Kiowa voices: Echoes and reverberations

Maurice Boyd. Kiowa Voices: Ceremonial Dance, Ritual and Song, Volume 1. Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1981. xx + 164 pp. Illustrations, footnotes, bibliography, index. $29.95 cloth.     

Locating the voices of the sterilized

Scholars have been studying eugenics and sterilization for years, but only recently have some begun to examine these issues from the point of view of those sterilized. This is in large part because so few records containing the voices of the sterilized exist or are accessible to scholars. This essay examines my own effort to recover the voices of women sterilized in the post-baby boom United States from the "bottom up" and includes my own experience researching and writing Fit to Be Tied?: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1960-1984. It represents the beginning of a discussion about locating and using sources containing the voices of the sterilized and working with the limitations inherent to them.     

Raise your voices! Civilian protest in civil wars

Under what conditions do protests occur in civil wars? Evidence from case studies suggests that protests can indeed play an important role in contexts of civil wars, with civilians using respective tactics both against the state and rebels. We argue that localities experiencing armed clashes are likely to see protest events in the same month. Civilians conduct protests due to battle-related changes in the local opportunity structures and grievances related to losses experienced through collateral damage. Using spatially disaggregated data on protest and battle events in African civil wars, we find support for our hypothesis that battles trigger civilian protests. This effect is robust to the inclusion of a comprehensive list of confounding variables and alternative model specifications, including the use of different temporal and spatial units. Our findings highlight the role of the civilian population and the spatial relationship between war events and protests in civil wars.     

Smoking bans for private vehicles: children's rights and children's voices

Smoking bans have recently expanded to private vehicles in which children are present. This study considers the place of children's rights and children's voices in this policy initiative, with respect to the Canadian context, where vehicular smoking bans have been widely adopted. First, we examine print media reports, finding children's right to health was acknowledged less frequently than an array of competing adult rights. Children's voices were largely absent from the record. Second, we report on focus groups involving 23 young people in Edmonton, Alberta, highlighting participants' strong support for bans, based on their knowledge of health harms, aversion to smoke, and awareness that children have limited ability to contest adult authority in vehicles. We conclude that vehicular smoking bans may address the situation whereby children are forced to share an unhealthy environment, in breach of their rights.     

Dis-placed voices: sense of place and place-identity on the Sunshine Coast

The geographical literature on place interrogates, amongst other notions, sense of place, place identity, and their connections or disruptions. Although notions of place are multiple and very fluid, place transformation in rural and regional areas may be more rapid than the changing understandings of place held by residents. This research examines notions of place held by residents on the Sunshine Coast of Australia, one of the fastest growing ‘sea change’ regions in the nation. It presents a reading of empirical material that suggests sense of place and place-identity cannot be easily equated in the region. Sense of place was more important to rural and long-term residents than was the place-identity. Landscape change in the region is narrated, and images of place-identity interpreted, to suggest that place-identity has been created and imposed by the globalising forces of development, rather than emanating from many resident's perspectives. Those local voices have been, and continue to be, successively displaced and disrupted. Thus discursive power in various ways shapes and is shaped by dominant place-identity in the region, and some voices are blocked by the discourses of urbanisation. The unequal geographies of power shaping the regional landscape need to be acknowledged within place transformation processes. These geographies of power suggest that sense of place can be thought of as a ‘view from the bottom’, while place-identity primarily functions as a ‘view from the top’.     

Gender and environmental struggles: voices from Adivasi Garo community in Bangladesh

Based on an ethnographic field investigation conducted on the matrilineal–matrilocal Garo community of Bangladesh, this article provides a historical account of local environmental struggles to draw attention to the interconnections between gender, environment and sustainable resource management. From a feminist political ecology perspective, the article argues that interacting with traditional culture, forest ecology and changing processes of centric resource governance, gender remains a salient variable in environmental issues. Local contexts of gender dynamics help configuring local people's mode of participation in environmental struggles as well as being the consequence of those struggles. Findings suggest that Garo women and men have sustained gender specific roles and interests through their struggles to ensure control over forest lands and tree resources. Furthermore, they have developed a class-based relationship with forest ecology which must be acknowledged in forest policies.     

神农架自然保护区

神农架是我国唯一以“架”命名的华中地区最高山——华中屋脊。神农架自然保护区始建于1982年，1986年经国务院批准为国家级森林和野生动物类型自然保护区；     

Man And Nature

In an introductory lecture to freshmen of Moscow University's Geography Faculty, the man-nature relationship is analyzed in terms of the interplay of entropic and negentropic processes. Entropy is used in the sense of a leveling trend or degradation, and involves the dissemination of materials and goods. Negentropy refers to accumulation, concentration, enhancing of diversity and contrasts. In the original world of inert nature, entropy was dominant. With the appearance of life on earth, the negentropic process assumed significance as living matter accumulated the sun's energy and concentrated it in the form of fossil fuels, forests, etc. In the present man-altered environment, termed the noosphere (sphere of the mind), both entropic and negentropic trends are apparent. First, man concentrates chemical elements for processing; then, he disseminates them to users or, in the case of waste products, into the air and water. The dissemination of radioactive materials through fallout and waste disposal is the most hazardous form of the entropic process. The pollution danger may be reduced by adding to the present sequence of “concentration—dissemination” an additional element, namely “reconcentration,” meaning the recovery of useful products from wastes.     

The Problematic Nature of Nature: The Post-constructivist Challenge to Environmental History

This article discusses the program of environmental history within the larger discipline of history and contrasts it with more recent contributions from post‐constructivist science. It explores the ways in which post‐constructivism has the potential to productively address many of the shortcomings of environmental history's theories and models that environmental historians themselves have begun to view with a critical eye. The post‐constructivist authors discussed in this article, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, both represent challenges to the ways in which nature and the natural sciences tend to be conceptualized as non‐problematized entities within environmental history. They also challenge the ways in which dichotomies of nature and culture tend to be reproduced within the program of environmental history. It is argued that these post‐constructivist contributions represent a radical and arguably more truly historical way of introducing non‐human actors into the historical narrative, and thus represent a potential reinvigoration of environmental history that would embrace a more radical historicity, greater diversity, and openness to difference.     

亲密接触大自然--俄罗斯赤塔之旅散记

2004年7月,全国党报社长、总编辑研讨会在满洲里召开,会议安排了去俄罗斯赤塔市采访观光。三天的赤塔之行,让人感受最深的是俄罗斯民族对大自然的呵护和亲近。呵护自然由满洲里至赤塔480公里的旅程,可谓是地广人稀。沿途所见的30余个市镇村落,千户以上不过二三,多是百余户、几十户。彼此隔着几十或是十几公里的茫茫荒野林海,大多没有人烟、牛羊、耕地。由于人烟稀少,即便是公路两侧的荒草,也十分茂盛,厚厚的,一层盖着一层,将地面遮掩得严严实实;在林区,路边的原始树木也比比皆是。在拥有丰富自然资源的同时,是俄罗斯人对大自然的倍加珍惜与…     

掌握生态摄影 探索自然万物

生态摄影是近年来新兴的生态传播中的一个重要主题,它是将生态学和摄影术联系起来的一种摄影理念,是摄影者生态意识的物化表现,同时,又兼具科研、科普和艺术审美的复合功能,是摄影在生态文明社会的新发展.