Studies of local knowledge and farmer participatory research tend to focus on raising crops and livestock. Little attention is given to processing and marketing farm products, an important source of income for rural households, particularly women.This article presents the case of an investigation into processing and marketing of milk products by agropastoral Fulani women, which revealed how the women under stand local market forces and recognize important social and even local political functions of their marketing activities. However, it also (...) revealed the limits of their knowledge about how the local economy interlinks with national and international economies.Reasons are examined why the study did not lead to local technical and institutional development in dairying. Differentiation is made between two types of research: “extractive” research to provide information for development planners and academics; and participatory or “enriching” research, in which data collection, analysis, and reporting are done with rural people, to use in their own problem-solving. It is argued that “enriching” research should be aimed at increasing rural people's present knowledge, so that they can better understand and cope with external influences on their activities. They could then better defend their own interests against the macroplanning State.Finally, the ethics of documenting the research results are questioned. Documentation of conventional research is primarily for empowerment and enrichment of the extractive economic and academic systems. But there is also a danger that wider dissemination of results of participatory research and local knowledge will not benefit the rural participants but rather strengthen the information base of planners, so that they can better manipulate local economies. (shrink)

This chapter argues that the human right to water entails specific moral limits to commodifying water. While free-market economists have generally recognized no such limits, the famous Canadian environmental thinker Maude Barlow has claimed that the human right to water entails that no water markets should be permitted. With a Lockean conception of the human right to water, this chapter argues that both views are mistaken. If water markets prevent people from obtaining some (...) minimal and proportional share of water, by charging a prohibitively high price, or otherwise, then they put the human right to water in jeopardy and, therefore, should be blocked. (shrink)

The United States Environmental Protection Agency has begun to encourage innovative market-based approaches to address nonpoint source water pollution. These water quality trading programs have the potential to achieve environmental standards at a lower overall cost. Two fundamental questions must be answered before these benefits can be realized: How will trades between point and nonpoint sources be monitored and enforced? and, How will nonpoint sources be included within a trading market? ;Point-nonpoint source trading can be accommodated (...) through either a technology-based or performance-based approach. The technology-based approach accommodates trading through the use of a proxy for unobservable, individual nonpoint source emission reductions. While trading ratios can effectively deal with the uncertainty associated with using a proxy for actual abatement, they are inefficient and ineffective for dealing with problems of hidden action. The alternative use of performance-based trading approaches requires the use of team contracts that provide individual incentives linked to the performance of the entire group. Such contracts must be designed to overcome both adverse selection and moral hazard problems. Performance-based approaches promise efficiency gains in terms of reducing the problems of asymmetric information, and by introducing flexibility into the choice of nonpoint source abatement technologies and practices. ;Nonpoint sources are exempted from direct regulation under the polluter-pays-principle. As a result, their participation in trading markets is voluntary, thus preventing a baseline cap on pre-trade emissions. To determine whether this arrangement should be changed, we must ask if there something that morally prohibits the direct regulation of nonpoint sources of pollution. While a morally relevant distinction can be made between point and nonpoint sources of emission based on differences in the ability to observe individual emission levels, this relevance is limited to the case of performance-based policy instruments. The moral legitimacy of applying the polluter-pays-principle to nonpoint sources of pollution must be made on a case by case basis, as it is dependent upon existing social, economic, and other practical factors. However, it can be stated that there is no general moral barrier to prohibit the application of the polluter-pays-principle to nonpoint sources of pollution. (shrink)

Ensuring access to clean water is one of the most important development and health challenges of the twenty-first century. Given the manifold impacts of business activities on water resources, corporate water actions should be of central concern to business ethics researchers. Yet so far we know too little about whether business activities that impact on water resources are noticed or how corporate water actions are valued by a firm’s stakeholders, including by financial markets. In response, (...) we conduct an event study to investigate the shareholder wealth effect of reports of corporate water actions. We explore stock market reactions to water actions by S&P 500 firms from 2005 to 2017, showing that the market reacts positively to reports of responsible water actions and negatively to irresponsible actions. We further explain that these abnormal returns to water actions are associated with a firm’s past performance on ethical issues, arguing that the reputational effects from prior corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility influence market reactions. Our analysis provides evidence that there are diminishing marginal returns to responsible water actions for firms with records of past responsibility and an offsetting effect for those with past irresponsibility. Similarly, we demonstrate an insurance effect that limits punishment for irresponsible water actions for firms with responsible performance records and diminishing negative marginal returns for those already seen to be irresponsible. This study is the first to show that shareholders recognize market value in corporate water actions and are prepared to award or punish firms in stock markets based on their impacts on water. (shrink)

To date, the primary focus of research in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been on the strategic implications of CSR for corporations and less on an evaluation of CSR from a wider political, economic and social perspective. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by critically engaging with marketing campaigns of so-called ‘ethical’ bottled water. We especially focus on a major CSR strategy of a range of different companies that promise to provide drinking (...) class='Hi'>water for (what they name as) ‘poor African people’ by way of Western consumers purchasing bottled water. Following Fairclough's approach, we unfold a three-step critical discourse analysis of the marketing campaigns of 10 such ‘ethical’ brands. Our results show that bottled water companies try to influence consumers' tastes through the management of the cultural meaning of bottled water, producing a more ‘ethical’ and ‘socially responsible’ perception of their products/brands. Theoretically, we base our analysis on McCracken's model of the cultural meaning of consumer goods, which, we argue, offers a critical perspective of the recent emergence of CSR and business ethics initiatives. We discuss how these marketing campaigns can be framed as historical struggles associated with neo-liberal ideology and hegemony. Our analysis demonstrates how such CSR strategies are part of a general process of the reproduction of capitalist modes of accumulation and legitimation through the usage of cultural categories. (shrink)

