Land Back Research Articles

Against colonial grounds: Geography on Indigenous lands

In this response to Natalie Oswin’s provocation, ‘An other geography’, we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictive histories. Can they be retrofitted in the present to enable the futurity of Indigenous people and theorizations? Can we turn our discipline’s history of erasure inside out, to center the land, people, and practices that were both crucial to and absent from it except as shadowy and metaphorical presences? We draw on our own teaching, and from scholarship in Indigenous and Black Studies, to consider what it might look like to return land and reconfigure relations among those who have been cast aside by white patriarchal settler structures, but in incommensurate ways.

Introduction: Unsettle the Struggle, Trouble the Grounds

Introduction: Unsettle the Struggle, Trouble the Grounds SA Smythe (bio) The interrelated quest to map the unknown—the geographic unknown, the corporeal indigenous/black unknown—sets forth what Neil Smith calls “uneven development,” albeit from a very different analytical perspective: the systematic production of differential social hierarchies, which are inscribed in space and give a coherence to disproportionate geographies. —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds We, to paraphrase [Kamau Braithwaite], can make here, on these broken grounds . . . something torn and new . . . , a communal future of wholeness. —Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Kamau Brathwaite: The Voice of African Presence” As Black feminist Barbara Smith notes in Marlon Riggs’s iconic film Black Is…Black Ain’t, “There are as many kinds of Black people as there are Black people to be. There are so many variations on this theme.” And for as many kinds of Black people as there are to be, there are also many kinds of relationships to place and to belonging. The study of the African diaspora—of the practices and experiences that teem across language, histories, and other attachments—points to an origin: to Africa or “the continent.” However, to those not committed to its study, this reference is often reduced and ideologically bound to enslavement and departure. This special issue is instigated and organized around this observation, and wonders: what to the African, Black, and Afro-descendant is indigeneity? What, to the Indigenous, is Black(ness)? We know well that the stakes of considering Blackness and Indigeneity together in epistemological relation are high, and certainly not singular. Nor are they discrete, despite the efforts (be they concerted or a result of ideological neglect) to make indigeneity cartographically and thus epistemologically implausible or unthinkable in a specifically Black African context.1 This inability to trace landed attachment to places perpetuate the notion of Afro-descended people’s nonbelonging, and the question of sovereignty and self-possession becomes ephemeralized. In this settler imaginary, who owns the land (which is already a white supremacist conceit: many Native authors have argued over generations that relation to rather than possession of land is the deeper intention of land acknowledgments or even Land Back demands) is utilized as a coercive cudgel with which to determine who is made to labor on the land and who can form and maintain knowledge over the land and place writ large as well as let themselves be known/knowable.2 Here we see the connection between racial capitalism and settler colonialism, as epistemological-material projects of genocide, super exploitation, and dispossession are always already linked. The representation of Africans as un-landed in cartographic renderings like Native Land is one of the proliferating examples of how Indigenous belonging has been removed from Blackness and Black people. This informs the tenuous relationship of Africans in the diaspora to Indigenous claims (for example, of Afro-descended peoples in places like the colonial United States where Africans were considered enslaved people and not people with Indigenous identity and the policing of those lines continues to impact our present day perceptions of incommensurability).3 Continuing down the path of unsedimenting the relationship between Blackness and landedness and the delimiting relationship of Indigenous peoples to their lands as the only measure through which to understand and afford or experience sovereignty is to trouble the grounds—to disturb the tasks, the conditions, and the terrain—of understanding and knowledge production on which Blackness and Indigeneity can be thought in multiscale and dynamic relation. Situated as the contemporary vanguard of this settler structure of knowledge production, obstruction, and maintenance is the academic industrial complex in the United States in particular, which is founded on genocide, anti-Black racism, and other ongoing modes of dispossession. We see these formations in the land grant institutions built on stolen lands (such as the University of California) and in the fact that across Turtle Island, Black Studies and Native Studies programs and departments are forced to compete for the same scarce resources and encouraged to remain discrete units and bodies of knowledge, despite the realities on the ground and their shared relational histories. The matter of funding and employment also reveals the university’s commitment to racial capitalism, as...

