Digital Commons Network^™

Environmental Beliefs And Concern About Animal Welfare: Exploring The Connections, Catherine A. Faver

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

An online survey examined environmental beliefs and concern about animal welfare among 105 social work students in the U.S.- Mexico border region. Environmental beliefs were measured using items from the revised New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) Scale (Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, & Jones, 2000). Higher concern about animal welfare was significantly related to three dimensions of the revised NEP Scale: (1) belief in the fragility of nature's balance, (2) belief in the possibility ofan ecological crisis, and (3) rejection of the notion that humans have a right to dominate nature (anti-anthropocentrism). The findings suggest that by making explicit connections between the …

Food Sovereignty: An Alternative Paradigm For Poverty Reduction And Biodiversity Conservation In Latin America, M Jahi Chappell, Hannah Wittman, Christopher M. Bacon, Bruce G. Ferguson, Luis García Barrios, Raúl García Barrios, Daniel Jaffee, Jefferson Lima, V. Ernesto Méndez,, Helda Morales, Lorena Soto-Pinto, John Vandermeer, Ivette Perfecto

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Strong feedback between global biodiversity loss and persistent, extreme rural poverty are major challenges in the face of concurrent food, energy, and environmental crises. This paper examines the role of industrial agricultural intensification and market integration as exogenous socio-ecological drivers of biodiversity loss and poverty traps in Latin America. We then analyze the potential of a food sovereignty framework, based on protecting the viability of a diverse agroecological matrix while supporting rural livelihoods and global food production. We review several successful examples of this approach, including ecological land reform in Brazil, agroforestry, milpa, and the uses of wild varieties in …

Introduction To Empowered Partnerships: Community-Based Participatory Action Research For Environmental Justice, Christopher M. Bacon, Saneta Devuono-Powell, Mary Louise Frampton, Tony Lopresti, Camille Pannu

Environmental Studies and Sciences

This article introduces a special section on empowered partnerships that deepens a dialogue initiated during the 2010 symposium titled EmPowered Partnerships: Community-Based Participatory Action Research for Environmental Justice. The articles in this section will be divided between issues 1 and 2 of the Journal. After briefly reviewing the definitions and the steps associated with community-based participatory action research (CBPAR), we identify the synergies connecting the underlying principles and values of the environmental justice (EJ) movement and CBPAR. The principles-based comparison is part of an ongoing effort to craft a framework that produces research partnerships that are simultaneously more responsive to …

Le Nature Degli American Studies, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Al “Futures of American Studies Institute” di Dartmouth del 2003 lanciai una provocazione sulle “geografie immaginate” dell’americanistica. Volevo mettere in discussione sia le celebrazioni romantiche del “luogo” in quanto elemento in qualche modo autentico e particolare, minacciato da un mondo sempre più globalizzato e controllato dalle multinazionali, sia l’esaltazione della “delocalizzazione” nelle società in rete, negli “spazi di flusso”, nella mobilità senza attrito. Suggerivo che queste, come altre geografie poco studiate, si sposano troppo facilmente con molte correnti dell’eccezionalismo americano.

The View From The Table: An Analysis Of Participant Reactions To Community-Based Dialogues On Food And Justice, Jennifer Turner

Dissertations and Theses

While Portland, Oregon's sustainable food movement wins accolades for explicitly situating itself in opposition to the industrialized global food system, it often fails to address systems of oppression that are reproduced within the alternative agri-food movement itself. This demonstrated aversion towards the messy, complex, contingent nature of the social world reflects larger processes of "de-politicization" of the overall sustainability agenda, which leads to the favoring of technological and/or spatial solutions that may undermine the social equity and justice dimensions of the "triple bottom line." This thesis focuses on an action research project involving a series of community dialogues that provided …

Urban Forest Justice And The Rights To Wild Foods, Medicines, And Materials In The City, Melissa R. Poe, Rebecca J. Mclain, Marla R. Emery, Patrick T. Hurley

