Low-Level Groundwater Atrazine in High Atrazine Usage Nebraska Counties: Likely Effects of Excessive Groundwater Abstraction

Recent studies observed a correlation between estrogen-related cancers and groundwater atrazine in eastern Nebraska counties. However, the mechanisms of human exposure to atrazine are unclear because low groundwater atrazine concentration was observed in counties with high cancer incidence despite having the highest atrazine usage. We studied groundwater atrazine fate in high atrazine usage Nebraska counties. Data were collected from Quality Assessed Agrichemical Contaminant Nebraska Groundwater, Parameter–Elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model (PRISM), and water use databases. Descriptive statistics and cluster analysis were performed. Domestic wells (59%) were the predominant well type. Groundwater atrazine was affected by well depth. Clusters consisting of wells with low atrazine were characterized by excessive groundwater abstraction, reduced precipitation, high population, discharge areas, and metropolitan counties. Hence, low groundwater atrazine may be due to excessive groundwater abstraction accompanied by atrazine. Human exposure to atrazine in abstracted groundwater may be higher than the estimated amount in groundwater.

I Know I'm Healthy Because: Qualitative Definitions of Health in Older Rural African-Americans

In recent years, there has been attention to health disparities between racial groups in the US, and between urban and residents. Older rural African Americans are at high risk, but have historical reasons tor distrust the health care system. This study examined qualitative definitions of health in older rural African Americans. Our sample included 47 African Americans aged 52-79 (20 male, 27 female, median age = 66 ) from non metropolitan counties in northeast Mississippi, at least 10 miles from the nearest town of more than 1000. Participants rated their health on a 5-point scale; only 1 person rated their health as a 5 for excellent. On average, they rated their health as fair. Most reported significant health problems, (mean=2) including 17 (36%) who reported having been diagnosed with diabetes. Participants were asked by interviewers “how they knew they were healthy.” Their responses were transcribed. Using phenomenological methods, participants’ responses were sorted into naturally-occurring categories, which were retested against the data. The categories that emerged were Performing Basic Tasks is Enough/I’m OK (12), Good Health Due to Healthy Behaviors (8), Healthy Due to Social Support or God (11), Healthy Despite One Problem (6), and I’m Not OK (7). Given that our sample is somewhat younger than most gerontological samples, participants seemed to have relatively low expectations about their health, which might not be surprising considering the health problems in the sample. Interventions to improve the health of this group should concentrate on increasing health self-efficacy and expectations.

Classification of Recreation Opportunity Spectrum Using Night Lights for Evidence of Humans and POI Data for Social Setting

The recreation opportunity spectrum (ROS) has been widely recognized as an effective tool for the inventory and planning of outdoor recreational resources. However, its applications have been primarily focused on forest-dominated settings with few studies being conducted on all land types at a regional scale. The creation of a ROS is based on physical, social, and managerial settings, with the physical setting being measured by three criteria: remoteness, size, and evidence of humans. One challenge to extending the ROS to all land types on a large scale is the difficulty of quantifying the evidence of humans and social settings. Thus, this study, for the first time, developed an innovative approach that used night lights as a proxy for evidence of humans and points of interest (POI) for social settings to generate an automatic ROS for Hunan Province using Geographic Information System (GIS) spatial analysis. The whole province was classified as primitive (2.51%), semi-primitive non-motorized (21.33%), semi-primitive motorized (38.60%), semi-developed natural (30.99%), developed natural (5.61%), and highly developed (0.96%), which was further divided into three subclasses: large-natural (0.63%), small natural (0.27%), and facilities (0.06%). In order to implement the management and utilization of natural recreational resources in Hunan Province at the county (city, district) level, the province’s 122 counties (cities, districts) were categorized into five levels based on the ROS factor dominance calculated at the county and provincial levels. These five levels include key natural recreational counties (cities, districts), general natural recreational counties (cities, districts), rural counties (cities, districts), general metropolitan counties (cities, districts), and key metropolitan counties (cities, districts), with the corresponding numbers being 8, 21, 50, 24, and 19, respectively.

10. Local Government

This chapter examines the institution of local government. This topic is often neglected in constitutional law studies, on the rather simplistic basis that since the United Kingdom is not in a legal sense a ‘federal country’ it is only the national governmental system that merits close attention. The suggestion made here is that analysis of the role played by local government institutions reveals a great deal about the nature of ‘democracy’ within our modern constitution. The chapter focuses in general terms on the evolution of ideas relating to localism, tradition, and the ‘modernisation’ of local government and on local government’s changing constitutional status during the course of the twentieth century. More specifically, the chapter examines trends in the institutional structure of the local government sector (and especially the abolition of the Greater London Council and metropolitan counties in the mid-1980s), developments relating to the fiscal autonomy of local government throughout that period, the role played by the judiciary in determining the limits of local government autonomy, and changes in one of the most important areas of local authority activity – the provision of council housing.

Cost of living variation, non-metropolitan America, and implications for the Supplemental Poverty Measure

Poverty scholarship in the United States is increasingly reliant upon the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) as opposed to the Official Poverty Measure of the United States for research and policy analysis. However, the SPM still faces several critiques from scholars focused on poverty of non-metropolitan areas. Key among these critiques is the geographic adjustment for cost of living employed in the SPM, which is based solely upon median rental costs and pools together all non-metropolitan counties within each state. Here, we evaluate the current geographic adjustment of the SPM using both microdata and aggregate data from the American Community Survey for 2014-2018. By comparing housing costs, tenure, and commuting, we determine median rent is likely an appropriate basis for geographic adjustment. However, by demonstrating the wide variability between median rents of non-metropolitan counties within the same state, we show that the current operationalization of this geographic adjustment is sorely lacking.

Creatures of the state? Metropolitan counties compensated for state inaction in initial U.S. response to COVID-19 pandemic

Societal responses to crises require coordination at multiple levels of organization. Exploring early efforts to contain COVID-19 in the U.S., we argue that local governments can act to ensure systemic resilience and recovery when higher-level governments fail to do so. Event history analyses show that large, more urban areas experience COVID-19 more intensely due to high population density and denser socioeconomic networks. But metropolitan counties were also among the first to adopt shelter-in-place orders. Analyzing the statistical predictors of when counties moved before their states, we find that the hierarchy of counties by size and economic integration matters for the timing of orders, where both factors predict earlier shelter-in-place orders. In line with sociological theories of urban governance, we also find evidence of an important governance dimension to the timing of orders. Liberal counties in conservative states were more than twice as likely to adopt a policy and implement one earlier in the pandemic, suggesting that tensions about how to resolve collective governance problems are important in the socio-temporal dynamic of responses to COVID-19. We explain this behavior as a substitution effect in which more urban local governments, driven by risk and necessity, step up into the action vacuum left by higher levels of government and become national policy leaders and innovators.