We reviewed, annotated, and organized recent social science research and developed a framework for addressing the wildland fire social problem. We annotated articles related to three topic areas or factors, which are critical for understanding collective action, particularly in the wildland-urban interface. These factors are collaborative capacity, problem framing, and mutual trust. The integration of these is a prerequisite of collective action to develop Community Wildfire Protection Plans, reduce vegetative fuels, enhance public safety and preparedness, and/or create defensible space. Collective action requires partnerships, common goals, and a common language. Understanding the inter-relationships between the factors that enable collective action is important to collaborative partnerships, forest managers, and social science researchers as they work together to address the wildland fire social problem.
This title provides a synoptic overview of the current state of interdisciplinary research, education, administration and management, and includes problem solving-knowledge that spans the disciplines and interdisciplinary fields and crosses the space between the academic community and society at large.
Prior to the Nixon administration, environmental policy in the United States was rudimentary at best. Since then, it has evolved into one of the primary concerns of governmental policy from the federal to the local level. As scientific expertise on the environment rapidly developed, Americans became more aware of the growing environmental crisis that surrounded them. Practical solutions for mitigating various aspects of the crisis - air pollution, water pollution, chemical waste dumping, strip mining, and later global warming - became politically popular, and the government responded by gradually erecting a vast regulatory apparatus to address the issue. Today, politicians regard environmental policy as one of the most pressing issues they face. The Obama administration has identified the renewable energy sector as a key driver of economic growth, and Congress is in the process of passing a bill to reduce global warming that will be one of the most important environmental policy acts in decades. The Oxford Handbook of U.S. Environmental Policy will be a state-of-the-art work on all aspects of environmental policy in America. Over the past half century, America has been the world's leading emitter of global warming gases. However, environmental policy is not simply a national issue. It is a global issue, and the explosive growth of Asian countries like China and India mean that policy will have to be coordinated at the international level. The book will therefore focus not only on the U.S., but on the increasing importance of global policies and issues on American regulatory efforts. This is a topic that will only grow in importance in the coming years, and this will serve as an authoritative guide to any scholar interested in the issue.
"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.
Many teens today who use the Internet are actively involved in participatory cultures—joining online communities (Facebook, message boards, game clans), producing creative work in new forms (digital sampling, modding, fan videomaking, fan fiction), working in teams to complete tasks and develop new knowledge (as in Wikipedia), and shaping the flow of media (as in blogging or podcasting). A growing body of scholarship suggests potential benefits of these activities, including opportunities for peer-to-peer learning, development of skills useful in the modern workplace, and a more empowered conception of citizenship. Some argue that young people pick up these key skills and competencies on their own by interacting with popular culture; but the problems of unequal access, lack of media transparency, and the breakdown of traditional forms of socialization and professional training suggest a role for policy and pedagogical intervention. This report aims to shift the conversation about the "digital divide" from questions about access to technology to questions about access to opportunities for involvement in participatory culture and how to provide all young people with the chance to develop the cultural competencies and social skills needed. Fostering these skills, the authors argue, requires a systemic approach to media education; schools, afterschool programs, and parents all have distinctive roles to play. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning
No person or place is immune from disasters or disaster-related losses. Infectious disease outbreaks, acts of terrorism, social unrest, or financial disasters in addition to natural hazards can all lead to large-scale consequences for the nation and its communities. Communities and the nation thus face difficult fiscal, social, cultural, and environmental choices about the best ways to ensure basic security and quality of life against hazards, deliberate attacks, and disasters. Beyond the unquantifiable costs of injury and loss of life from disasters, statistics for 2011 alone indicate economic damages from natural disasters in the United States exceeded $55 billion, with 14 events costing more than a billion dollars in damages each. One way to reduce the impacts of disasters on the nation and its communities is to invest in enhancing resilience-the ability to prepare and plan for, absorb, recover from and more successfully adapt to adverse events. Disaster Resilience: A National Imperative addresses the broad issue of increasing the nation's resilience to disasters. This book defines "national resilience", describes the state of knowledge about resilience to hazards and disasters, and frames the main issues related to increasing resilience in the United States. It also provide goals, baseline conditions, or performance metrics for national resilience and outlines additional information, data, gaps, and/or obstacles that need to be addressed to increase the nation's resilience to disasters. Additionally, the book's authoring committee makes recommendations about the necessary approaches to elevate national resilience to disasters in the United States. Enhanced resilience allows better anticipation of disasters and better planning to reduce disaster losses-rather than waiting for an event to occur and paying for it afterward. Disaster Resilience confronts the topic of how to increase the nation's resilience to disasters through a vision of the characteristics of a resilient nation in the year 2030. Increasing disaster resilience is an imperative that requires the collective will of the nation and its communities. Although disasters will continue to occur, actions that move the nation from reactive approaches to disasters to a proactive stance where communities actively engage in enhancing resilience will reduce many of the broad societal and economic burdens that disasters can cause.
Environmental and natural resource policy decision making is changing. Increasingly citizens and management agency personnel are seeking ways to do things differently; to participate meaningfully in the decision making process as parties work through policy conflicts. Doing things differently has come to mean doing things collaboratively. Daniels and Walker examine collaboration in environmental and natural resource policy decision making and conflict management. They address collaboration by featuring a method collaborative learning, that has been designed to address decision making and conflict management needs in complex and controversial policy settings. As they illustrate, collaborative learning differs in some significant ways from existing approaches for dealing with policy decision making, public participation, and conflict management. First, it is a hybrid of systems thinking and alternative dispute resolution concepts. Second, it is grounded explicitly in experiential, team-or organizational-and adult learning theories. It is a theory-based framework through which parties can make progress in the management of controversial environmental policy situations. They discuss both the theory and technique of collaborative learning and present cases where it has been applied. This is a professional and teaching tool for scholars, students, and researchers involved with environmental issues as well as dispute resolution.
