Spinning A Yarn: Exploring Social Work And Artistry, Cal F. Erasmus Tronson

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

Community Food Security Strategies In Montana: Exploring Practices And Policies, Andrew T. Besser

Graduate Student Portfolios, Professional Papers, and Capstone Projects

No abstract provided.

The Anchor: May 2023, Hope College

The Anchor: 2023

The Anchor began in 1887 and was first issued weekly in 1914. Covering national and campus news alike, Hope College’s student-run newspaper has grown over the years to encompass over two-dozen editors, reporters, and staff. For much of The Anchor's history, the latest issue was distributed across campus each Wednesday throughout the academic school year (with few exceptions). In recent years The Anchor moved to monthly print issues and a more frequently updated website. The Anchor is now published in print twice per academic semester. Occasionally, the volume and/or issue numbering is irregular.

Contemporary Environmental Art: The Multidimensional Relationship Between Black Communities And The American Landscape, Sophia S. Perkins

Honors Capstones

No abstract provided.

Impacts Of Climate Change In The United States, Nathan Thompson

Ballard Brief

While every country both contributes to and feels the effects of climate change, the United States' heavy influence and high rates of contribution make this problem even more acute domestically. Climate change is primarily driven by human emission of greenhouse gases through the burning of fossil fuels and from mass-scale agriculture. Because climate change can be a polarizing issue, passing legislation to slow the harmful contributing factors has proven difficult. The effects of climate change have worsened in the past few decades, with increased instances of wildfires and extreme shifts in weather patterns. These negative consequences disproportionately affect vulnerable people …

Ireland V. United States: Agricultural And Environmental Sustainability Policies, Lauryn O'Grady

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

The United States and Ireland have varying practices to achieve similar objectives in regard to environmental sustainability. While the European Union has maintained and updated a uniform policy throughout its existence--the Common Agricultural Policy--the United States instead created short-term solutions to a long-term problem. Not only does the United States tend to solve issues in the short-term, the policies between agricultural production and environmental sustainability are not necessarily aligned or remotely relative to the other. While the United States’ new Global Food Security Strategy implements parts of both agricultural and environmental sustainability, much of the history was not based off …

Contrasting Public And Private Approaches To Private Land Conservation In The United States: Local Government, Land Trust, And Landowner Viewpoints, Anna Overby

All Dissertations

In the United States (US), low-density, non-contiguous development, termed sprawl, has long been of widespread concern. Since the 1970s, rural residential sprawl, or exurban sprawl, has grown faster than any other development pattern. Exurban sprawl is development beyond the urban/suburban fringe with ties to the urban environment, such as employment and consumption, rather than to rural economies. Exurban sprawl is highly consumptive of land and has implications for conservation, natural resource management, agriculture, and communities. This study explores two main avenues of exurban sprawl prevention in the US: voluntary conservation easements and local government growth management regulations. The use of …

Catalytic Water Photolysis For Generating Renewable Hydrogen Fuel, Dr. Niveditha Nanda

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Modern advances have enabled rapid industrialization and urbanization. However, the consequences of global modernization have included significant pollution to the air and water resources. Consequently, many changes to energy use must come to address and mitigate damages to our future. Solar energy derived hydrogen gas is a clean, renewable fuel that does not produce carbon dioxide or other pollutants. My research investigates the use of heterogeneous photocatalysis, by focusing on solar photochemical energy conversion, which is the making of hydrogen from water using sunlight. The production of clean, renewable hydrogen fuel will enable the utilization of low-cost, pollution-free energy resources …

The Intersection Of Urban Heat Islands And The Cdc Social Vulnerability Index In Two Border Cities, Ileana Morales

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Toward A More Holistic Understanding Of Uranium-Related Views And Experiences Of Residents In The Four Corners Region Of The United States, Matthew J. Barnett

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Research on rural Four Corners Region (FCR) residents’ views about uranium production has focused mainly on predominately-White communities in the northern portion of the region. Meanwhile, residents in the southern part of the region, which includes the Navajo Nation and other tribal nations and communities, have dealt with the worst environmental and health effects of the uranium boom. Through a series of three studies in the southern part of the FCR, I explore the uranium-related views and experiences of racially diverse FCR residents.

