Browsing by Subject "environmental justice"

Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Chicago's Botanic Garden: Translating Horticulture into Community Action
    (2020-01) Luiken, Reba
    In 1972 when the Chicago Botanic Garden opened to the public, it introduced the nation’s “second city” to its new botanic garden. Just one of a proliferation of new museums in the second half of the twentieth century, the botanic garden would become a national leader of in community work as museums and public gardens focused on local community engagement. From its inception, CBG aspired to join the most well-established botanic gardens in the United States. This dissertation documents the financial, social, and personal influences that shaped programs that were innovative and effective. As the Chicago Botanic Garden developed, its leaders strove to meet the tripartite goals of the field—scientific inquiry, education, and landscape cultivation. They proved to be particularly successful in the area of education and, specifically, community horticulture. Encompassing programs like horticultural therapy, community gardening, and environmental and science education in local schools, community horticulture programs became centers of expertise at the garden. Given CBG’s origin in the Chicago Horticultural Society, staff and board members at the botanic garden already had a vested interest in ongoing programs in the field, and this led them to concentrate resources there, often at the expense of research development. Dedicated leadership at the executive level succeeded in creating a striking physical landscape, even as they balanced the goal of reaching central areas of the city of Chicago. The public, private foundations, and governmental funders demanded increased relevance and accountability. As a suburban garden funded in large part by urban tax revenue and a young museum without an established scientific reputation or broad philanthropic base, garden leaders and staff worked hard to meet sponsors’ expectations. Ultimately, CBG did provide an impressive number of widely recognized programs by the end of the century. In significant ways its community horticulture accomplishments relied on the expertise of long-tenured employees who built an environmentally just community infrastructure through personal relationships and strategic funding strategies.
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    Creative Contributions to Sustainable Fashion Through Racial and Geographic Diversity
    (2022-06) Tomfohrde, Paige
    The fashion industry is one of the world’s largest environmental polluters (Ellen MacArthur, 2017). With the climate crisis looming, creative solutions are needed to address this pollution. The industry continues to ideate creative solutions within the same insular, homogenous group (von Busch, 2018; Barber, 2021), but this does not reflect the findings of creativity literature. Homogeneity is the enemy of creativity. Diverse groups bring varied “toolboxes” of experiences and ideas that result in the most creative solutions (Page, 2007). Unfortunately, diversity in the fashion industry is an ongoing problem, with 50% of racial minorities in the fashion industry feeling the industry is not accessible to everyone equally (Council of Fashion Designers of America & PVH, 2021). Racial diversity remains an ongoing issue (Johnson, 2020; Hoskins, 2014), especially in sustainable fashion where the creative impact of diverse lived experiences is most needed. Simultaneously, racial minorities face the brunt of the consequences of the climate crisis globally (Mohai, 2018). Within the United States, harmful practices like redling have geographically segregated minorities into specific zones with poor environmental conditions (Bay & Fabian, 2015). While this causes significant harm to these communities, it also makes these individuals more personally acquainted with the climate crisis. In conjunction with Environmental Deprivation Theory, this may help these individuals produce knowledge and creative solutions that differ from non-minorities or individuals in better environmental conditions. The aim of this thesis is to address this issue head on by understanding how racially and geographically diverse voices creatively contribute to the sustainable fashion conversation. This research uses Amabile’s Componential Theory of Creativity (1983; 2012) and Butler and Francis’s Socially Responsible Consumption Behavior model (1997) to address this aim through mixed methods. The four components of Amabile’s theory are: Creativity Relevant Processes, Task Motivation, Domain Relevant Skills, and Social Environment (2012). These four elements were paired with the four elements of Butler and Francis’s model: Exogenous Stimuli, Environmental Attitude, Apparel Environmental Attitude, and Behavior. Crossover was found between Task Motivation and Apparel Environmental Attitude that allowed the two models to be merged with the hypothesized resulting behavior being Apparel Environmental Creativity.This joint model resulted in four research objectives and three hypotheses. The research objectives were: 1. To understand how racially and geographically diverse voices creatively contribute to the sustainable fashion conversation.2. To determine if behaviors that do not relate to purchase or consumption can be correlated with apparel environmental attitudes. 3. To develop a tentative model for the incorporation of Socially Responsible Consumption Behavior and the Componential Theory of Creativity. 4. To challenge existing siloed research paradigms in order to center and uplift geographically and racially marginalized voices, in keeping with the advocacy and participatory research worldview. Three hypotheses were developed as a quantitative extension of these research objectives: H1: Exogenous stimuli, as measured by a) the Environmental Condition of the ZIP code of an individual’s residence and b) the individuals’s minority race identification, will positively influence that individual’s general Environmental Attitude.H2: Environmental Attitude, as measured by Environmental Stewardship and Environmental Dominion (r), will positively influence Task Motivation, as measured by Apparel Environmental Attitude. H3: Creativity score on a Sustainable Fashion Creativity test will be positively influenced by a) Creativity Relevant Processes, as measured by DAT score, b), Task Motivation as measured by Apparel Environmental Attitude, and c) Domain Relevant Skills as measured by Apparel Eco Knowledge. Two studies were designed and conducted to address these objectives and hypotheses. In the first 118 participants were recruited from Prolific, an online survey platform, to develop creative solutions to two of four fashion sustainability case studies. In Study 2, 93 professional or academic experts were recruited to judge these solutions in conjunction with the Consensual Assessment Technique (Amabile, 1982). Data was analyzed through path modeling using PLS-SEM and thematic and inductive qualitative analyses. H2 and H3b were validated and partially validated, respectively. Quantitative results indicated that scores for creative ideation for fashion sustainability were statistically similar regardless of any identity factor, including race or geographic location. Qualitative results showed that while there was some minor evidence of the significance of geography to an individual's solution generation, it was racial diversity that mattered more. Participants created solutions that often respected or utilized elements of their racial culture. Limitations include the use of race as a social construct within a siloed research paradigm and the current imperfect state of environmental condition reporting by government agencies. Future research should look at smaller subsections of this research and test developing theories in the areas of creativity and environmental justice.
