Sustainability and Culture Lecture notes

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from lectures on sustainability, conservation, and resource management.

Common-pool resources

Resources where exclusion is difficult and joint use involves subtractability.

Tragedy of the Commons

The idea that humans have a flaw that leads to environmental destruction when pursuing their own best interest in common property resources.

Cod and Grand Banks

A historically important and productive fishery that collapsed due to overfishing and technological advancements.

Declining CPUE

Declining Catch Per Unit Effort, which indicates a potential problem in a fishery.

Industrial-scale fishing

Global fishing capacity that exceeds the total world catch capacity by four times, leading to overexploitation.

Bycatch

The portion of caught fish that is not used for human consumption, often fed to other fish in aquaculture.

Race to the fish

A short, open fishing season driven by incentives leading to increased risk-taking and debt.

Catch shares

A system where each boat has allocated a share of the catch, incentivizing stock protection.

TURF (territorial use rights in fishing)

Institutions that manage resources collectively and sustainably through territorial use rights in fishing.

Open access regimes

One of the four basic property regimes with free access to resources.

Common property regimes

One of the four basic property regimes where institutions manage resources collectively.

Private property regimes

One of the four basic property regimes based on individual ownership.

State property regimes

One of the four basic property regimes where the state controls the resources.

Biodiversity

The variety of life on Earth, facing increasing rates of extinction, with hotspots mainly in warm, humid, and developing countries.

Species Endemism

The ecological state of a species being unique to a defined geographic location, such as an island, nation, country or other defined zone, or habitat type; organisms that are indigenous to a place are not endemic to it if they are also found elsewhere.

Intrinsic value of biodiversity

The view that nature has inherent rights and deserves moral, ethical, and legal protections, associated with biocentric views.

Utilitarian value of biodiversity

The human-centered view that nature's monetary value is key to its conservation, encompassing goods, services, information, and psychospiritual benefits.

Yellowstone model

The rise of national parks in the US during the first phase of protection, inspired by the American frontier and preservation paradigm.

Coercive conservation

The approach to conservation based on the premise that nature must be preserved free of human influence.

Community-based conservation

A shift from strict protectionism, coupling environmental protection with poverty alleviation, capacity building, and social justice.

Human-centered conservation

A strategy that embraces co-management and decentralized control in environmental conservation.

Fiction of proportionality

The discourse that implies we are all equally responsible for environmental problems, hindering meaningful change.

Structural/organizational factors in water sustainability

Emphasis on the connection between broader societal, governmental, and economic elements.

Perverse subsidies

Subsidies that lead to damaging environmental outcomes; also result in economic inequity.

The natural lure of the open road

How the traffic problems in San Diego freeways may be overlooked.

Environmentally honest pricing

Pricing that includes externalities, though difficult to measure, for creating environmentally sustainable systems.