Browsing by Subject "Waste"
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Item Climate action strategies for the University of Texas at Austin(2010-05) Hernandez, Marinoelle; Eaton, David J.; Walker, Jim H.This report analyzes the current greenhouse gas emissions inventory for The University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin), reviews the carbon reduction strategies being implemented at UT-Austin and other peer institutions, and offers recommendations for strategies that could reduce greenhouse gas emissions at UT-Austin in the future.Item Ethics in local government : cultivating a robust ethical environment(2015-05) Dory, Mary Christine; Wilson, Robert Hines; Evans, AngelaThis professional report identifies best practices for building and sustaining an ethical environment within local government. A healthy ethical environment benefits governments and citizens alike by safeguarding the public trust and by protecting resources from loss due to fraud, waste or abuse. Ethics are particularly important -- and apparent -- within local government, due to the direct presence of local services in many citizens' lives. The first half of this report applies leadership and development theory to create an ideal operational framework for an ethical environment at the local government level. Specifically, the report finds that strong organizational values, postconventional reasoning, and adaptive leadership should be incorporated into the basic ethical framework of every local government. The second half of this report addresses the sustainability of ethical environments by analyzing the root cause of recurring ethical risk factors within local government. In particular, the report addresses risk factors involving internal controls, conflicts of interest, the limits of managerial discretion, and data transparency. With respect to each of these vulnerabilities, the report provides a set of policy recommendations tailored to the level of local government. The report concludes that while each local government must ultimately adopt the ethics structure that best suits that particular entity’s needs and resources, the following best practices emerge for building and sustaining an ethical environment within local government: respect for the public trust, strong organizational culture that empowers ethical leadership at all levels, regular risk assessment and risk mitigation activities, appreciation of the power of public perception, and commitment to transparency regarding ethical successes and failures.Item Narrative salvage(2016-05) Shapland, Jennifer Ann; Houser, Heather; Cvetkovich, Ann, 1957-; Cullingford, Elizabeth; Bennett, Chad; Lewis, RandolphNarrative Salvage brings together contemporary writing and film of what I call wastescapes: places made expendable—wasted—under late capitalism. In hybrid works of the 2000s by Bonnie Jo Campbell, Agnes Varda, Natasha Trethewey, Brenda Longfellow, Rebecca Solnit, Claire Vaye Watkins, and Eileen Myles, I analyze tactile and emotional representations of everyday life in the wastescape. Each of the four chapters examines a particular wastescape featured by these writers and filmmakers: the postindustrial junkyard, the oil-slicked Gulf Coast, the nuclear waste strewn Nevada desert, and the melting Arctic tundra. Within these spaces, I track practices of repurposing that occur in the inhabitants’ everyday lives and analyze the potential for writing and film to reclaim and transform place through representation. I argue that waste is a crucial site of trans-corporeal experience, which in Stacy Alaimo's words constitutes a "literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature." The trans-corporeal wastescape affects ecosystems, human communities, and material objects; however, the representation of waste has not been a primary focus in environmental criticism. Narrative Salvage addresses this gap by approaching waste interdisciplinarily, drawing on the critical tools of environmental studies, sociology, and material culture studies. Practices of repurposing in the works I study dismantle the ideologies that create wastescapes by calling into question the production of value and rejection of waste that undergird capitalist and patriarchal enterprise. In the deviant ethics of the wastescape, the telos of progress loses its hold, making way for makeshift epistemologies and queer temporalities of continuous making do and regeneration. These experimental contemporary works' alinear, fragmented, and polyvocal forms embrace the vital ongoingness of decay and contamination. In Narrative Salvage, adamantly personal literatures and films of the wastescape urge audiences to rethink waste by seeing it anew, by defamiliarizing it, and in so doing help to rethink the human's relationship to—immersion within—place and environment.Item The recyclists : bikes, borders and basura(2009-12) Melanson, Michael P., 1978-; Dahlby, Tracy; Minutaglio, Bill; Cash, WandaIn January, 2009, I joined Bikes Across Borders, a local grassroots organization, on their yearly bike caravan to Mexico. The group works to promote bicycles, both here and in Mexico, as an environmentally and financially sound alternative to motorized transportation. Each winter, members ride bicycles they build out of salvaged parts to border cities in Mexico. They give these bicycles to maquiladora workers who would otherwise spend a large portion of their income on transportation. These workers make a fraction of what they would in the U.S. and live in shacks amid the pollution from the factories they work in. This is the story of one group’s attempt at making a difference in the lives of these workers.