Shifting partisan public opinion towards Community Choice Aggregation through outreach and awareness.

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) is a rapidly expanding electricity supply model in the United States. By enabling local governments to obtain electricity for their residents, CCAs have the potential to increase the use of renewable energy while lowering costs. Recent studies have focused on how CCAs will impact renewable energy markets, since at least five more states are currently considering CCA-enabling legislation.

Corridors of Clarity: Four Principles to Overcome Uncertainty Paralysis in the Anthropocene.

Global environmental change challenges humanity because of its broad scale, long-lasting, and potentially irreversible consequences. Key to an effective response is to use an appropriate scientific lens to peer through the mist of uncertainty that threatens timely and appropriate decisions surrounding these complex issues. Identifying such corridors of clarity could help understanding critical phenomena or causal pathways sufficiently well to justify taking policy action.

Through a glass darkly: patients of the Illinois State Hospital for the Insane at Jacksonville, USA (1854-80).

The State Hospital for the Insane at Jacksonville, Morgan County, Illinois, was the first public hospital of its kind to be established in the state and among the earliest to be built on the 'Kirkbride Plan'. It opened for patients in 1851. We describe the background to the establishment of the hospital and, so far as is possible from publicly available sources, its catchment area, the nature of the patients held there up to 1880, its mechanisms of discharge, and supposed causes of death.

Moving beyond panaceas in fisheries governance.

In fisheries management-as in environmental governance more generally-regulatory arrangements that are thought to be helpful in some contexts frequently become panaceas or, in other words, simple formulaic policy prescriptions believed to solve a given problem in a wide range of contexts, regardless of their actual consequences. When this happens, management is likely to fail, and negative side effects are common. We focus on the case of individual transferable quotas to explore the panacea mindset, a set of factors that promote the spread and persistence of panaceas.

Small-scale forestry and carbon offset markets: An empirical study of Vermont Current Use forest landowner willingness to accept carbon credit programs.

This study investigates the preferences of small forest landowners regarding forest carbon credit programs while documenting characteristics of potentially successful frameworks. We designed hypothetical carbon credit programs with aggregated carbon offset projects and requirements of existing voluntary and compliance protocols in mind. We administered a mail survey to 992 forest landowners in Vermont's Current Use Program utilizing best-worst choice, a novel preference elicitation technique, to elicit their preferences about these programs.

Integration of ecological-biological thresholds in conservation decision making.

In the Anthropocene, coupled human and natural systems dominate and only a few natural systems remain relatively unaffected by human influence. On the one hand, conservation criteria based on areas of minimal human impact are not relevant to much of the biosphere. On the other hand, conservation criteria based on economic factors are problematic with respect to their ability to arrive at operational indicators of well-being that can be applied in practice over multiple generations.

Trade-offs between three forest ecosystem services across the state of New Hampshire, USA: timber, carbon, and albedo.

Forests are more frequently being managed to store and sequester carbon for the purposes of climate change mitigation. Generally, this practice involves long-term conservation of intact mature forests and/or reductions in the frequency and intensity of timber harvests. However, incorporating the influence of forest surface albedo often suggests that long rotation lengths may not always be optimal in mitigating climate change in forests characterized by frequent snowfall.

Incorporating carbon storage into the optimal management of forest insect pests: a case study of the southern pine beetle (Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmerman) in the New Jersey Pinelands.

Forest insect pest disturbance is increasing in certain areas of North America as many insect species, such as the southern pine beetle, expand their range due to a warming climate. Because insect pests are beginning to occupy forests that are managed for multiple uses and have not been managed for pests before, it is becoming increasingly important to determine how forests should be managed for pests when non-timber ecosystem services are considered in addition to traditional costs and revenues. One example of a service that is increasingly considered in forest management and that may affect forest pest management is carbon sequestration.

Pro-environmental behavior: rational choice meets moral motivation.

The determinants of individual behaviors that provide shared environmental benefits are a longstanding theme in social science research. Alternative behavioral models yield markedly different predictions and policy recommendations. This paper reviews and compares the literatures from two disciplines that appear to be moving toward a degree of convergence.

Sources and timing of anthropogenic pollution in the Ensenada de San Simon (inner Ria de Vigo), Galicia, NW Spain: an application of mixture-modelling and nonlinear optimization to recent sedimentation.

The Ensenada de San Simon is the inner part of the Ria de Vigo, one of the major mesotidal rias of the Galician coast, NW Spain. The geochemistry of its bottom sediments can be accounted for in terms of both natural and anthropogenic sources. Mixture-modelling enables much of the Cr, Ni, V, Cu, Pb and Zn concentrations of the bottom and subaqueous sediments to be explained by sediment input from the river systems and faecal matter from manmade mussel rafts.