“Virtual water,” water needed for crop production, is now being mainstreamed in the water policy world. Relying on virtual water in the form of food imports is increasingly recommended as good policy for water-scarce areas. Virtual water globalizes discussions on water scarcity, ecological sustainability, food security and consumption. Presently the concept is creating much noise in the water and food policy world, which contributes to its politicization. We will argue that the virtual (...) water debate is also a “real water” and food and agricultural policy debate and hence has political effects. Decisions about food strategies and resource allocation play out on the national political economy, benefiting some while harming others. Therefore, a policy choice for virtual water is not politically neutral. “Real␣water” interventions are, likewise, inspired by economic as well as political considerations like control of the countryside, geopolitical strategy, and food sovereignty (independence from international political conditionality and market uncertainties). To illustrate these ideas, we look into case studies of Egypt and the State of Punjab in India. In India, a debate on the merits and demerits of a virtual water strategy is now emerging. In Egypt, which switched to food imports in the early 1970s, a long-standing taboo on debating virtual water is now being relaxed. (shrink)

Water saving irrigation is promoted as a strategy to mitigate future water stresses by the Chinese government and irrigation scientists. However, the dissemination of WSI in China has been slow and little is understood with respect to why farmers adopt WSI or how WSI interacts with the social and institutional contexts in which it is embedded. By analyzing qualitative data from 37 semi-structured and 56 unstructured interviews across 13 villages in northwest China, this paper examines smallholder farmers’ knowledge (...) and perceptions of WSI, and how WSI interacts with farmer livelihood decision-making and extant systems of land and water management. The results show that smallholders’ willingness to adopt and continuously use WSI was dampened by a lack of communal capital and measures for conflict resolution, a disconnect between the temporal demands of practicing WSI and the ways farmers prioritize different livelihood strategies, misconceptions about WSI systems and how they work, market risks, and landownership structure and economies of scale. These results suggest that programs for promoting WSI must be holistic in nature and address smallholders’ day-to-day problems. Understanding why WSI did not succeed in some places will help formulate policy interventions that avoid reproducing conflicts, risks, and technological malfunctions responsible for previous failure. (shrink)

Water is a finite resource held in common by the community yet coveted by individuals and special interests. The water management field is filled with disputes about water allocation, rights, and pollution. Environmental ethics is a basis for equitable water policy making in Delaware. The resource allocation dilemma is examined in relation to conflicting objectives imposed by a market economy between individual self-interests and community environmental well being. Two forms of water law are practiced (...) in the USA—eastern riparianrights and western prior appropriation. Both forms seek an ethical balance to resolve conflicts and protect individual water rights while protecting downstream users (the common good). Delaware Valley case studies discuss how environmental ethics can help the water policy specialist make difficult decisions during conflicts. Surveys polls indicate that 81 percent have values supportive of a balance between the economy and environment, or pro-environment, indicating that an environmental ethic is central to decisions concerning water policy. (shrink)

The financial crisis has led to new interest in the ethics of financial markets. In this article, we further the debate on the nature of banking contracts by showing that the fundamental subjective purposes of loan and deposit contracts are irreconcilable. Any resultant mixture of the two contracts is a legal aberration. We consider a mutual fund as an important and legitimate alternative to the common demand deposit to provide high liquidity and some yield without offering full availability of a (...) nominal sum. Besides being a close substitute for how many deposit accounts function today, the mutual fund has the additional benefit of satisfying all legal and ethical requirements. Loan and investment contracts allow for the “bank” to make use of their clients’ funds while the intents of money owners are clearly classified without running into legal or ethical problems. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:5. Grange plays the blame game on the free market system for example on pp. xviii, T^ 29, 67, 74, 85, 91, 94, 109, III; in connection with remarks on environmental mat- ~ ters it is a consistent subtext of his entire work. Two of his previous works are Nature: J^ An Environmental Cosmology, 1997, and The City: An Urban Cosmology, 1999 (both Albany: tfl SUNY Press). ^ (...) 6. The transliteration of ren as "authoritative person" is an egregious tour deforce, ^ leading to a somewhat inelegant result in English, as in the following examples: "Authoritative persons are content in being authoritative; wise persons flourish in it"; and "The Master said: "I have yet to meet people who are truly fond of authoritative conduct (ren)... And those who abhor behavior contrary to it, in becoming authoritative themselves, will not allow such conduct to attach itself to them" (cited from Grange, p. 29). Li (ritual propriety) is co-opted as a match for the Deweyan concept of experimental inquiry. Yi (sense of justice, outer righteousness, often combined with ren, which in combination constitute the two cardinal virtues of Confucian moral theory), and zhi (knowledge, wisdom) are similarly adopted to work in tandem with a model of an "aesthetic" populism. Grange renders yi as "what is fitting and appropriate," akin to "beauty," or "the fair and the fitting," that is, acting consistently in a manner of openness to what is happening that is "the very opposite of the narcissism that infects so much of Western culture" (p. 52)). 7. The demiurgic role of the "master" here reminds one of the fundamental rift between Whitehead and Dewey that is glossed over in this construction. Dewey, who remained committed to a naturalistic doctrine of emergent evolution, chided Whitehead for his doctrine of the ingression of eternal objects. In reply, Whitehead refused to change this key part of his cosmology. The doctrinal clash between the two thinkers appears to be reflected in the debate over the value of the Confucian concept of Heaven (tian), as indicated in note 4. Edited by Anne Waters American Indian Thought. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 306 pages. $29.95 paper. This volume is a group of twenty-two essays about the various facets of Native American thought and philosophy. Eighteen Native American scholars of American Indian thought are the contributors. In many ways this volume is a first in that these Native peoples are trying to create an inteUectual space where ideas, philosophies, spiritualities and esthetics can be examined in a meaningful way. As a long time student of Native American political thought, I applaud this volume because it represents a departure from the attitudes that I encountered in the academy as a young Native American scholar a generation ago. I can remember as a young Associate Ptofessor being in the elevator of Bunche HaU at UCLA when a history colleague of mine turned to me and quizzed me about my interests in Native American history. When I stated that I was interested in Native American thought and particularly Native American political theory, the coUeague replied that they did not know that American Indians had any thoughts or inteUectual traditions. Needless to say, we have 863 ^ corne a long way since that conversation over twenty five years ago. I have ^ always taught undergraduate courses and graduate courses on the History of KH Native American Thought and I adopted this book for a graduate course of ^ mine when it first came out last year. I can say that it was well received by my ^ graduate students and it provided an excellent array of essays on the various areas of Native American philosophy. The work also demonstrates that Native American ideas can be examined within the context of the discipline of philosophy. This collection of essays by American Indian thinkers blends contemporary philosophies with traditional ideas and philosophical issues. Thus, philosophical questions relating to time, place, history, national communities, religion, law, science, the arts and ethics are all addressed. Moreover, the reader can compare Native American viewpoints on phenomenology, metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, epistemology, logic and science with the perspectives of Western philosophy on these topics. In a very real sense, this volume opens new ways... (shrink)

