Nothing inherent in the discipline steers planners either toward environmental protection or toward economic development—or toward a third goal of planning: social equity. Instead, planners work within the tension generated among these three fundamental aims, which, collectively, I call the “planner's triangle,” with sustainable development located at its center. This center cannot be reached directly, but only approximately and indirectly, through a sustained period of confronting and resolving the triangle's conflicts. To do so, planners have to redefine sustainability, since its current formulation romanticizes our sustainable past and is too vaguely holistic. Planners would benefit both from integrating social theory with environmental thinking and from combining their substantive skills with techniques for community conflict resolution, to confront economic and environmental injustice.

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Green Cities, Growing Cities, Just Cities?: Urban Planning and the Contradictions of Sustainable Development

Although it is evident in routine decision-making and a crucial vehicle of rationalization, commensuration as a general social process has been given little consideration by sociologists. This article defines commensuration as the comparison of different entities according to a common metric, notes commensuration's long history as an instrument of social thought, analyzes commensuration as a mode of power, and discusses the cognitive and political stakes inherent in calling something incommensurable. We provide a framework for future empirical study of commensuration and demonstrate how this analytic focus can inform established fields of sociological inquiry.

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Commensuration as a social process

Preface and Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations Prologue: The Bus 1. Introduction 2. The California Political Economy 3. The Prison Fix 4. Crime, Croplands, and Capitalism 5. Mothers Reclaiming Our Children 6. What Is to Be Done? Epilogue: Another Bus Notes

Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

North American drought: Reconstructions, causes, and consequences

The causes of persistent droughts and wet periods, or pluvials, over western North America are examined in model simulations of the period from 1856 to 2000. The simulations used either (i) global sea surface temperature data as a lower boundary condition or (ii) observed data in just the tropical Pacific and computed the surface ocean temperature elsewhere with a simple ocean model. With both arrangements, the model was able to simulate many aspects of the low-frequency (periods greater than 6 yr) variations of precipitation over the Great Plains and in the American Southwest including much of the nineteenth-century variability, the droughts of the 1930s (the “Dust Bowl”) and 1950s, and the very wet period in the 1990s. Results indicate that the persistent droughts and pluvials were ultimately forced by persistent variations of tropical Pacific surface ocean temperatures. It is argued that ocean temperature variations outside of the tropical Pacific, but forced from the tropical Pacific, act to ...

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Modeling of Tropical Forcing of Persistent Droughts and Pluvials over Western North America: 1856–2000*

The story of the American West is the story of a relentless quest for a precious resource: water. This is the story of the early settlers, lured by promises of paradise. The author documents the rivalry between government giants and other institutions, in the competition to transform the West.

Marc Reisner

Papers

Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water