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Local Concern (local + concern)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

HALF A CENTURY OF CROPLAND CHANGE,

GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 3 2001
JOHN FRASER HART
ABSTRACT. The census concept of total cropland is a better measure of effective agricultural land than is total farmland, which includes extensive areas of woodland owned by farmers. The cropland area of the United States dropped from 478 million acres in 1949 to 431 million acres in 1997, for a net loss of less than 1 million acres, or roughly one-fifth of 1 percent, per year. In the midwestern agricultural heartland most counties changed less than 5 percent in the half-century, and more counties gained than lost. The West was a crazy quilt of change, and in the East most counties lost more than 10 percent. Major metropolitan counties lost a few percentage points more than did adjacent areas, but at a lower rate per capita than the nation as a whole. Most of the loss of cropland was in marginal agricultural counties with soils of low inherent fertility and topography unsuited to modern farm machinery. The loss of cropland to suburban encroachment may be cause for intense local concern, but attempts to thwart development cannot be justified on grounds of a net national loss of good cropland. [source]

Multispecies conservation planning: identifying landscapes for the conservation of viable populations using local and continental species priorities

JOURNAL OF APPLIED ECOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
REGAN EARLY
Summary 1Faced with unpredictable environmental change, conservation managers face the dual challenges of protecting species throughout their ranges and protecting areas where populations are most likely to persist in the long term. The former can be achieved by protecting locally rare species, to the potential detriment of protecting species where they are least endangered and most likely to survive in the long term. 2Using British butterflies as a model system, we compared the efficacy of two methods of identifying persistent areas of species' distributions: a single-species approach and a new multispecies prioritization tool called ZONATION. This tool identifies priority areas using population dynamic principles (prioritizing areas that contain concentrations of populations of each species) and the reserve selection principle of complementarity. 3ZONATION was generally able to identify the best landscapes for target (i.e. conservation priority) species. This ability was improved by assigning higher numerical weights to target species and implementing a clustering procedure to identify coherent biological management units. 4Weighting British species according to their European rather than UK status substantially increased the protection offered to species at risk throughout Europe. The representation of species that are rare or at risk in the UK, but not in Europe, was not greatly reduced when European weights were used, although some species of UK-only concern were no longer assigned protection inside their best landscapes. The analysis highlights potential consequences of implementing parochial vs. wider-world priorities within a region. 5Synthesis and applications. Wherever possible, reserve planning should incorporate an understanding of population processes to identify areas that are likely to support persistent populations. While the multispecies prioritization tool ZONATION compared favourably to the selection of ,best' areas for individual species, a user-defined input of species weights was required to produce satisfactory solutions for long-term conservation. Weighting species can allow international conservation priorities to be incorporated into regional action plans but the potential consequences of any putative solution should always be assessed to ensure that no individual species of local concern will be threatened. [source]

The Political Economy of the Ecological Native

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 3 2007
MOLLY DOANE
In Chimalapas, Mexico, nongovernmental actors attempted to integrate campesinos into the discourse and practices of the Western environmental movement. The political economy school of anthropology assumes that cultural identity and practice flow from historical experiences grounded in relevant national and institutional contexts. In this article, I argue that although the movement in Chimalapas drew from the well-developed symbolic toolkit of the environmental movement, it was not able to create a space for local concerns within a transnational agenda that was already fairly well established and inflexible. Political ecology was the hinge of this movement: a political-economic analysis that validated traditional agrarian concerns in Chimalapas but included an environmentalist discourse legible to international funders. In this way, environmentalists in Chimalapas attempted both to create new practices and to link old practices to new expressions of culture and identity. [source]

Mobile phones and Mipoho's prophecy: The powers and dangers of flying language

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010
JANET MCINTOSH
ABSTRACT In this article, I examine the ideologies surrounding the poetic forms of Giriama text messaging in the town of Malindi, Kenya. I argue that young people use rapid code-switching and a global medialect of condensed, abbreviated English as an iconic index of a modern, mobile, self-fashioning, sexy, and irreverent persona, whereas their use of the local vernacular (Kigiriama) tends to reroot them in the gravitas of social obligations and respect relationships. In text messages, then, English and local African tongues are sometimes treated as foils for each other, suggesting that, rather than merely being mimicked, the English medialect is flavored by distinctly local concerns. Indeed, among many Giriama elders, the poetic patterns of text messaging are construed as a special breed of witchery in which hypermobility and linguistic innovation threaten ethnic coherence and even sanity itself. I suggest, however, that the use of Kigiriama in text messaging may point not to the abandonment of ethnicity but to new ways of being Giriama that are simultaneously local and modern. [mobile phones, text messaging, globalization, Kenya, witchcraft, language ideology, code switching] [source]