Environmental Studies Commons^™

Cookie Monsters: Seeing Young People’S Hacking As Creative Practice, Gregory T. Donovan, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

This paper examines the benefits and obstacles to young people’s open-ended and unrestricted access to technological environments. While children and youth are frequently seen as threatened or threatening in this realm, their playful engagements suggest that they are self-possessed social actors, able to negotiate most of its challenges effectively. Whether it is proprietary software, the business practices of some technology providers, or the separation of play, work, and learning in most classrooms, the spatial-temporality of young people’s access to and use of technology is often configured to restrict their freedom of choice and behavior. We focus on these issues through …

Geography And Capacity Of Alternative Fuel Production 1999 - 2006: The Case Of Solar And Wind, James Pace

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Access to reliable, low cost energy production is key to the wellbeing of our economy, standard ofliving, and national security. As the cost of energy from conventional resources has increased, efforts have started to convert to alternative, renewable sources of energy production. Currently, wind and solar technologies are the best options for an alternative source of energy. Data on wind and solar energy resources, the availability of incentives, and the existence of renewable portfolio standards (RPS) were used to determine the most plausible influencing factors of wind and solar energy production. Maps generated from these data point to a relationship …

Finding A "Disappearing" Nontimber Forest Resource: Using Grounded Visualization To Explore Urbanization Impacts On Sweetgrass Basketmaking In Greater Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, Patrick T. Hurley, Angela C. Halfacre, Norm S. Levine, Marianne K. Burke

Environment and Sustainability Faculty Publications

Despite growing interest in urbanization and its social and ecological impacts on formerly rural areas, empirical research remains limited. Extant studies largely focus either on issues of social exclusion and enclosure or ecological change. This article uses the case of sweetgrass basketmaking in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, to explore the implications of urbanization, including gentrification, for the distribution and accessibility of sweetgrass, an economically important nontimber forest product (NTFP) for historically African American communities, in this rapidly growing area. We explore the usefulness of grounded visualization for research efforts that are examining the existence of "fringe ecologies" associated with NTFP. …

Geoarchaeological And Paleolandscape Reconstructions In The Lower Ohio River Valley: Late Wisconsin And Early Holocene Landforms In Knob Creek Bottom, Nathan Christopher Scholl

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines a paleolandscape model that focuses on alluvial landforms that date to the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene in Knob Creek bottom of the lower Ohio River valley. The study tests and refines a landscape model based on geoarchaeological data from the Caesars Archaeological Project. Analysis centers on the relationship between late Wisconsin and early Holocene Landform Sediment Assemblages (LSA), including early paleochannels. For this analysis a series of soil cores was extracted from the LSA understudy and described using standard USDA terminology. Additional analysis included particle size analysis using a hydrometer to determine textural composition of core …

Darfur: Rainfall And Conflict, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

Data on rainfall patterns only weakly corroborate the claim that climate change explains the Darfur conflict that began in 2003 and has claimed more than 200,000 lives and displaced more than two million persons. Rainfall in Darfur did not decline significantly in the years prior to the eruption of major conflict in 2003; rainfall exhibited a flat trend in the thirty-years preceding the conflict (1972-2002). The rainfall evidence suggests instead a break around 1971. Rainfall is basically stationary over the pre- and post-1971 sub-periods. The break is larger for the more northerly rainfall stations, and is less noticeable for En …

Hazard Adaptations Along The Ohio River: A Case Study Of Bushman's Lake, Clark County, Indiana, Jennifer L. Lathem

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Hazard researchers define a hazard as a threat to people and their belongings (Cutter 2001). An adaptation, for the purposes of this research, is any alteration, physical or behavioral, made by a person in which the person is better able to survive in their "hazardous" natural environment. The challenge facing individuals and communities is the ability to adapt to these hazards so as to continue with normal everyday life. People living near a waterway are faced with flooding, which becomes a hazard when it alters everyday social structures. The purpose of this study is to identify flood hazard adaptations in …

Human–Wildlife Conflict And Gender In Protected Area Borderlands: A Case Study Of Costs, Perceptions, And Vulnerabilities From Uttarakhand (Uttaranchal), India, Monica V. Ogra

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

Human–wildlife conflict (HWC) is a growing problem for communities located at the borders of protected areas. Such conflicts commonly take place as crop-raiding events and as attack by wild animals, among other forms. This paper uses a feminist political ecology approach to examine these two problems in an agricultural village located at the border of Rajaji National Park in Uttarakhand (formerly Uttaranchal), India. Specifically, it investigates the following three questions: What are the “visible” and “hidden” costs of such conflict with wildlife? To what extent are these costs differentially borne by men and women? How do villagers perceive any such …

