FES Outstanding Graduate Student Paper Series

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https://hdl.handle.net/10315/13775

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Open Access
Regional Policy and EU Accession in the Czech Republic 1997 - 1999
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2000) Evans, Hannah
This paper examines the formulation of regional policy and the creation of a Regional Development Plan in the Czech Republic during the period of 1997 - 1999. The regional policy and planning process occurred within the larger dynamic of the Czech Republic's application for membership in the European Union, and the paper considers the application of European Union partnership principle in the regional planning process. Analysis focuses on whether this process, required by the EU, enhanced democratic decision-making in the Czech Republic.
Open Access
Landscapes of Environmental Injustice: The Environmental Justice Movement in Context
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2000) Chan, Emily S.
In this paper, the environmental justice movement is introduced through a study of its historical context, and the structures of environmental, economic and social disparities in North America. The principles of environmental justice and its primary community organizing strategies are addressed to illustrate how environmental justice is alternative to mainstream environmentalism. Also discussed are some of the tensions and challenges within the environmental justice movement. Contrary to some arguments in published literature, I argue that the movement for environmental justice is not a branch of mainstream environmentalism, but a movement in its own right.
Open Access
Re/Producing 'Normalcy': Bodies, Everyday Social Practices and Photography
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2000) Luciani, Teresa (Tracy) C.
As the white, female, able-body(ies) comes to the written and visual fore in mainstream academic, political, social and cultural circles in Euro-North-America, it is crucial at this particular historical moment to attend to how the fore needs that which it excludes, how the fore becomes normalized on an everyday basis. By tracing various social processes/practices that normalize and disavow particular bodies and practices, what begins to unfold is an understanding of how our everyday social practices may both re/produce and interrupt normalizing practices. Through an interweaving of visual and textual theories, of photography and written words, I attempt to make sense out of how bodies become re-presented and theorized, normalized and marginalized, and how bodies may disrupt and offer new and alternative possibilities through photography and written words.
Open Access
Active Citizenship Reviving and Extending Democratic Practices
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2000) Nayak, Navin Ajay
Contending that our current liberal understanding of politics is exclusive and unresponsive, this paper explores the possibilities for reviving and extending democratic practices through a renewed understanding of citizenship. In direct opposition to the passive and individualistic theory of citizenship presented in the work of John Rawls, a theory of active citizenship is retrieved through a critical synthesis of the unique works of Hannah Arendt and Chantal Mouffe. Active citizenship is presented as a practice that is anti-foundational, anti-essentialist, conditioned by pluralism and antagonism, and necessarily active. This paper was initially part of a larger project that explored how active citizenship would necessarily call into question our practice of environmental politics, particularly interrogating environmentalism's reliance on ecology and the ontological and epistemological privileges granted to Western science, arguing that democratizing environmentalism requires constructing it primarily as an ethical-political dilemma rather than a managerial-technological one.
Open Access
Spatial Practices: Architecture, Planning and Citizenship in Mexico City
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2000) Gomez-Palacio del Rio, Antonio Ignacio
This study questions the view that privileges planning professionals with the right and responsibility of building the city. Instead, it brings social movements, everyday practices and a cultural politics to the foreground of a study of architecture understood simultaneously as a profession, a built form and a way of life. The study of spatial practices in Mexico City, in conjunction with a reading of Lefebvre, presents the concept of space as a potential site for articulating a social/ecological project through planning and architecture in light of a democratisation of the planning process and a politicisation of urban spaces.
Open Access
Genome Presence: The Work of a Diagnostic/Iconic Image
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2000) Martin, Aryn E.
This paper is an exploration the work of a potent image: the human-instrumental-material work required to produce a karyotype, as well as the work done by the image, both in clinical settings, and as a public emblem of "the human genome". In keeping with theoretical accounts of the visual in science studies, I conduct an ethnographic exploration of the resolution of ambiguous bodies into their genomic portrait. Next, I leave the specific context of the image's production to speculate on the existence of "genome presence", which, much like "fetal presence", relies on public consumption of newly visible objects.
