Natural and unnatural complexities: flood control along Manitoba's Assiniboine River

Flooding and flood control long have been topics of concern for geographers and historians of North America, from Gilbert White's foundational work to attempts to understand the recent disaster in New Orleans. This paper considers the problem of flood control along the Assiniboine River in the province of Manitoba, Canada. The first section addresses the local landscape and the larger context, explaining changes in the relevant human and physical geography. The second section examines efforts to mitigate flooding, focusing on how the risk of inundation was shifted in location (not eliminated altogether) and compounded through time (not progressively resolved). The third focuses on a further source of complexity: the contested character of government jurisdiction. This final section also addresses major mid twentieth century changes in mitigation efforts: in the light of flooding on an unprecedented scale, governments became more open to compromise and more willing to undertake substantial projects. Gilbert White asserted that while floods are natural occurrences, flood damages are the responsibility of humanity. The question of responsibility might seem relatively clear in relation to flood mitigation, given that dykes are human constructions. The history of flood mitigation along the Assiniboine would suggest, however, that assigning responsibility for the failures and successes of flood mitigation is not so straightforward.     

Why foragers choose acorns before salmon: Storage,mobility, and risk in aboriginal California

Despite the enormous potential of anadromous fish, foragers do not mass extract and store salmonids until very late in the archaeological record of California. Acorns, by contrast, were intensively used quite early in the record. Salmon are traditionally viewed as a low cost, high ranking resource, and acorns as a high cost, low ranking resource. The question thus arises: why were salmon not used and stored en masse much earlier? We offer a solution using a simple foraging model that distinguishes resources on their storage as well as overall cost, making it possible to calculate the risk of resource caching, which appears to have delayed intensive salmon procurement in California.     

Maradidae: a new family of vombatomorphian marsupial from the late Oligocene of Riversleigh,northwestern Queensland

Black, K., March 2007. Maradidae: a new family of vombatomorphian marsupial from the late Oligocene of Riversleigh, northwestern Queensland. Alcheringa 31, 17-32. ISSN 0311-5518.

Marada arcanum gen. et sp. nov. is described from the late Oligocene Hiatus Site, Riversleigh World Heritage Property, northwestern Queensland. Although known from only a single dentary, it is assigned to a new family Maradidae, based on a unique combination of both plesiomorphic and apomorphic features. Of the known vombatomorphians, Marada is most similar to primitive wynyardiids and diprotodontoids (palorchestids and diprotodontids). Further clarification of the phylogenetic position of Maradidae within Vombatomorphia requires discovery of upper dentitions and crania.

Karen Black [k.black@unsw.edu.au], Vertebrate Palaeontology Laboratory, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052, Australia; received 17.1.2005, revised 1.6.2005.     

Book reviews

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF THE BRITISH LABOUR GOVERNMENT 1945–1951, by M. A. Fitzsimmons. University of Notre Dame Press, 1953.

DEMOGRAPHIC YEARBOOK, 1952; United Nations Statistical Office; New York, 1952.

SEARCH AFTER SUNRISE, by Vera Britain, 1951; London, Macmillan; pp. 271.

GOVERNMENTAL POLICIES CONCERNING UNEMPLOYMENT, INFLATION AND BALANCE OF PAYMENTS, 1951–2. United Nations publication, November, 1952; pp. viii and 135; price one U.S. dollar.

THE STATE THE ENEMY, by Sir Ernest Benn. Benn, London, 1953; pp. 175; price 12/6 (stg.).

CONGRESS. ITS CONTEMPORARY ROLE, by Earnest S. Griffith; New York University Press; New York, 1951; pp. vii and 191; 3.50 U.S. dollars.     

Breaking the Convention: Researching the "Illegal" Migration of Refugees to Europe

The study of refugees by geographers and other social scientists is, almost by definition, framed around a series of legal categories, which provide us with more or less neat categories of types of involuntary migrants. Yet the process of migration emerges in relation to legal categories and is not simply dictated by them. Thus, as legislation on migration in general and the interpretation of the 1951 Geneva Convention in particular have become more restrictive, patterns of migration have increasingly emerged that manipulate, circumvent or simply break existing legislation.
This paper examines the responses by researchers in geography and related disciplines to asylum–seeking and other forms of migration that are increasingly categorised as "illegal" as a result of recent European policy developments. Specifically, the potential for participatory and/or emancipatory research in such circumstances is explored, through comparative analysis of the ethical issues involved in radical research on a range of "trafficking" scenarios. The interaction of such research with public policy–making is also examined.     

Policy Subsystems and Regimes: Organized Interests and Climate Change Policy

This research is an examination of the role of organized interests in international climate change policy formation. Systematic survey results are used to demonstrate that organized interests actually engage in the same activities in both the international and domestic arenas. This research demonstrates that the climate change negotiations can be characterized as both a policy subsystem and an international regime. It is further argued that these two concepts are in fact highly analogous, thereby facilitating new cross-discipline research opportunities. The research is based on a web survey of organized interests accredited by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and on interviews and field research at the 8th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in New Delhi, India.