A regional comparison of the implications of climate change for the golf industry in Canada

Golf is a recreation industry particularly sensitive to climate, yet the potential implications of climate change for the industry remain largely unexamined. This study presents findings of the first known impact assessment to compare the regional impacts of projected changes in the climate on the golf industry in Canada (or internationally). Empirical relationships between daily rounds played and four weather variables were defined through multiple regression analysis and then used to examine the potential impacts of two climate change scenarios on the length of the golf season and the number of rounds played in three regions of Canada (West Coast, Great Lakes, East Coast). Regionally, the West Coast region was projected to benefit the least from projected climate change, as golf courses that are currently open year round experienced only slight projected increases in rounds played in the 2020s and 2050s. Golf courses in the Great Lakes region could experience a 10- to 51-day longer average golf season and a 21 percent to 3 percent increase in rounds as early as the 2020s, and an even more pronounced increase in the 2050s. East Coast golf courses were projected to benefit the most under both climate change scenarios, experiencing larger gains in average operating seasons (25 to 45 days in the 2020s) and a 40 percent to 48 percent increase in rounds played by as early as the 2020s.     

The making of classical Edinburgh: A review

The proposed Scottish Environmental Protection Agency is one mechanism by which Government is seeking to put into practice the principles of sustainable development. This is an acknowledgement in part that to effect sustainable development demands innovative policies and institutional arrangements. The paper sets out the nature of the existing and administrative and regulatory arrangements for environmental protection and pollution in Scotland. The established administrative hierarchy of individual bodies, responsibilities, functions and powers provides the context within which the proposed agency will operate. The article reviews the distinctive structure and remit of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency and considers the advantages and disadvantages of creating a centralised, independent organisation.     

The founding of the Edinburgh medical school

This article seeks to show that the usual accounts of the founding of the Edinburgh Medical Faculty in 1726 give undue prominence to John Monro, an Edinburgh surgeon, and to George Drummond, later Lord Provost of Edinburgh. They do so because their authors have ignored the ways in which patronage appointments, such as medical professorships, were and had been dispensed in the city of Edinburgh and in its university. There the Town Council was only nominally independent when it came to making professors. Medical historians have been equally cavalier in their treatment of the roles of leading politicians, especially of Archibald Campbell, first Earl of Ilay and later third Duke of Argyll, who was the most important Scottish politician working between c. 1716 and his death inl 1761. A more realistic view of the history of Scottish medicine would not ignore the realities of politics and the relation of these to institutions, such as the Edinburgh Medical Faculty.     

A Family Business: The Bartholomews of Edinburgh in the First World War

This article examines the lived experience of the Bartholomew family of Edinburgh during the course of the First World War. Families, as much as nations, empires and other communities, were important participants in the conflict that collapsed the boundaries between the various battlefronts and homefront like none before. The Bartholomews’ letters to one another were the chief means by which the shared experience of total war was mediated and constructed, as well as a vital source for ascertaining the role played by the family in their nation’s war effort. In them, we can see the way unpalatable truths were concealed beneath literary tropes, drawn from the language of glory and sacrifice, but also the way such sentiments were real and deeply felt to a generation not yet experienced in the cynicism and sarcasm that the war occasioned in the English language as much as the mind. These letters also represent a form of organically created propaganda that sustained the Bartholomews’ morale and commitment to the war effort, and also their collective identity as a family unit, despite the scattering of parents and siblings from Edinburgh, to Flanders, and northern Italy.     

Multiple multiculturalisms: insights from the Edinburgh Mela

This paper contributes to debates about the future of multiculturalism in Britain by exploring how it is conceptualized, constructed and experienced in contemporary Scotland. The work is grounded in Hall's (2000) important but commonly overlooked distinction between a ‘multicultural society’, which designates a condition of cultural diversity, and ‘multiculturalism’, which refers to processes and policies that attempt to fix the meaning of such diversity. As these definitions suggest, the abandonment of multiculturalism as a ‘policy failure’ cannot be a solution to problems arising from the complex composition of contemporary societies. The fact that all societies must make decisions about the significance of cultural diversity and its management—they must all practise some form of multiculturalism—is established through a review of how multiculturalism has been conceptualized and pursued to date. The paper then draws on the example of Edinburgh's South Asian Festival—the Mela—to explore the empirical complexities of these different applications in a Scottish context. An analysis of the Mela's changing organization and artistic programme over time reveals the coexistence of multiple conceptions of multiculturalism—in time, space and experience. This progressive reinterpretation of multiculturalism—as multiple—advances the goals of both cultural diversity and societal cohesiveness.     

Womanliness in the Slums: A Free Kindergarten in Early Twentieth‐Century Edinburgh

This paper considers the intersection of Spiritual Motherhood, early childhood education and child welfare in early twentieth‐century Edinburgh. Its focus is St Saviour's Child Garden (SSCG), which opened in the Canongate, in November 1906, part of the Free Kindergarten movement that emerged in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century. The paper focuses on the SSCG's founder Lileen Hardy, in order to trace the development of this new approach to child welfare and women's work in Britain. It discusses her training at the Sesame House for Home‐Life Training in London, her move to Edinburgh, and the network of predominantly women reformers, whose interests ranged from urban reform to medical welfare, she found there. It shows how this network facilitated the founding of the SSCG and discusses the form it took and Hardy's implementation of a modified form of Froebelian praxis. In so doing its concern is to show how Free Kindergarten forms part of a wider history of social welfare and urban reform as well as to the history of early childhood education, and to move attention away from the men usually associated with innovations in Scottish social reform like Patrick Geddes, and onto a group of women who created a women and child‐centred proto‐Welfare State in pre‐First World War Edinburgh.