User:AnnakarenR/sandbox

Article Evaluation

 * San Francisco Naval Shipyard
 * I initially chose this article over "Bay-view Hunters Point" because it is shorter, more manageable, and already lets readers know that there is a need for improvement on the page (specifically in terms of a need of additional resources and citations for verification).
 * Under the section "Navy closure" is where I think I can make the most impact. The very first sentence requires a citation, and I definitely have enough information to either correct, add on to this statement, or just add a citation if the information is correct and there isn't anything else to add on to.
 * The last two paragraphs are great, and basically cover everything I was interested in mentioning, but the wording is a bit awkward (there is a long run on sentence in the first paragraph) so I figured that is something I could work on. I may also be able to add much more information to this section (there is a part that mentions activists) or even add my own subsection.
 * Superfund
 * This article has a subsection entitled "Environmental Justice," which I am very interested in working on. I couldn't work on the main Environmental Justice article, but I think this would be a good middle ground because it centers on the specific type of environmental injustices that I am involved in.
 * This section actually needs a lot of work. Many of the statements sound like generalizations and many of the citations can be fact-checked and updated with more recent citations. It would not be very difficult elaborating on the first section and possibly organizing different cases. It seems that what this section was trying to do was emphasize the effects on minority communities, and present many cases to prove that. I'd have to check if it isn't too biased to do this, but i could structure the cases- and remove the "AfricanAmerican/Native American Communities" section.

