O’Brien, William

The dry-cleaning industry relies on solvents to perform the cleaning, and there are several environmental issues that result from the use of these solvents, which are dangerous to human and environmental health. These solvents are regulated by several agencies, but pollution can still be found in at least 75% of active drycleaners. This pollution is very expensive to remediate, and would put most drycleaners out of business unless they are in the Dry-cleaning Solvent Cleanup Program, which is a State Government program in Florida that finances the remediation costs for these businesses. I will analyze literature on the environmental impacts of dry-cleaning solvents, the economic burdens that the industry places on our society, and the policies regulating the dry-cleaning industry. There are several viable alternatives for operation, solvent choice, and regulation methods that would greatly improve the quality of the environment and the health of humans who are involved with the industry.

Western attitudes toward nonhuman animal species can be organized into two kinds:
an ethical and a mythological. The ethical attitude is that which characterizes the animal
as a subject of ethical consideration, while the mythological attitude is that which
characterizes the animal as a semiotic tool for human communicability. Many important
conflicts on the issue of animal rights arise out of a conflict of these two attitudes. This
thesis examines these conflicts in case studies focused on the wolf species canis lupus as
well as in the practices of zoo maintenance and species conservation, with philosophical
background in structuralism in the case of the mythological attitude, and contrasting
forms of utilitarianism.

The emotional Stroop task is an information processing approach that assesses emotion. College students completed a neutral and a spider-word emotional Stroop task in the presence of a fear stimulus, a disgust stimulus or nostimulus for control participants. Following the Stroop tasks, participants underwent a Behavioral Approach Task with the stimulus present during the Stroop task. Participants were asked to come back for a second session where the Stroop tasks and Behavioral Approach Task was repeated in the presence of the opposite stimulus seen in the first session. Although not statistically significant, the findings of this study suggest that spider phobics take a longer time to color name spider words on the emotional Stroop task than non-phobics in the presence of a disgust stimulus or in the absence of a stimulus. However, they appear to perform about the same as non-phobics in the presence of a feared stimulus.

Media representations perpetuate stereotyped images of Haiti and Haitians. Such
expressions typically emphasize extreme poverty, mismanagement, exploitation,
hopelessness, and also environmental degradation. The environmental image of Haiti is
that it is massively deforested, and the connection of deforestation to poverty and other
problems has been captured in an iconic aerial photograph of the Haitian and Dominican
Republic (DR) border. First appearing in National Geographic in 1987 and replicated
since in various sources, the image displays a stark contrast between the tropical lushness
of the DR and a desert-like Haiti, stripped of its vegetation. The stark image in effect
dichotomizes a supposedly dysfunctional Haiti with a normally-functioning DR. This
study analyzes the “mythologies” that are reinforced by the photo and the discourse
surrounding it, which produces an accepted story of the way Haiti “is.” Going beyond
such stereotypes, the study considers ways of rewriting such depictions to account for
greater complexity.

Emotional Stroop tasks are used to observe the effects of interference in colornaming
performance when under high arousal. Participants in the present study
completed the Spider Phobia Questionnaire, trait fear questionnaire and trait disgust
questionnaire. Response latency data were collected by an emotional Stroop task with
spider-related words. Although interference effects were not observed, it is possible
that this is due to the suppression effects threatening stimuli evoke in high distress
participants. Participants also took part in a Behavioral Approach Task (BAT) with a
Chilean Rose-hair tarantula and a Chilean Rose-hair tarantula’s shed exoskeleton.
There was not a significant difference between approach distance between the
distressed and non-distressed groups nor many consistent significant differences
between reported fear and disgust in response to the two stimuli between the two
groups. There were some significant correlations between trait fear and BAT
responses to the exoskeleton stimuli.

Management of nonnative invasive species (NIS) frequently involves removing
animals or plants from an area in order to conserve native communities. Methods of
removing invasive animals include killing individuals, justified as a means of protecting
broader ecological values. This management approach, however, is often controversial and highlights differences between discourses of environmental and animal rights. The former values life at a holistic level while the latter emphasizes the value of individual lives. Language both reflects and shapes belief and action, and to assess these divergent views, I compare invasive species rhetoric of a prominent environmental organization with that of an influential animal welfare group. The goal is to identify the most prevalent themes in the different organizations’ characterizations, highlighting areas of convergence and divergence regarding such themes, and, ultimately, to find out if their rhetoric points to any viable suggestions for compromise.

The question of land access rights for indigenous peoples is now a prominent
theme in the management of large parks and game reserves in Africa. This comparative
study addresses different government responses to this question regarding land
dispossession of the San in Southern Africa. Ancestral lands of this unique and
marginalized indigenous population had been rendered off limits by the creation of
Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park (KTP) in South Africa and the Central Kalahari Game
Reserve (CKGR) in Botswana. In more recent years, the government of Botswana and
the post-apartheid government of South Africa have pursued quite divergent approaches
to addressing the question of renewed San access rights in the parks. Central to the
comparative analysis in this study is the degree to which South Africa and Botswana have
embraced the concept of “double sustainability” in park management, which emphasizes
the protection of biodiversity and people’s livelihoods at the same time.

To date, Germany has denied any obligation to financial compensation for the Herero genocide of 1904-1907. The Herero began petitioning in 1995 and haven’t yet seen results. The reconciliation process has been slowed by German denial and Namibian politics alike. Germany maintains that genocide was not technically illegal until the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, an argument that contradicts the hundreds of millions of dollars they continue to pay to Jewish victims as restitution for WWII. Historians argue that there are extensive links between German colonialism and the Jewish Holocaust. German concentration camps in Namibia developed extermination techniques that later enabled Jewish Holocaust, and both used the victims’ bodies for scientific research. In 2012, a delegation of Namibians retrieved 20 skulls of Herero and Nama victims from Germany. The repatriation of the skulls stimulated a resurgence of debate about reparations, motivating the Left Party to make a motion in German parliament that outlines an apology, repatriation, reparations, and continued partnership between the two nations.