Magister Legum - LLM / In order to address the challenge of global environmental degradation and natural resource depletion, a complex and multi-layered environmental governance structure has materialised over the past few decades. There is widespread agreement that the current international environmental regime is too complex and inadequate to effectively address global environmental challenges. Thus, in order to control the threat of environmental degradation, many countries, authors, commentators and academics alike have opined that one centralised body be created for the effective control and governance of environmental matters on an international level. Governance is not the same as government. It includes the actions of the state and, in addition, encompasses actors such as communities, businesses, and Non-Governmental Organisations (hereafter referred to as NGOs). Within the context of the evolution of global environmental politics and policy, the end goal of global environmental governance is to improve the state of the environment and to eventually lead to the broader goal of sustainable development. The efficacy of global environmental governance will ultimately depend on implementation at global and domestic levels. National implementation is the ultimate key, both to the efficacy of the GEG system and to meaningful environmental improvements. In the following composition, I will critically analyse the concept of a Global Environmental Organisation (hereafter referred to as a GEO) and discuss whether the formation of such an establishment is indeed necessary to handle environmental matters on an international scale.

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.

Bibliography: p. 109-111. / This is an academic report submitted in partial fulfilment of the degree Master of Environmental Science. It is written to demonstrate the competence of the writer in undertaking work in the field of Environmental Impact Assessment. The main purpose of the report is the comparative evaluation of two proposed alternative roads, the "Western Access Route" (WAR) and the "Least Cost Alternative Route" (LCAR). Since this is an academic report, it will not be used as a decision-making document and it will not be submitted to the proponent of the alternative roads.

The U.S. Environmental Movement is facing a paradox: increased mobilization over the last 100 years has not been entirely effective in halting environmental degradation. This research suggests that discourse divisions among environmental movement organizations constitute a fundamental obstacle to progressive change. The discourse divisions are evident in movement organizing patterns during periods of increased environmental crisis over the history of the modern environmental movement. In addition, evidence suggests that federal environmental policy is an outcome of increased organizing among movement organizations with more transformative visions of change. However, policy outcomes from increased pressure among transformative organizations are significantly correlated with Republican presidential administrations lending evidence to the idea that policy reform is a moderating strategy employed to silence radical change-makers. The results from this research contribute to the Marxist model of historical change under-discussed in the social movement literature. It also contributes to the ongoing debate in the environmental movement literature addressing the continued effectiveness of the environmental movement as a program for change.

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An integrated systems approach framework was developed that defines the performance of a near surface low-level radioactive waste disposal facility as a system of three components (or subsystems): the engineered component (cover systems and bottom liners); the properties of the waste (composition, waste form and waste package); and the site-specific environmental features (climate, geology, hydrology). US government radioactive waste disposal facility design and management were examined and compared using this approach. The waste component, historically not considered when calculating waste movement within the facility, was evaluated in greater detail by looking at corrosion of carbon steel boxes filled with waste and buried in a humid environment. The time to hydraulic failure from initial burial to development of corroded holes was calculated for four corrosion scenarios under a constant and a slowing corrosion case. Corrosion rates were estimated from several historical studies and related to the corrosivity and aeration profile of the soil. The scenarios were chosen to represent a range of possible conditions at current and future U.S. Department of Energy disposal facilities. A leachate model was then created that could show the amount of liquid leachate present in each waste package at the time of failure. This model was applied to three different infiltration situations based off of past, current, and proposed future installations of operational and interim cover systems over recently buried waste packages. It was found that for past practices of a 25-year operational period, the estimated amount of leachate within the waste zone over current practices was greater than 300 percent. In order to reduce leachate for future planned disposal facilities, it would be useful to install interim cover systems immediately after waste burial, and fill the waste packages with grout before disposal. For all disposal facilities, leachate movement from the waste zone into the vadose zone would be a good target for performance monitoring.

Nuclear chemical facilities are facilities that contain the operating hazards of a complex chemical facility with the additional hazards of radioactive materials. The approach to safety management at nuclear chemical facilities is rooted in nuclear hazard analysis techniques, and could benefit from lessons learned from the chemical industry. A content analysis of chemical industry accident reports, as well as occurrences from select nuclear chemical facilities was undertaken to determine common themes of process safety accidents. Grounded theory was applied to these common causes and themes to develop a set of theories about safe operations at nuclear chemical facilities; these theories were, in turn, used to postulate a set of leading performance indicators to monitor safety. The performance measures were reviewed for practicality and effectiveness by subject matter experts, and impact on facility safety using an existing probabilistic risk assessment. Guidelines are provided for facility implementation of the performance measures.

The sharp increase in production of engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) combined with their high potential for aquatic toxicity, mean that understanding the transport of these materials throughout the environment is of utmost importance. In the presence of environmentally relevant surfaces, the relationship between particle attachment and relevant variables was quantitatively investigated and reported. Increasing temperature greatly altered the attachment onto two different humic substances by altering the hydration, and therefore confirmation, of the natural organic matter (NOM) matrix. By increasing the hydration of the NOM layer, the matrix swelled, allowing for more surface area for particle attachment and an increase in possible sorption sites. Similarly, high ionic strengths caused the NOM layer to condense, reducing surface area and sorption sites for particle attachment and effectively lowering particle attachment efficiency. The shape of the particle itself also played a role in attachment. A humic acid layer showed preference to smaller, more spherical particles due to the size of the voids within the layer, raising attachment efficiency for the smaller, spherical particles only, while a smoother, more condensed layer did not. As ionic strength increased, however, the layer condensed and the preference vanished. Finally, a predictive model for attachment efficiency was developed using a machine learning approach and trained on a database containing all the data gathered in this work combined with all currently available, relevant attachment efficiency literature. The model employed 13 training features, each of which was a physicochemical characteristic of the particle, surface, or solution system, to predict attachment efficiency with relatively high performance. The most important features for predicting attachment efficiency were also identified. The results presented in this work improve the understanding of particle attachment efficiency by identifying important variables, explaining why these variables have an effect on attachment efficiency, and also providing an empirical predictive model for attachment efficiency. By applying this approach to other areas of particle transport, we can close the gap between experimental and modeling efforts, advancing transport knowledge as quickly and efficiently as possible. Only by closing this gap can we expect to understand particle transport in a system as complex as the natural environment.