Despite the commons being a long-standing site of conflict, the role of social movements in common-pool resource management has been underaddressed. By exploring the role of environmental justice organizing in the San Joaquin Valley during California’s landmark groundwater reform process as a commoning practice, this article seeks to fill this gap and advance our understanding of how collective action can, and is, being leveraged to advance just and sustainable transitions. I argue that through three principal strategies of challenging participation, scope, and authority, the movement has played a formative role in a landscape of intensive enclosure. Applying a commoning lens to the case highlights the important role of not only social movements in commons management but also of commons management as a venue for the rearticulation of regional socionatural relations. Such opportunities are particularly important in underinstitutionalized rural areas where opportunities to renegotiate these relations are often few and far between. Understanding the emergence and growth of commoning communities engaged in such efforts provides several important lessons. Individual commoning strategies can help identifying principal constraints and opportunities to transcend them. To be fully understood, however, they need to be considered collectively as well as in context. In doing so, the critical importance of focusing on the work commons do, rather than produce, becomes apparent. Commoning is both a tool and a goal in itself.

Municipalities are key agents in the transition to sustainability, and yet we have poorly developed theories and practices for how to facilitate the use of climate information by local governments in adapting to climate change. Existing research suggests that climate information is more likely to lead to adaptation actions when it is coproduced by researchers and policy makers because doing so increases the likelihood that the content of information is credible, salient, and legitimate. In this study, we explored how the coproduction process facilitated or hindered use of information from two climate adaptation projects in coastal New Hampshire. Based on 17 interviews and document review, we found that, contrary to expectations, highly engaged coproduction of knowledge may not be necessary due, in part, to preexisting trust among New Hampshire coastal municipalities, technical service providers, and researchers. However, we found in small towns with limited capacity, even the best climate knowledge is unlikely to be used without ongoing context-specific implementation assistance. Our research provides both practical recommendations for those actively advancing climate adaptation, as well as contributions to the undertheorized third phase of transdisciplinary research in which knowledge is translated to action.

Orphaned oil and gas wells are abandoned wells for which the cost of environmental impacts usually falls on governments and the general public. Government agencies responsible for well plugging often face funding shortfalls and many orphaned wells remain unplugged. To address this and support the oil and natural gas industry, federal governments are already spending, or considering spending, billions of dollars to plug orphaned oil and gas wells. Here, we analyze oil and gas data for the United States and Canada and identify policy recommendations that can best address environmental impacts of abandoned and orphaned wells. At least 116,245 wells across 32 states and four Canadian provinces/territories are operated by companies filing for bankruptcy in the first half of 2020, which may be an indication that many wells will be orphaned in the near future. Moreover, there are 4,700,000 historic and active oil and gas wells in the United States and another 790,000 in Canada. Of these, 2,000,000 and 310,000 wells are active in the United States and Canada, respectively. Thus, three of five wells ever drilled in the United States are currently inactive (2,700,000 wells), but only one in three are plugged (1,500,000 wells). Plugging involves isolating zones containing oil, gas, and water and is the main strategy for well abandonment. If the orphaned well stimulus funding comes through, tens of thousands of wells will be plugged within a few years. Well plugging at this scale far exceeds current rates of plugging, and it is important that we work to ensure long-term environmental benefits of well abandonment to water, air, climate, ecosystems, and human health. Minimizing environmental impacts of the millions of abandoned and orphaned wells in the United States, Canada, and abroad will allow for an economically beneficial and environmentally safe transition to a carbon-neutral economy.

