Digital Commons Network^™

Social Inequalities In Flooding Inside And Outside Of Floodplains During Hurricane Harvey, Kevin T. Smiley

Faculty Publications

While previous research often finds flood impacts outside of conventional flood risk zones such as FEMA's 100-year floodplain maps, we have less of a sense of the social and demographic composition of the areas outside of floodplains that experience these impacts, even though social inequalities in flood risk and impacts more broadly is well-documented in the United States. Using data on 100-year floodplains, flood impacts, socio-demographic characteristics, and residential parcels, this study focuses on race as a primary marker of socio-spatial inequality to examine flooding inside and outside of floodplains during Hurricane Harvey in Greater Houston. Descriptive findings show that …

Addressing The Social Vulnerability Of Mississippi Gulf Coast Vietnamese Community Through The Development Of Community Health Advisors, Susan Mayfield-Johnson, Danielle Fastring, Daniel Le, Jane Nguyen

Faculty Publications

Background:Resiliency is the ability to prepare for, recover from, and adapt to stressors from adverse events. Social vulnerabilities (limited access to resources, political power, and representation; lack of social capital; aspects of the built environment; health inequities; and being in certain demographic categories) can impact resiliency. The Vietnamese population living along the Mississippi Gulf Coast is a community that has unique social vulnerabilities that impact their ability to be resilient to adverse events. Objectives: The purpose of this project was to address social vulnerability by implementing and evaluating a volunteer Community Health Advisor (CHA) project to enhance community resiliency in …

Framework For Implementing Socially Just Climate Adaptation (Post-Print), Jeffrey T. Malloy, Catherine M. Ashcraft

Faculty Publications

The previous two decades of scholarship devoted to the role of social justice in climate change adaptation has established an important theoretical basis to evaluate the concept of just adaptation, or, in other words, how the implementation of climate adaptation policy affects socially vulnerable groups. This paper synthesizes insights from relevant literature on urban climate change governance, climate adaptation, urban planning, social justice theory, and policy implementation to develop three propositions concerning the conditions that must occur to implement just adaptation. First, just adaptation requires the inclusion of socially vulnerable as full participants with agency to shape the decisions that …

The Role Of Climate Change Education On Individual Lifetime Carbon Emissions, Eugene Cordero, Diana Centeno Delgado, Anne Marie Todd

Faculty Publications

Strategies to mitigate climate change often center on clean technologies, such as electric vehicles and solar panels, while the mitigation potential of a quality educational experience is rarely discussed. In this paper, we investigate the long-term impact that an intensive one year university course had on individual carbon emissions by surveying students at least five years after having taken the course. A majority of course graduates reported pro-environmental decisions (i.e., type of car to buy, food choices) that they attributed at least in part to experiences gained in the course. Furthermore, our carbon footprint analysis suggests that for the average …

Tempered Radicalism And Intersectionality: Scholar-Activism In The Neoliberal University, Jennifer Richter, Flora Farago, Beth Blue Swadener

Faculty Publications

Using a collaborative critical personal narrative methodology grounded in intersectionality, we interrogated tensions in identifying ourselves as tempered radicals and scholar-activists who were involved in a local university-community activist organization. We assert the value of informal activist spaces within the university and identify issues related to the lack of recognition of scholar-activism as legitimate scholarship, including the paradox of universities as colonizing and liberatory spaces for community engagement and activism. Our themes highlight how mentorship affects scholar-activism and how activism transforms and disrupts the neoliberal university. Yet, activism is rendered invisible, making homeplaces for scholar-activism critical for students, faculty, staff, …

Framework For A Community Health Observing System For The Gulf Of Mexico Region: Preparing For Future Disasters, P Sandifer, L Knapp, M Lichtveld, R Manley, P Sandifer, R Caffey, D Cochran, T Collier, K Ebi, L Engel, J Farrington, M Finucane, C Hale, D Halpern, E Harville, L Hart, Y Hswen, B Kirkpatrick, B Mcewen, G Morris, R Orbach, L Palinkas, M Partyka, D Porter, G Prather, T Rowles, G Scott, T Seeman, H Solo-Gabriele, E Svendsen, T Tincher, J Trtanj, A H. Walker, R Yehuda