Scholarly Sources and Summaries
This article does a great job of synthesizing the underlying concept of discriminatory policies, but mostly how inefficient they are in following through with their promises and how low-income minorities continue to face the effects of unsustainable government action, this is good for my paper, though I couldn't find where to add it yet.
 * San Francisco Naval Shipyard
 * Dindeen, J. K. “Hunter’s Point Shipyard: Ex Workers Say Fraud Rampant at Navy Cleanup.”NewsBank, 30 June 2017.: This source and many that follow come from the San Francisco Chronicle Archive, Complete (Historic and Current). These provide important background information on the Navy closure. The information on the article is okay, and mainly covers why the site was closed down when remediation efforts began, but more information on fraudulent remediation would keep the page up to date.
 * Nuru, Mohammed "Community Call for Environmental Justice for Bayview- Why does the Department of Defense promise to clean up hazardous wastes apply to the Presidio but not to the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard?" 13 April 2000 : I’m using this article to give background information on the shortcomings that the site has created for community members for a long time now. This source is from 2000, making it more dated than I would hope, but like the last article, this one is good to set the precedent on what this cleanup project is doing to those that live in the area. This article would add on directly after the one before this, I plan to start out with solid background information on the fraudulent remediation followed by its effects. The current SF Naval Shipyard article already does this a bit, but all of the information is clumped together in one large run on sentence. I’d like to consolidate the key facts, and separate them into a sentence or two for each of these articles
 * Selna R. "Slow cleanup delays Hunters Point project: The last article I chose for background information on the Naval Site follows the previous one chronologically." 23 November 2006 This article expands on the information that I found the information that I added to last week. It has more accurate data on the development project efforts at the site today.
 * Davis, L. (2003, Aug 27). Diseaseville; asthma, cancer, and other illnesses occur at higher-than-average rates in hunters point. many residents blame the nearby navy shipyard, one of the most contaminated ex-military bases in the nation.S.F.Weekly Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/367787376?accountid=14496  Lisa Davis, Journalist for SF Weekly won a Polk Award in 2002 for exposing much of the nuclear waste history of Hunters Point. Her papers site many sources and give a thorough account of the many processes and parties involved in the gentrification and persistent pollution to citizens in Hunter's Point. There are many articles she has written on the topic, but this one in particular I find relevant to my topic because of the health and community component of it.
 * Waldholz, R. (2011, May 30). Greening a city ... and pushing other colors out. High Country News Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/870401460?accountid=14496  This paper speaks on the issues associated with sustainable development and the displacement that it causes. Here, the author sites EPA directors and community members to touch base on how community members are victimized after their environment is cleaned up. This paper uses hunter's point as a case study to examine the strategies that been put into place that systematically removes people despite the lack of proper cleanup to increase profit and housing development.
 * Davis, L. (2003, May 21). Hot story; navy admits burning 600,000 gallons of radioactive fuel at S.F. shipyard. S.F.Weekly Retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/367791541?accountid=14496  This paper is one of Lisa Davis' first publications on the radioactivity at the S.F shipyard. It goes into detail as about the Navy's safety assessments and the discrepancies between their testing mechanisms and the harmful effects of the radioactive materials that they were inadequately remediating.
 * Superfund
 * O’Neil, Sandra George. “Superfund: Evaluating the Impact of Executive Order 12898.” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 115, no. 7, May 2007, pp. 1087–1093., doi:10.1289/ehp.9903. I’m choosing this paper to expand my research on how effective federal law and policy are at addressing the environmental justice issues, specifically in the case of remediating Superfund sites. This paper touches on the sociopolitical factors that determine which populations are most affected by these sites and which ones have their environmental/health needs fastest based on their demographic. This study specifically looks at Executive Order 12898, which was issued during the Reagan administration to address the Environmental Justice needs of minority communities at these contaminated sites. The results show that this E.O has not followed through on its mission to deliver equitable cleanup to communities affected by superfund sites. This information supports what is already on the article, and I plan to either replace or add onto these statements with my own, since source verification is an issue on my page.
 * Burda, Martin, and Matthew Harding. “Environmental Justice: Evidence from Superfund Cleanup Durations.” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol. 107, 10 June 2014, pp. 380–401., doi:10.1016/j.jebo/2014..04.028.: This paper is very similar to O’Neil’s with its analysis of the efficacy with which superfund site cleanups are carried out. This paper provides a different angle to analyze this, by using cleanup durations rather than the success of specific federal actions and how those results compare and contrast.
 * Holifield, Ryan. “Neoliberalism and Environmental Justice in the United States Environmental Protection Agency: Translating Policy into Managerial Practice in Hazardous Waste Remediation.” Geoforum, vol. 35, no. 3, 2004, pp. 285–297., doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2003.11.003.: This source is a bit older than the others, but is important because it builds upon the details on the ways in which the EPA carried out the Clinton Administration’s efforts to address environmental justice in waste management through multiple guidelines and projects.
 * Baden, Brett M., et al. “Scales of justice: Is there a geographic bias in environmental equity analysis?” Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, vol. 50, no. 2, 2007, pp. 163–185., doi:10.1080/09640560601156433.: This article discusses the implications of choosing different scales and scopes when studying environmental injustice in superfund listed sites. This paper may provide important insight into the causes of the discrepancies between sites that get remediated, those that don't, as well as how the literature compares to how people living around these sites are truly affected by them.
 * Ramirez-Andreotta, Monica D., et al. “Environmental Research Translation: Enhancing interactions with communities at contaminated sites.” Science of The Total Environment, vol. 497-498, 2014, pp. 651–664., doi:10.1016/j.scitotenv.2014.08.021. I was drawn to this article because it is a good follow up to my previous source that introduces the importance of the types of approaches and biases that are imposed on environmental justice cases near superfund sites. This paper speaks on the importance and the benefits associated with increasing the capacity of community members to be involved in the process of remediating sites at multiple levels.
 * Konisky, David M. “The Federal Government’s Response to Environmental Inequality.” Failed Promises, 2015, pp. 29–56., doi:10.7551/mitpress/9780262028837.003.0002.
 * Martínez, Sofía. “Color-Blind, Color-Mute, and Color-Deaf: Race and Expertise in Environmental Justice Rule Making.” Environmental Justice, vol. 1, no. 2, 2008, pp. 93–100., doi:10.1089/env.2008.1102. This is a great source to use for my additions on redevelopment as it touches on subjects of gentrification and unbalanced exposure to toxins. This uses a case study in New Mexico to communicate its argument, and although the location in particular is not relevant to my area, the subject matter is still really important to include and gave me a lot of insights into my topic.

