Desalination – or the creation of 'new' water by removing salt and impurities from saline, brackish or contaminated water – has transformed water resource management in many parts of the world. This ...technology is likely to continue to reshape the practices, politics and political economy of water throughout the 21st century. Desalination has long been a focus of research in techno-managerial and techno-triumphalist circles, but as global capacity has grown and as new water infrastructures have developed in more diverse and contested contexts, it has increasingly attracted debate in the critical social sciences and humanities. This paper offers a critical review of the current state of the desalination debate. The paper proceeds in three parts. First, it sketches out the contours of desalination’s uneven global emergence as a game changer in water resource management, briefly introducing the reader to its technical aspects and highlighting key trends. Second, the paper examines differing interpretations of the drivers of this phenomenon. The paper challenges dominant and reductionist explanations that tend to highlight water scarcity as an external factor, population growth and industrialisation. Instead, it foregrounds four alternative explanations for the extraordinary growth of desalination as: 1) a tool for fixing insoluble political issues in water management; 2) a technological adaptation that reflects and reinforces processes of decentralisation in water management; 3) a source of reliable long-term revenue for increasingly financialised models of water service provision; and 4) a driver of growth in particular industries and economic sectors. Finally, the paper suggests some future directions for critical desalination research.
This paper explores the contradictory and sometimes incompatible imperatives towards enhancing water supply reliability and addressing the water-energy nexus. Using the highly contested development ...of seawater desalination for municipal water supply in the San Diego metropolitan region as an analytical entry point, the paper excavates divergent water-energy politics emerging in California. Two underlying paradigm shifts of water governance are identified. First, supply diversification represents an attempt to increase reliability through the development of multiple decentralised water sources. Second, the notion of a loading order is being promoted by certain groups as a way of prioritising different water source options according to sustainability criteria, including energy footprint. Drawing on the concept of the socio-ecological fix, the paper argues that seawater desalination - as a technological adaptation to water stress - occupies a paradoxical position, being consistent with diversification, but representing a water-energy trade-off inconsistent with the loading order. This has resulted, the paper suggests, in a polarised debate between desalination and wastewater recycling as alternative climate-independent sources of freshwater. As such, the disputes over desalination in San Diego are understood to be a crucible for broader politics of resource governance transitions.
Site-specific recombinase Int mediates integration of the bacteriophage λ genome into the Escherichia coli chromosome. Integration occurs once the Int tetramer, assisted by the integration host ...factor IHF, forms the intasome, a higher order structure, within which Int, a heterobivalent protein, interacts with two nonhomologous DNA sequences: the core recombination sites and the accessory arm sites. The binding to these sites is mediated by the catalytic C-terminal domain (CTD) and the regulatory N-terminal domain (NTD) of Int, respectively. Within Int, the NTD can activate or inhibit the recombination activity of the CTD depending on whether the NTD is bound to the arm sites. The CTD alone cannot mediate recombination, and even when the NTD and the CTD are mixed together as individual polypeptides, the NTD cannot trigger recombination in the CTD. In this work, we set to determine what modifications can unlock the recombination activity in the CTD alone and how the CTD can be modified to respond to recombination-triggering signals from the NTD. For this, we performed a series of genetic analyses, which showed that a single mutation that stabilizes the CTD on DNA, E174K, allows the CTD to recombine the core DNA sequences. When the NTD is paired with the CTD (E174K) that also bears a short polypeptide from the C terminus of the NTD, the resulting binary Int can recombine arm-bearing substrates. Our results provide insights into the molecular basis of the regulation of the Int activity and suggest how binary recombinases of the integrase type can be engineered.
Toi te Kupu, Toi te Mana Williams, Joe
Auckland University law review,
01/2020, Letnik:
26
Journal Article
Katahi ano nei ka pau te marama o Mahuru. I enei wa ka kiia ko Mahuru Maori taua marama. Koia tena te marama me whetawheta te iwi kia korerotia ai, kia whakanuia ai, kia whakaorangia ai te reo Maori ...hei reo tuturu mo te motu. Ka mutu ko te wiki o te reo Maori ka timata i te tekau ma wha o nga ra o Mahuru, oti atu i te rua tekau ma tahi. No reira he wa totika pea tenei ki te anga atu o tatou whakaaro ki te ora, te mate ranei o te reo i roto i nga koti o Aotearoa.
