Ecological Orientation Research Articles

Reformed Protestantism and the Origins of Modern Environmentalism

The question I investigate in this essay is why it was individuals and regions with a Reformed Protestant religious background—rather than, say, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Buddhist, or Taoist—which pioneered environmental campaigns and efforts to set aside national parks and rare species for conservation. Subsidiary questions discussed are two: (1) What might be the roots of an affinity between Protestantism and an ecological orientation to the world? (2) If there was this affinity in the nineteenth-century origins of ecological conservation, why is it not more widely acknowledged in contemporary scholarship and in the public mind?

Екологізація економічних систем як пріоритет їх трансформації у ХХІ столітті

Розкрито інституційні засади екологізації сучасних економічних систем з позицій постіндустріальної парадигми та економічної компаративістики в умовах посилення глобалізації. Наведено зміст екологічної парадигми економічної теорії та обґрунтовано потреба виокремлення соціально-екологічних відносин у системі економічних відносин суспільства. Підкреслено важливість формування сучасної екологічної культури у процесі трансформації економічних систем, коли в її основі мають бути орієнтованість на екологічну доцільність і безпеку, відсутність протиставлення людини і природи. Запропоновано авторське трактування процесу екологізації сучасних економічних систем в умовах посилення глобалізації, переходу людства до суспільства знань та "зеленої економіки". Під екологізацією економічних систем пропонуємо розуміти посилення екологічної спрямованості економічних систем у процесі їх трансформації, що виявляється у становленні сучасної економічної та екологічної свідомості і культури, екологічної відповідальності, утвердженні сучасних екологічних цінностей, формуванні відповідної нормативно-правової, інституційної бази, спрямованої на суспільний контроль за системою зв'язків "людина – економіка – екологія", застосуванні санкцій і стимулів щодо впливу економічної системи на стан екологічної рівноваги в умовах обмеженості природних ресурсів та посилення екологічної кризи глобального, регіонального і локального характеру. Екологізація економічних систем є об'єктивним процесом їх трансформації, домінантою трансформації на зламі тисячоліть, що утверджує усвідомлення екологічних проблем як глобальних. Екологізацію економічних систем розглядають сьогодні як дуже важливий, навіть визначальний, критерій порівняльного аналізу національних систем чи наднаціональних системних утворень. Запропоноване поняття "екологізація економічних систем", на наше переконання, не тільки заповнює відповідну прогалину в економічній теорії, а й дає змогу повністю врахувати екологічний контекст дослідження і порівняння економічних систем на порозі третього тисячоліття.

HEALTH ACTIVISM FROM THE BOTTOM UP: PROGRESSIVE ERA IMMIGRANT CHICAGOANS’ VIEWS ON GERM THEORY, ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH, AND CLASS INEQUALITY

Drawing on Chicago immigrant communities’ archives, memoirs, and native-language newspapers, this article advances our understanding of Progressive Era environmental politics by delving into cross-class immigrant communities’ views on and activism concerning health. Everyday ethnic Chicagoans—medical and journalistic professionals alongside working-class immigrants—displayed a sophisticated understanding of health. Well versed in medical and scientific germ theories, they embraced a mixture of germ and environmental theories that made them, in effect, “disease ecologists,” revealing a widespread health ecology orientation not limited to the educated white professionals and reformers about whom scholarship has revealed much more. Such perspectives contribute to reinterpretations of earlier scholarly assumptions that germ theory largely displaced environmental analyses. Moreover, ethnic communities’ interpretations of health as ecological underpinned some of their political activism in pursuit of greater environmental parity. Many ethnic activists from across Chicago's class spectrum fought alongside white reformers to rectify environmental health inequities. They sometimes even initiated efforts, displaying an early version of environmental justice activism. At the same time, other cross-class ethnics at least partly blamed individual or ethnic communities’ habits and failures, mirroring to a degree the condescension visible among many Anglo reformers and professionals.

An Ecological Approach to Understanding Assessment for Learning in Support of Student Writing Achievement

In this paper, we report on a project conducted in a New Zealand primary school that aimed to enhance the writing achievement of primary school boys who were achieving just below the national standard for their age or level through the use of peer feedback and information and communication technologies (ICTs). The project involved a teacher collaborative inquiry approach where all seven teachers in the school and the school principal participated to achieve the project aim. We adopt an ecological approach as a lens to offer a holistic and comprehensive view of how peer assessment and use of ICTs can be facilitated to improve writing achievement.. Data were collected through teacher interviews and written reflections of practice and student learning, teacher analysis of student work, team meeting notes, classroom observations, and student focus group interviews. Findings from the thematic analysis of textual data illustrate the potential of adopting an ecological approach to consider how teacher classroom practices are shaped by the school, community and wider policy context. At the classroom level, our ecological analysis highlighted a productive synergy between commonplace writing pedagogy strategies and assessment for learning practices (AfL) as part of teacher orchestration of an ensemble of interdependent routines, tools, and activities. Diversity, redundancy and local adaptations of resources to provide multiple pathways and opportunities - social and material and digital - emerged as important in fostering peer assessment and ICT use in support of writing achievement. Importantly, these practices were made explicit and taken up across the school and in the parent community because of whole staff involvement in the project. The wider policy context allowed for and supported teachers developing more effective pedagogy to impact student learning outcomes. We propose that an ecological orientation offers the field a productive insight into the contextual dynamics of AfL as classroom practice that is connected to the wider community and that has long term value for developing student independence and learning outcomes.

