Bob Bolin - US grants

The primary purpose of this research is to investigate the processes involved in the sheltering of victims of the october 1, 1987 Whittier Narrows earthquake. Sheltering will be examined both from the perspective of victims who have utilized various shelter arrangements as a result of damage to their permanent housing and from the perspective of agencies and organizations involved in emergency response to the earthquake and the sheltering of victims. A survey of victims of the earthquake will be conducted. Results of the research will be usefyl to organizations charged with the responsibility for providing disaster assistance to victim populations.

This research is intended to provide a detailed case study of the social processes involved in community and household recovery from the October 1987 earthquake in Southern California. The research is longitudinal in design and will obtain data at two points, 20 and 30 months post- impact. In addition reconstruction issues and actions will be monitored continuously for the duration of the project. The project has 5 major objectives: (l) To provide a description and analysis of the recovery process for both community and households. (2) To analyze the interrelationships among agencies and organizations involved in the reconstruction process. (3) To examine recovery issues and actions at the household level through a longitudinal survey of heavily damaged households, including aid and insurance utilization. (4) To describe and analyze the reconstruction process in Whittier in terms of political processes involved in promoting recovery and mitigation plans, with a particular focus on interest groups and emergent organizations. (5) To provide a set of policy recommendations based on the project's findings and to summarize in a monograph all recent research on the Whittier earthquake. Data will be gathered using detailed surveys of households, interviews with agency personnel, political leaders, citizens groups and other community influentials. Interview data will be supplemented with reports, records and other documentary materials.

Bolin This project is being funded as part of the National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program's investigation into the causes and effects of the January 17, 1994 Northridge earthquake. The research will, in a multi-site and comparative framework, identify and analyze a comprehensive range of disaster response and recovery issues among victims of diverse ethnic/cultural and socioeconomic characteristics in Ventura and Los Angeles Counties. The analysis will include an examination of the roles of governmental agencies in providing assistance to diverse victim groups concentrating on intermediate to long-term recovery issues. In addition, the role of non-governmental organizations, neighborhood associations, and other locally based organizations that have responded to the recovery needs of victim groups will be documented. ***

The confluence of rapid population growth and the threat of global warming in an uncertain climate environment pose challenging policy and decision-making issues for the urbanizing desert of Central Arizona. The Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC) will coordinate a program of interdisciplinary research and community outreach to improve water-management decisions in central Arizona. To that end, DCDC will study the cognitive processes by which individuals and water managers make decisions, apply sophisticated models of decision science to water-allocation problems, develop GIS-based decision-support tools that foster better long-term and more integrated decision making, use climate models to define the dimensions of uncertain water availability both locally and regionally, and develop innovative educational programs organized around water, climate, and decision making. DCDC seeks to build a new model of science and policy engagement that allows decision makers and scientists to collaborate on important research questions and experiment with new methods.

Even the best climate science cannot reduce significantly the uncertainty associated with global climate change, the climate cycles that lead to droughts and floods, and the expanding and intensifying urban heat island that now grips the rapidly growing Phoenix area. In collaboration with local, state, and regional water managers, DCDC will produce basic interdisciplinary research about water availability, climatic uncertainty, and human decision making, create decision support tools to foster better water-management decisions, develop scenarios of different water futures and share them with decision makers and the public, and investigate the nature of research activity and decision making within DCDC itself for lessons about to build an effective organization at the boundary of science and policy. DCDC is closely aligned with Arizona State University's Decision Theater, a 3-D immersive space for visualization and outreach to the community. Many of the nation's, and indeed the world's, most rapidly growing urban areas are in arid environments and face a future of greater water uncertainty. Arid cities therefore will benefit from a clearer articulation of the effects of climate change on urban water demand and supply and on community response to growing uncertainty. This award was supported as part of the Fiscal Year 2003 Human and Social Dynamics priority area special competition on Decision Making Under Uncertainty (DMUU).

Introduction

This doctoral dissertation improvement grant will support an ethnographic study that focuses on toxicologists at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency who are developing new toxicity testing methods and on people living with chronic exposures in a low-income minority community in Phoenix, Arizona. The project will use data collected from participant observation, ethnographic interviewing, and scientific and community documents to identify the ways in which current chemical knowledge practices differ from prior practices and to analyze the socio-political implications of these changes.

Intellectual Merit

This project will serve to enhance the literature on co-production and distributed knowledge systems, as well as contemporary debates about the distinction between the environment, the body, the self, and technology. It will provide additional perspectives on how scale is understood in environmental justice contexts by investigating temporal and biological scales of toxicity, thereby complementing the use of spatial scales. It will also improve understandings of exposure experiences in disadvantaged communities where environmental justice activism is not prominent and exposures are complex. By engaging expert and lay notions of toxicity as they evolve, the research findings will be generalizable to broader questions about the relationship between science and public knowledge in an era where the growth and dissemination of knowledge proceeds at an increasingly rapid pace.

Broader Impacts

Research results will contribute to debates about the desirability of various types of knowledge about complex chemical risks. They will help to understand how environmental health and safety should be protected. They will inform interactions between scientific and lay knowledge practices, site remediation, and policy making in the United States. They may also serve to orient toxicologists and regulators to environmental justice issues and to publics who deal most intimately with chemical substances. Results will be disseminated through presentations to each study community and to broader scholarly communities, in a white paper written for the EPA?s National Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and through activities developed for an environmental outreach program in the urban field site.