Geography 595

Links for Nov. 23 November 23, 2008

• This piece on repairing the tunnel carrying New York’s water from the Catskills that is leaking up to 36 million gallons a day will be relevant to Gandy’s book in a few weeks.
• Here’s a shorter piece on how bureaucracy is delaying the installation of geothermal energy in NYC despite Mayor Bloomberg’s big plans to reduce carbon emissions.
• The aftermath of L.A.’s most recent wildfires, from the well-to-do to the mobile home park.
• Portland, OR, will include the reduction of “food deserts” as part of its comprehensive plan.
• Mike Davis weighs in on the Obama administration’s plans to boost the economy via infrastructure investment.

Country Seeks New Land November 15, 2008

Worried about becoming the next Atlantis?  It seems the President of Maldives is concerned enough to be shopping around for new land for his country before the ever-rising sea levels make his people leave http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7719501.stm

Links for Nov. 13 November 13, 2008

• No word on how much environmental issues will feature, but Obama plans to establish an Office of Urban Policy to centralize federal urban programs.
• City residents in North Carolina are taking advantage of loosened restrictions on chicken-raising to produce super-local food, but not without controversy.
• Showdown in San Francisco between a proposed new Platinum green building (designed by the same architect as our new business school green building) and waterfront height limits.
• The desire for more alternative energy sources is running into the limitations of the existing transmission grid to deliver power over long distances.
• California air pollution is estimated to cost $28 billion a year in health-related effects.
• The NTSB is preparing to rule on the causes of last year’s I-35W bridge collapse in Minneapolis.
• And finally, a UN report finds that “A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun” across much of Asia.

Have a great weekend!

Katrina tours November 12, 2008

Go read this article and check out the articles it links to…it raises some really good questions about “disaster tourism” in New Orleans and elsewhere.

readings … November 10, 2008

Here’s mine -

Edmund Valdemars Bunkse.  “Feeling is believing, or landscape as a way of being in the world.”  Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography. Vol. 89 Issue 3 2007.

Fiona Coyle.  “Posthuman geographies?  Biotechnology, nature, and the demise of the autonomous human subject.”  Social and Cultural Geography. Vol.7 No. 4 August 2006.

Don’t hate on me for the first piece, but I want to stick with that one for now as something that’s just different.  Or phenomenological.

Links for Nov. 10 November 10, 2008

I’ve been too busy to look for links the past few weeks, but are some that are too good to pass up:

• People are implementing more sustainable practices indoors than out in their yards;
• Retail jumps on the green bandwagon, including McDonalds’s, Wal-Mart, and Chipotle;
• “[New York] City is Cited for Insufficient Safeguards at School Campus Being Built on Brownfield; and
• Green cement requirements are forcing Texas cement plants to reduce their pollution.

discussion articles November 7, 2008

Ok here is what I currently am thinking of:

Braun, Bruce. 2008. “Environmental Issues: inventive life.” Progress in Human Geography, 32(5) 667-679.

Lorimer, Hayden. 2006. “Herding memories of humans and animals.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24. 497-518

Hinchliffe Steve, Kearns, Matthew, Degen, Monica, and Whatmore Sarah. 2007. “Ecologies and economies of action–sustainability, calculations, and other things.” Environment and Planning A, 39, 260-282.

New Discussion Articles November 7, 2008

I’ve decided to switch my discussion articles so ‘please make a note of it.’  I thought it would be interesting to look at two articles that both deal with the urban political ecology of trash or waste.   

Njeru, Jeremia.  2006.  “The urban political ecology of plastic bag waste problem in Nairobi, Kenya.”  Geoforum, 37, 1046-1058.  (This is one of our supplemental readings from Oct. 10).

Moore, Sarah.  2008.  “The politics of garbage in Oaxaca, Mexico.”  Society and Natural Resources 21, 597-610.

NYC may charge for plastic bags November 7, 2008

I thought this article was pretty interesting, especially because one of the articles I’d like to discuss is the one about plastic bag problems in Kenya.  The article from yesterday’s NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/07/nyregion/07bags.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

 discusses Mayor Bloomberg’s recent proposal of imposing a fee of 6 cents per plastic bag used at retailers in the city.  I was happy to see a quick reference to a great article I read last year about the former Mayor of Bogota, Colombia and his quest to improve the happiness of residents via several different measures. 

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070622.whappyurbanmain0623/BNStory/lifeMain/home

Race and Environmental Justice November 6, 2008

My project has emerged to become a review of how the concept of race has been incorporated into research on environmental justice.   We can trace the beginnings of race and environmental justice to Robert Bullard’s study of siting decisions for hazardous waste facilities, which were found to have been overwhelming sited next to minority neighborhoods.  And while there is a plethora of quantitative research on race and environmental justice since then, there has been less engagement with the “spatiality of racism” and the ways in which the formation of the built environment and race came to produce certain environmental injustices.  In short, there has been little explicit discussion of the nature of racism in these studies, something that scholars like Laura Pulido, Lisa Park, and David Pellow have sought to investigate in their studies of environmental racism in California.  They make use of the ideas of Michael Omi and Howard Winant, whose idea of racial formation argues that race is complex interplay of social, economic, and cultural factors that is manufactured and congealed in a certain way to enact “race.”  More extensive book-length studies include Julie Sze’s Noxious New York, which documents the struggles of four New York City neighborhoods in relation to environmental justice, and Melissa Checker’s Polluted Promises, a study of community activism in a small southern town.  These sustained ethnographies provide a more detailed look at how local politics and planning, race, and the built environmental come together in environmental justice struggles.  All of these works have emerged after Omi and Winant’s idea of racial formation was first popularized in the mid-1990’s.  Thus, the exact aim of this project would be a general summation of themes, continuities, and disagreements of how these pieces critically engage the topic of race in environmental justice literature.