This dissertation studies the science and policy-making of alternative energy using biofuels as a case study, primarily examining the instruments that can be used to alleviate the impacts of climate change and their relative efficacy. Three case studies of policy-making on biofuels in the European Union, United States of America and Brazil are presented and discussed. It is found that these policies have had large unintended negative consequences and that they relied on Lifecycle Analysis studies that had concluded that increased biofuels production can help meet economic, energy and environmental goals. A close examination of these Lifecycle Analysis studies reveals that their results are not conclusive. Instead of continuing to attempt to find answers from Lifecycle Analyses, this study suggests an alternative approach: formulating policy based on recognition of the ignorance of real fuel costs and pollution. Policies to combat climate change are classified into two distinct approaches: policies that place controls on the fuels responsible for emissions and policies that target the pollutants themselves. A mathematical model is constructed to compare these two approaches and address the central question of this study: In light of an ignorance of the cost and pollution impacts of different fuels, are policies targeting the pollutants themselves preferable to policies targeting the fuels? It is concluded that in situations where the cost and pollution functions of a fuel are unknown, subsidies, mandates and caps on the fuel might result in increased or decreased greenhouse gas emissions; on the other hand, a tax or cap on carbon dioxide results in the largest decrease possible of greenhouse gas emissions. Further, controls on greenhouse gases are shown to provide incentives for the development and advancement of cleaner alternative energy options, whereas controls on the fuels are shown to provide equal incentives to the development of cleaner and dirtier alternative fuels. This asymmetry in outcomes--regardless of actual cost functions--is the reason why controls on greenhouse gases are deemed favorable to direct fuel subsidies and mandates.

In this dissertation I assess the effect of fertilizer-based efforts to increase crop yields on smallholder African farms (the African Green Revolution) on the diversity and functional capacity of soil microbial communities and the ecosystem processes they regulate. In the introduction I provide a brief overview of the African Green Revolution and its critiques. In chapter 1, I advocate for the application of a functional trait-based approach to agroecology. I propose a functional trait-based approach to understanding the contribution of biodiversity to ecosystem services in agriculture. In chapter 2, I assess the impact of organic and mineral fertilization on the taxonomic composition and functional capacity of soil microbial communities in western Kenya. In chapter 3, I attempt to link these patterns in taxonomic and functional capacity to ecosystem process rates, specifically denitrification potential and carbon mineralization. Finally, in chapter 4, I measure fast- and slow-cycling organic matter fractions and their relationship to crop production and to the microbial enzymes that drive their turnover. Common to all chapters is the theme that short- and medium-term efforts to improve agricultural production through nutrient addition may feedback on the processes that sustain agriculture. This is in contrast with most research on the impacts of agricultural intensification, which tend to assess environmental impacts per se such as eutrophication and greenhouse gas emissions. I provide a summary and recommendations for future research in the conclusions.

This is a study at the interface of self, craft, and sustainability. It is a small part of a wider personal and social conjecture on the subject of ‘change ’ involving these three domains.This research develops the proposal that the success of a profound social change, which in our time pertains to the change towards sustainable societies, lies in the likeliness of self-transformation in individuals. Here the craft perspective is taken in order to link it to a large body of research in response to environmental and ethical concerns. However, unlike other object-oriented approaches with a similar purpose, the purpose of this research is to seek a greater contribution from craft practice when it is viewed as a transformation of the craftsperson. By referring to this human capacity, it argues, not only is crafting an inducement to self-transformation but also self-transformation can be regarded as a craft. To support this argument, material is drawn from the literature on craft, sustainability, philosophy of the self and social and developmental psychology. The historical and developmental formations of the key areas of the research are explored and psychological factors that motivate desirable ‘changes’ are identified. This exploration is then supported by interviews, personal narratives and the active participation of the researcher in the actual practice of craft. The research suggests that the state of self-actualization, where humanity reaches its fullness, is the destination to which the self needs to transform. It then traces elements involved in such a transformation back to their origin. This includes meanings and values leading to transformation, knowledge leading to meanings, experience leading to knowledge and the embodied connection between the self and the environment leading to experience. At the deepest level, it proposes a particular mode of relationship which is best described as craftsmanship or ‘the craft way of being.’ This process is also traced in the personal experience of the researcher.This thesis concludes with an explanation of the concept of ‘deep craft’. It proposes that the outcome of a deeper understanding of craft, which in effect widens the territory of craft activities, becomes manifest in the world in the form of ‘care taking’, essential for the ‘change’ towards more sustainable societies.