Faculty Publications

The Gulf of Mexico (GoM) region is prone to disasters, including recurrent oil spills, hurricanes, floods, industrial accidents, harmful algal blooms, and the current COVID-19 pandemic. The GoM and other regions of the U.S. lack sufficient baseline health information to identify, attribute, mitigate, and facilitate prevention of major health effects of disasters. Developing capacity to assess adverse human health consequences of future disasters requires establishment of a comprehensive, sustained community health observing system, similar to the extensive and well-established environmental observing systems. We propose a system that combines six levels of health data domains, beginning with three existing, national surveys …

The Persistence Of High Energy Burdens: A Bibliometric Analysis Of Vulnerability, Poverty, And Exclusion In The United States, M A. Brown, A Soni, A D. Doshi, C King, M A. Brown

Faculty Publications

Using bibliometric methods, we examine the persistently high energy bills borne by low-income households in the U.S. This is a mystifying problem in today's age of abundant and low-priced electricity and fossil fuels. After decades of energy-efficiency programs and targeted policies, the average low-income household still spends a disproportionately large percentage of its income on energy bills. Issues of equity, race and justice are increasingly linked to the problem of persistent energy burdens. In the complex ecosystem of stakeholders that influence energy burden, key gaps still exist in the understanding of causes and solutions. In particular, limited research has examined …

Pollution And Polluter Pays, Aaron Lercher

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Ends And Means Of Decarbonization: The Green New Deal In Context, Jonas J. Monast

Faculty Publications

Disputes about climate policy involve much more than whether or not to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is general agreement among proponents of climate policy that strategies should be cost effective, address distributional impacts, and incentivize investments in low-carbon technologies. Yet disagreements abound regarding additional goals of climate policy design.

Decarbonizing the economy means changing the sources of energy we use, how we transport people and products, how we produce food, and which resources we consume. Yet even among proponents of federal climate legislation there is strong disagreement regarding policy instruments. Recent proposals for a revenue-neutral carbon tax and a …

Identity: Obstacles And Openings, Osamudia James

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Associations Among Neighborhood Socioeconomic Deprivation, Physical Activity Facilities, And Physical Activity In Youth During The Transition From Childhood To Adolescence, Morgan N. Clennin, Min Lian, Natalie Colabianchi, Andrew Kaczynski, Marsha Dowda, Russell R. Pate

Faculty Publications

Background: This study aims to examine the longitudinal association of neighborhood socioeconomic deprivation (SED) with physical activity in youth during the transition from elementary to middle school, and to determine if access to physical activity facilities moderates this relationship. Methods: Data were obtained from the Transitions and Activity Changes in Kids (TRACK) study, which was a multilevel, longitudinal study designed to identify the factors that influence changes in physical activity as youth transition from elementary to middle school. The analytic sample for the current study included 660 youth with complete data in grades 5 (baseline) and 7 (follow-up). A repeated …

Responsible Devolution Of Affordable Housing, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

The federal government has been heavily involved in promoting housing affordability since the 1930s and continues to have a critical role to play. Over the past several decades, the federal government has financed affordability by promoting development and income subsidies, but specific allocation decisions have devolved. Housing inequities can best be addressed locally, but only if localities are held to high standards of fairness and regional coordination is facilitated. Successful and sustainable local solutions to housing affordability will also require a substantial financial investment, one that the federal government can and should reliably and adequately provide. Each year, Congress permits …

Clean Energy Justice: Charting An Emerging Agenda, Shelley Welton, Joel Eisen

Faculty Publications

The rapid transition to clean energy is fraught with potential inequities. As clean energy policies ramp up in scale and ambition, they confront challenging new questions: Who should pay for the transition? Who should live next to the industrial-scale wind and solar farms these policies promote? Will the new “green” economy be a fairer one, with more widespread opportunity, than the fossil fuel economy it is replacing? Who gets to decide what kinds of resources power our decarbonized world? In this article, we assert that it is useful to understand these challenges collectively, as part of an emerging agenda of …

Impacts Of Experimental Flooding On Microbial Communities And Methane Fluxes In An Urban Meadow, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Gary M. King, Katherine Henry

Faculty Publications

© 2019 King and Henry. The impacts of extended flooding on microbial communities and their activities in natural and agricultural wetlands have been well-documented, but there is little basis for predicting the responses of urban soil microbial communities to infrequent, short-term flooding. To assess these responses, surface soil samples (0–1 cm) and intact soil cores (10 cm depth) were collected from an urban meadow in Baton Rouge, LA subsequent to an unprecedented flood during August 2016. During the flood, a topographically low region of the meadow (LM) was inundated for at least several days, while an elevated area (upper meadow …

Just Transitions, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

The transition to a low-carbon society will have winners and losers as the costs and benefits of decarbonization fall unevenly on different communities. This potential collateral damage has prompted calls for a “just transition” to a green economy. While the term, “just transition,” is increasingly prevalent in the public discourse, it remains under-discussed and poorly defined in legal literature, preventing it from helping catalyze fair decarbonization. This Article seeks to define the term, test its validity, and articulate its relationship with law so the idea can meet its potential.

