Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Room To Grow: Agritourism Opportunities In Vermont Agriculture And Food System Plan: 2020 (Part One), Carolyn Hricko, Katie Robertson, Nick Rose, Meredith T. Niles

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

This analysis demonstrates that there is signficant unrealized potential to advance agritourism within the Vermont Agriculture and Food System Plan: 2020 (Part One)1 strategic plan and that applying an agritourism lens allows for the identification of a wide range of additional opportunities that can support Vermont farmers and agritourism goals. While agritourism is recognized in the report with a dedicated issue brief, this subsector of Vermont agriculture is otherwise largely overlooked in the other opportunities identified in Vermont’s strategic plan, particularly for the agritourism activities of hospitality, recreation, and entertainment. While direct-to-consumer sales, agricultural education, and farm diversification were referenced …

Vermont Agriculture And Food System Plan 2020 -- A Review Of Recommendations (Part One), Susanna Baxley, Ann Chiarenzelli, Lucy Drummond, Tung-Lin Liu, Meredith T. Niles

Food Systems Master's Project Reports

Key Findings in reviewing the Vermont Agriculture and Food System Plan:

1. All recommendations in this review have been coded into eight thematic categories to be used more effectively by stakeholders.

2. We identify four clusters of recommendations to assist stakeholders in understanding the relationships between categories and enabling understanding of the various stakeholders and resources necessary to implement recommendations from different briefs

3. 87% of recommendations either request direct funding for an initiative or recommend a capital expenditure. With financial challenges amidst COVID-19, we highlight eight recommendations for a Vermont Food System that could move forward without financial resources. …

Quantifying The Health Benefits Of Nature Contact In Cities Across The Us, Aaron J. Schwartz

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Urbanization, the rise of sedentary lifestyles, and increasing screen time have led to a significant decline in nature contact, or how much time people spend in greenspace. At the same time, urban populations are experiencing declining physical and mental well-being. While nature contact has been shown to have a variety of health benefits, these benefits have not been well-quantified or verified across different geographic contexts. In addition, there is a lack of clarity around how the benefits of nature contact vary temporally (e.g. seasonally) and between different types of greenspaces. In this dissertation, I investigate the health benefits of urban …

Seed Systems Of Bhutanese-Nepali Refugee Gardeners: Making Place In Chittenden County, Vermont, June Guo

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

War, political unrest, and climate disasters cause major disruptions to peoples’ lives and livelihoods, and for subsistence farmers, who make up much of the world’s population, this means their agricultural practices. Among the farming habits that are disrupted are seed systems, defined in this study as the market and nonmarket institutions that affect how farmers access, store, share, distribute, and learn about propagative materials. In particular, the local varieties and knowledge, also described as Traditional Ecological Knowledge, contained in farmer-managed informal seed systems may be vulnerable when a crisis disrupts the social ties that the seed systems are built upon. …

Aridity In The Literature Of The American West: Water In Stegner's Angle Of Repose And Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang, Annie Frodeman

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines how Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang have been molded by water scarcity and in turn have shaped the discourse about water. Angle of Repose offers a reliable history of water in the West, showing how the myth of the garden permeated the lives of people who made the journey West at the end of the nineteenth century. Stegner’s narrative of the building of the West shows what comes of humanity’s desire to change the environment by making the desert bloom. The Monkey Wrench Gang complements Stegner’s Angle of Repose as …