Project Ideas Page:

Having trouble thinking of a good environmental project? Or picking a good site to study your environmental interest? The following resources provide a few ideas for projects that combine the necessary elements to make a good global environmental project that contains elements of environmental justice.

The Environmental Justice Atlas provides a map of environmental justice struggles in places across the globe: "Across the world communities are struggling to defend their earth, air water and resources and their livelihoods from damaging environmental impacts. Mining projects, mega dams, tree plantations, fracking, gas flaring, incinerators, etc … As resources needed to fuel our economy move through the commodity chain from extraction, processing and disposal, environmental impacts are externalized onto the most marginalized populations. But all this takes place far from the eyes of the consumers of the end-products. The EJ atlas aims to make these impacts more visible and to make the case for true corporate and state accountability for the injustices inflicted through their activities.

This Atlas collects stories from around the world of communities struggling for environmental justice. It attempts to serve as a virtual space for those working on EJ issues to get information, find other groups working on related issues, and increase the visibility of environmental conflicts."

Guardian environmental Page (US edition)/ Guardian environmental page (UK edition -- the 'other UK'): The International Guardian newspaper has an excellent environmental section in which you can find top-notch environmental reporting on any number of issues. If you click on any of the issues on offer, the page will provide many additional options as well, e.g., the Guardian Endangered Species page

TRAFFIC endangered species and wildlife trafficking resources site: lots of interesting cases and excellent documents and resources

Finding Ethnographic Information about a place:

One very good way to get information about a place is to find the local place name from the region, province, or state and search for it on the web of science (a database with a link on the UK library page, see below) or google scholar.

If you don't have a place name, this is one way to find it -- is a bit involved, but it does work quite well

First locate your location on google earth. Google earth has a lot of environmental layers if you are looking for a World Wildlife Fund site or something similar.

Second, once you have found a site using Google Earth or some other resources such as the environmental justice atlas, then go to the University of Texas Map Archive to find a country map.

Find the country and use a 'political' map to find the name of the region or province where your project is located.

For instance, here is a political map of Eritrea:

you can see several provinces listed, let's say that your project is located in the region of Aseb along the coast

Third, with this information you can go to the Web of Science on the Library Webpage

Click the 'databases' link and use the pull-down menu on the lower right to scroll down to web of science, and type 'aseb eritrea' into the search field, this yields a few articles on maternal mortality. If there aren't any articles, or none of them provides detailed information on local people and livelihoods that is useful to your writeup, then search a nearby province or the country for ethnographic materials related to your topic. For instance, 'eritrea conservation' yields a few articles: one entitled 'Community-based natural resources management in Eritrea and Ethiopia: toward a comparative institutional analysis' looks particularly promising.

Download these and use them as project ethnographic resources.