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It's All Happening At The Zoo: Children's Environmental Learning After School, Jason A. Douglas, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Pairing dynamic out-of-school-time (OST) programs with zoos can encourage young people's relationships with and sense of responsibility for animals and the environment. The project presented in this article, Animal Rescuers, gave the authors the opportunity to examine how such a pairing can work. OST programs enable learning in settings that are generally unavailable during school time (Honig & McDonald, 2005). They provide space for collaboration among students, teachers, and others such as program visitors or outside educators. Taking advantage of the flexibility, location, and educational playfulness of an OST setting, the authors worked intensively with a small number of 10-12-year-old …

Teacher Perceptions Of Environmental Education: An Exploratory Assessment, Joye Charlotte Marika Cantrell

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study was to initiate an exploratory assessment of teacher knowledge, values, and environmental education practices at a local urban high school to gain general perception of a staff's readiness to yet embrace another teacher certification requirement.

Care Local Partnerships Healthy Communities: Promising Practices (Draft), Environmental Protection Agency

Mickey Leland Center Information Portal

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Community Action for a Renewed Environment (CARE) program is a competitive grant program that offers communities an innovative way to address the risks from multiple sources of pollution in their environment. The CARE program awarded its first series of grants in 2005; to date there are 68 CARE communities.

The Role Of Gender In Environmental Justice, Nancy Unger

History

Environmental Justice incorporates an inclusive definition of its subject matter, exploring the environmental burdens impacting all marginalized populations and communities. This expansive definition allows for the possibility that populations conventionally viewed as privileged can nevertheless be marginalized and suffer uniquely from environmental injustices. Employing such a definition can also reveal how an ostensibly powerless group can fight for environmental justice on its own terms—and win. Gender has played an important role in environmental justice (and injustice) throughout the history of the United States. Excerpts from my current book project, Beyond “Nature’s Housekeepers”: Gendered Turning Points for American Women in Environmental …

An Environmental Justice Analysis: Superfund Sites And Surrounding Communities In Illinois, Angela Maranville, Tih-Fen Ting, Yang Zhang

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Is there an association between Superfund sites and the socioeconomic makeup of the surrounding communities? This research analyzes the current economic and racial demographics of Illinois counties that contain Superfund sites. Specifically, variables that are indicators of environmental injustice are analyzed; e.g. race, median household income, and home ownership. Since the inception of the environmental justice movement in the late 1980s, studies have been conducted nationally and at state levels in Michigan, California, Ohio, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina (i.e. Cutter 2006; Mohai & Saha 2006; Pastor et al. 2004; Anderton et al. 1997; Bevc et al. 2007; Bowen et …

Fema Trailers, Jae Rhim Lee

SWITCH

This article introduces an art and research project centered on a surplus FEMA travel trailer delivered to MIT which is used as a focal point of a course taught by Jae Rhim Lee. Lee uses the trailer to explore broader issues of environmental justice, government failure, and the health effects of disaster response. The project connects to another one of her projects, N=1=0=Infinity, a proposal for eco-friendly burial methods using mushrooms to return the body’s nutrients to the Earth.

Carbon Neutral? Exploring Electronic Waste., Jessica Issler

SWITCH

This interview with Ted Smith, founder of the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition, explores the environmental and human health issues caused by electronic waste and toxic materials in the tech industry. Smith discusses his advocacy work, experiences meeting global leaders, and the efforts needed to make the electronics industry more sustainable. He shares insights on policy change, personal eco-practices, and the need for public access to environmental data.