This article examines how the formation of markets in bottled water has relied on assembling a particular subject: the subject of hydration. The discourse of hydration is a conspicuous feature of efforts to market bottled water, allowing companies to appeal to scientifically framed principles and ideas of health in order to position the product as an essential component in self-health and healthy lifestyles. Alongside related principles, such as the ‘8 × 8 rule’, hydration has done much to (...) establish new practices of water drinking and consumption in which the consumer appears to be always at risk of dehydration and must engage in practices of ‘frequent sipping’. This article traces the emergence of the concept of hydration from its origins in exercise science and explores its circulation, contemporary uses and purchase. I argue that the appeal to biomedical languages and concepts found in the discourse of hydration connects with much broader ways of conceiving and acting upon the self that have become prevalent in contemporary society – what Rose and Novas call ‘biological citizenship’ – indicating how the ensemble of hydration participates in wider-ranging transformations in forms of rule. The story of hydration reveals how biomedical techniques of the self can be made to double up as ‘market devices’ by offering specific procedures for assessing the self and calculating the body’s needs. In order to grasp these developments, I position the health sciences, and health and fitness in particular, as a potent site of popular culture in which bodies learn to be affected by the procedures of scientific experiment. A critical grasp of this context is best enabled, I argue, by situating the producers and consumers of scientific principles and commercial products as embodied and looking at their interconnection in processes of emergence. Through these means, we can begin to develop a fully materialized account of the question: how have we become so thirsty? (shrink)

SUMMARYThis article considers how chemical analyses were employed not only to study and describe mineral waters, but also to promote new spas, and to reinforce the scientific authority of experts. Scientists, jointly with bath owners, visitors and local authorities, created a significant spa market by transforming rural spaces into social and economic sites. The paper analyses the role developed by the chemist Antonio Casares in the commodification of mineral water in mid-19th century Spain. His scientific publications and (...) class='Hi'>water analyses put a new economic value on some Spanish mineral waters and rural springs. First the paper explores the relationship between geographic factors, regulation, and spa development in 19th century Spain, and considers how scientific work improved the economy of some rural areas. Then the transformation of numerous country springs into spas, and the commodification of baths as places between science and leisure is examined. Finally the location of spas across the borders of medicine and chemistry is shown, together with the complex field operations required to study mineral waters. This paper reveals an intense circulation of knowledge between the field, laboratories and scientific publications, as well as the essential role developed by experts like Casares, who not only contributed to the study of rural springs but also to their economic transformation. (shrink)

The availability of and demand for water in China is an extreme case of uneven distribution in time and space. In response, the South to North Water Diversion (SNWD) project, the largest inter-basin water transfer scheme in the world, channels large amounts of fresh water from the Yangtze River in southern China to the more arid and industrialised north. In order to keep the SNWD project running smoothly, a comprehensive governance system has been implemented and innovative (...) institutional arrangements have been created to facilitate the transfer of water itself. By taking the SNWD project’s Middle Route as one case study and drawing on primary and secondary data, this article examines the project’s emerging institutional arrangements. The article outlines the establishment of new institutions for the SNWD project with high administrative rankings at both central and local levels, the encouragement of inter-department cooperation, the adoption of a market mechanism and the integration of market functions into administrative functions. We argue that these institutional arrangements have to some extent overcome common challenges in water governance in China, including an engineering-heavy approach and what Chinese commentators have traditionally called the problem of water being managed by multiple government ministries and municipal authorities as the common metaphor of ‘nine dragons managing the water’. Our findings have significant implications for understanding the continuing evolution of water governance in China. (shrink)

This paper presents an oral history of farming in the Southern Yangtze Valley in China, covering the period from pre-liberation to recent market liberalization. Using the stories and observations of 31 elderly residents of a small water town, the paper describes the hard labor of traditional farming practices and the acquiescence of many when, post-liberation, they could leave farming for better-paid factory work. However, in a departure from conventional analyses, these oral histories suggest that the co-dependency culture of (...) traditional farming has broken down, and farmers are unwilling to return to the land and continue farming. The changes in knowledge cultures of local farmers in recent decades are not likely to lead to pathways to working with incoming modern “outsider farmers,” nor able to be blended with potential new “urbanite” knowledges of those who might wish to increase organic farming. The current knowledge cultures of these farmers has shifted as needed to the optimization of family unit needs, naturally leading them to urbanization and the relinquishing of their ties to the land. For cultural rather than economic reasons, these farmers see themselves as the last peasant farmers of Tianshanzhuang. (shrink)

The Australian government's response to the Millennium Drought (1997–2010) has been met with praise and contestation. While proponents saw the response as timely and crucial, critics claimed it was characterized by government overreach and mismanagement. Five months of field research in farm communities in the Murray Darling Basin (MDB) identified two dominant discourses: administrative rationalism and a local community-based discourse I have termed community-centrism. Administrative rationalism reflects the value of scientific inquiry in service to the state and is the dominant (...) research-based problem-solving model used by water and natural resource agencies (Dryzek in The politics of the earth: environmental discourses, Oxford University Press, 2013; Colloff and Pittock in Aust J Water Resour, 23(2):88–98, 2019). Community-centrism was identified through discussions with farmers and represents a bottom-up approach to environmental planning and management that seeks to incorporate local knowledge, planning, and direct participation. This investigation reveals how discourses define problems and policy choices. While market-based government interventions were likely necessary to address the crisis in the MDB, community-centred responses could have enhanced the government’s capacity to respond to problems. This paper argues that the long-term sustainability of water management in the Basin will require a reorientation on the part of farmers, academics, and governments to develop a community-centred approach to water policies impacting agriculture. (shrink)

