Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Is Dismissing The Precautionary Principle The Manly Thing To Do? Gender And The Economics Of Climate Change, Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

Many public debates about climate change now focus on the economic "costs" of taking action. When called on to advise about these, many leading mainstream economists downplay the need for care and caution on climate issues, forecasting a future with infinitely continued economic growth. This essay highlights the roles of binary metaphors and cultural archetypes in creating the highly gendered, sexist, and age-ist attitudes that underlie this dominant advice. Gung-ho economic growth advocates aspire to the role of The Hero, rejecting the conservatism of The Old Wife. But in a world that is not actually as safe and predictable as …

The Role Of Home Environments In Residential Adjustment Decision Making In Later Life, Kimberly Joy Stoeckel

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Using the nationally representative Health and Retirement Study, this research explored the multi-faceted influence of the accessibility of housing environments on the occurrence and characteristics of residential adjustments made by older adults aged 70 or older. A range of housing adjustment outcomes were examined, including home modifications and relocation into age-segregated senior housing. Analysis of the accessibility gains following relocation was also included in the empirical analyses.

The Ecological Theory of Aging (Lawton & Nahemow, 1973) provided the conceptual framework for the research. The longitudinal design of the HRS empirically advanced understanding of the key theoretical constructs by sensitizing the …

Global Learning Partnerships, Margaret Leonard

New England Journal of Public Policy

The title of this section is profoundly significant to those of us who have experienced global partnerships. Our experience has revealed to us that there is a profound organic integrity to these five words, Transnational, Social Change, Learning, Networks, and together they are revelatory of an emerging future we are stretching to envision and realize in the twenty-first century. In this brief essay I would like to share with you five core experiences of global learning partnerships that I have had over the past half decade. From these experiences I have learned volumes about the organic relationships of these five …

Economists, Value Judgments, And Climate Change: A View From Feminist Economics, Julie Nelson

Julie A. Nelson

A number of recent discussions about ethical issues in climate change, as engaged in by economists, have focused on the value of the parameter representing the rate of time preference within models of optimal growth. This essay examines many economists' antipathy to serious discussion of ethical matters, and suggests that the avoidance of questions of intergenerational equity is related to another set of value judgments concerning the quality and objectivity of economic practice. Using insights from feminist philosophy of science and research on high reliability organizations, this essay argues that a more ethically transparent, real-world-oriented, and flexible economic practice would …

Editor's Note, Padraig O'Malley

New England Journal of Public Policy

This issue of the New England Journal of Public Policy that deals with issues of climate change, oil, and water and the interconnection of the three with the future of the planet.

Initially our topic was conceived as “Oil & Water” only. We planned to present the proceedings of an Institute for Global Leadership symposium held at Tufts University in 2005. There was then still a debate about global warming, although the Kyoto Treaty was in place. But without the world’s preeminent manufacturer of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the United States (20 percent of the total emissions with 5 percent …

Oil. Changing Geopolitics Of Oil In Asia & The Usa, Jay Hein, John Clark, Robert Ebel, Dong Hyung Cha, Richard Lotspeich

New England Journal of Public Policy

One of the most important responsibilities the United States assumed following World War II was ensuring the stable flow of relatively inexpensive oil to the industrialized and industrializing countries of the world. A glance at a list of the top petroleum exporting countries shows that most of them are poor, have despotic governments, and experience frequent bouts of political instability and ideological extremism.

Climate Change In Metropolitan Boston, Paul Kirshen, Matthias Ruth, William Anderson

New England Journal of Public Policy

Even though urban infrastructure systems are important and are designed according to socioeconomic and environmental conditions that are very sensitive to climate, there have been few major integrated assessments of the impacts of climate change on metropolitan infrastructure systems and services and possible adaptations. An analysis of the Boston metro area found that adaptation actions taken before full climate-change impacts occur will result in fewer expected negative impacts to the region than waiting for major impacts to occur. Adaptation of infrastructure to climate change must also consider land use management, environmental and socioeconomic impacts, equity, and adaptation actors and institutions. …

Environmental Public Health Awaits Rediscovery, Anthony Robbins, Phyllis Freeman

New England Journal of Public Policy

Preventing environmental exposures that threaten human health remains among the best but least attended to opportunities to improve everyone’s health. For more than a decade, medical care concerns, exacerbated by voracious competition among medical empires and the implacably growing number of uninsured, have often been misconstrued as constituting a complete agenda for health system reform. The authors explain the predicament from an historical perspective — how defining events moved U.S. health policy away from protecting the public against dangerous exposures toward unrealistic expectations that doctors will fix whatever goes wrong, at least for individuals with ample medical insurance. They explain …

Generating Environmental Knowledge And Inquiry Through Workshop Processes, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

Since the late-1980s many scholars in Science and Technology Studies have accounted for the validity of scientific knowledge or the effectiveness of technologies by discussing the heterogeneous resources mobilized by diverse agents spanning different realms of social action. In the environmental arena such "heterogeneous construction" is, in effect, self-consciously organized through the frequent use of workshops and other "organized multi-person collaborative processes" (OMPCPs). This paper describes my own process of making sense of the workshop form for generating environmental knowledge and further inquiry. This process was catalyzed by participating during the spring and summer of 2000 in four innovative, interdisciplinary …

Burning And Burying In Connecticut: Are Regional Solutions To Solid Waste Disposal Equitable?, Timothy Black, John A. Stewart

New England Journal of Public Policy

To comply with federal legislation, states throughout the country are replacing old town dumps with a regional system for municipal solid waste disposal.This system includes trash-to-energy incinerators and ash landfills as well as recycling and reduction facilities. While these new types of facilities are expected to be environmentally safer, they have concentrated the disposal process of waste generated throughout the state in fewer locations. State leaders champion the use of newer, cleaner disposal methods, while local community groups complain that they have become the dumping grounds for the state. This is the first environmental equity study to examine whether these …

How Do We Know There Is A Population-Environment Problem?, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

Five fictional friends of the author have agreed to meet and talk, hoping that he was right when he claimed that discussion crossing the usual boundaries of their fields would enrich their different inquiries and concerns. Ecolo, a natural and human ecologist, breaks the ice. He wants to marshall scientific knowledge to persuade others of the seriousness of the population problem. He is questioned by Philoso, whose philosophical bent leads her to observe the models that people use and to ask how they support the claims they make. In turn, the other three join in: Activo, an activist who is …

Seabrook: A Case Study In Mismanagement, Irvin C. Bupp

New England Journal of Public Policy

The Seabrook nuclear power plant construction project is an unqualified financial disaster. It simultaneously threatens its chief owner, the Public Service Co. of New Hampshire (PSNH) with bankruptcy and the company's electricity customers with huge rate increases. The fifteen-year history of the project is reviewed to identify "what went wrong?"

The review suggests that the basic problem has been mismanagement by both PSNH and by government regulators. A three-year regulatory imbroglio over the environmental effects of the plant's cooling system was extremely costly in the mid-1970s.

By the time this problem was belatedly resolved, the project had begun to outstrip …