In the first paper of this dissertation, I used 53 interviews to explore how sociodemographic factors (e.g., …

Best Practices Are Never Best: Evaluating Primate Conservation Education Programs (Pceps) With A Decolonial Perspective, Michelle Bezanson, Montserrat Franquesa-Soler, Martin Kowalewski, Allison Mcnamara, Rahayu Oktaviani, Michelle A. Rodrigues

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Who do we aim to educate with primate conservation education programs (PCEPs)? In a commentary published in a recent AJP, Annette Lanjouw suggested that many efforts to “educate” habitat-country communities can be neocolonial in their approaches. Forest destruction and habitat loss are a result of global consumption and expansion. We therefore need to approach conservation education from many angles including local stakeholders, policy makers, government officials, and the humans living in industrialized nations who are major consumers of the items that shrink primate habitats. In this review, we investigate PCEPs to determine if the conservation education goals, education methods, and …

The Optimization Of Microtransit In Houston Suburban Outer Ring Ii Transit Deserts., Jamaal Schoby

Dissertations (2016-Present)

During the past decade, urban cities have been inundated with a plethora of on-demand smartphone enabled transportation services including ridesoucring, ridesplitting, and most recently microtransit. At the same time, local governments are accentuating the gentrification of blighted central city neighborhoods. While the revitalization is causing an increase in the tax base and property values, the adverse impacts are resulting in rising housing cost and the displacement of socio-economic disadvantaged African Americans. A mounting body of research is finding this demographic group migrating outward to suburban low-density spatially fragmented areas for affordable housing. However, transit coverage and supply are minimal to …

Land Use Analysis On Vertiports Based On A Case Study Of The San Francisco Bay Area, Wenbin Wei, Kerry Rohrmeier, Tiffany Martinez, Michael Winans, Heungseok Park

Mineta Transportation Institute

Vertiport research and development trails in the emerging commercial air taxi sector known as Advanced Air Mobility (AAM). Published scholarship remains limited as federal, state, and local governments have yet to create or implement policies for the rapidly progressing larger AAM ecosystem, which is designed around autonomous electric vehicle takeoff and landing aircraft. With the potential for frequent low altitude flights, long-range planning must demonstrate awareness, knowledge, and utilization of geographic information science to select safe and just vertiport locations. This study summarizes the AAM literature and offers planners a set of stakeholder-informed parameters to use in a no-cost preliminary …

Netzero Insight: The Role Of Data Analytics And Machine Learning In Combating Climate Change, Tariq Najar, Chrissie Aldo

Theses

Countries must act urgently to achieve the SDGs and make significant progress for the planet and people by 2030. But there are some key challenges that the world must address. Climate change is one of the most significant challenges of our time, and its impacts can undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development. However, countries committed to limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre- industrial levels in the Paris Agreement. Member nations pledge to take urgent action on climate change to save the planet from global warming.

Using data analysis techniques and methodologies, such as CRISP-DM, and …

Local Restrictions On Renewable Energy Siting In The United States, Jesse Honig

UC Law Journal

Climate change has arrived. The next decade will provide critical opportunities to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. The decisions we take over the next ten years will be the difference between moderate levels of warming and warming that will cause catastrophic changes to the planet. To avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change, the United States must rapidly transition the energy sector to almost entirely renewable energy. Notwithstanding the rapid growth of renewable energy over the past decade, the United States must add renewable capacity at an unprecedented rate. To meet this challenge, many states have …

Design Justice And Design Pedagogies With Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Dr. Sasha Costanza-Chock

Open Educational Resources Symposium

Zoom Link: https://linnbenton.zoom.us/j/98939920915

In this 90-minute keynote address, Dr. Costanza-Chock will share reflections on critical pedagogies of design justice. We will explore questions such as: How might we teach and learn design justice? What would it mean for institutional structures to support a community-based pedagogy of technology design? What are the challenges in an age of the neoliberalization of the educational system? Dr. Costanza-Chock will challenge Oregon's open ed community to build design systems where students analyze the role of design in our world, recommending methods and strategies that instructional designers and open education practitioners in Oregon can take up …

The Intersection Of Herbicide Policy, Exposure, And Health At The University Of Connecticut, Katherine Hayward

Honors Scholar Theses

Pesticides play an extremely complicated role in our everyday lives. From the water you use to make your coffee, to the breastmilk your neighbor provides for their child, to the lake your dog swims in, chemical pesticides or their byproducts have been found in nearly every corner of our lives. The chemicals used in synthetic herbicides, a subcategory of pesticides, have far reaching negative impacts on human health, biodiversity, and water quality. Despite there being numerous published studies on the relationships between pesticide exposures and health, there is still ongoing discord and controversy surrounding their role in our lives. After …

The Levee Disservitude: How And Why Louisiana Should Stop Undermining One Of Its Most Essential Powers, Isabel Englehart

Louisiana Law Review

No abstract provided.

A Precision Environmental Health Approach To Prevention Of Human Disease, Andrea Baccarelli, Dana C Dolinoy, Cheryl Lyn Walker

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

Human health is determined by the interaction of our environment with the genome, epigenome, and microbiome, which shape the transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic landscape of cells and tissues. Precision environmental health is an emerging field leveraging environmental and system-level ('omic) data to understand underlying environmental causes of disease, identify biomarkers of exposure and response, and develop new prevention and intervention strategies. In this article we provide real-life illustrations of the utility of precision environmental health approaches, identify current challenges in the field, and outline new opportunities to promote health through a precision environmental health framework.

