Electronic Green Journal

EGJ Issue 30 Earth Day 2010 ISSN 1076-7975 In celebration of 40th Earth Day the Electronic Green Journal presents one contemporary and twelve posters from 1970s focusing on ecology and the environment.

Digital images of posters from the San Francisco Bay Area present a history of social activism movement before and during 1970s.

While the benefits of healthy eating and greenspace development have been well documented, the social impact of urban and community gardens remain less studied. This paper explores the social and cultural effects of urban gardening in the greater Cleveland area. Gardening is shown to have a multitude of motivating factors, including economic, environmental, political, social, and nutritional. While analyzing the impact that gardens have on community building, identity, and food security, some authors claim that the gardeners themselves are preoccupied with the economic impact of their actions. Perversely, this leads readers to the conclusion that poor people or people of color are only interested in gardening for its dollar value. Following this argument, more affluent gardeners have the security to ignore the economic impact and focus only on furthering an environmentalist agenda. Such authors presume that utilitarian function and environmentalist ideology are mutually exclusive, but my own fieldwork showed that many gardeners actively combine these ideas. This paper intends to convey the complexity of use, function, and intent in these communal spaces, filling an existing gap in our understanding of their social impact.

The concept of sustainable development emerged to offer a fresh perspective on the traditional developmental paradigm and to attempt to provide global consensus as to how to achieve sound environmental goals in a world characterized by economic disparities. In Trinidad and Tobago, the new environmental regime, which was introduced in 1995, had at its cornerstone a two-pronged approach to environmental protection. The first was the introduction of the requirement for special approval of a list of designated activities covering the major economic sectors of Trinidad and Tobago. This approval process contemplated resolution of major environmental impacts associated with specific economic activities prior to any approval being granted for such activities. The second prong was a permitting system that would see a gradual reduction in the output of pollutants from existing industry. The aim, therefore, was the stabilisation of the output of pollutants by controlling the actions of new economic players and the gradual reduction of the existing pollution inventory through the permitting system. This paper will focus specifically on the use of the Environmental Impact Assessment (“EIA”) process for the making of developmental decisions with a brief examination of how the permitting process works in Trinidad and Tobago.