Environmentalism can be about people's backyards.
It can be an urban issue. Beausang, a senior Schreyer scholar, is working on a degree in geography with a specialization in cartography and geographic information systems. For the past three years, Yapa has been traveling to Philadelphia with teams of undergraduates to study the problems faced by poor people in an urban environment. Beausang, who went to Philadelphia in 1999, decided to focus on policy issues. Part of her thesis involves mapping locations of toxic waste sites and overlaying census data to show that a disproportionate number of toxic waste sites are in low-income, minority neighborhoods.