Studying the global politics of the environment is a complex, sometimes challenging, but always illuminating task. Those who study this area approach it from many different directions: political science, economics, sociology, law, and ecology, to name but a few. For my own part, I first heard about climate change from my high school biology teacher in the mid-1980s; shortly thereafter, we all found out about the ozone layer as all the hairsprays, deodorants, and other aerosol products containing ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) vanished from store shelves. As an undergraduate studying economics, I learned about “externalities,” “public goods,” and other ways that unregulated capitalism leads, in the absence of intervention, to environmental damage – including damage that travels across national borders. I carried these interests on to graduate school and Ph.D. work in political science, without really expecting to be able to study them in the context of an advanced degree in international relations theory. This all changed following the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro. The Earth Summit, as it is often called, brought into focus a whole network of international treaties and agreements set up to manage international environmental problems – and proved to be a watershed moment for an emerging academic field of international environmental politics, particularly the study of international cooperation among nation states for global environmental protection. These days, as a professor in an interdisciplinary environmental studies department, and an active participant in the academic field of global environmental politics, I encounter perspectives outside the political science field that explain the deeply pervasive nature of global environmental change and advocate a range of political solutions above and beyond international diplomacy.

Today's students were born into a world with serious and widespread environmental challenges, with literally thousands of international agreements, organizations, partnerships, networks, and initiatives attempting to meet these challenges. They also know that many global environmental trends are in the wrong direction, and serious structural and institutional changes are likely to be needed in order to address them. There are no optimal solutions to global environmental degradation, and many will be grappling with these problems for decades to come.

A little history, to begin with: the phenomena that come under the heading ‘English auxiliaries’ were instrumental in bringing about the contemporary era in syntax, and, beyond syntax, in linguistics as a field. In Chomsky's watershed 1957 monograph Syntactic Structures, these phenomena were perhaps the key setpiece for the pivotal argument in the book that context-free phrase structure rules, of the sort that we first formulated to capture basic phrasal constituency in English, get crucial facts about the language wrong. Chomsky's point was not that such rules cannot summarize our observations about what we find in English, but rather that, implicitly, they deny the existence of a certain kind of pattern that can in fact be shown to exist, and therefore are wrong, not about the data, but about recurrent patterns in the data. The new kind of rule that Chomsky proposed to deal with this difficulty (a more user-friendly version of a kind of mechanism that certain logicians and linguists of the preceding generation (in particular Emil Post and Zelig Harris) had devised and experimented with) had the apparent virtue of being able to express these patterns easily. A good deal of the development syntax has experienced in the last quarter of a century reflects a somewhat belated counting of the costs incurred by Chomsky's innovation, and a gradual realization that there were far simpler, more economical solutions to the problem he pointed out with empirical coverage considerably better than what he had proposed in 1957.

The particular virtue of Chomsky's approach, then, is not the particular solution he advanced, which has become progressively less attractive as time has passed (even independently of framework-internal changes in the specific theory he inaugurated), but rather the enhanced scope of the linguist's intellectual responsibilities that it assumed. Recording the facts correctly no longer had the status of a sufficient activity, even with a convenient classification and organization of those facts; what was now essential was motivating those facts, by showing how they were manifestations of underlying patterns and their interaction. One could characterize most previous work in linguistics as at best proto-scientific, in the sense that recording and classification are crucial to the actual business of science, but are not themselves that business, which is to identify a domain of phenomena and discover the general principles governing the behavior of the phenomena in that domain.

The relationship between economic globalization and the environment has spurred debate across the fields of economics, international relations, law, geography, and other social science disciplines (Clapp and Dauvergne 2011). Is economic globalization, and the political structures that support it, intrinsically bad for the global environment? Is it a net positive for the environment, as the additional wealth generated by globalization is channeled into environmental protection and technological innovation? Alternatively, is globalization compatible with a sustainable future as long as we build in institutions and processes that enable environmental – and social – protections? As Clapp and Dauvergne point out, there are no definitive answers to these questions. However, they continue to inform how scholars, activists, and policy-makers address the ways in which the global economic order intersects with global environmental politics (GEP).

In this chapter we focus on the three main international economic governance institutions identified in Chapter 3 as sites of global governance: the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), known collectively as the Bretton Woods institutions, after the 1944 conference where they were founded. We examine how they have created rules and institutions that steer and shape environmental governance at all levels, including governing the impacts of their own activities. Further, we focus on how they manage this transition, including the linkages and overlap between their work and that of the global environmental governance (GEG) arena.

As the main international organizations governing trade, finance, and development assistance, the Bretton Woods institutions have been critical in defining the path of economic globalization in the decades since World War Two. More recently, they have become focal points for critics of the environmental and social impacts of capitalist, or neoliberal, globalization. We examine the origins and trajectory of the post-war global economic order, and how trade, aid, and global finance are seen both as causes of global environmental change, and – potentially – as part of a transition to a more sustainable global economy.

Scholars give different weight to the role of the international economic order in global environmental politics. In Chapter 1 we discussed the difference between scholars who approach the global environment from a collective-action perspective and those who argue, by contrast, that global environmental degradation needs to be seen in the context of global capitalism.