There are many examples of nonmonetary awards which can serve as proxies for social recognition of good agricultural stewardship and conservation behavior. However, the degree to which these awards motivate implementation and sustained use of conservation practices (such as cover cropping) has not been adequately examined. In this study, we used a serious game approach to explore the effect of nonmonetary conservation awards on participants’ agricultural management decisions in an online experiment. Our results show that study participants were highly motivated to implement cover crops on a year-by-year basis by the fictional Ecobadge award, particularly when award thresholds were set at low levels. There was no difference between participants with prior agricultural experience and those without. Although participants who were not motivated to seek the Ecobadge achieved higher mean financial returns, they also had a wider variation in their financial performance as a group. Those who attained the Ecobadge were less risk-tolerant than those who did not. Achievement of the Ecobadge decayed over several rounds of game play, except among participants who planted cover crops on a high percentage (≥50%) of their land, suggesting these participants possessed high intrinsic motivation. This exploration suggests that nonmonetary awards have high potential to serve as motivational tools to increase adoption of cover crops and potentially other agricultural conservation practices, likely as part of a suite of motivational strategies. We suggest that organizations reconsider how they issue these awards. Better integration of awards with opportunities for peer-to-peer recognition among farmers is a promising approach to expand implementation of conservation practices.

Sustainability is a common goal and catchphrase used in conjunction with seafood, but the metrics used to determine the level of sustainability are poorly defined. Although the conservation statuses of target or nontarget fish stocks associated with fisheries have been scrutinized, the relative climate impacts of different fisheries are often overlooked. Although an increasing body of research seeks to understand and mitigate the climate forcing associated with different fisheries, little effort has sought to integrate these disparate disciplines to examine the synergies and trade-offs between conservation efforts and efforts to reduce climate impacts. We quantified the climate forcing per unit of fish protein associated with several different U.S. tuna fishing fleets, among the most important capture fisheries by both volume and value. We found that skipjack tuna caught by purse seine, a gear type that is often associated with relatively high bycatch of nontarget species, results in lower climate forcing than all other sources of proteins examined with the exception of plants. Conversely, skipjack tuna caught by trolling, a gear type that is often associated with relatively low bycatch of nontarget species, generates higher climate forcing than most other protein sources with the exception of beef. Because there is a range of selectivity and climate forcing impacts associated with fishing gears, examining the trade-offs associated with bycatch and climate forcing provides an opportunity for broadening the discourse about the sustainability of seafood. A central goal of more sustainable seafood practices is to minimize environmental impacts, thus mitigation efforts—whether they target conservation, habitat preservation, or climate impacts—should consider the unintended consequences on fisheries conservation.

Methane leakage from point sources in the oil and gas industry is a major contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions. The majority of such emissions come from a small fraction of “super-emitting” sources. We evaluate the emission detection and quantification capabilities of Kairos Aerospace’s airplane-based hyperspectral imaging methane emission detection system for methane fluxes of 18–1,025 kg per hour of methane (kgh(CH 4 )). In blinded controlled releases of methane conducted over 4 days in San Joaquin County, CA, Kairos detected 182 of 200 valid nonzero releases, including all 173 over 15 kgh(CH 4 ) per meter per second (mps) of wind and none of the 12 nonzero releases below 8.3 kgh(CH 4 )/mps. Nine of the 26 releases in the partial detection range of 5–15 kgh(CH 4 )/mps were detected. There were no false positives: Kairos did not detect methane during any of the 21 negative controls. Plume quantification accuracy depends on the wind measurement technique, with a parity slope of 1.15 (σ = 0.037, R 2 = 0.84, N = 185) using a cup-based wind meter and 1.45 (σ = 0.059, R 2 = 0.80, N = 157) using an ultrasonic anemometer. Performance is comparable even with only modeled wind data. For emissions above 15 kgh/mps, quantification error scales as roughly 30%–40% of emission size, even when using wind reanalysis data instead of ground-based measurements. This reflects both uncertainty in wind measurements and in Kairos’ estimates. These findings suggest that at 2 mps winds under favorable environmental conditions in the United States, Kairos could detect and quantify over 50% of total emissions by identifying super-emitting sources.

