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Many environmental problems are large scale in terms of geographical units and long-term with regard to time. We therefore find a coincidence of different causes and impacts that qualify the interplay between humans and nature as highly uncertain ("transparency challenge"). In consequence we see a need for innovative analytical methods and modelling approaches to supplement the traditional monitoring-based approach in environmental policy. This should allow capturing different degrees of uncertainty which in general is out of power of any monitoring activity. Moreover, with regard to the design of monitoring approaches it requires collecting and connecting data from different fields of social activities in regard of a divergence of natural and social systems' boundaries. This requires the provision of sufficient, frequently huge data sets ("availability challenge") that need to fit with each other ("compatibility challenge"). Even if these challenges are met data processing remains a very complex and time-consuming task which should be supported by a user-friendly infrastructure. We here see a comparative advantage in using the GIS technology and a nested structure for data provision supporting the up and down scaling of information and the access of data from different perspectives ("connectivity challenge") - a polluters, a victims and a regulators point of view.

Building on interdisciplinary work by critical and feminist scholars in geography, architecture and urban planning, and history, this article proposes a reworking of social work's person-environment formulation to incorporate gender and its implications more fully. Three interlocking domains are addressed: (a) women's subjective experiences of their everyday environments; (b) the connections among these environmental experiences, the geography of women's lives, and larger social categories such as race/ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation; and (c) women's environmental strengths, resources, and agency.

This article theorizes why Indigenous peoples' security claims fail to be accepted by government authorities or incorporated into the security policies and practices of settler states. By engaging the concepts of securitization and ontological security, I explain how Indigenous peoples are unable to successfully "speak" security to the state. I argue that nondominant societal groups are unable to gain authoritative acceptance for security issues that challenge the dominant national identity. In effect, indigeneity acts an inhibiting condition for successful securitization because, by identifying the state and dominant society as the source of their insecurity, Indigenous peoples' security claims challenge the ontological security of settler societies. Given the incommensurability of Indigenous and settler claims to authority over land, and the ontological relationship to land that underpins Indigenous identities and worldviews, the inhibiting condition is especially relevant with respect to security claims based on damage to the natural environment.

This article examines the possibilities and implications of employing virtual environments (VEs), immersive virtual environments (IVEs), and collaborative virtual environments (CVEs) in the courtroom. We argue that the immersive and interactive reality created by these tools adds significant value as a simulation of experience to enhance courtroom practice. The obvious boundaries between real and virtual enhance the attractiveness of these tools as technologies of rhetorical persuasion that can be used to demonstrate subjective perspective, strengthen or impeach the credibility of witnesses, and provide the trier of fact with a better understanding of each side's perception of the facts at issue. The article introduces the concepts of VEs, IVEs, and CVEs, describes the manners in which these technologies have been applied to settings other than the courts system, and review the relevant psychological and legal literature. It discusses specific applications of the technology to the court system and suggests how it could improve upon current procedures. Finally, it discusses some of the limitations and problems, and suggests legal reforms necessary to the adoption of these technologies, specifically rules of procedure that provide for all parties to be able to access, manipulate and inspect any virtual environment, the trier of fact to be able to interact with, rather than just accept the lawyer's rendition, and rules that provide for the parties to introduce at trial an inventory of all digital assets contained in the virtual environment, making those that are stipulated to and those that are in controversy.

The period since the last survey published in this journal has been marked by much activity, but also some frustration, in the area of EU environmental policy.1 The present survey comes as the EU nears the end of its Sixth Environmental Action Programme (EAP) setting out the EU's environmental policy directions from 2002 to 2012, where it identified four priority areas for this period: climate change; nature and biodiversity; environment and health; and natural resources and waste.2 While progress has been made in each of these fields, significant setbacks have also occurred and, in a number of important areas, the state of the EU environment continues to deteriorate.

Violent Environments. Nancy Lee Peluso and Michael Watts. eds. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. 453 pp.