Disaster science is a procedural field often construed as producing blanket policies that attempt to cover everyone, but the complexity of human lived experiences must have a space to exist within disaster science if its research and findings are to be effective. This thesis illustrates that disaster policies and publications often leave out the most vulnerable communities—those in greatest need of collective support. Through critically analyzing beautification through green space, discussing photovoice interviews, and by deconstructing public preparedness documents published by Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HCOHSEM), it is clear that accumulation by dispossession filters down through not only property and money but also access to green spaces and a healthy life. By dispossessing low-income communities of their right to green spaces and life, those communities end up in places that are environmentally dangerous, leaving them at a disadvantage in the disaster preparedness and recovery process. This thesis serves as a case study highlighting how HCOHSEM failed to provide low-income communities with assistance prior to, during, and after Hurricane Harvey. The lessons from these gaps in protective measures show that public policies need to be malleable to ensure residents of any community are covered. Though no two communities are alike, other cities and federal emergency entities can learn about what public policy measures require progressive changes to better serve the most vulnerable communities.

This dissertation brings together the history of slavery and environmental history to explore the legacy of slavery on Texas’ Trinity River from the 1820s to the 1970s. Many southern rivers, including the Trinity, experienced few sustained efforts to transform or control them until well into the twentieth century, and these environments were just as likely to diffuse rather than consolidate any particular group’s power over people. Unlike elites in the older regions of the slave South, no one assumed that they controlled the environment in places such as Texas’s Trinity River. Drawing on nearly fifty different archives, my dissertation explains the surprising ways in which slavery, urbanization, and environmentalism were connected. Environmental racism changed the Trinity into a more flood prone and polluted place, but it also meant that its mostly black residents were rarely mentioned in official engineering reports or newspaper articles. This invisibility served as a temporary advantage during the racist violence of the post-emancipation decades and people squatted on land for which they did not hold titles. However, because so many people were not included in official records such as census reports, I have relied on qualitative sources to analyze this history. Freedpeople incurred plantation slavery’s environmental debts of erosion and disease, but they also seized the opportunity to avoid crop-liens and other forms of usury by living in an overlooked landscape. Upstream cities on the Trinity gave little consideration to the effects of using the river as a sewer, and they ignored the black families who called the river home. In the early twentieth century, a novel class of elites on the lower half of the river began to issue bonds to build levees that pushed out many longtime residents. As prisons replaced plantations and subsistence-oriented farmers could no longer endure the worsened floods, pollution, and enclosure of its common lands, the lower Trinity lost most of its remaining residents. Yet as debates raged along the entire river about remaking it into a canal and the proper use of state and federal resources, the memory of an unruly river contributed to the political outcomes despite slavery’s legacy of inequality.

Thesis advisor: Yasmin Zaerpoor / The Coronavirus pandemic has cast a new light on the intersection of environmental justice and public health, as communities of color and low-income communities have experienced greater rates of infection and mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic. These inequalities can be attributed to a multitude of injustices. I investigate the impact that air pollution has had on COVID-19 incidence within Massachusetts, while also investigating other possible correlating factors. I use a regression model to consider the impact of air pollution, population density, race, income, age, and education on COVID-19 positivity rates in Massachusetts. In this study, I found that air pollution, population density, and the percentage of Hispanic population in a given community were all statistically significant in a linear regression model. Further research would be needed to investigate whether the coefficient on Hispanic population is conclusive. It is possible that the significant coefficient is picking up variables that are not included in this regression, namely the percentage of essential workers or access to healthcare. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Environmental Studies.

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This paper identifies social conditions that shape perceptions of risk to environmental toxins among residents in the Gulf Coasts of Louisiana and Mississippi following Hurricane Katrina. Demographic information from a randomly selected sample of 2,548 residents was used to explore the concept of the "White male effect" as discussed in previous literature, which has found that white males are particularly risk accepting compared to all other race and gender groups. This analysis also evaluated the influence of trust in government and beliefs about environmental justice on perceived exposure and compared responses from residents within and outside the City of New Orleans to determine whether there is evidence of location-specific differences. Hierarchical regression analysis revealed strong support for the combined race and gender effects proposed by previous literature. Additionally, hypotheses regarding the influence of trust in government and belief in environmental injustice were supported. Suggestions for future research and policy implications are discussed.