Modeling Environmental Justice: A Comparative Analysis Of Multiple Environmental Metrics, Trevor K. Fuller

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Environmental justice, the study of interactions between environmental disamenities and socioeconomic conditions, has been a focus of policy debates and research since the late 1970s. To date, environmental justice research has relied heavily on a few selected metrics, including, but not limited to, Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), Treatment, Storage, and Disposal Facilities (TSDF), and Super.fund site Jocations. In this study, I will examine the efficacy of these environmental quality datasets, as well as that oflocal blood-lead level data (in children), to predict observed socioeconomic conditions and compare these results to an emerging metric, normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI). Based on …

Review Of Restoring The Connection To The Natural World: Essays On The African American Environmental Imagination, Uwe Küchler

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

In her introduction to The Ecocriticism Reader from 1995, a landmark in the short and dynamic development of this new field of knowledge, Cheryl Glotfelty anticipated that "Ecocriticism has been predominantly a white movement. It will become a multi-ethnic movement when stronger connections are made between the environment and issues of social justice, and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion" (Glotfelty 1996, xxv). The collection of essays reviewed here, published in 2003, fills this gap in ecocritical research. The nine contributors to Sylvia Mayer's edition have critically evaluated various aspects of African …

Introduction, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. …

Translating Ecocriticism: Dialoguing With Michel Serres, Stephanie Posthumus

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Since its humble beginnings in the Western United States, ecocriticism has grown under the banner of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment into an organization of over 1000 members with international affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, Koria and the UK. At first sight, it would seem that ecocriticism has achieved global status. But as Ursula Heise remarks in her assessment of ecocriticism, this process of globalisation has been mainly a process of becoming known internationally. In truth, ecocriticism has remained strongly rooted in Anglophone literary studies even as it has been exported to …

Review Of The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics & Pedagogy, Edited By Mei Mei Evans Admson And Rachel Stein, Katie Ahearn

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The editors of The Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, & Pedagogy (2002) chose to include at least five scholarly essays, comprising one third of the book's content, that directly address the theme of water, thus illuminating the importance of this topic in the realms of environmental and social justice. Contributors to the anthology, ranging from urban activists to literary and anthropological scholars, address a wide variety of national and international environmental disasters from the complex vantage point of the intersection among race, politics, and class, so that the inevitable blurring of the boundaries between traditionally distinct academic disciplines …

San Jacinto Center For Environmental Education, Susanna Catherine Hamilton

Theses Digitization Project

The author sets out to find what the characteristics of a functional and successful nature center includes. In doing so, she helps to create the San Jacinto Center for Environmental Education. The desire behind this is to bring more school-age children and university students to the site as well as to manage and expand the public walks on the San Jacinto Wildlife Area.

Activist Training In The Academy: Developing A Master's Program In Environmental Advocacy And Organizing At Antioch New England Graduate School, Steve Chase

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This curriculum action research study begins by raising the question of whether environmental studies programs within higher education should launch activist training programs for public interest advocates and grassroots organizers working for nonprofit organizations focused on environmental protection, corporate accountability, and social justice. Answering that question in the affirmative, the study then focuses on the theoretical issues underlying the creation of activist training programs within the academy, specifically within environmental studies programs, and reports on a case study of the successful development of a master’s program in Environmental Advocacy and Organizing. The first section on theoretical issues focuses first on …

“Peace Is More Than The End Of Bombing”: The Second Stage Of The Vieques Struggle, Sherrie Baver

Publications and Research

The nature of colonialism in Puerto Rico has caused most political issues to be viewed within the framework of status politics. In the first stage of the struggle to expel the U.S. Navy from the island (1999–2003), civil society in Puerto Rico united when the issues were reframed with links not to status politics but to human rights and social justice. Viequenses symbolized for Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico, on the mainland, and in the world at large the costs of military colonialism. In the second stage of the struggle, since the military’s departure, Viequenses have struggled to control the …

The Case For Cautious Optimism: California Environmental Propositions In The Late Twentieth Century, Marie Bolton, Nancy Unger

History

The efficacy of direct democracy throughout California's history continues to be a subject of intense debate, a state-wide phenomenon with an international audience. California boasts the world's fifth largest economy, and plays a leadership role in national, and sometimes even international, politics. British scholar Wyn Grant, studying the politics of air quality management in California, succinctly sums up the burning issue for environmentalists worldwide who are striving to understand the efficacy of California's activists' efforts: in "Direct Democracy in California: Example or Warning?" Grant concludes that although direct democracy has its merits, its history in California ultimately provides more of …

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.)