Academic literature on the topic 'Eco-citizen'

The Modern Western state is characterized by unmediated individual access to wellness, health, safety and liberal human rights. The Newtonian conception of space and time makes formal room for a discursive public area with the citizen and the public institutes in the margin, while participation and ethical responsibility is a prejudice of good citizenship. It is a necessary condition of consistency and coherence of the nation. To date, global migration and multiculturalism threaten those necessary basic conditions of Western states´ political equilibrium. To challenge the actual global phenomena national states transform into virtual places of fear dominated by cybernetics, digital bureaucracy while citizen’s identity is mirrored by the efficiency and unisexual beauty ideal of cyborgs. The substantive conception of technology is government’s tool box to realize the cyberstate while citizen reduce to “cytizen”.In order to escape from this global grey, we propose a different conception of space and time namely the Leibnizian conception of pluralistic independent participating worlds. Moreover, we modify Leopold’s Land-Ethics by introducing the transpersonal identification claim of Warwick Fox inside the common Land so-called eco-homeland while the care for the foreigner serves as paradigmatic core attitude to all participants of the eco-homeland. So we constitute a common eco-refuge, similar to the ideas of Bookchin´s eco- anarchistic ideas but avoiding his dialectic ideal conception of the Land and its participants.

This article examines the benefits and challenges of engaging children in environmental citizen science, defined as science conducted by nonspecialists under the direction of professional scientists, to promote social good. Citizen science addresses two central elements of the social good model—environmental justice and inclusion with particular attention to diversity in age, gender, race/ethnicity, and social class in addressing environmental injustice that is more prevalent in underrepresented communities. This article evaluates how participation in citizen science projects focused on the environment (eco-citizen science) benefits the child’s development, contributes to science, and leads to commitment to environmental stewardship and justice as adults. Our work offers a novel contribution to the discourse on social good and social justice through explicitly calling for children to be included in environmental citizen science projects. We examine the benefits and challenges of involving children in scientific projects and discuss implications for policy, practice, and future research.

Education for sustainability in early childhood tends to focus on practices and advocacy, rather than on the aims of this education. We suggest that the aim should be to consider children as being and becoming eco-citizens. This suggestion is built on an exploration of children as eco-citizens. With theories concerning child-sized citizenship we suggest a description of children and adults as being and becoming eco-citizen. We explore this through the fields of nature connection and science and children’s curiosity. We find that environmentally friendly practices as gardening and harvesting wild food show how children’s eco-citizenship is realizable. We support this additionally by references to how children’s literature, seeing how children depicted as eco-citizens can support the notion of children as eco-citizens. Through these analyses, we conclude that children should be viewed as being and becoming eco-citizens.

The monitoring of environmental flows is usually considered an important first step in realising environmental reform of production and consumption. When citizen-consumers are involved, monitoring is frequently associated with surveillance and social control by the powerful (governmental and nongovernmental) providers of goods and services. The authors investigate the future perspectives for monitoring that empowers citizen-consumers. Post-Fordism, chain inversion, and liberalisation allow for consumer-oriented monitoring, which increases the countervailing power of end-users and strengthens the potentials of citizen-consumers to change the infrastructures of consumption. Several monitoring projects, for example eco-teams and Scorecard, are dealt with in some detail. It is concluded that consumer-oriented monitoring schemes do seem to be of considerable importance.

Practices for the engagement of citizens and other research and innovation (R and I) stakeholders in science can be found aplenty in the existing literature, all along with principles, guidelines and tools providing meaningful guidance for practitioners in research funding and performing, organizations (RPFOs) and helping them achieve high quality and responsible citizen science projects addressing sustainability challenges. Such guidance, however, is scarce when it comes to setting up and running transdisciplinary citizen science eco systems, where projects can be systematically initiated by different stakeholders and carried out in a dedicated supportive environment. Based on literature review and series of semi-structured interviews with quadruple helix stakeholders in Lithuania, this paper provides a current overview of the perceptions, concerns, motivational factors, and obstacles with regard to participation in citizen science activities.

