Matching Items (15)
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- All Subjects: Environmental Studies
- All Subjects: environment
- All Subjects: Land use
- Creators: Minteer, Ben
- Creators: Aggarwal, Rimjhim
- Status: Published
Description
Professional environmental scientists are increasingly under pressure to inform and even shape policy. Scientists engage policy effectively when they act within the bounds of objectivity, credibility, and authority, yet significant portions of the scientific community condemn such acts as advocacy. They argue that it is nonobjective, that it risks damaging the credibility of science, and that it is an abuse of authority. This means objectivity, credibility, and authority deserve direct attention before the policy advocacy quagmire can be reasonably understood. I investigate the meaning of objectivity in science and that necessarily brings the roles of values in science into question. This thesis is a sociological study of the roles environmental values play in the decisions of environmental scientists working in the institution of academia. I argue that the gridlocked nature of the environmental policy advocacy debates can be traced to what seems to be a deep tension and perhaps confusion among these scientists. I provide empirical evidence of this tension and confusion through the use of in depth semi-structured interviews among a sampling of academic environmental scientists (AES). I show that there is a struggle for these AES to reconcile their support for environmentalist values and goals with their commitment to scientific objectivity and their concerns about being credible scientists in the academy. Additionally, I supplemented my data collection with environmental sociology and history, plus philosophy and sociology of science literatures. With this, I developed a system for understanding values in science (of which environmental values are a subset) with respect to the limits of my sample and study. This examination of respondent behavior provides support that it is possible for AES to act on their environmental values without compromising their objectivity, credibility, and authority. These scientists were not likely to practice this in conversations with colleagues and policy-makers, but were likely to behave this way with students. The legitimate extension of this behavior is a viable route for continuing to integrate the human and social dimensions of environmental science into its practice, its training, and its relationship with policy.
ContributorsAppleton, Caroline (Author) / Minteer, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Chew, Matt (Committee member) / Armendt, Brad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Protein is an essential macronutrient in the human diet, but the source of this protein has both human health and environmental impacts. Health complications can result from protein deficiency, but the practices by which protein sources are raised, grown, or harvested have environmental consequences, potentially reducing biodiversity, essential habitat, and crucial stocks of natural resources. Terrestrial cultivation encroaches on natural habitats and consumes resources inefficiently, while overfishing has greatly depleted wild fishery stocks. These environmental factors, along with concerns about nutrients, contaminants and the ethics of animal protein has led to confusion about weighing the risks and benefits associated with alternative sources of protein. Providing consumers \u2014 and policy makers \u2014 with a comprehensive account of major protein sources and their impacts in an understandable form is crucial to reducing environmental degradation and improving human health. Here I provide a general framework to compare the health and environmental impacts of livestock, seafood, and plant protein, and illustrate the application of this framework with case studies for each of these categories.
ContributorsGeren, Sarah Lindsey (Author) / Gerber, Leah (Thesis director) / Smith, Andrew (Committee member) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
The Committee on Rare and Endangered Wildlife Species (CREWS) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) made important and lasting contributions to one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in U.S. history: the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). CREWS was a prominent science-advisory body within the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) in the 1960s and 1970s, responsible for advising on the development of federal endangered-wildlife policy. The Committee took full advantage of its scientific and political authority by identifying a particular object of conservation--used in the development of the first U.S. list of endangered species--and establishing captive breeding as a primary conservation practice, both of which were written into the ESA and are employed in endangered-species listing and recovery to this day. Despite these important contributions to federal endangered-species practice and policy, CREWS has received little attention from historians of science or policy scholars. This dissertation is an empirical history of CREWS that draws on primary sources from the Smithsonian Institution (SI) Archives and a detailed analysis of the U.S. congressional record. The SI sources (including the records of the Bird and Mammal Laboratory, an FWS staffed research group stationed at the Smithsonian Institution) reveal the technical and political details of CREWS's advisory work. The congressional record provides evidence showing significant contributions of CREWS and its advisors and supervisors to the legislative process that resulted in the inclusion of key CREWS-inspired concepts and practices in the ESA. The foundational concepts and practices of the CREWS's research program drew from a number of areas currently of interest to several sub-disciplines that investigate the complex relationship between science and society. Among them are migratory bird conservation, systematics inspired by the Evolutionary Synthesis, species-focused ecology, captive breeding, reintroduction, and species transplantation. The following pages describe the role played by CREWS in drawing these various threads together and codifying them as endangered-species policy in the ESA.
ContributorsWinston, Johnny (Author) / Hamilton, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Henson, Pamela (Committee member) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Food waste is one of the most significant food system inefficiencies with environmental, financial, and social consequences. This waste, which occurs more at the consumer stage in high income countries, is often attributed to consumers’ behavior. While behavior is a contributing factor, the role of other contextual factors in influencing this behavior has not been systematically analyzed. Understanding contextual drivers of consumer food waste behavior is important, as behavior sits in a matrix of technology, infrastructures, institutions and social structure. Hence designing effective interventions will require a systems perceptive of the problem. In paper 1, I used Socio-ecological framing to understand how personal, interpersonal, socio-cultural, built, and institutional environments contribute to food waste at the consumer stage. In paper 2, I explored the perception of stakeholders in Phoenix on the effectiveness and feasibility of possible interventions that could be used to tackle consumer food waste. In paper 3, I examined the impact of knowledge and awareness of the environmental consequence of food waste in terms of embedded water and energy on the cognitive factors responsible for consumer food waste behavior. Across these three papers, I have identified three findings. First, the most influential factor responsible for consumer food waste is meal planning, as many decisions about food management depend on it. However, there are many contextual factors that discourage meal planning. Other factors identified include the wide gap between food producers and consumers, the low price of food, and marketing strategies used by retailers to encourage food purchases. Systems level interventions will be required to address these drivers that provide an enabling environment for behavioral change. Second stakeholders in the city overwhelmingly support and agree that education will be the most effective and feasible intervention to address consumer food waste, 3) there is need to carefully craft education materials to inform consumers about other resources, such as water and energy, embedded in food waste to stimulate a personal norm that motivates change in behavior. In this study, I emphasize the need to understand the root causes of consumer food waste and exploration of systems level interventions, in combination with education and information interventions that are being commonly used.