Introduction: Cotton, Globalization, And Poverty In Africa, William G. Moseley, Leslie C. Gray

Environmental Studies and Sciences

This volume employs a modified commodity chain approach, focusing on the social, economic, and environmental dimensions of cotton production in Africa, and the links between this production and the global market. Individual chapters may examine one or multiple levels in the commodity chain and employ different theoretical approaches, from ethnography, to agroecology, to political ecology, to classic economic analysis. We want to acknowledge, however, that while the commodity chain is an important part of cotton dynamics, it is not the only force at work in African cotton. There are new and interesting developments outside the commodity chain that work for …

Cotton Production In Burkina Faso: International Rhetoric Versus Local Realities, Leslie C. Gray

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Voices ranging from the editorial page of the New York Times to organizations such as Oxfam and the presidents of Burkina Faso and Mali have argued that U.S. cotton subsidies depress world cotton prices and hurt African farmers. These policies deny West African countries their comparative advantage in cotton, which they can produce more cheaply and with lower environmental impacts than farmers in the United States. Some have gone as far as phrasing this as a national security issue; editorials in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have suggested that removing subsidies would have a strong auxiliary …

Conclusion: Hanging By A Thread: The Future Of Cotton In Africa, Leslie C. Gray, William G. Moseley

Environmental Studies and Sciences

Several broad themes emerge from the chapters in this volume. While declining world prices are a serious issue, the ability of farmers to weather declines in prices is often determined by national and local issues. These include government policy, institutions that provide marketing and supply services, access to resources such as land, labor, and agricultural inputs, and individual decision making. Despite declining world prices, some cotton growing economies have had success with cotton production while others have not fared well. In particular, the failure of cotton institutions in many countries is striking.Whether it comes to managing input distribution, new technologies, …

Diminished Access, Diverted Exclusion: Women And Land Tenure In Sub-Saharan Africa, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to …

Land Tenure And Rental In Western Sudan, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray

Economics

This paper reports on aspects of land tenure in western Sudan, especially the nature of tenure insecurity and the functioning of the land rental market. The active land rental market accounted for about one-third of cultivated land. Patterns of land rental transactions, and tests of the importance of insecurity in renting land, where the owner may not be able to reclaim land rented out, do not support the presumption that rental markets perform poorly. The role of the sheikh as administrator of village land, and the claims of large landowners to vast tracts, are, however, important political problems that must …

Deep Ecology And Postmodernity: Making Space For Conversation, Chris Drinkwater

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[Fourth paragraph]

I begin with the fact of ecology's virtual exclusion from cultural studies. Cultural studies are centrally concerned with issues of meaning, subjectivity, objectivity and knowledge. They attempt to describe their production, conditions and complex structural effects. They are particularly interested in effects of inclusion and exclusion: for instance, "What is a legitimate object of attention within a particular discourse?" Why do cultural studies not attend to ecology? Why is negligible attention paid to a discourse and cultural movement, which are so challenging to dominant values and ways of life? I suggest that the omission is not accidental. Cultural …

Early Days In The Green Movement: A Personal Account, Rosemarie Rowley

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

From someone who from an early age had wanted to be a poet, and whose favourite poet was Wordsworth, it is not difficult to imagine that in some way I would relate to nature as a mature woman. For me it was not the difficulty of being a woman poet which offered the greatest challenge, since my father, a traditional musician, and my aunt who was a songwriter in America had encouraged me to write poetry, but the difficulty was of combining political activism with poetry.

Introduction, Alexandra Ganser, Vibha Arora

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

At the time of finalizing EcoCultures for publication, nearly all discussions in mass media remind us that climate change has been caused by anthropogenic excesses in the last three centuries. Environmental concern, intertwined with a critical and scholarly perspective, is also at the heart of EcoCultures: Culture Studies and the Environment. The twelve academic articles comprising this issue were written by scholars based in the North and South, speaking different languages yet living in a multicultural global world, and positioned in disciplines ranging from landscape and environmental history, literature and gender studies to visual studies and art. …

