THE EFFECT OF FEEDGRAIN PROGRAM PARTICIPATION ON CHEMICAL USE

Economic incentives created by the commodity programs are hypothesized to cause program participants to apply agrichemicals at greater rates than nonparticipants. Corn producers who participate in the USDA feedgrain program are shown to apply nitrogen, herbicides, and insecticides at statistically greater rates than those who do not participate.Crop Production/Industries,

K/T boundary stratigraphy: Evidence for multiple impacts and a possible comet stream

A critical set of observations bearing on the K/T boundary events were obtained from several dozen sites in western North America. Thin strata at and adjacent to the K/T boundary are locally preserved in association with coal beds at these sites. The strata were laid down in local shallow basins that were either intermittently flooded or occupied by very shallow ponds. Detailed examination of the stratigraphy at numerous sites led to the recognition of two distinct strata at the boundary. From the time that the two strata were first recognized, E.M. Shoemaker has maintained that they record two impact events. We report some of the evidence that supports this conclusion

Chemical fractionation of siderophile elements in impactites from Australian meteorite craters

The abundance pattern of siderophile elements in terrestrial and lunar impact melt rocks was used extensively to infer the nature of the impacting projectiles. An implicit assumption made is that the siderophile abundance ratios of the projectiles are approximately preserved during mixing of the projectile constituents with the impact melts. As this mixture occurs during flow of strongly shocked materials at high temperatures, however there are grounds for suspecting that the underlying assumption is not always valid. In particular, fractionation of the melted and partly vaporized material of the projectile might be expected because of differences in volatility, solubility in silicate melts, and other characteristics of the constituent elements. Impactites from craters with associated meteorites offer special opportunities to test the assumptions on which projectile identifications are based and to study chemical fractionation that occurred during the impact process

Complexity\u27s Shadow: American Indian Property, Sovereignty, and the Future

This Article offers a new perspective on the challenges of the modern American Indian land tenure system. While some property theorists have renewed focus on isolated aspects of Indian land tenure, including the historic inequities of colonial takings of Indian lands, this Article argues that the complexity of today’s federally imposed reservation property system does much of the same colonizing work that historic Indian land policies—from allotment to removal to termination—did overtly. But now, these inequities are largely overshadowed by the daunting complexity of the whole land tenure structure. This Article introduces a new taxonomy of complexity in American Indian land tenure and explores in particular how the recent trend of hypercategorizing property and sovereignty interests into ever-more granular and interacting jurisdictional variables has exacerbated development and self-governance challenges in Indian country. This structural complexity serves no adequate purpose for Indian landowners or Indian nations and, instead, creates perverse incentives to grow the federal oversight role. Complexity begets complexity, and this has created a self-perpetuating and inefficient cycle of federal control. Stepping back and reviewing Indian land tenure in its entirety—as a whole complex, dynamic, and ultimately adaptable system—allows the introduction of new, and potentially fruitful, management techniques borrowed from social and ecological sciences. Top-down Indian land reforms have consistently intensified complexity’s costs. This Article explores how emphasizing grassroots experimentation and local flexibility instead can create critical space for more radical, reservation-by-reservation transformations of local property systems into the future

Emulsified Property

The typical American Indian reservation is often described as a “checkerboard” of different real property ownership forms. Individual parcels of reservation land may be held in either a special federal Indian trust status or in fee, by either Indian or non-Indian owners. The general jurisdictional framework provides that federal and sometimes tribal law sets the rights and responsibilities of trust owners, while fee owners are subject to a peculiar mix of state and tribal law. Many scholars have analyzed the challenges created by this checkerboard pattern of property and jurisdiction. This Article, however, reveals an even more complicated issue that has thus far not been fully identified in the literature. This Article analyzes for the first time how the modern reservation is not merely a checkerboard of fee and trust parcels situated next to each other. Rather, significant numbers of reservation lands are now jointly owned by co-owners who hold undivided interests in the same property in different tenure forms. Thus, many individual tracts of land now contain a mix of trust and fee co-ownership interests in the same physical resource. These “emulsified” properties are made up of theoretically undivided co-ownership interests; however, the fee and trust co-owners have very different rights to the same property. There is neither a single overarching set of legal rules that applies equally to all interests in emulsified properties nor any single dispute resolution tribunal through which all co-owners can reliably negotiate a fair and efficient use of the resource. This Article explores for the first time how these emulsified properties are created and analyzes the unique obstacles they create for landowners and for reservation governance. While others have argued for a refocus on tribal property regimes in order to support tribal sovereignty more generally, this emulsified property problem tips the scales and makes more robust tribal property systems, with clear tribal authority to govern all interests in emulsified properties, a critical next step