The Power of Place “The main thing is to root politics in place. The affinity for home permits a broad reach in the process of coalition building. It allows strange bedfellows to find one another. It allows worldviews to surface and change. It allows politics to remain an exercise in hope. And it allows the unthinkable to happen sometimes.” Allen Thein Durning, This Place on Earth , P.249 The concept of place, home and community is a transnational and trans-community concept. Human places have just recently been given political boundaries. Previously, human boundaries were determined the same way that animal, plant, and ecosystem boundaries were defined. They were defined by ecology and they were defined by geography of region and hemisphere. Tony Hiss Author of The Experience of Place brings to our attention that as humans “We react, consciously or unconsciously, to the places where we live and work, in ways we scarcely notice or that are only now becoming known to us…In short, the places where we spend our time affect the people we are and can become.” Place defines characteristics in both human and extended moral communities. Place is not necessarily specific to gender, race, generation or specie. This understanding and recognition of place is fundamental when thinking about institutionalizing ecological and social responsibility. Because of human and nonhuman connections to specific places including knowledge, experience and community, using a sense of place and permanence as a green transnational multilateral initiative could be a successful step towards green democracy and ecological citizenship. Robyn Eckersley offers the suggestion of a constitutionally entrenched principle that would enhance ecological and social responsibility: the precautionary principle. I suggest connecting localized, place-specific boundaries with the principle. This addition is meant to aid in fostering ecological citizenship, expanding the moral community, and creating a responsible society. This addition would also be meant to unite a transnational issue that all nations could agree upon. This would create a binding multilateral principle that would be thoroughly accepting of specific ecological needs and characteristics of specific places. In short, the big picture of an international perspective needs the resolution of the peculiarities of place that can't be emphasized in a global viewpoint. The second major international environmental conference was held in Rio de Janeiro, in 1992. It was at Rio that the precautionary principle first became known to the public. Called principle 15, the precautionary principle provided that: “Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation” (p.
In the book The Power of Place: Geography, Destiny, and Globalization’s Rough Landscape, the author, Harm de Blij, argues that where we are born and our geography can affect who we are and what we will become. He applies his knowledge of geography and other relatable information such as health, economy, languages, and several other areas of subject. De Blij categorizes the earth into three subdivisions: locals, globals, and mobals. He defines locals as “those who are poorest, least mobile, and most susceptible to the power of place” (pg-notes). Globals are those who “whether in government, industry, business, or other decision-making capacities, flatten
The reduction if sea-ice coverage is likely to effect krill population (Meade, et al., 2015). The reduction in the duration of sea-ice coverage will allow greater opportunity for humans to exploit the Antarctic ecosystem. Extended periods of ice-free water allow the temporal and spatial expansion of krill fisheries. This leads to increased krill catch, which means a reduction in the number of krill for leopard seals (Meade, et al.,
The award winning novel, To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, may appear to be a simple story about childhood and life in a Southern town in Alabama, but it is really a complex novel dealing with themes of education, moral courage, and tolerance. Through the eyes of Scout Finch, the narrator, Harper Lee teaches the reader about the importance of a moral education, bravery and courage, and prejudice vs. tolerance.
Antibiotic resistance is a consequence of the misuse of antibiotics that give pathogenic bacteria the ability to withstand the effects of an antibiotic. Resistance occurs when bacteria change in such a way that they survive exposure to antibiotics. Resistance may not be confined to a single antibiotic, but may affect multiple antimicrobial classes. Antibiotic resistance is a major problem and everyone needs to work together to combat it - from medical practitioners to patients.
