abstract: Mexico City has an ongoing air pollution issue that negatively affects its citizens and surroundings with current structural disconnections preventing the city from improving its overall air quality. Thematic methodological analysis reveals current obstacles and barriers, as well as variables contributing to this persistent problem. A historical background reveals current programs and policies implemented to improve Mexico’s City air quality. Mexico City’s current systems, infrastructure, and policies are inadequate and ineffective. There is a lack of appropriate regulation on other modes of transportation, and the current government system fails to identify how the class disparity in the city and lack of adequate education are contributing to this ongoing problem. Education and adequate public awareness can potentially aid the fight against air pollution in the Metropolitan City. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Justice Studies 2018

Increased public awareness of environmental issues has led to greater public demand for involvement in environmental decision-making. The value of public participation has been recognized by academics and government authorities alike. Relevant public participation and environmental justice literature suggest that successful participation can help to achieve a heightened democratic governance system, uphold citizenship rights and, in turn, reduce environmental injustice. Although some might argue that public participation has already been integrated into the Canadian governance system, it is suggested that the legitimacy of public participation must be solidified with improved regulations and guidelines for process design. This research call is explored through the lens of the Ontario Source Water Protection (SWP) Initiative in the Raisin Region Source Protection Area. As Source Water Protection is ongoing, it provides an outstanding opportunity to observe the implementation of public participation within a decision-making process. Specifically, the objectives of this research were to examine Source Water Protection stakeholder perceptions of public participation and to explore any variation in perceptions that exist between stakeholder groups. Stakeholder groups included SWP Process Architects, SWP Provincial Process Managers, SWP Local Process Managers, and SWP Community Members. Results show that the stakeholder groups have similar understandings of public participation objectives and effective characteristics. At the same time, there was limited understanding of participation design with regards to mobilization strategies, instrument sensitivity and process evaluation. This has resulted in significant differences in stakeholder perception of the Clean Water Act (2006) and the role of the Source Protection Committee. These findings uncover perceived Source Water Protection process strengths and weaknesses, information that can be used to facilitate improvements to public participation practices. In the end, these findings will also help inform public participation processes in other decision-making domains.

<p> This research study examines the Flint water crisis to determine if Flint residents were the target of a degenerative policy. The study employs critical ethnography to explore the development and implementation of environmental water policy and investigate state-appointed legislator's decision to switch water sources in the city of Flint, Michigan, a predominantly low-income and minority community. In addition to using critical ethnography as a method, the study is interdisciplinary, integrating secondary data from news reports, governmental and nongovernmental documents, and budgets. The residents in Flint, Michigan water source was switched from Lake Huron (Detroit) a source used for more than 50 years to the Flint River. The water switch resulted in lead-contaminated water that poisoned more than 7,900 children and caused a widespread outbreak of Legionnaires' disease.</p><p>

<p> Since Encounter, Cherokees have straddled their worldview and the Euro-American worldview with success in cultural persistence. In any worldview, the Self is a pivotal concept. Recombinant, dialogical, emergent, and relational research methodologies are currently evolving a reconceptualization of Self. This dissertation re-centers a Cherokee American conceptualization of the Self-In-Relationship through in-depth concept analysis drawing on Indigenous and Western ways of knowing. </p><p> Interviews with Cherokee Americans are held in focus through the lenses of narrative content, theme, metaphor, and the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model concept of Self. Analyses of narrative interview transcripts surface a concept of Self expressed in English after transgenerational trauma that aligns with wisdom teachings descending through Cherokee language. Participant metaphors juxtaposed with IFS metaphors provide a crosswalk between meta worldviews where respectful dialogue among equals is more possible. Metaphors are drawn from themes: 1) Losses that resulted in hiding who we are; 2) Blood quantum, passing for White, and mixed identity; 3) Self as described through essential attributes of harmony and balance; and 4) Releasing impacts of historical trauma. </p><p> Ancient Cherokee knowings regarding a Self-In-Relationship concept emerge as coherent with a newly established conceptualization of Self that descends from Western lineages, the IFS model. Findings from Cherokee American perspectives may contribute to widening a crosswalk for those who negotiate Indigenous and Western worldviews to support individual and collective healing; stronger tribal sovereignty; individual redignification; and a language for wellbeing. </p><p>