Ecoracism And Antiracism In The Environmental Justice Movement And Their Place In Literature, Jill Amari

Academic Festival

The term “ecoracism” has recently entered the fields of environmental activism, ecocriticism, and Critical Race Theory, though not much research on ecoracism has yet been done in the latter two fields. Antiracism, another modern concept, refers to the acknowledgment of racism and the promotion of racial equality. This paper explores how ecoracism and antiracism are important within the environmental justice movement, just as they are significant in literature. But how can looking at nature literature through an ecoracist and antiracist lens help future studies of these subjects, as well as future environmental and literary scholars? Scholars, like activists, have a …

Pollution In Feathers: A Reflection Of Environmental Racism In Chicago, Grace Whitten

Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium

Residents of a majority Latine community, Little Village, located in the west side of Chicago are known to face increased environmental hazards and subsequent environmental racism, especially that of carbon emissions and PM2.5 from industrial pollution.1-6 Bird feathers have been used in previous studies to note pollution accumulation with success.7-8 In this study I found that there increased material in the feathers collected and higher PM2.5 detected in Little Village in comparison to Edgewater, indicating that feathers can reflect the history of environmental racism in Chicago and that using loss on ignition has potential for use on feathers.

Implementing An Action Plan Through Analyzing The Sustainability (Stars) Rankings Of The University Of Alabama In Huntsville (Uah), Sameera Reanne White

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Elementary Classroom Views Of Nature Are Associated With Lower Child Externalizing Behavior Problems, Amber L. Pearson, Catherine D. Brown, Aaron Reuben, Natalie Nicholls, Karin A. Pfeiffer, Kimberly A. Clevenger

Kinesiology and Health Science Faculty Publications

Exposure to nature views has been associated with diverse mental health and cognitive capacity benefits. Yet, much of this evidence was derived in adult samples and typically only involves residential views of nature. Findings from studies with children suggest that when more greenness is available at home or school, children have higher academic performance and have expedited attention restoration, although most studies utilize coarse or subjective assessments of exposure to nature and largely neglect investigation among young children. Here, we investigated associations between objectively measured visible nature at school and children's behavior problems (attention and externalizing behaviors using the Brief …

Harm Egalitarianism, Michael E. Herz

Articles

In the last few years, law schools and law professors have given new attention to how questions of race can be interwoven into courses that are not explicitly about race. Much has been written about how to do so in both first-year and upper-level courses, and, from all reports, the law school classroom has meaningfully changed. My sense, though it is completely impressionistic and unscientific, is that the typical Administrative Law course may have changed less than many others. It seems fair to say, at least, that there has not developed a standard suite of topics that a professor wanting …

Assessing Corporate Social Responsibility And Sustainability In The Small Businesses Of Bridgewater, Ma, Ryan Mannett

Honors Program Theses and Projects

This thesis examines the extent to which small, local businesses in Bridgewater, MA generate social value for their community by engaging in socially responsible and sustainable corporate practices. After conducting an examination of local businesses to determine those that utilize such strategies, members of the selected organizations were contacted via email and asked to participate in a survey intended to generate qualitative data relating to corporate sustainability. Factors such as community impacts, internal benefits, motivations, and communication strategies pertaining to sustainability were all evaluated. Results indicate that Bridgewater businesses practicing sustainability not only generate internal value for the organization by …

Newsnotes

Vincentian Studies

No abstract provided.

Tweets That Matter: Exploring The Solutions To Maternal Mortality In The United States Discussed By Advocacy Organizations On Twitter, Diane Ezeh Aruah, Yvonne Henshaw, Kim Walsh-Childers

Communications Faculty Research

This study investigated maternal mortality solutions mentioned on Twitter by maternal health advocacy organizations in the United States. Using qualitative content analysis, we examined tweets from 20 advocacy organizations and found that the majority of the tweets focused on policy, healthcare, community, and individual solutions. The most tweeted policy solutions include tweets advocating signing birth equity, paid family leave, Medicaid expansion, and reproductive justice bills, whereas the most tweeted community solutions were funding community organizations, hiring community doulas, and building community health centers. The most tweeted individual solutions were storytelling, self-advocacy, and self-care. These findings provide insights into the perspectives …

Turning Green: Envisioning A Sustainable Future For Bowling Green, Kiana Fitzpatrick

Honors Projects

This project examines how smaller cities and communities can become more sustainable.

Incorporating Environmental Justice Communities In Environmental Policy Recommendations For The City Of Huntsville, Jaxon Wayne Tolbert

Honors Capstone Projects and Theses

No abstract provided.

Robot Recycling Project, Zoha Hassan

Undergraduate Research and Engagement Symposium

The purpose of the Robot Recycling Project is to eliminate the need to manually sort waste. Throughout the world piles of waste are sorted by hand for it to be properly recycled, but it is a difficult and tedious task with a low success rate. The purpose of the robot recycler is that it would sort through waste by being able to identify the type of garbage something is and be able to sort it into the correct category, consequentially increasing the rate of recycling throughout the world to help our environment.