Jessica K. Graybill

Incorporating ecosystem-based management into urban environmental policy: a case study from western Washington

The worldwide growth of urban settlements affects the management of natural resources and has prompted scholars in the natural and social sciences to call for ecosystem-based approaches to the management of human settlements. While considerable literature exists on the definition, theoretical underpinnings and methods for applying ecosystem-based management (EBM), few studies have examined whether urban and regional planners consider elements of EBM when developing environmental policy. This study assesses the extent to which planners apply EBM principles when reviewing scientific information for environmental policies in western Washington State. Using a working definition of EBM based on existing literature, the study conducts a content analysis of interview data from 42 environmental planners working for cities in western Washington, and asks what elements of EBM are considered as they review scientific information. The results suggest that elements related to monitoring, inter-agency co-operation, ecological boundaries, values and to a limited extent, adaptive management, are considered when planners review scientific literature for environmental policy development. However, urban and regional planners struggle with, or do not explicitly consider, the elements of scale, ecological integrity and organisational change when developing local environmental policy. The paper concludes with a description of why some elements of EBM are considered and why others are not, and offers suggestions for improving urban environmental policy development through application of EBM principles.

Using best available science to protect critical areas in Washington state: challenges and barriers to planners

Urban development has profound impacts on ecological patterns and processes making the scientific information required for developing environmental ordinances central for mitigating these negative ecological impacts. Washington State requires that planners use the best available science (BAS) to formulate land use ordinances as part of the state’s Growth Management Act (GMA). We present empirical findings describing challenges to planners in defining “best available science” and using BAS to create local ordinances that balance development needs with natural resource protection. We interviewed city and county planners (and their consultants) in western Washington to determine what they find useful about BAS, whether or not BAS is applicable to their jurisdictions, and what constraints they experience in reviewing and using BAS to create or update their land use ordinances. Our results suggest that applying the BAS requirement is particularly difficult in urban areas. Specifically, planners had difficulty applying results from research conducted in systems dissimilar to their urban landscapes. These challenges to planners were exacerbated by (1) a lack of resources and (2) political tensions among stakeholders with competing values in urban settings. We conclude with recommendations for improving the consideration of science in statewide land-use planning.

Teaching energy geographies via videography

Abstract In our digital age of information acquisition, multimedia information streams are constant, constantly changing and often contain multiple messages about topics important to everyday life, such as energy geographies. Recognizing that college students are prime consumers of digital information, it seems that crafting of academic engagement for and with students that is in touch with the knowledge networks they utilize and will continue to be part of today and into the future is important. Engaging students in the production of videos about important topics, such as energy geographies, aids them in becoming critical producers of knowledge.

Response to Young and Wolf: goal attainment in urban ecology research

Our critique focuses on the poorly defined key concepts, methodological inconsistencies, circular research design, and over-reaching substantive claims made by Young and Wolf. We suggest that Young and Wolf have provided an assessment of the Urban Ecosystems journal, not of urban ecology as a field. We conclude by identifying questions to guide a bibliometric analysis that focuses on a collaborative and interdisciplinary future of urban ecology (how are participating disciplines contributing to urban ecological research and scholarship; what theories and conceptual frameworks are being used, and how are these theories being tested and modified; and what mixed methodologies are being developed to collect data to address complex urban issues that are inherently interdisciplinary). We take seriously Young and Wolf’s call for a “fundamental discussion as to if and how the intentions of the field have been or need to be updated” and argue that such a discussion requires a more inclusive, rigorous, and meaningful identification of the “core” of urban ecology literature than provided.

Arctic sustainability research: toward a new agenda

ABSTRACT The Arctic is among the world’s regions most affected by ongoing and increasing cultural, socio-economic, environmental and climatic changes. Over the last two decades, scholars, policymakers, extractive industries, local, regional and national governments, intergovernmental forums, and non-governmental organizations have turned their attention to the Arctic, its peoples and resources, and to challenges and benefits of impending transformations. The International Conference on Arctic Research Planning (ICARP) has now transpired three times, most recently in April 2015 with ICARP III. Arctic sustainability is an issue of increasing concern within the Arctic and beyond it, including in ICARP endeavors. This paper reports some of the key findings of a white paper prepared by an international and interdisciplinary team as part of the ICARP-III process, with support from the International Arctic Science Committee Social and Human Sciences Working Group, the International Arctic Social Sciences Association and the Arctic-FROST research coordination network. Input was solicited through sharing the initial draft with a broader network of researchers, including discussion and feedback at several academic and community venues. This paper presents a progress report on Arctic sustainability research, identifies related knowledge gaps and provides recommendations for prioritizing research for the next decade.

The suburban bias of American society

ABSTRACT Past research has characterized countries as displaying the traits of urban or rural bias. Neither concept fits the United States well. We propose, as a hypothesis for research, that it may better be understood as displaying a suburban bias vis-à-vis both urban and rural populations. Drawing on the urban and rural bias literatures, we discuss two forms that suburban bias might take, allocational and dispositional, and the ways in which they might be identified. We offer initial evidence of a prevailing suburban bias in the United States in two spheres, those of judicial interpretation and American planning history, and conclude with suggestions for further research on the hypothesis.

Response to comment on “The suburban bias of American society?”