Constraints on the expansion of western water supply projects have turned the attention of urban water developers to market purchases of agricultural water supplies as a source of new water. The conventional wisdom of natural resource economics suggests that such shifts should have minimal impact on the agricultural area-of-origin, promote efficiency in water use, and provide an inexpensive and environmentally preferable alternative to building more dams and reservoirs. However the concentration of urban demand combines (...) with water-extensive irrigation practices in western agriculture and a characteristically bipolar economic and social structure in western irrigation communities to create a potential for severe stress on rural economies and communities. The adaptation of supply-oriented western water institutions to market-oriented functions has not provided a decision-making context that accounts for costs imposed on rural communities; moreover, historically water-rich rural communities have not evolved a water policy infrastructure capable of responding to stress. Before the promise of low-cost water supply through the market mechanism can be realized, the structural contradictions inherited from the traditional water-management institutions must be faced and dealt with by both rural source regions and urban water importers. (shrink)

Rural women did not fare very well inthe land reforms carried out during the Latin American“reformist period” of the 1960s and 1970s, with womenbeing under-represented among the beneficiaries. It isargued that women have been excluded from access toand control over water for similar reasons that theywere excluded from access to land during thesereforms. The paper also investigates the extent towhich women have gained or lost access to land duringthe “counter-reforms” of the 1980s and 1990s. Underthe neo-liberal agenda, production cooperatives (...) aswell as communal access to land have largely beenundermined in favor of privatization and theindividual parcelization of collectives. Significantland titling efforts are also being carried outthroughout the region to promote the development of avigorous land market. This latter period has also beencharacterized by the growth of the feminist movementthroughout Latin America and a growing commitment bystates to gender equity. The paper reviews the extentto which rural women‘s access to land and, thus, waterhas potentially been enhanced by recent changes inagrarian and legal codes. (shrink)

In this essay we explore extensive modes of enactive engagement among humans, physical and computational media richer than the modes represented by classical notions of interaction and relation. We make use of a radically material and a potential-theoretic account of event to re-conceive ad hoc, non-pre-schematized activity in responsive environments. We can regard such activity as sense-making via dehomogenization of material that co-articulates subjects and objects.

Research and activism have increasingly denounced the problematic environmental record of the infrastructure and value chain underpinning artificial intelligence (AI). Water-intensive data centres, polluting mineral extraction and e-waste dumping are incontrovertibly part of AI’s footprint. In this article, I turn to areas affected by AI-fuelled environmental harm and identify an ethics of resistance emerging from local activists, which I term ‘elemental ethics’. Elemental ethics interrogates the AI value chain’s problematic relationship with the elements that make up the world, critiques (...) the undermining of local and ancestral approaches to nature and reveals the vital and quotidian harms engendered by so-called intelligent systems. While this ethics is emerging from grassroots and Indigenous groups, it echoes recent calls from environmental philosophy to reconnect with the environment via the elements. In empirical terms, this article looks at groups in Chile resisting a Google data centre project in Santiago and lithium extraction (used for rechargeable batteries) in Lickan Antay Indigenous territory, Atacama Desert. As I show, elemental ethics can complement top-down, utilitarian and quantitative approaches to AI ethics and sustainable AI as well as interrogate whose lived experience and well-being counts in debates on AI extinction. (shrink)

China is the world’s largest market for solar water heating systems, installing 13 million square meters of new systems in 2004, mostly in large cities. Municipal authorities, however, are sensitive to quality and visual impact issues created by this technology deployment. Therefore, there is currently a trend toward developing building integrated systems as well as upgrading building codes, establishing testing and certification programs, and educating building architects and developers. The use of photovoltaics for urban and grid-connected applications has (...) lagged behind the solar water-heating market; however, in 2003, a 1 MW photovoltaic-rooftop system was constructed in Shenzhen in southern China and several demonstration building integrated systems have since been installed. There is also an emerging interest in photovoltaics for distributed generation and grid support in China. Trends and requirements for developing solar urban applications in China will be presented in this article. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Just Capitalism: A Christian Ethic of Economic Globalization by Brent WatersNicholas Aaron FriesnerJust Capitalism: A Christian Ethic of Economic Globalization Brent Waters LOUISVILLE: WESTMINSTER JOHN KNOX PRESS, 2016. 260 pp. $40.00In Just Capitalism, Brent Waters offers a wide-ranging defense of economic globalization, the market state, and the pursuit of affluence, which together provide a means to spread human flourishing around the globe. For Waters, the free-flowing economic (...) exchange enabled by globalization does not inherently conflict with Christian tradition, and it can be harnessed in a responsible manner to share and communicate the goods of creation. He argues that breaking down global barriers to market participation expresses a preferential option for the poor and provides a means for achieving the work of the Spirit by spreading the materials goods that lift people out of poverty and alleviate suffering. The book's primary contribution is its broad explanation of recent work on the economics of globalization and Waters's ability to put this literature into a theological conversation. The argument is particularly timely for Christian ethicists who are concerned with developing the tools to respond to expanding movements toward isolationism and economic protectionism in the United States and Europe.Part 1 of Just Capitalism claims that moral theology has not properly interrogated the common view that affluence fundamentally conflicts with the Christian tradition. By contextualizing both the biblical sources and the traditional theological voices that support this view, Waters shows that these sources assumed an economic model in which resources are scarce and wealth is built by exploiting the poor. Instead, Waters argues that our present economic system is based on increasing productivity, and therefore wealth is not necessarily exploitative. In fact, he claims that the pursuit of affluence can be beneficial for helping to lift people out of poverty. Rather than retreating from engagement with wealth and the market, Christians should recognize that free exchange is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition for human flourishing (15). [End Page 213]In part 2, Waters develops a notion of koinonia, whereby human flourishing depends on communicating the goods of creation in the associations of civil society. Responding to worries about the homogenizing forces of market economies that make individuals into producers and consumers, Waters offers the church as a communicative association that stands in tension with capitalist markets by cultivating reciprocity instead of consumption, breaking down barriers in a gathering community, and being nonterritorial in its scope (150–51). Because communicative associations like the church are essential to the vitality of civil society, the challenge is to "embrace the dynamism of global markets in order to promote more widespread prosperity," while establishing the requisite political stability that allows these associations to exist (159).Nevertheless, Waters does not spend much time elaborating on specific moments when the church should come into conflict with capitalism—he notes that his reservations only give him "two-and-a-half-cheers" for globalization, rather than three (14–15). In his desire to show compatibility with globalization, he neglects to give a sense of when communicative associations could justifiably remove themselves from the system of exchange. This relates to Waters's final chapter on capitalist responses to environmental devastation, which relies on his earlier development of a stewardship model, one that seems to reduce creation to its instrumental value for human "delight" (89–90, 92, 111, 115). Waters admits that the pursuit of affluence requires short-term environmental damage, especially in developing countries; nevertheless, he thinks that affluent societies will better preserve the environment (through "national parks and wildlife preserves") (217), and some environmental exploitation is needed to form these affluent societies. This will probably be insufficient for environmental ethicists who resist the notion that creation's purpose is to be ordered to promote human flourishing (204). He is clear, however, that "Eden is a garden, and not a wilderness" (203).Nicholas Aaron FriesnerBrown UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