The Article is the first to disambiguate and assess two main …

Rural Practice As Public Interest Work, Hannah Haksgaard

Faculty Publications

As the rural lawyer shortage continues to grow, rural states and communities must find new ways of attracting law students and graduates to rural practice. This Article explores incentives based on conceptualizing rural private practice as public interest work. Rural lawyers provide public interest lawyering through pro bono cases, mixed practices, community service, and even through providing fee-paid services in rural communities. The Article asserts that law schools and rural communities can capitalize on this view to recruit new lawyers and argues that federal loan forgiveness programs should be expanded to cover rural lawyers.

Integration Of An Electrical Engineering Capstone Course With Social Justice And Global Studies, David Parent, Patricia Backer

Faculty Publications

A four course package (six units total) consisting of two general education (GE) classes and two electrical engineering capstone classes that are taught in a highly integrated manner, that not only meets university GE requirements, but also meets the new ABET criteria in which the need to address a societal need is embedded with design criteria. The prompts for the new integrated GE/capstone Assessment results are also presented, along with methods to increase student motivation for studying GE.

Local To Global Justice: Roles Of Student Activism In Higher Education, Leadership Development, And Community Engagement, Flora Farago, Beth Blue Swadener, Jennifer Richter, Kimberly Eversman, Denisse Roca-Servat

Faculty Publications

This study examined how organizing an annual social justice forum and festival through involvement in a multi-issue, progressive, activist student organization called Local to Global Justice (LTGJ; www.localtoglobal.org) impacted students’ academic experiences and professional development (e.g., scholar-activism, critical thinking, applied learning), leadership development, and community engagement and activism. Current and alumni student leaders (n = 33; 90% graduate students), faculty mentors (n = 3), and community members (n = 4) of LTGJ (N = 40) completed a close- and open-ended question online survey about their educational experiences and related activism, and shared their perceptions about the value of student activism …

Experience Design In Leisure Studies, Parks, Recreation, And Tourism, Neil R. Lundberg

Faculty Publications

This article provides a response to the article “Leisure Studies is for Experience, Not Industry,” by Harmon (2018). In responding to Harmon’s critique, I address two important issues; both could be expanded into full-length articles but are treated only briefly in this response. First, it is critical to clearly understand and differentiate between the related concepts of experience design, experience industries, and experience economy, so I will provide a preliminary differentiation. Second, and in connection with the differentiation of experience-based concepts, I briefly discuss the need for curriculum reform or refocus within the broad discipline of leisure studies, parks, recreation, …

Social License To Regulate: Consumer-Producer Collusion And Related Policy Risks For Consumer-Facing Regulation, Nathan D. Richardson

Faculty Publications

Used a gas can recently? If not, prepare for a surprise—they’ve become harder to use due to government-mandated design changes aimed at reducing air pollution. Faced with persistent environmental and other challenges, government regulators have increasingly turned to similar regulations on consumer products. But these consumer-facing regulations create new policy and political problems for regulators, different from those associated with traditional industry-facing regulation. This paper looks in depth at three case studies of consumer-facing regulation: emissions controls on gas cans, efficiency standards for light bulbs, and European vehicle fuel economy standards. In each case, there is strong evidence for widespread …

Food Federalism: States, Local Governments, And The Fight For Food Sovereignty, Sarah B. Schindler

Faculty Publications

Recently, a number of states have sought to withdraw or restrain local power. In this Article, which is part of the “Re-Thinking State Relevance” symposium hosted by the Ohio State Law Journal, I write about a state taking the opposite approach, and attempting to affirmatively endow its local governments with additional powers. The state is Maine, and the context is control over local food production and sales. This Article begins by addressing the emergence of the sustainable local foods movement broadly, and reasons for the growth of this movement. It then focuses more pointedly on the food sovereignty movement, considering …

