The rapid progress of information technology has made public online participation in policy formulation an inevitable product of modern government reshaping and reconstruction. However, compared with developed countries, citizens’ online participation in policy formulation in China started relatively late. Thus, in order to explore an effective and efficient method for Chinese citizens’ participation in policy formulation, this research made a brief review of the experiences from the typical developed country of United States of America at first, followed by some other developed countries such as Singapore, South Korea, and Japan in Asia with similar situations. Still, combined with the current situation of the China itself into consideration, this research further proposes targeted recommendations. It is expected that the findings in this research could provide some references for the Chinese government to form more effective and efficient theoretical frameworks targeted at the future development trends of the Chinese society and accordingly, to improve the construction of democracy in China.

The Circular Economy is one of the most prominent cross-disciplinary and cross-sectoral concepts to emerge in recent decades. It has permeated academia, policymaking, business, NGOs, and the general public, leading to numerous applications of the concept, some of which only partially overlap. In this article, we review recent debates and research trends in the Circular Economy, outlining the ten most common groups of its conceptualizations using the PRISMA (Preferred Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis) method. We then propose a post disciplinary and transnational research program on the Circular Economy that would not only combine hard and soft sciences in unprecedented ways but also have important practical applications, such as developing tools to embed the Circular Economy in natural, technical, economic, and socio-cultural settings.

This article aims to present an analysis of the evolution and contributions developed and integrated into the corpus of Earth Jurisprudence from practice in seven (7) South American countries where 135 records were found between 2005 and 2023. The case study was carried out using the methodological approach of the qualitative approach, the hermeneutic method, and the documentary review technique. The unit of analysis was based on the recognition of rights to nature, the data and information organized according to legal/political provisions, the state, the actor that initiated the action, and the ecological actor involved. Among the most outstanding findings, it is evident that a large number of records are concentrated in Ecuador and Colombia. The first correlates with the constitutionalization of the rights of nature and coincides with the second as they have been part of the stream known as new Latin American constitutionalism. In addition, a notable jurisprudential development recognizes nature as a subject of rights and declares it a victim of the armed conflict. Bolivia, which also joined this emerging denomination, has a different tendency than it had in its beginnings, not as the two countries mentioned above have done. Brazil stands out for its considerable increase in such legislative recognition. Argentina has a stronger emphasis on animal law. Peru has an incipient contribution to some regulatory implementation. Finally, Chile, the most laggard, tries it with a new constitution that recognizes these rights without having the approval at the ballot box. It is concluded the need to elevate the rights of nature and animals to constitutional status, claiming indigenous and ancestral cosmogonies regionally since it includes a legal stability that would facilitate the work of judicial and legislative actors and decision-makers for developing public policies, which would contribute to the practical development of the new Latin American constitutionalism and the Earth Jurisprudence.

The St. Peter Sandstone of the American Midwest is presented today in textbooks as a simple and unproblematic example of “layer-cake geology.” The thesis of this paper is that the very simplicity of St. Peter Sandstone has made it challenging to characterize. In widely separated states, the sandstone appeared under different names. Several theories about how it formed began to circulate. The story of the St. Peter is not only the story of the assemblage of a stratigraphic unit over a vast area during three centuries, but also the role the study of the provenance of this unit played in the development of sedimentology in the early twentieth century, research that was made all the more challenging by its “simple” mineralogy. Indeed, the St. Peter has been controversial since it was first described.