We use content analysis to show that the diagnosis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009 shifted significantly from a focus on the need for structural change in the banking industry to an emphasis on culture and reform at the organizational level. We consider four overlapping subsystems in which this shift in problem–solution clusters played out—political, regulatory, legal, and consulting—and show that the “structural reform agenda,” which was initially strong and publicly prominent in the political arena, lost attention. Over time it (...) was displaced by a neoliberal managerialist turn, which watered down or abandoned structural solutions and instead played up a new “culture and conduct reform agenda.” We explain this shift in terms of the marketization of regulation, which—following Mautner (_Language and the market society_, 1st ed. Routledge, 2010)’s model of interdiscursive alignment—we detect in the shifting language of financial-services reform across the four subsystems in scope. We argue that a neoliberal turn took place with a _discursive closure_ that made the structural reform alternative gradually unsayable and, in the end, unthinkable. At the same time, the discourse turned to embrace the neoliberal agenda, built on the myth of self-regulating actors and markets, manifest in the culture problematic. This managerialist turn was able to mobilise, and be operationalised by, an industry of consultants, whereas structural change came to be seen by regulators as too risky to implement. We claim that these dynamics reveal how a form of “collective strategic ignorance,” based on powerful institutional myths, was systematically oriented to ignore and reject structural sources of crisis. Finally, we suggest that the observed pattern of displacement—whereby initial calls for structural change become later displaced by managerial and procedural solutions—is common to other social issues, such as audit reform and corporate social responsibility. (shrink)

Buying and selling are the most natural activities common to human beings. In a society where profit overrides personal dignity and human rights, many people see market as a virtue-free zone. They do not believe that one can buy and sell without dishonest gains. Consequently, they are ready to do anything in the name of business: manufacturing and selling fake and substandard goods and services for originals. Today, markets are flooded with fake medical drugs, fake foods, fake drinks/water, (...) fake motor parts and fake building materials. Thus market exhibits exploitative and negative impacts on customer satisfaction. Its impact on human life and property leads to increased deaths because of poisoning, building collapses and even increased road accidents. Such market transaction lacks mutual benefit which is its telos. This paper seeks to establish that market is not a virtue-free zone. It has moral standards of excellence internal to it. (shrink)

This article tells the story of an Israeli regulatory program aimed at luring back home Israeli companies listed only on U.S. stock markets, to facilitate dual listing of their stocks on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange. Beyond documenting a piece of Israeli political economy, this article provides several lessons of general relevance to small or emerging markets as well as to large ones. In this story, the regulator of the small market finds itself a regulatory price-taker. In a mirror (...) image, the U.S. market emerges as a global regulatory price-setter. This regulatory externality, or regulatory arbitrage, is disturbing because the standard with which Israeli regulation had to align is the watered-down version for non-U.S. issuers. Indeed, any effort to require an iota of additional disclosure beyond the American foreign issuer regime has failed due to vehement objections from the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange and business interest groups. The role of the stock exchange as regulator and the interplay between corporate law and securities regulation are also discussed in this context. This article thus casts some doubt on the desirability of piggybacking on foreign markets. Sometimes, it turns out, piggybacking can be a ride to the bottom. (shrink)

Does anyone have a monopoly on God? Can religion be bought or sold? Why do we pay priests? How do we limit religious conflicts? And should states get involved in matters of faith? "Faithonomics" shows that religion should be analyzed as a market similar to those for other goods and services, like bottled water or haircuts. It is about religion today, but Brekke shows us that there have always been religious markets, all over the world, regulated to a (...) greater or lesser degree. He argues that state "control" over religious markets is often the cause of unforeseen and negative consequences. Many of today's problems like religious terrorism or rent-seeking by religious political parties, are easier to understand if we think like economists. Religious markets work best when they are relatively free, and religious organizations should be left to sell their products without unnecessary restrictions. We have no good reason to grant any one of them special privileges, political or financial."--book jacket front flap. (shrink)

Experts identified water quality, manure, good handling practices (including personal hygiene and equipment sanitation), and traceability as critical farm problem areas that, if addressed, are likely to decrease risk associated with microbial contamination of fresh produce from all scales of agriculture. However, the diverse nature of production strategies used by produce farmers presents multiple options for addressing foodborne illness issues while simultaneously creating potential complications. We use a mental models methodology to enhance our understanding of the underlying factors and (...) assumptions of small, medium, and large produce growers that influence their decision-making processes for contamination prevention and control. This empirical evidence demonstrates how challenges and opportunities to food safety are related to the scale of production and marketing strategies. We believe that refining the development of standards and existing extension and outreach food safety programs are important to both consumer protection and supporting agricultural communities. Additionally, this approach will help develop and refine food safety programs that will result in empirically grounded recommendations based on identified grower information needs. (shrink)

