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 research conducted for this dissertation was methodologically designed to explore human environments and the role of housing as a space that makes an integral difference in the livelihoods and well-being of residents facing environmental burden and climate risks. The research explores the following questions: 1) How does the contextual scale of the home serve as a support or detriment to well-being and climate-preparedness for residents living in neighborhoods that have undergone degradation in the urban environment resulting from Philadelphia’s history of racialized planning practice? 2) How can the housing structure be reconceptualized as the scale which holds the fullest potential of resilience mitigation and climate preparedness in the built environment? 3) How does analytically centering the focus on the “home” and housing environments within the geographical urban landscape fill a gap in understanding about what ties people to place physically and socio-economically connects people to communities? Focusing in on the “Home” as a scale of geographic and qualitative inquiry, deriving its significance from resident voice expands the body of literature that can bridge the theoretical and advocacy based analytical framings of Black feminist thought and environmental justice to highlight the importance of housing in the urban landscape to find solutions to equitable housing concerns in the city. The objective of the research is to understand how environmental neighborhood conditions resulting from racialized planning practice manifest in present day socio-environmental outcomes and influence resident well-being even within the context of the “home”. I argue that climate change vulnerability and environmental burden can be more holistically understood and mitigated by reframing the scale at which environmental justice claims and research is formulated and analyzing the home itself as an environmental site of struggle and/or resilience. / Geography

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

This research presents a new environmental justice assessment toolkit, the Equitable Environmental Justice Assessment Toolkit 2016 (EEJAT 2016). The purpose of this toolkit is to enable urban planners to more effectively measure whether environmental justice populations (low-income, non-white, Limited English proficiency, disabled, or elderly persons) are disproportionately burdened by long-range transportation plans. This toolkit is based on the concept that effective assessment of environmental justice (EJ) in transportation planning requires assessment frameworks that methodologically unify three sometimes divergent interests: those of federal and state bodies enforcing EJ assessment requirements, those of metropolitan planners who face capacity constraints and need guidance on how to conduct these assessments, and, most importantly, those of the protected populations themselves. This thesis involved analysis of current requirements, exploration of existing environmental justice assessment tools, case studies, decision theory, and principles of equity, and stakeholder engagement through surveys, interviews, and public meetings, all towards the development of the toolkit designed for the Roanoke Valley Transportation Planning Organization (RVTPO)'s Constrained Long-range Multimodal Transportation Plan 2040 (CLRMTP 2040) released in 2016. The resulting toolkit is a multi-step framework. The first step is a GIS map-based EJ Index, structured by normalized population distributions for each EJ demographic, and mapped by block group compared to regional (MPO) averages. This z-score based mapping was done in lieu of Roanoke's former linear model in effort to more systematically compare effects, and to more accurately represent the data, and by extension, the people. Second, the Community Profile expands upon the EJ Index to include documentation of community elements and social and economic systematic injustices in the area. Next, a Benefits and Burdens matrix guides planners to an appropriate model or method of assessment for each EJ effect for the project at hand, based on project scale and type, data availability, and skillsets of the assessor. The results of these assessments of each EJ effect are compiled for an overall Project Impact Assessment. Checks on assessor bias based on stakeholder feedback and decision theory are incorporated into this Project Impact Assessment. Cumulatively, the toolkit is designed to incorporate equity as a defining element of both processes and outcomes, to be flexible in order to be applicable to multiple projects, and to be usable by practitioners. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning

Master of Public Health / Department of Kinesiology / Andrew T. Kaczynski / Background: Parks are key community assets for promoting physical activity, especially in low income areas where other accessible, low cost resources may not be available. However, some evidence suggests these integral resources are not equitably distributed. The primary purpose of this study was to examine disparities in park availability, features, and quality across socioeconomically and racially diverse census tracts (CTs) in Kansas City, Missouri (KCMO). Methods: All parks in KCMO were mapped using GIS shape files provided by the City of KCMO. Park features and quality were determined via on-site audits using the Community Park Audit Tool. Data from the American Community Survey were used to designate all 174 CTs within KCMO as either low, medium, or high income and percent minority. MANCOVA was used to analyze differences in park availability, features, and quality across income and race/ethnicity tertiles. Results: Low income CTs contained significantly more parks (M=1.46) than medium (M=1.25) or high (M=1.00) income CTs, but also had more quality concerns (e.g., vandalism) per park. High income CTs contained more playgrounds per park (M=.69) than low (M=.62) and medium (M=.52) income tracts. There were more basketball courts per park in high minority CTs (M=.59) than low (M=.13) or medium (M=.30) minority CTs, and more trails per park in low (M=.60) and medium (M=.55) minority CTs than high (M=.39) minority CTs. Finally, there were more sidewalks around parks in low (M=.87) and high (M=.74) income CTs than medium (M=.61) income CTs. Conclusions: This study adds to an important body of literature examining income and racial disparities in access to active living environments. Park availability was greater in low income areas, but several key park characteristics were less common in low income or high minority areas. Future research should consider the quality of park facilities and amenities and the composition of neighborhoods around parks, as well as how disparities in access to park environments are associated with physical activity and health outcomes. Public health and parks and recreation researchers and practitioners should work together to examine policies that contribute to and that might rectify disparities in access to safe and attractive parks and open spaces.

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

No description available.

Local agencies must comply with environmental justice regulation and as such, it is important that they possess practical tools to identify target populations and assess impacts of projects, programs, and policies on these populations. These tools are not readily available or fully developed to evaluate impacts on a regional level, especially when the impacts are benefits rather than burdens. This issue comes into play when accessibility is assessed. This analysis measures accessibility for an environmental justice evaluation using spatial statistical clusters and cumulative opportunity. It shows that the majority of schools, libraries and local transit lines are within areas with high concentrations of target populations, however, park space is limited in these areas. Alternative approaches for environmental justice assessments of regional outcomes such as accessibility provide opportunities for MPOs to gain a greater understanding of the regional impacts of transportation improvements as well as more accurately comply with the spirit of environmental justice regulations.

The industrial history of the Great Lakes basin has left its mark on the landscape with more than 4,500 known hazardous waste sites on both sides of the Canada-United States border. The vast majority are closed and no longer accept wastes, but they still pose potential risks to the environment and nearby communities. For the past several years, state and provincial governments have proposed new "state-of-the-art" facilities as a way to allow industries continued access to waste disposal capacity, but with far stricter controls than most older sites have provided. Publicity of contamination incidents at existing waste sites, and also the institution of formal administrative reviews and public hearings for the location of new ones, have complicated the facility siting process considerably and led to the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) syndrome. Additionally, issues related to environmental equity and justice often arise, especially in cases where local residents are racial minorities or low-income (social equity). The problem also has a spatial dimension when one region is expected to receive wastes from, and for the benefit of, industries in other areas (spatial equity), or when a heavily industrialized community becomes slated for yet another facility (cumulative equity). Cross-boundary and local autonomy issues heighten the controversies as well. This thesis reviews ten hazardous waste siting disputes in communities on the Canada-U.S. border in terms of their environmental justice implications. In the majority of cases, opponents of new hazardous waste facilities based their concerns on spatial equity and a variety of procedural matters. Racial minority groups tended to base their arguments on cumulative equity rather than social equity. In some cases, local and regional disputes became international matters given the geographic setting along the Canada-U.S. border.