Environment and Sustainability Faculty Publications

Urban forests are multifunctional socio-ecological landscapes, yet some of their social benefits remain poorly understood. This paper draws on ethnographic evidence from Seattle, Washington to demonstrate that urban forests contain nontimber forest products that contribute a variety of wild foods, medicines, and materials for the well-being of urban residents. We show that gathering wild plants and fungi in urban forests is a persistent subsistence and livelihood practice that provides sociocultural and material benefits to city residents, and creates opportunities for connecting with nature and enhancing social ties. We suggest that an orientation toward human-nature interactions in cities that conceptualizes the …

International Organizations, Free Trade And Environmental Citizenship: Mexico And Chile In Comparative Perspective, Sherrie Baver

Publications and Research

This paper focuses on the potential of Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) and specific International Organizations (IOs) to promote democratic and effective environmental governance. FTAs are often cited in the political science literature for their negative impacts; yet, they are central to the present stage of economic globalization. Given that U.S. FTAs have environmental requirements as do accession agreements to developed country IOs (e.g. OECD), they remain under-explored institutions providing space for activists to expand environmental citizenship. The specific research question explored here is how might activists use these institutions to promote procedural environmental rights to information, participation, and justice, collectively …

Introduction: Sex, Sexuality, And Gender As Useful Categories In Environmental History, Nancy Unger

History

This book is an effort to explain these kinds of extreme gendered divisions and to offer an enriched understanding of the powerful interplay between environment and sex, sexuality, and gender. The synergy produced by that interplay has been significant throughout American history, but it cannot be adequately understood and appreciated as long as those fields are discussed as discrete entities. The fields of gender and environment are growing, but scholars have seldom joined them together in analysis or heeded historian Carolyn Merchant's call that a gendered perspective be added to conceptual frameworks in environmental history.5 They have not offered a …

Iirsa And Energy Connectivity In The Amazon: Can Infrastructure Solve Energy Poverty In The Region?, Keon Monroe

Geography and the Environment Capstone Projects

About 85 percent (EIA 2010) of Brazil’s electricity comes from hydropower plants. Recent efforts are expanding the use of hydropower throughout the country and across its Amazonian region. Major programs, both private and in the government, are financing expansion of dams, as well as other transportation infrastructure. The largest infrastructure group in South America, the Initiative For the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), defines its purpose as an aim to strengthen transport, energy, and communications infrastructure under a regional prospective (IIRSA 2011). Thus presumptuously expanded and new infrastructure is essential to providing a better quality of life. …

Diversified Farming Systems: An Agroecological, Systems-Based Alternative To Modern Industrial Agriculture, Claire Kremen, Alastair Iles, Christopher M. Bacon

Environmental Studies and Sciences

This Special Issue on Diversified Farming Systems is motivated by a desire to understand how agriculture designed according to whole systems, agroecological principles can contribute to creating a more sustainable, socially just, and secure global food system. We first define Diversified Farming Systems (DFS) as farming practices and landscapes that intentionally include functional biodiversity at multiple spatial and/or temporal scales in order to maintain ecosystem services that provide critical inputs to agriculture, such as soil fertility, pest and disease control, water use efficiency, and pollination. We explore to what extent DFS overlap or are differentiated from existing concepts such as …

The Social Dimensions Of Sustainability And Change In Diversified Farming Systems, Christopher M. Bacon, Christy Getz, Sibella Kraus, Maywa Montenegro, Kaelin Holland

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Agricultural systems are embedded in wider social-ecological processes that must be considered in any complete discussion of sustainable agriculture. Just as climatic profiles will influence the future viability of crops, institutions, i.e., governance agreements, rural household and community norms, local associations, markets, and agricultural ministries, to name but a few, create the conditions that foster sustainable food systems. Because discussions of agricultural sustainability often overlook the full range of social dimensions, we propose a dual focus on a broad set of criteria, i.e., human health, labor, democratic participation, resiliency, biological and cultural diversity, equity, and ethics, to assess social outcomes, …

How Milk Does The World Good: Vernacular Sustainability And Alternative Food Systems In Post-Socialist Europe, Diana Mincyte

Publications and Research

Scholarly debates on sustainable consumption have generally overlooked alternative agro-food networks in the economies outside of Western Europe and North America. Building on practice-based theories, this article focuses on informal raw milk markets in post-socialist Lithuania to examine how such alternative systems emerge and operate in the changing political, social, and economic contexts. It makes two contributions to the scholarship on sustainable consumption. In considering semi-subsistence practices and poverty-driven consumption, this article argues for a richer, more critical, and inclusive theory of sustainability that takes into consideration vernacular forms of exchange and approaches poor consumers as subjects of global history. …

