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Issue 12.2 Abstracts

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Bottom-Up Environmental Decision Making Taken Seriously: Integrating Stakeholder Perceptions into Scenarios of Environmental Change

By Areti Kontogianni, Ilias Tziritis, and Michalis Skourtos

The long-standing quest for properly integrating stakeholder perceptions and attitudes into environmental decision-making has not yet reached a definite answer. Particularly in a river basin context, the interaction of economic activities, ecological factors and social values contribute to an increase in the complexity of policy options and the likelihood of intervention failures. Conflicts between users, their relationship with the State and their interaction with the natural environment must be analyzed in depth. This paper attempts to analyze the active stakeholder groups in the river basin of Axios in northern Greece applying the methodological tools of stakeholder analysis and focus groups. Special attention is paid to their perceptions about risk, values of the coastal environment, the role of State and individual responsibilities.

Keywords : integrated coastal zone management, environmental conflicts, risk perceptions

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Engendering Deliberative Democracy: Women's Environmental Protection Problems

By Adrianna A. Semmens

In this paper I consider the western, male-centred practice of deliberative democracy and its suitability for addressing cross-border environmental problems that intersect with the issue of women's protection, featuring the use of threat or force (hereafter referred to as environmental-women's protection problems). Central to this paper is the consideration of the extent to which the problem-solving practice of deliberative democracy is relevant for processing such problems. It is contended that although deliberative democracy as a political methodology in the form of inclusive participatory designs is relevant for processing environmental-women's protection problems, it needs to take on board feminist environmental insights from the broad area of feminist ecology. These would include: a focus on activism contesting structural injustices, relationships, ecological embeddedness , security, women's agency, gender training and culturally-sensitive community development processes. Ultimately, such considerations would make deliberative democracy more meaningful in a problem-ameliorating sense for such problems.

Keywords : feminist ecology, democratic problem-solving, problems of ecological security

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The Alternative Technology Movement: An Analysis of its Framing and Negotiation of Technology Development

By Adrian Smith

Technology mediates our relations with one another and with nature. Modern environmentalism recognised this from its inception. Alternative Technology (AT) activists called for innovations which would pre-figure ecological society. This paper analyses AT advocacy of technology. Using the history of AT, three issues will be explored: 1) the relations between conceptualisations of environmental problems and the kinds of technology solution promoted; 2) the interplay and compromises environmentalists must make with other actors important in technological development; 3) the limits to seeking technical solutions to fundamentally social problems. The paper concludes by exploring the hollow technology metaphor in order to capture the complex ways social actors advocate and construct technology. Hollow technology highlights how technology-fixes provide only temporary solutions to problems that are, fundamentally, questions about prioritising multiple social values that are always shifting and developing.

Keywords: alternative technology, social movements, sociology of technology

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European Governance and Green Social Movements: Transport and GMO Policies in Spain

By Inaki Barcena

This article is a part of a current research project focusing on the extent to which the activities of public interest associations, activist coalitions and green movements bridge the large gap between the European citizenry and the European policy making level. In studying the link between European civil society and the EU policy process, this project tackles the crucial problem of the democratic deficit within the EU policy making process.

I will focus on the Spanish civil society and especially on the environmental movement (transport and GMO policies) to asses the extent to which groups concerned with this policy sector accurately reflect citizens' preferences. I will also assess the way that these preferences are acted upon in the policy making process at the regional, national and European level.

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Risk Versus National Pride: Conflicting Discourses Over the Construction of High Voltage Power Stations in the Athens Metropolitan Area for Demands of the 2004 Olympics

By John Karamichas

This paper first explores the conflictual discourses employed by Government agencies, citizens' initiatives, and environmental organizations over the construction of a High Voltage Power Station (KYT) for demands of the 2004 Olympic Games, as presented in media reports and movement literature over a period of one year. Having in mind recent criticisms targeting the lack of empirical evidence in Ulrich Beck's risk theorization, this exploration is of distinct importance. Secondly it takes into account that both the defensive character of societal action and mistrust to expert authorities have been confirmed as prevalent characteristics of both the Greek and the general risk social context. The paper attempts to re-evaluate and/or complement existing perspectives of societal activism in general and environmental mobilizations in particular within the confines of the Greek social context. As a tentative conclusion, it is suggested that the risk perspective offers a novel prism for the examination of societal activism without confining it to the characteristics of individual national contexts.

Keywords : mega-events, ‘deep'/'light' green, new social movements, environmental mobilizations, civil society

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The Fox-Hunting Debate in the United Kingdom: A Puritan Legacy?

