Sharon Moran

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry

This paper explores how tourism can be understood as an opportunity to develop sustainable enterprise, providing business opportunities while also advancing social and environmental goals. While every country has multiple challenges to manage in the future, we argue that comprehensive planning for sustainable tourism can integrate several policy go...

The widespread occurrence of organic micropollutants (OMPs) is a challenge for aquatic ecosystem management, and closing the gaps in risk assessment of OMPs requires a data-driven approach. One promising tool for increasing the spatiotemporal coverage of OMP data sets is through the active involvement of citizen volunteers to expand the scale of OM...

Argues that all interested in improving our water resources must pay attention to toilets, sanitation, and wastewater. Though the world embraces sustainability,at least in theory, the stigmas around toilets and the environment remain. Two big ones are the yuck factor, and out of sight, out of mind. Issues of gender dynamics and environmental justic...

Toilets and the water environment; stigma, shame, and denial.

This paper presents ecosystem cultural services related to water based scenic landscape resources and then applies it to an Upstate New York lake landscape. A very careful accounting of greenspace ecosystem services is presented as they are applied to lakeshore residents, village residents and town/watershed residents and lake greenspace users util...

This book addresses environmental justice issues and inclusiveness of communities affected by urban waterway revitalization. Theories and practice are drawn from North American and European examples plus positive techniques for moving forward.

The authors studied the level of people's knowledge about their drinking water source, their level of concern for it, and how this relates to living in a city where lead levels in the water exceed the US Environmental Protection Agency's lead action level. Results show that, depending on how respondents perceived the issue, knowledge level and perc...

This paper explores some of the challenges encountered in organizing multiple stakeholders in working toward the revitalization of an urban waterway. Drawing primarily from positive experiences with a creek revitalization project in Syracuse, New York, we identify several factors concerning the context and challenges – both material and social – th...

This paper explores how a specific project (creek restoration planning) in a particular place (Syracuse, NY) challenged its proponents to identify best practices for community outreach. Within this watershed, several kinds of social and biophysical problems converged with two environmental justice (EJ) challenges, making for a complex project. We w...

Large cities have historically been well protected against floods as a function of their importance to society. In Warsaw, Poland, located on a narrow passage of the Vistula River valley, urban flood disasters were not unusual. Beginning at the end of the 19th century, the construction of river embankment and training works caused the narrowing of...

In this paper, the Pilica River catchment (central Poland) is analyzed with a focus on understanding the total phosphorous transfer along the river system which also contains the large artificial Sulejów Reservoir. The paper presents a GIS method for estimating the total phosphorous (TP) load from proxy data representing sub-catchment land use and...

The Skaneateles Lake Watershed Composting Toilet Project highlights the material and sociocultural challenges of developing new kinds of embodied practices that effectively utilize alternatives to traditional water-dependent plumbing. Practical, small-scale innovation is important to addressing the human dimensions of these changes, particularly gi...

Stream restoration initiatives are examined using the framework of environmental justice. These projects seek to improve stream quality as well as provide benefits to communities. Restoration projects are engaging, educational, and they resonate with narratives of redemption. However, stream restoration projects have been located primarily in rural...

The decommissioning of dams has been discussed on an international scale in the context of the economic, social, and environmental costs of maintaining aging infrastructure. While dams can provide extensive benefits such as water management, power generation, and flood control, their environmental impacts can be detrimental, and much remains to be...

This paper explores how several water technologies mediate people's relationship with nature in the domestic sphere. While septic systems are critical to the built environment in exurban North America, they remain largely unacknowledged. Their hidden participation in the backyards of private homes silently facilitates—yet outwardly denies—people's...

Stream restoration projects are discussed in the context of their larger social purposes. Using a political ecology framework (including some of its European threads), the author explores how stream restoration initiatives have been carried out to date in the US and offers some preliminary reflections on how they could do more to advance environmen...

By using stream restoration as a seminar theme, geography faculty can create a topical course that helps provide a shared intellectual agenda for both physical and human geography students, while highlighting the holistic strengths of our discipline. Although it is not necessary that faculty have prior knowledge about the topic, a willingness to wo...

Over the past two decades, new types of policies to address environmental issues have been celebrated as promising innovations. In contrast to the "first generation" policies that employed an end-of-pipe approach, these "next generation" policies employ approaches that are considered improvements because they are results-oriented, integrative, and...