During the primitive civilization and the agricultural civilization, human beings had limited understanding of nature, while the industrial civilization has created unprecedented material wealth and great convenience, the natural resources and ecological environment have been depleted and damaged. This paper illustrates that eco-civilization is the integral product of material, spiritual and regulation achievement; it’s the cultural and ethical manifestation of the harmonic co-existence of human and nature, balanced development, sustainable prosperity. The major characteristics of eco-civilization are studied in this paper, the essence of eco-civilization is to pursue the harmonic co-existence between human and nature and the goal of which is to realize the all-rounded, harmonic and sustainable development of human society. At last, the strategies to construct eco-civilization in China are explained, such as construction of ecological government, establishment and improvement of the laws and regulations to protect the ecological environment, developing ecological and circular economy, utilizing the traditional eco-ethics culture and nurturing the sense of eco-citizen, etc.

Le développement de villes intelligentes et durables nécessite le déploiement des technologies de l'information et de la communication (ITC) pour garantir de meilleurs services et informations disponibles à tout moment et partout. Comme les dispositifs IoT devenant plus puissants et moins coûteux, la mise en place d'un réseau de capteurs dans un contexte urbain peut être coûteuse. Cette thèse propose une technique pour estimer les informations environnementales manquantes dans des environnements à large échelle. Notre technique permet de fournir des informations alors que les dispositifs ne sont pas disponibles dans une zone de l'environnement non couverte par des capteurs. La contribution de notre proposition est résumée dans les points suivants : - limiter le nombre de dispositifs de détection à déployer dans un environnement urbain ; - l'exploitation de données hétérogènes acquises par des dispositifs intermittents ; - le traitement en temps réel des informations ; - l'auto-calibration du système. Notre proposition utilise l'approche AMAS (Adaptive Multi-Agent System) pour résoudre le problème de l'indisponibilité des informations. Dans cette approche, une exception est considérée comme une situation non coopérative (NCS) qui doit être résolue localement et de manière coopérative. HybridIoT exploite à la fois des informations homogènes (informations du même type) et hétérogènes (informations de différents types ou unités) acquises à partir d'un capteur disponible pour fournir des estimations précises au point de l'environnement où un capteur n'est pas disponible. La technique proposée permet d'estimer des informations environnementales précises dans des conditions de variabilité résultant du contexte d'application urbaine dans lequel le projet est situé, et qui n'ont pas été explorées par les solutions de l'état de l'art : - ouverture : les capteurs peuvent entrer ou sortir du système à tout moment sans qu'aucune configuration particulière soit nécessaire ; - large échelle : le système peut être déployé dans un contexte urbain à large échelle et assurer un fonctionnement correct avec un nombre significatif de dispositifs ; - hétérogénéité : le système traite différents types d'informations sans aucune configuration a priori. Notre proposition ne nécessite aucun paramètre d'entrée ni aucune reconfiguration. Le système peut fonctionner dans des environnements ouverts et dynamiques tels que les villes, où un grand nombre de capteurs peuvent apparaître ou disparaître à tout moment et sans aucun préavis. Nous avons fait différentes expérimentations pour comparer les résultats obtenus à plusieurs techniques standard afin d'évaluer la validité de notre proposition. Nous avons également développé un ensemble de techniques standard pour produire des résultats de base qui seront comparés à ceux obtenus par notre proposition multi-agents
The development of sustainable smart cities requires the deployment of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to ensure better services and available information at any time and everywhere. As IoT devices become more powerful and low-cost, the implementation of an extensive sensor network for an urban context can be expensive. This thesis proposes a technique for estimating missing environmental information in large scale environments. Our technique enables providing information whereas devices are not available for an area of the environment not covered by sensing devices. The contribution of our proposal is summarized in the following points: * limiting the number of sensing devices to be deployed in an urban environment; * the exploitation of heterogeneous data acquired from intermittent devices; * real-time processing of information; * self-calibration of the system. Our proposal uses the Adaptive Multi-Agent System (AMAS) approach to solve the problem of information unavailability. In this approach, an exception is considered as a Non-Cooperative Situation (NCS) that has to be solved locally and cooperatively. HybridIoT exploits both homogeneous (information of the same type) and heterogeneous information (information of different types or units) acquired from some available sensing device to provide accurate estimates in the point of the environment where a sensing device is not available. The proposed technique enables estimating accurate environmental information under conditions of uncertainty arising from the urban application context in which the project is situated, and which have not been explored by the state-of-the-art solutions: * openness: sensors can enter or leave the system at any time without the need for any reconfiguration; * large scale: the system can be deployed in a large, urban context and ensure correct operation with a significative number of devices; * heterogeneity: the system handles different types of information without any a priori configuration. Our proposal does not require any input parameters or reconfiguration. The system can operate in open, dynamic environments such as cities, where a large number of sensing devices can appear or disappear at any time and without any prior notification. We carried out different experiments to compare the obtained results to various standard techniques to assess the validity of our proposal. We also developed a pipeline of standard techniques to produce baseline results that will be compared to those obtained by our multi-agent proposal

