University-Community Collaboration for Climate Justice Education and Organizing: Partnerships in Canada, Brazil, and Africa

In the coming decades, countries around the world will face increasingly severe challenges related to global climate change. While the details vary from country to country, the impacts will be especially grave for marginalized people, whose access to food, potable water, and safe shelter may be threatened due to fluctuations in rainfall and temperature and to disasters related to extreme weather events. International strategies for addressing climate change are in disarray. The complicated financial and carbon-trading mechanisms promoted by the United Nations and other global institutions are far too bureaucratic, weak, internally inconsistent, and scattered to represent meaningful solutions to climate change. Already the housing, health, and livelihoods of marginalized people worldwide are being threatened by the ramifications of climate change. This means that the marginalized in every community, by definition, have expertise in how priorities should be set to address climate change. Their experiences, knowledge, and views must be part of local, regional, national, and international governance—including urban planning and housing, water management, agriculture, health, and finance policies.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Extinction for two parabolic stochastic PDE's on the lattice

It is well known that, starting with finite mass, the super-Brownian motion dies out in finite time. The goal of this article is to show that with some additional work, one can prove finite time die-out for two types of systems of stochastic differential equations on the lattice Z^d. Our first system involves the heat equation on the lattice Z^d, with a nonlinear noise term u(t,x)^gamma dB_x(t), with 1/2 <= gamma < 1. The B_x are independent Brownian motions. When gamma = 1/2, the measure which puts mass u(t,x) at x is a super-random walk and it is well-known that the process becomes extinct in finite time a.s. Finite-time extinction is known to be a.s. false if gamma = 1. For 1/2 < gamma < 1, we show finite-time die-out by breaking up the solution into pieces, and showing that each piece dies in finite time. Our second example involves the mutually catalytic branching system of stochastic differential equations on Z^d, which was first studied by Dawson and Perkins. Roughly speaking, this process consists of 2 superprocesses with the continuous time simple random walk as the underlying spatial motion. Furthermore, each process stimulates branching and dying in the other process. By using a somewhat different argument, we show that, depending on the initial conditions, finite time extinction of one type may occur with probability 0, or with probability arbitrarily close to 1

Equitable, Ecological Degrowth: Feminist Contributions

This paper uses feminist ecological economics and ecofeminist methodologies and theory to contribute to Degrowth in theory and practice. These feminist contributions involve highlighting unpaid work and ecological services, redistribution, and participatory processes as crucially important in developing the new paradigm and movement for equitable material Degrowth.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Local Economies, Trade, and Global Sustainability

Bioregional and "ecological economics" theory describes the growth of local economic linkages as vital to move post-industrial economies in the direction of sustainability. This involves expanding local stewardship over environmental and economic resources, so that progressively more production for local needs can be done within the community. Far from existing solely in the realm of theory, this is a pattern which is becoming more and more familiar in many parts of North America and Europe. The blossoming initiatives to create local, community-centred economies can be understood in light of the long history of environmental challenges faced by people living in the industrialized North, and the double economic blows of recession and trade liberalization/globalization exemplified by the passage of GATT and NAFTA and the development of the EC in the 1990s.This paper discusses the dynamic relationship between globalization and local economic development in the North from both theoretical and practical viewpoints. It provides examples from Toronto, Canada of the synergy among environmental awareness, community organizing and "alternative" employment creation (e.g. in environmental remediation and energy conservation activities) which can accompany recession or trade-induced worker layoffs. The resulting local economic patterns tend to be "greener" and more socially sustainable than the globally-tied economic linkages they replace.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Building Commons Governance for a Greener Economy

