Digital Commons Network^™

Ocean Governance For The 21st Century: Making Marine Zoning Climate Change Adaptable, Robin K. Craig

Robin K. Craig

The variety of anthropogenic stressors to the marine environment—including, increasingly, climate change—and their complex and synergistic impacts on ocean ecosystems testifies to the failure of existing governance regimes to protect these ecosystems and the services that they provide. Marine spatial planning has been widely hailed as a means of improving ocean governance through holistic ecosystem-based planning. However, that concept arose without reference to climate change, and hence it does not automatically account for the dynamic alterations in marine ecosystems that climate change is bringing.

This Article attempts to adapt marine spatial planning to climate change adaptation. In so doing, it …

An Environmental Justice Critique Of Comparative Advantage: Indigenous Peoples, Trade Policy, And The Mexican Neoliberal Economic Reforms, Carmen G. Gonzalez

Carmen G. Gonzalez

The free market reforms adopted by Mexico in the wake of the debt crisis of the 1980s and in connection with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have jeopardized the physical and cultural survival of Mexico’s indigenous peoples, increased migration to the United States, threatened biological diversity in Mexico, and imposed additional stress on the environment in the United States. Despite these negative impacts, NAFTA continues to serve as a template for trade agreements in the Americas. Unless this template is fundamentally restructured, future trade agreements may replicate throughout the Western hemisphere many of the economic, ecological and social …

B.Y.O.B. (Bring Your Own Bag): A Comprehensive Assessment Of China’S Plastic Bag Policy, Mary Beckwith O'Loughlin

Mary Beckwith O'Loughlin

On June 1, 2008, the Chinese government enacted a nationwide policy prohibiting all stores from freely distributing plastic bags to customers. This new policy requires that, henceforth, all retailers must charge a nominal fee for plastic bags and that those purchasable bags must meet certain quality requirements to improve their potential reusability. These retailers, which include everything from grocery and clothing stores to farmer’s markets and food stalls, individually determine how much to charge for their bags and get to keep all related proceeds. The policy is an effort to mitigate the “white pollution” that is choking China’s landscape, as …

Fees On Plastic Bags: Altering Consumer Behavior By Taxing Environmentally Damaging Choices, Alice R. Baker

Alice R Baker

Reduce, reuse, recycle, the environmental adage of the 1980s has proved unsuccessful in solving many of our solid waste problems. Far too often emphasis was placed only on recycling as the solution to our troubles, while the concepts of reducing our consumption or reusing products fell by the wayside. Thirty years later, it is clear that simply recycling is not enough.

Plastic bags have emerged as an icon of society’s eagerness to acquire goods and its single-use consumerism. Every year approximately 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. Our uncontrolled consumption and quick disposal of plastic bags …