Bringing local voices into community revitalization: engaged communication research in Urban planning

ABSTRACTThe need to better engage low-income communities affected by revitalization of the built environment has been well documented in urban planning. Guided by communication infrastructure theory (CIT), this study presents a research project that made concerted efforts at engaging neighborhoods of Northeast Los Angeles that are experiencing rapid gentrification. The project was a partnership with a multi-sector collaborative working on the revitalization of the L.A. River and its surrounding communities. This paper specifically demonstrates how CIT's social ecological orientation was applied to seek input on L.A. River and community revitalization from storytelling networks made up of residents, small businesses, and local media. We also examine the impact of this engaged research on the organizational partners of the collaborative, and their views on community engagement in revitalization. Lastly, we discuss how the lessons learned broadly speak to future opportunities and challenges that aim for communicative planning approaches to urban revitalization.

Alphabetic print-based literacy, hermeneutic sociality, and philosophic culture

ABSTRACTThis essay offers a media ecological orientation to Western philosophy, showing the essential role that alphabetic writing and print play in making philosophy possible. It offers reviews of historical developments in alphabetic print-based literacy to show how modern literacy has congealed into a hermeneutic sociality undergirding philosophic culture.

Media ecological orientations to philosophy and philosophical problems

ABSTRACTThis introduction to the Media Ecology special issue of the Review of Communication provides a broad overview of the history of media ecology, clarifies its main orientations and key thinkers, and then illustrates how problems and orientations within philosophy are symptoms of various kinds of technological mediation.

Nowhere to run, rabbit: the cold-war calculus of disease ecology.

During the cold war, Frank Fenner (protégé of Macfarlane Burnet and René Dubos) and Francis Ratcliffe (associate of A. J. Nicholson and student of Charles Elton) studied mathematically the coevolution of host resistance and parasite virulence when myxomatosis was unleashed on Australia's rabbit population. Later, Robert May called Fenner the "real hero" of disease ecology for his mathematical modeling of the epidemic. While Ratcliffe came from a tradition of animal ecology, Fenner developed an ecological orientation in World War II through his work on malaria control (with Ratcliffe and Ian Mackerras, among others)-that is, through studies of tropical medicine. This makes Fenner at least a partial exception to other senior disease ecologists in the region, most of whom learned their ecology from examining responses to agricultural challenges and animal husbandry problems in settler colonial society. Here I consider the local ecologies of knowledge in southeastern Australia during this period, and describe the particular cold-war intellectual niche that Fenner and Ratcliffe inhabited.

Improvement of Teaching Ability Based on Teaching Reflection and Evaluation: Taking Economics Teaching as an Example

Scientific teaching quality evaluation system and the effective operation mechanism have a positive meaning for promoting teaching reform. Teachers' specialization is the core of education, and is the starting point and end-result of education reform. Teachers' professional development has three kinds of orientation: rational orientation, reflection-evaluation orientation, and ecological orientation. Some new research suggests that reflection-evaluation orientation is the best way to improve teachers' professional abilities. At present, reflective teacher education has become worldwide trend. Compared with experiential teaching, reflective teaching is a sort of positive tool which is used to help teachers conduct their active and professional work. The main purpose of reflective teaching is to allow teachers to reflect on their own work and self-evaluation, and improve their methodology, eventually improve teaching methods and promote student learning. Nevertheless, there are many problems in the teaching quality evaluation system in the aspects of concept, subject, standard, organization, etc. Therefore, we have to reflect and reconstruct the teaching quality evaluation system in colleges and universities.

Environmental awareness of the students of agriculture at the University of Novi Sad: Testing the differences using NEP scale

In this paper, the NEP scale has been used for measurement of achieved level of environmental awareness of students of the Faculty of Agriculture at the University of Novi Sad. As they are future decision makers in the field of agribusiness, it is very important for them to accept the new ecological paradigm in order to be able to make decisions in the future that are consistent with sustainable development and environmental protection. The research has been conducted on a sample of 800 students. The average value of the environmental awareness of students measured by NEP scale is 3.47, which indicates that students have a pro-ecological worldviews, but still firmly believe in technological development which will provide comfortable and safe life for future generations, without major changes in behavior patterns. Special emphasis was put on understanding of the effects of certain demographic variables on students? ecological orientation. A statistically significant difference in terms of acceptance of new environmental paradigm has not been observed regarding these variables, but there is a statistically significant difference when it comes to the individual NEP scale statements.

