Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Malaya's Greatest Menace? Slow-Onset Disaster And The Muddy Politics Of British Malaya, C. 1900–50, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1948, a chilling statement from British Malaya’s Director of Agriculture, F. Burnett, made headline news. According to Burnett, unchecked soil erosion across hillside Malaya would soon render the country’s precious agricultural land infertile. Erosion had worsened considerably after the 1880s due to widespread, indiscriminate agricultural and industrial clearing. By the 1920s, it had become a sizeable socioeconomic and environmental issue, thought also to contribute to the scale and intensity of flooding and the likelihood of dangerous landslips. The British Government raised a series of empire-wide inquiries across the first half of the twentieth century, tied to an emerging global …

Disasters Fast And Slow: The Temporality Of Hazards In Environmental History, Fiona Williamson, Chris Courtney

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Popular representations of disasters tend to focus upon dramatic moments of chaos. They envision panicked communities desperately scrambling for safety as earthquakes reduce cities to rubble or lava turns villages to ashes. Yet disasters actually unfold on numerous temporal scales. Media reports tend to reduce disasters to discrete events, initiated on the shallow causal timescale of a meteorological fluctuation or seismic disruption. Social scientists, by contrast, have often sought to emphasise the processual nature of disasters—embedding causality in the deeper timescale of a community, in which risk and vulnerability build over months or years.2 Environmental historians elongate causality even further, …

The Ethics Of Environmental Litigation, Jenna Marie Dibenedetto

Student Theses 2015-Present

Abstract

We are raised from the early days of our youth to distinguish right from wrong, evil from good. Though there are many careers that have easily distinguishable ethics from their day of creation, others require spend their entire professional careers floating in a grey area. Being a lawyer can leave you in limbo very often. The ethical battle between prosecuting people whose actions go against everything you believe in and defending someone who actions you struggle to rationalize, looking for a “nail in the coffin” or finding a way to pry it open can play a large role in …

Inch By Inch: Expanding The Community Garden Programs In New York City, Michael Bailey

Student Theses 2015-Present

The importance of community gardens in New York City is twofold: first as a portal to a real natural aesthetic in an otherwise brick and concrete urban jungle, and second as a sustainable alternative to agribusinesses that are dominant in the contemporary private sector. This paper addresses the issue of the diminishing community garden support in NYC, especially in middle and lower-income areas. The introduction is a personal anecdote about the poor quality of New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) gardens, and the work being done behind the scenes to improve them. Chapter one provides data showing the scope and …

Forgotten Soldiers: Burials On The Texas Frontier And Shifting Perceptions Of Military Interment, Anthony Schienschang Ii

Index of Texas Archaeology: Open Access Gray Literature from the Lone Star State

This research examines the interrelation between civilian and military burials on the Texas frontier in the 1850s with further discussion about the drivers for changing military burial practices. A soldier’s life on the Texas frontier is briefly outlined along with some of the difficulties facing service members living in border forts. Special focus is placed on examining the socio-economic differences between officers and enlisted personnel, as well as the recording of deaths on the frontier. As a case study, the condition of the proposed location of the Fort Gates cemetery is explored and brief analysis of data gathered from the …