Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The long term is a defining characteristic of sustainability. Other goals may have an implicit long-term element, but they are not defining. In other goals—democracy, growth, peace, for instance—the long term element is thin; it merely follows from the very desirability of the goal itself: since peace is a good thing, obviously we want it all the time. In sustainability, the long term element must be thick, it must stand out, bold and explicit, constantly debated and negotiated to be sure, but prominent and defining. In part this is because the sustainability goal has arisen at a historical juncture (roughly the 1980s to the present) where so much decision making is short term. A primary reason is the ever-increasing penetration of the market where more and more of life, especially everyday life, is commodified and where the externalization of costs, the distancing of commerce, all informed by modern economics, a form of reasoning inherently short term, even atemporal prevails. But the larger reason for developing a thick notion of the long term is the state of the environment, both the biophysical environment, that is, the material underpinnings of all economies, and the social environment, the relations among people and between people and the natural world. The strain on these dimensions are well documented, and the trends are rarely positive. Yet for many, that is, those who can buy their way out of the consequences of environmental degradation (for now), things look good. For them, roughly a fifth of the world’s population, concentrated in the North and in capital cities of the South, the challenges of life are indeed short term; the future, as always, will take care of itself. The trends speak otherwise, however, for rich and poor alike: no one escapes climate change or persistent toxics or the consequences of depleted soils.
The challenge of so constructing a “thick” long term rests on a central dilemma in the global environmental problematic: the incidence and scope of cause-effect time lags and consequent proliferation of risks is expanding at the same time that time scales of practice are contracting (from the years and seasons of agrarians to the minutes and nanoseconds of technologists, for instance). Overlaying this twin phenomenon is a pervasive belief that humans are inherently short term, a belief buttressed by:
i. everyday experience (e.g., shopping as recreation and expression; throw-away product design, packaging, and buildings for ; investing as gambling;
ii. science (especially behavioral biology: it’s all a fight for day-to-day survival and reproduction);
iii. markets (especially those dominated by discounted financial mechanisms); and
iv. politics (especially that driven by public opinion polls and marketing reports).
In this paper I argue that it is not enough to make pleas for long-term thinking. Scientific evidence for time-lagged risk proliferation has no more bearing on policymaking or everyday life (e.g., consumption) than historical evidence has on the imperialistic ambitions of political leaders (with the urge to dominate and the likelihood of overextension). A more fruitful approach is, on the one hand, to expose the seemingly natural or inevitable short-termness of contemporary thought and practice and, on the other, to identify structural conditions that lean decisionmaking away from the short term and toward the long term.
This paper, then, is an attempt to construct a long term, not through scientific proof or appeals to environmental necessity, but through a logic of thought and action grounded in history, ecology, organization and politics. I start with a brief characterization of the biophysical and social context for which the imperative of long-term thinking is most evident—“long crises”—then turn to what is perhaps the most vexing issue in the consideration of the long term, namely, the modern belief that humans are inherently short term. Here I trace several intellectual traditions that contribute to that belief. I then construct an alternative view, one grounded in research on human thinking and adapting and provide contrary evidence, some anecdotal, some historical, in modern business practice (cases) and theory (discount rate). I conclude by positing minimal conditions for a policy environment oriented to the long term, what I term a neo-prudential order.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: For Panel Domestic Politics and Foreign
Policy
#031005
Much of the research on whether domestic political factors within democratic
states affects the use of force abroad tends examine only the onset of conflict and is
centered squarely on the United States. What is missing is an understanding of how
domestic political conditions continue to influence conflict once underway. Additionally,
because the bulk of this research is US centered it is not clear as to how generalizable this
research is beyond the US borders. Using hazard analysis and a new data set on major
power interventions in the post World War II era I examine whether domestic political
factors in the US the UK and France affect the decision to continue or cease using force
abroad. The results suggest that the domestic political environment does affect the
decision to continue an intervention but that the method of intervention is crucial to this
relationship. This may help explain why past studies that only focus on the severity of
conflict or lump disputes together often are contradictory. The results also suggest that
much of the research on domestic politics and foreign policy is generalizable to
democratic states beyond the context of the US.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper presents some midterm research outcomes or policy recommendations of a three-year project of the National Institute of Environmental Studies (NIES) to envision a long-term target for Japan and the rest of the world. An attendant objective of this paper is to evaluate some efforts to attempt to help articulate a long-term target for the reduction of greenhouse gases (GHGs) beyond the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (beyond 2012) especially referring to EU?s efforts.The first part of this collaborative paper will present a theoretical framework about how to look into the future international political changes aiming at setting up the parameter within which concrete policy proposals for the reduction of GHGs will be articulated. Having given the theoretical framework consisted of three major outlooks of the world--?protective regionalism,? ?globalism,? and ?global communitarianism?--, the paper will try to identify each outlook?s domestic and international policy options relating to global climate change, such as energy and industrial policies. Then, the rest of the paper will elaborate how to share the burden of reducing GHGs especially among Annex-I countries and the rest of the world, while attending to enunciating robust and feasible criteria for the allocation of long-term targets.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Narrative seduction is a readerly and writerly collaboration mediated by suasory texts, and they are designed to invite in the imagination, distort realities, delight the senses and move the story along. As is the case in any seduction, the rhetorical process is powerful and the narrative results often delicious, deflective, a little disturbing and potentially dangerous. In this paper I will explore, in a self-reflexive manner, narrative seductions as they work in texts. My goal is to ask questions about how narrative seductions, operating under the label of “fiction,” “creative nonfiction/memoir,” and “autoethnography” allow authors to “get away with” or at least to deflect attention away from their depictions, which otherwise may be found deeply offensive to their readers. What is the “work” that these textual seductions serve? Do they help readers (and writers) understand better the various complexities of human thoughts, passions, and actions? Do they provide textual space to expose and maybe exorcise demons? Do they enable textual interrogations of otherwise “unspeakable” situations and characters? Or are they, as may also be the case in any form of seduction, ways to use the playful allure of the erotic to mask true feelings of power, passion, and control.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The 1990s were a decade of markedly declining domestic and international wars. These declines are attributable to the convergence of many trends. I suggest here that those trends continue and the recent upsurge in terrorist attacks and other mass violence perhaps are an aberration. I discuss how the current events may be in part a consequence of governments and groups acting in ways that are contrary to the major trends contributing to global peace and cooperation. Acting in concert with those trends may help reduce the current rise in mass violence.