Ellen Kohl

St. Mary's College of Maryland · Department of Environmental Studies

How damaging was the Trump administration to environmental justice (EJ) efforts and policy? Since federal EJ oversight at the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is governed by executive order, rather than statute, approaches to it have varied by presidential administration. In this paper, we draw on interviews with current and rece...

The Trump administration has severely curtailed the work of the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has rolled back environmental protections, lost ground on addressing climate change and environmental justice, and shed large numbers of experienced staff. All of this has accelerated a longer-term decline in EPA resources, e...

Environmental justice governance is affected not just by the political context within which it is executed but also by the choices made by the individuals who are responsible for implementing, enacting, and enforcing policies. In this article, I examine the experiences of seven African American women at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA...

In this article, we reflect on the need for, and geography of, embodied cross-racial talk in the current political context. We reflect on our 2015 article ‘Kitchen Table Reflexivity: Negotiating Positionality through Everyday Talk’ to question whether we were too optimistic in our advocacy of the kitchen table as a space for racial reconciliation t...

This paper explores the relationship between scientific operationalizations of drought and the politics of water management during times of drought. Drawing on a case study of the 2007-09 drought in Georgia in the southeastern United States, this paper examines how multiple ways of knowing drought were produced, circulated, and utilized by stakehol...

In this article, we explore the role of self-reflexivity in the understanding of positionality in human geography to argue that self-reflexivity in and of itself does not offer researchers sufficient opportunities to question and critique their fluid, ever-changing positionalities. Drawing on the work of feminist scholars, critical race scholars, a...

This paper analyzes how stakeholders' interpretations of ambiguous and multiple operationalizations of ecological processes can lead to changes in how these processes are managed. Through a case study of water management during the 2007-2009 drought in Athens, Georgia, the paper examines how members of the urban agricultural sector recognized the m...

Throughout 2007, as forecaster's predic- tions provided no relief for the drought stricken South- eastern United States, Georgia's politicians grappled with how to manage a dwindling water supply. The in- teractions between a 100-hundred year meteorological drought, dramatic population growth, and unmanaged water usage, stressed North Georgia's wat...