A large body of scholarship in political economy suggests economic growth, and foreign direct investment in regulated industries in particular, is more likely to occur when formal institutions allow states to provide credible commitments regarding the security of property rights. In contrast, this article argues that we must instead examine differences in firm organizational structure and embeddedness to explain variation in the resilience of privatization contracts in weak institutional environments. Domestic investors—or, if contracts are granted at the subnational level, domestic (...) investors with diverse local holdings—work most effectively in the developing world. Domestic investors are better able to negotiate mutually beneficial adaptations to their formal contracts with host governments because they can draw on informal contractual supports that derive from cross-sector diversification and embeddedness in the market. This article finds strong support for this argument through an analysis of fourteen water privatization contracts in Argentina. (shrink)

_The following paper highlights the contradictions that exist in the understanding of water: it is considered a marketable resource over which one can exert power and, at the same time, a common good used by the planet’s species and ecosystems. Based on this, and after an analysis of several widespread ideas, the paper proceeds to describe the paradox in the perception of water as a product of an alienated aesthetics that makes it impossible to experience the after-effects of (...) the Westernised world. This lack of perception will be called _aesthetic omission_, corresponding to Eaton’s “nonperceivables” (2000). The text urges us to be aware that these kinds of aesthetics exclusions around water have global effects and ultimately determine the fate of life on Earth itself. Therefore, a complex revision of the established ontology of water is proposed in response._ _Keywords_: water; nonperceivables; aesthetics; epistemology; Earth. (shrink)

Private participation in infrastructure is a relatively newphenomenon in the developing world (World Bank, 1999). In telecommunications, electric power, water, and other sectors, developing countries are turning to private sector investors to help increase availability, improve access, and move toward market-based pricing of resources and services. The findings of this dissertation demonstrate that the governance, mode of entry, and mix of public and private ownership of infrastructure projects are influenced by country-level economic, institutional, and technological factors, and by (...) investing firms’ ownership structures and strategies. (shrink)

This paper attempts to answer the question of whether or not government is needed to build walkways near bodies of water such as rivers and lakes, or whether private enterprise can supply such needs. In it we argue that the market is indeed capable of instituting such amenities, despite the fact that there are either none such or at most very precious few in existence at the present time. This occurrence is explained on the grounds that government has (...) preempted the market that would otherwise have taken place in this regard. We also claim that the likelihood of private walkways being built is proportional to the population density of the surrounding habitat, on the grounds that privacy in densely populated regions is already compromised, and thus the costs of such walkways is lowered. (shrink)

Retraction note: Figueroa Mendoza, M., & Olivares González, C. (2022). Drought: A current problema and its treatment in the chilean legal order. HUMAN REVIEW. International Humanities / Revista Internacional De Humanidades, 12(6), 2–15. https://doi.org/10.37467/revhuman.v11.4100 The Editorial Office of Eurasia Academic Publishing Group has retracted this article. An investigation carried out by our Research Integrity Department has found a group of articles, among which this one is found, that are not within the thematic scope of the journal. We believe that the (...) editorial process was manipulated and, furthermore, acceptance decisions were made under possibly inappropriate peer review. (shrink)

El objetivo de este trabajo será responder si las potestades de la DGA son idóneas para paliar los efectos de la sequía, a través de tres secciones: primera, Identificación de la sequía como fenómeno fáctico multifactorial y su tratamiento en el CAg; segunda, revisión de las potestades de la DGA de acuerdo al artículo 314 CAg; tercera, revisión de la normativa que incorpora el usos prioritario del aguas y derecho humano al agua, cuya metodología será principalmente descriptiva, a través del (...) método dogmático basado en la legislación y la doctrina, igualmente el método exegético para establecer el sentido de conceptos técnicos. (shrink)

Concrete is one of the most intelligent and widely utilized man-made materials in the construction industry. Despite this, even high-quality concrete is susceptible to porosity, which reduces its serviceability period. Furthermore, there is an increasing need to increase longevity due to environmental exposure such as soil moisture, corrosive outside elements, or structural defects forming in the surface of concrete. The use of crystalline admixtures in concrete is one of the many approaches to reducing these risks. When crystalline admixtures come into (...) contact with water, they form thin crystals that fill pores, capillaries, and micro fractures, as a result making concrete a self-sealing material. When the concrete has dried, the crystalline particles remain dormant until they come into contact with additional water, which causes them to crystallize once more. This research aims to analyze and compare the material properties of commonly used concrete and concrete where crystalline waterproofing is present. Furthermore, experiments are conducted to evaluate each of the concrete samples: compressive strength, water permeability, and flexure strength. As a result, demonstrating the benefits or negative aspects of the use of crystalline admixture in the early stages of concrete is important. It is not yet defined, whether this is the future of cutting-edge concrete and the impact that it will have in the Albanian building market. (shrink)

​This book describes argumentative tools and strategies that can be used to guide policy decisions under conditions of great uncertainty. Contributing authors explore methods from philosophical analysis and in particular argumentation analysis, showing how it can be used to systematize discussions about policy issues involving great uncertainty. The first part of the work explores how to deal in a systematic way with decision-making when there may be plural perspectives on the decision problem, along with unknown consequences of what we do. (...) Readers will see how argumentation tools can be used for prioritizing among uncertain dangers, for determining how decisions should be framed, for choosing a suitable time frame for a decision, and for systematically choosing among different decision options. Case studies are presented in the second part of the book, showing argumentation in practice in the areas of climate geoengineering, water governance, synthetic biology, nuclear waste, and financial markets. In one example, argumentation analysis is applied to proposals to solve the climate problem with various technological manipulations of the natural climate system, such as massive dispersion of reflective aerosols into the stratosphere. Even after a thorough investigation of such a proposal, doubt remains as to whether all the potential risks have been identified. In such discussions, conventional risk analysis does not have much to contribute since it presupposes that the risks have been identified, whereas the argumentative approach to uncertainty management can be used to systematize discussions. (shrink)