Summarizing

 * San Francisco Naval Shipyard: I plan to expand the entire closure section by at least a paragraph with a simple outline of the events that have taken place in Hunters Point that has led to the naval site closure. Many of the sources that I found are news articles, which I was skeptical about adding too much of because I did not want inherent biases to become an issue when stating facts about the site closure. However, the sources that I cite rely on extensive research on the topic and site government and city agencies, making them more reliable. The Author, Lisa Davis, of two of my sources won a Polk Award for unveiling much of the radioactive history in the ship yard. Most of these articles cite document sources, EPA directors, and other agencies, as well as community members and give legitimate information to share on the page.
 * Superfund: Much of the research on Superfund sites throughout the country highlight the inadequacies in remediation projects. Many of them point to concepts of Environmental Justice and systematic racism that underly their inefficient cleanups. Papers outline these discrepancies by analyzing the effects of Executive Orders to implement Environmental Justice programs, the duration of site cleanups compared to their surrounding demographics, managerial practices, and the overall lack of cleanup (such as in the case of Hunters Point) and the social disenfranchisement that follows. There is a significant amount of information on the subject to add to the Environmental Justice section of the Superfund page. This topic has been extensively studied and there is enough empirical evidence to further elaborate on the subjects already on the page. I plan to bring up a new section to separate different case studies after the general overview.

Synthesizing

 * San Francisco Naval Shipyard: Closure of the Naval Shipyard: After Navy closure, the shipyard has undergone recent redevelopment projects, and has been subject to Superfund site cleanup projects undertaken by the contracted company TetraTech and overseen by the California Environmental Protection Agency (Dindeen, 2017). Tetra tech and the entire cleanup project took 29 years to complete, but towards the end of their contracting period, workers that had been fired released claims that the company falsified their soil samples, and were testing in areas that were known to be less contaminated when supplying their data. According to the Navy, at least 386 out of the 25,000+ soil samples that were collected over the past two decades were identified as "anomalous" (Dindeen, 2017). Much of the rush to get this data out and claim the area as cleaner than it actually was can be connected to the redevelopment project underway led by major housing developer Lennar (Selna. 2006). Lennar has already built townhouses on a parcel of land that was turned over to them after the area was labeled as "safe". This housing development project has been the subject of scrutiny by many community members and other environmental justice organizations (Waldholz, 2011). This scrutiny centers around the significant exposure to environmental pollutants that has led to the degradation of health in residents of Bayview with statistics that show that more than 15 percent of the community's children have asthma, compared to 5.6 percent of Americans nationally, the average lifespan of a Bayview Hunters Point residents being 12 years less than those that live in Russian Hill, hospitalization rates for chronic illness are three times the state average, and breast and cervical cancer rates high in this area (Waldholz, 2011). This adverse health effects coupled with rising housing costs contribute to what one community member and organizer wrote in the local paper "the voice of Black Liberation," referred to this level of development as "meeting the UN standard definition of genocide" (Waldholz, 2011). S.F weekly writer, Lisa Davis, has unveiled much of the radioactive history of the site which revealing the potency of adverse effects that this development project has had on residents living in the area with her pieces that have exposed the unsafe radioactive testing going on at the site and the severe detrimental health effects that it has led to.
 * Superfund: The Clinton administration’s environmental justice policy called for the regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency to apply required guidelines for its managers to take into consideration data analysis, managed public participation, and economic opportunity when considering the geography of toxic waste site remediation. Holifield's study found that the EPA was making significant strides in enhancing communication with grassroots environmental justice movements, but they had very little effect in the actual decision making process. The effects of this program were only subtle, and the efforts to allow EJ communities to contribute information to the EPA rather than just receiving information on ongoing remediation projects lacked substantial effects on the distribution of hazardous waste risk (Holifield, 2014).  Another way to assess the efficacy of Clinton's executive order can be seen in Burda, Martin, and Harding's study which looked at Cleanup duration and the associated demographics that found that indeed before Executive Order, there was a bias against black and urban neighborhoods and preference for educated populations to have better remediating practices. They claim that after the executive order, cleanups began prioritizing economically disenfranchised neighborhoods (Burda, Martin, and Harding; 2014). Although it is important to analyze which sites are being remediated,  studying the duration of cleanups may not be fully indicative of the quality of cleanup occurring in the area which can be influence by many other sociopolitical and economic factors. This is particularly important to take into consideration when considering the case of the poor cleanup at the Naval Shipyard site. The contract for remediation spanned a couple of decades, yet throughout that time, efforts were inadequate and it wasn't until the end of the contract period when reports of falsified data came out. The quality of this cleanup was not time dependent and its effects speak to deeper environmental and systematic injustices. The inefficiency of this policy in regards to equitable superfund site cleanup can be highlighted in Sandra Georg O’Neil's evaluation of the success of Executive order 12898 to required environmental justice policies to be implemented by federal regulatory agencies such as the EPA  by using historical analysis to compare the impacts of the order on the equitability of the Superfund Program (O’Neil, 2007). O’Neils study found that despite federally mandated environmental justice policies, after the executive order had been put in place, there persisted a discrepancy in the demographics of the communities living near toxic waste sites and their listing as Superfund sites which would grant them federally funded cleanup projects. Communities with both increased minority and low-income populations were found to have lowered their chances of site listing after the executive order, while on the other hand, increases in income led to greater chances of site listing (O’Neil, 2007). Although many of these studies point to the marginal success of the mandate, the considerable differences in the analysis of overall success can be pinpointed to the many different ways in which environmental justice efforts are studied. Many of the differences in studying geographical bias of environmental hazards can be attributed to their size and scope. Baden et al.'s study compiled and analyzed various environmental justice case studies surrounding the topic of superfund site cleanups which concluded that interpretations of results vary largely to  the size and scope of the study. For example, on a national scale, there is a disproportionate exposure of blacks and a higher disproportionate exposure of hispanics in a smaller national scale, but the inverse can be seen at the county scale. This variation can also been seen  with low-income populations which differ also differ at multiple scales. To account for this, Baden suggests that researchers improve their credibility of their results by reporting sensitivity analyses (Baden et al. 2007).

