Developing a decision support system: The Pressure State Response (PSR) framework to highlight conceptions and perceptions concerning environmental justice (Maryland)

There is a clear need to identify ways to make communities and their human and natural habitats more sustainable. Particularly in impoverished inner-city neighborhoods, we need to know how community regeneration, community decision-making, and ecologically sustainable issues might be so shaped as to contribute to the solution of regional as well as local urban and environmental issues. This is the fundamental problem addressed in this research. In particular, I seek to investigate and evaluate the history, effectiveness and possibilities of a specific framework known as the Pressure State Response (PSR) in highlighting, educating and developing understanding among communities concerned with environmental issues. At a micro level, therefore, it seeks a way to realize the macro objectives long ago laid out in the Brundtland report and made more concrete in the Agenda 21 component of the Rio agreement.; The study experiments with a particular version of the framework relevant to the Baltimore Metropolitan Region. Intensive interviews were focussed in the Park Heights community in Baltimore, Maryland. The interviews explored potential environmental justice issues and encouraged discussion about potential causes and responses using the PSR framework as an instrument for dialogue and communication. It was important to construct a profile of participants' thinking about Environmental Justice before exposure to the PSR and develop comparative data on how they thought after exposure. To do this, I interviewed each participant(s) separately. I outlined the issues to each participant or stakeholder group and subsequently constructed a PSR application for participant(s) based on their responses. Once PSR's were constructed for each participant or stakeholder group, the experiment then went through an iterative process and shared PSR's from each participant(s) among all the participants.; The PSR framework initially was developed to evaluate environmental impacts and assist in understanding and representing environmental information in political decision-making and state administration settings. However, I found that PSR the framework could help with learning processes among disenfranchised groups. This was particularly important because one of the primary focuses of the research was to encourage a learning process about environmental justice and the environment. The PSR framework was also useful in assisting participants to clarify their thinking and discuss environmental justice in their hierarchy of community concerns. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...