Translating Environmental Science into Policy and Action

Background/Question/Methods: Many ecologists are skilled at identifying environmental problems and defining solutions, but not at achieving concrete action to implement those insights. The question, then, is how to help ecologists translate environmental science into policy and action. Most ecologists' education and training do not prepare them to be effective in the policy arena, much less in ways to achieve action. Ecologists find disincentives in the form of the academic attitude that somehow the application of science is inferior to so-called "pure science." This ivory tower holdover has been largely discredited in the context of environmental issues, and the discipline of conservation biology exists explicitly to foster applications of science, but the attitude remains a potent obstacle, especially for younger ecologists seeking academic acceptance and tenure. Even when ecologists ignore or overcome this obstacle there are few resources available to provide guidance for achieving action. For example, most textbooks that describe the policy process present an academic picture that bears little relationship to the messy real world process. One approach to providing such guidance has been developed in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia. This is a course developed specifically to identify and analyze the basic principles, skills and strategies involved in turning scientific knowledge and information, and the policies derived from them, into action. The course uses a series of actual case histories drawn from experience with local and national U.S. and foreign governments, UN organizations, NGOs and other relevant situations. The approach is to give a case hissory, analyze it and derive from it the principles, strategies and skills that work. The professor describes the setting, background, objective, procedure followed and the result. This is followed by class discussion to analyze the case and identify what lessons can be learned and what specific principles, skills and strategies were responsible for or contributed to the results.

Results/Conclusions: While there are some basic principles that hold true in many situations, no single formula for achieving action can be applied in every case. Each situation is somewhat different and to succeed one has to be able to select from an array of principles and skills to fit them to the special needs. This course is a proven way to provide students with a "tool kit" of principles, skills and strategies to guide them effectively to translate environmental science into policy and action

The World's Conservation Strategy

Rational use and conservation of living resources must be the active concern of all of us, rich and poor alike, if the world is to continue to develop in any reasonable degree of harmony with Nature. Accordingly it is necessary to recognize that industrial—and even some degree of demographic—development is not necessarily incompatible with environmental protection, and indeed that, in the world to come, conservation and development will have to be widely interlinked. Cognizant of this and of the fundamental need to protect and perpetuate living, renewable resources in the face of ever-mounting and demanding human populations, and stressing the imperative of preserving a holistic approach to these problems of Man's and Nature's ‘only one Earth', IUCN, with the support of UNEP and WWF, and the endorsement of some other bodies, launched, early in 1980, after several laborious redraftings, a ‘World Conservation Strategy', in the manner described in the last part of this paper. It sets a policy for all to follow, taking mankind well away from the merely reactionist basis of conservatio

IUCN in Retrospect and Prospect

IUCN is a unique, international but independent, organization which promotes and carries on scientifically-based action for conservation throughout the world. Founded originally for the ‘Protection of Nature', it has evolved greatly in the intervening nearly 35 years in response to current needs, and now occupies a very prominent position in the environmental/conservational movement to withstand ever-increasing human population-pressures through rational use of resources and seeking to assure that development is environmentally soun

National memorial: a bronze statue of John Carver

Truth crushed to earth shall rise again the eternal years of Gd are hers. Many facts relating to Governor John Carver have come to light since we made an address in the Congress of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants at Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1927, when we made the statement, There would have been no Mayflower Pilgrims but for Rev. John Robinson. We now know there would have been no Mayflower Pilgrims but for John Carver, who was the leader of the movement in Holland to come to America. Born in Nottinghamshire, England, about 1576, and spent his early life in business, moving to London about 1603, where he acquired, in trade, what for those days was a considerable fortune. Emigrating to Holland in 1609, he joined the Pilgrims at Leyden, probably in 1610-11. His high character, his stern piety, his maturity (most of them were young men) gave him place at once among the leaders, and soon he was made a deacon of the church; his financial ability enabled him to finance the congregation in part at least, and explains, perhaps, the purchase of the Great House in which his brother-in-law Rev. John Robinson, the pastor lived, and in which the congregation worshipped.https://digicom.bpl.lib.me.us/books_pubs/1069/thumbnail.jp

Large-scale distributions of tropospheric nitric, formic, and acetic acids over the western Pacific basin during wintertime

