This research paper seeks to explore the environmental justice movement in California, through specifically examining the cleanup of EPA Superfund sites. In 1980, the Environmental Protection Agency created the Superfund list, consisting of the nation's worst toxic waste sites, which the EPA has committed to clean. This paper qualitatively analyzes the cities/counties near two Superfund sites in California, one that has been permanently cleaned and another that has yet to be cleaned. While many factors may influence the EPA to clean up certain sites over others, this paper focuses on whether race, income/education, representation, and community groups play a role in the permanent cleanup of a site. I initially hypothesized that the site with a higher non-white population and lower educational attainment/income was less likely to receive permanent cleanup. This hypothesis was not supported in my analysis of the two selected sites. I also hypothesized that the site with lower levels of bureaucratic representation would be less likely to experience permanent cleanup, however it seems that distributional equity may have played more of an influential role on the EPA than bureaucratic representation. My results regarding the presence of community organizations were inconclusive, though some groups were found to have had access to the EPA. While examining more sites across the U.S. would further research in this area, this project serves as a basis of understanding toxic waste sites in vulnerable communities and the EPA's role in the environmental justice movement.

The modern food system unsustainably produces both a food surplus and record levels of hunger. Capitalist investment into agriculture disrupted natural cycles and social relations. Marx’s concept of the metabolic rift describes the way capitalist agriculture actively deteriorates the ecology (ecological rift) and disenfranchises people from food (social rift) are traced on the global scale. Then these rifts are deeply explored on the local scale of Maricopa County, Arizona to reveal the ways that even local food systems are enmeshed within the global capitalist agricultural food system. Phoenix, AZ, located in Maricopa County, has made commitments to become equitable and sustainable by 2050 in part to address issues facing the local food system. Efforts to achieve this goal (policies and studies) are analyzed using the frameworks of sustainable development (dominant “green”/ market based sustainability) and just sustainabilities (disruptive/ justice oriented sustainability). These frameworks help determine whether local efforts mend the ecological and social rifts created by capitalist agriculture, or actively deepen them. While a few studies may attempt “sustainable” solutions, they may in fact further entrench local agriculture in an unsustainable globalized food system. The efforts that are able to address both rifts, challenging the logic and structures of capitalist agriculture, are lacking in scale. In order for Phoenix to reach its sustainability goals by 2050, the ecological and social rifts must be addressed together. To do this, residents and policy makers must be able to determine between efforts that toy at the edges of capitalist agriculture and those with transformational potential, as they challenge the structures and logic of capitalism, ultimately mending the metabolic rift. While this is being done on a small scale, much more is needed to achieve a truly just and sustainable food system.

This thesis argues that food delivery gig workers are the canaries in the coalmine for understanding the future of work and point to the proliferation of a more exploitative capitalist system. While exploitation in the workplace is not new, the way in which choice, freedom, and autonomy are used to repackage old forms of exploitation through digital platforms indicates a new iteration. This thesis draws on extant literature in order to analyze twelve in-depth interviews with gig workers working for food delivery platforms, as well as online forums dedicated to food delivery workers. The study finds that food delivery gig workers perceive this new labor system as advantageous in terms of flexibility, autonomy, and finances. Although this new job niche mitigates precarity for some individuals, the food delivery corporations constrain the very control that gig workers value and ultimately exacerbate worker precarity. Gig work is both an economic relief and exploitative, flexible, and unreliable, and emancipative and restrictive. Food delivery gig workers’ experiences highlight tensions for those who want both autonomy and control, alongside better working conditions and protections. Despite some workers being aware of their exploitation, conditions outside of the gig sector in the traditional economy are increasingly unable to meet their needs, so they are willing to accept and even defend a job that actively undermines their stability. Food delivery gig workers help to reveal the contradictions within the current labor market and point to opportunities for changing it.