Islamophobia Never Rests in the Balkans: Muslim Communities and the Legacy of Exclusionary Nationalisms and Ethnic Expulsions

A long history of anti-Muslim prejudice has marked the Balkans. From Pope Urban’s call to take the Holy Land back from the “Turks,” to the writings of Martin Luther seeking repentance for Christian sins by undergoing Muslim persecution, to anti-Ottoman invectives by Catholic writers in the sixteenth century, Islamophobia has been a dominant narrative. But Islamophobic Orientalism may be a preferred framework for examining anti-Muslim prejudice since the intersectionality of race and religion, combined with region, offers a more comprehensive explanatory narrative. Over la longue durée [“the long term”], the crumbing of Islamic structures in the late nineteenth century, the horrors of World War II on the peninsula, and the outbreak of the Balkan wars in the 1990s—with genocide charges invoked as the definitive sanction—sapped the Muslim presence. The refugee crisis affecting the Balkans contributed further to producing internally-displaced persons and others seeking protection abroad. Albanian writer Ismail Kadare serves as source conveying the exclusionary character of nationalism, prejudice, and stereotyping for a region abounding in provincial, ethnic, and religious intermingling.

Pathways to forest wealth in Nepal

ABSTRACTNepal is one of the leading countries embracing community forestry with about 45% of households being members of community forest user groups. However, there has been a failure to deliver the full potential of forest wealth because of a lack of proper silvicultural management, a constraining policy environment and a complex socio-institutional context. Meanwhile, mid-hill agriculture has not kept pace with the changing economy and out-migration. Food insecurity is rife in a landscape of under-utilised forests and under-utilised land. Australian development assistance between 1978 and 2006 supported the establishment of 21 000 ha of community forests and significant contributions to community forest institutions. In the light of the under-performance of this sector, the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research established the project Enhancing Food Security and Livelihoods through Agroforestry and Community Forestry in Nepal, locally known as EnLiFT, which ran from 2013 to 2018. This paper aims to explain Australia’s contribution to Nepal’s forestry, with a focus on more recent achievements supporting pathways to realise the potential wealth in Nepal’s forests. It begins with an outline of the early Australian support and origins of community forestry in Nepal via the Nepal–Australia Forestry Project, and then the current status of community forestry. It then describes the research process of the EnLiFT project starting with new conceptual models and methods such as: (1) the Pathways Approach to link forest and food security; (2) the EnLiFT Bioeconomic Model of the Farm-Forest Interface; (3) the Silvo-Institutional Model for Scientific Forest Management; (4) Active and Equitable Forest Management; (5) Rapid Silvicultural Appraisal; (6) the Strategic and Inclusive Planning process and (7) EnLiFT Policy Labs. We also highlight many significant development impacts of EnLiFT. The demonstration and training of silvicultural methods released considerable forest wealth into the community. This occurred around the time of the 2015 earthquake when timber was in need for reconstruction. It was also associated with the re-vitalisation of a defunct sawmill by facilitation of community-private partnership. It was responsible for turning the public debate from resistance to acceptance of scientific forest management. It also developed inclusive planning processes for the revision of operational plans of community forests. On privately owned land, EnLiFT demonstrated: (1) the possibility for marked and rapid changes in livelihoods from relatively simple agroforestry interventions based on horticultural commodities and tree fodders; (2) an even greater potential for livelihood enhancement through private forestry and (3) articulated the current institutional and regulatory constraints on sale of trees from private land. We conclude by highlighting the contributions of EnLiFT in policy debate which led to policy outcomes that further the improvement of community forestry, agroforestry and bringing under-utilised land back into productive use.

Teaching and Learning about Settler-colonial Racism: A Case for “Unsettling” Minoritizing and Multicultural Perspectives

This article contributes to emerging efforts to decolonize race-based approaches and antiracist pedagogies in sociology. Building on recent scholarship on settler colonialism and decolonization as well as her experiences of being unsettled, the author discusses the limitations of her critical sociological toolkit for understanding and teaching about the cultural violence associated with “Indian” sport mascots. By discussing an active-learning writing assignment and students’ work from an online course in sport and society, the author argues for sociologists to go beyond frameworks that conceptualize American Indians as a racial or ethnic group seeking greater inclusion in a multicultural nation and consider ongoing settler colonialism that structures U.S. society. The author contends that adding land back into sociological frameworks will help make visible legitimized racism and the cultural logic of elimination and replacement of Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. To conclude, the author advocates for instructors to be critically self-reflective and to use sociology classrooms as sites of decolonization.