Women Of The New Walden: Gender In Sound Culture, Now And Then, Phylis Johnson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Sonic diversity in the midst of wilderness, as original and untamed, can confound and discomfort the novice listener who becomes overwhelmed by its plethora of mysterious languages. Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, author of Summer on the Lakes (1844), expressed sensory overload when she was confronted with the sights and sounds of Niagara Falls. Sound permeates our life, from conception, birth, and varied sonic spheres of influence that penetrate our physical space. Sound acknowledges its relevance as a cultural influence within the socialization of the individual. For instance, high-powered car stereos and subwoofers swimming in bass overtones have become associated with masculinity. …

Gestures Toward Cross-Species Reciprocal Relations In Contemporary Poetics, Mary Newell

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In this essay, I explore some embodied bases of ethical attitudes toward human/ animal exchanges in the texts of three contemporary authors: Mary Oliver, Heller Levinson, and Adrienne Rich. Since other species share with humans varieties of agency, sentience, and purposive activity, I suggest that reciprocity is a fundamental aim in cross-species relations. Phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty depicts the correlation between embodied actions and attitudes, for example, between the hand movement of grasping and an appropriative attitude toward the natural world. His concept of reciprocity, grounded in the experience of one hand touching another, provides a reference for encounters that …

Translating Ecocriticism: Dialoguing With Michel Serres, Stephanie Posthumus

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Since its humble beginnings in the Western United States, ecocriticism has grown under the banner of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment into an organization of over 1000 members with international affiliates in Australia-New Zealand, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, Koria and the UK. At first sight, it would seem that ecocriticism has achieved global status. But as Ursula Heise remarks in her assessment of ecocriticism, this process of globalisation has been mainly a process of becoming known internationally. In truth, ecocriticism has remained strongly rooted in Anglophone literary studies even as it has been exported to …

Can Nature's Language Be Written, Spoken, And Heard? Mahasweta Devi's "Pterodactyl" And Marlene Nourbese Philip's Looking For Livingstone, Lori Martindale

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

How do traditional western epistemologies affect natures' subjectivity? This essay deconstructs the status of nature as silent Other. I argue Mahasweta Devi's The Pterodactyl and Marlene Nourbese Philip's epic Looking for Dr. Livingstone translate nature, or the radical Other, as subject. Scientific, xenophobic, and imperial behaviors have affected the status of natures' subjectivity in the naming, mapping, and exploitation of land, during colonial and commodity enterprise. As a result, nature’s language has become increasingly radical and is one to be translated for an awareness and avoidance of imposition; nature is a language yet to be understood.

Bird Watching: Global-Natural Worlds And The Popular Reception Of Winged Migration, Lisa Uddin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

This paper examines the contemporary visual cultures of economic globalization and natural history by considering the popular French wildlife film, Winged Migration (dir. Perrin 2001). Through the small-scale of a single film's reception, the paper offers a critique of the Euro-American tendency to conceptualize the global world and the natural world in totalizing and mutually constitutive terms. How have images of a timeless and universal global world become a way of imagining the natural world, and vice versa? How has Winged Migration's circulation amongst an American popular audience reproduced, but also undermined, these joint constructions? Analyzing the film's central theme …

The World Is White And Slow And Infinitely Flat, Rob Baum

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Eco-feminism, cultural study and the environment coalesce in the form of poetic cultural commentary, originally fieldnotes. I draw exclusively from my years in the Alaskan Arctic among the Iñupiat Eskimo, who call themselves "the People of the Whale." The striking and severe natural environment, a landscape of endless ice, is central to the poetry, which richly portrays a vision of the Arctic absent from tourist travel guides, National Geographic and anthropological volumes. These magazines vend the Far North's beautiful austerity, including at times the physical beauty of its animal inhabitants, including humans, while disregarding human specificity and violence …

Model Estimation Of Land-Use Effects On Water Levels Of Northern Prairie Wetlands, Richard A. Voldseth, W.Carter Johnson, Tagir Gilmanov, Glenn R. Guntenspergen, Bruce V. Millett

Natural Resource Management Faculty Publications

Wetlands of the Prairie Pothole Region exist in a matrix of grassland dominated by intensive pastoral and cultivation agriculture. Recent conservation management has emphasized the conversion of cultivated farmland and degraded pastures to intact grassland to improve upland nesting habitat. The consequences of changes in land-use cover that alter watershed processes have not been evaluated relative to their effect on the water budgets and vegetation dynamics of associated wetlands. We simulated the effect of upland agricultural practices on the water budget and vegetation of a semipermanent prairie wetland by modifying a previously published mathematical model (WETSIM). Watershed cover/landuse practices were …

Ethnoecology, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Ethnoecology – the study of cultural explications of nature – generates insights into the interface between peoples and the more-than-human world. Ecology is the scientific study of the interrelationships between plants, animals, and the environment, and it has developed into the study of interdependent communities of organisms and their environments. But while most ecologists have been trained to seek knowledge solely from scholarly books or nonhuman nature, tremendous environmental information is stored in the minds, cultures, and arts of indigenous peoples.