We thank Thomas and Fulkerson for their comments and for the opportunity to explore further some of the issues we raised in our paper, “The suburban bias of American society?”. In our response, we confine ourselves to the statements in their commentary, doing the authors the possible injustice – for which we apologize in advance – of oversimplifying matters that they may have discussed in more detail elsewhere. Thomas and Fulkerson find our model of suburban bias “too particularistic,” writing that “by focusing on American society and, as the article continues, specifically the time period since the late nineteenth century, the ability to intuit deeper structures in the organization of populations across space and time is lost.” However, we offered the concept of suburban bias as a hypothesized local model. We suggested at the end of our article that it may perhaps have some wider applicability, but we focused on the time and region to which it seems most relevant. We did not propose to replace all existing or possible models with it, merely to supplement them with one that illuminates the experience – not a trivial one – of the United States since the late nineteenth century. Doing so ought not in any way to deter others from seeking to identify alternative urban structures and processes operating at other scales of time and space, and we welcome Thomas and Fulkerson’s efforts to do just that. The structures that they emphasize involve the political economy of relations between a powerful and hegemonic yet resource-dependent urban sector and a dominated hinterland, relations maintained by the mechanisms of colonialist coercion and what they refer to as “urbanormative idealizations”. They offer this framework as an alternative to prior concepts of urban and rural – and especially of an urban–rural continuum of settlement patterns – that were standard in mid-twentieth century social science, and remain embedded in US Department of Agriculture coding practices, but that, they write, “have by-and-large not held up to empirical scrutiny.” Much of what they say, as they observe, does not conflict with what we said in our paper. We described a rural disadvantage vis-à-vis suburbs in the United States as in large part resulting from the kinds of processes they detail. It is a limitation of their framework, though, that it makes no room for the concept of the suburban as a distinct and important category. If suburbs did not in fact form such a category that would be no problem. But inasmuch as increasing numbers of

Urban climate vulnerability and governance in the Russian North

ABSTRACT Two different kinds of locales that are commonly understood as sensitive to the effects on ongoing and potentially increasing climate change are the Arctic, as a world region, and cities, as the preferred dwelling place of over half of the planets population. Understanding how climate change may affect Arctic cities would be of paramount importance, especially where population densities are high. In the Arctic, the Russian Federation contains the most Arctic territory, the most highly urbanized places and greatest number of urban residents across all of the Arctic. This paper provides an overview of climate change policy in Russia, generally, and an urban vulnerability framework developed specifically to elucidate the suite of biophysical, socioeconomic, political and cultural vulnerabilities related to climate change in Russian Arctic urban places. This paper suggests that domestic politics and policy do not currently address the current and impending vulnerabilities related to climate change for people in urban settings in the Russian North.

Forces of Change in Doctoral Education

This chapter, as its title suggests, examines the forces affecting doctoral education from the shared perspective of four early-career researchers (ECRs).1 We define the term early-career researchers as denoting current doctoral students as well as individuals who have completed doctoral study within the past three years and who may now be working in academic settings as well as in a variety of other employment sectors. As such, the ECR cohort may include advanced doctoral students, postdoctoral students, assistant professors, and other beginning researchers.

Red to green: environmental activism in Post-Soviet Russia

travel abroad a key signifier of cultural sophistication. As Gorsuch points out: “Exposure to difference, be it controlled, was now part of what made a good Soviet citizen” (p. 93). But enabling citizens to experience life abroad brought its own set of problems. While official discourse presented the Baltic republics and Eastern Europe as ideologically immature peripheries of the Soviet empire, some Russian tourists could not but notice that, for instance, Estonian and Czechoslovak locals enjoyed higher life standards and did not always welcome their more advanced socialist brothers with open arms. In Gorsuch’s words: “If, in theory, the material superiorities of many East European countries might be taken positively as evidence that socialism and consumerism could coexist, in practice, it was hard to explain why the socialist younger brother was so much better off than his elder sibling” (p. 105). The difficulties Soviet authorities experienced in projecting an unproblematic imperial image in Estonia and the countries of the Eastern bloc resurfaced as they aimed to portray themselves as the superior competitor in the Cold War ring. Because consumption was a central aspect of the competition between the two superpowers, attitudes toward consumer goods and material bounty attained critical importance in the eyes of the Soviet authorities. But although the official post-Stalinist socialist code of morality supported shopping as a rational and educative experience, it disapproved of consumption as compulsive acquisitiveness. Reflecting on the practical implication of this philosophical distinction, Gorsuch observes: “Consumptions reveals the contradictions inherent in sending people abroad to further the collective cause of Soviet socialism, and then giving them hard currency, even if in limited amounts, to satisfy individual desires while there” (p. 97). The paradoxes of post-Stalin travel and tourism enumerated above offer but a highlight of Gorsuch’s account but hopefully effectively allude to the solid research, thorough analysis, and compelling conclusions characterizing this study. This compelling monograph should find its way to the shelves of scholars who are interested in the de-Stalinization process, Cold War cultural relations, Soviet nation and empire-building after Stalin, and the history of consumption and leisure in the socialist context. Gorsuch’s analyses are subtle and perceptive; her conclusions are insightful and consequential. This book deserves to be read widely. Marko Dumančić Oberlin College mdumanci@oberlin.edu # 2012, Marko Dumančić http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2012.688261