Historicizing Food Production in Polynesia: A Case Study of 2700 years of Land Use on Ofu Island,American Samoa

Strategies and techniques of food production change throughout the world reflecting the influence of a range of social and ecological factors. Often excluded in discussions of changing cultivation strategies, however, are the structuring effects of history. Within this paper, an examination of how history structured changing food production over the last 2700 years is presented using a case study of the island of Ofu in the archipelago of Samoa. The environment of Ofu has been altered significantly since human colonization, and many of these changes were caused or modulated by cultivation strategies. These cultural landscapes were inherited by subsequent generations of producers, impacting future productive strategies. Far from being simple artifacts of the past, these modified landscapes created by past producers continue to be inherited and cultivated by modern groups.     

“They Will Take the Country from Us”: Labor Zionism,the Origins and Legacy of the “Other” in Israeli Mass Media,and Hegemonic Narratives

After 1948, Israel's governing elites embarked on a rigorous program of state building and settling hundreds of thousands of Jewish immigrants. In the process, the elites, primarily from the leading Mapai party, developed a process of othering Jewish immigrants from Arab countries, Arab citizens, and Orthodox Jews. They were physically segregated in their own schools and communities, and the elite culture described them as a threat against the European culture of Jewish immigrants from central Europe. The process targeted Mizrahi Jews before moving on to deplore the “demographic threat” of Orthodox Jews and resulted in the current normative hegemonic discourse in Israel that paints numerous groups as threatening the state. This article proposes a four‐part model for understanding “the other” in Israel: contemporary denial and nostalgia for a homogenous past, the view of Zionism as a civilizing mission, the application of separation of ethnic groups in planning, and demographic fear of the other. Altogether, they paint a picture of an Israel that has not come to grips with its past, and therefore continues the process of “othering” in its contemporary ethnocratic framework. Combining the analysis of geographic separation, and planning and media, it presents an innovative understanding of Israeli society.     

Soft Transport Policies and Ground‐Level Ozone: An Evaluation of the “Clear the Air Challenge” in Salt Lake City

In recent years, communities have begun to implement both “soft” and mandatory policies designed to address worsening air quality. Voluntary or soft transportation policies have included air quality alert systems that encourage people not to drive on days when the air quality index is above a specified threshold and public education/action campaigns that focus on reducing automobile related travel. In this article, we evaluate the effectiveness of one such soft policy, the Clear the Air Challenge (CAC), in reducing ground‐level ozone during the Wasatch Front's summer ozone season. Using daily ozone data and color‐coded daily air quality designations from 2006 through 2012, we estimate a range of nonequivalent control group models. In only one of the models does the CAC generate a statistically significant but small reduction in ground‐level ozone. Future research should assess the full range of costs and benefits to the public associated with such soft transport policies.     

Integrating Local and Regional in Pre-Contact Hawaiian Agriculture at Kahuku,Hawai‘i Island

ABSTRACT

The agricultural systems of the Hawaiian archipelago were some of the most intensive in the Pacific and this scale of intensity is well illustrated by the large agricultural landscapes of leeward Hawai‘i Island. Previous research in the area has centred on understanding the relationship between agriculture, political process, and large-scale environmental conditions. Much of this research has been oriented at the regional level, privileging discussion of elite management and oversight, with only limited investigation exploring farmer-centric adaptation at local scales. In this paper, we assess the integration of local and regional processes in Hawaiian agriculture using recent paired archaeological and ecological data from the Ka‘ū Field System as a case study. We demonstrate the presence of both general patterns previously identified in the archipelago and particular adaptations to the local environment of Kahuku ahupua‘a. In particular, we highlight targeted infrastructural developments that allowed for cultivation of what would otherwise be a difficult cultivation medium within the confines of a larger, likely regionally organised, field system constrained by general soil biogeochemical thresholds. We argue that such investigations provide an increased understanding on how these large-scale agricultural landscapes were formed by integration at multiple social and spatial scales.