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Transportation planning has become increasingly more performance-based over the past several decades. In part due the mandate from the 2012 Federal Surface Transportation Program authorization, Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century (MAP-21), agencies are adopting performance-based policies and programmatic frameworks to integrate the attainment of national goals into the transportation planning and decision making process. As agencies implement performance-driven decision making as a means to achieve national goals, local goals will become subject to the same framework. Although equity is not a national goal, transportation agencies continue to recognize it within their vision and planning goals. However, it is difficult to determine what constitutes equity, and to quantify and measure it. To plan for equitable outcomes in transportation therefore, it is necessary to develop evaluation methods that support the integration of equity in planning processes. The objectives of this research are to develop recommendations for procedures to formally incorporate equity considerations in transportation planning and program evaluation and to propose methodological revisions to existing analytical processes to enable evaluation of cumulative accessibility outcomes. A literature review -- drawing from the theories of equity, Federal regulations for addressing equity in transportation, performance management, and transportation and sustainability -- and practitioner interviews were used to gather information on the common and effective practices for addressing equity in transportation planning at the regional level. This information was an input in the development of a quantitative research approach to explore methodological limitations and planning gaps related to transportation planning for equitable outcomes. These results informed the development of a comprehensive approach to analyze and characterize cumulative impacts (i.e. accessibility) regionally. The approach is used to develop recommendations for regional transportation planning to influence equitable transportation outcomes for the full range of demographic groups over time. The research contributes to the knowledge base and professional practice of transportation planning by putting forward a construction for approaching equity in transportation planning and decision making based on equity theory, developing analytical methods to evaluate transportation investments for equitable outcomes, and offering a set of recommendations for moving transportation planning practices towards transportation planning for equitable outcomes.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Geography / Bimal K. Paul / This research set out to better understand the impact of socioeconomic characteristics, environmental risk, and the built environment on health in Mobile County, Alabama. A multilevel statistical analysis was used to identify those characteristics that had the greatest impact on health. The variables determined to be the most significant in defining health in Mobile County were used in the development of a health inequity index (HIQ). The index was used to identify the zip code tabulation areas (ZCTAs) in Mobile County that were likely to exhibit greater health inequality, and as a result, a higher potential for health inequity. In this study, a mailed survey on the built environment and health was conducted to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of individual residences, perceptions of individuals in regards to neighborhood health, citizen activism, and the environmental justice movement. Because there was a low response rate for the mailed surveys, fieldwork with face-to-face interviews was conducted in July, 2009. In conjunction with the survey data, mortality data obtained from the Alabama Department of Public Health was incorporated into the multilevel analysis. Using crude death rate, cause-specific death rate for cancer, and cause-specific death rate for heart disease as dependent variables and factors associated with socioeconomic status, environmental risk, and the built environment as independent variables, multiple linear regression was performed. The results of the multiple linear regression identified factors of socioeconomic status, environmental risk, and the built environment that had the greatest impact on health in Mobile County. Geographically weighted regression was performed to test local model strength by ZCTA in Mobile County. It was determined that the health inequity index developed as a result of the multilevel analysis was a reasonable measure of population health. Calculations of HIQ for each ZCTA in Mobile County helped to identify those ZCTAs most in need of intervention. The ZCTAs with high HIQ values were also those where the built environment was extremely poor, indicating that health is impacted by the places where people live.

Through studying the intersections of sanitation and segregation in Brooklyn, New York in the post-WWII era, this thesis reveals a web of willful white negligence that constructed a narrative that supports continued environmental injustices towards black Americans. As a result of housing discrimination, the lack of sanitation, and the political and social climate of the 1950s, black neighborhoods in Brooklyn became dirtier with abandoned garbage. Institutional anti-black racism not only permitted and supported the degradation of black neighborhoods, but also created an association between black Americans and trash. In the present day, this narrative not only leads to the increased segregation of black Americans into dirty neighborhoods, but also justifies more environmental injustice in these vulnerable communities. Based on a case study of Brooklyn in the 1950s, this thesis asserts that environmental injustices are more than just siting landfills and toxic sites proximate to vulnerable neighborhoods, but rather they are dependent on the creation and preservation of narratives that claim minority communities are naturally predisposed to or deserving of living in dirty and unclean places.

Environmental justice communities, those disproportionately affected by pollutants, are simultaneously exposed to multiple environmental stressors and also experience social and cultural factors that may heighten their health risks in comparison to other communities. In addition to being more susceptible to toxic exposures and being exposed to more toxins, such communities may have weakened abilities to combat or rebound from such exposures. Many communities that are overburdened by environmental exposures reject traditional risk assessment approaches that solely consider the effects of single chemicals or mixtures of like chemicals and instead have advocated for the use of place-based approaches and collaborative problem solving models that consider cumulative exposures and impacts. Cumulative risks are the combined risks from aggregate exposures to multiple agents or stressors, including chemical, biological or physical agents and psychosocial stressors. This dissertation adapts three research approaches that each use either publicly available data (“expert” data) or community-generated data about environmental and social factors in Northwest Atlanta’s Proctor Creek Watershed. Through this work, we were able to define cumulative environmental and social impacts experienced by watershed residents and to prioritize geographic areas and environmental challenges for investments in environmental monitoring and further research, community capacity-building, and policy change. A principal finding of the study is that local community knowledge is helpful to fill critical gaps about local conditions and pollution sources than a reliance on expert data alone.