Notre thèse relève du champ des sciences de l’éducation, plus particulièrement de la psychologie de l’apprentissage et de la pédagogie. Elle s’appuie sur des travaux de psychologues, philosophes et pédagogues : Jacques Lévine (2008), Philippe Meirieu (2009), Lucie Sauvé (2003), et se situe dans le prolongement de théories développées antérieurement par John Dewey (1925), Henri Wallon (1942) ou encore Lev Vygotski, (1926). Dans leur sillage, nous analysons les stratégies et les conditions à mettre en place pour amorcer un processus d’apprentissage visant à développer chez le sujet enfant une pensée génératrice d’actes responsables. En effet, l’un des enjeux majeurs de l’éducation aujourd’hui est de promouvoir des valeurs, comportements et attitudes de manière à favoriser l’édification d’un monde plus viable, plus vivable et plus solidaire tant pour les générations présentes que futures. La complexité des questions soulevées par une telle exigence éducative requiert que, sur chaque territoire, l’on recherche les modalités les plus adaptées et les plus pertinentes. Ces interrogations nous ont conduits à formuler la question suivante comme point de départ : comment, dans un pays où subsiste encore dans l’École des relents d’acculturation et d’enfermement du sujet, peut-on favoriser son émancipation afin de mieux le préparer à devenir éco-citoyen ? Ainsi, prenant appui sur l’expérimentation du dispositif des « Ateliers d’éducation à l’éthique éco citoyenne » (A3E), dans le contexte spécifique du Burkina Faso, la présente thèse démontre la nécessité de construire une pensée réflexive chez le sujet, laquelle est fondatrice de perspectives de changements, à la fois de représentations et de comportements. Les résultats de notre recherche conduite à Markoye montrent que, malgré le fort ancrage de pratiques enseignantes répétitives et dirigistes héritées de l’ère coloniale, les acteurs éducatifs du système scolaire burkinabé sont ouverts aux innovations pédagogiques si certaines conditions sont réunies. Le dispositif tel que conçu et expérimenté, se veut être une démarche de transformation des pratiques pédagogiques parmi d’autres, dans le sens d’une plus grande efficacité émancipatrice des futurs éco-citoyens. Le cadre dans lequel il est mis en œuvre, parce qu’interactif, dialogique et coopératif, favorise l’éveil de la pensée réflexive et suscite chez les sujets le désir de s’engager librement en adoptant des comportements nouveaux, plus responsables vis-à-vis de problématiques en relation avec l’environnement et le développement durable
This thesis belongs to the science of education, more specifically to the psychology of learning and pedagogy. It draws on the works of psychologists, philosophers and pedagogues: Jacques Lévine (2008), Philippe Meirieu (2009), Lucie Sauvé, (2003), extending the earlier developed theories of John Dewey (1925), Henri Wallon (1942), and even Lev Vygotski (1926). Following their examples, this thesis analyses the conditions and strategies required for initiating a learning process for developing in the child-subject a generative thinking of responsible action. In fact, one of the major efforts of current education is to promote values, behaviour and attitudes with a view to create a more viable, liveable and solidary world for the present as well as for future generations. The complexity of questions raised by such educative expectations again require research, within each of these domains, of the most pertinent and adapted modalities. These interrogations have led to formulation of the following question as point of departure: In a country where acculturation and enclosure of the child-subject still pervade in school, how could his or her emancipation be promoted in order to best prepare him or her to become an eco-citizen?Thus, based on experiments in the specific context of Burkina Faso, by means of Eco-citizen ethical education (3E) workshops, the present thesis demonstrates the need to construct a reflective thinking by the child-subject, which is fundamental from a change and behaviour perspective.The results of this research conducted at Markoye show that, in spite of the strongly ingrained repetitive and directive teaching practices, inherited from the colonial era, the education agents in the burkinabé school system are open to pedagogical innovations, under certain conditions. The methodology as conceived and tested applies, inter alia, an approach of transforming pedagogical practices so that there is a much more effective emancipation of future eco-citizens. The framework in which this is implemented favours, because it is interactive, dialogic, and cooperative, an awakening of reflective thinking and desire in the child-subject to freely engage him/herself by adopting new and in adopting new and more responsible behaviours in relation to EESD

