Hannah Axtell

Photo by Element5 Digital on Pexels

April 15th, 2022

Party over Country: The American Obsession with Identity Politics

Americans, desperate to find themselves and understand themselves on a deeper level, latch onto the comfort provided by identity politics and party affiliation. There is no room for confusion, or for variation of opinion for that matter, they simply open their favored news platform and are immediately relieved with the burden of doing their own research to form their own perspectives on the latest affairs.

May 19th, 2022

Climate Con Artists: The Culpability of ‘Big Oil’ in Misinforming the Public

The United States has a corporate monopoly problem. Despite the prevalence of antitrust legislation that supposedly prevents a single seller from having a monopoly in a given market, several industries are dominated by a select few corporations with immense market power, colloquially labeled “Big.”

Photo by David McBee on Pexels

April 11th, 2022

Campaign Finance Reform: An Ecological Economics Approach

This case study aims to investigate the relationship between a lack of climate action progress in the past three decades and campaign finance policies that fail to address issues of political corruption within the U.S. federal government from a solutions-based ecological economics framework.

March 19th, 2022

Climate Change and the Global Refugee Crisis: A Literature Review

This literature review seeks to evaluate the relationship between climate change, human consumption, extreme weather events, natural disaster patterns, voluntary and forced migration events, and the effect all of these factors can have on people psychologically synthesized for a popular audience.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Pexels

February 9th, 2023

The Necessity and Challenges of Taking a Climate Adaptation Approach to Global Development: A Literature Analysis

This literature analysis seeks to explore how a collection of three climate readings have influenced my perspective on the challenges of pursuing adaptation and development on an international stage and critique the author’s respective ability to accurately evaluate the future with theoretical or policy alternatives to address the greater climate issue.

February 16th, 2023

Climate Impacts and Vulnerability Analysis: Indonesia

This climate impacts analysis of the nation of Indonesia seeks to explore historical and future climate projections, the expected impacts on the health of the nation’s agricultural industry, and evaluate the interconnected relationships between the main four drivers of vulnerability to detail the need for increased climate adaptation infrastructure in the region.

Photo by Joe Fikar on Pexels

March 22nd, 2023

A Major Barrier to Adaptation Development in Indonesia: Climate Change and Smallholder Agriculture

This analysis aims to contribute to understanding the complex interactions between climate change, agriculture, and development in Indonesia in order to expose the vulnerabilities needing acknowledgement in future policy and investment decisions to support national adaptation and resilience.

Photo by Adonyi Gábor on Pexels

April 26th, 2022

The Emancipatory Potential of Carbon Tax Infrastructure: A Public Policy Analysis

This carbon tax public policy analysis aims to acknowledge a need to greatly reduce carbon emissions while identifying simple ways to turn this large-scale change into individual habits and setting a precedent for future sustainable action.

Photo by Dio Hasbi Saniskoro on Pexels

March 30th, 2023

Community-based Approach to Climate Change Adaptation: Agroforestry in Indonesia

This literature review explores the theoretical and empirical literature related to agroforestry as a community-based adaptation option for Indonesian social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities in the face of the climate crisis.

Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels

March 14th, 2022

Corporate Greed and Opaque Climate Mitigation Policy: An Amazon Case Study

This essay will provide an overview of these sustainability initiatives as well as an in-depth analysis of their transparency and progress.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels

February 22nd, 2022

The Carbon Dilemma: Rampant Corporate Polluters and Unambitious Climate Mitigation Strategy

The University of Chicago News’s podcast episode with Michael Greenstone, Director of the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago and Co-founder of the Climate Vault (CV) nonprofit organization, sheds a light on the ferocity of the climate problem and the exigency to incentivize carbon emission reductions with the help of economics and a new market manipulation strategy.

Photo by Sora Shimazaki on Pexels

April 22nd, 2022

A Response to the Distributive Paradigm

Iris Marion Young’s Justice and the Politics of Difference, while normative in proposing how we ought to think of injustice manifestly, thus implying an idea of what constitutes a just society conversely, is a non-ideal theory in its acknowledgement of oppression already having taken place.

April 27th, 2021

The Relationship Between the Socioeconomic Demographics of Massachusetts and the Presence of Police Stations and Prisons

The objective of my project is to investigate another element of social justice to see if minority communities have to shoulder the majority of Massachusetts jails and prisons and bear the brunt of policing.

November 27th, 2020

Marine Pollution as a Result of COVID-19

That is to say, COVID-19 has cracked an already failing plastic recycling system (recycling plant closures all over the world as demand for recycled material has fallen), just as big oil firms are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to make even more plastic. These investments in increased production drastically exceed the industry’s spending to tackle the consequent plastic waste.

October 11th, 2020

The Evolution of Shape Presentation

Variations in shape across taxa are just as much of a result of genetic coding as they are a result of environmental trends. This idea helps challenge the misconception that phenotypic traits are a result of only genotypes or the environment, as we learned, and it helps solidify the indelible connection between Darwinian evolution and Mendelian genetics.

April 27th, 2021

South Weymouth Environmental Redevelopment Plan Presentation

This U.S. Department of Defense funded South Weymouth redevelopment project will outline plans to turn the former NAS into a community center with recreational activities and affordable housing that will conquer issues with soil/water contamination, invasive species, as well as water, sewage, stormwater, climate change, transportation, and energy on the site.

April 16th, 2022

Ecosystem Services Presentation

Ecosystem services are direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human well-being. Bees are in trouble! As pollinator species, particularly bees, experience population decline, people’s livelihoods and the global food system are threatened.

March 30th, 2023

Community-based Approach to Climate Change Adaptation: Agroforestry in Indonesia Presentation

Community-based adaptation (CBA) is “an approach to strengthening the adaptive capacity of local communities vulnerable to climate change. The CBA approach increasingly features in discussions among policy makers, planners, advocates, and researchers, and has been endorsed and adopted by numerous governmental and non-governmental organizations” (Kirkby 2018, 577). Agroforestry is a unique CBA strategy to address the impacts of climate change in Indonesia in that it serves as an effective climate mitigation and carbon sequestration technique while it simultaneously offers methods in which to equip the local people with much needed independence, financial stability, and food security.