Public preferences of the Great Lakes Environment : a Lake Michigan pilot study

The Great Lakes watershed is home to over 40 million people, and the health of the Great Lakes ecosystem is vital to the overall economic, societal, and environmental health of the U.S. and Canada. However, environmental issues related to them are sometimes overlooked. Policymakers and the public face the challenges of balancing economic benefits with the need to conserve and/or replenish regional natural resources to ensure long term prosperity. From the literature review, nine critical stressors of ecological services were delineated, which include pollution and contamination, agricultural erosion, non-native species, degraded recreational resources, loss of wetlands habitat, climate change, risk of clean water shortage, vanishing sand dunes, and population overcrowding; this list was validated through a series of stakeholder discussions and focus groups in Grand Rapids. Focus groups were conducted in Grand Rapids to examine the awareness of, concern with, and willingness to expend resources on these stressors. Stressors that the respondents have direct contact with tend to be the most important. The focus group results show that concern related to pollution and contamination is much higher than for any of the other stressors. Low responses to climate change result in recommendations for outreach programs.

Arctic network builders : the Arctic Coal Company's operations on Spitsbergen and its relationship with the environment

In 1906, two American industrialists, John Munroe Longyear and Frederick Ayer, formed the Arctic Coal Company to make the first large scale attempt at mining in the high-Arctic location of Spitsbergen, north of the Norwegian mainland. In doing so, they encountered numerous obstacles and built an organization that attempted to overcome them. The Americans sold out in 1916 but others followed, eventually culminating in the transformation of a largely underdeveloped landscape into a mining region. This work uses John Law’s network approach of the Actor Network Theory (ANT) framework to explain how the Arctic Coal Company built a mining network in this environmentally difficult region and why they made the choices they did. It does so by identifying and analyzing the problems the company encountered and the strategies they used to overcome them by focusing on three major components of the operations; the company’s four land claims, its technical system and its main settlement, Longyear City. Extensive comparison between aspects of Longyear City and the company’s choices of technology with other American examples place analysis of the company in a wider context and helps isolate unique aspects of mining in the high-Arctic. American examples dominate comparative sections because Americans dominated the ownership and upper management of the company.