Environmentally Devastated Neighborhoods

It seems that residents prefer to see money spent on fixing the immediate dangers on their blocks than on making toxic waste sites safe. Beginning with a call for a definition of environment that fits the reality, the authors propose policy initiatives that address all the neighbourhood's needs.

The fall of the iron curtain revealed widespread environmental and safety short comings in relation to industrial operations, mining and other human activities. It was the purpose of this Advanced Research Workshop, sponsored by NATO, to bring together a group of eminent experts from East and West in order to present and analyse environmental data, assess environmental damage, establish priorities, strategies and methods of remediation and compare these with case studies from the Western World. In this volume a number of important contributions have been gathered, that reflect the presentations and discussions held. Alfons Georges Buekens Vasily Victorovich Dragalov Table of Contents I. General Consideration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Scientific and Technological Policy of Ministry of Sciences of Russian Federation in Application to Water Treatment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Target Federal Program - Revival of the Volga. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 II. River Basins and their Characterization. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 River Basin Management in the Upper and Middle Odra River . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Water Quality and Environmental Degradation in the Tom River Basin (Western Siberia): The Need for an Integrated Management Approach . . . . . . 29 Danube Environmental Programme on the Hron River Basin, Slovakia . . . . . 39 Global Regularities in the Occurence of the Environmentally Devastated Urban Areas as a Fundamental Basis for Urbo-Monitoring (Methodology of Sustainable Development of Towns in River Basins) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Principles of Integrated Water Management for the Revival of Old Industrial Areas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57 Pollution Potentials of Storm Runoff from Urban and Industrial Areas . . . . . 105 Assessment of Pollution Hazards in the Estarreja Aquifer (Portugal) Remediation Strategies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

What does it take to mobilize a grass-roots force dedicated to bringing new life into a decaying neighborhood? Can any one person or group successfully halt physical deterioration, drug-related crime, or the encroachment of clusters of factories, highways, and other noxious land uses? Michael Greenberg demonstrates in this book that it can and has been done against all odds. Restoring America's Neighborhoods profiles twenty-four such cases from across the United States. It tells the story of people determined to make the blighted, crime-ridden urban enclaves in which they live and work a better place for everybody. These are people from many different walks of life: ministers working to bring jobs to their communities; city planners and federal employees trying to relocated residents of potential disaster areas; and locals taking matters into their own hands to create a healthier, more pleasing living environment for their children. Greenberg's is a heartening account of courage and unwavering resolve as well as of hope that individuals can make a difference, that violent criminals and uncaring bureaucrats need not carry the day. He calls them "streetfighters," a fitting tribute to their efforts to take back their neighborhoods, block by block and street by street.

Many effects of environmental and energy policy are likely to disproportionately burden those with low income. First, it raises the price of fossil-fuel-intensive products that constitute a high fraction of low-income budgets (like gasoline, heating fuel and electricity). Second, the handout of pollution permits to firms provides value to those who own them. Third, low-income individuals may place more value on food and shelter than on improvements in environmental quality, so high-income individuals may get the most benefit of pollution abatement. Fourth, air quality improvements may raise the value of houses owned by landlords, rather than helping renters. These effects might all hurt the poor more than the rich. This book brings together the seminal economics literature that studies whether these fears are valid and whether anything can be done about them.

This book stimulates thinking on the topic of detrimental environmental change and how research psychologists can help to address the problem. In addition to reporting environmentally relevant psychological research, the author identifies the most pressing questions from an environmental point of view. Psychology and Environmental Change: *focuses on ways in which human behavior contributes to the problem; *deals with the assessment and change of attitudes and with studies of change of behavior; *proposes ways in which psychological research can contribute to making technology and its products more environmentally benign; and *introduces topics such as consumption, risk assessment, cost-benefit and tradeoff analyses, competition, negotiation, and policymaking, and how they relate to the objective of protecting the environment.

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall near New Orleans leaving death and destruction across the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast counties. The lethargic and inept emergency response that followed exposed institutional flaws, poor planning, and false assumptions that are built into the emergency response and homeland security plans and programs. Questions linger: What went wrong? Can it happen again? Is our government equipped to plan for, mitigate, respond to, and recover from natural and manmade disasters? Can the public trust government response to be fair? Does race matter? Racial disparities exist in disaster response, cleanup, rebuilding, reconstruction, and recovery. Race plays out in natural disaster survivors' ability to rebuild, replace infrastructure, obtain loans, and locate temporary and permanent housing. Generally, low-income and people of color disaster victims spend more time in temporary housing, shelters, trailers, mobile homes, and hotels - and are more vulnerable to permanent displacement. Some 'temporary' homes have not proved to be that temporary. In exploring the geography of vulnerability, this book asks why some communities get left behind economically, spatially, and physically before and after disasters strike.

In Living Detroit, Brandon M. Ward argues that environmentalism in postwar Detroit responded to anxieties over the urban crisis, deindustrialization, and the fate of the city. Tying the diverse stories of environmental activism and politics together is the shared assumption environmental activism could improve their quality of life. Detroit, Michigan, was once the capital of industrial prosperity and the beacon of the American Dream. It has since endured decades of deindustrialization, population loss, and physical decay – in short, it has become the poster child for the urban crisis. This is not a place in which one would expect to discover a history of vibrant expressions of environmentalism; however, in the post-World War II era, while suburban, middle-class homeowners organized into a potent force to protect the natural settings of their communities, in the working-class industrial cities and in the inner city, Detroiters were equally driven by the impulse to conserve their neighborhoods and create a more livable city, pushing back against the forces of deindustrialization and urban crisis. Living Detroit juxtaposes two vibrant and growing fields of American history which often talk past each other: environmentalism and the urban crisis. By putting the two subjects into conversation, we gain a richer understanding of the development of environmental activism and politics after World War II and its relationship to the crisis of America’s cities. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in environmental, urban, and labor history.