Search

Political discourse suggests that federal officials in Washington D.C. manage Western lands and resources with little regard for local interests. This narrative is inconsistent with theory and practice alike. A central tenent of socio-ecological systems theory is that land and resources are inherently interconnected with local peoples and economies. Decades of federal land management also reflects the importance of localized inputs into law and policy. Legal scholars have, however, yet to provide a comprehensive account of the modern processes through which agencies engage localized considerations in land and resource decisions. To fill this void, the Administrative Conference of the United States ("ACUS") hired the Author as an Academic Consultant to construct a longitudinal account of agencies' engagement with stakeholder collaborations. The Author identified hundreds of relevant laws and regulations, conducted dozens of interviews, and constructed case studies in Alaska, Arizona, and Maine. This Article presents that research-providing a robust, empirically informed descriptive account of agencies' engagement with local constituencies to create law and policy. The resulting account reveals that stakeholder collaborations are widely used. They play a vital role in agency decision-making-particularly for the most pressing, controversial issues. For example, agencies are using [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article compares and contrasts cost-benefit analysis with "collaborative analysis" in agency decision-making. While mathematical models drive cost-benefit analysis, ongoing stakeholder negotiations drive collaborative analysis. Cost-benefit analysis relies on economists inputting numerical values into a model, whereas collaborative analysis relies on the diverse perspectives of groups and individuals affected by an agency's decision. Administrative law scholars have exhaustively researched cost-benefit analysis while overlooking widespread agency reliance on collaborative analysis. This Article advances the novel observation that legislatures and courts sometimes treat collaborative analysis and cost-benefit analysis as interchangeable. Administrative law scholars might find it unorthodox, even irresponsible, to equate the deliberative process of average citizens with numerical calculations performed by economists. Yet, collaborative analysis works well in several contexts when numerical analysis does not: where data are scarce, burdens are unevenly distributed, normative values are at stake, and conditions are changing. Under such circumstances, agency officials report that collaborative analysis creates better outcomes, secures ex ante social approval of policies, provides adaptive decisionmaking, and reduces conflict and litigation risk relative to alternative tools. Despite the benefits of collaborative analysis and its surprisingly widespread use, its potential remains largely untapped. In identifying and defining collaborative analysis for the first time, this Article provides agencies, stakeholders, and courts the tools necessary to understand collaborative analysis and tap into its benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article identifies a disturbing trend: wildlife management agencies permitting landowners to shift threatened and endangered species from their native habitat on commercially valuable land to public land, land in foreign countries, and even captive breeding facilities. Surprisingly, this occurs under the auspices of the Endangered Species Act. Certainly, there are many instances of translocation that serve goals of species preservation. But, in practice, political pressures sometimes cause agencies to shift endangered wildlife populations from higher-value lands to lands with less commercial value. Analyzing the political economy of species translocation suggests that the continuous shift of wildlife to public and foreign land appears to be an almost inevitable outcome given the social, economic, ecological, and political context of the Endangered Species Act. To illustrate this phenomenon, I present a detailed case study of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service paying Mexico to provide habitat for the endangered thick-billed parrot rather than re-establishing a population in the United States. This is not an isolated phenomenon; any one of the individual examples that I provide may seem relatively small. In aggregate, however, the long-term effects of shifting wildlife populations to make way for development or industrial activity may prove devastating. Moreover, translocations are a small part of the much broader trend of humans expropriating land from wildlife bit-by-bit, species-by-species. This reality, coupled with the current political climate, suggests that the Endangered Species Act, as applied, is insufficiently protective of wildlife habitat. I analyze the potential of an animal property rights regime-a new, habitat-preservation-focused solution to species preservation- as a new tool for stemming systemic habitat loss and related extinctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The animal rights movement largely focuses on protecting species whose suffering is most visible to humans, such as pets, livestock, and captive mammals. Yet, we do not observe how unsustainable land development and fishing practices are harming many species of wildlife and sea creatures. Fish and wildlife populations have recently suffered staggering losses, and they stand to lose far more. This Article proposes a new legal approach to protect these currently overlooked creatures. I suggest extending property rights to animals, which would allow them to own land, water, and natural resources. Human trustees would manage animal-owned trusts managed at the ecosystem level--a structure that fits within existing legal institutions. Although admittedly radical, an animal property rights regime would create tremendous gains for imperiled species with relatively few costs to humans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on the case Horne v. United States and the constitutional challenges of a supposed beneficiary's statutory givings or a government-provided financial windfall.

The United States manages natural resources held in the public trust for the collective benefit of all citizens. When human action injures certain natural resources, the government has statutory authority to pursue monetary damages, which are used to restore the resources to their pre-injury condition. As the only statutory tort remedy in environmental law, natural resource damages provide a valuable opportunity to consider the efficiency of a tort regime as a tool for addressing environmental problems. Moreover, administration of the remedy provides insights into interagency dynamics and valuation of natural resources without a market value. At present, these important inquiries are sharply limited by a lack of comprehensive information about the remedy. Commentators routinely underestimate the frequency and size of claims by failing to account for settlement, which resolves over ninety-five percent of natural resource damages matters, and lesser-known applications of the remedy. This Article begins to fill the void of information surrounding natural resource damages settlements. It presents a novel empirical overview of all settlements by federal trustees between 1989 and 2015, constructed from data gathered by Freedom of Information Act requests to each relevant agency. The available data indicate that federal agencies settled for $10.4 billion across hundreds of claims over more than twenty years. This Article maps the statutory authorities that agencies use to provide a comprehensive overview of the field. Ultimately, the data presented in this Article lay a foundation for the important, yet under-theorized, questions surrounding the potential for statutory tort remedies to address environmental problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General-purpose computation on graphics processing units (GPGPU) has great potential to accelerate many scientific models and algorithms. However, since some problems are considerably more difficult to accelerate than others, ascertaining the effort required to accelerate a particular problem is challenging. Through the acceleration of three typical scientific problems, seven problem attributes have been identified to assist in the evaluation of the difficulty of accelerating a problem on a GPU. These attributes are inherent parallelism, branch divergence, problem size, required computational parallelism, memory access pattern regularity, data transfer overhead, and thread cooperation. Using these attributes as difficulty indicators, an initial problem difficulty classification framework has been created that aids in evaluating GPU acceleration difficulty. The difficulty estimates obtained by applying the classification framework to the three case studies correlate well with the actual effort expended in accelerating each problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Informatica (03505596) is the property of Slovene Society Informatika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Wildfires' increasing growth and spread have prompted aggressive approaches to fighting fire. The techniques used by firefighters can cause great damage to timberlands. Yet, there is currently no external review of the efficiency, costs, or impacts of various firefighting techniques. Consequently, there is no meaningful way to compare the relative costs and benefits of various strategies. This Article provides a ground breaking first ex post analysis of the effects of wildfire firefighting techniques. It provides a detailed case study of the technique of backfire-use offire to fight fire-to demonstrate that the incentives offirefighters can be poorly aligned with the interests of landowners and environmentalists interested in protecting timberlands. Despite the costs inflicted by backfire, firefighters increasingly use it as a firefighting technique. The result is that enormous swaths of forest are burned to fight fire that could be suppressed with far less environmental and property loss. Using backfire as an example, this Article illustrates the importance of ex post analysis of wildfire suppression techniques and the value of such analysis in encouraging more sustainable firefighting techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]