Magister Legum - LLM

Recent years have seen a growing interest in and the publication of more formal scholarship on philosophical hermeneutics and environmental philosophy--i.e. environmental hermeneutics. Grasping how a human understanding of environments is variously mediated and how different levels of meaning can be unconcealed permits deeper ways of looking at environmental ethics and human practices with regard to environments. Beyond supposed simple facts about environments to which humans supposedly rationally respond, environmental hermeneutics uncovers ways in which encounters with environments become meaningful. How we understand and, therefore, choose to act depends not so much on simple facts, but what those facts mean to our lives. Therefore, this dissertation explores three paths. The first is to justify the idea of an environmental hermeneutics with the hermeneutic tradition itself and what environmental hermeneutics is specifically. The second is to demonstrate the benefit of addressing environmental hermeneutics to environmental philosophy. I do this in this dissertation with regard to the debate between anthropocentrism and non-anthropocentrism, a debate which plays a central role in questions of environmental philosophy and ethics. Thirdly, I turn to environmental justice studies where I contend there are complementarities between hermeneutics and environmental justice. From this reality, environmental justice and activism benefit from exploring environmental justice more deeply in light of philosophical hermeneutics. This dissertation is oriented toward a continuing dialogical relation between philosophical hermeneutics and environments insofar as environments are meaningful.

Disaster science is a procedural field often construed as producing blanket policies that attempt to cover everyone, but the complexity of human lived experiences must have a space to exist within disaster science if its research and findings are to be effective. This thesis illustrates that disaster policies and publications often leave out the most vulnerable communities—those in greatest need of collective support. Through critically analyzing beautification through green space, discussing photovoice interviews, and by deconstructing public preparedness documents published by Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HCOHSEM), it is clear that accumulation by dispossession filters down through not only property and money but also access to green spaces and a healthy life. By dispossessing low-income communities of their right to green spaces and life, those communities end up in places that are environmentally dangerous, leaving them at a disadvantage in the disaster preparedness and recovery process. This thesis serves as a case study highlighting how HCOHSEM failed to provide low-income communities with assistance prior to, during, and after Hurricane Harvey. The lessons from these gaps in protective measures show that public policies need to be malleable to ensure residents of any community are covered. Though no two communities are alike, other cities and federal emergency entities can learn about what public policy measures require progressive changes to better serve the most vulnerable communities.

This dissertation brings together the history of slavery and environmental history to explore the legacy of slavery on Texas’ Trinity River from the 1820s to the 1970s. Many southern rivers, including the Trinity, experienced few sustained efforts to transform or control them until well into the twentieth century, and these environments were just as likely to diffuse rather than consolidate any particular group’s power over people. Unlike elites in the older regions of the slave South, no one assumed that they controlled the environment in places such as Texas’s Trinity River. Drawing on nearly fifty different archives, my dissertation explains the surprising ways in which slavery, urbanization, and environmentalism were connected. Environmental racism changed the Trinity into a more flood prone and polluted place, but it also meant that its mostly black residents were rarely mentioned in official engineering reports or newspaper articles. This invisibility served as a temporary advantage during the racist violence of the post-emancipation decades and people squatted on land for which they did not hold titles. However, because so many people were not included in official records such as census reports, I have relied on qualitative sources to analyze this history. Freedpeople incurred plantation slavery’s environmental debts of erosion and disease, but they also seized the opportunity to avoid crop-liens and other forms of usury by living in an overlooked landscape. Upstream cities on the Trinity gave little consideration to the effects of using the river as a sewer, and they ignored the black families who called the river home. In the early twentieth century, a novel class of elites on the lower half of the river began to issue bonds to build levees that pushed out many longtime residents. As prisons replaced plantations and subsistence-oriented farmers could no longer endure the worsened floods, pollution, and enclosure of its common lands, the lower Trinity lost most of its remaining residents. Yet as debates raged along the entire river about remaking it into a canal and the proper use of state and federal resources, the memory of an unruly river contributed to the political outcomes despite slavery’s legacy of inequality.

Thesis advisor: Yasmin Zaerpoor / The Coronavirus pandemic has cast a new light on the intersection of environmental justice and public health, as communities of color and low-income communities have experienced greater rates of infection and mortality due to the Covid-19 pandemic. These inequalities can be attributed to a multitude of injustices. I investigate the impact that air pollution has had on COVID-19 incidence within Massachusetts, while also investigating other possible correlating factors. I use a regression model to consider the impact of air pollution, population density, race, income, age, and education on COVID-19 positivity rates in Massachusetts. In this study, I found that air pollution, population density, and the percentage of Hispanic population in a given community were all statistically significant in a linear regression model. Further research would be needed to investigate whether the coefficient on Hispanic population is conclusive. It is possible that the significant coefficient is picking up variables that are not included in this regression, namely the percentage of essential workers or access to healthcare. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Departmental Honors. / Discipline: Environmental Studies.

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