Digital Commons Network^™

Environmental History, Fall/Winter 2009, Issue 19

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Global Sustainability, Fall/Winter 2005, Issue 11

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Environmental Justice, Spring/Summer 2004, Issue 10

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Consent Decrees, Fall/Winter 2017, Issue 35

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Carbon Neutral, Spring/Summer 2018, Issue 38

Sustain Magazine

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Urban Odor With Field Olfactometry In Camden, Nj, Jennifer L. Kitson, Monica Leiva, Zachary Christman, Pamela Dalton

School of Earth & Environment Departmental Research

Odor annoyance negatively impacts residents of communities adjacent to persistent nuisance industries. These residents, often with a high percentage of minority or otherwise marginalized residents, experience subjective and objective impacts on health and well-being; yet, reliable methods for quantifying and categorizing odors have been elusive. Field olfactometry is integral to the study of odor annoyance experienced by communities as it includes both qualitative (human perception) and quantitative (intensity measurement) dimensions of human odor experience and has been employed by municipalities in the U.S. to evaluate odor pollution levels. Cartographic visualization of odor data recorded using a field olfactometer offers further …

Food Deserts Debunked And Decentered: From Deficit To Relational Mapping For Food Justice In Worcester, Ma, Brenna Robeson

Sustainability and Social Justice

The mapping of food deserts has become a standardized component of food and health policy work concerned with expanding food access. These maps often follow a similar format of spatially identifying where grocery stores are absent in communities, thus suggesting a straightforward problem diagnosis and intervention blueprint. This paper questions the over-emphasis among many food and health policy practitioners on these technically engineered policy stories, specifically for their obstruction of histories of white supremacy and capitalism within the US food system and urban landscapes. A mixed-methods approach is applied to a case study of Worcester, MA which appropriates GIS to …

Understanding Cumulative Hazards In A Rustbelt City: Integrating Gis, Archaeology, And Spatial History, Daniel Trepal, Don Lafreniere

Michigan Tech Publications, Part 1

We combine the Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (HSDI) concept developed within spatial history with elements of archaeological predictive modeling to demonstrate a novel GIS-based landscape model for identifying the persistence of historically-generated industrial hazards in postindustrial cities. This historical big data approach draws on over a century of both historical and modern spatial big data to project the presence of specific persistent historical hazards across a city. This research improves on previous attempts to understand the origins and persistence of historical pollution hazards, and our final model augments traditional archaeological approaches to site prospection and analysis. This study also demonstrates …

How Pennsylvanians Define Environmental Justice, Kayla Hofmann

Sociology Summer Fellows

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) defines an environmental justice area as any census tract that partially or wholly includes a 30 percent or greater minority population or 20 percent or more of a population living in poverty. However, little is known about how the average Pennsylvanian defines environmental justice, hindering our ability to determine whether the current definition is adequate. Using transcripts from nine listening sessions on the DEP’s tour of affected counties, I address 3 questions: (1) How do people define environmental justice? (2) What do people think are the most pressing issues in each county? And …

Enhancing Ontario’S Rural Infrastructure Preparedness: Inter-Community Service Sharing In A Changing Climate — Rural Community Practitioners Workbook, Bryce Gunson, Brenda Murphy

Social and Environmental Justice Faculty Publications

This practitioner workbook draws together the insights from a three-year (2016-19) Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) funded research study. The purpose of the research project was to 1) assess the potential of inter-community service cooperation (ICSC) as a possible tool to address the impacts of climate change (CC) in small (500-7500 pop.) Ontario rural communities south of the Sudbury region and 2) understand the extent to which such collaboration and the impacts of CC are, or could be, embedded within the community’s infrastructure (asset) management processes (AMP). While the conclusions of this workbook are generalized to …

Enhancing Ontario’S Rural Infrastructure Preparedness: Inter-Community Service Sharing In A Changing Climate — Policy Brief, Brenda Murphy, Bryce Gunson

Social and Environmental Justice Faculty Publications

This policy brief draws together the insights from a three-year (2016-19) Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) funded research study. The purpose of the research project was to 1) assess the potential of inter-community service cooperation (ICSC) as a possible tool to address the impacts of climate change (CC) in small (500-7500 pop.) Ontario rural communities south of the Sudbury region and 2) understand the extent to which such collaboration and the impacts of CC are, or could be, embedded within the community’s infrastructure (asset) management processes (AMP). While the conclusions of policy brief are generalized to …