My contributions
Both of the Articles that I used for my area contributions were Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco and San Francisco Naval Shipyard. Combined, I contributed 6 sources, reorganized and added sections for both articles, deleted irrelevant content, and reorganized content. In the Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco article, I reorganized the table of contents by moving "marginalization" directly after demographics for continuity purposes, and changed "community activism" and "redevelopment" as subcategories under marginalization to emphasize how closely related these topics are. "landmarks" was originally somewhere in between demographics and marginalization but I moved it to the top so it doesn't obscure how the important these topics are to Bayview Hunters Point. Overall, I made these structural changes in a way that makes more sense, enhances continuity, and funnels into some of the most recent and pressing issues going on in Bayview today by flowing from its history to its future in redevelopment. I added 2 sentences and 2 sources to marginalization in reference to the persistent health hazards and how that shapes the marginalization in this area. I included my practice experience organization in the list of orgs described in the "community activism" section and posted a link to their website with a small description of what they do. Lastly, for this article I added the last and final sentence to the article under the "redevelopment" section that briefly mentions the EPA's role in closing the site for redevelopment and why it was important for them to do so to change the narrative of this massive romanticized development project that is incredibly dangerous. For the San Francisco Naval Shipyard, I added a section on "shipyard redevelopment" because it didn't exist before and I thought it should because there was definitely a need for that separation because the history and future of this shipyard is very distinct and the information already present necessitated this divided. I added a citation to one of the lines already written, and proceeded to add more information by presenting some data and citing it. I didn't add too much here because it would have been redundant to do so considering the Bayview-Hunters Point, San Francisco was already linked in this page which offers enough insight already. For my sector, I added a total of seven sources to the Superfund article, reorganized the content, deleted content that was not cited, created a new section, and reorganized content within different sections. I added a clarifying question after the first sentence that clarifies that the program name is also applied to describe cites under this program, which was a very helpful suggestion that I hadn't considered before. I reorganized a little bit of the paragraphs under the "history" section because they didn't make sense together. I also added 2 citations and 2 sentences about the history of the environmental justice policy that came out as a direct response to the discrimination tied to this program against minorities and low-income populations. I renamed the "environmental justice" section to "environmental discrimination" for clarifying purposes, then moved "african american communities" and "native american communities" as subcategories under this to because they are directly connected and renamed them as "case studies in african american communities" and case studies in native american communities" to further bolster whatever was written in the main category. I added 3 sentences and 2 citations to this category and reorganized the information already there so that it flowed appropriately. Lastly, I added a brief summary of the case in Bayview under the subcategory "case studies in african american communities", linked both the Bayview Hunters Point and San Francisco Naval Shipyard artciles to it, and added three citations to this summary.
 * Area
 * Sector