No description available.

<p> The primary and immediate objective of this educational intervention study is to raise consumer awareness of the impact of under-inflated tires on global warming. The short-term result of this would be the widespread maintenance of proper tire air pressure, the use of low-rolling resistance tires, and the inflation of tires with nitrogen instead of air, which could assist in the reduction of fuel use and resultant CO₂ emissions. Such a reduction could have a significant short-term result of benefitting consumers economically and the world environmentally.</p><p> Utilizing a quasi-experimental design, a pamphlet and pre- and post-survey questionnaires were employed to collect data from a convenience sample of consumers (N=126). An educational pamphlet was prepared to increase consumer awareness about the importance of how properly inflated tires can be a factor in driver safety, fuel conservation, and the prevention of unnecessary increases in greenhouse gas emissions, which are among the major factors affecting global warming.</p><p> Data from the pre-intervention survey provides strong evidence that participants possess insufficient knowledge of general tire care, maintenance, performance and the impact of under-inflated tires on the environment in general and global warming in particular. Statistical analysis demonstrated significant change from pre- to postintervention surveys in the participants&rsquo; attitudes and knowledge regarding the maintenance of tire pressure and the impact of under-inflated tires on greenhouse gases and global warming.</p><p> The improvement in overall knowledge and attitudes demonstrated in the analysis between pre- and post-survey data indicates greater recognition by the participants that appropriate car care and tire maintenance are essential, and that for consumers, the acquisition and application of this knowledge can be powerful in improving the economy and environment. Suggestions for further study include development of consistent monitoring and data collection processes for use by facilities responsible for automobile care and the development of a broad-based, media-driven consumer education programs on the importance of the studied variables.</p>

<p> Health effects attributed to outdoor fine particulate matter (PM_2.5) rank it among the risk factors with the highest health burdens in the world, annually accounting for over 3.2 million premature deaths and over 76 million lost disability-adjusted life years. Existing PM_2.5 monitoring infrastructure cannot, however, be used to resolve variations in ambient PM_2.5 concentrations with adequate spatial and temporal density, or with adequate coverage of human time-activity patterns, such that the needs of modern exposure science and control can be met. Small, inexpensive, and portable devices, relying on newly available off-the-shelf sensors, may facilitate the creation of PM_2.5 datasets with improved resolution and coverage, especially if many such devices can be deployed concurrently with low system cost. </p><p> Datasets generated with such technology could be used to overcome many important problems associated with exposure misclassification in air pollution epidemiology. Chapter 2 presents an epidemiological study of PM_2.5 that used data from ambient monitoring stations in the Los Angeles basin to observe a decrease of 6.1 g (95% CI: 3.5, 8.7) in population mean birthweight following <i>in utero</i> exposure to the Southern California wildfires of 2003, but was otherwise limited by the sparsity of the empirical basis for exposure assessment. Chapter 3 demonstrates technical potential for remedying PM_2.5 monitoring deficiencies, beginning with the generation of low-cost yet useful estimates of hourly and daily PM_2.5 concentrations at a regulatory monitoring site. The context (an urban neighborhood proximate to a major goods-movement corridor) and the method (an off-the-shelf sensor costing approximately USD $10, combined with other low-cost, open-source, readily available hardware) were selected to have special significance among researchers and practitioners affiliated with contemporary communities of practice in public health and citizen science. As operationalized by correlation with 1h data from a Federal Equivalent Method (FEM) &beta;-attenuation data, prototype instruments performed as well as commercially available equipment costing considerably more, and as well as another reference instrument under similar conditions at the same timescale (R² = 0.6). Correlations were stronger when 24 h integrating times were used instead (R² = 0.72). </p><p> Chapter 4 replicates and extends the results of Chapter 3, showing that similar calibrations may be reasonably exchangeable between near-roadway and background monitoring sites. Chapter 4 also employs triplicate sensors to obtain data consistent with near-field (&lt; 50 m) observations of plumes from a major highway (I-880). At 1 minute timescales, maximum PM_2.5 concentrations on the order of 100 &mu;g m^&ndash;3 to 200 &mu;g m^&ndash;3 were observed, commensurate with the magnitude of plumes from wildfires on longer timescales, as well as the magnitude of plumes that might be expected near other major highways on the same timescale. Finally, Chapter 4 quantifies variance among calibration parameters for a large sample of the sensors, as well as the error associated with the remote transfer of calibrations between two sufficiently large sets (&plusmn; 10 % for <i> n</i> = 12). These findings suggest that datasets generated with similar sensors could also improve upstream scientific understandings of fluxes resulting from indoor and outdoor emissions, atmospheric transformations, and transport, and may also facilitate timely and empirical verification of interventions to reduce emissions and exposures, in many important contexts (e.g., the provision of improved cookstoves; congestion pricing; mitigation policies attached to infill development; etc.). They also demonstrate that calibrations against continuous reference monitoring equipment could be remotely transferred, within practical tolerances, to reasonably sized and adequately resourced participatory monitoring campaigns, with minimal risk of disruption to existing monitoring infrastructure (i.e., established monitoring sites). Given a collaborator with a short window of access to a reference monitoring site, this would overcome a nominally important barrier associated with non-gravimetric, <i>in-situ </i> calibration of continuous PM_2.5 monitors. Progressive and disruptive prospects linked to a proliferation of comparable sensing technologies based on commodity hardware are discussed in Chapter 5.</p>