This thesis explores whether environmental justice can attenuate the burdens attributed to the operation of the E.B. Campbell Dam experienced by downstream Indigenous communities in the Saskatchewan River Delta. Environmental justice for Indigenous people who are affected by dam management is important for three reasons. First, Indigenous people often experience environmental burdens of dam management disproportionately. Second, Indigenous people are often excluded from dam decision-making. Third, when Indigenous people are included in dam decision-making, their rights and values are sometimes misrecognized within decision-making processes. While exploring environmental justice for Indigenous people in the context of dam management, this thesis contributes to a recommendation that empirical studies of environmental justice should describe the underlying causes of environmental injustice. This thesis contributes to this recommendation by documenting how power relations challenge environmental justice for Indigenous people in dam decision-making. A place-based, interdisciplinary methodology was taken to clarify an environmental justice pathway for downstream Indigenous communities in the Saskatchewan River Delta. This methodology involved analyses of hydrometric data, interview data and legal and policy documents. The findings of this thesis include that Indigenous people, through their meaningful participation in dam decision-making, could help government representatives recognize the environmental burdens of dam management. However, imbalances in power between Indigenous people and government representatives could constrain Indigenous people’s meaningful participation. The implication of these findings is that if power relations are accounted for in decision-making, the meaningful participation of Indigenous people can facilitate the recognition and remediation of environmental burdens attributed to dam management.

This paper assesses the continued community participation mechanisms, especially the Restoration Advisory Board, and the role of these mechanisms in the environmental cleanup of post U.S. military training operations in the current colonial situation of the Puerto Rican island municipality of Vieques. Today the community has many informal and formal mechanisms of organization meant to address the social, economic, health and environmental problems resulting from the Navy's presence on the island. These mechanisms are the cornerstone of the community's search for social and environmental justice. This paper provides a brief history of the Navy's presence on Vieques, the evolution of community participation mechanisms and an analysis of how these mechanisms allow the community to interact with public, private and government institutions involved in the cleanup. The research is centered around interviews with community members to discern whether they feel these mechanisms are effective in properly addressing community concerns. The case study of Vieques could also have international implications for the future of foreign military bases and toxic waste disposal around the world. Analysis of the effectiveness of community participation mechanisms could help marginalized communities deal with developed countries on issues that may concern human health and environmental risks as a result of the developed countries' activities. The analysis of community participation mechanisms can be used as a guide for Vieques and other communities around the world trying to achieve social, economic and environmental justice.

This thesis seeks to challenge the dominant narrative that oil has been a positive contributor to Houston's development as a city by exploring the real lived consequences for those who live along the Houston Ship Channel--the home of Houston's oil industry. This is done through an examination of historical processes which look at how a pro-oil sentiment has been intertwined into Houston's identity juxtaposed to the historical processes which have shaped the lives of communities near the Houston Ship Channel. This thesis then ends by delving into how it is difficult to organize around the environment in Texas because of how much influence oil has on the state politically and physically.

<p>While environmental literary criticism has traditionally focused its attention on the textual representation of specific places, recent ecocritical scholarship has expanded this focus to consider the treatment of time in environmental literature and culture. As environmental scholars, activists, scientists, and artists have noted, one of the major difficulties in grasping the reality and implications of climate change is a limited temporal imagination. In other words, the ability to comprehend and integrate different shapes, scales, and speeds of history is a precondition for ecologically sustainable and socially equitable responses to climate change.</p><p>My project examines the role that literary works might play in helping to create such an expanded sense of history. As I show how American writers after 1945 have treated the representation of time and history in relation to environmental questions, I distinguish between two textual subfields of environmental temporality. The first, which I argue is characteristic of mainstream environmentalism, is disjunctive, with abrupt environmental changes separating the past and the present. This subfield contains many canonical works of postwar American environmental writing, including Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital trilogy. From treatises on the ancient ecological histories of particular sites to meditations on the speed of climate change, these works evince a preoccupation with environmental time that has not been acknowledged within the spatially oriented field of environmental criticism. However, by positing radical breaks between environmental pasts and environmental futures, they ultimately enervate the political charge of history and elide the human dimensions of environmental change, in terms both of environmental injustice and of possible social responses.</p><p>By contrast, the second subfield, which I argue is characteristic of environmental justice, is continuous, showing how historical patterns persist even across social and ecological transformations. I trace this version of environmental thought through a multicultural corpus of novels consisting of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, Helena María Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus, Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms, and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Some of these novels do not document specific instances of environmental degradation or environmental injustice and, as a result, have not been critically interpreted as relevant for environmental analysis; others are more explicit in their discussion of environmental issues and are recognized as part of the canon of American environmental literature. However, I demonstrate that, across all of these texts, counterhegemonic understandings of history inform resistance to environmental degradation and exploitation. These texts show that environmental problems cannot be fully understood, nor environmental futures addressed, without recognizing the way that social histories of inequality and environmental histories of extraction continue to structure politics and ecology in the present.</p><p>Ultimately, then, the project offers three conclusions. First, it suggests that the second version of environmental temporality holds more value than the first for environmental cultural studies, in that it more compellingly and accurately represents the social implications of environmental issues. Second, it shows that “environmental literature” is most usefully understood not as the literature that explicitly treats environmental issues, but rather as the literature that helps to produce the sense of time that contemporary environmental crises require. Third, it shows how literary works can not only illuminate the relationship between American ideas about nature and social justice, but also operate as a specifically literary form of eco-political activism.</p> / Dissertation