Your search

International non-profit organizations have started to implement eco-labeling for credence attributes programs aimed to inform consumers about environmentally sound or “sustainable” production standards for various products. Using coffee labeled as “shade grown” or “bird friendly” as an example, this paper describes the impact such labeling programs may have on local land use patterns in coffee producing regions. Shade grown coffee farms should provide a variety of external benefits, including the preservation of biodiversity, carbon sequestration, the prevention of soil erosion and aquifer recharge. Those externalities, however, are not expected to have observable land use impacts unless they are capitalized in the coffee market. The prospect of market capitalization of externalities suggests the extension of the conventional von Thunen model to the calculation of social location rent. Using the maximization of social location rent as a criterion allows the externality effect to play a direct role in market-based land use allocation of land between eco-labeled shade grown coffee production and other activities.

Broadwater Energy is one of a number of recent proposals to construct a liquefied natural gas facility along the East Coast of the United States. The proposal calls for the construction of an import and regasification terminal in Long Island Sound, roughly halfway between the states of New York and Connecticut. First made public in 2004 by its sponsors, TransCanada and Shell, the Broadwater proposal has inspired opposition from a range of interest groups. An examination of the Broadwater debate with a focus on arguments made by Connecticut residents in the months leading up to the release in late 2006 of the proposal's Draft Environmental Impact Statement reveals explicit and implicit points of overlap between concerns about the facility's environmental impacts and concerns about its status as a potential terrorist target. Discussions about terrorism deployed in the Broadwater debate have initiated and informed a politics of scale through which themes common to environmental debates have been transformed. This transformation, in turn, highlights the discursive and material influence of terrorism in contemporary U.S. society. Concerns about terrorist attacks have been deployed by activists to enhance the strength of an otherwise environmental debate and, in the process, those concerns have developed the potential to shape land use policy in Long Island Sound. Key Words: environmentalism, liquefied natural gas, Long Island Sound, scale, terrorism.

Five new suffrutescent to shrubby Jaltomata Schlechtendal species (Solanaceae) of the department of Cajamarca, Peru, are described and illustrated, Jaltomata contumacensis S. Leiva & Mione has a light green, urceolate-tubular corolla and grows in the province of Contumazá between 2530 and 3000 m; J. lanata S. Leiva & Mione has a whitish purple to pale purple, short-tubular corolla and grows in the province of San Pablo between 1850 and 2400 m; J. leivae Mione has a red-violet, urceolate corolla containing red nectar and grows in the province of Contumazá between 2560 and 2650 m; J. oppositifolia S. Leiva & Mione bas a white, broadly infundibular to rotate corolla and grows in province Chota between 2250 and 3090 m; and J. yacheri Mione & S. Leiva has a blue-purple, urceolate corolla and grows in province Hualgayoc at 3460 m. The fruits of two of these species are eaten by people.

Between 2001 and 2003, Roxanne Quimby - then the sole owner of a natural personal-care products company named Burt's Bees - invested millions of dollars of her company's profits in tens of thousands of acres of forestland in northern Maine. Her intention was to donate that land to the United States government on behalf of a controversial national park proposed for the region - the Maine Woods National Park. Quimby's actions set off sharp debates between policy makers, environmentalists and residents of northern Maine. As this article suggests, those debates were informed in part by their association with green consumerism. When consumers purchase `environmentally friendly' products like those made by Burt's Bees, they typically envision their actions as having positive consequences for places associated directly with the production and consumption of that product. In this case, however, profits from a green consumer product were reinvested outside its immediate commodity chain, thereby implicating green-consumer decisions in a politics of identity and landscape control beyond that product's lifecycle. This paper explores that process, suggesting that even the most well-intended consumer choices can carry social and environmental consequences into new and perhaps unexpected terrain. When we shop to save, we can never be quite certain of what it is that we are saving.

The rise of American geography as a distinctive science in the United States straddles the 19th and 20th centuries, extending from the post-Civil war period to 1970. American Geography and Geographers: Toward Geographic Science is the first book to thoroughly and richly explicate this history. Its author, Geoffrey J. Martin, the foremost historian on the subject and official archivist of the Association of American Geographers, amassed a wealth of primary sources from archives worldwide, which enable him to chart the evolution of American geography with unprecedented detail and context. From the initial influence of the German school to the emergence of Geography as a unique discipline in American universities and thereafter, Martin clarifies the what, how and when of each advancement. Expansive discussion of the arguments made, controversies ignited and research voyages move hand in hand with the principals who originated and animated them: Davis, Jefferson, Huntington, Bowman, Johnson,, Sauer, Hartshorne, and many more. From their grasp of local, regional, global and cultural phenomena, geographers also played pivotal roles in world historical events, including the two world wars and their treaties, as the US became the dominant global power. American Geography and Geographers: Toward Geographical Science is a conclusive study of the birth and maturation of the science. It will be of interest to geographers, teachers and students of geography, and all those compelled by the story of American Geography and those who founded and developed it.

This mixed-methods case study identifies how floodplain property acquisitiona buyoutimpacts an urban environment at the neighborhood scale while considering the role of individual residents in formal and informal land-use decision making. In floodplain buyouts, the reopening of urban space is enabled by federal structural drivers, primarily Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), but it is repurposed as a cultural landscape constructed and produced by individuals. This research explores how residents perceive and ascribe values to the buyout landscape in Lexington, Kentucky. Enabled by federal funds, but left largely to their own devices, residents in Lexington adopted uses, ascribed values, and produced their own land-use norms in each buyout neighborhood.

Three neighborhoods in Lexington, Kentucky, share a common flood history, including property acquisitions, as a means to mitigate against flooding; yet, the interactions of residents with the buyout landscapes vary significantly among the neighborhoods. Although the same institutions and structural controls implemented flood buyout programs in all three neighborhoods, semi-structured interviews illustrate that differing perspectives, personalities, and neighborhood politics shaped unique identities and land uses for the acquired properties in each neighborhood. Varying levels of resident engagement with the buyout landscape resulted in a range of attitudes towards hazard preparation, management, and mitigation, thus leaving some neighborhoods more resilient to future flooding than others. This study explores key residents, termed magnetic agents, who drove neighborhood civic action and land uses on the open space created through floodplain property acquisition. This research indicates magnetic agents can serve as important partners for local governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in building community-based projects aimed at reducing vulnerability to flood events and instituting high utility land uses on floodplain buyout open space.(C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.