Engaging students in redesigning a local urban space to improve ecosystem services

Ecosystem services are an important, but often invisible component of the urban landscape. Humans have altered the environment in cities, leading to degraded or missing ecosystem services in many cases. To enhance or replace these services, many urban municipalities are integrating green spaces and infrastructure into urban planning. We have designed an activity to help undergraduate students: 1) recognize the importance of urban ecosystem services, 2) identify when they are degraded or missing, and 3) integrate “green” ideas from multiple sources to propose improvements to them. To help students achieve these goals, we asked them to evaluate an underutilized space on their own campus, and propose a redesign of that space to support ecosystem services. While many students struggled initially to link urban ecosystem services with specific proposed improvements, we found that having students work together in groups for a second redesign often improved understanding and also resulted in more creative and interdisciplinary designs. The exercise also helped students to better identify ecosystem services and allowed them to practice integrating multiple viewpoints while proposing solutions to local environmental problems.

Footpaths of the Late-Soviet Environmental Turn: The “Forest City” of Novosibirsk’s Akademgorodok as a Sociotechnical Imaginary

The founding of Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk in the late 1950s features prominently in the historiography of the Thaw and the general turn of Soviet science to the eastern parts of the country. This article puts this story into the context of the formation of modern “green” ideas in the late Soviet Union and reconsiders the relationship between humans and nature, along with the definition of nature itself. Akademgorodok produced a telling visual perspective: the architectural plan for the city dictated that its scientific, industrial, and living zones were drowned deep in the taiga. Architects named this type of urban planning “diffusive,” and memoirists described it as a “Forest City.” Using the term of Sheila Jasanoff, we designate this “Forest City” as a sociotechnical imaginary of Akademgorodok. Our aim is to study the historical roots of the “Forest City” and how it became a collective imaginary. How did it happen that in the 1950s and 1960s, when the “faces” of Soviet cities were defined by districts of standard panel houses, that a city was built near Novosibirsk in which so much attention was given to pre-human flora, fauna, and landscapes? What ideas and intellectual contexts composed the concept of Akademgorodok as a “Forest City”? Our answer possesses two dimensions. First, the rejection of the use of decorative elements in housing construction in the post-Stalin epoch stimulated architects to pay more attention to the greening of cities. They revived the concept of a “garden city” proposed by Ebenezer Howard on a new level. Second, the evolution of the ideas of Mikhail Lavrentyev, the founder of Akademgorodok, who upon arrival in Siberia applied the productivist program manifested in the slogan “Siberia is a treasure of resources,” but later changed his opinion to more “green” views under the influence of the so-called “Baikal Discussion.” The viewpoints of Lavrentyev influenced the design of this “center” of Siberian science, and then he formulated the idea of a “Forest City.” These contexts enable the utopian horizons and the search for models of a constructed future that were typical of the Thaw era to reflect upon the important challenges of the contemporary Anthropocene.

Green Economy and Green Growth—Opportunities for Sustainable Development

Economic activities are increasingly carried out in modern conditions, a situation which is often linked to a negative impact on the environment. They have now reached such a level that they can be considered a real factor in climate formation and modeling. Such a trend has generated a lot of initiatives and strategies aimed at a green economy development. Thus, special public policy measures for the green economy and green growth have been developed and also implemented in the last few years. The analysis of the main challenges in the field of economic and environmental development, as well as the public policies for a green economy, is a real concern. More and more, the global trends for sustainable development are represented by green economy and green growth. The purpose of the present article is to present and analyze the issue of green economy and green growth, which is a new operating strategy both globally and European level. Green growth represents a practical tool for achieving the objective of sustainable development, as a timeless objective. This means fostering economic growth and development, while ensuring that the natural assets continue to provide environmental resources and services. We will try also to systematize the main challenges in the field of economic and environmental development, taking into account their specific characteristics, and to provide relevant suggestions for public policies related to reducing the impact of economic activities on the environment. Additionally, particular attention is focused here on establishing the kind of relationship that occurs between the green economy, green growth and sustainable development. In this regard, we will analyze the purpose of the simultaneous functioning of these three green ideas. We consider that the co-existence of the three green ideas (green economy, green growth and sustainable development) is reasonable due to the complementary and simultaneous nature of these concepts.

Ecological consciousness of the XXI century human and the ways of its verbalization in the media discourse environment

The paper aims at studying and analyzing the language implementation of the development of peoples ecological consciousness in the present-day Russian and English-speaking media discourse environment. The modern media discourse has become an important source of various environmental lexical units which can affect peoples consciousness and change their behavior in a more eco-friendly way. The research is based on two parallel and opposite scientific approaches integrated in the media discourse which are ecologisation and anthropocentrism. The study is built on the analysis of the language models of ecological issues in different popular national and international media editions of Russia and English-speaking countries; in TV documentaries; on YouTube channels; in eco-friendly bloggers speeches and texts. The findings of the research showed that the media discourse environment is actively inculcating green ideas into peoples consciousness today both in Russia and abroad. More people are trying to follow the conscious consumption lifestyle. The media language is also becoming an important tool in introducing new environmental lexical units - neologisms - which are easily disseminated in the media discourse space and are actively being adopted by society. Overall, this research has confirmed the idea that the present-day language of the media discourse space is a powerful mediator of a new life sustainable development philosophy which helps human consciousness evolve in an eco-friendly way and try to make our planet a safer, healthier and more comfortable place for living.

How Furiously Can Colorless Green Ideas Sleep? Sentence Acceptability in Context

We study the influence of context on sentence acceptability. First we compare the acceptability ratings of sentences judged in isolation, with a relevant context, and with an irrelevant context. Our results show that context induces a cognitive load for humans, which compresses the distribution of ratings. Moreover, in relevant contexts we observe a discourse coherence effect that uniformly raises acceptability. Next, we test unidirectional and bidirectional language models in their ability to predict acceptability ratings. The bidirectional models show very promising results, with the best model achieving a new state-of-the-art for unsupervised acceptability prediction. The two sets of experiments provide insights into the cognitive aspects of sentence processing and central issues in the computational modeling of text and discourse.

Energy Enterprise Management in China under the Perspective of Green Development

With the aggravation of climate change, energy enterprises will gradually assume more and more responsibilities for environmental protection and energy conservation. How to incorporate green ideas into their business management has become an important theme. After reviewing the past background and policies, based on the supply chain model established in the past literature, this paper determines the more important indicators that affect the sustainable development of the company, and based on this, puts forward the points that should be paid attention to in the future management of the enterprise. First, energy companies should incorporate green ideas into their corporate training to raise the morale of their employees. Second, through strict control of upstream and downstream suppliers and the establishment of environmental requirements, so as to improve the green degree of the entire supply chain. Third, in the current society with advanced information technology, the operation of information means to achieve the goal of green management should be the focus of future management.