Urban green spaces, such as parks, provide urban residents with a multitude of environmental benefits and city residents should all have access to these benefits. This study examined the socioeconomic status of urban residents who live within one-mile distance to a public park in the city of Atlanta. Park accessibility was investigated with respect to distances to parks and park acreage using Euclidean distance and street-network distance. Socioeconomic status was examined using five variables: population density, median household income, percentage of population living below poverty, percentage of minority population and percentage of female population. A site suitability analysis was conducted to determine where additional park space could be most beneficial for the populations lacking access to the benefits of park space. Using Geographic Information Systems to analyze socioeconomic data from U.S. Census Bureau vis-à-vis Atlanta parks, this study discovered there is no statistically significant socioeconomic disparity among residents who currently have or do not have park access in Atlanta. The findings of this study showed some weak relationships of park distance and park size with population density and minority populations. The site suitability study suggested two sites that could be potentially used for future park development. Note: This is a large file due to the number of images in the document. Users can right click on the download button and select "Save file" or "Save Link" from the available options. This will circumvent the browser from timing out by downloading the file directly to your computer rather than attempting to open it in the browser.

The nuclear energy has already widely behaved the type of usage in nowadays, however the output radio wastes of the usage process of the nuclear energy, now saves in Taitung (the radio material of the usage mainly come from an electricity nuclear power station, hospital etc.), and still revolves now in it currently three nuclear power station, face the radio wastes that increase continuously every year, force The Taiwan Power Company to actively look for the final treatment field, to expect to thoroughly resolve to check the waste treatment problem. This research addressed the environment justice by investigation about "the radio wastes saving station in lanyu". establishes in a process, the government parties concerned decision is the way and local people to cognize the difference of top, and the government parties concerned and local people avoids the position of the facilities to the nimby etc., the way that then look for to relax through the detection of problem, reach the most suitable an electricity " the radio wastes saving station " constitution policy to turn with the period. The final treatment project of the low radio wastes relaxs current " the radio wastes saving station in lanyu " is an important public policy, and the urgent performance point conduct and actions to have: (1)The government and The Taiwan Power Company should open and publish the related data of "lanyu plan" of that year, discover history true facts, to dissolve the rumor, worry, and opposition. Depend on the final treatment facilities address constitution regulation of the low radio wastes, actively operate by law. (2)In order to win the people trust, rebuilding the government and set The Taiwan Power Company¡¦s public trust, and responding to make policy the performance implement, even should establish more thoughtful of related ordinance standard with the result that decision the performance ability transparency, effectively also fair implementation environment influence valuation etc.. (3)Establish the mission responsible association, in order to communication, coordination of the professional high class manages the single unit mechanism, simplifying the process. Also effectively dissolve people's worry in uncertainty, determining the government policy position, setting up the action government image of the effect and professional working talent.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains ix, 137 p. : ill. (some col.), col. maps. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 104-105).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--York University, 2001. Graduate Programme in Sociology. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 348-365). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pNQ67937.

Home environments pose a number of challenges for environmental justice. Healthy homes in healthy neighborhoods are often inaccessible due to socioeconomic factors, environmental racism, and/or environmental gentrification. Publicly funded home repair programs increasingly strive to both improve environmental health conditions and to reduce energy bills for low-income homeowners. Such programs have been intended to stimulate reinvestment in neighborhoods experiencing blight and more recently to reduce gentrification pressure in neighborhoods experiencing rapid reinvestment. While such programs do not represent a silver-bullet solution to the accessibility of healthy housing, the question remains: “What is the potential of low-income home repair programs to serve as a leverage point for environmental justice in urban home environments facing gentrification pressure?” This question is investigated through performance evaluation case studies of three municipally funded, low-income home repair programs in Austin, Texas intended to ameliorate gentrification and advance outcomes related to environmental justice. The findings suggest that as a site of intervention, dialogue, community connection, and resource-mobilization, home repair programs have potential as leverage points in regenerative community development that advances environmental justice performance outcomes. Actors in home environments can increase their performance with the support of the home ecology paradigm (HEP), a synthetic research paradigm that draws from sustainability science, environmental justice, and social learning literature to renew an action research paradigm established by Ellen Swallow Richards in the late 1800s to advance healthy community design and development. Guided by a vision of environmental justice, equipped with tools supporting holistic, multi-scalar systems-thinking and regenerative dialogue assessments, and engaged in a practice of resilient leadership, such actors can more deftly dance with the co-evolving systems of their home environments. In so doing, they increase their potential to directly enhance the material, social, and ecological conditions of life in the present, while also cultivating the capacity of these living systems to adapt resiliently to future disruptions. Furthermore, beyond producing life-enhancing performance outcomes, the HEP also appears to support actors in an engaged praxis that enhances their moment-by-moment experience of life and the vitality of living systems in the present.

