Browsing by Subject "Environmental history"
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Item Bordering North America : constructing wilderness along the periphery of Canada, Mexico, and the United States(2013-05) Baumgardner, Neel Gregory; Bsumek, Erika Marie; Brands, H.W.; McKiernan-Gonzalez, John; Hoelscher, Steven; Johnson, BenjaminThis dissertation considers the exchanges between national parks along the North American borderlands that defined the contours of development and wilderness and created a brand new category of protected space -- the transboundary park. The National Park Systems of Canada, Mexico, and the United States did not develop and grow in isolation. "Bordering North America" examines four different parks in two regions: Waterton Lakes and Glacier in the northern Rocky Mountains of Alberta and Montana and Big Bend and the Maderas del Carmen in the Chihuahuan Desert of Texas and Coahuila. In 1932, Glacier and Waterton Lakes were combined to form the first transboundary park. In the 1930s and 1940s, using the Waterton-Glacier model as precedent, the U.S. and Mexican governments undertook a major effort, ultimately unsuccessful, to designate a sister park in Mexico and combine the two areas into another international space. Finally, in 1994, Mexico established two protected areas, including the Maderas del Carmen, adjacent to the Big Bend. Ideas about parks and wilderness migrated across borders just as freely as the flora and fauna these spaces sought to protect. Moreover, a multiplicity of views and forces, from three different Park Services, the visiting public, private enterprise, local landholders, competing government agencies and international NGOs, and even the elements of nature itself, all combined to shape the trajectory of park development.Item City of mountains : Denver and the Mountain West(2012-12) Busch, Eric Terje; Brands, H. W.; Bsumek, Erika M; Hoelscher, Steven D; Stoff, Michael B; Zamora, EmilioThis study is an urban history of Denver, Colorado, viewed through the lens of its constantly evolving physical, political, cultural and economic relationship with its mountain hinterland. From the town's early years as a 19th century mining and ranching depot to its 20th century emergence as a hub of tourism and technology, that relationship informs every aspect of the city's urban, cultural and environmental history. This study seeks, first, to analyze Denver's historical appropriation and utilization of its mountain hinterland, whether for water, wealth, recreation and cultural identity. Second, it highlights how access to and control over the Rocky Mountain hinterland shaped Denver's evolving political, class and racial landscapes throughout the city's history. Integrating the methodologies of environmental, urban, and social history, it demonstrates how different social groups competed for access, control, and the ability to vii assign value to the mountain hinterland. Every Denverite in the city's history, regardless of station, has lived within the context of this tense and constantly changing relationship. Since the city's founding, that relationship has been the constant object of human agency, accommodation, and change, and in it can be read the story of Denver itself.Item Compost and consumption : organic farming, food, and fashion in American culture(2010-05) O'Sullivan, Robin; Meikle, Jeffrey L., 1949-; Hoelscher, Steven; Davis, Janet; Engelhardt, Elizabeth; Davis, DianaThis research analyzes the history and cultural significance of organic agriculture as a social movement. It illuminates how organic production and consumption are polyvalent and socially embedded. Organic farming has been classified as a hobby and as a constituent of agribusiness; organic food has been dubbed as a hollow preference and as an exploited industry. At its core, though, organics is a social movement. From agricultural pioneers in the 1940s to contemporary consumer activists, the organic movement has preserved connections to environmentalism, agrarianism, health food dogma, and other ideological alignments. Organic farming has been a method of agriculture, social philosophy, way of life, and subversive effort. Organic consumption has been a practical decision, lifestyle choice, communicative performance, status marker, and political act. The dissertation embraces this multiplicity and expounds on the nuances of what the organic zeitgeist has meant in American culture. The study entails collection and analysis of historical and contemporary data, including archival, legislative, and regulatory documents. It applies discourse analysis, semiotics, iconographic study, and cultural analysis to texts and additional sorts of media. Observations of organic sites of consumption also enhance the historical and theoretical evaluations. This project includes scrutiny of rhetorical strategies used by organic farmers, business leaders, chefs, consumers, writers, and organizations that engage with the “organic lifestyle.” Despite the fluid intertextuality of these expressions, there are common themes. Unraveling the multivocality and interconnectedness of prevailing discourses provides insight into the movement’s epicenter.Item Locality and empire : networks of forestry in Australia, India, and South Africa, 1843-1948(2010-12) Bennett, Brett Michael; Louis, William Roger, 1936-; Hunt, Bruce J.; Minault, Gail; Vaugh, James; Barton, GregoryThis dissertation draws from national and regional archives to argue that many important aspects of forestry science, education, and culture in colonial Australia, India, and South Africa developed according to unique local