional redundancy in scavenger communities. Moreover, the results of these studies are mixed and confined to a very limited range of habitat types and taxonomic groups. This study attempts to address this knowledge gap by conducting a field experiment in an undisturbed natural environment assessing functional roles and redundancy in vertebrate and invertebrate scavenging communities in a South African savanna. We used a large-scale field experiment to suppress ants in four 1 ha plots in a South African savanna and paired each with a control plot. We distributed three types of small food bait: carbohydrate, protein and seed, across the plots and excluded vertebrates from half the baits using cages. Using this combination of ant suppression and vertebrate exclusion, allowed us explore the contribution of non-ant invertebrates, ants and vertebrates in scavenging and also to determine whether either ants or vertebrates were able to compensate for the loss of one another. In this study, we found the invertebrate community carried out a larger proportion of overall scavenging services than vertebrates. Moreover, although scavenging was reduced when either invertebrates or vertebrates were absent, the presence of invertebrates better mitigated the functional loss of vertebrates than did the presence of vertebrates against the functional loss of invertebrates. There is a commonly held assumption that the functional role of vertebrate scavengers exceeds that of invertebrate scavengers; our results suggest that this is not true for small scavenging resources. Our study highlights the importance of invertebrates for securing healthy ecosystem functioning both now and into the future. We also build upon many previous studies which show that ants can have particularly large effects on ecosystem functioning. Importantly, our study suggests that scavenging in some ecosystems may be partly resilient to changes in the scavenging community, due to the potential for functional compensation by vertebrates and ants.Natural Environment Research Council and Royal Society.http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/janehj2024Zoology and EntomologySDG-15:Life on lan