Local People's Perception on the Development of Large Scale Plantations in Ethiopia and Its Implications in Success: A Case Study of Nazareth Fuelwood Plantation Project

Plantation forestry is a long time experience in Ethiopia. But, large scale plantations as national programs have been initiated recently. However, the attempts have not been very successful as expected. There have been formidable challenges to sustainable management of plantation projects following conflict of interest with local people. Most often, afforestation programs over emphasize technical solutions to wood scarcities leaving aside the human dimension. Nazareth fuel wood project (NFWP) is one of the most conspicuous one in this regard. Efforts made so far to reverse the situation have been unsatisfactory whilst there is an increasing demand for the woody biomass. Realistic assessment of what determines the success of such projects is too often neglected. Therefore, this study was carried out on NFWP, in Eastern Shawa Zone of Oromia to examine perceptions of the local people towards the plantation project and its implication in success. Peasant Associations (PAs) and households surrounding the project area were randomly selected for quantitative and qualitative data collection. Formal interviews, rapid appraisals and forest surveys were conducted to gather the required data. Descriptive statistics, multiple regression, chi-square test and Area Production Model (APM) were used in the analysis of the data. From the analysis, perceptions of the local people towards NFWP were found to be affected by the impact of the project on the local people, land tenure, project management system and institutional gaps. Accordingly, two major views and responses of the local people towards the project were identified. 1. Antagonistic perception and response - since the project had taken over their farm and grazing land without compensation and benefit sharing mechanism. Consequently, 55% of the informants were found to perceive the plantation project negatively – demanding for complete destruction to the forest and their land back. 2. Use response – as a means of livelihood security, people resorted to destruct the forest for firewood and construction materials including for income generation. Hence, most of the forest dependent poor and the women generally perceive the plantation project positively. These groups believe that they would become more vulnerable to serious food insecurity, fuel-wood and construction materials shortage if the plantation forest doesn’t exist. Currently, about 56% of the plantation in terms of volume has been totally destroyed at about 2.5% mean annual rate of destruction, which could lead to a complete deforestation within 15-20 years. The failure of the project is mainly attributed to the conflict of interest between the project and the local people. Thus, effective participation of the local people in such projects is a key to success. Harmonizing the conflict of interest through effective local participation, benefit sharing mechanism, tenure security and adequate institutional support is essential for the success of plantation projects. Hence, joint management system should be designed with active participation of the local people and other key stakeholders as a matter of urgency so as to save the project from total destruction. This could be the future pathway to sustainable forest management system.

EPA pushes redevelopment of Superfund sites

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is seeking investors for 31 hazardous waste sites that EPA determined have the greatest potential for redevelopment. The sites, scattered across the country, feature several former chemical manufacturing sites, including the old Kerr-McGee Chemical company in Jacksonville, Fla., as well as a the BoRit Asbestos site in Ambler, Pa. All 31 have been on EPA’s Superfund list of hazardous waste sites for priority cleanup and have undergone remediation. And all have “significant redevelopment potential” because of access to transportation, local land values, previous interest by investors, or other factors, the agency said on Jan. 17. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt is pushing hard to get remaining cleanup of Superfund sites completed and the land back into use. He says sites on the list are “ready to become catalysts for economic growth and revitalization.” It’s unclear whether Pruitt expects those potentially responsible for the contamination to pony

Estuarine dynamics and acid sulfate soil discharge: Quantifying a conceptual model

Over 170,000km2 of Acid Sulfate Soils (ASS) have been identified worldwide, with 65,000 km2 in Asia; 45,000km2 in Africa; 30,000km2 in Australia; 30,000km2 in South America; and a combined total of 10,000km2 in Europe and North America. A state-of-the-science approach to remediate these soils is to encourage tidal buffering. This approach involves the removal of drainage infrastructure and the repurposing of agricultural land back to tidal wetlands. To date, remediation efforts have largely focused on individual locations at the farm plot scale. Remediation projects have commonly focused on onsite acidity levels, groundwater transport and impacts to agricultural infrastructure. This site-based approach provides detailed information on acid hotspots, but provides limited understanding of the overall issues affecting the broader coastal floodplain.A catchment-wide estuarine dynamics approach has been developed and field tested to overcome current limitations. The catchment-wide approach combines onsite investigations with large-scale studies of: (i) the fate/transport of acidic plumes, (ii) the coastal floodplain response dynamics to rainfall or flooding events, and (iii) the objective prioritisation of impacted landscapes for remediation. This paper provides a detailed description of the catchment-wide approach supported by conceptual processes and a detailed case study. The 20km2 case study site highlights the importance of local and catchment processes in guiding rehabilitation plans.

Does demolition improve biodiversity? Linking urban green space and socioeconomic characteristics to avian richness in a shrinking city

Anthropogenic change, specifically urbanization, has lasting impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services. Past work has linked green space variables and socioeconomic characteristics with biodiversity in urban areas. Shrinking cities present an interesting case for studying biodiversity because many of these places have implemented demolition policies to remove vacant buildings from the landscape, which returns previously urbanized land back into a “natural” state. The objective of this study is to investigate the multifaceted relationship among urban green space, socioeconomic characteristics, demolition activities, and avian species richness in the shrinking city of Buffalo, NY. We first establish a baseline understanding of how social and ecological factors are related to avian species richness through generalized linear models (GLM) and then incorporate a variable characterizing demolition to understand how the process of demolition may be impacting species richness relative to other factors. Second, since our analysis relies on “citizen science” data from eBird, we aim to better understand the factors driving eBird participation in Buffalo through zero-inflated negative binomial (ZINB) regression models to test how social and ecological characteristics and demolition affect checklists submission across the city. Our findings suggested that demolition activities do not increase species richness in Buffalo, indicating these sites may not be returning to a natural state that is usable by birds. We also found that areas that have undergone considerable demolition may be a potential deterrent to eBird participation, and eBird users may create bias by sampling areas with greater green space connectivity, and thus higher richness.

Corporate Responsibility and Compliance with the Law: Land, Dispossession and Aftermath at Newmont's Ahafo Project in Ghana

An important part of responsible business practices is compliance with the law. This article details what actually happens when the laws of the host country fail to ensure adequate protection. The focus here is on land dispossession and loss of livelihood in relation to a gold mine project in central Ghana. How come that a well-known international company – Newmont – with its own CSR statements sets up a project in the year 2003 that displaces subsistence farmers from their land without compensating in cash or with replacement land? The analysis identifies the factors that lead the company to not compensate farmers for their lost land: cost-cutting, strict adherence to the law, CSR commitment that was new and not internalised, complexities of the Ghanaian land tenure system, peer pressure to preserve the status quo, selection of an ‘old school’ CSR manager, and the inadequacy of Ghanaian mining law to account for relatively novel, ‘open pit’ mining techniques. However, the specter of famine raised by civil society activism, the involvement of the International Financial Corporation, and a better qualified CSR team constitute another set of factors that lead to a comprehensive package of livelihood improvement measures. There is a contrast between the complexity, long-term and advanced type of assistance Newmont currently envisages and the backward, short-term, formalism and brutality of denying compensation for land back in 2003. This research is based on the extensive documentation Newmont makes available on its website, interviews conducted in Ghana, and literature research.

Willingness of Farmers to Transform Vacant Rural Residential Land into Cultivated Land in a Major Grain-Producing Area of Central China

A large amount of cultivated lands in China is occupied by vacant residential areas, thereby wasting land resources and placing local food security at risk. Therefore, transforming vacant rural residential land back to its previous form is urgently required to maintain the amount of cultivated land and guarantee food security. We comprehensively analyzed the willingness of farmers to participate in vacant residential land transformation and determine the factors that influence such willingness, including the awareness of farmers about their rural residential environment, their knowledge of residential land-use policies and their awareness of the consequences of such transformation. A detailed survey was conducted amongst 252 farmers owning vacant residential lands in central China. Amongst these farmers, 75, 87 and 90 were entirely, partly and not living on farming, respectively. Only half of these farmers were willing to transform the vacant residential land, whilst those farmers who were partly living on farming were less willing to participate in the transformation than those who were entirely and were not living on farming. The factors that influence the willingness to transform varied across different types of farmers. Farmers who were not and were partly living on farming were significantly affected by their awareness of their rural residential environment, their knowledge of residential land-use policies, the length of residential land vacant time and their household income. Those farmers who were partly living on farming were also influenced by the number of vacant residential plots they possessed. Farmers who were entirely living on farming were significantly affected by their knowledge of the residential land-use policies, the number of vacant residential plots they possessed, their awareness of the consequences of land transformation and their family size. Results indicate that farmers are anxious about vacant residential land loss and that a communication gap is observed between them. Therefore, along with the communication between farmers and the government, the publicity and transparency of the rural residential land-use policies must be improved to eliminate the communication gap, relieve the anxiety of farmers, and increase the willingness to transform their vacant residential lands.

Protracted (~ 30 Ma) eclogite-facies metamorphism in northern Victoria Land (Antarctica): Implications for the geodynamics of the Ross/Delamerian Orogen

Northern Victoria Land, Antarctica, plays a key role in any geodynamic reconstructions of the paleo-Pacific margin of Gondwana because it represents the along-strike continuation of Australia in Antarctica and hosts the only Paleozoic eclogites known along the Transantarctic Mountains. The architecture and evolution of the early Cambrian to Early Ordovician Ross–Delamerian Orogen in northern Victoria Land, however, remain controversial. Accurate geodynamic reconstructions have been hindered by a dearth of temporal metamorphic constraints. This study reports laser-ablation split-stream ICP-MS data on zircon in newly recognized eclogite, that preserves a memory of the prograde evolution, and on zircon from its country rock from the Lanterman Range of northern Victoria Land. Geochronological data are supplemented for the eclogite by whole-rock geochemical and petrological constraints, that indicate an E-MORB protolith derived from a depleted mantle source, and P–T conditions for the eclogite-facies stage of ~700°C and 1.7–2.4GPa. U–Pb ages, trace-element contents, cathodoluminescence imaging and textural/inclusion relationships testify to protracted zircon growth/recrystallization history under eclogite-facies conditions, that also included (re)crystallization during part of the prograde path. Results extend the onset of eclogite-facies metamorphism in northern Victoria Land back to ~530Ma and, together with geochronological evidence for the emplacement of calc-alkaline granitoids at ~530–520Ma, suggest that UHP–HP rocks formed by accretion of material beneath an active continental margin. Regionally, this interpretation implies that burial of mafic rocks and associated siliciclastic sequences to mantle depths commenced significantly earlier than previously believed (~500Ma), thereby contrasting with the common belief that high-pressure metamorphism was linked to arc–continent collision. New and old results reveal the coexistence along the same ridge of two eclogite types: (1) medium-grained, “colder” and undeformed eclogites, that recorded both prograde and peak conditions, and (2) finer-grained, “hotter” and slightly deformed eclogites, that recorded only metamorphic peak conditions with hints of the subsequent retrogression. We propose that “prograde/peak” eclogites formed during an active continental margin stage and “peak” eclogites during the subsequent island arc–continental arc collision.

The Protective Value of Estuarine and Coastal Ecosystem Services in a Wealth Accounting Framework

Recent concern over the loss of estuarine and coastal ecosystems (ECEs) often focuses on an important service provided by these ecosystems, their role in protecting coastal communities from storms that damage property and cause deaths and injury. Certain ECEs, especially mangroves, marshes, seagrasses and near-shore coral reefs, may significantly reduce storm surges through attenuating waves. This function is key to the protective value of ECEs, which is used as a basis for coastal restoration efforts worldwide. In a wealth accounting framework, net domestic product (NDP) should be adjusted for the direct benefits provided by the current stock of this restored ecological capital but not for their indirect contributions in terms of protecting or supporting economic activity, property and human livelihoods. If ecosystem restoration leads to the creation of new ecological landscape, including transforming developed land back to ecological capital, then NDP must be further modified to reflect any capital revaluation that occurs. Both the current benefits of restoration and any capitalized land values must be adjusted if there is a risk of restoration failure. These issues encountered in a wealth accounting approach to the protective value of ECEs is illustrated with reference to the case of marsh creation in Louisiana, USA, in light of the 2012 Louisiana Coastal Master Plan.

Grammars of Disguised, Multiple, and Missing Critique inDreams of TrespassandTomorrow We’ll Get Our Land Back

AbstractThis article extends critical analysis of Fatima Mernissi’s 1995 semiautobiographical Dreams of Trespass to Fatima al-Rawi’s 1967 novel, Tomorrow We’ll Get Our Land Back (Ghadan tatabadal al-ʾard), which shares with Dreams the trope of Moroccan women imprisoned by patriarchal power and cooperating through storytelling. Both narratives reflect their own forms of “multiple critique.” Tomorrow confronts the exploitation of the working class in postcolonial Morocco but does so in a way that disguises a frontal challenge to the masculinist context of the 1960s and the undemocratic postcolonial state. Examining Tomorrow through a gendered lens opens up a new perspective on Dreams. The harem imprisonment of the Mernissi women marks the family’s vast wealth and class privilege, which are not meaningfully addressed in Dreams. The liberation of young, privileged women in both works depends on the imprisonment of slaves and servants, whose conditions are only partly considered in Dreams and not at all addressed in Tomorrow.

We are not a Christian mob, we want that UAM land back

Hello everybody. I am pretty happy that yesterday Jon Altman said we would be hearing from the next generation today. So I believe Sylvie and I are part of the new generation. Secondly, that’s probably the first time in 25 years or so that I am attending a symposium or a seminar where I have colleagues who were enrolled in the PhD at the same time as I was, my supervisor, one of my examiners and very close friends as well, so it is a bit embarrassing. Not only for that, but embarrassing too because I am facing a panel of experts on Aboriginal studies and I only see myself now as a part-time “Aboriginalist”. Because since I left Australia in 1989, I think, returning briefly in 1991, I got a position with IRD which stands for the Institute for Research and Development. I have had several positions overseas for up to 5 years all together. We are very lucky at IRD to get posted overseas for such long periods of time. And I did work in Thailand, Madagascar and Laos, so even though I was not dealing with Australian Aborigines any longer I was confronted with many similar issues, like ethnic minority groups, and people that don’t get the status of indigenous people, although they are, but not recognised as such, struggling with land issues and recognition of rights to name only a few. So, I had to dig for my old fieldnotes from the late 1980’s to remember what I would be talking about, and I also relied on work from the new generation, like Martin (Preaud) here and Catherine Thornbu [...]

The response of soil organic carbon and nitrogen 10 years after returning cultivated alpine steppe to grassland by abandonment or reseeding

The effects on the status of carbon and nitrogen in alpine steppe soils from returning cultivated land back to grassland is not well known. The present study reported on the effects on the soil carbon and nitrogen status of alpine steppe soils from two restoration methods, reseeding grasses and abandonment. The study based on four study sites selected within the same broad area on the north slope of Qilian Mountain: native alpine steppe, cropland of 40years, former oat cropland reseeded with the grass (Elymus sibiricus) 10years ago, and cropland abandoned 10years ago. This experiment measured the soil physical, carbon and nitrogen properties of all selected plots. Ten years after restoration by reseeding or abandonment had resulted in the return of cropland to a perennial grass community through succession, with total soil carbon and nitrogen returning to more than 70% of the original grassland plots. The reseeding method benefited soil carbon and nitrogen more than abandonment after 10years. The light fraction organic carbon, microbial biomass carbon and microbial biomass nitrogen recovered more quickly than soil organic carbon and total soil nitrogen. In conclusion, we recommend the two methods (reseeding and abandonment) as suitable methods to engineer the returning of cultivated land back to grassland in the alpine steppe.

Accelerating public sector land disposal

The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) brings land back to market in the best possible way. This involves working closely with delivery partners and public and private sector bodies to speed up sales, access development finance and have a better understanding of the property market. This work will increase the supply of land, help stimulate economic growth and benefit local communities.

Integrating Remediation and Reuse to Achieve Whole‐System Sustainability Benefits

AbstractThis perspective article was prepared by members of the Sustainable Remediation Forum (SURF), a professional nonprofit organization seeking to advance the state of sustainable remediation within the broader context of sustainable site reuse. SURF recognizes that remediation and site reuse, including redevelopment activities, are intrinsically linked—even when remediation is subordinate to or sometimes a precursor of reuse. Although the end of the remediation life cycle has traditionally served as the beginning of the site's next life cycle, a disconnect between these two processes remains. SURF recommends a holistic approach that brings together remediation and reuse on a collaborative parallel path and seeks to achieve whole‐system sustainability benefits. This article explores the value of integrating remediation into the reuse process to fully exploit synergies and minimize the costs and environmental impacts associated with bringing land back into beneficial use. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Anguish of Wildlife Ethics

Abstract As an environmental philosopher I had long been aware of dilemmas between animal ethics and ecological ethics, but now, as the manager of my own biodiversity reserve, I was facing these dilemmas in a more gut-wrenching and complex form than I had ever encountered in the classroom. Pressured by environmental authorities to cull kangaroos on my property, in the name of ecological ethics, I started thinking about the very meaning of ethics, its origins in the evolution of society and its material and metaphysical presuppositions. Two different conceptions of the normative root of society emerged, the deontic conception, appropriate within the material and metaphysical framework of hunter-gatherer societies, and the axial conception, appropriate within the framework of 'civilization', viz the agrarian societies that evolved into the urbanindustrial formations of the modern era. The axial conception, based on empathy, aligned with our modern conception of ethics, and underlay our contemporary sense of animal ethics. 'Ecological ethics', on the other hand, seemed to be obscurely underpinned by the deontic conception, and was not ethical at all in the axial sense, and was moreover mismatched, normatively speaking, with the material and metaphysical realities of modern societies. A different set of practices from those currently prescribed by environmental authorities needs to be devised to meet both the ethical and ecological requirements of our contemporary natural environment. Keywords animal ethics, ecological ethics, origins of ethics, wildlife ethics, kangaroos I ANIMALS ETHICS VERSUS ECOLOGICAL ETHICS? When I took up residence at my new 350-acre property on the shoulder of a little stone mountain in Central Victoria last year, I thought I was fairly well prepared to manage it for conservation. I had taught environmental ethics for twenty years and was looking forward excitedly to putting theory into practice. It was straightforward. I truly revered all life. I had devoted an entire academic career to this cause. My environmental ethic was my raison d'etre. Now at last I had a place where I could regenerate the bush and offer sanctuary for wildlife. However, things were not to be so simple. As soon as I walked through the gate of my new haven, I found myself slapped in the face with one ethical dilemma after another, till I felt punch-drunk and bewildered. It was as though the tough old no-nonsense mountain thought to itself, let's put this little whitefella upstart through her paces and see how her classroom ethics stacks up against the life-and-death, anything-but-merry-go-round of the real 'environment'. First it was the rabbits. The mountain, being a granite outcrop, is a headquarters for rabbits. There is quite good remnant vegetation on the property but no further progress could be made towards restoration until the rabbits were brought under control. I had seen the results of uncontrolled rabbit infestation in the past: a kind of earth leprosy, with vegetation stripped off and land collapsed in on itself, rotting and eroding. Rabbits are of course themselves innocent and totally adorable little creatures, but I could not manage the property for biodiversity unless they were controlled. 'Controlled' meant killed, since no other methods for controlling rabbit populations are currently available. But what method of killing was appropriate in the circumstances? I was lucky enough to obtain a grant for rabbit management almost as soon as I took up residence on the property. An environmental services contractor was recommended to me. His preferred method was to bait with the poison, 1080, via treated grain scattered broad-scale across the entire property. He assured me that this method was safe for non-target species - well, apart from (swamp) wallabies, who were 'greedy', he said, and foolishly stuffed themselves on the grain. There might therefore be one or two wallaby casualties, but this was a minor ecological deficit - it was just the price you paid for bringing the land back into environmental production. …

Allocating Urban Agricultural Reuse Strategies to Inventoried Vacant and Underutilized Land

Community groups have a growing desire to use vacant and underutilized land for urban food production purposes; however, there are limited community-based tools available to assess the suitability of sites or location-allocation decisions.The purpose of this research is to provide decision support to community groups via a scientific software product developed in Microsoft Excel iƒ’that will aid users in identifying and inventorying the location and condition of vacant and underutilized land, determining the relative site suitability of the inventoried land, and allocating urban agricultural reuse strategies across the urban landscape. This paper describes an augmented capacity to the prototype community-baseddecision support tool (C-SAP) developed by Kirnbauer and Baetz (2011). C-SAP includes two existing tools that employ a binary scoring methodology for the vacant and underutilized land inventory process (VULI) and the analytic hierarchy process for the calculation of a set of site suitability indices (SSI). The additional capacity introduced herein, known as LOCAL, employs a multi-objective binary integer program formulation for the location-allocation of reuse strategies at a neighborhood, community or potentially city-wide planning level. The application of the prototype decision support tool to twenty one sites identified as potential future sites for urban agriculture is summarized and discussed. This tool has the potential to assist groups in clarifying both community needs and constraints, while producing outputs that provide a scoped, informed direction to users for the allocation of reuse strategies. This paper describes a methodology for engaging community groups in making well-informed decisions related to effectively and efficiently bringing vacant and underutilized land back into productive reuse in a way that complements city-wide land use planning initiatives related to sustainable growth.