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    Environmental Justice Storytelling Project
    (2023-10) Lim, Eden; Garvey, Michelle; Loo, Clement; Grant, Samuel; Villasenor, Jose Luis; Harris, Jothsna
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    Environmental Planning, Urban Development, and the Making of Environmental Injustice in Minneapolis
    (2023-05) Walker, Rebecca
    This dissertation examines the intersection of urban environmental planning, real estate,and inequality in three case studies in Minneapolis, MN. The first chapter, focused on the period in which racial segregation began to characterize the urban landscape, considers the intersection of racial covenants and park development in Minneapolis in the 1910s. The second chapter connects the historical insights from Chapter 1 to contemporary environmental outcomes through an analysis of patterns of urban heat and tree canopy cover relative to the historic geographies of racial covenants and the HOLC redlining maps in Minneapolis, MN. The final chapter considers contemporary green gentrification and the re-entrenchment of patterns of environmental injustice. Together these chapters aim to understand how environmental inequalities were built into the fabric of Minneapolis, addressing key themes related to 1) the role of nature in the construction of racialized space, 2) the legacy effects of racial discrimination and implications for planners, and 3) the role of planners in producing and maintaining environmental injustices.
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    Improving Environmental Justice by Focusing on Emission Location: Diesel PM2.5 in Southern California
    (2015-10) Nguyen, Nam
    For exposure to urban air pollution, disparities by race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class are well documented, but there are few methods or tools to evaluate or quantify the justice and equality effects of emission-reduction options. That gap hampers the advancement and implementation of rigorous policies to address environmental justice. Here, I employ state-of-the-science air dispersion modeling for diesel-generated fine particulate matter in Southern California to estimate how location-based changes in fine particle emissions would impact four goals: health impact, exposure efficiency, exposure equality, and exposure justice. My results explore how spatially targeted reductions may improve environmental justice and equality. Results indicate potential trade-offs (e.g., an increase in equality but reduction in justice) as well as opportunities for “win-wins”: for a region I identify, a 2.6% emission-reduction would benefit overall average exposure, exposure inequality, and exposure injustice by 5%, 6%, and 18%, respectively. As another example, rerouting trucks to avoid hot spots of exposure disparity could improve exposure justice up to 67% and reduce the potential exposure of the truck emissions by 17%. Understanding the spatial patterns of environmental justice, and the connections to spatial patterns in emissions, may highlight how targeted emission-reduction can help maximize efficiency and justice-based goals.
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    River, Race, and Redlining: Racialized Wealth & Environmental Injustices Along the Mississippi River
    (2023) Mandal, Antara
    This paper examines the historical social and spatial dynamics that underlie urban environmental injustices along the Mississippi River. Focusing on three riverfront cities, Minneapolis, St. Paul and New Orleans, I have used the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC)’s City Survey Area Description sheets (ADS) to investigate how real estate appraisers have interpreted the values of the Mississippi River for different demographics and how this has contributed to environmental injustice. In doing so, I analyze how the changing values of the river as either an environmental amenity or disamenity have shaped injustices. It is a mixed methods paper using qualitative and comparative spatial analyses. The dramatic changes in property values indicate signs of environmental gentrification in all three cities, but the causes are different. There are multiple policy implications of this research highlighted in the last section.
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    Undermining the urban present: Struggles over toxicity and environmental knowledge in Zambian mining cities
    (2019-10) Waters, Hillary
    The crux of this dissertation is twofold: first, I investigate Mopani Copper Mine in Mufulira and the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mine’s (ZCCM) Kabwe lead mine to analyze how state and corporate actors evade responsibility for industrial contamination and its associated environmental and human destruction. Second, I think through how to understand, legitimize, and value in one kind of ‘minor’ knowledge, which I have termed embodied knowledge. The first section of the dissertation analyzes how Mopani, ZCCM, and the Zambian government produce an abstract regulatory apparatus, a particular way of framing, measuring, and legitimizing knowledge about the environment that silences its critics. This is done by manufacturing ignorance, telling simple fictions, and promoting enumerations that mean very little about what actually matters. This in turn compels residents of adjacent mining Townships to wait amidst life-threatening toxicity, despite their valiant efforts. The second section of the dissertation re-thinks what it means to wait in this instance, arguing that residents are not passive but are instead constantly moving and furious. The final section builds the concept of embodied knowledge, which I define as a way of knowing and claiming expertise through a sustained connection between bodies and place. Embodied knowledge arises from sensing, emplacement, and recounting. Finally, I argue that this knowledge—acquired while enduring the quasi-event of toxicity—has the potential to upend the apparatus by questioning its legitimacy.