Rights, symbolic violence and the micro-politics of the rural: the case of the Parish Paths Partnership scheme

In this paper microlevel politics and conflict associated with social and economic change in the countryside and linked changes in rural governance are explored with a focus upon research carried out on a recent rural policy initiative aimed at local 'empowerment'. This acts as a touchstone for a wider theoretical discussion. The paper is theorised within a conceptual framework derived and extended from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and others in order to explore case studies of the English Countryside Commission's Parish Paths Partnership scheme. The micropolitics involved with this scheme are examined and used to highlight more general issues raised by increased 'parish empowerment' in the 'postrural'.

The politics of the environment: a survey

The book is a collection of cutting edge essay on the politics of the environment covering and analysing important topics, such as the Kyoto protocol and deforestation, this book provides extensive coverage of all aspects of environmental politics. This unbiased survey is of interest to students, academics, business people and general researchers. Four sections present a thorough overview of current issues in the politics of the environment in historical perspective. The first section consists of essays written by a variety of academic and other experts on topics including Globalization: The Environment and Development Debate; The State, International Relations and the Environment; Environmental Movements; Mass Media and Environmental Politics; and The Ethical Dimensions of Global Environmental Change

The social life of ruins: sites of memory and the politics of a Zimbabwean periphery

This article explores conflicts over a series of ruins located within Zimbabwe's flagship National Park. The relics have long been regarded as sacred places by local African communities evicted from their vicinity, and have come to be seen as their ethnic heritage. Local intellectuals' promotion of this heritage was an important aspect of a defensive mobilization of cultural difference on the part of a marginalized minority group. I explore both indigenous and colonial ideas about the ruins, the different social movements with which they have been associated and the changing social life they have given the stone relics. Although African and European ideas sometimes came into violent confrontation - as in the context of colonial era evictions - there were also mutual influences in emergent ideas about tribe, heritage and history. The article engages with Pierre Nora's notion of 'sites of memory', which has usefully drawn attention to the way in which ideas of the past are rooted and reproduced in representations of particular places. But it criticizes Nora's tendency to romanticize pre-modern 'memory', suppress narrative and depoliticize traditional connections with the past. Thus, the article highlights the historicity of traditional means of relating to the past, highlighting the often bitter and divisive politics of traditional ritual, myth, kinship, descent and 'being first'. It also emphasizes the entanglement of modern and traditional ideas, inadequately captured by Nora's implied opposition between history and memory. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Framing the local and the global in the anti-nuclear movement: Law and the politics of place

This article examines the politics of place in relation to legal mobilization by the anti-nuclear movement. It examines two case examples - citizens' weapons inspections and civil disobedience strategies - which have involved the movement drawing upon the law in particular spatial contexts. The article begins by examining a number of factors which have been employed in recent social movement literature to explain strategy choice, including ideology, resources, political and legal opportunity, and framing. It then proceeds to argue that the issues of scale, space, and place play an important role in relation to framing by the movement in the two case examples. Both can be seen to involve scalar reframing, with the movement attempting to resist localizing tendencies and to replace them with a global frame. Both also involve an attempt to reframe the issue of nuclear weapons away from the contested frame of the past (unilateral disarmament) towards the more universal and widely accepted frame of international law.

Effects of past climate variability on fire and vegetation in the cerrãdo savanna of the Huanchaca Mesetta, NE Bolivia

Cerrãdo savannas have the greatest fire activity of all major global land-cover types and play a significant role in the global carbon cycle. During the 21st century, temperatures are projected to increase by ∼ 3 ◦C coupled with a precipitation decrease of ∼ 20 %. Although these conditions could potentially intensify drought stress, it is unknown how that might alter vegetation composition and fire regimes. To assess how Neotropical savannas responded to past climate changes, a 14 500-year, high-resolution, sedimentary record from Huanchaca Mesetta, a palm swamp located in the cerrãdo savanna in northeastern Bolivia, was analyzed with phytoliths, stable isotopes, and charcoal. A nonanalogue, cold-adapted vegetation community dominated the Lateglacial–early Holocene period (14 500–9000 cal yr BP, which included trees and C3 Pooideae and C4 Panicoideae grasses. The Lateglacial vegetation was fire-sensitive and fire activity during this period was low, likely responding to fuel availability and limitation. Although similar vegetation characterized the early Holocene, the warming conditions associated with the onset of the Holocene led to an initial increase in fire activity. Huanchaca Mesetta became increasingly firedependent during the middle Holocene with the expansion of C4 fire-adapted grasses. However, as warm, dry conditions, characterized by increased length and severity of the dry season, continued, fuel availability decreased. The establishment of the modern palm swamp vegetation occurred at 5000 cal yr BP. Edaphic factors are the first-order control on vegetation on the rocky quartzite mesetta. Where soils are sufficiently thick, climate is the second-order control of vegetation on the mesetta. The presence of the modern palm swamp is attributed to two factors: (1) increased precipitation that increased water table levels and (2) decreased frequency and duration of surazos (cold wind incursions from Patagonia) leading to increased temperature minima. Natural (soil, climate, fire) drivers rather than anthropogenic drivers control the vegetation and fire activity at Huanchaca Mesetta. Thus the cerrãdo savanna ecosystem of the Huanchaca Plateau has exhibited ecosystem resilience to major climatic changes in both temperature and precipitation since the Lateglacial period.

