The Reintroduction of Beavers to Scotland Ward, Kim J; Prior, Jonathan
Conservation & society/Conservation & Society,
04/2020, Letnik:
18, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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Rewilding is a distinctive form of ecological restoration that has emerged quite publicly within environmental policy and conservation advocacy circles. One of the fundamental tenets of rewilding is ...its emphasis on non-human autonomy, yet empirical examples that examine non-human autonomy are currently limited. While there is a growing body of literature on the biopolitics of broader environmental conservation strategies, there is comparatively little scholarship on the biopolitics of rewilding. This paper argues that autonomy should not be used as a boundary marker to denote ‘wild’ non-humans, but as a situated condition that is variable across locations. It offers an empirical study of the biopolitics that govern the different expressions of non-human autonomy at two different locations in Scotland, where beavers have been reintroduced. The findings reveal how, depending on location and context, modes of governance related to rewilding strategies co-exist and interplay with animal autonomy and forms of power in contradictory ways.
This paper has two intentions. The first is to focus on seaside towns as sites of social exclusion and to contribute to the development of a ‘seaside scholarship’, provoking scholars of poverty and ...exclusion to engage more critically with seaside locales beyond rural/urban binaries. As this paper demonstrates, many seaside towns face problems associated with both rural and urban areas and therefore a more place-based approach to geographical studies of poverty and exclusion is needed. The second intention of this paper is to explore further how problems associated with traditionally ‘rural’ areas such as remoteness, seasonal employment and a labour market which potentially reinforces gender divisions are often held in tension in seaside towns with traditionally more ‘urban’ concerns such as the quality of privately rented housing, or more specifically Houses in Multiple Occupancy (HMOs). This paper argues that HMOs are a fundamental factor for the particular nuance of exclusion in many seaside towns due to their potential to attract individuals in receipt of Housing Benefit (HB). By attracting HB claimants into seaside towns HMOs indirectly affect those individuals’ opportunities to find and sustain long-term employment and access services in ways which mimic those evidenced in rural areas. To support these claims a case study from the town of Ilfracombe, north Devon is used, drawing from a large qualitative data set which includes interviews with local authority officers, community workers and HMO residents.
•HMO landscapes create a unique inflection of social exclusion in seaside towns.•Seaside HMOs play a role in exclusion from income, knowledge, services and access employment.•Exclusion in seaside towns has characteristics of both ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ exclusion.
Insufficient access to quality, safe, efficacious and affordable medical products in Africa has posed a significant challenge to public health for decades. In part, this is attributed to weak or ...absent policies and regulatory systems, a lack of competent regulatory professionals in National Medicines Regulatory Authorities (NMRAs) and ineffective regional collaborations among NMRAs. In response to national regulatory challenges in Africa, a number of regional harmonisation efforts were introduced through the African Medicines Regulatory Harmonisation (AMRH) initiative to, among others, expedite market authorisation of medical products and to facilitate the alignment of national legislative frameworks with the AU Model Law on Medical Products Regulation. The goals of the model law include to increase collaboration across countries and to facilitate the overall regional harmonisation process. The AMRH initiative is proposed to serve as the foundation for the establishment of the African Medicines Agency (AMA). The AMA will, as one of its mandates, coordinate the regional harmonisation systems that are enabled by AU Model Law domestication and implementation. In this paper, we review the key entities involved in regional and continental harmonisation of medicines regulation, the milestones achieved in establishing the AMA as well as the implementation targets and anticipated challenges related to the AU Model Law domestication and the AMA's establishment. This review shows that implementation targets for the AU Model Law have not been fully met, and the AMA treaty has not been ratified by the minimum required number of countries for its establishment. In spite of the challenges, the AU Model Law and the AMA hold promise to address gaps and inconsistencies in national regulatory legislation as well as to ensure effective medicines regulation by galvanising technical support, regulatory expertise and resources at a continental level. Furthermore, this review provides recommendations for future research.
•Interrogates biosecurity in theory and practice.•Uses detailed empirical work with farmers, veterinarians and breeders to challenge disease-free accounts of biosecurity.•Demonstrates that animal ...health requires local knowledge and expertise.•Argues that an affirmative biopolitics requires such expertise in order to be responsive to health challenges.
Biosecurity, in broad terms, aims to reduce the impact and incidence of threats to life through regulatory means. For reasons we raise in this paper, such regulation can often lead to the specification of disease free processes within the food and farming industry, with biosecurity success measured in terms of the degree of compliance with and allegiance to modern farming practice. We counter this progressive narrative in three ways. First we draw on UK-based qualitative fieldwork with vets, farmers and pigs to demonstrate how biosecure farming and disease freedom are translated and qualified, in practice, to pathogen free, pathogen management and ultimately to configuring health through immunity management. Second, these translations demonstrate how building health is dependent on spatial and microbiological diversity rather than uniformity. Crucially, health involves patch-work and situated knowledge practices that are under threat within an industry increasingly marked by control and homogeneity. Third, in conceptual terms, we argue that while pig farming is organised through both biosecurity and a biopolitical regulation of life, immunity opens up political space for exploring an alternative politics of life, one where farmers and others are not so much made responsible for disease prevention, but make valued contributions to understandings of animal health and food security.
The Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) is the 4-m wide-field survey telescope at ESO’s Paranal Observatory, equipped with the world’s largest near-infrared imaging camera ...(VISTA IR Camera, VIRCAM), with 1.65 degree diameter field of view, and 67 Mpixels giving 0.6 deg2 active pixel area, operating at wavelengths 0.8−2.3 μm. We provide a short history of the project, and an overview of the technical details of the full system including the optical design, mirrors, telescope structure, IR camera, active optics, enclosure and software. The system includes several innovative design features such as the f/1 primary mirror, thedichroic cold-baffle camera design and the sophisticated wavefront sensing system delivering closed-loop 5-axis alignment of the secondary mirror. We conclude with a summary of the delivered performance, and a short overview of the six ESO public surveys in progress on VISTA.
Historically, glaciers have been seen as pristine environments. However, recent research has shown that glaciers can accumulate and store contaminants over long timescales, through processes such as ...atmospheric deposition, sedimentation, glacial hydrology and mass movements. Studies have identified numerous anthropogenically derived contaminants within the global cryosphere, including the six we focus on here: fallout radionuclides; microplastics; persistent organic pollutants; potentially toxic elements; black carbon and nitrate-based contaminants. These contaminants are relatively well-studied in other environments; however, their dynamics and role in glaciated systems is still poorly understood. Therefore, it is important to assess and quantify contaminant levels within the cryosphere, so that current and future threats can be fully understood and mitigated. In this first progress report (Part I: Inputs and accumulation), we review the current state of knowledge of six of the most common anthropogenic contaminants found in the cryosphere, and consider their sources, transportation, accumulation and concentration within glacial systems. A second progress report (Part II: Release and downstream consequences) will outline how these contaminants leave glacial systems and the consequences that this release can have for communities and ecosystems reliant on glacial meltwater.
The last forty years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of great cormorants (Phalacrocorax carbo) moving inland away from British coastlines. Britain’s largest inland colony currently reside ...at Walthamstow Wetlands, a nature reserve and functional reservoir system in northeast London, recently branded ‘Europe’s largest urban wetland’. Here, great cormorants are embroiled in contested ideas of nature. Celebrated by conservationists for their resilience and adaptability, yet hounded by anglers for launching ecological chaos on rivers and reservoirs and disrupting the balance that is imagined for urban recreational spaces. This paper argues for a more nuanced version of rewilding that acknowledges the biogeographical complexity and mobility of nonhumans in relation to radically altered ecologies and post-industrial urban environments. It uses the conceptual frame of more-than-human to examine the increased presence, mobility, and agency of great cormorants at Walthamstow Wetlands in terms of nonhuman autonomy and auto-rewilding. The findings demonstrate that the self-relocation and autonomous occupation of inland cormorants in Walthamstow are intimately entangled with human histories and activities, and that they are active alongside humans in creating novel ecosystems.
Objective: This study aimed to synthesise current evidence about the optimal hours of use of CPAP for OSA to offer an evidence-based approach to using this therapy.
Method: A systematic integrative ...literature review was conducted with quality assessment criteria applied.
Results: 10 of 4693 studies met inclusion criteria. Thematic analysis identified three themes: 1) more is better, but anything is better than nothing; 2) six hours is optimal; 3) the percentage of total sleep time/individualised optimal hours are the best way to determine ‘compliance’ and efficacy. Hours per night in the context of total sleep time may offer a more individualised indicator of compliance than four hours per night for every user.
Conclusion: Overall, this review identified limited evidence about optimal hours of CPAP use for OSA. The previously employed four hours of use as the threshold for determining compliance warrants review in the context of total sleep time per night. Additionally, patients can be encouraged that any CPAP is better than none and increasing use should yield clinical improvement. We argue that optimal hours of use are an individualised definition and that previous ideas around universally applicable optimal hours be discarded in favour of a focus on improving clinical indicators and CPAP use as a percentage of total sleep time.
Critical scholars have questioned the shifting dynamics of power and governance involved, how these are enfolded in novel spatial and temporal framings, and the ethical and justice implications for ...both human-human and human-nonhuman relations. By mobilising scientific knowledge and employing mechanisms such as species lists and the concept of biodiversity, compositionalist conservation has demarcated, ordered and valued nature at both a species-population scale and through the bodies of individuals (Biermann and Mansfield 2014; Braverman 2015). Within this collection, the demarcation of life as protected or ‘made killable’ is a subject of discussion for papers by Clancy and Ward; O'Mahony; Ward and Prior, who evaluate the ways in which the lives of birds, boars and beavers (respectively) are ranked, ordered and regulated according to measures such as breeding and physiology, the extent and locations of territory, and behavioural dynamics. Reintroduction is a central feature of the rewilding movement, to enable the enhancement of trophic complexity and enrich depleted system dynamics (Svenning et al. 2016), but it is a fraught objective.
Anthropogenic contamination has been detected in glacial and proglacial environments around the globe. Through mechanisms of secondary release, these contaminants are finding their way into glacial ...hydrological systems and downstream environments, with potential to impact hundreds of millions of people who rely on glacial meltwater for water, food and energy security worldwide. The first part of our progress report outlined the sources and accumulation mechanisms of contaminants in glacial environments (Part I: Inputs and accumulation). Here we assess processes of contaminant release, pathways to downstream environments, and socio-environmental consequences. We reflect on the potential impacts these contaminants could have for human, ecosystem, and environmental health, as well as framing glacial contaminants within the context of the water-food-energy nexus. Improved understanding of these processes and impacts, while crucially embedding local knowledge, will help to develop key policy and mitigation strategies to address future risk of contaminant release from glaciers.
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