<p> Transnational networks are growing in prevalence and importance as states, nongovernmental, and intergovernmental organizations seek to meet climate change goals; yet, the organizations in these networks struggle between the global, technical and local, contextual sources of power, authority, and knowledge used to influence decision-making and governance. This dissertation analyzes these contestations in Pacific Islands climate change diplomacy and governance efforts by asking: i) What do <i>power</i> relations look like among the Pacific Islands&rsquo; networked organizations? ii) To what <i>authority </i> do organizations appeal to access sources of power? iii) What sources of <i>knowledge</i> are produced and reproduced by these organizations? and iv) How do these patterns fit within the <i>broader history</i> of the Pacific Islands and climate change? I draw from interviews, document analysis, event participation, and social network analysis of Pacific Island climate change diplomacy and governance. This examination leads me to propose the concept of "Climate Empire,&rdquo; which can be understood as the network of knowledge and communicative services that imagine, build, and administer the globe through a decentralized and deterritorialized apparatus of rule. </p><p> In the Pacific Islands, Climate Empire upholds technical bureaucratic and scientific approaches to overcoming climate challenges; however, the global spaces in which these approaches are produced are reconnected with the spaces of local resistance through data collection networks and efforts to relocalize knowledge. Thus, the local/global divisions found in diplomacy and governance in the Pacific Islands collectively produce and reform Climate Empire as organizations interact in the network. Further research is necessary to understand the extensiveness of Climate Empire, as well as to ensure the inclusion and empowerment of Pacific Island voices in climate governance for both justice and efficacy.</p><p>

The oil shocks of the 1970's have revealed two important features of this commodity: I) that all countries use energy to achieve economic and social goals and 2) national stability and autonomy are closely linked to the security of its supplies. The South Pacific region has greatly experienced these effects in its pursuit of development, due to its increasing and nearly complete dependence on imported petroleum products. This is compounded by the situation of high expectations for a quality of life similar to the more developed nations of the Pacific Rim. Therefore the role of energy in these economies must be addressed before it is too late. / Thesis / Candidate in Philosophy

Objectives: Traditional guided tissue regeneration procedures use particulate bone graft materials and occlusive membranes with the primary aim of reconstitution of the supporting periodontal tissues. Currently, the Food and Drug Administration has cleared only four treatment modalities for true periodontal regeneration. These materials are autogenous bone, demineralized freeze dried bone allograft, LANAP (Millennium Dental Technologies INC, Cerritos, CA) and Emdogain (Institut Straumann AG, Basel, Switzerland). The biologically inactive nature of many commercially available bone graft materials provides an opportunity for the addition of certain biologic materials to enhance the healing response. The development of an adequate carrier for biologic agents is a crucial step in the creation of a bioactive graft material. This experiment uses Emdogain (Institut Straumann AG, Basel, Switzerland) to study the specific characteristics of protein binding and release on three different commonl / Oral Biology

No description available.

Protected areas, such as national parks, can provide nearby communities with a wide range of environmental, social, and economic benefits, such as ecosystem services and tourism development. However, protected areas can also subject communities to a number of costs, such as displacement and an increase in negative human-wildlife interactions. This study investigates how the communities of Tofino and Ucluelet, British Columbia, Canada perceive they have been impacted by Pacific Rim National Park Reserve (PRNPR). Specific areas of focus include respondents’ attitude and level of support for PRNPR and their perceptions of concerns and benefits related to the park. Data for this study was collected using a focus group and questionnaire administered using the “drop-off” method. The results of this study suggest that residents of Tofino and Ucluelet generally have a positive attitude towards the park and perceive PRNPR subjects their communities to a number of concerns and benefits. It was found that attitudes were linked to perceived concerns and benefits, perceived changes in the community, and level of involvement with PRNPR. With regards to concerns and benefits, it was found that respondents were most concerned with financial costs related to PRNPR and most valued benefits related to conservation. / Graduate

Thesis (M.E.S.)--York University, 2004. Graduate Programme in Environmental Studies. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-112). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: LINK NOT YET AVAILABLE.