ContributorsOpejin, Adenike Kafayat (Author) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Thesis advisor) / White, Dave (Thesis advisor) / Garcia, Margret (Committee member) / Merrigan, Kathleen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Producing, transforming, distributing, and consuming food requires a multitude of actors, from the microbes in the soil to the truck drivers, from the salesperson to the bacterial life that supports digestion. Yet, the global food system – far from being neutral – unequally provides and extracts resources around the globe to serve and protect the needs of some, while excluding and/or oppressing others and producing trauma in the process. Drawing on feminist scholarship and permaculture research – two fields that discuss the importance of care but only rarely work together – and using social science methods, I explore how to integrate care into food systems, and what are the outcomes of such an integration. I first bring together the voices of 35 everyday experts from Cuba, France, and the United States (Arizona) and perspectives from ethics of care, creation care, indigenous scholars, and permaculture specialists, and I use grounded theory to develop a definition of care in food systems context, and a conceptual map of care that identifies motives for caring, caring practices and their results. I then discuss how caring practices enhance food systems’ adaptive capacity and resilience. Next, I study the relationship between a subset of the identified caring practices – what is recognized as “Earth care” – and their effect on well-being in general, and Food Well-Being more specifically, using three case studies from Arizona based on: (1) interviews of school teachers, (2) interviews of sustainable farmers, (3) a survey with 96 gardeners. There, I also discuss how policies and cultural transformations can better support the integration of Earth care practices in food systems. Then, I examine how urban food autonomy movements are grassroots examples of integration of care in food systems, and how through their care practices – Earth care, “People care” and “Fair share” – they can serve as a catalyst for social change and contribute to the achievement of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Lastly, I conclude with recommendations to strengthen a culture of care in food systems, as well as limitations to my research, and future research directions.
ContributorsGiraud, Esteve Gaelle (Author) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Thesis advisor) / Cloutier, Scott (Thesis advisor) / Samuelson, Hava (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
As general awareness and concern for environmental issues has increased over time, so has the growth of environmental artwork. Artworks in this genre have been used with the intent to motivate conservation action and environmental justice action, as well as spread broader environmental awareness. Different approaches to environmental messages may have varying impacts on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes related to the environment. Yet this topic is still not widely studied. Using a combination of survey and interview techniques, this thesis examines the intersection of art, ethics, and the environment by eliciting the reactions and responses of Arizona State University students to various environmental artworks. The study design presented groups of students with differing imagery, one set categorized as environmentally hopeful or positive, the other as environmentally gloomy or negative. The New Ecological Paradigm scale (NEP) was used as a measure for ethical views. After exposure to the artworks, students showed shifts in their NEP scores in both directions, and some had no change. Between positive and negative artworks, there was no significant difference in change in score on the NEP scale. The results of the thesis inspired a suggestion for a new scale to describe an emerging environmental ethic that is evidenced by the artworks, artists statements, and student reactions in this project: the Social And Ecological Paradigm (SAEP). The paradigm abbreviation includes the letter A to emphasize the importance of considering both the social and ecological implications of human activity. This mindset addresses environmental justice concerns, positive human interactions with the environment, and sustainable human communities. At the core, it is a basic human right to live in a healthy and safe environment, and a positive societal relationship with the environment is necessary to guarantee this right for all. Art is a way for people to connect with the environment and can give insight into the way society’s environmental ethic is ever shifting.
ContributorsCrawford-Paz Soldán, Elise (Author) / Minteer, Ben (Thesis director) / Sale, Gregory (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Art (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2022-05
ContributorsUllah, Isaac I. T., 1979- (Author) / Barton, C. Michael (Author)
Created2007
ContributorsBarton, C. Michael (Author) / Ullah, Isaac I. T., 1979- (Author)
Created2006
Description
Environmental ethics is often described on a continuum of anthropocentrism to biocentrism. Pet ownership has been shown to correlate with biocentrism. This study aims to answer how strong the correlation is between pet ownership and biocentrism and how pet owners react when pets' needs conflict with the environment. Findings from the study confirm previous research that pet owners lean biocentric, but their biocentric beliefs end when their pet's well-being misaligns with environmental concerns.
ContributorsCrawford-Paz Soldan, Esme (Author) / Wynne, Clive (Thesis director) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2024-05
ContributorsBergin, Sean M. (Author) / Ullah, Isaac I. T., 1979- (Author) / Barton, C. Michael (Author) / Gravel-Miguel, Claudine (Author)
Created2012