Open Access
Ecohealth and Displacement: A Case Study of Resettlement and Return in Ethiopia
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2001) Erlichman, Sarah Elizabeth
This Major Paper is based on field research conducted in the northern highlands of Ethiopia investigating the situation of farmers returned from resettlement in southwest Ethiopia under a government program that resettled 800,000 people in the late 1970s and mid-1980s in an attempt to counter environmental threats to food security. The returnees fled ill-health and conflict with local people in resettlement areas and returned to their places of origin. The paper explores the impact of displacement on a broadly defined concept of "ecohealth" in terms of environmental change over three historical periods: pre-resettlement, resettlement, and return.
Open Access
Biodiversity Conservation in Agroecosystems: A Comparison of Surface-dwelling Beetle Diversity in Various Shade Coffee Production Systems in Costa Rica
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2001) Hall, Susan
Beetle diversity was determined in six coffee agroecosystems representing a spectrum of structural complexity including (in increasing order) a chemical free site without shade, Poró (Erythrina poeppigiana), Eucalyptus (Eucalyptus deglupta), Amarillón (Terminalia amazonia), Banana (Musa spp.), and a control site at Los Cusingos Neotropical Bird Sanctuary. At each site beetles were collected using pitfall traps while leaf litter quantities and soil properties were recorded. Beetles were not related to structural complexity per se but were more strongly affected by soil and leaf litter characteristics. They showed relatively strong co-relations to increased leaf litter, increased soil fertility and decreased soil compaction.
Open Access
Planning for Appropriate Recreation Activities In Mountain Environments: Mountain Biking in the Canadian Rocky Mountains
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2001) Mosedale, Jan
The Canadian Rocky Mountains offer spectacular settings and the necessary topographic features to be conducive to mountain biking. Calgary, one of the major population centres of the region, which has a proportion of mountain bike riders, is situated close to a high concentration of National Parks and other protected areas. The protected areas are therefore an important component of the local and regional outdoor recreation system. However, recreation can impose considerable stress on the parks ecosystems and is often incompatible with their mandate. The study combined the Visitor Activity Management Process with the Appropriateness Model in order to focus on policies regarding recreation and mountain biking in the Canadian Rocky Mountains and to offer a situational analysis, an examination of management strategies and specific recommendations.
Open Access
Natural Systems and Alternative Urban Development
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2001) McClean, Marc
The preservation of the Oak Ridges Moraine has forced an unprecedented examination of the ramifications of traditional urban growth patterns on natural systems. In 2000 and 2001, the focus of the debate became the relatively narrow corridor of undeveloped land that runs through the Town of Richmond Hill linking more undisturbed halves of the Moraine to the west and east. Using this 'ground zero' as a springboard, this paper, informed by the tenets of landscape ecology, examines the planning framework as a source of, and possible solution to, the ecological issues engendered by the forces of urban growth in the GTA. The planning framework is defined to include the legal framework, the policy framework and the effect of the Ontario Municipal Board, which interprets the planning framework in arbitrating land use decisions to finality. The planning framework will be revealed as largely pro-growth, inhibiting ecologically innovative approaches to land use, such as is needed presently on the Moraine. It concludes that an ecologically comprehensive and legally binding policy framework would allow more ecologically informed and innovative land use decisions, by mitigating the pro-growth effects of the legal structure and by providing appropriate direction for the OMB. Interestingly, this paper was completed only a few months before the Ontario Government introduced and then passed the Oak Ridges Moraine Conservation Act, a measure that went beyond anything this author would have predicated possible from the government of the day. A remarkable example of the effect public protestation can have on governments in power.
Open Access
The Bicycle and Urban Sustainability
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2001) Tomlinson, David
This paper presents a rationale for promoting bicycles for basic transportation, in the context of global efforts to achieve more sustainable urban development. The importance of urban transportation systems, and the negative impacts of automobile dependence are discussed. An empirical approach to developing local sustainable transportation initiatives is presented, based on comparative study of North American and European municipalities that have successfully promoted alternatives to automobile use. The general conclusion is that the overriding freedom of movement of motorists must be restrained as infrastructure improvements that support alternative modes are implemented.
