Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

A Resilience-Based Approach To The Conservation Of Valley Oak In A Southern California Landscape, James J. Hayes, Shannon Donnelly

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Conservation thinking will benefit from the incorporation of a resilience perspective of landscapes as social-ecological systems that are continually changing due to both internal dynamics and in response to external factors such as a changing climate. The examination of two valley oak stands in Southern California provides an example of the necessity of this systems perspective where each stand is responding differently as a result of interactions with other parts of the landscape. One stand is experiencing regeneration failure similar to other stands across the state, and is exhibiting shifts in spatial pattern as a response to changing conditions. A …

Landscape, History And The Media: An Introduction, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Writing from Nebraska’s eastern edge, my mind’s eye drawn to the Platte River (west and south of me), I consider landscape, history, and the media. The Oto called the river “Nebraskier” which means flat or shallow, giving us the name of the state.1 Early accounts describe the Platte as “a mile wide and an inch deep” and “too thick to drink, too thin to plow”; Washington Irving described it as “the most magnificent and useless of rivers” (Allin 1982, 1). But to dismiss this river is to judge too quickly. As the river gains momentum, growing in size, it is …

Deathscapes, Topocide, Domicide The Plains In Contemporary Print Media, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

The American print media are a powerful mechanism for communicating information about places and environment to the American public. When it comes to a landscape such as the Great Plains, experienced by many Americans as either sleep-through land in a car or flyover land in a plane, the print media may be their only real source of information about this landscape, excluding 30 second soundbites which occasionally appear in electronic media. Often perceived as monotonous or dull, the Plains has been overlaid with powerful images, of garden or desert, of Dust Bowl or Buffalo Commons. But recent media coverage of …

Constructing A Home On The Range: Homemaking In Early Twentieth Century Plains Photograph Albums, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam,
Where the deer and the antelope play,
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day.¹

These lyrics capture a yearning for a place to call home. But what landscape is associated with this longing? For people living near the coasts or mountains of America, it must be hard to imagine longing for a "home on the plains"-but many Americans have had, and still have, a home on the Plains. The stereotypical American image of the Plains is flatness, austerity, emptiness. Not all would …