La logique impérialiste et anthropocène a donné lieu à des pratiques dont les traces se lisent dans un hégémonisme environnemental et une difficulté à tenir compte du lien au vivant, à cet autre différent, humain ou non-humain, qui participe cependant de la relation. Par une analyse écocritique postcoloniale, il apparaît que ces exploitations qui se perpétuent dans la contemporanéité ont un lien avec la crise écologique. Une approche comparatiste des œuvres de Bessora, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nadine Gordimer et Kate Grenville éclaire cet état de crise : elle guide le lecteur vers de nouvelles réalités et annonce les contours changeants d’un environnement naturel en mutation. Les œuvres réapprennent également à l’humain à poser un regard autre sur la nature environnante et véhiculent des valeurs culturelles propres à enrichir la relation au vivant. En ce sens, la littérature contribue à montrer que la réconciliation se construit par l’éveil d’une conscience environnementale, c’est-à-dire la modélisation de l'interaction entre l’humain et l’environnement pour préserver la nature. La réconciliation se tisse en outre par un rapprochement entre l’imagination littéraire et l'inclusion de réalités socioculturelles, qui conduit à une poétique sensible de l’habitation du monde. La trajectoire culturelle d’un groupe étant liée à la terre, il est nécessaire que la prise de conscience écologique passe d’abord par les cultures locales. Autrement dit, il faut décoloniser le savoir écologique afin d’aboutir à une restauration de l’environnement naturel et des relations entre les différentes formes de vie. Le but de ce travail est donc de mettre en évidence les éléments qui rendent possible une réconciliation entre exigences anthropocentrées et éthique environnementale
The imperialist and anthropocene logic has given rise to practices whose traces are to be found in an environmental type of hegemonism and a difficult apprehension of the connection to the living, to this different, human or non-hum another, who nevertheless participates in the relation. A postcolonial ecocritical analysis shows that these exploitations which are perpetuated in the contemporary world have a link with the ecological crisis. A comparatist approach to the works of Bessora, Patrick Chamoiseau, Nadine Gordimer and Kate Grenville highlights this state of crisis: it guides the reader to wards new realities and announces the evolving contours of a changing natural environment. These works also teach humans to look at the surrounding nature in a different way and convey cultural values that are likely to enrich the relationship with the living. In this sense, literature shows that reconciliation cannot be achieved without man’s awakening to an environmental conscience, that is to say the modelling of the interaction between humans and the environment to preserve nature. Reconciliation means that the working together of the literary imagination and the inclusion of socio-cultural realities will lead to a sensitive poetics of inhabiting the world. Since the cultural trajectory of a group is linked to the earth, ecological awareness must first be developed by local cultures to then influence global cultures. In other words, it is necessary to decolonize ecological know ledge in order to restore the natural environment and the relationships between the different forms of life. The goal is therefore to identify the elements that enable a reconciliation between anthropocentric requirements and environmental ethics

Providing adequate sanitation facilities for the poor remains one of the major challenges in all developing countries. In South Africa, an estimated 11,7% of the schools are without sanitation. The South African government has a constitutional responsibility to ensure that all South Africans have access to adequate sanitation. When sanitation systems fail, or are inadequate, the impact of the health of the community, on the health of others and the negative impact on the environment can be extremely serious. In rural South African schools, many Enviro-Ioo toilets are available today. They are designed to suit a variety of water scarce areas and where there is a high risk of contamination of ground water resources. It is important to realize that any Enviro-Ioo system programme requires an education programme to ensure that the principles of use and maintenance are clearly understood by the user group. Their maintenance requires more responsibility and commitment by users. This study is an interpretive case study that indicates how sanitation in a rural Ramashobohle High School in Polokwane municipality was managed through an EcoSchools Sanitation Community of Practice, and how this developed action competence for sanitation management in the school. The study established that the earlier practice and knowledge of the Ramashobohle Eco-Schools community of practice exercised in maintaining Enviro-Ioo systems was inadequate; unhealthy and unsafe according to the data generated through focus group interviews, observations, interviews, action plan, workshops and reflection interviews. The data generated also indicates that the Eco-Schools community of practice was not committed to maintaining sanitation in their school because they were not sharing sanitation knowledge; they were not communicating and not updating one another concerning Enviro-Ioo systems maintenance as they had no adequate knowledge as to how to maintain the facilities; and the school management was also not supportive and was not taking responsibility. The study shows how this situation was turned around as an Eco-Schools Sanitation Community of Practice focussed on developing action competence in the school community. It provides a case based example of how knowledge and action competence, supported by an Eco-Schools Community of Practice, can find and implement solutions to inadequate sanitation management practices in rural schools, and shows how members of the school community can be engaged in learning how to manage and maintain school sanitation systems through a participatory process that develops action competence. The study points to important dimensions of developing action competence, such as providing knowledge and demonstrations, inviting experts to the school, involving learners in observations and monitoring and in ensuring that adequate facilities are available. In particular, a workshop conducted by Enviro-Ioo consultants, organised and supported by the Eco-Schools Sanitation COP, together with a follow up action plan, provided the main impetus for changes in practice in the school and served to support action competence development. Finally the study provides research findings and recommendations for further research.