We report here measurements of the acidic gases nitric (HNO3), formic (HCOOH), and acetic (CH3COOH) over the western Pacific basin during the February-March 1994 Pacific Exploratory Mission-West (PEM-West B). These data were obtained aboard the NASA DC-8 research aircraft as it flew missions in the altitude range of 0.3–12.5 km over equatorial regions near Guam and then further westward encompassing the entire Pacific Rim arc. Aged marine air over the equatorial Pacific generally exhibited mixing ratios of acidic gases \u3c100 parts per trillion by volume (pptv). Near the Asian continent, discrete plumes encountered below 6 km altitude contained up to 8 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) HNO3 and 10 ppbv HCOOH and CH3COOH. Overall there was a general correlation between mixing ratios of acidic gases with those of CO, C2H2, and C2Cl4, indicative of emissions from combustion and industrial sources. The latitudinal distributions of HNO3 and CO showed that the largest mixing ratios were centered around 15°N, while HCOOH, CH3COOH, and C2Cl4 peaked at 25°N. The mixing ratios of HCOOH and CH3COOH were highly correlated (r2 = 0.87) below 6 km altitude, with a slope (0.89) characteristic of the nongrowing season at midlatitudes in the northern hemisphere. Above 6 km altitude, HCOOH and CH3COOH were marginally correlated (r2 = 0.50), and plumes well defined by CO, C2H2, and C2Cl4 were depleted in acidic gases, most likely due to scavenging during vertical transport of air masses through convective cloud systems over the Asian continent. In stratospheric air masses, HNO3 mixing ratios were several parts per billion by volume (ppbv), yielding relationships with O3 and N2O consistent with those previously reported for NOy

Fire regime: history and definition of a key concept in disturbance ecology

"Fire regime” has become, in recent decades, a key concept in many scientific domains. In spite of its wide spread use, the concept still lacks a clear and wide established definition. Many believe that it was first discussed in a famous report on national park management in the United States, and that it may be simply defined as a selection of a few measurable parameters that summarize the fire occurrence patterns in an area. This view has been uncritically perpetuated in the scientific community in the last decades. In this paper we attempt a historical reconstruction of the origin, the evolution and the current meaning of "fire regime” as a concept. Its roots go back to the 19th century in France and to the first half of the 20th century in French African colonies. The "fire regime” concept took time to evolve and pass from French into English usage and thus to the whole scientific community. This coincided with a paradigm shift in the early 1960s in the United States, where a favourable cultural, social and scientific climate led to the natural role of fires as a major disturbance in ecosystem dynamics becoming fully acknowledged. Today the concept of "fire regime” refers to a collection of several fire-related parameters that may be organized, assembled and used in different ways according to the needs of the users. A structure for the most relevant categories of parameters is proposed, aiming to contribute to a unified concept of "fire regime” that can reconcile the physical nature of fire with the socio-ecological context within which it occur

Church and the End Times

The Rapture, by Charles Feinberg; The Resurrections and Judgments, by Arthur B. Whiting; The Tribulation, by Gerald B. Stanton; The Millennium, by Louis T. Talbot. As heard over The Bible Institute Hour

Church and the End Times

As heard over the Bible Institute Hour; four important Bible themes.https://digitalcommons.biola.edu/biola-radio-pubs/1000/thumbnail.jp

Kranc: a Mathematica application to generate numerical codes for tensorial evolution equations

We present a suite of Mathematica-based computer-algebra packages, termed "Kranc", which comprise a toolbox to convert (tensorial) systems of partial differential evolution equations to parallelized C or Fortran code. Kranc can be used as a "rapid prototyping" system for physicists or mathematicians handling very complicated systems of partial differential equations, but through integration into the Cactus computational toolkit we can also produce efficient parallelized production codes. Our work is motivated by the field of numerical relativity, where Kranc is used as a research tool by the authors. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of both the Mathematica packages and the resulting code, we discuss some example applications, and provide results on the performance of an example numerical code for the Einstein equations.Comment: 24 pages, 1 figure. Corresponds to journal versio

Intercomparisons of airborne measurements of aerosol ionic chemical composition during TRACE-P and ACE-Asia

As part of the two field studies, Transport and Chemical Evolution over the Pacific (TRACE-P) and the Asian Aerosol Characterization Experiment (ACE-Asia), the inorganic chemical composition of tropospheric aerosols was measured over the western Pacific from three separate aircraft using various methods. Comparisons are made between the rapid online techniques of the particle into liquid sampler (PILS) for measurement of a suite of fine particle a mist chamber/ion chromatograph (MC/IC) measurement of fine sulfate, and the longer time-integrated filter and micro-orifice impactor (MOI) measurements. Comparisons between identical PILS on two separate aircraft flying in formation showed that they were highly correlated (e.g., sulfate r2 of 0.95), but were systematically different by 10 ± 5% (linear regression slope and 95% confidence bounds), and had generally higher concentrations on the aircraft with a low-turbulence inlet and shorter inlet-to-instrument transmission tubing. Comparisons of PILS and mist chamber measurements of fine sulfate on two different aircraft during formation flying had an r 2 of 0.78 and a relative difference of 39% ± 5%. MOI ionic data integrated to the PILS upper measurement size of 1.3 mm sampling from separate inlets on the same aircraft showed that for sulfate, PILS and MOI were within 14% ± 6% and correlated with an r 2 of 0.87. Most ionic compounds were within ±30%, which is in the range of differences reported between PILS and integrated samplers from ground-based comparisons. In many cases, direct intercomparison between the various instruments is difficult due to differences in upper-size detection limits. However, for this study, the results suggest that the fine particle mass composition measured from aircraft agree to within 30–40%