However, he notices that despite the difficulty of following the cosmopolitan order (laws of war and human rights) “states and emerging powers have demanded inclusion in the multilateral order” (38), and have not abandoned it. This allows Hed to say that “a political space has opened up to re-forge the multilateral order on a more inclusive basis” (38): once again, the ability to imagine a new cosmopolitan project (which would be hard to oppose with, say, “traditional values” project) becomes a key question. Hed thinks that is possible, but he is also afraid that just like the shaping of the modern national state took centuries to happen, the cosmopolitan order will take long time to come into action; time, during which global challenges (e.g. ecological) will “reshape the conditions of human life” forever (39). And because of the danger that cosmopolitanism “as a world-making project will continue to try to encompass [these] alternative words, and their aspirations for the universal, within a single frame, reducing discussion to a debate about principle and pluralism” (Moore 108), the task of every individual to seek for alternatives is getting more urgent. The road to
When David Harvey asserts, “The right to remake ourselves by creating a qualitatively different kind of urban sociality is one of the most precious of all human rights,” he presents a conundrum. One that insistently tells us that access to the city in order to create the type of utopian urban space is a fundamental right that must be shared amongst all people regardless of their social standing. He raises the proverbial question about ownership over urban space and the impact it has on those who live within it. Ideally, those who identify a geographical space as their home place typically claim proprietorship over it and often carry a sense of place-pride; gratification towards a city rooted in local cosmopolitanism that recognizes the city
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. New York: Warner, 1982. 4-5, 29-30, 74-5, 89, 91-6,
However, even though education is accessible to all, there still remains a state of inequity in academic achievement, as measured by the reform movement’s standardized tests. As Helen F. Ladd notes in her study the “Presidential Address: Education and Poverty: Confronting the Evidence, “Study after study has demonstrated that children from disadvantaged households perform less well in school on average than those from more advantaged households” (Ladd, 2012). NCES has identified many factors that contribute to low performance and the state of inequity within the national educational system. These differences can be broken down by demographics, participation, and levels of
The United States school system has been struggling for years in the aspect of the child achievement gap. According to the NEA, achievement gaps are the all new reality in the present educational system. The National Education Association is the largest labor union in the United States determined to advance the cause of public education. Throughout the years, differences in education achievements between different groups of students have been hard to ignore. Those who fall under the categories of English language deficiency, poverty, racial and ethnic backgrounds and disabilities fall far behind than the rest of the students, and despite all that has been done in hopes of closing the gap, there has not been much of a change. Poverty in itself
Upon reading “The City” by Park, Burgess and McKenzie I had a very vague understanding of what natural space was defined as, but these reading illustrated how it is easy to see through a metropolitan area. According to the articles a natural space is not just a physical mechanism and artificial construction, it is a product of nature better understood as human nature. The authors understood that humans are social beings so to create a space of interaction from business, to relationship and commerce was a foundation to natural human functioning. Human ecology was being evaluated and that is defined by the study of the special and temporal relations of humans as affected by the selective, distributive, and accommodative forces of the environment. Here we are interested in finding out how the effect of time and space is presented upon human institutions and their behavior. The study of this field can be directly linked to being able to understand “natural space” because a city displays how the environment and current time shape a person through their behavior and the social institutions they have been a part of.
...nces of habitual ecological legal principles. This is mostly so because environmental law itself is of moderately recent vintage, and as a result there has been little time for dependable state perform to enlarge, either in rejoinder to solemn declarations by IGOs or from side to side the all-purpose reception of norms set out in many-sided treaties. On the other hand, the processes described above have in additional areas, and in exacting that of human rights, been particularly creative in the formation of customary law, and there is consequently every cause to wait for that the similar will apply in admiration of ecological principles. http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu25ee/uu25ee0a.htm References http://www.law.cornell.edu/topics/international.html http://indylaw.indiana.edu/library/InternatlLaw1.htm http://www.unu.edu/unupress/unupbooks/uu25ee/uu25ee0a.htm
The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992) The Declaration of Rio on Environment and Development [Online] Available at: http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=78&ArticleID=1163
Legislation aimed at protecting New Zealand’s environment and natural resources has been through countless reforms to better tailor it to the various discourses that surround environmental management. In Simin Davoudi’s (2012) reading “Climate Risk and Security: New Meanings of “the Environment” in the English Planning System”, Davoudi discusses that environment can be seen in various different ways, as local amenity, heritage ,landscape ,nature reserve, as a store house of resources, as a tradable commodity, as a problem, as sustainability and as a risk (Davoudi, 2012). Although, Davoudi’s typology relates to aspects of New Zealand’s environmental management paradigms, it fails to include some important aspects such as indigenous and community inclusion. Davoudi’s (2012) typology can provide for future guidance in the discourse surrounding environment as risk.
The issue of space and place has often been a controversial one as the two are described or defined relative to each other. Place surpasses space when meaning is attached to that space. Sime (1986) argues that place as opposed to space, suggests a strong emotional tie an individual attributes to a certain physical location whether permanent or temporary which gives that space character. According to Tschumi (2009) The pleasure of space cannot be put into words, it is unspoken. It is the form of experience. In order to attain pleasure in a space one must experience it first, it is through these experie...
A place, for me, is somewhere that I am familiar with and I recognize it in some way as my own special geographic location. It is somewhere I am emotionally attached to and it is a place that I wish to remain at. I personally feel that it has taken me years to achieve this particular comprehension about where for certain that place is for me in my life, and to make out why I feel a certain way about being within the walls of my own home. I have now come to realize that my home is where my heart will always truly be, because I believe it is the only place where I will always be loved without