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Today, populism is widely understood to entail an exclusionary conception of "the people" that threatens climate change action. While this threat is real, I argue that populism itself can be understood as a response to perceived exclusion and marginalization, making it possible to conceptualize a more heterogeneous conception of populism's "people." Examining two approaches to climate change action rooted in contrasting conceptions of the people and the elite, I argue that climate justice organizing offers a promising effort to construct a heterogeneous people and offers a powerful critique of the elite representation of climate change action in which "we are all in this together." Yet along with this promise, climate justice organizing must navigate tensions that are inescapable within any populist formation. One neglected thread of populist history and theory offers resources for doing so; in the final section of this paper, I explore its relevance to climate justice today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a comprehensive review and synthesis of studies that forecast economic impacts of ocean acidification. The changes in seawater chemistry resulting from increased carbon dioxide emissions, known as ocean acidification, will have detrimental impacts to marine ecosystem services. Those services include wild capture fisheries, aquaculture, recreation, shoreline protection, and others. The current literature valuing expected impacts to those services is rather thin and tends to focus on mollusk harvesting and aquaculture. Despite the paucity of studies, we divide all relevant estimates into five additively separable economic sectors to provide an aggregate estimate of economic damage from ocean acidification at the end of this century. We perform nonparametric bootstrap simulations to characterize the distribution of estimates within each sector and the aggregation across sectors. We also perform meta-regressions to explore whether estimates provided by these studies are generally consistent with expectations based on ocean chemistry and economic theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the factors that render environmental concerns salient in people's lives, and under what conditions do people make connections between an abstract concept such as climate change and concrete experiences in their own daily circumstances? Taking as our focus ethnographic work with children in several different ethnographic settings (Barrow, Alaska; Oaxaca, Mexico; Tuv aimag and Uvurkhangai aimag, Mongolia; and East Anglia, United Kingdom), we explore how the children come to articulate environmental knowledge as a process of "figuring out" and the extent to which the children engage with the changing climate as a matter of concern. The paper provides an ethnographic account of the main themes that emerged in each region, before developing a comparative discussion of some key factors that gave shape to how climate change comes to matter in the lives of the children. Three dimensions are explored: the effect of climate change on livelihoods and the proximity of children's experience to those livelihoods, the political salience of the narrative of climate change, and the temporal depth invoked by the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the nature and dynamics of adaptation and resilience in the face of a diverse and varied environmental and ecological context using the case study of South Asia's Indus Civilization (ca. 3000-1300 BC). Most early complex societies developed in regions where the climatic parameters faced by ancient subsistence farmers were varied but rain falls primarily in one season. In contrast, the Indus Civilization developed in a specific environmental context that spanned a very distinct environmental threshold, where winter and summer rainfall systems overlap. There is now evidence to show that this region was directly subject to climate change during the period when the Indus Civilization was at its height (ca. 2500-1900 BC). The Indus Civilization, therefore, provides a unique opportunity to understand how an ancient society coped with diverse and varied ecologies and change in the fundamental environmental parameters. This paper integrates research carried out as part of the Land, Water and Settlement project in northwest India between 2007 and 2014. Although coming from only one of the regions occupied by Indus populations, these data necessitate the reconsideration of several prevailing views about the Indus Civilization as a whole and invigorate discussion about human-environment interactions and their relationship to processes of cultural transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The academic study of dragonflies and damselflies (odonatology) is well established, but relatively limited attention has been given to odonates in the context of applied ecology and conservation science. We used the Web of Science™ and Odonatological Abstract Service (ISSN 1438-0269) to capture trends in primary literature, characterize study features (habitats, life stages, etc.), identify research themes, and suggest future directions for odonatology in freshwater applied ecology and conservation science. We found no papers in this area prior to 1980, and 411 papers from 1980 through 2013. Nearly 75% of these papers were recent (since 2005) and >40% were very recent (since 2010). We identified several broad and overlapping research themes: 1) model taxa, 2) tools and indicators, 3) odonate-centered work, and 4) methodological issues and improvements (field sampling, data modeling/simulation, conservation/landscape-scale genetics). We found more reliance on field-based observational approaches than experiments and model-driven exercises, although the number of papers using model-driven exercises is rapidly increasing. We found a strong focus on adult stages, odonate assemblages, the Odonata as a whole, and studies of particular species. We identified research priorities in areas such as ecological valuation and management, monitoring and assessment, climate change and landscape planning, concordance with other taxa, effects of urbanization, data modeling/simulation, and rare-species ecology and conservation. To help establish an identity and facilitate communication, we suggest naming this diverse realm "applied odonatology". We think applied odonatology has a good future for a range of topics from conservation genetics and population ecology to assessments of anthropogenic impacts and the conservation of biodiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeological, paleontological, and genetic evidence indicate that Homo sapiens originated in Africa around 200, 000-150, 000 years ago (200-150 kya). Behavioral differences between earlier and later Homo sapiens populations are clearly germane to research on the origins of uniquely derived (i.e, "modern ") human behavior. This paper examines evidence for behavioral differences between Middle (MP) and Upper Paleolithic (UP) Homo sapiens in the East Mediterranean Levant. Levantine archaeological assemblages associated with Homo sapiens between 130 and 75 kya and again between 45 and 25 kya show contrasts in settlement, subsistence, technology, and social organization. Recent explanations for these differences include technological-social evolution, neurogenetic mutation, population growth, and interspecific competition. These hypotheses are each critically examined. None accounts for the particular timing of the MP-UP transition, ca. 45 kya. A new hypothesis explains Middle vs. Upper Paleolithic behavioral differences among Levantine Late Pleistocene Homo sapiens as the result of intensified intraspecific competition among African Homo sapiens populations who dispersed into the Levant after a period of rapid climate change, 50-45 kya. This hypothesis contradicts the long-standing assumption of biological and cultural continuity across the MP-UP transition in the Levant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and his colleagues. The author views that the paper lacks convincing demonstration of how climatic change affected the cultural growth of human population of four different studied region. He views that Jones and colleagues were correct to mention that economic factors depending on local factors influence population dynamic up to some extent.

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and associates, which is published within the issue. He criticizes the overstated significance given to environmental flux as a factor responsible for the extinction of the late prehistoric population in western North America. He argues that there is a lack of convincing demonstration in the paper to support the vigorous effect of climatic anomalies on human system.

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and colleagues, which has been published within the issue. The paper by Jones and colleagues was focused on the correlation between environmental factors and cultural development during the medieval climatic anomaly. According to the author, references used by Jones and colleagues to establish correlation between environmental and cultural pattern of the period are unusual.

The article presents the author's views on the research paper "Environmental Imperatives Reconsidered," by Terry L. Jones and colleagues, which has been published within the issue. The author views that Jones and colleagues failed to pay attention to environmental variability as a component of cultural and ecological change. He emphasized the need for the application of evolutionary perspective of climate and environment in the interpretation of cultural changes.