Rustbelt Theater: Children's Environmental Justice Narratives From South Elyria, Oh, Lissette Lorenz

Honors Papers

Children's knowledge of their eco-social environment is rarely privileged in environmental literature. Their voices help to broaden conceptions of environmental justice, to the benefit of both the environmental justice movement and the emerging discipline of environmental studies. In this community-based research project conducted in partnership with Save Our Children, an afterschool/summer enrichment center, in South Elyria, Ohio, third and fourth grade children utilized Theater of the Oppressed techniques to create an environmental justice narrative in the form of an original play. The goal of Theater of the Oppressed is for participants to dramatically analyze real-life oppressions/obstacles/challenges they face and act …

Do Environmental Audits Improve Long-Term Compliance: Evidence From Manufacturing Facilities In Michigan, Mary F. Evans, Lirong Liu, Sarah L. Stafford

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

Using a unique facility-level dataset from Michigan, we examine the effect of environmental auditing on manufacturing facilities’ long-term compliance with U.S. hazardous waste regulations. We also investigate the factors that affect facilities’ decisions to conduct environmental audits and whether auditing in turn affects the probability of regulatory inspections. We account for the potential endogeneity of our audit measure and the censoring of our compliance measure using a censored trivariate probit, which we estimate using simulated maximum likelihood. We find that larger facilities and those subject to more stringent regulations are more likely to audit; facilities with poor compliance records are …

Community Engagement In Sustainable Design: A Case Study Of The Oberlin Project, Amanda L. Goldstein

Honors Papers

The Oberlin Project is an unprecedented opportunity for the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and other participating institutions to work together to achieve sustainable development and carbon neutrality. How might these institutions engage Oberlin citizens in some of the planning decisions that will shape Oberlin's future? Collaborating with citizens is important because in theory, encouraging participatory, collaborative planning contributes to just, equitable, and diverse cities. Study of sustainability initiatives in Chattanooga, Tennessee, for instance, reveal that it is possible for cities to make great leaps at sustainable urbanism while simultaneously building up a strong base of social capital aimed at …

A History Of Resilience Is A History Of Resistance, Melissa Ooten

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Faculty Publications

As an historian, I’m struck by the emphasis this documentary places on non-humans – be it animals, plants, soil, or mountains – although as a native of Appalachia, that doesn’t surprise me. The film is billed as “America’s first environmental history series: and as such, it gives us a bold, unique template of how to talk holistically about the concept of place and the specific place of Appalachia. While it may be particularly prescient to talk about the broader concept of place through ecology and other facets when analyzing the history of Appalachia, surely it is no less important when …

Roger Bass, Roger Bass, Arthur Bednar, Charles Closmann

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Roger Bass, environmentalist and a founding member of the St. Johns Riverkeeper, interviewed by Arthur Bednar and Charles Closmann on November 19, 2010.

Bob And Kae Andry, Bob Andry, Kae Andry, Chris Brooks, Clayton Galloway

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Bob and Kae Andry, co-founders of Save Rodman Reservoir, interviewed by Chris Brooks and Clayton Galloway on November 13, 2010

Robert Knight, Robert Knight, Margaret Devore

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Robert Knight, leading expert and scientist working on protection of Florida springs and executive director of the Florida Springs Institute, interviewed by Margaret Devore on November 10, 2010.

Frankie Pacetti, E.J. Pacetti And Sandie Stratton, Frankie Pacetti, E.J. Pacetti, Sandie Stratton, Jennifer Warren, Melissa Williams

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Frankie Pacetti, a noted sports and commercial fisherwoman, E.J. Pacetti, an experienced commercial crabber in the region and Sandie Stratton, interviewed by Jennifer Warren and Melissa Williams on October 30, 2010.

Ron Littlepage, Ron Littlepage, Robert Mcdermott

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Ron Littlepage, staff columnist at the Florida Times Union, interviewed by Robert McDermott on October 26, 2010.

