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Articles 1 - 20 of 20
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Treasure Island: Gold Dust Or Radioactive Soil?, Ari Daniels
Treasure Island: Gold Dust Or Radioactive Soil?, Ari Daniels
Scripps Senior Theses
Former Naval Station Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay is undergoing an expensive redevelopment process to be turned into a sustainable living community. However, the area has a long history of mishandled radioactive material, irresponsible behavior on behalf of authorities, environmental instability, lawsuits, and administrative complaints. This research project focuses on Treasure Island’s history and redevelopment plan, utilizing San Francisco government documents, local newspapers, literature on environmental justice and racism, and state legislation to draw conclusions on the efficacy of the project from a sustainability standpoint and the responsibilities of the planners and developers. After providing a historical overview …
Let Us Be The Fish Who Grow Legs: A Curriculum Guide For Linking Prison Industrial Complex Abolition, Environmental Justice, And State Power, Tess Gibbs
Scripps Senior Theses
This curriculum guide is designed to connect students’ understandings of environmental problems and injustices to their understandings of prison industrial complex (PIC) abolition, with the ultimate intention of cultivating the knowledge and imaginative practices to develop abolitionist-aligned solutions to environmental justice (EJ) problems outside of frameworks that rely upon state sanction. Students will connect the mutual causal forces of environmental injustices and the carceral state; explore intersections of environmental and carceral politics; and finish the course with broadened understandings of humans’ real and unrealized relationships with each other and the more-than-human world. The guide is intended to be worked through …
An Ancient Thread Of “Inseparable Oneness”: A Theoretical Exploration Of Community And Kinship In Grassroots Environmental Justice Movements, Izzy Dean
Pitzer Senior Theses
This thesis arose from a particular fascination and frustration with the prescribed nuclear family unit and the competitive isolation that capitalism breeds within normative communities, particularly in the United States. In this paper, I use the approach of theoretical exploration combined with case study research to explore the role of community and kinship within grassroots environmental justice organizations. I initially wanted to explore examples of people and groups who found strength and resistance by engaging in “non-normative” or “queer” community-building practices. I have since redefined my topic as a broad theoretical exploration in which I cite theories of non-normativity, among …
Radioactive, Internal Colonialism: The Uranium Industry’S Historic And Current Impact On The Navajo Nation, Sophie Arens
Radioactive, Internal Colonialism: The Uranium Industry’S Historic And Current Impact On The Navajo Nation, Sophie Arens
Pitzer Senior Theses
The United States withheld information pertaining to the health problems associated with nuclear power, allowing uranium to be extracted, processed, and stored in the Southwest of the United States and more specifically the Navajo Nation. With this, many Diné people who had previously worked in the mines or lived within close vicinity to facilities developed various types of illnesses. This thesis argues that the development of nuclear energy in the United States is a form of radioactive, internal colonialism and that the current waste facility located in Carlsbad, New Mexico is furthering this history into the present day. This thesis …
Forest Offsets In The California Carbon Market: Challenges Of A Market Based Climate Solution, Eric Warmoth
Forest Offsets In The California Carbon Market: Challenges Of A Market Based Climate Solution, Eric Warmoth
CMC Senior Theses
Within California’s cap-and-trade program, forest offsets allow landowners to earn carbon credits for protecting forests that sequester carbon and sell these credits to polluters that can then emit one additional ton of carbon. The state’s top regulator, the California Air Resources Board (CARB), is tasked with overseeing cap-and-trade and the forest offset system. CARB is currently updating the state’s Climate Change Scoping Plan to set California on track to achieve its 2030 climate goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels. CARB is approving forest offsets that overestimate emissions reductions, while allowing companies to continue polluting in …
Present And Passionate: A Critical Analysis Of Asian American Involvement In The United States Environmental Justice Movement, Emily M. Ng
Pitzer Senior Theses
Communities of color are disproportionately exposed to toxins and pollution. The environmental justice movement addresses the greater health and environmental risks experienced by minority groups. Although Asian Americans are the fastest growing population in the United States, there is little known about their involvement in the movement. In this thesis, I further observe Asian American involvement in the United States environmental justice movement. By analyzing community case studies, I identify Asian American-specific mobilization challenges and strategies. Interviews with prominent Asian American environmental justice activists reveal activism and collective identity are connected, but vary greatly according to individualized Asian American experiences. …
Elevating Equity: Strategies From State-Level Clean Energy Standards In The United States, Spencer Burget
Elevating Equity: Strategies From State-Level Clean Energy Standards In The United States, Spencer Burget
Pitzer Senior Theses
