中国环境史的兴起和学术渊源问题

关于中国环境史的兴起和学术渊源,中国学者已进行了比较系统的分析和总结,并形成了两类典型的叙述.在此基础上,值得进一步考虑的一个重要问题是,如何看待国外环境史的引入以及此前中国学界许多领域所涉及的相关研究对于当前中国环境史学科建构的意义.如果说,国外环境史成果为我们展示了构建环境史学科框架的蓝图,那么,中国学者的相关研究则为我们提供了建设中国环境史学科的基石和砖瓦.迄今,中国环境史学科大厦尚处于设计之中,其建设必将是一项巨大、艰辛的工程.     

灾疫伦理学：一种生态文明的话语方法

灾疫伦理学作为一门新型的综合性应用型人文科学,以生态理性哲学为指导,拷问频频爆发的当代灾疫之难的历史性生存之因,引导当代人类从伦理学角度入手检讨自我,重建生境,重续人与自然宇宙、生命世界的亲缘性存在关系,恢复日常生活的安全感、稳定性和生存的家园归宿感。灾疫伦理学的最高使命,就是为当代人类开创生态文明构架起一座全新的实践理性桥梁。这座桥梁即是负载灾疫伦理认知体系、观念体系、价值体系和方法体系的生态理性实践话语体系,它以＂灾疫伦理＂为基本范畴,以＂生境重建＂、＂生态利益＂、＂生态安全＂为核心概念,以灾疫防治宏观伦理方案设计和微观伦理方案实施为两维指向。     

修养:中国哲学的道路

修养历来被哲学所忽视,以修养为特征的中国哲学作为哲学的资质也一直受到怀疑.但是,只要我们承认哲学与人的生存状态相关,哲学有不同的形态,就能发现,修养在中国传统哲学中,不仅仅具有伦理倾向,而且与人的认识和实践活动紧密相连,与人的全面发展密切相关.修养不仅是中国哲学的道路,而且是具有"哲学"根本意义的人的活动,这种哲学为新时期哲学的发展和哲学观念的更新提供了可资借鉴的途径.     

简论中国古代的环境伦理思想

中国古代环境伦理思想的哲学基础是天人统一观 ,尊重生命 ,兼爱万物是这一伦理思想的主题。寡欲节用是中国古代珍惜自然资源的传统美德。中国古代就已形成了渗透环境伦理意识的政法理念。不同于西方传统伦理学所奉行的人类中心主义 ,中国先哲主张保持人和自然关系的和谐统一。作为珍贵的文化遗产 ,中国古代环境伦理思想是保证和维护中华民族几千年生存繁衍和中华文明绵延不断的重要因素之一 ,它对现代环境伦理学的发展也具有重大的理论借鉴价值。在当前现代化建设中 ,有分析地借鉴我国古代的环境伦理思想 ,对创建适合我国国情的环境伦理学 ,解决社会可持续发展问题是极有意义的     

Working-class ecology and union politics: a conceptual topology

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that Environmental Labour Studies may benefit from incorporating the perspective of environmental justice. We offer a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where working-class communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of activism that link labour and environmental struggles around the primacy of reproduction. The paper’s theoretical section draws on a social ethnography of working-class ecology in the case of Taranto, a mono-industrial town in southern Italy, which is experiencing a severe environmental and public-health crisis. We show how environmental justice activism since the early 2000s has allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the local economy. We conclude by offering a conceptual topology of working-class ecology, which situates different labour organizations (confederal, social/community, and rank-and-file unions) according to their positioning in respect to environmental justice.     

Minimal Risk in Pediatric Research: A Philosophical Review and Reconsideration

Despite more than thirty years of debate, disagreement persists among research ethicists about the most appropriate way to interpret the U.S. regulations on pediatric research, specifically the categories of “minimal risk” and a “minor increase over minimal risk.” Focusing primarily on the definition of “minimal risk,” we argue in this article that the continued debate about the pediatric risk categories is at least partly because their conceptual status is seldom considered directly. Once this is done, it becomes clear that the most popular strategy for interpreting “minimal risk”—defining it as a specific set of risks—is indefensible and, from a pragmatic perspective, unlikely to resolve disagreement. Primarily this is because judgments about minimal risk are both normative and heavily intuitive in nature and thus cannot easily be captured by reductions to a given set of risks. We suggest instead that a more defensible approach to evaluating risk should incorporate room for reflection and deliberation. This dispositional, deliberative framework can nonetheless accommodate a number of intellectual resources for reducing reliance on sheer intuition and improving the quality of risk evaluations.     