Vince Seibold, Vince Seibold

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Vince Seibold, division chief of the City of Jacksonville Environmental Quality Division, interviewed by Charles Cold on October 25, 2010.

Neil A. Armingeon, Neil A. Armingeon, Katie Tofano

Voices from the Stream: An Environmental History of the St. Johns River

Neil A. Armingeon, St. Johns Riverkeeper (at the time of the interview), interviewed by Katie Tofano on October 22, and November 18, 2010.

Climate Change And Globalization In The Americas: Case Studies Of Mitigation And Adaptation, Mary Finley-Brook, Melissa Haeffner, Charmaine Heslop-Thomas, Elma Montaña, Leah Sprain

Environmental Science and Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

Robin Leichenko and Karen O‘Brien have proposed ―double exposure‖ as a conceptual framework to demonstrate how processes of globalization and global environmental change (GEC) redefine risk and encourage new, interrelated responses to social and ecological transitions (O‘Brien and Leichenko, 2000; Leichenko and O'Brien, 2008). In particular, the concept encourages researchers and policy makers to consider interplay between global climate change and globalization and how this is expressed unevenly across space. After reviewing the ways double exposure has been used in the literature, we consider four case studies to investigate the utility of the framework for analyzing and understanding climate change …

The Hidden Costs: A Case Study For Sustainable Development Studies, Gabriel R. Valle

NACCS Annual Conference Proceedings

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Environmental Justice Movements For A Post-Capitalist World, Devon Peña, Kathryn Blackmer Reyes

NACCS Annual Conference Proceedings

No abstract provided.

From Jook Joints To Sisterspace: The Role Of Nature In Lesbian Alternative Environments In The United States, Nancy Unger

History

Despite the depth and breadth of Catriona Sandilands's groundbreaking "Lesbian Separatist Communities and the Experience of Nature," with its emphasis on communities in southern Oregon, Sandilands does not consider her article, published in 2002, to be "the last one on the topic." Instead she hopes "fervently that other researchers will enter into the ongoing conversation [about queer landscapes)" (136). This essay is an answer to her invitation to draw further "insight from queer cultures to form alternative, even transformative, cultures of nature" (135). It examines the role of place in the history of American lesbians, particularly the role of nonhuman …

Public Initiatives And Local Practices In China’S Response To Climate Change, Lei Xie

Conference on China and Global Climate Change : Reconciling International Fairness and Protection of the Atmospheric Commons

China is facing increasing environmental pressure, among which climate change is the most serious one. As many areas are still under development, the country’s vulnerability to the adverse impacts of climate change lies not only in its ecological aspect but also its social aspect. In particular, the country’s increasing energy demand has posed serious problem, as the country strongly relies on fossil-fuels. Dilemmas exist between development and increasing level of pollution. Local government, to realize its political credibility often permits environmental pollution happen and has been ineffective in local environmental governance.

Chinese environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGO), led by journalists, scientists …

Modeling China’S Climate Change Policy In A Post-2012 Framework : On The Perspective Of Reputation, Edward Xuedong Wang

Conference on China and Global Climate Change : Reconciling International Fairness and Protection of the Atmospheric Commons

The post-2012 world Climate Change scenario would heavily depend on China’s next steps on Climate Change Policy. The world could not coordinate their policies to slow global warming without China’s participation. However, China, the world’s largest GHG emitter with the rising energy demand, is reluctant to change its high-carbon economic development models by sticking to the concept of Climate Injustice. The Economic Cost and Climate Injustice are two major concerns Chinese government faces. This raises the issue of which approach would be most likely to stimulate and persuade China to take appropriate actions in the post-2012 climate regime.

This paper …

Climate Duties, Human Rights And Historic Emissions, Derek Bell

Conference on China and Global Climate Change : Reconciling International Fairness and Protection of the Atmospheric Commons

The problem of global climate change cannot be resolved without the cooperation of both China and the USA. However, neither government appears close to signing up to mandatory emissions reductions. Both nations defend their climate policies by appealing to ideas of fairness, equity and justice. This paper outlines the arguments offered by Chinese opponents of mandatory emissions reductions, highlighting three central claims about historical responsibility, ability to pay and the right to development. The first part of the paper examines these claims, the arguments supporting them, the relationships among them and their implications for a just global climate regime. Two …