I compare strategies for equity in state-level clean energy standards across the United States. I avoid adopting an explicit definition of equity because I do not attempt to evaluate the impacts of these policies. Rather, I analyze how different states are forging their own definitions of equity within their clean energy policy. Specifically, I present case studies of four early adopters that have championed equity in their clean energy transition. First, New Mexico offers a unique strategy for protecting displaced fossil fuel workers through power plant securitization. Next, California’s robust policy context demonstrates how to minimize the financial impact of …
Equity, Education, And Emergency: Examining Social Resilience Building Pilot Programs, Methods, And Successes In Massachusetts Communities, Mia Kania
Scripps Senior Theses
The concept of resilience and the methods and process of building it are as-of-yet undefined, set, or universally agreed upon. However, as the need to build resilience’s essential components, i.e. “the capacity of social, economic, and environmental systems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance,” increases, the urgency to understand the driving factors behind the concept and develop effective methods to foster these capacities grows as well. To gain insight into how climate change preparations can best facilitate resilience in their target communities, therefore, this thesis explores the concept of resilience as it is built, practiced, and …
Exploring Transit-Based Environmental Injustices In San Gabriel Valley And Greater Los Angeles, Bailey Lai
Exploring Transit-Based Environmental Injustices In San Gabriel Valley And Greater Los Angeles, Bailey Lai
Pomona Senior Theses
This thesis attempts to disentangle the multilayered interactions between Greater Los Angeles’s history, its built environment, and its inequitable treatment of different peoples, focusing on how transportation in surrounding suburban communities like San Gabriel Valley has developed in relation to the inner city of Los Angeles. Greater Los Angeles contains a long, winding trajectory of transit-based environmental injustices, from the indigenous societies being overtaken by the Spanish missions, to the railroads and streetcars boosting the farmlands and urban growth of Los Angeles, leading into the decline of transit and rise of automobile-oriented suburbia. Within the San Gabriel Valley, the suburban …
Campaigning On An Environmental Justice Platform: Irmalinda Osuna For Upland City Council, District 3, Jenny Bekenstein
Campaigning On An Environmental Justice Platform: Irmalinda Osuna For Upland City Council, District 3, Jenny Bekenstein
Pitzer Senior Theses
After successfully organizing around preserving Cabrillo Park in Upland and feeling a lack of local political representation, Irmalinda Osuna ran for Upland City Council in the 2018 midterm elections. As one of the many female candidates in the 2018 elections, Irmalinda led a grassroots, community-led political campaign in which she advocated for environmental justice and the preservation of parks, a more inclusive community, increased civic participation, a more efficient use of technology in politics, and support for small businesses.
Indigenous People, Development And Environmental Justice: Narratives Of The Dayak People Of Sarawak, Malaysia, Elizabeth Weinlein '17
Indigenous People, Development And Environmental Justice: Narratives Of The Dayak People Of Sarawak, Malaysia, Elizabeth Weinlein '17
EnviroLab Asia
Focusing on the indigenous people of Sarawak, this article explores the authors learned biases as well as the dispelling of myths through hands on experiences in Malaysia. Over the period of a couple days, it becomes apparent that the indigenous people in Sarawak are not victims of systems of oppression, but survivors who continue to fight for their land rights and livelihoods.
White Privilege In Environmental Policy: An Analysis Of Hazardous Waste Management And Operations In Southeast Los Angeles, Lindsey Chen
White Privilege In Environmental Policy: An Analysis Of Hazardous Waste Management And Operations In Southeast Los Angeles, Lindsey Chen
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis takes an unconventional approach to environmental racism. Through the lens of white privilege and racial capitalism, I analyze hazardous waste procedures, work site dynamics, and governmental enforcement. Southeast Los Angeles encompasses 26 neighborhoods and the communities racial demographic is 85.8% people of color. The region is home to an abundance of hazardous waste generators, and the area is disproportionately burdened by pollution compared to the rest of LA County. I chose white privilege as a framework because more often than not, discrimination in the workplace is unintentional and covert. White privilege manifests through hazardous waste management in four …
Environmental Justice Litigation In California: How Effective Is Litigation In Addressing Slow Violence?, Deedee Chao
Environmental Justice Litigation In California: How Effective Is Litigation In Addressing Slow Violence?, Deedee Chao
CMC Senior Theses
As the environmental justice movement has spread and become more mainstream since its start in the 1980s, its framework and body of knowledge has expanded, and environmental justice activists, organizers, and scholars have developed and critiqued different methods through which environmental justice can be pursued. Among its relatively new concepts is the idea of slow violence, or the long-term and continuous impacts of environmental injustices on an afflicted community; and among the methods examined by scholars is environmental justice litigation, where legal action is taken, often with members of an affected community as plaintiffs, to remedy environmental injustices within that …
Oceans Of Space, Stephanie Steinbrecher '16
Oceans Of Space, Stephanie Steinbrecher '16
EnviroLab Asia
