Christina Ergas

A Model of Sustainable Living: Collective Identity in an Urban Ecovillage

Ecovillages are burgeoning communitarian phenomena in postindustrialized countries whose members push for ecologically sustainable change. The author situated a case study of an urban ecovillage in the social movement literatures on political opportunity structures and collective identity construction in an endeavor to bridge macro-structural movement and micro-identity construction theories. Using participant observation and interview data from ecovillagers, she answers three research questions to investigate how ecovillagers’ collective goals for sustainability are negotiated in the context of regulations and dominant consumer ideologies. Informed by literatures on collective identity, the author asked, “What are ecovillagers’ goals? What work do they do in their everyday lives to achieve these goals?” Additionally, to understand villagers’ interactions with political opportunity structures, she asked, “How do members negotiate actions within a larger political environment that both facilitates and constrains them?” From her data, she determined how ecovillagers conceptualize their collective identity and actions within the context of constraining institutions.

Urban density and the metabolic reach of metropolitan areas: A panel analysis of per capita transportation emissions at the county-level.

We engage a tension in the urban environment literature that positions cities as both drivers of environmental destruction and loci of environmental protection. We argue that the traditional binary view of cities as either harmful or beneficial is too simplistic; we advance a more nuanced understanding of cities to study their internal and external metabolic effects in terms of carbon emissions from on-road transportation at the county-level across the continental United States between 2002 and 2007. First, utilizing satellite imagery from the National Land Cover Database, we create a novel measure of population density by quantifying the number of people per square mile of impervious surface area. Second, we develop a measure of metropolitan adjacency from the rural classifications datasets published by the USDA. In spatial regression models, we find that while higher density reduces emissions, counties that are geographically isolated from metropolitan areas actually have lower per capita emissions, all else equal. We elaborate on the conceptual, methodological, and practical implications of our study in the conclusion.

Ecovillages, Restitution, and the Political-Economic Opportunity Structure: An Urban Case Study in Mitigating the Metabolic Rift

In cities around the world, environmental concerns have spurred urban activists to organize alternative forms of settlement. Here, we assess efforts by one ecovillage in the Pacific Northwest to change their lifestyles in accordance with ecological principles. Drawing from the concepts of restitution and the political-economic opportunity structure (PEOS), we find that ecovillagers intend to mitigate the antagonism between humans and nature, but they face limitations from the larger urban and political-economic contexts. As such, this study describes the routine practices and experiences of urban ecovillagers as an example of the micro-level dynamics and tensions implied in metabolic rift theory.

How do Slums Change the Relationship between Urbanization and the Carbon Intensity of Well-Being?

This study examines how the relationship between urbanization (measured as the percentage of total population living in urban areas) and the carbon intensity of well-being (CIWB) (measured as a ratio of carbon dioxide emissions and life expectancy) in most nations from 1960–2013 varies based on the economic context and whereabouts of a substantial portion of a nation’s urban population. To accomplish this, we use the United Nations’ (UN) definition of slum households to identify developing countries that have substantial slum populations, and estimate a Prais-Winsten regression model with panel-corrected standard errors (PCSE), allowing for disturbances that are heteroskedastic and contemporaneously correlated across panels. Our findings indicate that the rate of increase in CIWB for countries without substantial slum populations begins to slow down at higher levels of urbanization, however, the association between urbanization and CIWB is much smaller in countries with substantial slum populations. Overall, while urbanization is associated with increases in CIWB, the relationship between urban development and CIWB is vastly different in developed nations without slums than in under-developed nations with slums.

Barriers to Sustainability: Gendered Divisions of Labor in Cuban Urban Agriculture

Abstract Purpose Studying Cuban urban agriculture is important because empirically investigating existing, innovative projects geared toward sustainability can illuminate the processes that facilitate and inhibit environmental reform. I assess the social costs and benefits, achievements, and ongoing challenges at one urban farm. I highlight the interconnection of societal institutions – including gender relationships and gendered economic structures – that can foster or undermine sustainability projects. My analysis of the social dimensions of environmental problems is based on Ariel Salleh’s theoretical work. She argues that women’s invisible reproductive labor mediates paid labor by maintaining the viability of such labor. My contribution is to add an empirical dimension to her work. Methodology To assess the challenges of urban sustainability, I spent two months conducting participant observation and semi-structured interviews with workers at an urban farm in Havana, Cuba. Findings I find that culturally prescribed gender divisions of labor are entrenched in Cuban urban agriculture. Women continue to do most of the important, yet unacknowledged, domestic work that maintains the health of agricultural labor. Additionally, the heavier burdens women experience during the second shift restrict their ability to participate in local democratic decision-making processes, thereby limiting their capacity to modify oppressive cultural norms and maintaining the status quo. Implications Socially just environmental change does not automatically happen when the barriers of capitalism are removed, even if the society bases economic progress on increasing quality of life rather than profit. Instead, socially just environmental change must be a deliberate process that is constantly negotiated, reassessed, and prioritized.