<p> This dissertation examines the politics of knowledge in collaborative watershed governance institutions of the Klamath River Basin of Northern California and Southern Oregon. The waters of the Klamath are shared between farmers, fisherfolk, indigenous communities, hydro-electric facilities and one of the most biologically diverse eco-regions in the United States. Since 1986, the watershed has provided the primary spatial unit for resolving resource conflict by coordinating agency and citizen science, guiding integrated resource management and cultivating a shared sense of place and belonging among Klamath watershed inhabitants. For nearly three decades, the Klamath Basin has served as a laboratory for experiments in &ldquo;<i>watershed democracy</i>&rdquo;- a form of hydrologically-grounded political association that attempts to facilitate the direct participation of all watershed inhabitants in knowledge production, deliberation and collective action at the watershed scale. Through the idiom of <i>watershed democracy,</i> I connect empirical research on the outcomes of nearly three decades of community-based natural resource management in the Klamath with theoretical debates waged over the last century and a half regarding the question of scale in environmental science, democratic governance and natural resource management. </p><p> In this dissertation, I analyze the watershed as a scale of knowledge production, a site of democratic deliberation and a unit of environmental governance. I investigate whether the watershed is the most appropriate socio- spatial unit for representing people and place in the Klamath, paying particular attention to the impact of collaborative watershed governance arenas on the ability of Karuk Tribal members to participate in knowledge-production and decision- making for natural resource management in their ancestral territory in northern California. </p><p> Through participatory research with the Karuk Tribe&rsquo;s Department of Natural Resources, participant observation, document analysis and interviews with Federal, State, Tribal and local agency scientists and representatives, I follow knowledge and policy-making processes across a diverse range of institutions engaged in Klamath watershed governance. Combining participatory research and participant observation with theoretical insights from political ecology, science and technology studies (STS) and indigenous studies scholarship, I evaluate the processes and outcomes of collaborative watershed-based governance according to its impacts on local watershed ecosystems and communities. Drawing on the theoretical framework of &ldquo;co-production&rdquo;, I analyze the mutually constitutive relations between watershed science, watershed governance institutions, the materialities of Klamath watershed-ecosystems and the distributions of resource benefits and burdens in Klamath communities. I follow Klamath experiments in watershed democracy negotiate the basic terms of political life such as property, territory, sovereignty and the public good, as well as the material conditions and flows of watershed resources and the patterns of access to, ownership in and distribution of these resources. </p><p> While the Klamath experiements in collaborative environmental governance at the watershed scale have opened up oppportunities for Karuk representatives to participate in knowledge production and decision-making, the watershed scale has itself constrained the focus of integrated resource management, limiting the kinds of knowledge that can pattern as reliable and the types of restoration and management projects that can issue from Klamath collaborative governance forums. I demonstrate how Karuk representatives have both leveraged and critiqued the watershed as a way of conceptualizing Klamath watershed-ecological processes and as a socio-spatial unit for approaching ecological restoration and cultural revitalization in their ancestral territory. Watershed science and watershed governance forums were sometimes leveraged by Karuk representatives to substantiate Karuk sovereignty and resource rights and at times rejected for not being able to convey distinct Karuk epistemologies, ontologies and cosmologies. I demonstrate how collaborative watershed management forums have struggled to render different types of indigenous, local and scientific knowledge commensurable and have instead provoked debates about how to produce knowledge about nature in ways that are appropriate for the local community and its ecosystems. </p><p> I draw attention to the cultural politics of scale to critique watershed-centric management and search for alternative ways of representing the multiple scales through which Klamath inhabitants understand and value nature. I compare watershed-based governance with two other emerging scales of democratic resource governance- firesheds and foodsheds- in their abilities to bring together diverse forms of environmental knowledge around multiple nested scales of social and ecological processes. <i>Firesheds</i> are emerging areas of community-based fire management patterned according to the way fire burns across the western Klamath landscape. <i>Foodsheds</i> are another emerging form of community-based resource governance taking shape in the Klamath around the spatial and temporal characteristics of food resources and their associated management practices in forest ecosystems. Comparing watersheds, firesheds and foodsheds opens up the question of scale in collaborative environmental governance by highlighting tensions among different ways of producing knowledge, managing resources and acting collectively at different bioregional scales in the Klamath. </p><p> Against watershed-centric approaches to ecological democracy, I argue for deliberative multi-scalar approaches to implementing collaborative environmental governance, cultural revitalization and watershed-ecosystem restoration in the Klamath. Multi-scalar perspectives can accommodate multiple ways of making knowledge while avoiding homogenizing diverse situated perspectives into a single way of seeing Klamath eco-cultural landscapes. I argue for <i> &ldquo;democratizing scale&rdquo;</i> in order to define an appropriate scalar framework for producing knowledge, representing human values and making decisions about the management of natural resources. Collaborative environmental governance requires an accompanying democratization of scale to accommodate the myriad ways of knowing nature and making a living in Klamath watershed-ecosystems. Scalar formations that are produced through deliberative democratic processes can provide more inclusive grounds than watersheds for democratic environmental governance and multispecies world-making.</p>