Across Canada and the United States, public universities were founded with a mission to contribute to broad societal well-being. Yet, the capacity of public research institutions to develop and disseminate flexible and accessible tools for resilient agriculture has been challenged in recent decades. The role of universities in advancing extractive, rather than regenerative, economies has been amplified by the privatization of public agricultural research and extension of knowledge to farmers, particularly in plant breeding and plant genetics. In this article, we examine the history of public research for seed systems in North America through a “seed regimes” framework, arguing that a narrow focus on commercialization of public research has exacerbated inequalities inherent in the founding structure of public agricultural research, including the displacement of Indigenous land and seed relations. We then discuss how community organizations are challenging the enclosure of seed through seed sovereignty organizing and freelance plant breeding, in some cases through the development of community–university partnerships based on the principles of the cocreation of knowledge. We conclude by offering a reimagined public seed research agenda that focuses on strengthening links between public research and grassroots seed movements, as an opportunity to build more resilient seed and food systems.

Biotechnology describes a range of human activities in medicine, agriculture, and environmental management. One biotechnology in particular, gene technology, continues to evolve both in capacity and potential to benefit and harm society. The purpose of this article is to offer a policy bridge from unproductive descriptions of gene technology to useful methods for identifying sources of significant biological and socioeconomic risk in complex food systems. Farmers and the public could be voluntarily and involuntarily interacting with new techniques of genome editing and gene silencing in entirely new ways, limiting the usefulness of previous gene technology histories to predict safety. What we believe is a more consistent, verifiable, and practical approach is to identify the critical control points that emerge where the scale effects of a human activity diverge between risk and safety. These critical control points are where technical experts can collaborate with publics with different expertise to identify and manage the technology. The use of technical terminology describing biochemical-level phenomena discourages publics that are not technical experts from contesting the embedded cultural perspectives and uncertainty in “scientific” concepts and prejudice the risk discourse by ignoring other issues of significance to society. From our perspective as gene technologists, we confront the use of pseudo-scale language in risk discourse and propose an escape path from clashes over whether risks that arise spontaneously (from nature) can be perfectly mimicked by gene technology to a discussion on how to best control the risks created by human activity. Scale is conceptually implicit and explicit in gene technology regulation, but there is no agreement about what scales are most useful to managing risk and social expectations. Both differentiated governance (risk-tiered) and responsible research and innovation models could accommodate the critical control points mechanism that we describe.

Reply to Kamil Łuczaj and Magdalena Holy Łuczaj (2019). Live streaming at international academic conferences: Cooling down the digital optimism. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.435

Leafy greens cause a growing proportion of foodborne illness outbreaks despite heavy investment in surveillance technologies designed to control pathogenic hazards in agriculture. To understand how the governing regime maintains authority despite continual lapses in control, I examine a deadly 2018 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157: H7 linked to romaine lettuce. By comparing the outbreak investigation and regulatory response to the questions not asked and actions not taken, I show how the regime’s methods of understanding the outbreak also organized its ignorance of dangers outside its carefully constructed field of vision. Applying agnotology theory, I argue that the industrial organization of leafy greens agriculture and the institutionalized non-knowledge of emergent social–ecological vulnerabilities coproduce one another, allowing the industrial food regime to avoid fundamental reforms that might enhance resilience. This case demonstrates that critical examination of organized non-knowledge in complex environmental governance systems can reveal limits to institutional learning and systemic reflexivity that impede sustainability transitions.

The Anthropocene is the new geological epoch, characterized by the accelerating global influence of humankind and the impending point of no return on environmental changes. In this article, we highlight reactions of scientists to the challenges of the Anthropocene from the perspectives of biomimetics and sustainability research. To answer novel questions in the Anthropocene context, scientists have established relevant approaches to collaborate at an interdisciplinary level and have entered into exchange with society in the sense of transdisciplinary activities. With regard to biomimetics, we introduce the interdisciplinary approaches and transdisciplinary contributions leading to the development of biomimetic products on the market. Regarding sustainability research, we focus on a prospective assessment of substances of very high concern and show how environmental, economic, social, and ethical issues as well as policy measures play a central role in chemicals risk management. In the final “practice bridge” section, we use examples to describe how biomimetics and sustainability research can meet and how biomimetic products can contribute to sustainable development in the Anthropocene.