The current environmental crisis is due at least in part to a lack of effective science communication. Traditional methods of disseminating findings are important for continued progress but can be inaccessible to the public and rarely communicate the important emotional and cultural dimensions of environmental issues. Mitigation of the effects of climate change will not occur if a majority of people cannot understand the problem or do understand but fail to change their behaviors. There has been significant communications research into these issues—findings have suggested that communication techniques that can create a narrative, engage emotion, make the abstract more understandable, and use value frames to connect to an audience and encourage empathy will be most effective in encouraging behavioral change. The arts are capable of communicating in this fashion; sounding art in particular has a long history of engaging with politicized and emotional issues in ways that can ultimately provoke large-scale shifts in social convention. The arts and sciences each provide important responses to environmental problems. When used together, however, they have serious potential to create change. Data sonification, or the translation of data into sound, combines climate science and ecological art into a potentially powerful form of environmental activism. This thesis research examines the technique’s blend of art and science and its potential as effective environmentalist art through an exploration of three case studies: Lauren Oakes and Nik Sawe’s 2016 sonification of climate change impacts on Alaskan forests, Andrea Polli’s 2004 online sonification project Heat and the Heartbeat of the City, and the 2012 telematic multimedia opera Auksalaq by Matthew Burtner and Scott Deal. Data sonifications defy classification as either solely artistic or scientific—this disciplinary ambiguity can create tension—but it is exactly this disciplinary ambiguity that makes them useful as environmentalist tools. Sonifications appeal to emotions and logic and require creativity and evidence, powerful persuasive combinations in the face of environmental issues. They require scientists to consider the aesthetics behind the art, and composers to understand the science behind the data; in forcing us to acknowledge the importance of the other disciplinary perspective, they help us to question some of our disciplinary boundaries and effectively serve as a model for the interdisciplinary collaboration that is increasingly necessary as we navigate our changing world. / A Thesis submitted to the College of Music in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music. / Spring Semester 2019. / March 29, 2019. / Climate Change, Data Sonification, Ecological Art, Environmental Sustainability, Interdisciplinary Art, Science Communication / Includes bibliographical references. / Denise Von Glahn, Professor Directing Thesis; Sarah Eyerly, Committee Member; Michael Broyles, Committee Member; Jeffrey Chagnon, Committee Member.

Leaders of not-for-profit organizations could benefit from learning how to build a sustainable organization to help ensure that their organizations could continue to provide valuable services to the community for the future. The purpose of this single case study was to explore the fundraising strategies and donor development skills that leaders used to create a sustainable organization. Five purposefully selected leaders of a not-for-profit organization in Michigan, with experience in implementing effective fundraising strategies and fostering donor development skills for a sustainable business, participated in the study. Transformational leadership was the conceptual framework. The data collection process entailed face-to-face semistructured interviews, observations, and review of company documentation. In-depth analysis of interview transcripts, organizational websites, and organizational documents provided the basis for coding of repeated words and clusters of information to identify 3 themes: the impact of relationships on fundraising efforts, fundraising strategies for organizational viability, and endowment funds as a source of revenue that can help an organization become financially sustainable. The implications of this study for positive social change are increases in sustainability within the not-for-profit community or increases in charitable contributions locally, possible improvements in the quality of life for the employees and community, and the continuation of vital services that are provided by these organizations.

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The broad purpose of ‘In A City Like Delhi’ is to make an argument in favour of the positive link between spirituality and sustainability. Sustainability, at its core, requires an ethical commitment, and the thesis proposes that spirituality may be that vital means through which sustainability may be truly animated, in theory and in practice. The thesis is particularly preoccupied with considering the yet fully unrealised competence of spirituality to enrich the understanding and practise of sustainability in the urban space. To this end, it uses a very particular case study to make a modest exploration of such a conceptual association – the city of Delhi. The concept of sustainability, as articulated in the West, is primarily a secular notion. While international religious and spiritual organisations have taken up the sustainability challenge, the reverse is less true – sustainability planning is rarely conducted in a dialogue with religious or spiritual institutions and resources. In this context the case study of an Indian megacity to examine the relationship between religion, spirituality, secularism and development, is particularly interesting. The thesis explores, as one example of the potential interface, how Hindu spirituality as interpreted by Mahatma Gandhi, may usefully inform a spiritual philosophy to enliven a sustainability consciousness in Delhi. The theoretical speculations of the thesis are grounded in the local context by seeking the perspectives of twenty primary informants from Delhi who are all associated with various levels of planning and implementing development in the city. I specifically chose my interviewees from secular development backgrounds (rather than religious and spiritual representatives) because this would enrich critical understanding of how spirituality may be viewed within a secular sustainability discourse. I use their views on spirituality, sustainable development, and any affinities between the two notions to balance my own perspective, derived from both my research and my personal experience of the city of my birth. The interviews gave added depth to the environmental, economic and social challenges confronting the city of Delhi, which were already evident in the literature review. Additionally however, the interviews confirmed the hypothesis that sustainable development and spirituality together could have a productive, coherent and an even inseparable grounding union in Delhi and that spirituality may be vital in facilitating that essential shift in consciousness that a sustainable mindset requires. These findings are crucial to any study or strategy considering comprehensive sustainable development for Delhi.