environmental, political, social, and cultural influences. Local environmental constraints, combined with unique cultures of experimentation, encouraged the innovation of new scientific methods for forming timber plantations that differed from existing European and British methods. Debates over how to create forestry schools to train foresters in each region emphasized local problems and contexts rather than focusing primarily on continental European precedents or methods. The culture of foresters in each region corresponded to local cultures and social conditions as much as to a larger imperial ethos inculcated by training in continental European or British forestry schools.Item Masters not friends : land, labor and politics of place in rural Pakistan(2013-05) Rizvi, Mubbashir Abbas; Ali, Kamran Asdar, 1961-This dissertation analyzes the cultural significance of land relations and caste/religious identity to understand political subjectivity in Punjab, Pakistan. The ethnography details the vicissitudes of a peasant land rights movement, Anjuman-e Mazarin Punjab (Punjab Tenants Association) that is struggling to retain land rights on vast agricultural farms controlled by the Pakistan army. The dissertation argues that land struggles should not only be understood in tropes of locality, but also as interconnected processes that attend to global and local changes in governance. To emphasize these connections, the dissertation gives a relational understanding of 'politics of place' that attends to a range of practices from the history of colonial infrastructure projects (the building of canals, roads and model villages) that transformed this agricultural frontier into the heart of British colonial administration. Similarly, the ethnographic chapters relate the history of 'place making' to the present day uncertainty for small tenant sharecroppers who defied the Pakistan Army's attempts to change land relations in the military farms. Within these parameters, this ethnographic study offers a "thick description" of Punjab Tenants Association to analyze the internal shifts in loyalties and alignments during the course of the protest movement by looking at how caste, religious and/or class relations gain or lose significance in the process. My research seeks to counter the predominant understanding of Muslim political subjectivity, which privileges religious beliefs over social practices and regional identity. Another aspect of my work elucidates the symbolic exchange between the infrastructural project of irrigation, railway construction and regional modernity in central Punjab. The network of canals, roads and railways transformed the semi-arid region of Indus Plains and created a unique relationship between the state and rural society in central Punjab. However, this close relationship between rural Punjab and state administration is not void of conflict but rather it indicates a complex sense of attachment and alienation, inclusion and exclusion from the state.Item Undercurrents of urban modernism : water, architecture, and landscape in California and the American West(2015-05) Faletti, Rina Cathleen; Shiff, Richard; Charlesworth, Michael, 1955-; Clarke, John R.; Davies, Penelope J.; Reynolds, Ann M.; Alofsin, Anthony"Undercurrents of Urban Modernism: Water, Architecture, and Landscape in California and the American West" conducts an art-historical analysis of historic waterworks buildings in order to examine cultural values pertinent to aesthetiteics in relationships between water, architecture and landscape in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Visual study of architectural style, ornamental iconography, and landscape features reveals cultural values related to water, water systems, landscape/land use, and urban development. Part 1 introduces a historiography of ideas of "West" and "landscape" to provide a context for defining ways in which water and landscape were conceived in the United States during turn-of-the-century urban development in the American West. Part 2 provides a historical context for California waterworks with a discussion of major U.S. city waterworks from 1799 to 1893 in Philadelphia, Louisville, New York, and New Orleans. Primary architectural styles discussed are Greek Revival, Egyptian Revival, and Roman Revival. Part 3 presents the dissertation's central object of study: waterworks and hydropower architecture for the greater San Francisco Bay Area between 1860 and 1939. From substations to dams, architects who designed waterworks structures drew from historical revival, academic eclecticism, and structural design traditions. The specific waterworks structures anchoring inquiry in this chapter are two round, peripteral, neoclassical water temples built for San Francisco's water supply to mark key underground aqueduct features. I analyze these two temples--the Sunol Water Temple from 1910 and the Pulgas Water Temple from 1939--in formal terms as well as from within broader urban and historical contexts. Part 4 culminates the dissertation with a case study of two dams whose aesthetic features were obscured by unneeded buttresssing when concerns for dam safety arose after a Southern California dam failure had killed several hundred people in 1928. I inquire into a cultural ambivalence stemming that seems to stem from historical conflicts determining the relative aesthetics of "use" and "beauty" in utilitarian waterworks structures. The overall questions in this dissertation inquire into ways in which aesthetic aspects of architectural design of waterworks structures expressed cultural values regarding water, architecture, and landscape in California between 1860 and 1939.