Enhancing Ontario’S Rural Infrastructure Preparedness: Inter-Community Service Sharing In A Changing Climate — Final Report: Swot Analysis And Key Insights, Brenda Murphy, Bryce Gunson

Social and Environmental Justice Faculty Publications

This final report draws together the insights from the three-year Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (2016-2019) study. The quote above succinctly draws together the vision behind this project: Enhanced, efficient service cooperation that contributes to a sustainable and prepared infrastructure system, while protecting the environmental capital upon which rural economies frequently depend. The purpose of the research project was to 1) assess the potential of inter-community service cooperation (ICSC) as a possible tool to address the impacts of climate change (CC) in small (500-7500 pop.) Ontario rural communities south of the Sudbury region and 2) understand the …

Enhancing Ontario’S Rural Infrastructure Preparedness: Inter-Community Service Sharing In A Changing Climate — Interim Report 2: Provincial Survey Results, Brenda Murphy, Bryce Gunson

Social and Environmental Justice Faculty Publications

Rural communities draw from their history of doing more with less, strong social networks and an intimate relationship with the natural environment to achieve economic innovation, positive social capacity development and environmental sustainability. These spaces also experience challenges including preparing for the impacts of climate change (CC). Ontario has already felt some of these effects leading to millions of dollars of damage to the province’s infrastructure. Exacerbated by an aging infrastructure built by now outdated assumptions, the vulnerability to CC will likely increase and the built-in coping range may not be adequate to handle future climate extremes.

The purpose of …

Assessing The Rock Island Community Garden Program, Christian Elliott, Hunter Ridley, Robert Burke, Alexander Disabato, Abby Huffman, Dr. Christopher Strunk

Celebration of Learning

As part of Sustainable Working Landscapes Initiative with Augustana College’s Upper Mississippi Center, students in Urban Design and Environmental Justice (Geography 325) conducted research on Rock Island’s community garden program this fall. The City of Rock Island currently has 21 vacant-lot community gardens and plans to expand the program to 24 gardens in 2019. The purpose of this project was to develop an initial assessment of the community garden program and provide general information about the benefits of urban gardens. Students worked with Dr. Strunk to conduct a survey with current garden program participants and tested soil from 14 gardens …

Tree Canopy Cover And Potential In Portland, Or: A Spatial Analysis Of The Urban Forest And Capacity For Growth, Jeff Ramsey

Dissertations and Theses

Urban forests have positive impacts on human and ecosystem health, reduce stress on aging stormwater infrastructure, increase property values, and reduce energy consumption. The scale of these benefits ranges from the hyper-local to the global. While the benefits of urban forests can extend well beyond the boundaries of cities, they often do not reach all residents of the city equally. Urban forest policies do not adequately address environmental equity or employ planting strategies with knowledge of the social and political factors that determine the spatial variations of tree canopy extent in cities. Chapter I analyzes the determinants of current canopy …

Aesthetic Perception Of Urban Spaces: New York, Timur Pozhidaev

Theses and Dissertations

Aesthetic perception is an important field of interest in many aspects of everyday human life. It affects individual and social unconscious behavior and is strongly related to the decision-making processes in the human mind. The current study can serve as an important prototype for planning purposes and social and environmental justice among the regional units of New York City. With the current scientific sphere lacking a comprehensive methodology for assessing social superstructure, an aesthetic framework has the potential for success in evaluating the aspects of sustainable and resilient urban development.

Commoning Mobility: Towards A New Politics Of Mobility Transitions, Anna Nikolaeva, Peter Adey, Tim Cresswell, Jane Yeonjae Lee, Andre Nóvoa, Cristina Temenos

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Scholars have argued that transitions to more sustainable and just mobilities require moving beyond technocentrism to rethink the very meaning of mobility in cities, communities, and societies. This paper demonstrates that such rethinking is inherently political. In particular, we focus on recent theorisations of commoning practices that have gained traction in geographic literatures. Drawing on our global comparative research of low‐carbon mobility transitions, we argue that critical mobilities scholars can rethink and expand the understanding of mobility through engagement with commons–enclosure thinking. We present a new concept, “commoning mobility,” a theorisation that both envisions and shapes practices that develop fairer …

