Matching Items (6)
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- All Subjects: environmental justice
- Genre: Academic theses
- Creators: Schoon, Michael
- Creators: Hirt, Paul
Description
Mexico City has an ongoing air pollution issue that negatively affects its citizens and surroundings with current structural disconnections preventing the city from improving its overall air quality. Thematic methodological analysis reveals current obstacles and barriers, as well as variables contributing to this persistent problem. A historical background reveals current programs and policies implemented to improve Mexico’s City air quality. Mexico City’s current systems, infrastructure, and policies are inadequate and ineffective. There is a lack of appropriate regulation on other modes of transportation, and the current government system fails to identify how the class disparity in the city and lack of adequate education are contributing to this ongoing problem. Education and adequate public awareness can potentially aid the fight against air pollution in the Metropolitan City.
ContributorsGarcia, Lucero (Author) / Duarte, Marisa E. (Thesis advisor) / Arzubiaga, Angela (Committee member) / Richter, Jennifer (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Located in Southwest Alaska on the Bering Sea, Bristol Bay covers the area of land and water that lies north of the Alaska Peninsula. The Bristol Bay region consists of more than 40 million acres and is home to approximately 7,400 people of mostly Alaska Native descent. Many Natives still maintain a subsistence lifestyle. The region’s Indigenous inhabitants include Aleuts, Eskimos, and Indians. Bristol Bay’s Indigenous cultures developed around the abundant salmon runs. The Bristol Bay watershed, with its extensive lake and river systems, provides the ideal breeding grounds for all five species of Pacific salmon. As a keystone species, salmon directly or indirectly impact many species in the ecosystem. This dissertation focuses on the ecology and environment, culture, and economy in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery from its beginnings in 1884 until the present. The arrival of Euro-Americans altered the human/salmon relationship as Alaska Natives entered the commercial salmon fishery. The commercial fishery largely marginalized Alaska Natives and they struggle to remain relevant in the fishery. Participation in the subsistence fishery remains strong and allows Bristol Bay Natives to continue their cultural traditions. On a global scale, the sustainable Bristol Bay’s salmon harvest provides over half of the world’s wild sockeye salmon. Salmon cultures once existed throughout the Atlantic and Pacific. With the decline of salmon, few viable salmon cultures remain today. I argue that because of the ecological, cultural, and economic factors, salmon in Bristol Bay deserve protection from competing resource development and other factors that threaten the valuable fishery. The unique ecology of Bristol Bay needs clean water to continue its bountiful production. As a member of the Bristol Bay community, I include my own experiences in the salmon fishery, incorporating “writing from home” as one of my primary methodologies. I also include ethnohistory and oral history methodologies. I conducted interviews with elders in the Bristol Bay community to incorporate Indigenous experiences as Natives faced changes brought on by the commercial salmon fishery.
ContributorsGroat, Bridget Lee (Author) / Fixico, Donald L (Thesis advisor) / Bauer, William (Committee member) / Hirt, Paul (Committee member) / Riding In, James (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Effective collaboration and cooperation across difference are at the heart of present and future sustainability challenges and solutions. Collaboration among social groups (intragenerational), across time (intergenerational), and across species (interspecies) is each central to achieving sustainability transitions in the 21st century. In practice, there are three types of differences that limit collaboration and cooperation toward sustainability outcomes: differences among social groups, differences across time, and differences across species. Each of these differences have corresponding cognitive biases that challenge collaboration. Social cognitive biases challenge collaboration among social groups; temporal cognitive biases challenge collaboration across time; and anthropocentric cognitive biases challenge collaboration across species. In this work, I present three correctives to collaboration challenges spanning the social, temporal, and species cognitive biases through intervention-specific methods that build beyond traditional framings of empathy, toward social, futures, and ecological empathy. By re-theorizing empathy across these domains, I seek to construct a multidimensional theory of empathy for sustainability, and suggest methods to build it, to bridge differences among people, time horizons, and species for sustainability practice.