The growth of 'unconventional' water resources as a new resource frontier has been much touted over the last two decades and is transforming society’s relationship with water in diverse contexts. ...Desalination and wastewater reuse, in particular, are increasingly framed together as potentially game-changing technologies for water management and (re)distribution and are carried forward by promises to overcome water scarcity and enhance water security. While there are good reasons to critique the conflation of heterogeneous water resources under the single heading of 'unconventional', we argue that the scale and scope of the transition towards desalination and treated wastewater (which often use similar technologies) merit their inclusion in one Special Issue. The papers presented in this issue advance our understanding of the social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of this water transition. The papers are conceptually and empirically diverse, with case studies across the Global North and Global South. They offer an important counterbalance to the dominant techno-triumphalist narratives that typically surround these technologies, providing unconventional perspectives on unconventional water. In this opening paper, we chart the emergence of unconventional water. We then introduce the papers and highlight the cross-cutting themes of the issue: 1) the (de)politicising discourses that frame desalination and wastewater; 2) the political economies of unconventional water; 3) the materiality and politics of these technologies; and 4) their implications for water justice.
This paper analyses the “arduous and contingent” process of creating the “preconditions” for financialised forms of development in urban Kenya. Building on a growing critical literature on how ...finance is shaping development in the global South, the paper traces the more‐or‐less concerted effort of an array of actors and intermediaries to create a functioning market for urban water services. Such efforts, which are justified through appeals to a “finance gap” are an attempt to connect capital seeking profitable investment opportunities with a sector long starved of funding. The pursuit of financialised models of water provision, however, is deepening the gulf between service areas that are deemed profitable (or potentially profitable) and those that are not. The paper argues that it is not lack of money, but an emerging system of water service provision which prioritises commercial principles and value extraction, that shapes where investment does (and crucially) does not flow.
This paper is about the peculiar particularities of the dual trends towards urban water privatization and commodification. It uses as its analytical entry point the extraordinary emergence of ...large-scale seawater desalination, delivered through public-private partnerships, as an alternative municipal water supply for the San Diego–Tijuana metropolitan region. The paper engages and extends Karen Bakker’s work on water as an ‘uncooperative commodity’. Interrogating the neoliberalization of water through desalination, it is argued, requires reference to the socio-technical relations drawn together under the ‘desalination assemblage’. Such water treatment technologies –and the social relations that flow through them– are, in other words, efficacious in the market-disciplining of water. The paper presents an understanding of privatization and commodification as diffuse, and as unfolding through multiple and contradictory materially heterogeneous relationships. Drawing on both urban political ecology (UPE) and assemblage thinking, the paper calls for a more constructive dialogue between different concepts of socio-material relationality. The empirical case studies of two large seawater desalination plants (one in Southern California, one in Baja California) and the re-configuring relations of public/private water governance associated with these projects, provides a pertinent imperative for greater attention to be paid to contingency and heterogeneity in our understanding of the ecology of capitalism.
Greenwashing is a well‐understood concept, describing the use of false or misleading claims and symbolism to give an impression of a company or organisation's commitment to environmental protection ...and sustainability. While many environmental groups use the concept widely to criticise the ‘optics’ strategies of organisations wanting to improve their image while maintaining a business‐as‐usual approach, it has largely been ignored in Geography and related disciplines. This paper argues that we need to take greenwashing seriously. It develops a broad concept of greenwashing, suggesting that the processes of obscuring social and ecological relations via greenwashing are central to the (dis)functioning of contemporary capitalism. A critical theory of greenwashing, therefore, is not simply about challenging ‘bad actors’, but is an essential part of a wider critique of ‘green’ capitalism and Sustainable Development.
The University Libraries participated in a pan-campus planning exercise to determine the feasibility of a comprehensive data science (DS) initiative. In addition, Library Leadership set forth a ...charge to develop a DS framework to explore and articulate how the Libraries could add value to campus DS efforts. This article provides a model of how a large research university library system developed a DS framework by examining current and future services, skills, structures, stakeholders, and put forth recommendations around DS engagement for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill community. This framework could be applied to other academic departments and research support units.
This article engages with the “convivial turn” in writings about the city and offers a reorientation of sorts. Beginning with encounters, rather than particular spaces, we make the case that ...conviviality and its limits are realised in practices. Rather than starting in set piece urban spaces designed to foster conviviality we start out on the move, with frontline street-based care and outreach workers in Cardiff, Wales, and Manhattan, New York City, as they seek out and meet up with those sleeping on city streets. This provides a view of an improvised conviviality that makes the most of whatever the material affordances of a given city space happen to provide. Our research points to how these encounters necessarily take place in marginal settings and times due to the sorts of exclusions that can be built into contemporary city spaces that can at the same time be welcoming to the public, but hostile toward those most in need and vulnerably located in the centre of things. In this sense, we approach conviviality as a fragile interactional accomplishment and, in doing so, see questions of conviviality and conflict as less of a big-picture paradox of togetherness and distance, hope and hate in urban life, and more of a dynamic relation of co-presence and visibility. Public space, and indeed public life, might then be reconsidered not as a location but, rather, an active, shifting accomplishment, variously coloured by the politics of seeing and being seen.
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