Browsing by Subject "Environmental Justice"
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Item Composing the Gulf Coast: Narratives of Environmental Toxicity, Racial Injustice, and Carbon Energy Across Modalities(2019-05) Lapeyrouse-Cherry, JulietteThis dissertation examines Gulf Coast-centered environmental nonfiction narratives in texts across multiple genres, including nonfiction books, documentary films, and web-based interactives. These texts construct the region at the nexus of the negative geological, ecological, and human health impacts of oil extraction and petrochemical production. In the first body chapter, I analyze three nonfiction texts by journalists and academics who travel to south Louisiana and offer an outsiders’ perspective on the place, all of which I argue represent an emerging genre of elegiac travelogue. I then rhetorically analyze three documentaries on the BP spill, reading them rhetorically for oil’s visibility and invisibility, and arguing that all three films audiovisually construct, sometimes through the invocation of other senses, petroleum’s social-material impacts on the Gulf Coast through representations of sickness and toxicity, in alignment with environmental justice concerns. The final chapter begins with an analysis of two interactive maps focused on petrochemical industry-related environmental impacts along the Gulf Coast. I then place these maps within the context of scholarship and pedagogy in Writing Studies and Environmental and Energy Humanities, and conclude with teaching materials that aim to address these issues presented throughout this dissertation in an advanced undergraduate classroom, placing the issues faced by the Gulf Coast in broader national and international contexts.Item Comprehensive Green Infrastructure Planning: The Way Forward for Ecological and Environmental Justice(2012-05-30) Stewart, PaulaGreen infrastructure planning is an alternative concept that takes a long-term strategic and holistic approach to urban and regional development. It focuses on limiting sprawl, preserving or reclaiming natural areas of high environmental significance, and reconnecting fragmented landscapes. It includes highly dense, highly energy and resource efficient, racially and socially mixed built environments with urban agriculture as a necessary component. It balances the needs of humans and nature, economic interests, and ecosystem health while furthering environmental justice for all.Item Greenhouse Democracy: A Political Theory for Climate Change(2017-09) Hobbs-Morgan, ChaseThis dissertation offers a critique of what scholars have called the ‘dominant climate imaginary:’ a way of thinking that animates mainstream climate politics. It proposes in turn a ‘democratic imaginary’ through which to respond to anthropogenic climate change. Through the lens of the dominant imaginary: 1) climate change appears as an essentially technical and scientific problem, 2) the impacts of climate change are presumed to be spatially and/or temporally distant, and 3) individuals and communities implicated in a changing climate are encouraged to accept that countering climate change is primarily the responsibility of distant organizations and institutions. As such, the dominant imaginary provides little room for centering and addressing everyday entanglements with climate change, even as it stymies opportunities for approaching climate change through bottom-up, democratic politics. In response, this dissertation argues that concerned political theorists and activists ought resist the dominant climate imaginary, and proposes the concept of ‘climate violence’ as a means of doing so. Once climate change is understood as a problem of violence – and therefore not only a technical and scientific problem – questions about its political implications are more easily asked. Who is responsible for the problem? Who is most impacted? How should those who are implicated in one way or another think about responsibility for, and democratic responses to, climate change? Having critiqued the dominant imaginary and argued for the concept of climate violence, the dissertation ends with a turn to democratic and feminist political theorists. By putting such theorists into conversation with the problem of climate violence, I end by outlining ‘greenhouse democracy’ a set of ecologically sensitive democratic commitments and provocations. According to greenhouse democracy the experience of living under the threat of climate violence, rather than any official citizenship granted by states, qualifies and invites one to participate in building bottom-up, collective responses to climate violence.Item The River Calls Me Home: Cold War Diplomacy, US Militarization and Environmental Justice within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe(2023-08) Annis, AmberAbstractMy dissertation project is an examination of the militarization of reservation land, the appropriation of water, and the exploitation of tribal sovereignty of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. I argue that acquisition of the tribe’s resources for a military gunnery range and for a national damming project was fundamental to U.S. nation-building between the end of WWII and through the Cold War. My dissertation is an inherently American Studies and American Indian Studies project in regards to the various methodologies and sources I am employing. However, I also draw heavily from the fields of ethnohistory, history, and autoethnography. I have framed my project around four chapters that will move chronological in order. Beginning with a historical overview of the tribe, I shift to examining the air-to-air gunnery range and from there I move to telling the story of the damming of the Missouri River and the effects this damming project had on the land and on the people. From there I turn my attention to the community and focus on an environmental tribal program that spent years and millions of dollars in pursuit of mitigation of the gunnery range and the damming project. I end with an examination of concepts of nationhood, expressions of sovereignty and memory among the Lakota people of Cheyenne River. By placing Indian people at the center of my conversation I am investigating the manner in which American Indian people and resources were fundamental to America’s national identity. By highlighting these moments of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe our understandings of American Indian sovereignty, World War II and Cold War engagement, militarization, identity, mobility and nation to nation race-relations are greatly enhanced. The continued use of Lakota peoples resources, specifically land, on Cheyenne River have greatly influenced the development of the United States as a major player in the larger world and the sustained erasure of these histories of exploitation and disregard for sovereignty in dominant scholarship regarding public and foreign diplomacy perpetuates the misconception that Indigenous Studies is not central to postwar studies.