碩士
國立臺灣海洋大學
海洋事務與資源管理研究所
102
Aquatic product is an important food source of human. With the rising awareness of global food security and environmental protection, seafood safety verification and eco-labeling are considerable emphasis on international business. Since 2000, the promoting for various types of fish trade verification and eco-labeling management practices has increasing developed. Among them, Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) was established in February 1996, and held its first National Working Group at British’s Airlie House in December 1997. During the meeting, they laid the MSC principle and criteria as the important basis for practicing the concept of sustainable management of marine resource. The above mentioned eco-labeling verification of aquatic products based on a "pre-preventive" concept to manage the food industry and renewable resources, and ensure its products comply with international quality assurance for consumer food safety and the sustainability of renewable marine resources. Due to functions of eco-labeling mechanism for the maintenance of fishery productivity and economic value as well as its works for improving the management of marine biodiversity and conservation features, the MSC has become a standard for international seafood trade. Thus, this study examines the importance of eco-labeling and its developing trends through literature review and comparisons. We also analyze the health/safety management system and trade measures among countries, and explore their country-driven system of eco-labeling and effects of the current status. A result by factor analysis, there are three factors which include the sustainable use of fisheries resources, the cognition of eco-labeling and the inclination of support. The average of willingness to pay of eco-labeling product is 32.12% more of the price. However, this research evaluated the necessity and feasibility of promoting the eco-labeling system in Taiwan, and provides constructive recommendations for government to develop policies and regulatory of the industry to comply with the MSC requirements.

The Organic Citizen investigates an underlying environmentalist sensibility that links texts and discourses from varied realms and disciplines - Indian reform, environmental policy, social reform, ecology, sociology and legislation. I contend that, taken together, these works narrate an ecological vision of national affiliation: a concept of the nation as an ecological, natural zone of interdependence and its citizens (or non-citizen inhabitants) as members of this environmentally-conceptualized nation. This shared narrative of natural collectivity gives rise to what I call an "organic citizen" - the literary-political figure of an individual imagined to be a natural member of an ecological national body. I show that this concept of eco-citizenship both informs and is informed by contemporaneous concepts of indigeneity (what it means to be native) and by the actual political positioning of the American Indian in the U.S. citizenry throughout the century.

In five chapters, I argue that environmentalism is a site in which subjectivity is shaped, initially establishing modes of assimilative collectivity at the turn of the last century and later providing a realm in which the terms of subject affiliation may be analyzed and revised. I show how environmentalist discourse is profoundly connected to democratic practice and membership and how it formulates models of citizen collectivity. I contend that this discourse encompasses significantly more than a narrowly defined set of conservationist concerns for ecological entities, and can be used as a site of activism. Certain forms of stories - narratives that question these terms of national affiliation- expose the nuances of environmentalist thought. This type of storytelling offers a means through which environmentalist thought can become a realm of citizen engagement or activist possibility, opening access to and agency within a participatory democracy. An examination of this eco-narrative, I suggest, provides useful insights into how land use and rhetoric give definition to the way U.S. citizenship is socially imagined, legally adjudicated, and independently or communally practiced in a democratic system.

The first chapter examines the simultaneous emergence of wilderness narratives with the science of ecology and discourses concerned about national and geographical assimilation of communities and individuals of ethnic difference. I draw upon the writings of social reformers, particularly Jane Addams, ecologists Henry Chandler Cowles and Frederick Clements, and environmentalists John Muir and Gifford Pinchot. Together, I argue they demonstrate how immigrant and impoverished subjects living in urban zones were rhetorically imagined and physically and metaphorically associated with natural entities. I contend that this literal naturalization makes immigrant presence less threatening to a national collective by converting these bodies and places into natural resources to be consumed for nationalist purposes. This version of citizenship imagines collectivity as a form of organicism, a process by which foreign subjects and non-citizens can be incorporated into a citizenry as natural resources while not necessarily legally constituted as citizens of the nation.