The politics of slowness and the traps of modernity

This chapter re-evaluates the diachronic, evolutionist model that establishes the Second World War as a watershed between classical and modern cinemas, and ‘modernity’ as the political project of ‘slow cinema’. I will start by historicising the connection between cinematic speed and modernity, going on to survey the veritable obsession with the modern that continues to beset film studies despite the vagueness and contradictions inherent in the term. I will then attempt to clarify what is really at stake within the modern-classical debate by analysing two canonical examples of Japanese cinema, drawn from the geidomono genre (films on the lives of theatre actors), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Story of the Late Chrysanthemums (Zangiku monogatari, 1939) and Yasujiro Ozu’s Floating Weeds (Ukigusa, 1954), with a view to investigating the role of the long take or, conversely, classical editing, in the production or otherwise of a supposed ‘slow modernity’. By resorting to Ozu and Mizoguchi, I hope to demonstrate that the best narrative films in the world have always combined a ‘classical’ quest for perfection with the ‘modern’ doubt of its existence, hence the futility of classifying cinema in general according to an evolutionary and Eurocentric model based on the classical-modern binary. Rather than on a confusing politics of the modern, I will draw on Bazin’s prophetic insight of ‘impure cinema’, a concept he forged in defence of literary and theatrical screen adaptations. Anticipating by more than half a century the media convergence on which the near totality of our audiovisual experience is currently based, ‘impure cinema’ will give me the opportunity to focus on the confluence of film and theatre in these Mizoguchi and Ozu films as the site of a productive crisis where established genres dissolve into self-reflexive stasis, ambiguity of expression and the revelation of the reality of the film medium, all of which, I argue, are more reliable indicators of a film’s political programme than historical teleology. At the end of the journey, some answers may emerge to whether the combination of the long take and the long shot are sufficient to account for a film’s ‘slowness’ and whether ‘slow’ is indeed the best concept to signify resistance to the destructive pace of capitalism.

Sensitivity of the ERA40 reanalysis to the observing system: determination of the global atmospheric circulation from reduced observations

The impact of selected observing systems on the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) 40-yr reanalysis (ERA40) is explored by mimicking observational networks of the past. This is accomplished by systematically removing observations from the present observational data base used by ERA40. The observing systems considered are a surface-based system typical of the period prior to 1945/50, obtained by only retaining the surface observations, a terrestrial-based system typical of the period 1950-1979, obtained by removing all space-based observations, and finally a space-based system, obtained by removing all terrestrial observations except those for surface pressure. Experiments using these different observing systems have been limited to seasonal periods selected from the last 10 yr of ERA40. The results show that the surface-based system has severe limitations in reconstructing the atmospheric state of the upper troposphere and stratosphere. The terrestrial system has major limitations in generating the circulation of the Southern Hemisphere with considerable errors in the position and intensity of individual weather systems. The space-based system is able to analyse the larger-scale aspects of the global atmosphere almost as well as the present observing system but performs less well in analysing the smaller-scale aspects as represented by the vorticity field. Here, terrestrial data such as radiosondes and aircraft observations are of paramount importance. The terrestrial system in the form of a limited number of radiosondes in the tropics is also required to analyse the quasi-biennial oscillation phenomenon in a proper way. The results also show the dominance of the satellite observing system in the Southern Hemisphere. These results all indicate that care is required in using current reanalyses in climate studies due to the large inhomogeneity of the available observations, in particular in time.

Building a left coast: the legacy of the California Popular Front and the challenge to Cold War liberalism in the post-world war two era

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Exploring the climatic impact of the continental vegetation on the Mezosoic atmospheric CO2 and climate history

In this contribution, we continue our exploration of the factors defining the Mesozoic climatic history. We improve the Earth system model GEOCLIM designed for long term climate and geochemical reconstructions by adding the explicit calculation of the biome dynamics using the LPJ model. The coupled GEOCLIM-LPJ model thus allows the simultaneous calculation of the climate with a 2-D spatial resolution, the coeval atmospheric CO2, and the continental biome distribution. We found that accounting for the climatic role of the continental vegetation dynamics (albedo change, water cycle and surface roughness modulations) strongly affects the reconstructed geological climate. Indeed the calculated partial pressure of atmospheric CO2 over the Mesozoic is twice the value calculated when assuming a uniform constant vegetation. This increase in CO2 is triggered by a global cooling of the continents, itself triggered by a general increase in continental albedo owing to the development of desertic surfaces. This cooling reduces the CO2 consumption through silicate weathering, and hence results in a compensating increase in the atmospheric CO2 pressure. This study demonstrates that the impact of land plants on climate and hence on atmospheric CO2 is as important as their geochemical effect through the enhancement of chemical weathering of the continental surface. Our GEOCLIM-LPJ simulations also define a climatic baseline for the Mesozoic, around which exceptionally cool and warm events can be identified.