Objective:To test the efficacy of single family room (SFR) neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) designs, questions regarding patient medical progress and relative patient safety were explored. Addressing these questions would be of value to hospital staff, administrators and designers alike.Study Design:This prospective study documented, by means of Institution Review Board-approved protocols, the progress of patients in two contrasting NICU designs. Noise levels, illumination and air quality measurements were included to define the two NICU physical environments.Result:Infants in the SFR unit had fewer apneic events, reduced nosocomial sepsis and mortality, as well as earlier transitions to enteral nutrition. More mothers sustained stage III lactation, and more infants were discharged breastfeeding in the SFR.Conclusion:This study showed the SFR to be more conducive to family-centered care, and to enhance infant medical progress and breastfeeding success over that of an open ward.

Objective:With neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) evolving from multipatient wards toward family-friendly, single-family room units, the study objective was to compare satisfaction levels of families and health-care staff across these differing NICU facility designs.Study Design:This prospective study documented, by means of institutional review board-approved questionnaire survey protocols, the perceptions of parents and staff from two contrasting NICU environments.Result:Findings showed that demographic subgroups of parents and staff perceived the advantages and disadvantages of the two facility designs differently. Staff perceptions varied with previous experience, acclimation time and employment position, whereas parental perceptions revealed a naiveté bias through surveys of transitional parents with experience in both NICU facilities.Conclusion:Use of transitional parent surveys showed a subject naiveté bias inherent in perceptions of inexperienced parents. Grouping all survey participants demographically provided more informative interpretations of data, and revealed staff perceptions to vary with position, previous training and hospital experience.

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Tree-planting has long been an obsession of postcolonial environmental governance. Never innocent of its imperial history, the practice persists in global regimes of forestry today. For over two centuries, afforestation has been viewed as a panacea for a variety of ills including civilizational decline, diminished precipitation, warming temperatures, soil erosion, and decreasing biodiversity. As a result, tree plantations, despite their demonstrated failings in many environments, have flourished as an art of environmental governance that we term arboreal biopolitics. We trace some of the origins and importance of the taux de boisement in such plantation efforts, typically understood as a percentage of “appropriately” wooded land within a territory. Likely first developed in France by the early 19th century, this notion was operationalized in colonial territories assumed to be massively deforested. Targets of 30–33% forest cover, the minimum assumed for European civilization, were built into French forest training and policy and exported globally. Indeed, we demonstrate here that these French colonial policies and influences were as significant in many regions as those of better documented German forestry traditions, especially in African colonial territories and in British India. We further analyze the implications of these policies, and the degree to which the concept of a taux de boisement appears to have traveled to colonial forestry in India, further shaping forest policies of the postindependence era. We provide the example of the “National Mission for a Green India,” an effort by the Government of India to increase forest/tree cover by 5 million hectares and improve quality of forest cover on another 5 million hectares of forest/nonforest lands. Ostensibly aimed at improving forest-based livelihoods, the initiative has all the qualities of past forestry efforts in India, which have historically performed a reverse role: disinheriting forest-rooted populations. Colonial forestry, we therefore conclude, continues to haunt contemporary policy, contributing pathological ecologies, especially in the drylands, often with pernicious effects on local people.

Neoliberal restructuring in Morocco has been taking place for over twenty years. Beginning with a decade of structural adjustment, from the early 1980s to the early 1990s, parts of the public sector have been privatized, state services such as health care and education reduced, tariffs lowered and exports heavily promoted. In the dryland agricultural areas, a declensionist colonial environmental narrative has been appropriated to help justify and implement the neoliberal goals of land privatization and the intensification of agricultural production in the name of environmental protection. This paper contributes to areas of growing interest for geographers through an analysis of the underexplored relationship between neoliberalism and environmentalism, in the form of questionable environmental narratives, in Morocco. Land degradation in the dryland agricultural areas of Morocco is commonly blamed on overgrazing by local pastoralists despite existing documentation that suggests instead that ploughing of marginal lands and over‐irrigation are the primary drivers of land degradation in the region. The deployment of this colonial environmental narrative of ‘native improvidence’ has facilitated an expansion of state power over collective rangelands under neoliberalism at the same time that government involvement has decreased in other sectors. The effects of neoliberalism in Morocco have been complex and thus the paper argues that current neoliberal reforms such as the Morocco–US free trade agreement need to be scrutinized carefully to prevent a further exacerbation of poverty as well as to prevent further land degradation in these areas.