ecolog Articles
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Options for Reclamation of Mine Tailings in West Africa
Revegetation of tailings in West Africa presents two major problems when using established methodologies, in that soils have the potential to be highly alkaline, rather than acidic, plus the majority of recommended plant species are non-native to the area. Alteration of cap engineering however can modify hydrology, pH and morphology, allowing for a variety of habitats. Cover crops are often ...
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Ecological Risk Assessment
In recent years, ecological risk assessment (ERA) has emerged as an important part of environmental protection programs. The following discussion provides a brief overview of ERA issues. What is ecological risk assessment? Ecological risk assessment is the practice of determining the nature and likelihood of effects of our actions on animals, plants, and the environment. Ecological risk ...
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The social dimension of industrial ecology: on the implications of the inherent nature of social phenomena
A substantial body of scientific literature has grown on the necessity, opportunities and attractiveness of industrial ecology strategies. In many cases, proponents claim combined ecological and economic gains. Yet, mainstreaming of industrial ecology practices shows slow progress. Theorists often use a simplified model of an actor's behaviour in society, stressing a 'single actor rational ...
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Developing predictive systems models to address complexity and relevance for ecological risk assessment
Ecological risk assessments (ERAs) are not used as well as they could be in risk management. Part of the problem is that they often lack ecological relevance; that is, they fail to grasp necessary ecological complexities. Adding realism and complexity can be difficult and costly. We argue that predictive systems models (PSMs) can provide a way of capturing complexity and ecological relevance ...
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Post–normal science and ecological economics: strategies for precautionary approaches and sustainable development
Ecological economics provides a research field for critical reflection on relationships between the economy and the life–sustaining ecosystems. With focus on strong uncertainty, irreversibility, strong sustainability, precautionary approaches and ethical complexity, ecological economics differs from the approach of environmental economics and shares several of the characteristics of ...
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Ecologists pay disproportionately little attention to synthetic chemicals, study finds
Manmade chemicals may alter ecological processes, yet few scientists are studying the role of these chemicals in global environmental change, say a group of researchers from the U.S. and Germany in a scientific paper published today in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. In recent decades, humans have increased production of chemicals faster than we’ve made other changes ...
By Ensia
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Modelling undesirable outputs in eco-efficiency evaluation to paper mills along the Huai River based on Shannon DEA
Abstract: There are a great number of DEA models proposed to deal with ecological efficiency problems with undesirable outputs. However, which model should be used in a specific scenario or how about the discriminability of a given DEA model is hard to decide in practice. This paper uses the ecological Shannon DEA procedure based upon the existing study to obtain an ecological comprehensive ...
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Understanding the connections between double bind thinking and the ecological crises: implications for educational reform
This paper examines several reasons most professors of education are unable to recognise that the ecological crises require more than technologies that have a smaller ecological footprint. First, there is an explanation of double bind thinking where the thought patterns of the distant past are carried forward in the metaphorical language relied upon by most educators. Second, the importance of ...
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Ecological checkout: a sustainable initiative in Curitiba, Parana, Brazil
Aiming to reduce environmental impacts caused by the inadequate disposal of packing residues, the 'Ecological check-out' was created in a supermarket in Curitiba, Brazil. Consumers were encouraged to: voluntarily discard plastic and/or paper involucres immediately after their purchases anticipating the packing disposal; bring their own bags, looking for the minimisation of plastic bags' use. A ...
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Ecosystem services as assessment endpoints for ecological risk assessment
Ecosystem services are defined as the outputs of ecological processes that contribute to human welfare or have the potential to do so in the future. Those outputs include food and drinking water, clean air and water, and pollinated crops. The need to protect the services provided by natural systems has been recognized previously, but ecosystem services have not been formally incorporated into ...
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Methodology for conducting screening-level ecological risk assessments for hazardous waste sites. Part I: overview
The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) is a Department of Energy (DOE) facility. To assess the impact of the site activities and releases on ecological receptors, the INEEL implemented a phased approach for conducting ecological risk assessments (ERAS). This approach applies an iterative, 'tiered' process, in which conservative preliminary assessments support ...
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A comment on the independence of allocation, distribution and scale
There has been considerable debate about the independence of the three policy goals of allocative efficiency, distributional equity, and ecological sustainability since Daly's (1992) paper on the subject (Prakash and Gupta, 1994; Daly, 1994; Stewen, 1998; Daly, 1999; Stewen, 1999). I would like to weigh in here, if I may, because I think it is a key policy issue requiring further discussion. ...
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The British state and the environment: New Labour's ecological modernisation strategy
The environment and the pursuit of sustainable development were held as central aspects of New Labour's "joined up" approach to public policy. The way in which environmental concerns have been included within the overarching New Labour "project" has been by adopting an ecological modernisation approach to environmental policy, a central aspect of which is that the pursuit of ...
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Methodology for conducting screening-level ecological risk assessments for hazardous waste sites. Part III: exposure and effects assessment
The Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) has implemented a phased approach to ecological risk assessment (ERA). The first step in this process is a screening-level ERA at each facility. Basic to this approach was the development of ecologically based screening levels (EBSLs), defined as concentrations of chemicals in soil (or other media) that are not expected to ...
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Methodology for conducting screening-level ecological risk assessments for hazardous waste sites. Part II: grouping ecological components
Screening-level ecological risk assessments are commonly conducted to identify those contaminants and receptors on which to focus future phases or tiers of the ecological risk assessment process. Most screening assessments are performed using a suite of individual species subjected to intensive evaluation of exposure (endpoint species) and selected for their appropriateness for serving as ...
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Semi–arid watershed management: the experimental farm and representative catchment of the High Mountains of Sinai Peninsula
The need for watershed management models in the Arab Republic of Egypt - particularly in the remote arid and semi–arid desert and mountain regions - surfaced once again as one of the very demanding instruments for socio–economic and socio–ecological sustainable development. Highland watershed management and mountainous agriculture are highly impacted under the aspects of climate change, reflected ...
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An analysis of the relationship between sustainable development and the anthroposystem concept
In the 1980s, the concept of sustainable economic development emerged to try to deal with the complex and pervasive aspects of the environmental problem. However, an ecological perspective of sustainability requires taking a holistic approach that uses the ecosphere as a frame of reference. This paper describes the anthroposystem model that philosophically views the notion of sustainability in ...
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Re-writing the ecological metaphor, Part 2: the example of diversity
As the discipline has expanded, so questions have been asked of the limits to the industrial ecology metaphor and its status, by some of the practitioners, as an objective science. Moreover, the emergence of industrial ecology into the policy arena has inevitably presaged normative considerations over the integration of social, political, organisational and cultural factors for the discipline. ...
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Driving environmental innovation with corporate storytelling: is radical innovation possible without incoherence?
Concepts that until recently have been antagonistic to common business language, such as industrial ecology, are now being used in the stories that companies use to express their identity. In this article the relationship between the new, bold business language and environmental innovation is discussed. The analysis is based on a longitudinal case study of HAG – Norway and Scandinavia's leading ...
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Aquifers and hyporheic zones: Towards an ecological understanding of groundwater
Ecological constraints in subsurface environments relate directly to groundwater flow, hydraulic conductivity, interstitial biogeochemistry, pore size, and hydrological linkages to adjacent aquifers and surface ecosystems. Groundwater ecology has evolved from a science describing the unique subterranean biota to its current form emphasising multidisciplinary studies that integrate hydrogeology ...
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