The Green New Deal has gained international significance as the only prominent climate legislation in the United States. The Green New Deal has also become emblematic of a larger movement for climate justice; however, further analysis of the Green New Deal and its assumptions indicates that it falls short of enacting meaningful justice for those most effected by climate change, but least responsible for causing it. This shortcoming is due to the absence of calls to decolonize. Because of the large role U.S. militarism and imperialism play in contributing to the climate crisis, decolonization must be central to climate justice projects. Marx's concept of the metabolic rift and the phenomenon of humans' separation from nature through colonial acts of dispossession and enclosure of land plays an important role in thinking through the ways the Green New Deal recognizes this same phenomenon but fails to go deeper and recognize broader implications of the metabolic rift for continued U.S. imperialism. Additionally, the rocky legacy of the environmental justice movement raises questions as to whether working with the settler state can lead to meaningful justice. Though the Green New Deal is an operation of state recognition of the climate crisis as connected to other social inequalities, it does not overcome the settler state's reliance on racial capitalism and continued exploitation of people and the environment. A climate justice program that is in fact centered on decolonization and indigenous sovereignty is available and must be supported. / Master of Arts / The Green New Deal has gained international significance as the only prominent climate legislation in the United States. The Green New Deal has also become emblematic of a larger movement for climate justice; however, further analysis of the Green New Deal and its assumptions indicates that it falls short of enacting meaningful justice for those most effected by climate change, but least responsible for causing it. The project of the Green New Deal recognizes the phenomenon of humans' separation from nature and importantly seeks to connect environmental issues to social issues and assert environmental justice through state-led action. Because the Green New Deal fails to question the larger role of the U.S. military's involvement around the world and its pollution and wastefulness, it becomes complicit in the very forces that drive the climate crisis. A project of decolonization, which would involve ending U.S. military involvement at home and abroad and asserting indigenous nations' sovereignty, addresses many of the shortcomings of the Green New Deal.

Urban trees provide a variety of benefits to human physical and mental health. However, prior research has shown that urban tree canopy is unevenly distributed; areas with lower household incomes or higher proportions of racial or ethnic minorities tend to have less canopy. Urban tree benefits are largely spatially-dependent, so this disparity has a disproportionate impact on these communities, which are additionally subject to higher rates of health problems. Planting programs are a common way that municipal and nonprofit urban forest organizations attempt to increase canopy in cities. Increasing canopy in underserved communities is a commonly desired outcome, but which of the wide range of programmatic strategies currently employed are more likely to result in success? This research uses interviews with planting program administrators, spatially referenced planting data, and demographic data for six U.S. cities in order to connect planting program design elements to equity outcomes. I developed a planting program taxonomy to provide a framework for classifying and comparing programs based on their operational characteristics, and used it along with planting location data to identify programs that had the greatest reach into low-income and minority area. I found that highly integrated partnerships between nonprofit and municipal entities, reduced planting responsibility for property owners, and concentrated plantings that utilize public property locations to a high degree are likely to improve program penetration into low-income and minority areas. These findings provide urban forestry practitioners with guidance on how to more successfully align planting program design with equity outcomes. / Master of Science

Yes / The School of Law University of Bradford is a modern law school with a growing research portfolio on various aspects of sustainable development law and policy. We support an active research community which comprises our academics, our students, and external partners, leading on, and collaborating in, world-class research which is academically rigorous, innovative, applicable to real life, can positively influence policy and practice and promote social justice. For this purpose, we collaborate with academic, third sector, professional and industry partners at national and international levels to foster an active research community, social justice and innovative, policy-oriented research. The term ‘just transition’ has recently evolved from a process that seeks to galvanize a change in energy production and consumption practices to one which alludes to a transition from a fossil-fuel dependent economy or development approach to a lowcarbon economy. The just transition discourse takes as its point of departure the recognition that fossilfuel dependent economies were characterised by environmental injustice, inequalities or uneven distribution of environmental resources. Hence, the need to protect vulnerable communities, workers and dependent economic systems so that the adverse impact of the transition to a low-carbon economy will be reduced. It is imperative that a holistic approach be taken in recognising the inequalities which have arisen for various stakeholders within and between countries that bear the cost of decarbonization, including historical concerns and environmental (in)justice. Therefore, implementing just transition requires an overview of social equality; inclusive participation; distributive justice; policy reform and implementation of judicial and non-judicial mechanisms for access to environmental justice. Hence, the conference provided a forum to identify diverse pathways for implementing just transition, explore how inequalities arise from these transitions, and highlight effective legal frameworks for access to environmental justice at the international and national levels.

abstract: Sustainability and environmental justice, two fields that developed parallel to each other, are both insufficient to deal with the challenges posed by institutional environmental violence (IEV). This thesis examines the discursive history of sustainability and critiques its focus on science-based technical solutions to large-scale global problems. It further analyzes the gaps in sustainability discourse that can be filled by environmental justice, such as the challenges posed by environmental racism. Despite this, neither field is able to contend with IEV in a meaningful way, which this thesis argues using the case study of the Flint Water Crisis (FWC). The FWC has been addressed as both an issue of sustainability and of environmental justice, yet IEV persists in the community. This is due in part to the narrative of crisis reflected by the FWC and the role that knowledge production plays in that narrative. To fill the gap left by both sustainability and environmental justice, this thesis emphasizes the need for a transformational methodology incorporating knowledge produced by communities and individuals directly impacted by sustainability problems. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Sustainability 2019

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