ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY AND COMPETITIVE STRUCTURE: IMPLICATIONS OF THE HAZARDOUS WASTE MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA) assigns the Environmental Protection Agency responsibility for protecting the public from hazards created by industrial wastes. The Agency has understandably used its mandate to construct cradle to grave regulation of waste substances that pose health hazards. The regulations, however, are likely to hike costs of legal disposal by increasing the demand for disposal sites, while at the same time reducing the supply. The higher cost of disposal may give an advantage to larger, existing firms, may deter entry of new firms to both waste generating and disposal industries, and promote illicit disposal. RCRA therefore may have the paradoxical result of increasing public exposure to hazardous wastes.     

A Feasibility Study for the Investigation of Submerged Sites along the Coast of Slovenia

Maritime investigations along the Northern Adriatic coast have traditionally focused on the Roman and later archaeology. However, studies of post-glacial sea-level change and shoreline displacement suggest there is significant potential for the discovery of sites close inshore dating back to the early- to mid-Holocene, c .9000 BC onwards. A feasibility study for the investigation of submerged sites along the coast of Slovenia was undertaken in 2005. Here we describe the project rationale and research design, the survey and recording methods used, the logistical problems encountered, the results obtained (regardless of age), and the prospects for future research in the region.
© 2009 The Authors     

Building in Colonial Louisiana: Creolization and the Survival of French Traditions

Documents and limited archaeological evidence indicate that the building methods of the Louisiana Acadians during the colonial period strongly reflected a heritage of late-medieval and early-modern French methods and techniques of constructing vernacular buildings.     

“WHAT HAS POSTERITY EVER DONE FOR ME?”: FUTURE GENERATIONS,INTERGENERATIONAL JUSTICE,AND THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF DISTANT FUTURES

“Future generations” play a key role in current political debates. In the context of the climate crisis especially, political controversies are often framed as moral problems of “intergenerational justice.” This article aims to historicize the use of the concept of “future generations” in modern political discourse and to uncover its long—and often ambivalent—history. Its main argument is that talking about “future generations” was part of an attempt to integrate (distant) futures into the political discourse of the time. The first part of the article outlines a theoretical perspective on the relationship between generations and temporalities. The second part focuses on how anticipating “future generations” became an important part of the history of utopian thinking and political planning in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially in the realm of demographic and economic discussions. The third part analyzes the emergence of “future ethics” and “intergenerational justice” as important political discourses in the 1970s. This part refers both to the academic debates about “future generations” and to the way political decision-makers used the concept to legitimize their policies. The article argues that the concept of “future generations” should not be taken as an ethical principle that transcended the political debates of the present. Rather, it was itself the result of intense political controversies.