Youth,+Michael

Michael received his undergraduate and law degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For almost seven years, he served as an Assistant Attorney General, providing counsel and representation to the North Carolina Department of Revenue. In 2010, Michael enrolled in the Masters of Forestry and Environmental Resources program at North Carolina State University, where his studies focused on environmental policy and administration. At the end of 2011, he completed his coursework and began working for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association as its counsel and regulatory advisor. Research Overview Our increasingly urban society depends on infrastructure to maintain the //status quo//. At the same time, infrastructure that is perceived as unfair can induce social unrest and thereby disrupt the //status quo//. As a result, the creation and expansion of infrastructure requires decision-makers to engage in a delicate balancing of the economic, environmental, and social burdens and benefits. Environmental justice (EJ) researchers are interested in the relationships between infrastructural decision-making and demographics. EJ researchers aim to provide decision-makers with as much information as possible about the social burdens and benefits of a piece of infrastructure by investigating whether particular classes and pieces of infrastructure are associated with unfair demographic patterns and processes. Michael's research focuses on the EJ implications of creating dammed drinking water reservoirs in North Carolina.

Michael first developed a simple framework designed to help decision-makers conceptualize the social implications of their infrastructural decisions. The framework posits that there are four basic infrastructure-related demographic processes of concern that can take place in communities: White flight, perpetual poverty, gentrification, and gating the community. The extensively researched tendency of society to site hazardous waste facilities in poorer, minority communities is the paradigmatic example of an infrastructure that implicates perpetual poverty.

Michael next sought to figure out where North Carolina's urban drinking water reservoirs fit within the framework. Access to a supply of drinking water is just as critical to urban sustainability as waste disposal. Such access is frequently secured in North Carolina by constructing a dam to impound a water supply reservoir. Michael used higher-resolution US Census data and GIS analysis to explore the hypothesis that the creation of these reservoirs induces gentrification in the communities which find themselves newly adjacent to a lake. Having examined 66 urban reservoirs, Michael has found that (1) the white population (%) tended to be significantly higher within a half mile of reservoirs’ shorelines than in more distant communities, and (2) even as North Carolina as a whole became less white from 1990 to 2010, the white population (%) within the half mile areas tended to increase relative to the overall white population (%). These tendencies are consistent with gentrification and/or gating the community. Further research can explore whether these tendencies result from procedural inequities or mere cultural preferences. Michael presented a poster depicting his preliminary results at the 2011 Ecological Society of America annual conference: [|Poster (vFinal).pptx].

Michael is juggling work, two young children, and writing his thesis. . . and trying to keep all the balls in the air. He aims to complete and defend his thesis in 2012.