While the rhetoric surrounding land use began to take new political, constitutional and sociocultural form in the first wave of a formal environmental movement, there simultaneously was a dramatic jurisprudential shift in Indian status in the U.S. This chapter explores how the formulation of an "organic citizen" at the turn of the century draws upon circulating concepts of indigeneity. I bring together Indian reform policy, specifically the Dawes Allotment Act, environmental policy, particularly the Antiquities Act, and fictional writings by Mary Austin and George Bird Grinnell. These narratives demonstrate the consistency with which American Indians were imagined as organically connected to natural lands. I argue that the result is a concept of indigenous organicism that is predicated upon the Indian being publicly, although uncomfortably, imagined as a natural constituent of a citizenry and Indian land as a natural part of a national body. Chapter Three examines the fictional and political writings of Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman to consider how they use stories and their public roles to analyze the legal and discursive connections between an environmentalist sensibility and concepts of indigeneity. I contend that Eastman and Zitkala-Sa begin to use a language of rights and democracy within this eco-discourse as a way to insert the native as a rights-bearing citizen in the U.S. nation, putting forth a race analysis that ultimately disrupts the idea of ecological assimilation prevalent at the time. Reading their work alongside key environmental policies, like the Organic Act of 1916, Indian reforms, like the Citizenship Act of 1924, and Willa Cather's novel The Professor's House highlights the persistence of a concept of natural indigeneity that continued to be narrated even after American Indians are given legal citizenship.

Eastman's and Zitkala-Sa's use of the environmentalist/native link as a means for race critique falls out of environmentalist thought and practice in a critical moment of transition in the environmental movement. Their use of storytelling and sense of political right, however, lays the foundation for the type of environmental narrative that emerges with the second stage of the environmental movement. My fourth chapter shifts to this moment, focusing on Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962). I argue that both authors use an environmental narrative, particularly storytelling, as a means to imagine citizen engagement in a participatory democracy. However, while Leopold and Carson incorporate a language of political rights, they do not carefully factor into their versions of national/ecological belonging and action the ways in which race and class identities affect the social, political, and legal standing of various subjects within the eco-nation.

My final chapter explores how a race and class critique in environmentalist thought and politics returns in the last quarter of the twentieth century. I draw from significant legislation and Supreme Court opinions that explicitly defined the political rights of ecological objects and species, such as Sierra Club v. Morton, the Endangered Species Act, and a series of legal battles that emerged around the construction of the Tellico Dam, particularly the Cherokees' resistance to its development. These documents and cases deliberate over the political standing and rights of natural, non-human entities, but they circumnavigate engagement with questions of political standing for geographically and socially marginalized human citizens in the U.S., although this issue is implicitly present and strategically drawn upon in their arguments. This lost component takes shape and political articulation in the following emergence of the environmental justice movement. The politics of voice - "speaking for oneself" - that emerges particularly out of indigenous environmental justice movements highlights the use of storytelling as an activist practice. In their careful novelization of environmental activism, Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995) and Ruth Ozeki's All Over Creation (2003) not only pinpoint the interconnections, but also the injustices that arise out of the way human and ecological subjectivities are legally and culturally constructed. I argue that both authors use the literary form to model how stories and the act of storytelling allow for the articulation of and/or resistance to certain terms of national affiliation. Both Hogan's and Ozeki's novels bring forth an expanded sense of environmentalism, showing that storytelling can redefine our roles as U.S. citizens and position ourselves as active agents in democratic discourse, policy-making and change.

We are living in another pivotal moment of environmentalist thought as new attention is given to the way environmental conditions are deteriorating and as popular culture begins to take interest in these issues. It is crucial that Literary Studies rigorously engage with these issues to examine the kinds of narratives being generated. While Ecocriticism and Native American Studies have remained somewhat marginalized from the core of Literary Studies, this project (particularly in this moment) argues that these types of criticism and theory have an imperative role to play in illuminating narratives of identity, nation, and citizenship.