The ability of individuals and groups to identify, assess, and pursue alternative possible futures is an essential component of their ability to deliberately and collectively respond to major sustainability challenges rather than experience unguided or forced change. Deliberately engaging in transformation processes inevitably requires imagination. We refer to imagination for transformations as interdependent cognitive and social processes that create representations of present and possible future states of the world that can inform public deliberation, policy, decision making, and behavior from the individual to the global scale. We contend that imagination is an essential capacity for securing ecological, social, economic, and cultural well-being in times of rapid and often unpredictable global change. We sketch an emerging interdisciplinary research agenda on imagination as a transformational capacity and its role in transformation processes, building on contributions to a special issue on this subject. We specifically focus on imagination in relationship to transformative agency, causation, and individual-collective dynamics. Our aim is to identify research questions and challenges that are most pressing with a view to supporting efforts of transformations toward sustainability.

This article explores attitudes of stakeholders involved in biotechnology towards the Responsible Innovation (RI) framework. As a framework for governance, RI has received increasing scholarly attention but has yet to be successfully integrated into U.S. research and innovation policy. Using a mixed methods approach, we analyzed the attitudes of different biotechnology stakeholders, particularly those working in areas related to genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture and the environment, towards the principles and practices of RI. Homogenous focus groups (organized by stakeholder affiliation) and pre- and post-focus group surveys were used to measure attitudes towards RI. We designed the survey questions according to the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) and examined the agreement of stakeholders with policy core beliefs (general principles of RI) and secondary beliefs (implementation practices of RI). Although all stakeholder groups had neutral to positive attitudes towards RI general principles, we found significant differences in their reactions to the scholarly definitions of RI and in their attitudes towards practices to implement RI. In comparison to government and advocacy groups, stakeholders promoting biotechnology innovations–industry, trade organizations, and academics–had more negative reactions to social science definitions of RI and to RI practices that relinquish control to people outside of technology development pipelines. Qualitative analysis of focus-groups revealed barriers for implementing RI practices. For example, innovators were cynical about including external voices in innovation pathways due to inflexible funding programs and were concerned about potential delays to innovation given the highly competitive environments for financing and patents. In order to help address these tensions, we call for the co-design of RI practices between biotechnology innovators and other stakeholders. The opening-up of biotechnology innovation to RI practices of anticipation, inclusion, responsiveness and reflexivity will likely be important for future, public legitimacy of emerging genetic engineering applications such as gene editing and gene drives.

Given the slow policy response by governments, climate leadership by other institutions has become an essential part of maintaining policy momentum, driving innovation, and fostering social dialogue. Despite growth in carbon pricing in government and the private sector, our review suggests low, but growing, adoption of internal carbon prices (ICPs) by higher education institutions (HEIs), who may be uniquely suited to implement and refine these tools. We analyze the range of ICP tools in use by eleven U.S. HEIs and discuss tradeoffs. Our analysis identifies several reasons why proxy carbon prices may be especially well-suited to decisions (especially at the system-scale) around carbon neutrality at a wide range of institutions. Using a unique dataset covering 10 years of real-world analysis with a proxy carbon price, we analyze the interaction of ICPs with life cycle cost analysis to start to identify when and how internal carbon pricing will be most likely to shift decisions. We discuss how schools and other institutions can collaborate and experiment with these tools to help drive good climate decision-making and inform climate policy at larger scales.

This review of agroecology’s current work on culture and food traditions—a principle of the field and one of the FAO’s 10 Elements of Agroecology—reveals two things. First, although culture and tradition are frequently mentioned in passing, there is little published literature detailing how they intersect with agroecology. Second, mentions of tradition and culture in this corpus reveal scholarly assumptions that practicing agroecology or food sovereignty will naturally result in unspecified healthy, diversified, community-driven food choices. But consumption practices shape production practices at least as much as the reverse. Food cultures are complex, shifting, and geographically and historically informed, and must be considered within their rich contexts. Agroecology needs to critically engage with the kitchen and the table in order to achieve the holistic and multi-faceted agricultural transformations imagined by the FAO and others.