Much recent work in ecological economics and political ecology, including calls for “de-growth” in the transition towards more sustainable economies, focuses on commons as a promising paradigm for sustainable governance institutions.  The vision involves people who depend on or have an interest in a resource or asset, working together co-operatively to use that asset for production, service provision, and exchange which creates value and well-being while integrating ecological care, justice, and long-term planning to the best of diverse communities’ abilities. This includes institutions such as co-ops, land trusts, and non-market or beyond-market collective ways of organizing production, distribution, consumption, and waste or materials management.Developing such collective institutions requires nurturing the skills and abilities needed to create and maintain them: empathy, communication and listening skills, a sense of shared purpose, creativity, dispute resolution across differences, long-term vision, environmental awareness and stewardship, among others. Transformative education praxis and transdisciplinarity facilitate the growth of these skills and abilities in children and adults, as Paulo Freire and other transformative learning practitioners have shown (Gadotti 2009; O’Sullivan 1999;Gutierrez &amp; Prado 1998). Transformative pedagogy, including both eco-pedagogy and transdisciplinarity, is foundational as human society evolves institutions for sustainability such as commons.This research was supported by the International Development Research Centre, grant number IDRC GRANT NO. 106002-00

Feminist Ecological Economics

This article provides an overview of feminist ecological economics, with special attention to three particular aspects: its theoretical foundations and relation to other schools of thought, its implications for activism and public policy, and directions for future research work.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

Trade, transition paths, and sustainable economies

The main criticisms of trade from a sustainability viewpoint are that it accelerates resource depletion and pollution, harms income distribution both locally and internationally, and undermines democratic institutions. After considering the relationship between trade and "sustainability," this paper discusses a number of feedback mechanisms which promote the kind of trade that is more sustainable - for the South as well as the North. The role of technological change, a model of the relationship between production and "sustaining services," data needs and research priorities are also discussed

Feminist Ecological Economics and Sustainability

New developments in feminist ecological economics and ecofeminist economics are contributing to the search for theories and policy approaches to move economies toward sustainability. This paper summa- rizes work by ecofeminists and feminist ecological economists which is relevant to the sustainability challenge and its implications for the discipline of economics. Both democracy and lower material throughputs are generally seen as basic principles of economic sustainability. Feminist theorists and feminist ecological econ- omists offer many important insights into the conundrum of how to make a democratic and equity-enhancing transition to an economy based on less material throughput. These flow from feminist research on unpaid work and caring labor, provisioning, development, valuation, social reproduction, non-monetized exchange relationships, local economies, redistribution, citizenship, equity-enhancing political institutions, and labor time, as well as creative modeling approaches and activism-based theorizing.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad

An overview of international institutional mechanisms for environmental management with reference to Arctic pollution

Evidence is mounting of the environmental impact in the Far North of economic and industrial activity elsewhere in the world. While the sources of pollutants found in the Arctic are many and widespread, it is up to just a few countries - notably Canada,t he former Soviet Union, Finland, Norway and Greenland - to assestsh e damagea nd deal with the impacts.T his paper discussetsh e issueo f Arctic pollution in the context of trends in world economic growth, globalization of economic activity, international trade and related institutional arrangements (such as trade and environmental agreements)T. he importance of tracing the sourceso f particular contaminantsi s stressedt;h is is a first step towards internalization of environmental costs of production, and is also politically a key in efforts to control emissionsT. rade and investmenta greementsc ommonlyd iscussru les for cross-borderf lowso f goods,s services, personnel and investment capital, as well as matters specific to particular economic sectors. Cross-border flows of pollutants and other ‘bads’ also merit detailed sectoral attention. This linkage would make explicit the connections between production and pollution (making possible the ‘polluter pays’ approach), and also widen the scope for redistribution of economicr esourcest o equilibrate the situation (via trade and investmentm easuresa, mongo others) if flows of goods are related directly to flows of ‘bads’. The paper examinest he outlook for addressing Arctic pollution via international environmental agreements (along the lines of the Base1 Convention, the Montreal Protocol, CITES, etc.), existing and future trade agreements( such as GATT), or new institutional approaches

Social diversity and the sustainability of community economies

Economic restructuring related to globalization is producing a bifurcation in economic activity throughout the OECD countries: a split between those workers/industries/areas which are competitive in the global market, and those which are being phased out. Partly in response, community economies -- which use local resources and labour to produce locally-needed goods and services -- are growing rapidly in some parts of North America and Europe. This paper discusses the relationship between these two macro trends, describing some typical institutions and characteristics of community economies and the requisites for their sustainability. The implications of this development in terms of the environmental impacts of economic change, meaning and value of social diversity, gender issues and educational needs, receive particular focus.This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canad