Open Access
Voices Telling: Stories Rising from a Place Called Wiikwedong/Kettle Point
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2001) Milliken, Barry
The primary purpose of this endeavour is to tell a story of the community called Wiiwkwedong, or Kettle Point. A main premise of the telling is that story -or narrative voice - emerges from the natural environment through a reciprocation of personal memory and dream and more deeply of blood, or spirit memory. This concept in emergence of Story is significant for its fundamental difference from the positivist Western paradigm of knowledge and learning with relation to environment. The program's purpose, then, is to articulate a re-emergence of some of the lost relationships between the human community and the land known as Wiiwkwedong.
Open Access
Planning for Diversity in the Global City: The Toronto Case
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Altilia, Carol
This paper examines the contemporary treatment of difference as "diversity" and explores its articulation through planning. The utility of this approach to difference is set in the urban context to illuminate the role of diversity as a strategic asset in the local consolidation of global economic processes. The qualitative research reported here is a study of the City of Toronto's recently developed diversity initiative as expressed in the recommendations of the Task Force on Community Access and Equity. An evaluation of the efficacy of the City's Action Plan is provided with special focus on the main feature of the Plan, the city wide Community Advisory Committees. Their general role in facilitating inclusion and their specific impact on the planning function is considered. Assessment of the Plan finds it consistent with the dominant treatment of difference as "diversity" reflective of the competitive, corporatized city in which it has been developed, offering minimal opportunity to open political space for marginalized groups. The advisory committee approach to community participation can not only be seen as having limited impact, but also as containing and/or fracturing resistance. However, the contribution of such state-sponsored planning for inclusion is clear when it is set against the broader constellation of action in the social justice movement. The Plan's potential lies in the possibility of iterative developments pressed by forces inside as well as outside of the bureaucracy. The conclusions suggest that such initiatives are one aspect of multifaceted, cross-sectoral progress towards radical democracy.
Open Access
The Unicorn's Bargain: The Gift and The Environment
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Dickinson, Mark
"Gifting" or "gift exchange" is an economic practice carried out in cultures worldwide, from so called "archaic" times to the present day. Definitions vary: to some, gifting is a mirror image or a shadow of the current market economy. To others it is the very opposite - generalized, delayed, unreciprocated, unpredictable, both creative and destructive. This Area of Concentration considers the latter definition, and focuses on how gifting economies among human societies can reflect, involve, and merge with cycles within nature.
Open Access
Unearthing Montreal's Municipal Water System: Amalgamating and Harmonizing Urban Water Services
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Fleury, Marc-Antoine
In December 2000, the National Assembly of Quebec adopted numerous bills that would lead to a reconfiguration of the municipal territorial organization. The amalgamation process modifies long-standing patterns of urban governance. Within the metropolitan region, Montreal's municipal water system has been directly affected by the changes. For the first time in its 200 year-old history, the entire municipal drinking water and sanitation infrastructure is brought under a single municipal administration: the new City of Montreal now comprising the 28 cities that used to exist on the island. This paper looks upon the operational, financial and environmental aspects of drinking water delivery that have been modified following the amalgamation.
Open Access
Compromising the Environment?: The Spruce Budworm, Aerial Insecticide Spraying, and the Pulp and Paper Industry in New Brunswick
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Rashid, Asaf
Continual growth of the New Brunswick's pulp and paper industry since the late 1920s eventually brought the industry into conflict with the eastern spruce budworm (Choristineura fumiferana). This paper explores the evolution of budworm management since the 1950s, through an examination of the justifications behind the chosen control strategy of aerial insecticide spraying and the development of these justifications over time; through an examination of the criticisms of the spray program and the forest management practices that were linked to it; and, through an analysis of the design of the proposed control program for assessing responses to past criticisms.
Open Access
Animal Scents: Tracking the Betrayal of Animality Otherwise with/in Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Levinas
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Laskin, Lee
This book is a guide for tracking an animal in a text or in a jungle. It offers a non-dichotomous, non-totalizing, primordially ethical relation of self to animal. A relation where the self is not radically detached, disinterested and alienated from a marginalized and valueless animal other. Out of this work emerges alternative 'conceptions' of animal alterity. Conceptions where the self is fully imbedded in and has responsibility to the other, yet does not (only) appropriate its alterity into conception. Here I explore the structure, economy and dynamics of species differentiation between the human and the animal, within the realm of knowledge, and beyond, with the goal of capturing the animal otherwise-as uncapturable. The animal I am tracking recedes like the horizon upon approach, yet it could not be more intimately close to me. To help us track the trace and scent of our messianic quarry I draw on the works of Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, and Derrida.
