Mining sick: Creatively unsettling normative narratives about industry,environment, extraction,and the health geographies of rural,remote, northern,and Indigenous communities in British Columbia

Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities on Turtle Island are routinely—as Cree Elder Willie Ermine says—pathologized. Social science and health scholarship, including scholarship by geographers, often constructs Indigenous human and physical geographies as unhealthy, diseased, vulnerable, and undergoing extraction. These constructions are not inaccurate: peoples and places beyond urban metropoles on Turtle Island live with higher burdens of poor health; Indigenous peoples face systemic violence and racism in colonial landscapes; rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are sites of industrial incursions; and many rural and remote geographies remain challenging for diverse Indigenous peoples. What, however, are the consequences of imagining and constructing people and places as “sick”? Constructions of “sick” geographies fulfill and extend settler (often European white) colonial narratives about othered geographies. Rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous geographies are discursively “mined” for narratives of sickness. This mining upholds a sense of health and wellness in southern, urban, Euro‐white‐settler imaginations. Drawing from multi‐year, relationship‐based, cross‐disciplinary qualitative community‐informed experiences, and anchored in feminist, anti‐colonial, and anti‐racist methodologies that guided creative and humanities‐informed stories, this paper concludes with different stories. It unsettles settler‐colonial powers reliant on constructing narratives about sickness in others and consequently reframes conversations about Indigenous well‐being and the environment.     

An Applied Method for General Regional Seismic Loss Assessment—With A Case Study in Los Angeles County

We describe the formulation and application of an integrated general regional seismic loss assessment (RSLA) method for buildings in seismic regions. An efficient method for RSLA is valuable for engineers involved in city planning, risk management, and insurance dealings. In contrast to previously reported methods, the framework presented herein is hazard-based and utilizes a regional rapid seismic hazard deaggregation tool that allows regional assessment to be conducted more efficiently. The proposed technique is implemented as an example to assess general regional seismic loss in Los Angeles County for a ground motion hazard with 10% probability of exceedance in 50 years.     

Studying Immigrant Policy One Law at a Time

This article shows that, in the study of immigrant integration policy in the U.S. states, it is critical to report data and coding decisions for individual laws. This analysis uses an updated and public database of law‐level decisions, which includes 2,703 legislative actions recorded by the National Conference of State Legislatures from 2005 to 2016. These data are used to estimate models of aggregate state policy activity in a variety of ways: as a single continuum of policy balance versus separate models of welcoming and hostile, lumping all policy subareas together versus analyzing a specific subarea, and lumping all years together in one cross section versus panel analysis. The results in these models differ enough to indicate that reporting codes for individual‐level laws is absolutely essential so that each researcher easily can construct the measure that fits his or her theoretical framework best.     

Canadian geopolitical culture: Climate change and sustainability

Considering recent formulations of geopolitical culture in combination with concerns that environmental change be included in contemporary geopolitical analysis, this paper examines the implicit geopolitical formulations in recent Canadian federal political discourse both in Stephen Harper's Conservative government and the subsequent Liberal administration. Contrasting earth system science ideas about global transformations with Canadian nationalist rhetoric concerning petroleum production and notions of unlimited resource extraction as parts of national identity sharply highlights the contours of Canadian identity. If sustainability is to be taken seriously, the official nationalist formulation will have to be drastically changed, but as the widespread rejection of the LEAP manifesto suggests, such ideas of a sustainable mode of globalization have yet to substantially influence Canadian political discourse, despite the rhetorical support offered to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau.     

La rivière Romaine en chantier : Transformations contemporaines des territorialités des Innus d'Ekuanitshit

Since 2009, Innu members of the community of Ekuanitshit have faced a major hydroelectric project on the Romaine River, an integral part of the Nitassinan, their ancestral territory. In this paper, we study the project's impacts on the material and ideational relationship the Innu have with the river. We explore the idea that the project transforms the traditional relationship to territory into a more pragmatic one, marked by economic and political interests. Our analysis reveals that the Innu's territorialities, though partly transformed by increased contact—and sometimes conflict—with hegemonic non‐indigenous society, remain anchored in a strong cultural heritage and a deep identification with territory. We argue that these seemingly differentiated conceptualizations, of traditions on the one hand and development on the other, are not incompatible. These conceptualizations comprise dynamic cultural, social, and political territorialities which are thus internal and external, ancestral and contemporary.     

古典阿拉伯——伊斯兰舆地文献所记欧亚陆路交通

根据阿拉伯——伊斯兰舆地文献,结合汉籍文献记载,考辨了9—10世纪自地中海到中国的陆路交通路线。中亚到中国的道路起于呼罗珊的木鹿,中亚地区的布哈拉、撒马尔罕、扎敏、怛逻斯和碎叶是重要的交通枢纽,而花剌子模是中亚与东南欧及北欧贸易的中心及货物集散地。     

The role of accredited zoos in the recovery process for species at risk in Canada

Zoos and aquariums are responding to the worldwide biodiversity crisis through major conservation initiatives like captive breeding for assurance populations and reintroduction programs. These institutions also fundraise, offer education programs, and provide critical research on biodiversity. Through a case study inside three accredited Canadian zoos, this paper illustrates that zoos and their staff members are being incorporated into many official species‐at‐risk recovery efforts on provincial, federal, and international levels. Specifically, the zoos studied are involved in every stage of the recovery process, from providing valuable research and habitat analyses, to captive breeding animals for reintroduction, to writing recovery strategies and creating recovery policy for multiple jurisdictional levels. Zoo staff indicate that zoos are uniquely suited to conservation because zoos have space, expertise, apolitical status, and the ability to connect with the public. Overall, the paper suggests that zoos can significantly contribute to species‐at‐risk protection and recovery in Canada and beyond.     

Medieval Harbours in Norway: on a newly discovered jetty and possible ship‐blockage on Veøy in Romsdal

In the Middle Ages walls and ditches were used for defensive purposes on land; city walls and moats surrounding castles are part and parcel of the public image of the Middle Ages. Less well known are the defence systems constructed under the sea to protect harbours and waterways. In Scandinavia such systems, ship‐blockages, are especially well investigated in Denmark. In Norway medieval harbour‐defence systems and ship‐blockages are less known. This paper presents and discusses medieval harbours and defence systems in Norway, in particular the newly discovered jetty and possible ship‐blockage on Veøy in Romsdal, western Norway.     

Sustainability of Highway Bridge Networks Under Seismic Hazard

In order to evaluate the seismic risk of transportation networks, it is necessary to develop a methodology that integrates the probabilities of occurrence of seismic events in a region, the vulnerability of the civil infrastructure, and the consequences of the seismic hazard to the society, environment, and economy. In this article, a framework for the time-variant seismic sustainability and risk assessment of highway bridge networks is presented. The sustainability of the network is quantified in terms of its social, environmental, and economic metrics. These include the expected downtime, expected energy waste and carbon dioxide emissions, and the expected loss. The methodology considers the probability of occurrence of a set of seismic scenarios that reflect the seismic activity of the region. The performance of network links is quantified based on individual bridge performance evaluated through fragility analyses. The sustainability and risk depend on the damage states of both the links and the bridges within the network following an earthquake scenario. The time-variation of the sustainability metrics and risk due to structural deterioration is identified. The approach is illustrated on a transportation network located in Alameda County, California.