Seduction, Promises And Disneyfication Of Barbuda Post Irma, Sophia Perdikaris, Rebecca Boger, Emira Ibrahimpašić

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Under the guise of post-hurricane development, the national government of Antigua and Barbuda exploited the disasterscape of post Hurricane Irma Barbuda to usher in a new wave of economic development that has left Barbudans separated from their unique culture and identity. In this article we explore what are inhabited vs. uninhabited spaces, the effects of Colonial Christian ideas on cultivated vs. uncultivated lands and the effects of capitalist seduction to traditional landscapes and seascapes. We argue that this neocolonial approach to traditional lifeways increases vulnerability of both people and environment. By wiping out diversity and culture in order to replace …

Losing Louisiana: Race, Techno-Science, And The Disappearing Geographies Of The Lower Mississippi River Delta, Monica Patrice Barra

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Based on eighteen months of ethnographic and historical research in southeast coastal Louisiana (USA), this dissertation explores the racial histories, engineering and scientific practices, and geophysical processes that have shaped land loss and coastal restoration in the lower Mississippi River Delta. Rather than treating land loss simply as a natural process or matter of environmental restoration, this ethnography examines its cultural, material, and political dimensions, especially for communities of color that have already experienced long histories of loss — of property, livelihood, and political rights. A focus on the geophysical transformations of the river - dictating land growth, sinking, and …

Contested Development: A Poor People's Movement For A Better Los Angeles, 1960–2018, Deshonay R. Dozier

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Zooming in on the historical development of Downtown Los Angeles’s (LA) Skid Row, this dissertation traces a continuity of abolitionist alternatives made by homeless and poor Angelinos from the 1960s to our present day. Skid Row is an important entry way into Los Angeles urban politics, particularly with respect to how forms of difference, at the axis of race, gender, class, and ability shape regional relations of property and the built environment. I show how these relations shape Downtown Los Angeles’s geography through carceral practices. These carceral practices, made by social services and policing, shape space by routinely containing and …

Community, Renewables, And Development: An Analysis Of Placemaking And Sense Of Place In Community Responses To Large Scale Solar Developments, A Spotsylvania Case Study Report, Kidest Gebre

Geography and the Environment Capstone Projects

With the ever increasing threat of climate change, many nations are committing to decreasing their dependence on fossil fuels and turning to renewable energy development. The U.S is in the top ten list of nations that are solar-powered and the Spotsylvania Solar Farm Project is one of the largest utility solar farms in the U.S. With this project, my intention is to analyze the role community folks play as major stakeholders in large-scale energy project development, such as the Spotsylvania Solar Farm Project. I will use the Spotsylvania Solar Farm Project can be a case study to analyze community attitudes …

Los Angeles' Riparian Renaissance: Rethinking The Geographies Of Gentrification Through Green City-Wide Infrastructure Projects, Henry Nieberg

Geography Honors Projects

The neoliberal restructuring of global cities has allowed larger scales of investment that has catalyzed and enlarged gentrification processes. The impacts of gentrification today have the potential to transcend individual communities and affect the whole city. Building on the “rent gap” theory, I examine the reasons and ways capital is injected in capital-deficient neighborhoods, and how the inflow of capital affects the spatial scales in which the process of gentrification is occurring today. While there are studies on the impacts local green infrastructure-spending and greening initiatives can have on neighborhood gentrification, we know less about how large, arterial green infrastructure …

Sacrifices For Development Or Thirst For Capital Accumulation? Case Study On The “El Diquís Hydroelectric Dam” In Costa Rica., Marco Mora

Sustainability and Social Justice

Costa Rica’s state-led model of energy generation based on large-scale investments in hydropower has given the country autonomy in generating its own energy as well as sovereignty over its natural resources. Successive governments have used nationalist and ecological discourses to support the continued expansion of hydropower as the path to economic development. In more recent decades however, a number of factors have been eroding the dominance of the state-led hydropower development model. Some of those elements are the national and international pressures to liberalize and privatize the energy sector, an increasing body of scientific evidence indicating that large-scale hydropower in …

