Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The purpose of this article is to highlight some of the roles government can take on that exist outside the traditional regulatory powers of government. Two such nonregulatory roles include the rights of government as the property owner of submerged lands, and the rights/ obligations of government as trustee of the public trust under the public trust doctrine that exists at common law and also statutorily in many coastal states. The reasons these nonregulatory roles are important considerations is because of the reasonable argument that a government that is not acting in a regulatory capacity cannot be said to be …

The purpose of this paper is to explain a framework that focuses on information flows as a means of understanding public policy decision-making, with a specific emphasis on information relating to sustainable development. The goal of this framework is to further aid in identifying and explaining the extent to which sustainability goals are being implemented in public policy decisions. The suggestion is that by focusing on the information flows directly related to sustainable information, instances can be isolated where specific pieces of information are not making their way to final decision-making processes, or alternatively, where new information interferes with sustainable …

There is an ongoing practice in the international shipping community that impacts fundamental notions of sustainability as defined in the peer-reviewed literature (WCED, 1987; Gladwin, Kennelly & Krause, 1995; McManus, 1996, Naess, 2003; McGregor, 2004). The practice is based in discounting the true costs of maritime shipping through a system of open registries. By engaging in such practices, there is an inherent failure by the international community to internalize the true costs (environmental, social, labor, etc.) associated with shipping. The result is a practice that artificially keeps the international costs of maritime shipping low at the expense of environmental and …

This paper reviews the current management scheme used by Massachusetts to protect vernal pools, which represent small-scale ecosystems, and analyzes its relative strengths and weaknesses from an overall sustainability standpoint by looking at the frameworks developed for management. The frameworks are analyzed to determine if the objectives of vernal pool protection are being met. The initial impression is the outcomes are not meeting the objective of overall vernal pool protection, because there are failures in the drivers (mainly the certification requirement), which limits the number of verbal pools actually protected. An expansion of the current Massachusetts program is suggested to …

There is a traditional view suggesting forests remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (Pregitzer & Euskirchen, 2004), but they cease to serve as a carbon sink as they fully mature (Odum, 1969). Recent modeling of old-growth forest carbon sequestration indicate they continue to serve as a “net sink” of carbon even after maturity (Carey, Sala, Keane, & Callaway, 2001; Zhou et al., 2006) - sequestering an average of 2.4 +/- 0.8 tC ha-1 yr-1 (tC = metric tons of carbon; ha = hectare; yr =year), and yielding a ratio of heterotrophic respiration (Rh) to net primary production (NPP) of approximately …