Introduction

Initially termed “dementia praecox,” schizophrenia was first described by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in the late 19th century. Kraepelin distinguished dementia praecox from manic depressive illness, primarily a mood disorder, on the basis of differences in course and outcome: schizophrenia was observed to have a chronic and deteriorating course with a poor outcome, while manic depression was seen to have a cyclic “relapsing-remitting” course, with a more favourable long-term outcome. The name schizophrenia (literally “split mind”) was coined in the early 20th century by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, and much later manic depression was renamed bipolar disorder. However, problems in the distinctions between these two conditions were soon identified and noted by Kraepelin himself in his later writings. Considerable overlap was seen in clinical features, course, and outcome. The more recent diagnostic category of schizoaffective disorder may be seen to encompass composite forms of mood and schizophrenic disorders. Schizophrenia is now more commonly regarded as a clinical syndrome rather than a single disease entity; there is significant heterogeneity in clinical expression, and considerable overlap of both clinical and biological features with other psychiatric conditions. Scientific efforts are yet to delineate the causes and pathophysiology of schizophrenia, although some significant advances in understanding the neurobiology and treatment mechanisms have been made in the past 50 years.

A strong genetic basis for schizophrenia is indicated by family and molecular genetic studies. However, a clear role for environmental influences in the development of schizophrenia is also well established. Current molecular genetic studies of schizophrenia encompassing worldwide consortia have been able to account for an increasing but minor fraction of risk for schizophrenia in common genetic loci. Rare genetic variations, such as copy number deletions and duplications, are also emerging as important risk indicators. High overlap in the heritability of bipolar and schizoaffective disorder within families has also been shown in large-scale epidemiological research.

In terms of impact and incidence, schizophrenia ranks among the top 10 causes of disability in developed countries and incidence is estimated at 15.2/100 000, with current prevalence estimated at 4.6/1000 (McGrath et al., 2008).

Basic Properties of Finite Nuclei

We begin the discussions of finite nuclei with some general remarks on the systematics of the nuclear ground state. For even-even nuclei (nuclei with an even number of both protons and neutrons) the nucleons making up the nucleus form pairs containing one spin-up and one spin-down nucleon to yield a net spin of zero and even parity. In Chapter 15 we consider elastic electron scattering from such nuclei as the paradigm for what follows. Odd-even and even-odd nuclei often, but not always, have the same spin as the last unpaired valence nucleon; we shall see examples when discussing elastic magnetic electron scattering and magnetic moments also in Chapter 15. Finally, odd-odd nuclei are somewhat unusual. There exist only four stable nuclei having unpaired protons and neutrons, namely, 2H, 6Li, and 14N with spin-parity 1+, and 10B having 3+. The basic characteristics of the known nuclei are the following: they occupy a region in the NZplane whose central valley runs roughly along the N = Z line at values of A below 40 and then bends towards the region having higher values of N than of Z, as shown in Fig. 13.1. Taking cuts across the valley at either constant Z or at constant N, one climbs out of the valley, on the average moving to less bound nuclei until reaching the so-called drip-lines where nuclei are no longer stable to proton or neutron emission. At the bottom of the valley, where the most stable nuclei reside, one finds the binding energy per nucleon to be relatively constant for nuclei beyond A = 40 at a value ̴ 8.5 MeV per nucleon, as shown in Fig. 13.2 and, as the values of N and Z where stable nuclei exist become very large, this valley of stability narrows and then disappears.

One of the key questions in studies of nuclear systematics is: Do “islands of stability” exist at even higher N, Z-values, the so-called superheavy nuclei? An island of stability, first conjectured by Seaborg in the 1960s, is a collection of heavier isotopes of transuranic elements, expected to be more stable than those closer in atomic number to uranium with radioactive decay half-lives of minutes to days.

The past one hundred years has witnessed enormous advances in human understanding of the physical universe in which we have evolved. For the past fifty years or so, the Standard Model of the subatomic world has been systematically developed to provide the quantum mechanical description of electricity and magnetism, the weak interaction, and the strong force. Symmetry principles, expressed mathematically via group theory, serve as the backbone of the Standard Model. At this time, the Standard Model has passed all tests in the laboratory. Notwithstanding this success, most of the matter available to experimental physicists is in the form of atomic nuclei. The most successful description of nuclei is in terms of the observable protons, neutrons, and other hadronic constituents, and not the fundamental quarks and gluons of the Standard Model. Thus, the professional particle or nuclear physicist should be comfortable in applying the hadronic description of nuclei to understanding the structure and properties of nuclei. Experimentally, lepton scattering has proved to be the cleanest and most effective tool for unraveling the complicated structure of hadrons. Its application over different energies and kinematics to the nucleon, fewbody nuclei, and medium- and heavy-mass nuclei has provided the solid body of precise experimental data on which the Standard Model is built.

In addition, the current understanding of the microcosm described in this book provides answers to many basic questions: How does the Sun shine? What is the origin of the elements? How old is the Earth? Further, it underscores many aspects of modern human civilization, e.g., MRI imaging uses the spin of the proton, nuclear isotopes are essential medical tools, nuclear reactions have powered the Voyager spacecraft since 1977 into interstellar space.

The purpose of the book is to allow the graduate student to understand the foundations and structure of the Standard Model, to apply the Standard Model to understanding the physical world with particular emphasis on nuclei, and to establish the frontiers of current research. There are many outstanding questions that the Standard Model cannot answer. In particular, astrophysical observation strongly supports the existence of dark matter, whose direct detection has thus far remained elusive.