The city of Tirana during the period of socialism (1944–1990) has been through a relatively large change in the field of construction. The motto of the time was standardization and typification in order to build quick, and to meet the needs of the population, fulfilling the demands of the market for new constructions. The quality of the constructions was very poor in terms of building materials and surface area predicted per inhabitance. Meanwhile, the predicted static parameters of the buildings (...) reveal to be in good performance. The specific area taken into consideration located in the outskirts of the inner historical ring of Tirana is characterized by constructions realized during 1965–1980. The buildings are standing using retaining walls, according to the technical construction parameters of the time. The aim of the questionnaire implementation in the neighborhood is to have better insights into the social, economic and inhabitance behavior within the neighborhood. It is going to be analyzed their lifestyle, pollution in the area, their level of satisfaction, the actual conditions of the buildings, electricity consumption, water consumption, heating and cooling instruments, ventilation habits, etc. The results showed that the level of loyalty to the buildings is high, although the building physical conditions are very poor and their level of satisfaction living in the neighborhood is above average. Their level of satisfaction considers more the location of the neighborhood than the physical conditions of the buildings. The inhabitance agreed with a hypothetic thermal performance improvement of their buildings although sometimes the additional surface is required as the main priority and as a very important quality of life parameter. (shrink)

Periodical reports are important information sources for investors and society to monitor, contribute to, and allocate resources to listed companies contributing to environmental sustainability. This article provides a preliminary investigation into environment-related information disclosure in annual reports of 61 representative companies in Vietnam, a country that has a rapidly developing stock market and is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. It was found that although most of the companies’ reports disclosed the goals to pursue sustainability and environmental (...) protection (over 93%), only one-third of them genuinely reported investment in or research on environmental directions. The proportion of companies reporting detailed information on greenhouse gas emissions, energy consumption, water consumption, and waste production is relatively low; even among leading companies in sustainable development, the reporting rates for these indicators remained below 60%. We suggest that a separate mandatory annual report on environmental issues will increase businesses’ and society’s consciousness of environmental impacts. Transparent disclosure of environmental information will also offer an avenue to empower society to monitor, participate, and steer businesses toward sustainable development, thereby fostering an eco-surplus culture throughout the economic system. (shrink)

Modern industrial societies have achieved a level of economic prosperity undreamed of in earlier times, but in the view of the contemporary environmental movement, the prosperity has come at the cost of serious degradations to the natural world. For environmental advocates, problems such as resource depletion, air and water pollution, global warming and the loss of biodiversity represent due threats to the well-being of human societies and the planet itself. But just how serious are these threats and how should (...) we go about confronting them? Do environmental problems call for more extensive government controls over industrial activity, energy policy and the like, or is it possible to find solutions by harnessing the incentives of the free market? The essays in this collection address these questions and explore related issues. (shrink)

Through the personal stories of managers running global business, this book takes an inside look into the dilemmas of managers who are asked to make profits ethically according to the dictates of their company's ethics code. It examines what companies `think" they are doing to help managers in those situations and how those managers are actually affected. Thanks to the boost from the 1991 Sentencing Guidelines which minimizes penalties for companies with ethics codes caught in ethical wrongdoing, more than 85% (...) of US companies and two thirds of all Canadian companies and half of all European companies now have Codes of Ethics. Yet, over and over, we hear of stories of personal dilemmas and conflicts experienced by individual managers navigating those business waters in other cultures. "Eileen Morgan does an excellent job of mapping the course for navigating the previously uncharted global ethical waters. By identifying best practices, she leads the reader on a journey from Surviving, to Understanding to Knowing the ethical issues that frequently confront international business people. This is a must read for anyone who wants to successfully compete in world markets." -Michael J. Litwin, Executive Vice President, Chief Credit Officer, Heller Financial, Inc. "Eileen Morgan has combined the pragmatic concerns of the individual manager with the moral concerns that come from personal-life history, cultural roots, and corporate ethical culture …This book focuses on the constructive task of formulating and using an "ethical map," and is sure to be a tonic to conscientious managers who want to navigate cross-cultural commerce with integrity. It has done a superb job of creating order out of the complexity of cross-cultural moral experience by insisting that the complexity must be honored and appropriated rather than ignored or suppressed." -Dr. Richard Beauchamp, Professor of Ethics, Christopher Newport University "In this groundbreaking book, Eileen Morgan has provided scores of real-life examples and developed a framework for approaching ethical leadership in international business. This is mandatory reading for anyone involved in global management today...This is an important book on an important subject." -Stephen H. Rhinesmith, Ph.D. Author, A Manager's Guide to Globalization "Eileen Morgan provides us with a much needed roadmap for how to walk the path of ethical leadership with practical feet. She reminds us that ethical decision-making is a critical aspect of every day leadership, and that we can all choose to be 'ethical pioneers' in our companies and our communities. Every leader engaged in global business can benefit from the lessons and stories included in this book." -Christi A. Olson, Ph.D. Chair, Telecommunications Management Department, Golden Gate University "Eileen Morgan's thoughtful analysis of 'ethical capital' should be read by anyone who does business in a global environment…Morgan's book presents the issue clearly, comprehensively and compellingly, demonstrating that ethics is an indispensable aspect of individual leadership and organizational credibility. …It provides a clear roadmap for business leaders who need to communicate their commitment to integrity and accountability to their employees, their partners, and their customer, making their 'ethical capital' one of their most valuable assets." -Nell Minnow, Principal, Lens, The Corporate Governance Investors "Eileen Morgan gives excellent insight into ethical practices. She focuses on business but her insights have general application. This book also describes differences in ethical interpretation that can arise between diverse cultures. Ms. Morgan has made an excellent contribution to understanding the benefit of positive ethical practices." -David C. Lincoln, Sponsor, Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, College of Business, Arizona State University President, Arizona Oxides, LLC · First in-depth look at how managers in global companies actually bridge the gap between their organizations and their daily decisions · Explains the need for internal and external ethical operations¦and how organizations often create confusion rather than clarity with the label of "ethics". (shrink)

