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Ecoworship and Federal Environmental Law
Get PDFAs the growing land stewardship movement has joined with rising evangelical environmentalism, religious worship has intersected with ecological protection to spark the rise of a new variety of ecoworship. Given the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent willingness to expand constitu- tional protections for religious exercise and trim bulwarks against Establishment Clause challenges, religious claimants now have bolstered powers to assert exemptions from governmental mandates based on their free exercise of faith. The growing role of faith-based environmentalism and institutional religions in private environmental protection will likely lead to similar claims for religious exemptions for pro-environmental activism based on faith. Most legal scholarship so far has squarely focused on the general foundational question of how federal and state constitutional laws apply to protect religiously motivated actions both within and outside environmental law.
This Article takes a different tack. Federal environmental law is over- whelmingly statutory, and state environmental laws rely on a similar base. It is time to re-read these statutes through the newly expanded constitutional lens. This path yields two notable results. First, the increased accommodation for Free Exercise claims and revamped Establishment Clause parameters will inevitably shape the way that courts will interpret environmental statutes that impinge on religious activities. This interpretive tendency has a deep historical provenance in federal and state courts, although it is difficult to extract from the outsized historical shadow of Holy Trinity Church v. United States. Second, an altered interpretation of federal statutory terms through the new religious exercise lens could grant special status to proactive environmental initiatives impelled by religious beliefs, as essentially protected environmental worship. This reinterpreted statutory language could expand standing for certain claimants raising federal statutory claims, force the federal government to reassess the way it selects clean-up remedies or environmental permit limits in certain contexts, redefine the scope of environmental justice policies, and alter the degree of regulatory limitations on environmentally protective uses of land by religious actors
Wood Pellet Production in the U.S. South and Exportation for ‘Renewable’ Energy in Europe: The New Green Sacrifice Zone
Get PDFIn recent years, European demand for wood pellets has surged due to a misconception of carbon neutrality. The current legal frameworks posit that simply replacing a harvested tree renders the burning of wood pellets for energy use renewable energy. This oversimplification does not consider a number of factors, including the difference in carbon sequestration capabilities between original, natural forests and replacement monoculture plantations, the cumulative impact of CO2 emissions in the atmosphere, and the years required for a replacement tree to sequester as much carbon as the harvested tree. The EU and U.K. can currently utilize emissions “reductions” due to burning wood pellets to reach domestic renewable energy goals along with commitments under the Paris Agreement. The corresponding increase in demand for wood pellets in Europe has resulted in a hotspot of wood pellet production in the U.S. South with several significant consequences. This Note presents the environmental justice and climate change impacts of the growing wood pellet industry in historically marginalized communities in the U.S. South, with a close look at the Enviva wood pellet plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. It provides an overview of the inadequacies of U.S., EU, U.K., and international environmental law in protecting both the global climate and local communities from the impacts of wood pellet production and combustion. This Note then builds on calls to change IPCC and EU carbon accounting rules for wood harvested for energy use to propose a solution to the environmental justice side of the wood pellet dilemma in international environmental law: namely, adding environmental justice safeguards to the UNFCCC Paris Agreement
Novel Community Participatory Approach to Violence Intervention Program for Latino Youth
No full textFirearm violence is heavily prominent in large urban cities. Upon closer inspection, a pattern becomes evident whereby violence clusters in marginalized minority populations. In fact, gun violence is the leading cause of death of Hispanic youth aged 15 to 29 in the United States[6]. Unfortunately, many current, existing intervention programs lack the cultural competencies needed to engage directly with impacted communities. This article highlights a novel community participatory collaborative approach for violence intervention. Collaborating with an established program, the VOICE (Violence Outreach Intervention and Community Education) Program, youth from the greater Essex County area participated in gun violence awareness sessions. Activities included virtual education workshops, in-person teaching sessions, and local community engagement activities. The program shows how community engagement, meeting students at where they are, could help us create awareness in how to de-escalate violence. This participatory approach could be an innovative way to break the cycle of violence of our youth, especially Latinos
Causes, effects & mitigation of brain drain in Sub-Saharan Africa: An annotated bibliography
Get PDFBrain drain occurs when skilled labor from developing countries (LDCs) migrate to developed countries (DCs) in search of better living standards, professional growth, political stability and security, etc. This annotated bibliography aims to explore the causes of the brain drain, its effects on sending countries and mitigation that has been taken by stakeholders to slow it down and help LDCs achieve socio-economic and development growth. Publications cited are in the English language and were published between 2001 and 2022. The scope of this article is Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a region and includes country-specific highlights from SSA countries like Angola, Botswana, Burundi, Cape Verde, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somali, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe; as well as regional blocks, such as the Southern African Development Community (SADC); East, Central and Southern Africa. Country-specific highlights are included because the brain drain was felt and handled differently within these countries and regions that this literature discusses. Peer reviewed journals, working papers and government sources are also discussed