Open Access
Representing Science Representing Nature
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Auer, Adam J.
This paper examines the recursive and highly productive dialectic between the constitutive effects of science as a social praxis and as the image of a very unique kind of social praxis. I argue that dominant images of modern science engender a dangerous logic of reification though their appropriation of narratives of objectivity that claim a methodological path to unmediated or "natural" knowledge. Representations of science that fail to recognise their specificity as representations by abstracting human agency from the processes of representing science and scientifically representing nature, reify unexamined ideological presumptions (about human and nonhuman nature, and about science itself) within the kinds of scientific representations of nature that these representations of science engender.
Open Access
Deconstructing the Four Pillars of the Climate Change Debate: A Critical Review of the Scientific, Economic, Political, and Ethical Dimensions
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Davison, Paul
Four major discourses within the climate change are identified and explored in this paper. First and foremost, there is the scientific discourse of climate change. The prevailing themes in this discourse are complexity, uncertainty, risk, and ultimately, the authority and legitimacy of science-based policy making. Secondly, there is the economic discourse, where the climate change issue is framed in terms of the relative costs and benefits of mitigation vs. adaptation, and command-and-control approaches are compared to free market approaches. Next, there is the political discourse, characterized by issues of cooperation between States, regime formation, and international law vis-à-vis climate change, where realist conceptions of power, based on military and economic strength, are challenged by post-structuralist theories, which stress the roles of knowledge, and persuasion in international politics. Lastly, there is the ethical discourse of climate change. Here, the issue is usually framed in terms of burden sharing, rights and responsibilities, historical accountability, and ability to pay. While it is possible to understand each of these discourses in isolation, the analysis undertaken here critically examines each of these discourses in detail and explores the connections between them. Two key findings emerge from the analysis. Firstly, there is the recognition that a purely objective analysis of the climate change issue is neither possible, nor desirable. Secondly, each of the four discourses are intimately connected to one another; thus, the science of climate change cannot be divorced from the political context in which it is deployed, just as economic analyses of the issue cannot be understood without also considering the ethical dimensions of the various assumptions involved in any such analyses.
Open Access
Opportunities and Constraints of Co-Management: Cases of the Buccoo Reef Marine Park and the Speyside Reefs Marine Park, Tobago
(Faculty of Environmental Studies, York University, 2002) Mukhida, Farah
In order to understand co-management, the concept must be examined from both the community and government perspectives since its essence is embedded in a framework of co-operation between these two entities. While a commitment for co-operation is an integral component of co-management, it alone will not sustain it. Trust, openness, communication, a belief in the cause, as well as personal and group gain are all critical components of this management approach. The Buccoo Reef Action Group (BRAG) was formed in the middle of 1999. The Group emerged out of a joint research project among the Tobago House of Assembly (THA), the University of East Anglia, and the University of the West Indies. As a type of community-based organisation, BRAG sought to develop and implement projects related to the conservation and preservation of the Buccoo Reef Marine Park (BRMP), southwest Tobago, in a collaborative effort with the Department of Marine Resources and Fisheries, THA. Unfortunately, after the joint project ended, so did BRAG. This study examines the opportunities and constraints that a more participatory approach to management of the BRMP presented as well as explores why the potential for co-management was not realised. Moreover, with plans being created to establish a second marine protected area, the Speyside Reefs Marine Park (SRMP), along the northeast coast of the island, there is once again an opportunity for co-management - either informally or formally. The lessons learned from efforts aimed at increasing stakeholder involvement with regards to the BRMP could be influential in helping to ensure successful implementation and management of the SRMP. It is clear that management and conservation of marine natural resources and areas requires an integration and appreciation for both the arts and the sciences. A multidisciplinary approach that considers the cultural, social, economic, political, and ecological context of each situation is required thereby making the application of general frameworks difficult, but not impossible, so long as those frameworks remain flexible and those contexts are accounted for.