<p> This dissertation examines whether spatial measures of health determinants and health outcomes are being used appropriately and effectively to improve the health of marginalized populations in the United States. I concentrate on three spatial measures that have received significant policy and regulatory attention in California and nationally: access to healthful foods, climate change, and housing quality. I find that measures of these health determinants have both significant limitations and unrealized potential for addressing health disparities and promoting health equity. </p><p> I define spatial triage as a process of using spatial data to screen or select place-based communities for targeted investments, policy action, and/or regulatory attention. Chapter 1 describes the historical context of spatial triage and how it relates to ongoing health equity research and policy. In Chapter 2, I evaluate spatial measures of community nutrition environments by comparing data from in-person store surveys against data from a commercial database. I find that stores in neighborhoods with higher population density or higher percentage of people of color have lower availability of healthful foods and that inaccuracies in commercial databases may produce biased measures of healthful food availability. </p><p> Chapter 3 focuses on spatial measures of climate change vulnerability. I find that currently used spatial measures of "disadvantaged communities" ignore many important factors, such as community assets, region-specific risks, and occupation-based hazards that contribute to place-based vulnerability. I draw from examples of successful actions by community-based environmental justice organizations and reframe "disadvantaged" communities as sites of solutions where innovative programs are being used to simultaneously address climate mitigation, adaptation, and equity goals. </p><p> In Chapter 4, I combine electronic health records, public housing locations, and census data to evaluate patterns of healthcare utilization and health outcomes for low-income children in San Francisco. I find that children who live in redeveloped public housing are less likely to have more than one acute care hospital visit within a year than children who live in older, traditional public housing. These results demonstrate how integrating patient-level data across hospitals and with data from other sectors can identify new types of place-based health disparities. Chapter 5 details recommendations for analytic, participatory, and cross-sector approaches to guide the development and implementation of more effective health equity research and policy.</p>

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis uses a transdisciplinary, sustainability-science approach to investigate the dialectics and potential for the Hunter Valley region of New South Wales, Australia, to make a transition to sustainability. The Hunter Valley, one of Australia’s historic food, wine and grain breadbaskets, is now home to over 50 opencut and underground black coal mines and is one of the world’s major coalmining and exporting regions. It is Australia’s largest black coal electricity generating region where six coal-fired power stations generate 40% of Australia’s electricity supply. The carbon intensity of the Hunter Valley’s economy makes the region Australia’s largest direct and indirect contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions. The region is a climate change hot spot that embodies the challenges and opportunities confronting Australia if it is to move towards a clean, renewable energy future and ecologically and socially-sustainable economy. The study examines the Hunter Valley as a complex adaptive socio-ecological system nested in an extended panarchy (Gunderson and Holling, 2002) that includes global energy systems and the ecosphere. The research examines the linked ecological and social health impacts of different scenarios for the Hunter Valley, comparing its current status – given the name Carbon Valley (Ray, 2005a) – with an alternative socio-ecological regime described by local residents as a Future Beyond Coal (CAN, 2006). This Future Beyond Coal is a regional manifestation of what Heinberg (2004) calls, at a global scale, a Post-carbon Society. Transdisciplinary sustainability-science is used to examine complex processes in which Hunter Valley residents are dealing with linked ecosystem-human health distress, while developing capacity for anticipating and forging change towards sustainability. They are also boosting the resilience of desirable states while challenging the perverse resilience of coal dependency. The thesis examines the potential for a ‘Just Transition’ to sustainability, a social and economic restructuring process which aspires to move the region’s socio-ecological relationships rapidly towards sustainability through protecting the wellbeing of vulnerable workers, communities and ecosystems. It investigates hegemonic relationships within coal communities, and the role popular education and social learning are playing in building a social movement for sustainability, a movement that links local, regional and global attractors and disturbances in order to change the basin of attraction from the current non-sustainable coal-dependent society to one that is ecologically sustainable and socially just.

This thesis examines the discourses of human health and synthetic chemicals that emerged in New Zealand, focusing specifically on the 1970s dioxin controversy. Dioxins were highly toxic contaminants in the herbicide 2,4,5-T, one of the country’s most widely used agricultural chemicals from 1948 to 1987. The theoretical framework of the thesis is grounded in poststructural notions about power/knowledge and ideas from sociology and science studies that highlight the inevitable uncertainties that surround human exposure to chemicals. Archival material from the Agricultural Chemicals Board and the Department of Health, chemical industry publications and a range of other textual materials were analysed using a discourse methodology that focused on intertextuality. To better understand the discursive construction of dioxins in New Zealand, the role of the chemical industry, government and opposition groups in constructing, resisting and politicising dioxins is described. The thesis reconceptualizes environmental (in)justices as not exclusively local, but as boundless, discursive and socio-historic in character. It also reflects on how resolving contemporary dioxin injustices in New Zealand, themselves the result of historical exposures, are problematically still being approached primarily through a reductionist approach to health and chemicals.