Many Indigenous communities around the world are facing a health crisis aggravated by environmental degradation and dispossession. Through community-based participatory research, we examined barriers to land use, declining environmental health and human health implications for the Isga People in west-central Alberta, Canada. Through interviews, land use-and-occupancy and traditional and local knowledge of environmental change was spatially documented. Key concerns including declining wildlife health and water quality were largely attributed to the petroleum and forestry industries. Barriers included the encroachment of industry, agriculture and urban development, and a legacy of state-imposed assimilation policies. Human health concerns were associated with these barriers and environmental degradation along with a loss of connection to land and cultural practices. However, community resilience was also evident in the persistence of land use and cultural revival. Underlying environmental and sociopolitical factors are crucial for the health and wellbeing of the Isga and Indigenous Peoples worldwide.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

<p> Although there have been studies on the nocuous effects caused by human destruction of nature and the oppression of the man-made environment, there is scarce mention of the subliminal dimensions of this ecological alienation, or the dissociation or lack of self-reflexivity regarding one's embodied responses to the surrounding world. This inquiry explores the dissonance between documented psycho-physiological responses and psycho- emotional disconnection. It bridges the registers of the pre-reflective and reflective; conscious and unconscious. The study is of mixed method design and was conducted in Mumbai, India. Data gathering occurred by recording psycho-physiological responses to experimental stimuli consisting of randomized images of normalized ecological destruction with the aid of physiological monitoring, and through semi-structured interviews using the hermeneutic phenomenological method. It was found that often, individuals defensively organize around being unaware and split off from their psychesomas, when confronted with ecological destruction.</p>

Asthma prevalence is increasing worldwide and the causes of this increase are largely unknown. There is increasing recognition of the importance of early environmental exposures in childhood asthma development. Outdoor air pollution has been shown to trigger asthma symptoms but its role in incident disease remains controversial. To address these questions, I investigated the effect of in utero and first year of life exposure to ambient air pollution on risk of asthma diagnosis in a nested case-control study. All children born in Southwestern British Columbia in 1999 and 2000 (N=37,401) were assessed for incidence of asthma diagnosis at age 3 - 4 years using hospitalization and primary physician records. Exposure to ambient air pollution was estimated for the gestational period and first year of life using high-resolution pollution surfaces derived from government monitoring station data as well as land use regression models adjusted for temporal variation. Conditional logistic regression analyses were used to estimate effects of CO, NO, NO₂, PM₁₀, PM₂.₅, O₃, SO₂, black carbon, wood smoke and proximity to roads and point sources on asthma diagnosis. Elevated risks of asthma diagnosis were observed with increased early life exposure to CO, NO, NO₂, PM₁₀, SO₂, black carbon and proximity to point sources. Effects were generally larger for first year exposures than in utero exposures, and larger for girls than boys. The results indicate that early life exposure to air pollution is associated with increased risk of asthma diagnosis in early childhood. Although the effect sizes are small, air pollution exposure in urban areas is ubiquitous so may have significant effects at the population level. These results should be confirmed when children are older and asthma diagnosis is more robust.

Extraction, production, utilization and disposal of material resources have been undertaken continuously for much of human histories. Unavoidably, all of these activities have disturbed our environment, and subsequently have been harmful to humans and ecosystems in this and future generations. Due to time lag associated with both environment impact and the effects of measures taken to reduce this impact, existing approaches (i.e. monitoring and reacting) do not give sufficiently rapid feedback for effective environmental management. With regard to the complexity and concern related to environment-health chain effects, there is currently no environmental tool or approach that can provide comprehensive information and indicators covering all major environment and health themes, to enable decision makers to make informed judgements about regional policies and plans, relating to the sustainable use and disposal of material resources. Consequently, there is a need for developing a new approach by taking account of a multidisciplinary concept used in this thesis. Substance Flow Analysis (SFA) has been mainly applied in order to provide input information for Health Risk Assessment (HRA). The SFA approach provides the quantity of the substance that is transported (flows) and stored in the system (stock), and of which sub-system, flow, and process is the greatest concern. The HRA approach provides estimates of human health risk associated with site, activity and facility. An environmental fate and transport model is another key knowledge area incorporated into the HRA process. An integrating method of SFA, environmental fate and transport, and HRA is developed and illustrated by a case study of cadmium in Australia. This thesis shows that this new integration of existing stand-alone methods can provide holistic information and useful indicators covering all significant economic activities, environment, flows, and health risk assessment for selected substances. This enables better decision making on the use and disposal of substances at a range of levels in the economy, from corporations to regions and nations.