Food policy councils (FPCs) are an increasingly common mechanism to improve participation in food system decision-making. Including individuals from under-represented groups can foster greater understanding of their needs and experiences with food system barriers and is an important part of food justice. However, engaging under-represented groups in food systems decision-making remains challenging for FPCs. This paper presents the results from a survey of FPCs and networks in New England to: (1) identify FPC policy priorities, (2) characterize FPCs engaged in policy initiatives based on attributes which, based on the literature, may impact effective public participation: geographic scale, organization type, capacity, policy priorities, and membership, and (3) analyze methods for engaging the public in FPC policy initiatives and demographic groups and sectors engaged. Findings indicate only half of New England FPCs work on policy efforts. Many surveyed FPCs engage multiple food system sectors and under-represented groups through a combination of different public participation opportunities. However, results indicate that New England FPCs could benefit from a greater focus on engaging under-represented audiences. FPCs interested in engaging more diverse participants should commit to a focus on food justice, strive for representative membership through intentional recruitment, and offer multiple methods to engage the public throughout policy initiatives.

Comment on Parncutt and Seither-Preisler ( 2019 ). Live streaming at international academic conferences: Ethical considerations. DOI: http://doi.org/10.1525/elementa.393 .

Young people are both among the generations to be most affected by climate change and critical advocates for climate action. In the face of growing urgency surrounding the climate crisis, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has become an important institutional framework for political progress. We developed a community-based participatory action research project centered on youth involved in the COP climate negotiations. A “leverage points” approach guided our research; this paper is the first time the framework has been applied in an international negotiations context. Our findings point to the structural power, networks, and paradigms that youth might engage with for international climate justice work. We identify actionable leverage points through which youth organizers might increase their social power in the COP process to bring about climate action. Many of these leverage points are rooted in dynamics of power, which we expand upon and connect to broader literature. Moving forward, these findings can benefit and inform the strategies of youth as they participate in the COP process.

A host of technologies is rapidly entering agriculture. These new technologies—particularly gene editing—represent multifaceted shifts beyond “genetic modification” (GM), and are outpacing both public understanding and the capacity of regulatory regimes. This paper employs the case of the organic sectors in Canada and the United States, strongholds of GM resistance, to examine conversations about gene-editing technologies unfolding within the organic community, and elucidate their implications for the sector. We employ the concept of “boundary work” to illuminate how key actors and institutions delineate the concept of organic breeding in the face of emerging technologies. We draw upon semi-structured interviews with organic sector representatives, a review of documents published by organic organizations, and data from participant observation. We find that the organic community is reaffirming and deepening boundaries in response to arguments made by proponents of gene editing. Both internal and external pressures on the sector are facilitating a dampening effect on conversations about the boundaries between gene editing and organic agriculture, as the sector is compelled to present a united voice against the affront of new genetic technologies. The sector is also redrawing existing boundaries, as the advent of gene editing has forced conversations about the compatibility of both new and established breeding methods with organic. The resulting questions about what distinguishes acceptable levels of human intervention in plant genomes are highlighting some differences within the diverse organic community. We also argue that debates about gene editing and organic breeding may be “bounding out” important actors from deliberation processes, and note initial attempts to reckon with this exclusion.

Addressing social inequities has been recognized as foundational to transforming food systems. Activists and scholars have critiqued food movements as lacking an orientation towards addressing issues of social justice. To address issues of inequity, sustainable food systems education (SFSE) programs will have to increase students’ equity-related capabilities. Our first objective in this paper is to determine the extent to which SFSE programs in the USA and Canada address equity. We identified 108 programs and reviewed their public facing documents for an explicit focus on equity. We found that roughly 80% of universities with SFSE programs do not provide evidence that they explicitly include equity in their curricula. Our second objective is to propose an equity competency model based on literature from multiple fields and perspectives. This entails dimensions related to knowledge of self; knowledge of others and one’s interactions with them; knowledge of systems of oppression and inequities; and the drive to embrace and create strategies and tactics for dismantling racism and other forms of inequity. Integrating our equity competency model into SFSE curricula can support the development of future professionals capable of dismantling inequity in the food system. We understand that to integrate an equity competency in our curricula will require commitment to build will and skill not only of our students, but our faculty, and entire university communities.