One Engineer and a Dog: Technological Change and Social Restructuring in Alabama\u27s Pulp and Paper Industry

We apply a commodity systems analysis to examine a series of changes that are transforming Alabama\u27s pulp and paper industry. Alabama is a critical area for investigation because it lies at the heart of North America\u27s principle pulp and paper production zone. Industry restructuring is a complex process involving the reorganization of capital and corporate ownership, as well as changes in technologies, which affect the labor process. For example, a recent spate of corporate mergers has resulted in concentration of mill ownership and has accelerated the prevalence of sub-contracting. Indeed, the expansion of sub-contracting into new realms raises the fundamental question of what constitutes a core activity in this capital-intensive industry. The consolidation process has not proceeded in a unidirectional manner, however. For example, some corporations have expanded investments in forest land, while other firms have actively sought to divest themselves of direct ownership of such land, freeing capital for investment elsewhere. Placing Alabama mills in a broader regional context, we examine a set of environmental and economic pressures within the commodity system that have led to these changes

What are we Managing Anyway?: The Need for an Interdisciplinary Approach to Managing Fisheries Ecosystems

Fisheries managers should really be attempting to manage the fishing fleets and the processing industry, not the fish. Consequently we argue that effective management ought to take an eco-systems approach that is necessarily interdisciplinary, incorporating both natural and social sciences. We ascribe the inadequate results of existing management regimes to scientific uncertainty, political pressures, the regulations\u27 lack of legitimacy among fishers, and excessive reliance on individual fishers (rather than households and communities) as the unit of analysis. In a new interdisciplinary approach, we emphasize the contribution of social science in helping to understand what is defined as Scientific knowledge, how expert scientific and local or traditional knowledge might be integrated, and the role of science in the management process. We conclude by advocating an ecosystem management strategy of periodic (every three to five years) in-depth assessments with explicit requirements for sociological and economic input

Power and the Production of Science. Assessing Cod Stocks as the Mechanistic Fishery Collapses

This paper discusses power relations in the production of knowledge claims and the validation of management strategies. The experience of doing stock assessment science and creating management plans for Canada’s east coast cod fishery illustrates this general process. We demonstrate that the cyborgization of fisheries-management is limited by its inability to produce power for stabilizing the relations between managers, fishers, technology and fish. Lack of stability forces scientists and managers either to ignore a threat or to intervene by changing their strategy. Consensus is unlikely. Scientists and managers must reconsider reasons for action or lack of it, thus producing a new rationality. Managers attempt to control that reconstruction process in the interests of resolving shortterm challenges. Some scientists resist change and protect their earlier positions against new evidence or re-interpretations. The winning rationality has more to do with the power of the claimant than with the quality of reasoning

Mesoscale eddies release pelagic sharks from thermal constraints to foraging in the ocean twilight zone

Author Posting. © National Academy of Sciences, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of National Academy of Sciences for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (35), (2019): 17187-17192, doi:10.1073/pnas.1903067116.Mesoscale eddies are critical components of the ocean’s “internal weather” system. Mixing and stirring by eddies exerts significant control on biogeochemical fluxes in the open ocean, and eddies may trap distinctive plankton communities that remain coherent for months and can be transported hundreds to thousands of kilometers. Debate regarding how and why predators use fronts and eddies, for example as a migratory cue, enhanced forage opportunities, or preferred thermal habitat, has been ongoing since the 1950s. The influence of eddies on the behavior of large pelagic fishes, however, remains largely unexplored. Here, we reconstruct movements of a pelagic predator, the blue shark (Prionace glauca), in the Gulf Stream region using electronic tags, earth-observing satellites, and data-assimilating ocean forecasting models. Based on >2,000 tracking days and nearly 500,000 high-resolution time series measurements collected by 15 instrumented individuals, we show that blue sharks seek out the interiors of anticyclonic eddies where they dive deep while foraging. Our observations counter the existing paradigm that anticyclonic eddies are unproductive ocean “deserts” and suggest anomalously warm temperatures in these features connect surface-oriented predators to the most abundant fish community on the planet in the mesopelagic. These results also shed light on the ecosystem services provided by mesopelagic prey. Careful consideration will be needed before biomass extraction from the ocean twilight zone to avoid interrupting a key link between planktonic production and top predators. Moreover, robust associations between targeted fish species and oceanographic features increase the prospects for effective dynamic ocean management.We thank D. McGillicuddy, G. Lawson, and G. Flierl for helpful discussions while developing this work and 2 anonymous reviewers whose feedback significantly improved the manuscript. We also thank C. Fischer and the OCEARCH team for their support of this research. This work was funded by awards to C.D.B. from the Martin Family Society of Fellows for Sustainability Fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; the Grassle Fellowship and Ocean Venture Fund at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; and the National Aeronatics and Space Administration (NASA) Earth and Space Science Fellowship. C.D.B. and P.G. acknowledge support from the NASA New Investigator Program Award 80NSSC18K0757, and P.G. acknowledges support from NSF Award OCE-1558809. This research is partially supported by funding to S.R.T. as part of the Audacious Project, a collaborative endeavor, housed at TED. We thank donors to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) ProjectWHOI crowdfunding campaign: The Secret Lives of Sharks. Computational support was provided by the Amazon Web Services Cloud Credits for Research program. Funding for the development of HYCOM has been provided by the National Ocean Partnership Program and the Office of Naval Research.2020-02-0

Globalization, Fisheries and Recovery

This project looks at fisheries and fishing-dependent communities of western Newfoundland in the context of broader regional and globalization processes, especially those affecting labour markets and markets for fish products. We hope to answer several inter-related questions: 1) How is the fishing industry functioning in the post-moratorium period and what are its future prospects? 2) How can we best understand the current situation of, and prospects for, communities that have been dependent on the fishery? 3) How have they adjusted to the collapse of the groundfish fisheries? 4) What new opportunities are being pursued and what challenges exist, particularly in terms of labour and markets? In the course of our research, we also found evidence of social and cultural change in these communities, which we will take into account as we address the core questions