A Management Controversy at Point Reyes

Author(s):  
Laura Alice Watt ◽  
David Lowenthal

This introductory chapter presents the case study of the Point Reyes National Seashore (PRNS), which was embroiled in a controversy in 2012. The issue was not the usual industry-versus-nature debate: on the one hand, national environmental organizations sought official designation of a marine wilderness; on the other, oyster farm operators and local foods advocates insisted that their historic operation was doing no harm and should be allowed to continue. This case example reveals a great deal about parks management in the United States. As the chapter shows, such controversies highlight much larger questions about what parks are for, what they are meant to protect and provide to the public, and how to make choices between competing uses or management priorities for park resources.

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haley Leslie-Bole ◽  
Eric P Perramond

Abstract The closure of Drake's Bay Oyster Farm in Point Reyes National Seashore, California, ignited a heated local and national conflict regarding the roles of stewardship and conservation and private business in protected areas. It is vital to examine parks and conservation critically to identify places where they are exacerbating resource struggles that often result from globalization and development, in the United States and in other countries. This article uses Foucauldian discourse analysis to identify conflicting discourses present in this conflict and to analyze knowledge and power in relation to issues of resource and land use in protected areas. This analysis highlights differences in scale and logic between the discourse used by local stakeholders, and the discourse used by conservation organizations and Park officials, in the Point Reyes conflict and in other National Parks. Key Words: Political ecology, discourse, aquaculture, oysters, Foucault, National Parks, conservation, land stewardship, Point Reyes, protected areas


2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (7) ◽  
pp. 2120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cecilia Jaques ◽  
Mine Islar ◽  
Gavin Lord

Contrary to what practice suggests, social media platforms may not be an appropriate forum for communicating with civil society about sustainability issues such as climate change. Misinformation campaigns are distorting the line between fact and falsity on social media platforms, and there has been a profound shift in the way that social media users consume and interact with information. These conditions have been popularly labeled as the post-truth era. Drawing from Neo-Marxian theory, we argue that post-truth can be explained as a new iteration of ideological struggle under capitalist hegemony. We substantiate this claim through a mixed methods investigation synthesizing corpus-assisted lexical analysis and critical discourse analysis to evaluate 900 user-generated comments taken from three articles on socioenvironmental topics published on Facebook by news organizations in the United States. The results showed that the nature of this struggle is tied explicitly to the role of science in society, where the legitimacy of science is caught in a tug-of-war of values between elitism on the one hand and a rejection of the establishment on the other. It follows that presenting truthful information in place of false information is an insufficient means of coping with post-truth. We conclude by problematizing the notion that Facebook is an adequate forum for public dialogue and advocate for a change in strategy from those wishing to communicate scientific information in the public sphere.


1917 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-56

In planning its campaign the Food Conservation Bureau of the United States Food Administration has realized the importance of the public school as a medium for the dissemination of the ideas which are “to modify the food habits of the one hundred million of our people.”


1994 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 93-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Mitchell

As a frequent concern both of governments and of the public at large in Western Hemisphere nations, international migration is now more prominent than at any time since 1980. The episodic flow of seaborne refugees from Haiti since 1991 has been a key factor in spurring the inter-American community to oppose Haiti's military rulers. The flotilla of rafts leaving Cuba since early August 1994 has engendered high-profile negotiations on migration between Washington and Havana. The stream of undocumented labor migrants from Mexico to the United States has regained momentum since the late 1980s and is encountering increased public criticism, especially in the western United States.Underlying these instances of political tension is a strong, and only partially-met, demand for migration to the United States from parts of Latin America and the Caribbean on the one hand, and a growing anxiety in the US to “control the nation's borders” on the other.


Author(s):  
Wojciech Sadurski

This chapter addresses the salience of the Rawlsian idea of public reason for freedom of speech. It applies a philosophical template of Public Reason to a typically legal issue: what motivations for speech restrictions render the restriction legitimate under the Public Reason criterion, and what motivations taint the law as illegitimate, because they are non-endorsable by reasonable persons to whom they apply. Traces of this pattern of argument can be found in several legal systems: in the United States, Germany, New Zealand, and Australia, when they grapple with constitutionality of restrictions on freedom of speech, and choose the motive path (rather than the effects path) of scrutiny. The most typical pattern of argument is the one which disfavours content-oriented restrictions, as compared to content-neutral restrictions. This distinction offers attractive avenues of argument when it is viewed in the context of legislative motives, and how they fare under a general principle of Public Reason. The chapter then establishes that viewpoint restrictions and subject-matter restrictions—two subcategories of a broader genus of content-based restrictions of freedom of speech—correspond to two perceived wrongful motivations in regulating speech: intolerance and paternalism.