By investigating the status quo of the swimming training market in a certain area, we can obtain information on the current development of the swimming training market in a certain area and study the laws of the development of the market so as to provide a theoretical basis for the development of the market. This paper designs an evaluation algorithm suitable for swimming training based on the improved AlexNet network. The algorithm model uses a 3 × (...) 3 size convolution kernel to extract features, and the pooling layer uses a nonoverlapping pooling strategy. In order to accelerate the network convergence, the model introduces batch normalization technology. The algorithm uses data augmentation technology to expand the data set, including rotation and random erasure, to a certain extent alleviating the problem of overfitting. The results of the study showed that there were no significant differences in fat, minerals, protein, body mass index, basal metabolic rate, and total energy expenditure in the body composition ratios of children in the convolutional neural network assessment group and the control group, while muscle and total body water were not significantly different. However, there are significant differences in fat-free body weight and muscle strength of various segments of the body, among which there are very significant differences in muscle strength of lower limbs in each segment of the body. There were no significant differences in minerals, body mass index, basal metabolic rate, total energy expenditure, and lower limb muscle strength in the body composition ratios of men and women in the convolutional neural network assessment group. There are significant differences in body weight, upper limb muscle strength, and trunk muscle strength. There were no significant differences in the proportions of body composition between men and women in the control group, except for fat and protein. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we made. (...) It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

Law is indispensable to the public's health. The twentieth century proved this true as law contributed to each of the century's ten great public health achievements: vaccination, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, safer and healthier foods, fluoridation of drinking water, the control of infectious diseases, the decline in death from heart disease and stroke, recognition of tobacco use as a health hazard, motor vehicle safety, and safer workplaces.The readers of this journal can give examples of the relevant types (...) of laws with ease: Jacobson v. Massachusetts, the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of compulsory vaccination; mandatory immunization for school admission; authorization of state prenatal care programs; mandatory fortification of foods; Title X of the Public Health Service Act; the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906; the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, and hundreds of state and local enactments regulating food; fluoridation ordinanceswater, and sanitation; the Surgeon General's warning notices on cigarette packs and restrictions on marketing tobacco; seat belt laws and mandated vehicle and highway design features; and laws like the federal Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 that regulate working conditions. (shrink)

Arguably, the proposition that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens and the proposition that water is H2O are both a posteriori. Nevertheless, they both seem to be necessary. Ever since Davies and Humberstone :1–31, 1980), it has been known that two-dimensional semantics can account for this fact. But two-dimensionalism isn’t the only theory on the market that purports to do so. In this paper, I will look at two alternatives, one by Scott Soames and one by Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and (...) Peter Pagin, and argue that both of them fail. Regarding the former, I argue that the conceptually possible but metaphysically impossible worlds one is required to postulate are hard to conceive of on closer inspection. As for the latter, the proposal doesn’t work for certain modal sentences, and I show that it cannot be easily amended. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:684 Feminist Studies 43, no. 3. © 2017 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Megan Kaminski This Century This century is full-on burning the past past carrying back lost to re-memory the year brings millennial want: a bright new coat red shoes an end to oil pipelines and student loans encase us all in warmth not waged labor drab curtains pulled aside reveal window onto window echo us many permutations bring (...) responses wrought and metaled down empty that treasury steal back from church coffers there is something that binds more than moth-eaten sweaters more than stripped-soled shoes we wanting we to mean banks burning profits redistributed we holding the soft hands of we Megan Kaminski 685 This Century This century is not so good filled with tsunamis and snowstorms people displaced by capital and rising waters threaten to make even Kansas beach-front I’d like to stick a fork in the eye of the governor and the Koch brothers too help liberate people from bad shit minimum wage jobs and medical bills give all of us something real to be happy about like city parks clean water and a few fewer grams of rocket fuel in the arugula cats sunning themselves on warm days no old dudes wanting to mess with my uterus and a new sundress trimmed with ribbon This Century This century makes me say things about burning and baddies and whether poetry can really do much of anything unacknowledged legislator or just a lady ass atrophying perched in front of a laptop this century makes me write about changing and loving all of you and getting closer with warm-nosed nudges under your chin embraces while wearing my softest of sweaters these poems want to get out of my chair out of the house and the neighborhood out of capital and with people in favor of all of us animals and plants 686 Megan Kaminski This Century This century takes place in the streets in living rooms of friends in shared words exchanged across borders bridging the distance between you and me and we and ours and taking from board rooms and markets this century is full of things eroding making way for bodies for gardens for libraries for a commoning a burning of gates and fences and debts we spring forth in multitudes occupy more than street corners cordoned off we singing we and the streets the open fields... (shrink)

International agricultural development as practiced by U. S. sponsored research groups in developing countries has emphasized technical questions of production, ignoring more fundamental social and economic issues that underline rural poverty and hunger. Rethinking the role of U. S. development assistance will require transcending the view that the only way to impact agriculture in the Third World is by increasing the intensity of land use in high potential agricultural areas. The challenge is to find ways of how to further increase (...) agricultural productivity so that the rural poor significantly benefit, while at the same time conserving and regenerating the resource base. U. S. scientists must realize that this is only possible by improving the access of resource-poor farmers to land, water, other natural resources, as well as to equitable credit, markets, appropriate technologies, etc. Solidarious collaboration will emerge from the U. S. siding with progressive governments and/or community-based initiatives that promote political change aimed at securing farmers' control over resources and inputs, and changing the structural conditions and policies that perpetuate poverty. (shrink)

Chile needs to diversify its energy supply, and should establish policies that encourage the production and use of biofuels. The demand for energy resources increases with population growth and industrial development, making it urgent to find green alternatives to minimize the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions of traditional fuels. However, it is required that sophisticated strategies consider all externalities from the production of biofuels and should be established on the basis of protecting the environment, reducing GHG emissions and to avoid (...) violating human rights. This article presents the Chilean reality, based on ethical principles that should be guarded to regulate the bioenergy market. These principles are: human rights, environmental sustainability, climate change mitigation, right to a fair reward, and equitable distribution. It is concluded that in Chile the concentration of land and water for the development of extractive industries; and for agricultural and forestry purposes, contradicts the principle of human rights. The unequal distribution of income is also highlighted as part of a cycle of social injustice, with a high Gini coefficient . However, the policy of biofuels can be strengthened with the early use of second generation feedstock, the introduction of fair trade and regulation by the state to encourage participation of small farmers, and allows a position for Chile at the forefront of bioenergy production. (shrink)