Geophilia, Paul Faulstich

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

Extrapolated from E. O. Wilson's concept of biophilia, geophilia asserts that humans have an organic propensity to find wildlands emotionally compelling. It exists as a human tendency to emotionally connect with natural landscapes.

Spatial Autocorrelation Of Deer-Vehicle Accidents In Vigo County, J. Scott Horn

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Deer-vehicle accidents (DV As) are a problem in many areas. They cause millions of dollars in property damage, personal injury, and loss of life each year. This thesis examines whether DVAs in Vigo County, Indiana during the year 2000 were spatially autocorrelated; and whether DV As selected by deer habitat were spatially autocorrelated. Specifically using Moran's I to test for spatial autocorrelation this study determined if and to what degree spatial autocorrelation existed among these DVAs. A Moran's I value of .0023 shows that the accidents occurred randomly. These DV A data were then used to plot a map which …

Lost And Found: The Imagined Geographies Of American Studies, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

In the days after September 11th, 2001, and continuing until now, the national guard and other military personnel fanned out around New York City. Automatic rifles slung over their camouflaged shoulders, they "guarded" New York City's transportation stations, vital corners and thoroughfares, marquee buildings, and each and every bridge and tunnel entrance. Their comportment was usually cordial and rarely vigilant. Exuding the antithesis of an urban sensibility, they complemented the beefy boredom of the police who usually stood nearby, with an almost surreal sense of incredulity; not just "Why am I here?" but a sort of bafflement that anyone would …

Time-Series Analysis Of Clusters In City Size Distributions, Ahjond S. Garmestani, Craig R. Allen, K. Michael Bessey

Nebraska Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit: Staff Publications

Complex systems, such as urban systems, emerge unpredictably without the influence of central control as a result of adaptive behavior by their component, interacting agents. This paper analyses city size distributions, by decade, from the south-western region of the United States for the years 1890–1990. It determines if the distributions were clustered and documents changes in the pattern of clusters over time. Clusters were determined utilizing a kernel density estimator and cluster analysis. The data were clustered as determined by both methods. The analyses identified 4–7 clusters of cities in each of the decades analysed. Cities cluster into size classes, …

Wither The Fruited Plain: The Long Expedition And The Description Of The "Great American Desert", Kevin Z. Sweeney

Great Plains Quarterly (through 2013)

The view from Pikes Peak is breathtaking. Situated where the Great Plains meets the Rocky Mountains, one feels as if the whole nation is laid out before you. It is the perfect vantage point from which to write an inspirational anthem to the environmental magnificence of the United States. In the summer of 1893, Katherine Lee Bates, a Wellesley College English professor, sat on the summit of Pikes Peak, inspired by the panorama to pen the words to "America the Beautiful." Her poem was set to the tune "Materna" by Samuel Augustus Ward two years later to become one of …

Accuracy Of Neural Network Classifiers In Humid Tropical Areas, Genong Yu

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research develops a better understanding of the use of neural networks in the context of tropical land cover characterization using multiple scale remotely sensed data. Results of the research contributed to developing a robust neural network classifier suitable to use for humid tropical land cover classification in areas such as Altamira, Brazil. Research was focused upon the following: (1) performance ofneural networks with different ancillary data- such as DEM (digital elevation model) and its derivatives; (2) effect of spatial scale on neural network classifiers using remote sensing data from IKONOS, Landsat TM, ASTER, and MODIS; (3) accuracy of neural …

Reconfiguring Childhood Boys And Girls Growing Up Global, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

Children are a spur, a commitment, a way of imaging the future—but all too often these sorts of phrases just rattle around a vacuum, their utterance the beginning and end of the commitment. We emphasize “the best interests of the child,”but this gloss provides a moral imperative to all manner of uncompleted projects and unfulfilled policies. Likewise, the use of children’s images or presence in public forums of all types gives a patina of honorableness to practices and plans that never actually make good on the promissory note of childhood. The 1992 Rio Earth Summit is a notable example. Such …