Editing Nature: Reconceptualizing Biotechnology Governance, Jonas J. Monast

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Examining The Relationship Between Park Neighborhoods, Features, Cleanliness, And Condition With Observed Weekday Park Usage And Physical Activity: A Case Study, Kerry Hamilton, Andrew T. Kaczynski, Melissa L. Fair, Lucie Levesque

Faculty Publications

Background. Little research has comprehensively explored how park features, quality indicators, and neighborhood environments are associated with observed park usage and physical activity (PA). This case study examined whether weekday park usage and PA differ by neighborhood type, across numerous categories of park features, and according to park feature condition and cleanliness. Methods. Direct observation was used to capture the number of users and PA levels within 143 park features in 6 parks (3 urban, 3 suburban) over the course of six weeks. Audits of park environments assessed the type, condition, and cleanliness of all features and amenities. …

#Nodapl: Social Media, Empowerment, And Civic Participation At Standing Rock, Hayley Johnson

Faculty Publications

The struggle for environmental and social justice within American Indian communities is one that has been ongoing since the beginning of United States history, but the main catalyst to effect change and to promote and disperse the American Indian narrative has emerged through the power of social media in today's hyperconnected society. This article examines the power of social media to effect change, as well as a hyperconnected society's ability to empower historically disadvantaged groups that have often been misrepresented within traditional media outlets. The historic movement occurring at Standing Rock, North Dakota, and the #NoDAPL protests illustrates the capacity …

Grid Modernization And Energy Poverty, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

Grid modernization holds the alluring promise of rationalizing electricity pricing, saving consumers money, and improving environmental quality all at the same time. Yet, we have seen only limited and patchwork regulatory initiatives towards significant grid modernization in the United States. Outside of a few leading states, state energy regulators appear loath to embrace fullthroated versions of the project. This article argues that the underdiscussed problem of energy poverty in the United States is a critical contributing factor in the gap between grid modernization’s possibilities and our regulatory reality. Only by explicitly understanding how the issues of grid modernization and energy …

Do Sagebrush Rebels Have A Colorable Claim? The Space Between Parochialism And Exclusion In Federal Lands Management, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

This Article asks whether the troubling nature of the Sagebrush Rebellion and similar movements (e.g., their violence, antienvironmentalism, and racist overtones) has made us overly dismissive of a kernel of truth in their complaints. Commentators often acknowledge that federal lands management may be “unfair” to local communities, but the ethical and legal characteristics of the unfairness concern remain under-explored. Although the Sagebrush Rebellion and federal lands communities are far from synonymous, substantial overlap between the complaints and demands of Sagebrush Rebels and the complaints and demands of many regional local (and state) governments suggests that to explore the one necessitates …

Clean Electrification, Shelley Welton

Faculty Publications

To combat climate change, many leading states have adopted the aim of creating a “participatory” grid. In this new model, electricity is priced based on time of consumption and carbon content, and consumers are encouraged to adjust their behavior and adopt new technologies to maintain affordable electricity. Although a more participatory grid is an important component of lowering greenhouse gas emissions, it also raises a new problem of clean energy justice: utilities and consumer advocates claim that such policies unjustly benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, given the type of consumer best able to participate in the …

Alienation And Reconciliation In Social-Ecological Systems, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

After rancher Ammon Bundy’s forceful occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest federal “tyranny” in 2016, mainstream commentary dismissed Bundy and his supporters as crackpots. But the dismissal of the occupation as errant overlooked this event’s significance. This conflict: 1) involved a clash over scarce natural resources, of the type that will likely gain more frequency and intensity in the face of climate change; and 2) highlighted the popular idea that the federal government and federal environmental regulations are the enemy of the (white, rural, male) worker. This thread of antienvironmental, anti-federal alienation among many working people has …

Ideas About Nature In American Art And Visual Culture, Mark Graham

Faculty Publications

The stories we tell ourselves about nature deeply influence how we attempt to preserve, use, or restore nature as well as practices of art and art education that are concerned with ecological issues (Cronon 1996). Landscapes are culture before they are nature (Schama 1996). Yet, our ideas about wilderness, nature, landscape, and sustainability are fraught with paradox and debate. For example, Darwin’s fundamental assertions about the human relationship to nature continue to spark theological, political and educational controversies. Some environmentalists caution that our consumerist economy will destroy the planet and that we need to return to a less sophisticated technology …

Land Shark At The Door? Why And How States Should Regulate Landmen, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.