Sustainable development is now being recognised as a vital component of our society in the environmental, ethical, social, technological, economic, and institutional aspects, or dimensions, so, this thesis develops a framework to quantitatively measure sustainability. This thesis is distinctive in that it focuses on quantitative methods encapsulated in a formal assessment procedure and includes sustainability concepts that have rarely been put into practical use in sustainability reports. The framework is designed along the strategy that the methodology needs to be scale invariant and recursive, meaning the procedure is the same irrespective of the scale the user is interested in, and that different people can focus at different levels of sustainability by following a similar procedure. While the quantification process is aimed to be as unbiased as possible, a configuration of the tools from Total Quality Management (TQM) is adapted to identify sustainability indicators which are then mapped onto a scalar with mathematical functions. The sustainability indices are presented according to the amount of details needed by different users ─ some may need just one overall figure while others may need sustainability indices broken down by the six sustainability dimensions and presented on a spider diagram, while others may need all the details for analysis. This methodology also caters for sustainability analysis by different stakeholders. To fully demonstrate the potential of the methodology, the author has chosen to test it on a large-size industry sector so that it can have the capacity to be scaled up to a country or down to a small business, and on an industry sector that is important on its own right. Furthermore, this sector needs to be illustrative and has nontrivial complex problems. Under these criteria, the electricity sector of New Zealand was selected. The robustness of the methodology was investigated with inputs from three evaluators with different views: a standard view from the author that was made after much research in the sector and in the concepts of sustainability, a view with an environmental bias and one that focuses on commercial interests.

A key issue for sustainability planning is how to integrate economic, social and environmental concerns in the process of evaluating possible management actions. This thesis is particularly concerned with evaluating natural resource management actions. Integrated evaluation tools may assist in weighing up multi-dimensional pros and cons of each management action. These tools aid decision making in two main ways; helping a decision maker to clarify his or her thoughts and suggesting preferable management options. Many integrated evaluation tools produce a ranking of options, from most to least preferred, in order to guide the choice of a management option. They achieve this by integrating impact assessment data, on how well management options perform economically, socially and environmentally, with a decision maker’s value judgements. Multiple criteria decision analysis (MCDA) methods for example, often ask the user to specify what weight of importance each impact category should have in the appraisal of management options. If the impact data is in time series, a decision maker may be asked to consider how important future impacts are in comparison to short term impacts. The economic method of discounting future impacts is regularly utilised to aggregate a time-series of impact data. This thesis looks beyond weighting and discounting, and explores tools which may better formalise value judgements about: balancing economic, social and environmental outcomes and; intergenerational equity. Such tools may be more effective in helping a decision maker to clarify his or her thoughts and in suggesting appropriate courses of action. A water resource case study is utilised to illustrate some of the alternatives identified. A major contribution of this thesis is a new integrated evaluation method referred to as Target Ordering. The Target Ordering method was developed in order to better identify which performance outcomes are most important to stakeholders and ensure user control of tradeoffs between impact categories, while retaining simplicity. This method is based on value judgements about how important target outcomes are, rather than how important the impact categories themselves are. That is, it is an alternative to weighting methods. The Target Ordering method is also extended to allow an aggregation of data across multiple time frames. That is, to provide an alternative to discounting. There seems to be a dearth of studies comparing how effective integrated evaluation tools are for helping users to think through and articulate their own preferences and to learn about the preferences of others. This thesis draws on existing research and presents new research, such that the effectiveness of weighting and non-weighting methods on these dimensions may be examined. Two experiments were conducted where a small number of water industry professionals utilised weighting and non-weighting tools to rank a large number of water management options. The non-weighting methods include Target Ordering and a graphical tool for facilitating an intuitive evaluation of management options. These tools are respectively classified as aspirational and holistic evaluation methods. Feedback was obtained from the participants through both surveys and interviews. The survey results indicate that the Target Ordering tool was significantly more useful than weighting methods for helping participants to articulate and apply their values to the problem. In general the Target Ordering tool was easier to utilise and was said to be more intuitive by some participants. The graphical tool was found to outperform a simple weighting method in facilitating users to think through and articulate their value judgements. No differences in usefulness of the graphical method and the Target Ordering method were found. Further experimental research is needed to compare how effective weighting, aspirational and holistic methods are in facilitating learning and communication of preferences in the decision making process. / PhD Doctorate

<p>More and more companies are trying to adopt a sustainability strategy, because of a growing awareness among people about a need for better environment in the future. It has been noticed that a balance between economic, social and environmental aspects is of great significance. The benefits of a strategy to become more balanced are said to be competitive advantage and stakeholder satisfaction besides the economic, social and environmental benefits.</p>