Dissertation

The study investigates ecotourism potential at Ntimbankulu forest, a remote area which is found at Ugu District Municipality. The essential elements of true ecotourism according to Ceballos-Lascurain, Drake, Boo, Brandon, are: " the participation and involvement of the local communities and residents in close proximity to the site". It is for this reason that the researcher adopted the stakeholder theory which involves local community, NGO and the Government. The main aim of the research is: to improve the standard of living of people near Ntimbankulu forest, (b) to conserve and preserve the natural resources of the forest, (c) to promote and sustain development in the area,( d) to make local community realize the need to protect their natural heritage site which is a huge "rock ship" with a lion crest on one of its side, that is found in the deepest part of the jungle. Lastly, to make the local people benefit from the natural resources found in this Forest. The study also looks at the history and culture of the area. It is hoped that the development of Ntimbankulu Forest will bring many benefits to the local community involving better education, job opportunities, and environmental awareness.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2010.

AbstractA decade has passed since the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami struck. Despite increasing awareness that concrete-based coastal infrastructure, such as seawalls, is not sufficient to protect against unfathomable events, engineering structures still play a significant role in fortifying coastal communities. Meanwhile, purely nature-based approaches (i.e., coastal forests) also have limitations against cataclysmic waves, and there remain uncertainties regarding their ecosystem-based disaster risk reduction functions (Eco-DRR). In tackling these issues, hybrid infrastructure, which combines both gray and green components, has received growing interest. However, little research has been conducted to evaluate the economic values of coastal gray, green, and hybrid infrastructures under uncertainties in terms of people’s preferences.Therefore, in this study, we aimed to (1) quantify the economic value of coastal ecosystem services, including species richness, landscape, recreational services, and disaster risk reduction, under uncertainties through choice experiments; (2) clarify the differences in preferences for preparations against long-cycle tsunamis between those who reside in tsunami-prone areas and those who do not, using a conditional logit (CL) model; and (3) discuss the heterogeneities in coastal citizen perceptions by comparing the CL and mixed logit (ML) model. As a result, this study highlights the importance of considering the heterogeneity of preferences. Furthermore, our respondents in the tsunami-prone group (TPG) valued the coastal defense function offered by gray more highly than the non-TPG, demonstrating an especially large gap regarding seawalls against short-cycle tsunamis (willingness-to-pay (WTP) values of 11,233 JPY and 5958 JPY, respectively). However, there was no significance for coastal forests in the TPG, reflecting the importance of disaster prevention function offered by gray infrastructure. In addition, the hybrid landscape (seawalls + coastal forests) received higher positive responses, 71.1% with WTP of 8245 JPY, than the gray landscape (seawalls only) with WTP of −3358 JPY, as estimated by the ML model. These contradictions and heterogeneities in people’s preferences may foreshadow the difficulties of applying hybrid approaches; hence developing synthesized both stated preference and other revealed preference methods is indispensable for providing strategic design of gray-green combined coastal defense and bolstering coastal realignment.

“Green ICT” constitutes a new term in Informatics that describes environmentally sustainable ICT and the use of ICTs in the interest of the natural environment aiming to sustainable development. It encompasses innovative ICT tools, e- and m-services, and smart technologies in combination with green practices and green behaviour either for the ICT industrial sector or the ICT user/citizen that contributes not only to the protection and restoration of the environment but also to the enhancement of the quality of human life. Thus, “Green ICT” has become synonymous with eco-friendly technologies and software tools.

Chapter 2 attends to the role played by “moral offsets” and what socialpsychologists term “moral self-licensing” in intertwined stories of ecopiety and consumopiety in the nottotally unrelated realms of both popular erotic fiction and corporate public relations messaging.Reading across platforms, this chapter teases out various portrayals of environmental “sin” and “virtue,”juxtaposing the corporate public relations practice of “greenwashing” with the “eco-pious” storying of CEO and philanthropist protagonist Christian Grey in the popular mass-market romance Fifty Shades of Grey. As critics/activists use social media to organize and voice objections both to the corporate practice of public relations “greenwashing” and to the romanticized representations of abusive power in Fifty Shades, these protesters wield digital technologies as tools of narrative interruption and contestation. Their citizen interventions and “transformative works” of media offer insight into the participatory dynamics of what the chapter argues is an emergent environmental economy of virtue as mediated through popular culture.