ЭКОЛОГО-ГЕОГРАФИЧЕСКАЯ НАПРАВЛЕННОСТЬ СЕМЕНОВОДСТВА ОВОЩНЫХ КУЛЬТУР

ЭКОЛОГО-ГЕОГРАФИЧЕСКАЯ НАПРАВЛЕННОСТЬ СЕМЕНОВОДСТВА ОВОЩНЫХ КУЛЬТУР

Work Integration Social Enterprises in Austria – Characteristics, Evolution and Perspectives

AbstractAt a time of rising unemployment and strained labor market policy budgets, Work Integration Social Enterprises (WISEs) are currently facing difficult circumstances in Austria. If, and how, WISEs can continue to create and deliver quality services for their users (while meeting public authority’s demands) is a topic of vigorous debate at the national level. In an endeavor to gain insight into the current situation, the focus of this paper is to explain the historical emergence of WISEs in the context of the Austrian welfare state. The analysis combines empirical data on key characteristics of ECO-WISEs – a major subgroup of WISEs with an ecological orientation – with an analysis of the institutionalization process of these WISEs, based on the outcome of a series of semi-structured interviews with key experts in the field. The discussion begins by describing their development in the 1980s, growth in the 1990s and concludes with the marketization and reorientation process experienced by these WISEs from 2000 onwards. The paper concludes with a discussion of the victories and challenges faced by these WISEs and highlights the important role that ECO-WISEs have assumed in recognizing and responding to societal needs, developing innovative services, and in meeting the requirements of policy makers.

A Qualitative Metasynthesis of Consultation Process Research: What We Know and Where to Go

ABSTRACTQualitative metasynthesis (QM) is a research methodology that permits the meaningful integration and interpretation of qualitative research. This study applies a QM approach combined with constructivist grounded theory methods, bolstered by several features of research credibility, to examine the state of consultee-centered consultation (CCC) and related relational, process-oriented school consultation research. A systematic search and retrieval process including two rounds of appraisal resulted in a final sample of 38 relevant studies from 1995 to 2014. Data analyses included two stages of coding/theme development. Integrated themes suggest a number of considerations regarding consultation implementation including: system-level factors; consultation structure; consultee voice, social-emotional support, and learning; ecological orientation and cultural responsiveness; and consultation training. Future research priorities stemming from these themes are identified and elaborated upon, as are future applications for QM in educational research.

Public administration social responsibility of business entities

Social responsibility of a business entity is seen as an effective tool of public admin-istration. The current stage of development of social responsibility in Ukraine requires state involvement, as its vision by business entities are different, and there is also a need to develop a national model of social responsibility on the basis of international standards, because Ukraine, on the one hand, has the national characteristics of implementation of social initiatives and, on the other, the conditions and resources for their implementation is different from developed market economies. The visions of on social responsibility in the scientific literature are also different. This was the basis for the determination of her essence. We analyzed the interpretations of social responsibility and identified their advantages and disadvantages. Formulation of social responsibility, which is submitted in article, actualizes ecological orientation of the business entity taking into account the need for responsible behavior, and responsibility for actions, which violate the norms of society.

Eco-Economic Management as a Tool of Development of Agriculture

The purpose of the research is to determine the perspectives of the uses of eco-economic management for development of agricultural business. It is offered to use proprietary methodology of evaluation of effectiveness of managing marketing in business. The authors determine principles and factors which set specific form of organization of ecological management in business structure and analyze the process of eco-economic management of business subjects. The key results of the research are development of the scheme of balance approach to the development of agricultural business and model of eco-economic management of development of agricultural business. As a result of the research, the authors come to the conclusion that provision of necessary level of ecological security is a significant factor of development of modern entrepreneurship. Under these conditions, a task of national significance is intensive formation of new business structures and organizations of ecological orientation. Due to that, eco-economic management is an effective tool of development of agricultural business. The offered model of eco-economic management of development of agricultural business allows taking into account ecological factor in the process of conduct of business activities and ensuring the balance of interests of environment protection and development of business, which shows the expedience of its use in modern agricultural business. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n1s1p363

