Exploring the context and elements of local environmental stewardship: An embedded case study of the Niagara Region,Canada

Environmental stewardship—a concept that describes the relationships between humans and the environment—is gaining increased attention as an approach that can address planetary sustainability issues. In-depth empirical investigations of local environmental stewardship are needed to understand how social-ecological context influences stewardship, as well as the arrangement of conceptual elements in applied settings. This study addresses these needs by conducting an in-depth exploration of environmental stewardship in the Niagara Region of Canada. A single embedded case study design is employed, with environmental stewardship initiatives constituting the individual units of analysis with the case. Analysis of the spatial arrangement of a total of 89 initiatives indicated that initiatives tended to cluster closer to the Niagara River and in more populous municipalities. The significance of collaboration, tensions between the environment and economic development, and concerns about political impacts emerged as themes across contextual factors. The configuration of stewardship elements reveals interesting discrepancies between initiatives and previous stewardship research focused on larger scales, individuals, and organizations. Further analysis is encouraged to illuminate environmental stewardship in other settings as well as advance relational understanding of conceptual elements.     

Regulatory Alchemy: How the Water Cycle Becomes Capital in the California Desert

A proposed project will take water from an aquifer in the California desert to the coast. Lacking final approvals more than 30 years after it started, the project remains a plan despite sizeable opposition. What is its secret? In this paper, I examine the imaginaries of the underground aquifer underneath the lands of Cadiz Inc, the project proponent. While local theories insist the company is at the centre of a Chinatown conspiracy, I argue that the company stays alive through regulatory alchemy, a term that reveals the magic at the heart of scientific and regulatory approval processes. I examine narratives of the aquifer in environmental compliance and financial reporting in order to reveal how regulatory processes become the conditions of profit-making, building on debates in critical legal geography and political ecology.     

The Essential Body: Mesopotamian Conceptions of the Gendered Body

Linguistic, art historical, hermeneutic, gender and intercultural analyses clarify body and gender concepts in Sumerian and Akkadian mythology, literature and visual arts. The body was a fundamental point of reference in ancient Mesopotamia, metaphor for the total self, royal ideology, cities, humanity and deities. Humanity was created without gender; sex, gender and social status were subsequently inscribed on the body. Gender taxonomy tolerated ambiguity beyond the ‘normative’ masculine/feminine. Body and mind were an inseparable unity and denoted by the same Sumerian word. Mind/body and male/female dichotomy were unknown.     

Bringing Order Out of Chaos: Stanisław August Poniatowski’s Political Patronage of Architectural Classicism in the Late Eighteenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth

This article examines the political uses of classical architecture in the late eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It focuses specifically on the direct connection between the rise of the classical idiom on the eve of the collapse of the Commonwealth and the ill-fated idea of political recuperation of the deteriorating and dysfunctional state under the aegis of King Stanis?aw August Poniatowski (r. 1764–95). In particular, it outlines the extent and character of Polish-Lithuanian architectural classicism’s political engagement in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It also underscores the specific role of this architectural idiom as a political symbol and instrument of propaganda, which served to represent the idea of restoring political order to the Commonwealth and building a strong and self-sustaining political community headed by the king. Finally, it presents a selection of characteristic buildings and publications that contributed to this political discourse, and examines the ways classical architecture retained a political importance in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795.     

Who ate the birds: the taphonomy of Sarakenos Cave,Greece

The taphonomic analysis of avian remains from Sarakenos Cave reveals that, contrary to previous suggestions, many bird bones excavated there represent food remains of the Eagle Owls rather than humans. The conclusion is based on the presence of traces of digestion, beak and claw punctures, and indirect evidence that includes relative preservation of particular elements, species composition, the lack of cut marks, and the absence of numerous traces of burning. Specimens with medullary bone and traces of digestion indicate that the owls killed breeding females in spring. Since it is unlikely that owls shared the cave with humans at the same time, it supports the notion based on archeological evidence that human groups did not inhabit it permanently.     

Late Middle Palaeolithic occupations in Ciemna Cave,southern Poland

Recent excavations in Ciemna Cave in the Pr?dnik valley near Ojców, southern Poland have brought to light new stratigraphic and techno-typological evidence concerning Late Middle Palaeolithic groups and their cultural affinities. In 2007, excavations began in the hitherto-unexplored main chamber of Ciemna Cave, with the goal of clarifying the results of previous work in other parts of the cave. During excavation the rocky floor of the cave was reached. About 1000 stone artifacts have been collected to date. Three cultural traditions have been documented: Mousterian, Taubachian, and Micoquian. Within the Micoquian tradition, three cultural levels were observed, which enriches the previous understanding of occupational phases at the site. These findings permit revision of the traditional terms “Pr?dnik industry” and “Pr?dnik technique.”     

Spatial variation in cervical cancer screening participation and outcomes among Indigenous and non‐Indigenous Australians in Queensland

Indigenous women continue to experience a disproportionately higher burden of cervical cancer than non‐Indigenous women in Australia. The National Indigenous Cervical Screening Project used probabilistic record linkage to combine population‐based administrative databases and identify Indigenous women on Pap Smear Registers. This study aimed to quantify the spatial variation by local government areas (LGAs) for Indigenous and non‐Indigenous women in Queensland in cervical screening participation rates and related outcomes. Empirical Bayes local geostatistical smoothing was performed to reduce the likelihood of spurious variation between small areas. The cohort included 1,091,260 women (2 per cent Indigenous) aged 20 to 69 with 2,393,708 Pap smears between 2006 and 2011. Indigenous women had smoothed LGA‐specific 5‐year participation rates (interquartile range (IQR) 38.9–53.3 per 100 eligible women) consistently lower than non‐Indigenous women (IQR 80.7–85.3). The non‐overlapping confidence intervals of these rates suggest that the Indigenous differential was significant. Compared with Indigenous women, non‐Indigenous women had consistently lower and more stable prevalence rates of histologically confirmed high grade abnormalities (IQR 8.0–10.1 versus 15.0–21.3 per 1,000 screened women). Although the LGA‐specific rates also suggest that a higher proportion of non‐Indigenous women were followed‐up within two months of an abnormal screening result, the wide confidence intervals for these estimates limit our ability to draw definitive conclusions about spatial patterns for this outcome. These findings highlight the importance of continued monitoring and ongoing efforts to identify drivers of these patterns and develop effective strategies to improve participation and potentially reduce the cervical cancer burden among Indigenous women.