Contesting uneven development: The political geography of natural gas rents in Peru and Bolivia

Political and academic debates about the distribution of resource rents to producing areas have addressed the issue of whether or not the transfers unleash conflicts. While this kind of debate is valid, the present paper argues that such a discussion is missing the point regarding the processes behind said types of conflicts, as well as how such conflicts are framed at the sub-national political geography of the state. By more deeply exploring these dimensions, the argument of this paper is that the production of uneven development within sub-national areas is crucial for understanding the above-mentioned conflicts and how the central state internalises those conflicts, producing new political geographies of rent distribution. As such, different territorial discourses of autonomy emerge along with uneven development, but their capacity to reach institutional autonomy is grounded on the spatial politics of each state. Empirically, this paper analyses how natural gas rents are distributed to sub-national producing areas in Peru and Bolivia, and how the production of uneven development through natural gas rents at sub-national level re-activated previous territorial demands for autonomy, which were internalised by central states in different ways.     

Avian resource depression or intertaxonomic variation in bone density? A test with San Francisco Bay avifaunas

Previous analyses of the Emeryville Shellmound fauna suggested that ever-expanding late Holocene human populations of the San Francisco Bay area depressed a wide range of vertebrate taxa, including cormorants (Phalacrocorax), geese (Anserinae), and large shorebirds (e.g., Numenius, Limosa). Far-reaching implications for prehistoric human behavior, historical ecology, and modern conservation biology have resulted from that work. We test the generality of the bird-based conclusions here by documenting temporal trends in avifaunal abundances from five additional sites located on the San Francisco Peninsula. Analyses of these data reveal patterns identical to those found at Emeryville, showing significant declines through time in the relative abundances of both geese and cormorants between about 2000 and 700 B.P. New photon absorptiometric-based density data for cormorants, geese, and ducks (Anatinae) are used to determine if the declines through time in the relative abundances of geese and cormorants are correlated with variation in the extent of density-mediated attrition observed in these faunas. The data and analyses presented here suggest that while density-mediated attrition played a role in structuring element abundances in these avifaunas, there is no evidence that it varied systematically through time to produce the revealed patterns in taxonomic abundances. Resource depression thus remains a viable hypothesis for the declining abundances of large-sized waterbirds during the late Holocene of the San Francisco Bay region. The new bone density data we present should be useful to analyses of archaeological and paleontological avifaunas wherever these or related taxa are found around the world.     

中国旅游资源的开发评价、途径和对策

分别从历史发展和多民族分布对文化风光,从地域分异规律对自然风光进行旅游开发评价,划分中国1级旅游文化区,以华北区为例划分2、3级旅游文化区,对海内外客人分层次讨论其旅游目的地选择。区域旅游不能完全取代跨区的长线旅游。指出中国旅游开发的途径和对策,对中国旅游业发展要有一个清醒的估计,不能有过高的期望。     

Corporate ecology: BC Hydro’s Stikine-Iskut project and the unbuilt environment

For every successful megaproject, there are dozens that have failed to launch, left as paper remains, imaginary geographies of development and enterprise. Although most scholarly attention focuses understandably on the projects which have been built, we need to look again at those projects that have been put aside, rejected, and cancelled. Failed projects produce unbuilt environments, and these have their own peculiar effects. This paper interrogates the planning, development, debate and abandonment of a massive infrastructure project in a remote area of northwest British Columbia. BC Hydro’s attempt to build five dams on the Stikine and Iskut Rivers in the late 1970s and early 1980s never materialized. However, in the ten-year attempt to justify the economic and environmental cost of the proposed dams, BC Hydro commissioned several dozen large resource inventories and analyses of biophysical, cultural, socioeconomic and hydrological data in the Stikine Watershed, where this information had been largely absent. In doing so, BC Hydro circumscribed the terms of the debate around dam construction, framed the constituents of the debate and reordered knowledge about the region. Locals and other interested parties began to engage with the river differently. I argue that the apparatuses of scientific, engineering and technological engagement that were implemented by BC Hydro resulted in both material and discursive changes to nature in the Stikine. I develop the concept of ‘unbuilt environments’ to understand the changes that emerge in the wake of failed infrastructure projects.     