"Oceans of Space" relates my observations of the 2016 EnviroLab Asia Clinic Trip to Singapore and Sarawak, Malaysia. In this meditation, the concept of space serves as a lens to examine assumptions of geopolitical, historical, and philosophical positioning—regionally and globally. At the center of my inquiry is EnviroLab's connection to the Dayak communities in Baram, Sarawak. This region is experiencing dramatic social and ecological change as a result of industrial development. By triangulating my subjective impressions of this space, various knowledge systems, and the qualitative data EnviroLab gathered in Southeast Asia, I aim to untangle some paradoxes that complicate the …
Dismantling Structural Inequality In The Inland Empire: Rebuilding Community From The Ground Up At Huerta Del Valle Garden, Jennifer E. Reyff
Dismantling Structural Inequality In The Inland Empire: Rebuilding Community From The Ground Up At Huerta Del Valle Garden, Jennifer E. Reyff
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis provides an analytical case study of Huerta del Valle Community Garden as a successful model of redefining social capital through not only providing healthy, affordable, high quality produce to a community subjected to the disproportionate consequences of systemic inequality, but also in incorporating a food justice education framework to underlie all development at the garden. Located in the city of Ontario, Southern California – the heart of the Inland Empire, known for its prominence within the nation’s goods movement industry and its landscape of sprawling warehouses – local residents face high rates of poverty, obesity, and a lack …
Environmental Racism And The Movement For Black Lives: Grassroots Power In The 21st Century, Rickie Cleere
Environmental Racism And The Movement For Black Lives: Grassroots Power In The 21st Century, Rickie Cleere
Pomona Senior Theses
This thesis explores the ways in which the environmental justice movement, which is in opposition to environmental racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement, which is in opposition to police brutality and other forms of racism, are part of the same struggle: a struggle against the neoliberal violence of the state. This struggle against neoliberal violence is at the same time a struggle for communities of color to achieve self-determination on a global scale, a monumental task which might be informed through a revolutionary intercommunalist framework of global grassroots solidarity. State oppression embodies violence in more forms that one, including …
What A Waste: Segregation And Sanitation In Brooklyn, New York In The Post-Wwii Era, Amanda T. Chang
What A Waste: Segregation And Sanitation In Brooklyn, New York In The Post-Wwii Era, Amanda T. Chang
Pitzer Senior Theses
Through studying the intersections of sanitation and segregation in Brooklyn, New York in the post-WWII era, this thesis reveals a web of willful white negligence that constructed a narrative that supports continued environmental injustices towards black Americans. As a result of housing discrimination, the lack of sanitation, and the political and social climate of the 1950s, black neighborhoods in Brooklyn became dirtier with abandoned garbage. Institutional anti-black racism not only permitted and supported the degradation of black neighborhoods, but also created an association between black Americans and trash. In the present day, this narrative not only leads to the increased …
The Political Economy Of Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study Of New Delhi And Los Angeles, Ratik Asokan
The Political Economy Of Environmental Justice: A Comparative Study Of New Delhi And Los Angeles, Ratik Asokan
CMC Senior Theses
Though mainstream environmentalism, both in the U.S. and India, was initially rooted in social justice, it has, over time, moved away from this focus. The Environmental Justice Movement consequently arose to reunite social and environmental activism. In this thesis, I trace the historical relationship between the mainstream environmentalism, the Environmental Justice Movement, and marginalized communities. After providing this general overview, I examine two case studies – in Los Angeles and New Delhi respectively – where marginalized communities have been involved in Environmental Justice activities. My analysis reveals that marginalized communities often act in an ‘environmentalist’ or ‘environmentally friendly’ manner, without …
A Place Like This: An Environmental Justice History Of The Owens Valley - Water In Indigenous, Colonial, And Manzanar Stories, Monica Embrey
A Place Like This: An Environmental Justice History Of The Owens Valley - Water In Indigenous, Colonial, And Manzanar Stories, Monica Embrey
Pomona Senior Theses
This text provides an environmental justice analysis of the stories of the people who lived in the Owens Valley, who watered its land and cultivated its crops—pine trees, apple trees, and kabocha alike. Telling the personal stories of challenge and resistance that manifested alongside the oppressive forces of military and state domination provides the opportunity to align forcibly relocated, exploited and incarcerated people’s struggles throughout time. This text starts with The Nü’ma Peoples who were the first humans to live in the Owens Valley and continues with the struggle for empire between rival colonial empires of agriculture and distant urban …
Land Development And Biotechnology At The Claremont Colleges, Paul Faulstich
Land Development And Biotechnology At The Claremont Colleges, Paul Faulstich
Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research
Founded on the Oxford model of a cluster of institutions, the Claremont Colleges has periodically established a new school. In the Spring of 1997, the Board of Fellows of the Claremont University Center charged with policy-making for the consortium-voted to establish a seventh college; the Keck Graduate Institute of applied life sciences. or bioengineering. Despite other landholdings, including a golf course and a non-operational gravel quarry, the Board of Fellows voted to site the New Venture on a portion-approximately eleven acres--of the Bernard Biological Field Station. (Pitzer's vote was cast against building on the Field Station.)