By Italo Pardo and Giuliana Prato

This article is based on extended fieldwork carried out in the United Kingdom and particularly in Kent between 1997 and 2001. The discussion addresses key social and cultural issues highlighted by the contemporary British debate on hunting with hounds and their political, legislative and economic significance. As social anthropologists with a research interest, and subsequent participation, in hunting with hounds in Britain and elsewhere in Europe , we find this debate fascinating. It must be understood in the context of the Judeo-Christian ethic and its influence on Western views of nature and on the relationship between humankind and the natural environment. Western attitudes toward hunting belong to a historically identifiable process; from the mediaeval view of nature as an object of romantic conquest — hence, hunting as a ‘noble sport,' a special rite of passage into manhood — to the 17 th century Puritanical condemnation of hunting as morally and socially debasing, to the 19 th century Evangelical concern for animal rights.

Keywords: hunting policy, Judeo-Christian ethics, fox-hunting in the UK

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The Geography of Despair: Environmental Racism and the Making of South Pheonix, Arizona, USA

By Bob Bolin, Sara Grineski, and Timothy Collins

This paper discusses the historical geographical construction of a contaminated community in the heart of one of the largest and fastest growing Sunbelt cities in the US . Our focus is on how racial categories and attendant social relations were constructed by Whites, in late 19 th and early 20 th century Phoenix, Arizona, to produce a stigmatized zone of racial exclusion and economic marginality in South Phoenix, a district adjacent to the central city. We consider how representations of race were historically deployed to segregate people of color, both residentially and economically in the early city. By the 1920s race and place were discursively and materially woven together in a mutually reinforcing process of social stigmatization and environmental degradation in South Phoenix . This process constructed a durable zone of mixed minority residential and industrial land uses that survives into the present day. ‘Sunbelt apartheid' has worked to segregate undesirable land uses and minorities from ‘Anglo' Phoenix . Class and racial privilege has been built in a wide range of planning and investment decisions that continue to shape the human ecology of the city today.

Keywords: environmental justice, environmental racism, historical geographic development, Phoenix, Arizona

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Fire and Society: A Comparative Analysis of Wildfire in Greece and the United States

By Martha Henderson, Kostas Kalabokidis, Emmanuel Marmaras, Pavlos Konstantinidis, and Manussos Marangudakis

This paper compares Greek and American social experience of wildfire management. Regional comparison of the two countries' experience with wildfire reveals a common thread of experience and management regimes. Efforts to control the risk of fire damage over time have created an equal level of crisis and management tools. A comparison of environmental histories, wildland events, and management goals indicate that the two countries, while seemingly un-comparable, have much in common. Both countries share similar forest ecosystems within Mediterranean climate zones and at specific mountain elevations. An analysis of preferences and methods of selective ecosystem management and risk management at the national and local level overcomes the differences of absolute geography to create an equal area of investigation between the two countries. These commonalities are linked to social patterns, cultural beliefs, diffusion of science and forestry methods, and changes in political administration. National policies to prevent wildland fire, processes of environmental history, modes of public administration and risk management, and ecosystem management goals are compared. The global loss of traditional fire practices and the increasing efforts to manage fire are establishing new social boundaries of catastrophic wildland fire.

Keywords: human geography, cultural geography, environmental history

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Economy, Demographic Changes and Morphological Transformation of the Agri-Cultural Landscape of Lesvos, Greece

By Thanasis Kizos and Maria Koulouri

The cultural landscape is a concept that best depicts society and economic changes in an area. Cultural landscapes include more than just morphological characteristics of an area and act as symbolic tanks. The study of the cultural landscape and its transformations in morphological, economic, ecological and symbolic terms can thus provide a comprehensive picture of the social, ecological and productive changes in an area. Such a study can be used for understanding the major driving forces behind the dynamics of the changes and investigate future trends. In this paper the study of the changes of the landscape of Lesvos, a Greek island, is attempted on two levels: an economic level, which refers to land use changes linked to demographic changes and the transformations in landscape characteristics and images that these changes bring; and an ecological level that refers to the ecological consequences of the changes. The time span refers to the 18 th to 20 th centuries when major changes (local, regional and global) took place. Data come from a variety of published and unpublished local sources. Results indicate that economic and political changes brought forward major demographic changes and transformed the landscape significantly, particularly affecting ‘traditional' elements in a typical Mediterranean development.

Keywords: agricultural landscape, economic and social changes, Lesvos

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