The Politics of Permaculture: Towards an Ecologically Situated Approach to Resource Policy and Governance

The contributions to environmental politics of Torgerson, Oelschlager, Dryzek, Harrè and others, converge in their respective acknowledgements that the shift towards an ‘ecologically situated’ approach to environmental policy, including resource governance, will require the emergence and consolidation of a new lingua franca of environmental discourse. In this paper, I suggest that an extrapolation of permaculture ethics may provide a gambit through which such a discourse may be assembled and organised. I examine six key signifying elements derived from Orr and Capra’s approach to ecological literacy – network, nested system, flow, cycle, development and dynamic balance – and explore the implications that these might have for resource governance and policy, including the (re)framing of assessment indicators, energy auditing, resource management and integrated planning and development.

From radical to banal evil: Hannah Arendt against the justification of the unjustifiable

Two central strands in Arendt's thought are the reflection on the evil of Auschwitz and the rethinking in terms of politics of Heidegger's critique of metaphysics. Given Heidegger's taciturnity regarding Auschwitz and Arendt's own taciturnity regarding the philosophical implications of Heidegget's political engagement in 1933, to set out how these strands interrelate is to examine the coherence of Arendt's thought and its potential for a critique of Heidegger. By refusing to countenance a theological conception of the evil of Auschwitz, Arendt consolidates the break with theology that Heidegger attempts through his analysis of the essential finitude of Dasein. In the light of Arendt's account of evil, it is possible to see the theological vestiges in Heidegger's ontology. Heidegger's resumption of the question concerning the categorical interconnections of the ways of Being entails an abandonment of finitude: he accommodates and tacitly justifies that which can have no human justification.

Women are silver, women are diamonds: Conflicting images of women in the Cambodian print

This paper examines 116 articles related to sexual and reproductive health translated into English from the Khmer press from April 1997 to February 2004. These excerpts were found in The Mirror, a publication of the non-governmental organisation Open Forum of Cambodia, which collates Grid reviews all issues of the Khmer press on a weekly basis. Five major themes were identified: the politics of women's health, government regulation and control, the sex industry in Cambodia, rape, and the HIV epidemic. Discourse analysis of these articles in the context of other sources and experience allows a gendered exploration of the reporting of sexual and reproductive health and rights issues in Cambodia by the Khmer print media. The reports explore the contested political empowerment of women in this strongly hierarchical society, and the mechanisms used to regulate and control sexual activity. The expanding sex industry and associated sexual trafficking ore reported, together with the corruption of legal structures designed to regulate health systems and protect women and children from sexual exploitation and rope. The growing problem of AIDS and successes in reducing HIV transmission through the collaboration of sex workers in the 100% condom use policy is documented, and the tensions implicit in G Cultural representation of women that both protects and constrains women ore explored. (C) 2004 Reproductive Health Matters. All rights reserved.