Community Response Strategies for Environmental Problems of Water Supply and Wastewater Disposal in Fairbanks, Alaska

This report examines the history of the response strategies of the Fairbanks, Alaska, community to problems of water supply and wastewater disposal. Fairbanks is significant since it is the largest settlement in the northern subarctic and arctic regions of North America. Today, the City of Fairbanks and the surrounding urban area have a combined population of over 40,000

Environmental quality conditions in Fairbanks, Alaska, 1972

Published by The Institute of Water Resources and The Institute of Social, Economic and Government Research Fairbanks, AlaskaThis study represents a starting point for investigating the nature and interconnectivity of environmental quality problems in Fairbanks in the 1970's. Since the Fairbanks flood of 1967, no detailed survey of environmental quality conditions has been conducted despite the impact of the flood, the considerable expansion of the city limits, and the population expansion (anticipated and actual) associated with the oil pipeline. The study focuses on selective aspects of environmental quality of continuing and increasing concern to Fairbanks area residents and also to the city and borough governments. Specifically, the issues analyzed are (1) the environmental setting of the area, (2) structures, especially housing conditions, (3) premise conditions, and (4) waste control. Much of the data was derived from a program called NEEDS, an acronym for Neighborhood Environmental Evaluation and Decision System. NEEDS was developed by the Bureau of Community Environmental Management of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare for rapid gathering of environmental, health, and social information in urban areas.1 The NEEDS survey design consists of two separate stages. Stage I is concerned with collecting general environmental quality information to determine geographically where the most pronounced environmental health problems exist in a given urban area. Stage II consists of detailed interviews with residents of the identified "problem areas" to determine the exact nature of existing health and environmental problems, e.g., housing, health, availability of services, and attitudes regarding existing government (local, state, and federal) programs. With this information, local officials could begin to reorganize existing programs and/or develop new programs to solve some of the interrelated environmental quality problems in the disadvantaged sections of their cities.The work upon which this report is based was supported by funds provided by the State of Alaska, the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, the United States Public Health Service, and the Office of Water Research and Technology

The Long Run Demand for Lighting: Elasticities and Rebound Effects in Different Phases of Economic Development

The provision of artificial light was revolutionised by a series of discontinuous innovations in lighting appliances, fuels, infrastructures and institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Britain, the real price of lighting fell dramatically (3,000-fold between 1800 and 2000) and quality rose. Along with rises in real income and population, these developments meant that total consumption of lighting was 40,000 times greater by2000 than in 1800. The paper presents estimates of the income and price elasticities of demand for lighting services over the past three hundred years, and explores how they evolved. Income and price elasticities increased dramatically (to 3.5 and -1.7, respectively) between the 1840s and the 1890s and fell rapidly in the twentieth century. Even in the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first century, rebound effects in the lighting market still appear to be potentially important. This paper provides a first case study of the long run effects of socio-economic change and technological innovation on the consumption of energy services in the UK. We suggest that understanding the evolution of the demand for energy services and the factors that influence it contributes to a better understanding of future energy uses and associated greenhouse gas emissions.Energy Services, Demand, Economic Development, Rebound Effect

Rocher River, Northwest Territories

This small trapping area, ~10 mi south of Great Slave Lake had a population of 130 in 1956, and about 38 in 1968. The local potential resource industries include commercial fishing, hunting and trapping, and the soil and climate are conductive to garden agriculture; but for their development the community requires a school to attract families with children, new housing, sanitation facilities, road improvement, a landing strip, also improved communications as it has only one radio-telephone at present

Circular 73

An assessment of Growth of Infrastructure Booms have been a common element in the development of frontier areas in the 19th and 20th centuries. Most commonly, the booms have been associated with resource development such as the mineral booms of the western United States. Booms usually involve some type of dramatic short- term change which has wide-ranging implications (Gilmore, 1976). Since the arrival of the Russians in Alaska, six major booms have occurred: furs, whales, salmon, minerals, military, and petroleum. Each of these booms has, to some degree, created changes in the landscape of Alaska, in particular, the infrastructural base, which in turn has facilitated subsequent development, either another major boom, or a smaller development. For example, agricultural development has been enhanced by mineral, military, and petroleum booms in Alaska. The cumulative impact on infrastructure of more than one boom, or multibooms, as it is referred to here, is the focus of this paper. One problem encountered in studying booms is that there is no general agreement on what constitutes a boom. Detailed studies of booms in communities such as Dixon’s (1978) analysis of Fairbanks and Gilmore’s multi-community work in the Great Plains—Rocky •mountain regions, contained no specific definition of the term “boom”. Yet it was clear in each study that something dramatic had occurred. More general historical studies of the Western mineral bonanzas (Greever, 1963) or the Klondike gold rush (Berton, 1958) likewise suggest a number of factors such as population rise, influx of money, resource extraction, and infrastructure expansion. But in each case, there is no specific factor or define rate of something that specifically qualifies a time period as a boom. In this study, we are concerned with dramatic change of events which have had a major impact on the geographic landscape of an area, As a framework for the initial study, we review those events which have been given attention as boom-type activities in the historical literature of Alaska (Rogers, 1962; Naske and Slotnick, 1987)

The Power Structure of Council Bluffs, Iowa: A Methodological and Descriptive Analysis

The study of community power structure by scholars from a number of academic areas, in recent years has been fraught with controversy with respect to theory, research methods and substantive findings. This area of dispute has been particularly marked among those representing the fields of sociology and political science, with those two fields generally having represented polemical positions on a number of points concerning the structure of power in communities and how it should be studied, especially with respect to how holders of power might best be identified

Reviews

Anne Brockbank, Ian McGill and Nic Beech, Reflective Learning in Practice, Aldershot: Gower Publishing, ISBN: 0 566 08377 9. £49.50

Fairbanks: A Study of Environmental Quality

Fairbanks, Alaska is used as a case study for assessing problems of environmental quality that may intensify or develop in rapidly expanding northern settlements. Constraints imposed by site and situations are severe, although they have been partially overcome by high-cost technological measures. Additionally, flood damage, inadequate community action, and high costs have led to poor housing conditions and a housing shortage. Disposal of solid, liquid and gaseous wastes, inadequately controlled in the past, has become a serious problem. Enforcement of new health standards and the development of community-wide planning represent recent measures to improve environmental quality