A Call to Action: New Party Candidates and the 1931 General Election*

Sir Oswald Mosley established his New Party in early 1931. It proposed to cut across the party and class divides, with the objective of providing a ‘national’ solution to the economic crisis of the time. According to Mosley, the ‘old parties’– meaning the Labour, Conservative and Liberal Parties – had revealed themselves unable to adapt to the post‐war age. In their place, he argued, a modern organisation, based on youth, vitality and a scientifically reasoned economic plan, was needed to save Britain from terminal decline. Few heeded his call, and the party ultimately paved the way for the British Union of Fascists to emerge in 1932. Nevertheless, the New Party fought the general election of 1931, offering an unsuccessful but suitably intriguing challenge to the National coalition and Labour Party. This article will assess the New Party's election campaign, concentrating on those who briefly rallied to Mosley's appeal only to fall foul of the ballot box. In other words, it provides a case study of those who contributed to a dramatic electoral failure, and traces a significant stage along Mosley's journey to fascism.     

The Broad Spectrum Revolution at 40: Resource diversity,intensification, and an alternative to optimal foraging explanations

More than 40 years ago Kent Flannery coined the term Broad Spectrum Revolution (BSR) in reference to a broadening of the subsistence base of Late Pleistocene hunter–gatherers in the Near East that preceded and helped pave the way for the domestication and plants and animals and the emergence of agriculture. Set within a demographic density model that projected differential rates of population growth and emigration in different resource zones of the Near East, Flannery’s BSR quickly became a global construct linking resource diversification and intensification to imbalances between population and environmental carrying capacity. In recent years the BSR has proven especially attractive to researchers working within an optimal foraging theory (OFT) framework in which diversification and intensification of subsistence only occurs within the context of resource depression, caused by either demographic pressure or environmental deterioration. This OFT perspective, that situates human societies in a one-way adaptive framework as they are forced to adapt to declining availability of optimal resources, however, is increasingly being called into question. Numerous examples of diversification and intensification are being documented in contexts of resource abundance shaped, in part, by deliberate human efforts at ecosystem engineering intended to promote resource productivity. An alternative approach, framed within a newer paradigm from evolutionary biology, niche construction theory (NCT), provides a more powerful explanatory framework for the BSR wherever it occurred.     

Discovering Networked Information in the Internet Age: The JISC Resource Guide to Geography & the Environment

As networked information resources are used ever more in higher edu cation, the requirement for subject-specific, quality-assured resource selection assumes greater importance. The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee has implemented the Resource Guide initiative in which seven subject-specific printed and web-based guides to electronic resources have been provided. The centralised coordination of the guides ensures consistency in resource awareness across UK higher education and the training element packaged within each aims to improve students' approaches to resource discovery.     

对外汉语文化教学对博物馆资源的利用问题研究

对外汉语文化教学是对外汉语工作中一个不可或缺的重要部分,然而在具体的对外汉语文化教学工作中也存在着不少问题和有待改良的地方。博物馆是一个重要的文化教育社会机构,其丰富的文化资源与对外汉语文化教学有着不同程度的契合之处。本文从对外汉语文化教学的需求与博物馆资源能为其提供的帮助出发,研究对外汉语文化教学对博物馆资源的利用问题。     

Split phalanges from archaeological sites: evidence of nutritional stress?

Broken animal phalanges from archaeological sites have been widely used as an indicator of nutritional stress of the prehistoric people due to the low caloric return rate (caloric yield/processing time) of the phalanges. Although it sounds logical, this widely popular argument is based on Binford’s (1978) interview with the Nunamiut and lacks empirical support. In this study, we present the results of experimental studies conducted on 142 modern cow (Bos taurus) and deer (Odocoileus virginianus) first phalanges to document the processing of phalanges, such as the required force and processing time to break them open, possible methods of breaking phalanges, and the resultant breakage and surface modification patterns. This comparative dataset and ethnographic data from contemporary hunter-gatherer groups indicate that broken phalanges in and of themselves cannot be taken as evidence of resource stress. The phalanges do not require substantial amount of processing time and marrow from the phalanges could have been preferred for its taste and soft texture during the period when resources were not scarce. This may explain the bone breakage pattern from an 8800 year old archaeological assemblage from Tangzigou in southwest China, where phalanges were intensively broken without any other evidence of resource stress.     

?Theorising a Realm of Practice?: introducing archaeological heritage management as a research field

The paper introduces the field of archaeological heritage management, and the four papers on this subject here presented. Comparisons are made with Cultural Resource Management, Cultural Heritage Management and Archaeological Heritage Management. The research discussed here examines the management of archaeology in practical situations, including those involving indigeneity, to develop a body of theory that will help to illuminate such practice in terms of our own contemporary culture.