ContributorsLambert, Lauren Marie-Jasmine (Author) / Selin, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Tomblin, David (Committee member) / Berbés-Blázquez, Marta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
The act of moving water across basins is a recent phenomenon in Arizona water policy. This thesis creates a narrative arc for understanding the long-term issues that set precedents for interbasin water transportation and the immediate causes--namely the passage of the seminal Groundwater Management Act (GMA) in 1980--that motivated Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix to acquire rural farmlands in the mid-1980s with the intent of transporting the underlying groundwater back to their respective service areas in the immediate future. Residents of rural areas were active participants in not only the sales of these farmlands, but also in how municipalities would economically develop these properties in the years to come. Their role made these municipal "water farm" purchases function as exchanges. Fears about the impact of these properties and the water transportation they anticipated on communities-of-origin; the limited nature of economic, fiscal, and hydrologic data at the time; and the rise of private water speculators turned water farms into a major political controversy. The six years it took the legislature to wrestle with the problem at the heart this issue--the value of water to rural communities--were among its most tumultuous. The loss of key lawmakers involved in GMA negotiations, the impeachment of Governor Evan Mecham, and a bribery scandal called AZScam collectively sidetracked negotiations. Even more critical was the absence of a mutual recognition that these water farms posed a problem and the external pressure that had forced all parties involved in earlier groundwater-related negotiations to craft compromise. After cities and speculators failed to force a bill favorable to their interests in 1989, a re-alignment among blocs occurred: cities joined with rural interests to craft legislation that grandfathered in existing urban water farms and limited future water farms to several basins. In exchange, rural interests supported a bill to create a Phoenix-area groundwater replenishment district that enabled cooperative management of water supplies. These two bills, which were jointly signed into law in June 1991, tentatively resolved the water farm issue. The creation of a groundwater replenishment district that has subsidized growth in Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima Counties, the creation water bank to store unused Central Arizona Project water for times of drought, and a host of water conservation measures and water leases enabled by the passage of several tribal water rights settlements have set favorable conditions such that Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix never had any reason to transport any water from their water farms. The legacy of these properties then is that they were the product of the intense urgency and uncertainty in urban planning premised on assumptions of growing populations and complementary, inelastic demand. But even as per capita water consumption has declined throughout the Phoenix-area, continued growth has increased demand, beyond the capacity of available supplies so that there will likely be a new push for rural water farms in the foreseeable future.
ContributorsBergelin, Paul (Author) / Hirt, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Climate adaptation has not kept pace with climate impacts which has formed an adaptation gap. Increasingly insurance is viewed as a solution to close this gap. However, the efficacy and implications of using insurance in the climate adaptation space are not clear. Furthermore, past research has focused on specific actors or processes, not on the interactions and interconnections between the actors and the processes. I take a complex adaptive systems approach to map out how these dynamics are shaping adaptation and to interrogate what the insurance climate adaptation literature claims are the successes and pitfalls of insurance driving, enabling or being adaptation. From this interrogation it becomes apparent that insurance has enormous influence on its policy holders, builds telecoupling into local adaptation, and creates structures which support contradictory land use policies at the local level. Based on the influence insurance has on policy holders, I argue that insurance should be viewed as a form of governance. I synthesize insurance, governance and adaptation literature to examine exactly what governance tools insurance uses to exercise this influence and what the consequences may be. This research reveals that insurance may not be the exemplary adaptation approach the international community is hoping for. Using insurance, risk can be reduced without reducing vulnerability, and risk transfer can result in risk displacement which can reduce adaptation incentives, fuel maladaptation, or impose public burdens. Moreover, insurance requires certain information and legal relationships which can and often do structure that which is insured to the needs of insurance and shift authority away from governments to insurance companies or public-private partnerships. Each of these undermine the legitimacy of insurance-led local adaptation and contradict the stated social justice goals of international calls for insurance. Finally, I interrogate the potential justice concerns that emerged through an analysis of insurance as a form of adaptation governance. Using a multi-valent approach to justice I examine a suite of programs intended to support agricultural adaptation through insurance. This analysis demonstrates that although some programs clearly attempted to consider issues of justice, overall these existing programs raise distributional, procedural and recognition justice concerns.
ContributorsLueck, Vanessa (Author) / Klinsky, Sonja (Thesis advisor) / Schoon, Michael (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Stressors to marine environments are predicted to increase and affect the well-being of marine ecosystems and coastal communities. Marine protected areas (MPAs) are one most widely implemented interventions for marine stressors. Despite the implementation of thousands of protected areas worldwide, people are still striving to understand their dynamics as they vary in their efficacy and many MPAs have not met their objectives. Additionally, those that have often fail to protect the ecosystem services and cultural values necessary for human community health. Thus, research has expanded to include analyses of the human and social dimensions that may limit their effectiveness. This dissertation explores the role of community engagement in marine protected areas and perceptions of environmental changes in coastal communities. Currently, existing research on the roles of community engagement in marine conservation interventions is limited, particularly in the island-states of the Caribbean region. This dissertation contains a review of the literature to understand the nuances of community engagement in relation to MPAs. Through the review, it was determined that primary forms of engagement are interviews and surveys, and respondents primarily included businesses, community members, fishers, and resource users. To better understand the perceptions and practices on-the-ground, key informants were interviewed across the Caribbean. There are strong desires to conduct community engagement for innumerable benefits, but there are barriers that some participants have overcome. Sharing information between MPA sites offers an opportunity to effectively engage community members. For the local case study, Charlotteville, Trinidad and Tobago, a small, coastal fishing town in the northeast region of Tobago was selected to understand the role of perceptions of environmental changes. There were strong ties of environmental and social changes, with an emphasis on the impacts of environmental stressors to human health. The heterogeneity and diversity of responses in this chapter highlight the need to consider who is engaged in community engagement activities.
ContributorsBernard, Miranda Lynn (Author) / Gerber, Leah (Thesis advisor) / Buzinde, Christine (Committee member) / Schoon, Michael (Committee member) / Kittinger, Jack (Committee member) / Cheng, Samantha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021