<p> Impacts of climate change on the already severely strained freshwater resources of approximately 1000 inhabited islands in the Pacific Ocean are of great concern. The Western Pacific region is one of the world&rsquo;s most vulnerable when it comes to risk of disaster particularly for the several of the low-lying coral islands. Impacts have already been felt regarding the security of water resources that would directly impact agriculture, forestry, tourism and other industry-related sectors. The ironic and tragic aspect of the environmental crisis of greenhouse emissions is the fact that those parts of the world least responsible for creating the water security issues are the first to suffer its consequences. Pacific Island Nations are responsible for only 0.03 percent of the world&rsquo;s carbon dioxide emissions, and the average island resident produces only one-quarter of the emissions of the average person worldwide. </p><p> Utilizing the historical data, the evidence of change in water quality and access on Guam has been examined. All indicators except for the precipitation support the hypotheses that climate change trends are impacting Guam&rsquo;s water security. This will eventually weaken Guam&rsquo;s resilience. As a result of this research and its recommendations, a sustainable freshwater resources management plan, for a water-secured Guam can be produced. Adaptive management provided here is based on a process that can measure the resilience of Guam to the issue of water security.</p><p>

Although the term hybrid has gained much traction in literary analyses of contemporary experimental poetry, there is a notable divide within scholarly discourse wherein its uses pertain to either form or content. The term has been used by literary critics and anthologists to categorize works of poetry that combine formal techniques and practices from opposing traditions of literary history, but within cultural, postcolonial, and Asian American studies, it has served as an important term that designates sites of resistance within cross-cultural contexts of uneven power dynamics. This discrepancy in uses of the term hybrid serves as the basis for my critical investigation of experimental poetry by Cathy Park Hong, Craig Santos Perez, Don Mee Choi, and Monica Ong. This dissertation presents an interdisciplinary reassessment of the concept of hybridity that applies it to both formal experimentation and cultural content by examining the innovative ways in which Asian American and Pacific Islander poets use hybrid forms to represent hybrid identities and the particular social, political, and colonial contexts within which they emerge. While the term in relation to ethnic American poetry has primarily pertained to multilingual features, my study widens the scope of hybridity to not only include verbal expression but also visual forms of representation (such as photographs, illustrations, and digital renderings of images). How do these poets grapple with both text and image as a means of communicating across and confronting different types of boundaries (such as linguistic, national, cultural, racial, and ideological)? How do they utilize the page as a textual-visual space to not only represent hybrid identity but also to critique their social and political milieu? I address these inquiries by exploring the ways in which Hong, Perez, Choi, and Ong enact formal hybridity to challenge multilingualism as cosmopolitan commodity, the colonial erasure of indigenous language and culture, hegemonic narratives of history, and representations of the racial Other. This dissertation argues that their poetry demonstrates an expansive hybridity in which multilingual and mixed-media practices serve as the very means by which they negotiate the fraught conditions of migration, colonization, geopolitics, and marginalization. / English

This dissertation examines the production of knowledge around global climate change and the character of environmental literacy among youth in Tafuna, on Tutuila, American Samoa. I analyze this production of environmental knowledge across multiple social fields (i.e. status hierarchies, governance structures, etc.) and subjectivities (school-specific, village-based, and Samoan cultural identities) during a period of social, political, economic, and environmental transformation. I interrogate the emerging forms of control that have come to structure the formal educational system in American Samoa, such as standardized or "containerized" curriculum, assessment and accountability measures, and the assignation of risk/creation of dependency on funding, deployed by American governmental agencies such as the Department of Education, and utilized by state actors such as the American Samoa Department of Education. Of particular concern is the how these structures create contradictions that affect the possibilities of teaching, learning, and the integration of youth into meaningful social roles. Informal learning about the environment includes village-based forms of service, church initiatives concerning the environment, governmental agency programming, such as that provided by the American Samoa Environmental Protection Agency, and youth-serving non-profit programs concerned with engaging youth as leaders. In both these formal and informal contexts for environmental education, American Samoan youth dynamically co-create knowledge within and outside the parameters of the socialization processes in which they are embedded. This research encompassed four trips to American Samoa over the course of three years, and utilized ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews, questionnaires, archival research, and demographic data analysis, as the primary forms of data gathering. What this data reveals is the disengagement American Samoan youth feel for school-based environmental education because their science classes, as structured, do not integrate the co-relatedness of the social, the political, and the environmental fields that youth encounter. I discovered that youth are largely ambivalent about their future aspirations because they lack some of the cultural, linguistic, and educational tools necessary for local participation as well as for opportunities to study and work on Hawaii or the mainland United States. Lastly, I found that American educational ideals continue to be contradictory in the American Samoan context; whereas schools value and promote individually-oriented goals and responsibility, youth are also embedded in the values of communal identification and practice known as fa'a Samoa. I conclude that young people lack social integration and plan for a future away from American Samoa. / Anthropology

This dissertation explores the relationship between fiction, knowledge and "knowing" in Latin American discourses of China and Japan. By scrutinizing Brazilian and Hispanic American travel journals, novels, short stories and essays from the nineteenth century to the present, Disorientations engages with the epistemological problems of writing across cultural boundaries and proposes a novel entryway into the study of East Asia and Latin American through the notions of "cultural distance," "fictional Sinology" and "critical exoticism." / Romance Languages and Literatures