Echoic Re-Presencing: Towards a Feminist Media-Archaeological Listening
Get PDFThis paper considers listening as a method in media archaeology—a cluster of technology-oriented approaches to the past that attend to “dead end” inventions outside teleological narratives of progress. In particular, Wolfgang Ernst’s media-archaeological ear advances a materialist approach which favors listening to “the technical signifier rather than […] the acoustic or musical signified.” However, this perspective is subject to recurrent critiques from feminist scholars who highlight the lack of regard for the asymmetrical power structures that undergird technical objects and their exclusion from historical narratives. As a case study, and interrogation of the possibilities for a feminist media archaeology, this paper examines the work of Daphne Oram, a British composer whose contributions to electronic music have been routinely overlooked, and the excavation of her work in Oramics: Atlantis Anew (2011), a film by Aura Satz. The archival vestiges of Oram’s composition technique, in which visual notations on celluloid are sonified by her Oramics Machine, align with, and demand consideration beyond, Ernst’s “ascetic approach to signals.” Through a close reading of Satz’s film, I suggest that her simultaneous attention to the material processes of sound technologies and the erasure of women’s labor posits a necessary extension to this mode of enquiry. Considering recent feminist interventions in media archaeology, as well as critiques in sound studies that drawn on feminist STS to challenge the presumed universality of listening, this paper proposes a framework of media-archaeological listening as echoic re-presencing. Oram’s work, and Satz’s re-prescencing of it, therefore open up possibilities for listening otherwise to the sonic past. 
Borborygmus Auscultation of Stomachless Ecologies
No full textHDGC, or Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer, is a rare form of stomach cancer caused by a mutation of the CDH1 gene. Screening protocols suggest upper endoscopy biopsies every three to six months, however, since HDGC is nearly impossible to detect in early stages, the recommended preventative measure is total gastrectomy (TG) surgery—a complete removal of the stomach. Modified lifestyles for stomachless persons include many changes, but some of the most quotidian aspects surround the novel anatomy of the intestines and their lively gastrointestinal conversations. One patient describes their own intestinal dialogue as “so loud and so rumbly that you could hear it across the room.” Another claims how their “gut has made lots of noise, but these noises [post-surgery] are new, and REALLY loud .” For these patients and others, sound and listening become key characteristics and significant aspects of a stomachless body.
This lyric essay explores how audible bodily expressions can, on the one hand, manifest feelings of uncertainty, fear, self-loathing, and physical alienation; and, on the other hand, serve as forms of empowerment, healing, and physical remediation. Moreover, this piece is a meditation on environmental thinking, and questions the delineations between objects of listening (sonic phenomena as material objects) and listening-subjects. Here, borborygmus auscultation foregrounds the broader ecologies (from microbiomes to conservation field sites) in which listeners are enmeshed. 
Institutional Investors in China: Problems and Prospects
Get PDFInstitutional investors play a crucial role in promoting good corporate governance and the efficient allocation of capital. As such, regulators have urged institutional investors to act as responsible stewards by actively engaging with their investee corporations in order to deliver long-term value to their ultimate beneficiaries and to promote the long-term success of corporations. While there is significant literature on US and UK institutional investors, far less has been written about institutional investors in China.
This paper corrects this deficiency by exploring the critical question of whether, and if so, why, institutional investors in listed corporations in China are generally passive. I distinguish three categories of corporations—state-owned enterprises (SOEs), private-owned enterprises (POEs), and strategic investor enterprises. And I distinguish two main types of investors—state-backed institutional investors (SII) and privately-backed institutional investors (PII).
I make three key arguments. First, in SOEs where the state is the controlling shareholder, minority SIIs and minority PIIs are generally passive. This is because minority SIIs are subject to regulatory requirements, face inadequate incentives, and encounter conflicts of interest. As for minority PIIs, they may be subject to influence or pressure from the state, may face state retaliation for their activism, and may rely on an investor protection agency. Second, in a POE where a private investor is in the majority, while some minority SIIs that are set up to advance the state’s interest are activist in nature, others are passive. Furthermore, most of the domestic minority PIIs are not active. As for the large foreign minority PIIs, there is inconclusive evidence that they improve monitoring and firm performance. Finally, in a strategic investor enterprise where there are majority strategic PIIs, they may face obstacles when pursuing an activist approach. This is because the management of the company may be controlled or influenced by the state, and minority investors can rely on an investor protection agency to challenge or constrain the actions of the majority strategic PII.
To conclude, it suggests three principal mechanisms to increase engagement by minority SIIs, minority PIIs, and the majority strategic PII. The first is to reduce the influence of the state in SOEs. The second is to increase the incentives for the professional managers of passive minority SIIs to engage. Finally, the conflicts of interest surrounding the investor protection agency should be addressed