Ecological value orientations and readiness for activism in Serbia

The global environmental crisis, caused by the unreasonable behavior of human beings and their economic activities that affect nature and its resources, has created a basis for the development of new environmental paradigm, which emphasizes the intrinsic value of nature, the close connection between society and the environment and the importance of their mutual influence. Changing the view of the world becomes a necessary step in establishing the optimum of the inter­play between humans and the natural environment. Environmental knowledge is the most primary element of environmental awareness. The indispensable outcome of environmental awareness is ecological behavior that should be developed and encouraged. The formation of desirable behavior affect environmental objective and subjective factors. Objective factors are, for example, environmental conditions (degree of degradation of eco-system), socio-ecological infrastructure, the level of technological development. The subjective factors important for ecological behav­ior includes attitudes, expectations, political affiliation, personal and social values. For psychology, of particular importance are the values that support the behavior oriented towards environmental protection. This research examined the ecological value orientation and willingness to ecological involvement of students from the three groups of faculties: for mining and geology, for geography (environmental department), and faculties of social orientation (economic, law, philosophy . . . ). The results showed that the respondents have a well-developed environmental values that are a prerequisite for pro-environmental behavior and activities that leads to protection of the environment. Thus, the students were pretty much willing to engage in activities such as recycling various materials, use of public transportation and take other measures that contribute to a sustainable lifestyle.

Nature and the Non-human in Andrea Arnold'sWuthering Heights

This article examines the representation of the natural environment and its non-human inhabitants in Andrea Arnold's 2011 film version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. Arnold's ‘post-heritage’ adaptation, I argue, offers a post-humanist distribution of attention that, in its expansive interest in flora and fauna, exceeds the perspectives of its human protagonists, challenges popular ideas about the novel and subverts the conventions of mainstream narrative cinema. The film's intensely ecological and environmental orientation functions not only to divide our attention across human and non-human realms but also to counter nostalgic and ultimately ideological idealisations of ‘white’ and ‘English’ natural landscapes and rural lifestyles. Such idealisations have been extrapolated from Brontë’s novel, have informed earlier film adaptations and continue to have a material impact on the geographical region popularly known as ‘Brontë country’.

FROM ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND «GREEN ECONOMY»: NATIONAL PROJECT OF EDUCATION GREENING IN KAZAKHSTAN

The aim of the investigation is to show an system role during transition to green economy – to a new stage of development of world economy. Methods. The methods involve the analysis and generalization of contents of the international and interstate documents of the Republic of Kazakhstan urged to provide sustainable social and economic development. Retrospective and project analysis of course processes features of social and economic system of Kazakhstan is also applied. Results and scientific novelty. The essence of the concepts «green economy», enlightenment, education and greening of society are disclosed. The Kazakh national specifics of implementation of the international documents on implementation of model of a sustainable development are shown. The Concept of ecological formation of the Republic of Kazakhstan according to which the system of the country is urged to create, develop and fix effectively, along with a necessary complex of knowledge, stereotypes of behavior of the people capable to make reasonable decisions is provided and to work according to legislatively consolidated nature protection regulations and standards. It is stated that of content of in the republic has the developed regulatory framework, however additional measures for upgrade of an system are necessary: its theoretical and methodological reasons, preparation and advanced training of pedagogical personnel, development of the new methodical means bring into focus an ecological orientation of training and education, etc. Practical significance. Measures for further improvement of ecological and ecological at all steps of are listed.

Listening to food workers: Factors that impact proper health and hygiene practice in food service.

Foodborne disease is a significant problem worldwide. Research exploring sources of outbreaks indicates a pronounced role for food workers' improper health and hygiene practice. To investigate food workers' perceptions of factors that impact proper food safety practice. Interviews with food service workers in Baltimore, MD, USA discussing food safety practices and factors that impact implementation in the workplace. A social ecological model organizes multiple levels of influence on health and hygiene behavior. Issues raised by interviewees include factors across the five levels of the social ecological model, and confirm findings from previous work. Interviews also reveal many factors not highlighted in prior work, including issues with food service policies and procedures, working conditions (e.g., pay and benefits), community resources, and state and federal policies. Food safety interventions should adopt an ecological orientation that accounts for factors at multiple levels, including workers' social and structural context, that impact food safety practice.

Responsible tourist behaviour: The role of social engagement

This is a study of the effect of social engagement on responsible tourist behaviour. We also examine the mediating role of responsible public management of tourism, involvement in responsible tourism and the ecological orientation of tourism. This research is based on an overall sample of 656 respondents. Our research hypotheses are tested using structural equation modelling. The results reveal a direct positive effect of social engagement on responsible behaviour among tourists. Involvement in responsible tourism and satisfaction regarding the responsible public management of tourism have mediating effects on the relationship between social engagement and responsible tourist behaviour. However, an ecological orientation in tourism has no significant mediating effect on this relationship, nor does it have a direct effect on responsible tourist behaviour. We also discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings.