Nations Decade Research Articles

The gap between mycorrhizal science and application: existence, origins, and relevance during the United Nation's Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

During the United Nation's Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, planting material shortages are constraining restoration, while climate change exacerbates the need for restoration and reduces recruitment. Concurrently, research shows that native mycorrhizal fungi (symbiotic with plant roots) appropriate to plant provenance and site conditions significantly accelerate restoration, support crucial ecosystem services, and provide natural climate solutions (sequestering carbon), and nature‐based solutions for climate change (climate adaptation). We reviewed 130 management plans for natural areas in the United States to evaluate whether restoring native mycorrhizal communities has translated into implementation. Although management plans frequently discussed the ecosystem services mycorrhizal fungi provide, nearly one half (46%) viewed fungi solely as pathogens or ignored them altogether. Only 8% of plans mentioned mycorrhizal fungi. Only one plan mentioned that mycorrhizae were potentially helpful to natural regeneration, while one other mentioned utilizing soil as a restoration tool. Our examination of publicly available data and case studies suggests that relatively meager protections for fungi, limited research funding and resulting data, research difficulty, and limited access to mycology experts and training contribute to this gap between science and implementation. A database of literature showcasing mycorrhizal ecosystem services and benefits is provided to highlight when and why mycorrhizae should be considered in management, regeneration, and restoration. Three action items are recommended to safeguard native mycorrhizal fungal communities and accelerate restoration and regeneration. Ten implementation tips based in scientific literature are provided to clarify the need and methods for mycorrhizal restoration.

Decadence and Regeneration in d’Annunzio’s Il piacere (1889)

This paper considers the dialectics between national decadence and regeneration in d’Annunzio’s Il piacere. It argues that the novel’s fin-de-siècle reception was conditioned by the author’s prior classification as an immoral, anti-national writer in the wake of the poetry collection Intermezzo di rime. This classification determined a reading of d’Annunzio’s debut novel in terms of decadence, while Il piacere itself actually pointed toward a literature of regeneration. The novel staged d’Annunzio’s opposition to his own prior classification, while making claims for a more committed and more internationally relevant model of Italian literature in the context of European modernity.

Meta-analysis of ecosystem services associated with oyster restoration.

Restoration of foundation species promises to reverse environmental degradation and return lost ecosystem services, but a lack of standardized evaluation across projects limits understanding of recovery, especially in marine systems. Oyster reefs are restored to reverse massive global declines and reclaim valuable ecosystem services, but the success of these projects has not been systematically and comprehensively quantified. We synthesized data on ecosystem services associated with oyster restoration from 245 pairs of restored and degraded reefs and 136 pairs of restored and reference reefs across 3500km of U.S. Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic coastlines. On average, restoration was associated with a 21-fold increase in oyster production (mean log response ratio=3.08 [95% confidence interval: 2.58-3.58]), 34-97% enhancement of habitat provisioning (mean community abundance=0.51 [0.41-0.61], mean richness=0.29 [0.19-0.39], and mean biomass=0.69 [0.39-0.99]), 54% more nitrogen removal (mean=0.43 [0.13-0.73]), and 89-95% greater sediment nutrients (mean=0.67 [0.27-1.07]) and organic matter (mean=0.64 [0.44-0.84]) relative to degraded habitats. Moreover, restored reefs matched reference reefs for these ecosystem services. Our results support the continued and expanded use of oyster restoration to enhance ecosystem services of degraded coastal systems and match many functions provided by reference reefs.

Global road safety 2010–18: An analysis of Global Status Reports

BackgroundRoad traffic injuries (RTIs) pose a significant health burden with 1.35 million individuals dying on the world's roads annually. Nearly a decade ago, based on agreed road safety indicators, global commitments were encouraged to dramatically reduce this burden as part of the United Nation's Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011–2020. MethodsThe analysis was based on global level data from three Global Status Reports on Road Safety published by the World Health Organization in 2013, 2015, and 2018. A total of 161 countries that consistently reported statistics for all three reports were included in the analysis. Descriptive analyses, t-test, Wilcoxon rank-sum test, and Spearman's rank correlation were performed to evaluate past and current trends in road traffic deaths and countries’ progress in achieving key road safety indicators. ResultsWe found no significant decline in global road traffic death rates from 2010 to 2016 and in fact, death rates increased in low-income countries (LICs) and the African Region. Death rates were highly dependent on income level of the country, with deaths higher in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) when compared to high-income countries (HICs). We found that the strength of enforcement of speed laws and child restraint laws increased from 2011 to 2017. However, we did not find a correlation between enforcement of the five key prevention policies (speeding, drink-driving, seatbelts, helmets, and child restraints) and death rate. In terms of advancement in achieving key road safety indicators, there was slow progress in adopting most of the recommended policies and practices based on the five pillars (road safety management, safer roads and mobility, safer vehicles, safer road users, and post-crash response). ConclusionDespite global efforts during the past decade, road traffic deaths remain disproportionally high in LMICs and African countries as shown by global reports, and progress in achieving global road safety indicators is slow. Countries need to greatly accelerate the implementation of interventions proven to reduce RTIs in order to meet the goals of the second Decade of Action for Road Safety.

Motorized 2\u20133 wheelers death rates over a decade: a global study

BackgroundMotorized 2–3-wheelers-related death is high due to the exposed body of the driver/passenger and the high speed. The United Nation (UN) Decade of Action for road safety aimed to reduce road traffic deaths by 50% by the year 2020. We aimed to study the factors affecting the death rates of motorized 2–3 wheelers injured victims and whether the reduction in the death rates has met the UN target.MethodsData were retrieved from the WHO Global Status Reports on Road Safety published over 2009 to 2018 which covered the years of 2007 to 2016. Studied variables included motorized 2–3 wheelers death rates, percentage of helmet-wearing rate, helmet law enforcement, speed law enforcement, gross national income per capita, vehicles/person ratio, and motorized 2–3 wheelers/person ratio. A mixed linear model was used to define factors affecting the change of motorized 2–3 wheelers death rates over time.ResultsThe global mean motorized 2–3 wheelers death rates increased from 2.37/100,000 population to 3.23/100,000 population over the studied decade (a relative ratio of 1.36) which was not statistically significant. Factors that affected mortality included GNI (p = 0.025), motorized 2–3 wheelers per person ratio (p < 0.0001), percentage of helmet wearing rate (p = 0.046), and the interaction between vehicle/person ratio and motorized 2–3 wheelers/person ratio (p = 0.016). There was a significant increase in the death rates over time in the low-income countries (a relative ratio of 2.52, p = 0.019, Friedman test), and middle-income countries (a relative ratio of 1.46, p < 0.0001, Friedman test), compared with a significant decrease in the high-income countries (a relative ratio of 0.72, p < 0.0001, Friedman test).ConclusionsGlobal mortality of motorized 2–3 wheelers has increased by a relative ratio of 1.36 over a recent decade. The UN target of reducing death was not met. The increase was related to the increase in motorized 2–3 wheelers per person ratio and economic inequity which has to be addressed globally. The economic global gap significantly impacts the mortality rates of motorized 2–3 wheelers.

"Our one great national malady": Neurasthenia and American Imperial and Masculine Anxiety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century.

White upper middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century were entrenched in a battle with a newly discovered, or invented, mental illness called neurasthenia. This essay examines the ways in which the medical discourse of neurasthenia reflected late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century white Anglo-Saxon men's belief in, as well as anxiety over, American values bolstered by their idea of cultural, racial, and sexual superiority and consolidated through a conjunction of medicine and politics. The idea of neurasthenia as white American men's malady functioned as a mark both of whites' racial superiority to the "new" immigrants and African Americans as well as of women's intellectual inferiority to the opposite sex of their own race. Imposing a subtle distortion on the etiology and diagnosis of neurasthenia and associating it with specific groups of people, the "American disease" constituted the era's representative pathological symptoms which addressed Anglo-Saxon American men's anxieties about overcivilized effeminacy and racial and national decadence which was originated as a response to the racial and sexual heterogeneity. This essay also argues that neurasthenia was an imagined disease which addressed late nineteenth-century American men's spatial anxiety about the decline of the American pastoral ideal caused by the closure of the frontier. Given that the treatment for neurasthenic men was an escape to the frontier in the West in which they could rejuvenate withered American masculinity, their uneasiness about barbarous, unhygienic, and prolific immigrants and unruly white women, in fact, was tied to their spatial anxiety which symptomatically signifies the crisis of American masculinity. Channeled through the medical knowledge of neurology, it made American men's racial, sexual, and spatial anxieties function to act out their racist, misogynist, nativist, and imperialist impulses which legitimized exclusionary political techniques toward the racial and sexual others such as the U.S. imperial expansion in the 1890s and 1900s and a eugenic-influenced immigration policy from the 1900s through the1920s. In this sense, the decline of neurasthenia around 1920 should not be attributed solely to the continued efforts to professionalize American medicine accompanied by recent discoveries of chemical factors such as hormones and vitamins and the rise of psychiatry and psychology which offered physicians with a more specific theory of health built on clinical laboratory science. Like its rise, the decision to move away from the neurasthenic diagnosis was rather a cultural phenomenon, which reflected the American ascendancy to global power in the early twentieth century, particularly after the First World War. Sustaining a political order rested on racial and sexual hierarchies both within and outside the American continent, American men felt that they were no longer liable to specific, time-tested anxiety and somatic symptoms of neurasthenia, which was more an ideological and cultural construct than a clinical entity that dramatizes the racial, sexual, and imperial politics of the-turn-of-the-twentieth-century America.

A world of possibilities: six restoration strategies to support the United Nation's Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Ecological restoration is practiced worldwide as a direct response to the degradation and destruction of ecosystems. In addition to its ecological impact it has enormous potential to improve population health, socioeconomic well‐being, and the integrity of diverse national and ethnic cultures. In recognition of the critical role of restoration in ecosystem health, the United Nations (UN) declared 2021–2030 as the Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. We propose six practical strategies to strengthen the effectiveness and amplify the work of ecological restoration to meet the aspirations of the Decade: (1) incorporate holistic actions, including working at effective scale; (2) include traditional ecological knowledge (TEK); (3) collaborate with allied movements and organizations; (4) advance and apply soil microbiome science and technology; (5) provide training and capacity‐building opportunities for communities and practitioners; and (6) study and show the relationships between ecosystem health and human health. We offer these in the hope of identifying possible leverage points and pathways for collaborative action among interdisciplinary groups already committed to act and support the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration. Collectively, these six strategies work synergistically to improve human health and also the health of the ecosystems on which we all depend, and can be the basis for a global restorative culture.

Survey Study on Attitudes to Multi-Dimensional Sustainable Development with U.K. MSc Students

As reflected in the sustainable development goals (SDGs), sustainable development is a multi-dimensional concept integrating political, ethical, economic, and other factors. Reports from the United Nations (UN) Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD) suggest that universities are more engaged with sustainable development in higher education. Despite promising signals about student awareness of sustainable development, survey studies suggest student engagement and knowledge is limited. Previous studies have tended to focus on undergraduates and examine basic attitudes to triple bottom line issues. This study examined knowledge and attitudes of postgraduate U.K. students enrolled in one-year taught sustainability degrees on the multi-dimensional issues of sustainable development. This study piloted a 39-question 7-point Likert scale survey with a cohort of U.K.-taught postgraduate (MSc, MPhil) students (n = 121, Cronbach’s Alpha 0.796, n = 39 questions). The study found this cohort able to recognize and respond to the multiple challenges of strong and weak sustainable development issues rather than exhibiting knowledge gaps previously reported. Results and qualitative comments from the survey suggest, however, that students resist the idea of strong interventions in social, political, and economic life.

Proyección exterior, hispanoamericanismo y regeneración nacional en la península Ibérica en el siglo XIX

Las invasiones napoleónicas y la pérdida de las colonias americanas propiciaron un intenso debate entre las élites políticas y culturales portuguesas y españolas en torno a la decadencia nacional. La articulación de narrativas decadentistas respondió a dos modelos no excluyentes. Por un lado, la construcción nacional del estado liberal a partir de unos imaginarios que encontraron en la práctica historiográfica un baluarte de caracterización étnica y una fuente explicativa de la decadencia. Por otro, la formulación de proyecciones exteriores que tomaron como marco geográfico de regeneración el espacio ibérico, mediterráneo, europeo o hispanoamericano. De esta forma, queremos destacar la importancia que tuvieron estos horizontes de expectativas en la definición de los marcos culturales nacionales de España y Portugal en el siglo xix. Así mismo, cuestionamos el tópico historiográfico que ha explicado la proyección americana del pensamiento político español a partir de los “desastres” coloniales. Estos proyectos, lejos de originarse en las sendas crisis de 1890 y 1898, tienen un vasto recorrido argumentativo a lo largo del ochocientos.

Before 1898: Architecture and Nation in Emilia Pardo Bazán's El tesoro de Gastón

This essay explores the link between architecture and nation in Emilia Pardo Bazan’s El tesoro de Gaston (1897). By calling attention to the depictions of the exteriors and interiors of dwellings, this study demonstrates how the author availed herself of the descriptions of her main characters’ private quarters to comment on national decadence and to map Spain’s path to recovery and mod-ernization. Attentive to Pardo Bazan’s observations on architecture in her travel accounts and the political crisis in her journalistic writings before and after 1898, the article examines the ways in which images of buildings, i.e. an aristo-cratic castle in ruins and a remodeled residence in the style of an orderly English cottage, reveal the novelist’s concern with the present-day decline. Additionally, by drawing on the connection between architectural designs and national mat-ters in the turn-of-the-century intellectual debates in Spain, the study points to the author’s efforts to reinvigorate the nation’s spirit through encouragement to attend to the crisis and engage in renovation.

Gender and Politics in Interwar and Vichy France

One of the defining paradoxes of interwar France was the coexistence of a deep-rooted belief in national decadence with the development of a wide range of innovative organisations, cumulatively mobilising millions of people, as a means of fighting this supposed decline. While women played a key role in perpetuating the belief that the Republic was deteriorating, created numerous politically-oriented groups and entered into the government as ministers for the first time, these facts have barely entered into scholarly analysis of the state of France's political culture. Beginning in the 1960s a narrative of stagnation tended to dominate scholars’ interpretations of the interwar years. Reflective of the times, gender was absent from such analyses, as scholars defined ‘politics’ in certain ways and assumed that political actors were men. The influential political scientist Stanley Hoffman, for example, insisted that this was a period of stalemate, essentially the consequence of a failure to modernise during the Third Republic (1870–1940). Hoffman argued that peasants, small business and the bourgeoisie coalesced to advocate for protectionist measures and resist social and economic reforms. This conservative agenda was facilitated by governments that sought to limit economic change, which contributed to ministerial instability: during the interwar period, the French government changed forty-seven times, compared to thirty in Poland and Romania, nine in Great Britain and an average of one per year in Weimar Germany, Belgium and Sweden. For Anglophone and Francophone proponents of the idea of a systemic crisis, the Third Republic appears fundamentally flawed, crippled by an intrinsic defect rather than a democratic government that opened spaces for dynamic groups and movements to effect real change.

Patrias primitivas. Discursos e imágenes de la naturaleza en el primer conservacionismo español

Los orígenes de los Parques Nacionales y otras reservas proporcionan una oportunidad historiográfica para investigar diversos procesos científicos, culturales y sociales en la España de principios del XX. Por un lado, en España la conservación, al igual que en otros países occidentales, se originó en estrecha relación con las típicas preocupaciones finiseculares en torno a decadencias sociales y nacionales, especialmente en cuanto a las amenazas derivadas de la industrialización y la urbanización. Por otro lado, si bien el clima regeneracionista propiciaba un amplio movimiento de signo reformista y modernizador, también se trataba de recuperar y fortalecer una maltrecha identidad nacional. Así, la creación y los primeros pasos de los Parques y otras iniciativas conservacionistas estuvieron muy ligados al desarrollo de discursos ideológicos e imágenes culturales en torno a los Parques, los paisajes y la fauna salvaje de España, entendidos como poderosos reservorios de virtudes cívicas y de símbolos para la identidad nacional.

The Circuitous Origins of the Gender Perspective in Human Rights Advocacy: A Challenge for Transnational Feminisms

This article pieces together a complex genealogy of the multiple contexts that helped reshape women’s international organizing and create a global women’s human rights movement following the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women, 1975–85. It maps a multilayered history consisting of many different strands of women’s activities around the globe that increasingly converged in the 1970s, although in unanticipated ways. Through its broad focus on women in distinct social, political, and intellectual arenas, it links the UN human rights system and its oversight committees and commissions with the first two UN Development Decades of the 1960s and 1970s. And it interconnects these global structures, discourses, and activities with old and new patterns of women’s postwar organizing and with the emerging challenges to canons of knowledge and research methodologies from feminist theory and epistemology. Starting in the mid-1970s, four distinct yet overlapping endeavors converged: the work for international human rights, colonial and postcolonial expectations of economic development and well-being, women’s rights and liberation movements, and women’s studies in their global translations. This critical history, however, has all but been lost in the fraught contemporary debates about human rights as a vehicle for radical gender and social change.

Education for sustainable development in Africa: The search for pedagogical logic

The United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) is past its halfway milestone; yet, its overall impact on educational thinking and practice remains unclear in most places and regions of the world. While several efforts and programs are currently in place to promote and affirm the role of education in the global quest for sustainable development, most of these efforts remain largely unknown and invisible in most communities around the world. The Decade and ESD, arguably, are neither seen nor heard of in most of Africa. Most institutions, including schools, governments, businesses, civil society and individuals are yet to know and understand the role of education in the quest for sustainable development. The paper argues that in spite of the Decade and all the attention it is getting in some circles, the subject is muted in most educational policies and practices in Africa. In calling for more focused commitment to the roles of education in sustainable development in Africa, the paper also calls for a reconsideration of what sustainable development means, or might mean for Africans in their different places and cultures and to use that as a starting point for the exploration of more meaningful educational philosophies and pedagogies that responds to Africa's unique challenges.

Educational ethics and the DESD: Considering trade-offs

The United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (DESD) aims to prepare students for pressing economic and environmental problems. In this article, I argue that an exclusive emphasis on an ambiguous goal, sustainable development, raises important questions for educational ethics. Specifically, I argue that DESD mission statements and curricula often fail to account for trade-offs that are inevitable in environmental decision-making. Further, I argue that DESD aims don't adequately focus on the development of agency, decision-making skills, and ethical empowerment. I conclude by suggesting that ESD curricula should critically and constructively recognize the inevitability of trade-offs.

Teacher education as or for social and ecological transformation: place‐based reflections on local and global participatory methods and collaborative practices

This paper offers reflections on two transformative teacher education projects. The first a global communities module is set in a university in Vancouver and utilizes the lens of social ecology to examine the roles of teachers in bringing an awareness of local/global issues to their students' learning experiences. The second, a Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) teacher education project located in rural Peru, involves the collaboration of universities in Canada, Mexico and Peru. The projects are united in their use of ‘critical place‐based’ transformative teacher education agendas and democratic participatory methods. We use our experiences in these projects combined with relevant literature to explore three questions: (1) What inspirations might be drawn from our critical place‐based participatory approaches? (2) What might these approaches offer in response to the United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development [UNDESD]? (3) Does the UN Decade provides a conceptual framework to instigate and support social and ecological transformation?

Environmental education in teacher education in India: experiences and challenges in the United Nation's Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

Recognizing the need and importance of environmental education (EE) in India, recently several efforts have been made to reorient and reorganize school education and establish EE more formally. School textbooks, in all subjects and at all levels, have been revised to integrate environmental concepts. The effects of these curricular revisions will not be sustained unless they are coupled with appropriate changes in teacher education curricula. Efforts have been made to develop curriculum and other support materials for introducing EE at all four levels of teacher education in the country. Incorporating EE in teacher education involves deliberating several issues relating to content, learning and teaching methodologies, materials development and capacity building requirements for its effective implementation. This paper, by reviewing some exemplar experiences from India, seeks to examine the focus given to EE in teacher education and the challenges for teacher education in achieving the goals of sustainable development in the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD).

The troubled republic: visual culture and social debate in France, 1889-1900

Fin-de-siecle France was a period of unrest, with strikes, demonstrations, and anarchist terrorism reflecting deep social and political differences. Yet at the same time, this decade produced a vibrant visual culture--monumental sculpture, mural decoration, avant-garde painting, posters, illustrations, and photography--much of which was used to articulate France's ideological arguments. This fascinating book shows how four key issues in social debate were treated by contemporary artists. Richard Thomson begins by exploring disquieting attitudes toward the body and sexuality that resulted from France's concerns about national decadence after its defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. He then considers how artists depicted crowds and represented public discomfort about mass unrest. Next he discusses religious imagery during a decade when the Catholic Church was attempting to come to terms with Republicanism. And finally he addresses the question of revenge against Germany for the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, showing that it was kept alive in contemporary art.

MARCEL PAGNOL'S THE BAKER'S WIFE, A CINEMATIC CHARIVARI IN POPULAR FRONT FRANCE

Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.

Development of Special Education in Selected Sub-Saharan African Countries

African countries South of the Saharan Desert are predominately rural. A review of literature on current trends in special education in selected Sub-Saharan African countries indicates a changing attitude toward individuals with disabilities. Modern practices have been influenced by the development of basic education, the enactment of national policies, and heightened public awareness created by the United Nations' International Year (1981) and Decade of the Disabled (1981–1991). This work provides an overview of the historical development of special education in several Sub-Saharan countries, describes current conditions, and makes recommendations for further positive change.