Navigating Ethical Challenges in Social Media: Social Work Student and Practitioner Perspectives

ABSTRACT

The portable, accessible nature of technology affords social workers opportunities to venture outside traditional service contexts by engaging in the virtual realm. This qualitative article uses two small-scale exploratory case studies to investigate the concept of ethical challenges in online peer networking and blogging by a social work student and social work practitioner. The article seeks to address the opportunities for and complexities of navigating technology and social media, while also emphasising the need for social workers to acquire a range of skills and competencies, and use well-established frameworks to engage in ethical online practice.     

Sustainable supply chain management and the transition towards a circular economy: Evidence and some applications

In the last decades, green and sustainable supply chain management practices have been developed, trying to integrate environmental concerns into organisations by reducing unintended negative consequences on the environment of production and consumption processes. In parallel to this, the circular economy discourse has been propagated in the industrial ecology literature and practice. Circular economy pushes the frontiers of environmental sustainability by emphasising the idea of transforming products in such a way that there are workable relationships between ecological systems and economic growth. Therefore, circular economy is not just concerned with the reduction of the use of the environment as a sink for residuals but rather with the creation of self-sustaining production systems in which materials are used over and over again.Through two case studies from different process industries (chemical and food), this paper compares the performances of traditional and circular production systems across a range of indicators. Direct, indirect and total lifecycle emissions, waste recovered, virgin resources use, as well as carbon maps (which provide a holistic visibility of the entire supply chain) are presented. The paper asserts that an integration of circular economy principles within sustainable supply chain management can provide clear advantages from an environmental point view. Emerging supply chain management challenges and market dynamics are also highlighted and discussed.     

Process evaluation of an environmental walking and healthy eating pilot in small rural worksites

Small Steps are Easier Together (SS) was a pilot environmental intervention in small rural worksites in Upstate New York in collaboration with Extension educators. Worksite leaders teamed with co-workers to select and implement environmental changes to increase walking steps over individual baseline and to choose healthy eating options over 10 weeks. Participants were 226 primarily white, women employees in 5 sites. A mixed methods process evaluation, conducted to identify determinants of intervention effectiveness and to explain differences in outcomes across worksites, included surveys, self-reports of walking and eating, interviews, focus groups, and an intervention log. The evaluation assessed reach, characteristics of recruited participants, dose delivered, dose received, and context and compared sites on walking and eating outcomes. Emergent elements of participant-reported dose received included: active leadership, visible environmental changes, critical mass of participants, public display of accomplishments, accountability to co-workers, and group decision making. Participants at sites with high reach and dose were significantly more likely than sites with low reach and dose to achieve intervention goals. Although this small pilot needs replication, these findings describe how these evaluation methods can be applied and analyzed in an environmental intervention and provide information on trends in the data.     

Farmers,trust, and the market solution to water pollution: The role of social embeddedness in water quality trading

Water quality trading (WQT) is a market arrangement in which a point-source water polluter pays farmers to implement conservation practices and claims the resulting benefits as credits toward meeting a pollution permit. Success rates of WQT programs nationwide are highly variable. Most of the literature on WQT is from an economic perspective emphasizing property rights, transaction costs, and the role of the price signal, but this institutional approach cannot fully account for the differential success rates between and within WQT programs. In this paper I turn to the role of social embeddedness and trust in helping explain these variable outcomes. Using interview data from all WQT programs nationwide I demonstrate that differential success rates between, and particularly within programs is largely determined by the presence or absence of a trusted local intermediary with relationships to the farming community. Trust helps WQT programs succeed because it makes information more credible to farmers, makes outreach to farmers more efficient, and buffers the risk that farmers may perceive in participating in the trading scheme.