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- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
- Member of: Theses and Dissertations
- Status: Published
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
This thesis will examine possible connection points between the health of a local environmental/climate news ecosystem and that local community’s belief in and vulnerability to the effects of climate change in Central Appalachia and Northern Virginia. The three counties that will be studied in Virginia are Arlington, Buchanan and Wise Counties. This research will be mainly a hypothesis-generating descriptive analysis of data, coupled with both interviews with researchers and local experts, in addition to observations from relevant literature about the possible connections between availability of environmental news with climate change, institutional belief and climate vulnerability data. The local history of resource extraction will also be explored. The point of this thesis is not to prove that a lack of access to strong, locally focused climate and environmental news increases vulnerability to the effects of climate change (although it does raise this as a possibility). Rather, it is to continue a conversation with journalists, media professionals and climate professionals about how to approach understanding and engaging groups left out of the climate conversation and groups who've been traditionally underserved by news media when it comes to climate information and appeals for institutional trust. This conversation is already happening, especially when it comes to the importance of the health of local, community focused news in general in Appalachia, but given the urgency and scale of the climate crisis, merits continuation and some inquiry into environmental news.
Low-income areas are more likely to be exposed to poor air quality and hazardous levels of criteria pollutants, including particulate matter. While this relationship is well documented in environmental justice and equity literature, there is less discussion of how it is addressed by regulatory air quality departments and their monitoring networks. Socioeconomic clustering in highly polluted areas presents a challenge for local regulatory agencies as it may result in over- or under-monitoring of certain income brackets. This is significant because, for regulatory bodies, what is monitored determines where environmental regulations are enforced. In this study, I look at the spatial concentrations of low-income neighborhoods and their proximity to regulatory fine particulate matter monitoring stations in Maricopa County, Arizona and Santiago Metropolitan Region, Chile. This study also evaluates which monitors are most often in exceedance of air quality standards for PM2.5. Using census data, individual monitor readings, and monitoring network assessment data to create tables and maps, I illustrate that, in both case studies, regulatory PM2.5 monitors are frequently positioned in proximity to very low-income or highly impoverished communities. The monitors most often and furthest past exceedance of federal air quality standards are those in (or closest) to the poorest parts of the urban center of the region. In both cases, these populations and monitors are heavily concentrated to the south and west of the region’s primary city. This is likely due to compounding factors attributed to urban geography and zoning that should be explored in future studies. I use these findings to suggest that income and poverty level should be evaluated as an environmental justice factor and as an area for improvement in assessments of regulatory monitoring networks, and to provide further evidence in the debate about equitable air quality monitoring.
