No abstract

No abstract

This paper explains why neither Maine, USA's comparatively laissez faire economic and land use institutions, nor Dalarna, Sweden's more heavily regulated economy, seems well designed to make tourism a powerful economic development engine. The paper focuses on three clusters of institutions that have a major influence on tourism's scale, economic structure, and long-term sustainability. Labour laws and labour market institutions are important determinants of tourism employment, job quality, product mix, production methods, and regional competitiveness. Land ownership and property rights influence both the incentives facing landowners, tourists, and tourism businesses and stresses on ecosystem carrying capacity. Commodity taxes affect the absolute and relative prices of various tourist services and, via feedback effects on demand, influence tourism's aggregate scale, activity mix and transportation/location patterns. The paper employs institutional contrasts between Dalarna and Maine to frame hypotheses that will guide a larger comparative study of sustainable tourism in forest regions. Perhaps most controversially, we hypothesise that Sweden's venerable right of common access (allemansrätten), as currently implemented, impedes sustainable tourism development. An appendix sketches the current state of tourism in the two regions.

Reacting to the intensified contradictions of the capitalist food system, many agrarian activists seek to revitalize family labor farms, to make agriculture ecologically sustainable, to renew the social and economic life of rural communities, and to create an unalienated labor process. While the agrarian movement is fragmented along lines of ideology, issue priorities and tactics, it is fundamentally in the populist tradition. This problematic of neo-populism, with its contradictory progressive and petty bourgeois tendencies, provides the context for an analysis of production relations on Maine's organic farms. The division of labor and decision-making authority on these farms is shown to conform closely to the age-old pattern of male dominance. Evidence from a survey of small commercial organic farms suggests that most women face a "double," and some a "triple burden" of farm, household and off-farm labor; that their work is more proletarian than that of males; and that their contributions to the family's means of subsistence and capital accumulation are not systematically correlated with participation in farm decisions. These preliminary findings are not sufficient to argue that small organic farms are patriarchal or that women (and children and wage workers) are exploited. But that thesis is consistent with the data, suggesting that farms in the new agrarian movement are not likely to be a force for transformation of the relations of dominance and subordination that characterize both capitalism and petty commodity production.

No abstract

No abstract

High-precision land-cover-land-use GIS mapping was performed in four major townships in Maine's Aroostook River Valley, using on-screen digitization and direct interpretation of very high spatial resolution satellite multispectral imagery (15-60 cm) and high spatial resolution LiDAR data (2 m) and the field mapping method. The project not only provides the first-ever high-precision land-use maps for northern Maine, but it also yields accurate hectarage estimates of different land-use types, in particular grassland, defined as fallow land, pasture, and hay field. This enables analysis of potential land availability and suitability for grass biomass production and other sustainable land uses. The results show that the total area of fallow land in the four towns is 7594 hectares, which accounts for 25% of total open land, and that fallow plots equal to or over four hectares in size total 4870, or 16% of open land. Union overlay analysis, using the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) soil data, indicates that only a very small percentage of grassland (4.9%) is on "poorly-drained" or "very-poorly-drained" soils, and that most grassland (85%) falls into the "farmland of state importance" or "prime farmland" categories, as determined by NRCS. It is concluded that Maine's Aroostook River Valley has an ample base of suitable, underutilized land for producing grass biomass. OPEN ACCESSLand 2015, 4 232

No abstract