Meltwater from a receding glacier created the Des Moines River in central Iowa 12,000-14,000 years ago. Over the ensuing centuries the river overflowed its banks, flooding the plains then receding, meandering across the landscape. During the first century of statehood Iowa river…
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This dissertation is an environmental history of Brazil’s large dams, the country’s principal source of electricity. Hydropower undergirded economic growth, but reservoirs left huge social and environmental footprints. The country’s biggest and most infamous dams were those buil…
This project explores the preservation of the Covered Bridge as heritage in a rural valley of Southeastern China and develops a form of resiliency for the local community against capitalist development.
Historic open data can be an asset to community gardens in land use disputes, the preservation and sharing of cultural traditions, and adaptation to climate change. Yet scholarship has not yet provided an accessible guide to the many issues of labor and technology involved in pr…
This dissertation explores the role transportation infrastructure played in regional and community development in northwestern Arizona from 1882 to 1989. Transportation infrastructure undergirds the economic viability and development of most American regions and communities. In …
The dissertation is comprised of three papers about the social space of Chinese local environmental protection.
Many cod stocks have been described as metapopulations, each containing multiple semi-discrete spawning groups with limited connectivity between them. Reproductive isolation leads to independent and asynchronous demographics among sub-populations adapted to different habitats, w…
Seaports are a critical component of the economy and serve as key nodes in distribution networks that circulate merchandise worldwide. The Port of Long Beach (POLB, or Port), located in southern California, is the second largest port in the United States. Since its founding in 1…
Land use land cover change (LULCC) patterns are constantly changing the Earth’s surface. Growing population numbers and an increased demand for housing, energy and food have not only expanded the human footprint into natural ecosystems but have also accelerated LULCC processes. …
This dissertation focuses on the Cold War Era biologists and ecologists who monitored and tested nuclear animals at central Washington’s Hanford Nuclear Site, the place that produced plutonium for atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. It tells stories about familiar…
A rich tradition of nature writing exists within American literature. Writing with a focus on the natural world can be traced to America’s earliest writers such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir. With the turn into the twentieth-centur…
The traditional narrative of the Forest Service places the mythic “two-fisted” male ranger as the focus of its history. The reality is that without women he would not have gotten the job done. Women’s work as advocates, foresters, rangers’ wives, clerks, information and educatio…
Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there is a noticeable schism between two general approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature: the ambient approach and the narrative approach. focus on the character of aesthetic appreciation of nature, the way in whi…
In the experimental analysis of behavior, response allocation is typically studied under concurrent interval schedules, with two response alternatives, in a static environment. The natural environment of the unfettered organism, however, is dynamic insofar as even frequently vis…
The dissertation considers how a heterogeneous group of observers in the disciplines of natural history and lyric poetry write their attention to the natural world. The “intelligence” of their attention refers to the writing itself, as observation that bridges the divide between…
When we stand on earth and think of the world in latitudinal terms, we are minimal, yet this is the world we attempt to conquer and pretend to comprehend. When we stand at low altitudes in the tropics, in front of tropical glaciers, we can see the world – through Altitude – with…
The Appalachian area is characterized as a politically conservative, rural region with an economy that is historically based on resource extraction, factors which are thought to correlate with a lower degree of environmental concern relative to urban, liberal residents. Environm…
This dissertation argues that since the mid-19th century, the transformation of São Paulo from provincial commercial town into megalopolis depended on remaking its relationship with water supply and the ways water flowed in and out of the urban sphere. Whereas previously the reg…
Women of all backgrounds have contributed to the environmental history of the United States, but most of the environmental historical scholarship places such women alongside men and by doing so clouds their involvement as well as their achievements. This discussion introduces re…