Spatial Analysis Of Landscape And Sociodemographic Factors Associated With Green Stormwater Infrastructure Distribution In Baltimore, Maryland And Portland, Oregon, Ashley Baker, Emma Brenneman, Heejun Chang, Lauren Mcphillips, Marissa Matsler

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study explores the spatial distribution of green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) relative to sociodemographic and landscape characteristics in Portland, OR, and Baltimore, MD, USA at census block group (CBG) and census tract scales. GSI density is clustered in Portland, while it is randomly distributed over space in Baltimore. Variables that exhibit relationships with GSI density are varied over space, as well as between cities. In Baltimore, GSI density is significantly associated with presence of green space (+), impervious surface coverage (+), and population density (−) at the CBG scale; though these relationships vary over space. At the census tract scale …

Don't Let Their Future Blow Away: An Integrated Methodology To Inform School Leaders Of The Dimensions And Determinants Of School Vulnerability Leading To Disaster Learning Loss, Kaleen Daneil Weiland

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

School leaders play a key role in the critical functions of emergency response in a school system, including purposefully sustaining safe, secure, and healthy learning environments for all students before and after a disaster. Despite these values, school leaders remain underprepared and often unaware of the vulnerabilities associated with weather, climate, and other disaster events and the potential threat that climate change poses to both student achievement and access to education. This study presents school-leaders with a landscape-scale geospatial vulnerability assessment of school districts exposed to, or threatened by, hurricanes in order to improve mitigation efforts in schools. In this …

Corporate-Community Mining Conflicts In Guatemala: Unsettling Hegemonic Power Relations In Environmental Struggles, Anna Guðbjört Sveinsdóttir

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes corporate-community conflicts around extractive industries in Guatemala with the purpose of better understanding how environmental struggles emerge and take shape. The study uses environmental governance as a framework to analyze the processes, institutions, actors and discourses that shape the conditions of possibility of political action and mobilization in environmental struggles. The dissertation argues that to understand the conditions of possibility of political action and mobilization in environmental struggles we must study the interplay between political actions 'from above' and 'from below', which are seen as dialectically interrelated, with dynamic and contested interactions between actors within and between …

Measuring Sustainability (Geog 100 Intro To Human Geography), Michal Kohout

Q2S Enhancing Pedagogy

Sustainability is a complex measure of the correlation between economic, social and environmental factors. Using students' campus experiences as well as those from their communities we construct measures of sustainability, and create a sustainability index.

Just Preservation, A. Treves, F. J. Santiago-Ávila, W. S. Lynn

Anthropogenics and Population Decline Collection

We are failing to protect the biosphere. Novel views of conservation, preservation, and sustainability are surfacing in the wake of consensus about our failures to prevent extinction or slow climate change. We argue that the interests and well-being of non-humans, youth, and future generations of both human and non-human beings (futurity) have too long been ignored in consensus-based, anthropocentric conservation. Consensus-based stakeholder-driven processes disadvantage those absent or without a voice and allow current adult humans and narrow, exploitative interests to dominate decisions about the use of nature over its preservation for futurity of all life. We propose that authentically non-anthropocentric …

Belonging While Black At Lake Merritt: The Black Spatial Imaginary And Place-Making In Oakland, Ca, Betel Solomon Tesfamariam

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis aims to demonstrate how the processes of gentrification and displacement are interrelated processes that invent new ways of perpetuating anti- blackness in the U.S. I demonstrate this through an engagement with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) analysis of the imagery of the wake, the ship, the hold, and the weather as axis points that position Black life in the afterlife of slavery—how the conditions of slavery are ongoing today—presenting the racist encounters at Lake Merritt as illustrative examples. In her most recent book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Sharpe (2016) deploys an interdisciplinary approach to critically theorize …

Facilitating Experience Through Fabrication And Blue Biophilic Design, Teague Scanlon

Pomona Senior Theses

The way humans currently interact with the atmosphere and oceans around us is unsustainable, with pollution entering our waters faster than we are collecting it, and the sea level rising faster than we are building coastal barriers to protect our current infrastructure. This thesis explores the common methodology for communicating climate change and its future effects, and highlights an opportunity for using infrastructure to facilitate interaction with the urban-aquatic interface. By promoting experiential contact with the natural spaces that are most at risk to climate change’s impacts, a sense of stewardship for those spaces will spur behavioral change and activism. …