<i>Abstract.</i>—Despite its importance as a global biodiversity hotspot, the Neotropical savanna is threatened by rampant agricultural, hydropower, and mining development. This chapter describes the influence of landscape patterns and land uses on the taxonomic composition and structure of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages in wadeable streams and hydropower reservoirs in the Neotropical savanna, southeastern Brazil. We used the following approaches: (1) an environmental fragility (erodibility) index, (2) an integrated disturbance index, (3) a hemeroby index of natural vegetation change, (4) the spatial distribution of benthic macroinvertebrate assemblages, (5) macroinvertebrate multimetric indices, and (6) a simplified macroinvertebrate tolerance index for urban streams. We found that land use and anthropogenic disturbances at the catchment scale had significant effects on the structure and functioning of lotic ecosystems, thereby reducing their ability to deliver ecosystem services. Our results also showed that citizen science projects can successfully apply simple, inexpensive methodologies and open an important dialogue between academia and the society at large. This chapter is a synthesis of multistatus and multispatial scale assessment of landscape effects on benthic macroinvertebrates living in headwaters and hydropower dam reservoirs in the Neotropical savanna. Future challenges include incorporating novel ecological methodologies in ecological syntheses (e.g., eco-bioinformatics), functional trait-based indices and holistic thermodynamic indices, and standardized assessment methodologies. Doing so will further our understanding of the many-layered ecological effects of land use and other anthropogenic disturbances on aquatic biota at landscape scales.

The Smart City program has become a step towards the development of digital space in the urban environment of megacities such as Moscow. Despite the global nature of the idea of the communicative-digital urban model, an attempt at a human-oriented approach remains. In the digital space, the function of anthropocentrism is assumed by interactive design that serves as an adaptation of the manifold urban environment. Design becomes a tool creating a person's comfort zone, implementing various urban socio-cultural scenarios interactively, taking into account the psycho-emotional state of a person. In the developed concept of WATT interactive application a person acts as an energetic and emotional "component" of the city. The product answers the goal of the design system of the sensual stratum of the environment, forming the concept of a Sensitive city and its important parameter: an indicator mood of the urban environment’s mood. The innovative character of the approach lies on the city aimed at the creation of an new energetical product - a tool that forms the eco-energy exchange between the resident and the city, results as an index of resident’s "happiness". The application becomes an example of the hybrid existence of urban environment, harmonizes the relationship between the digital field and the citizen: it supports the emotional and psychological state and offers various rehabilitation programs. This becomes especially relevant due to the need to neutralize the consequences of self-isolation after the pandemic.

Digital Empowerment Foundation (DEF) has been making use of many innovative methods and technologies to democratize innovation, upskill, build resilience and foster lifelong learning in rural India with a special focus on marginalized communities. We would like to showcase some of our innovations here. // START: A digital learning and Media & Information Literacy (MIL) toolkit, designed exclusively for first-generation technology users to promote digital inclusion and fight information poverty. It is a 45-hour digital learning curriculum that covers 30 topics ranging from basics of computers, use of applications, MIL and online security and safety, among others. The pedagogy for START focuses on hands-on training and workshops in rural and tribal communities through activities and gamification of topics. // GOAL (Going Online as Leaders): A program to connect urban volunteers with rural women online to provide them guidance and support in digital skills to bridge the information gap. This technology-enabled mentorship program was adopted by the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Government of India and is now being replicated in several states. The data comparing baseline and endline show that beneficiaries of GOAL show higher interest in pursuing higher education, greater self-confidence, improved communication skills and aspiration to become changemakers. // Digital Sarthak: This program demonstrates how digital literacy through the community network model can be an important strategy to achieve a replicable model of local economic development. 100 rural women were trained to further train 500 women-led Community Development Organizations (CDOs) and 10000 rural women entrepreneurs in the first stage. The program placed women in active roles in the information eco-system that further improved their confidence and capacity. // SkillBot: A self-learning chatbot built on the free and open-source Telegram platform. Telegram provides free backend technical support and chatbot feature. SkillBot was developed by DEF and Commonwealth of Learning to teach digital literacy, financial literacy, citizen services and data management to rural youth and artisans. SkillBot is multilingual and employs tutorial lessons, audio graphics, infographics, flashcards, interactive quizzes and activities for teaching. Skil Bot thus provides an accessible, easy to understand platform for skilling. // Maker's Space is an initiative where physical centres equipped with STEM learning and digital skilling tools are created in DEF’s community information centres at the remotest locations. Maker's Space facilitates an unstructured learning space supported by digital/STEM tools that allow children and youth, especially persons with disabilities, to take ownership of their learning and create innovative solutions for their communities.