1940 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 439-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Starr

The legal status of political parties in the United States is far from being clearly defined. On the one hand, we do not have a mass of legislation and court decisions clearly constituting the political party as a branch of the government, as in the leading fascist countries of Europe; and, on the other hand, we do not have a situation similar to that of Great Britain or France, where political parties are practically unregulated except for laws designed to control subversive groups. To gain a concept of the legal position of American political parties, a great deal of legislation which differs widely in many particulars among the forty-eight states must be surveyed, and certain categories of common and public law must be explored. Even when the many branches of the law that seem to impinge upon the subject have been brought into view, the legal position of our political parties still seems elusive and indefinite. Yet the subject is one of considerable practical importance, since the near future is likely to bring insistent demands for new and more drastic regulation of political parties. A consideration of the rights of American political parties, and the scope of the powers of the legislature to interfere with parties in the public interest, therefore seems appropriate at the present time.


2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shalini Misra ◽  
Patrick Roberts ◽  
Matthew Rhodes

Abstract This research uses an abductive research strategy and person–environment (P–E) fit as a frame to understand: (1) how digital technologies have transformed emergency managerial work; and (2) managers’ cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses to these structural and organizational transformations. Interviews of county-level emergency managers in the United States reveal that pervasive computing environments have resulted in intensification of interchanges and new patterns of relationships with public, public officials, and other agencies that have changed the power balance between the public and emergency managers. We uncover points of tension between managers’ personal attributes and their organizational and broader environmental conditions. We articulate two mechanisms, optimization and passive adaptation, by which emergency managers and their immediate and broader socio-cultural and political environments interact to influence psychological and behavioral outcomes. On the one hand, role ambiguity, role conflict, and diminished agency indicate passive adaptation to structural transformation. On the other, predictive uses of technology, novel organizational routines, and new collaborative relationships suggest managers’ efforts at optimization. We develop a social ecological framework for P–E fit that elucidates the contextual factors most relevant to understanding public managerial responses to technological change and links antecedent conditions to the processes and outcomes of P–E incongruence.


Ad Americam ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 ◽  
pp. 51-64
Author(s):  
Natalia Koper

This paper explores the role of the doctrine of the responsibility to protect (R2P) in shaping U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period. Based on the in-depth study of declassified documents, public speeches, and other documents, this paper examines three case studies (Rwanda genocide, Iraq war, Libya conflict) as representative examples of the U.S.involvement in humanitarian crises abroad. The analysis reveals a consistently evolving narrative of a country fatalistically balancing the dilemma of responsibility. On the one side, having assumed the role of a global leader and norm-carrier, the United States is expected to act accordingly, and intervene in foreign humanitarian crises, safeguarding nations facing grave and continuous violations of human rights. On the other hand, every administration has been faced with the possibility of a backlash from either the public opinion, which does not prioritize humanitarian causes abroad, or the international community, which is not indifferent to violations of the principle of state sovereignty. As a result, the humanitarian narrative, albeit important, has been mainly applied as a secondary resource, and has not been the primary reason for interventions, as demonstrated with a number of inconsistencies in formulating foreign policies and employing the R2P rhetoric.


Author(s):  
William R Towns

The standard for trademark infringement in the United States is ‘likelihood of confusion’. Under this standard trademark infringement occurs when, dependent on the attendant circumstances, two parties’ use of the same or similar mark with related goods and services would be likely to cause the public mistakenly to believe: (1) that the goods and services emanate from the same source; or (2) that the parties are in some manner affiliated or that the goods and services of one party have the sponsorship, endorsement, or approval of the other party. In either case, trademark law aims to protect the public from deceit, and to prevent the diversion of reputation and goodwill from the one who has created it to another who has not.


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