As technology has evolved over time and the U.S. population increases each year, this thesis focuses on the ways in which food production has shifted from the original farm to table to industrialized, processed food systems. Through a rationalization perspective, this research looks to the history and repercussions of industrial agriculture as it has shifted over time. The term over-industrialization is used to operationalize the state of our current production methods. These methods focus extensively on the least expensive and most rapid methods to produce large yields of food products and pay no mind to ethics, respect of culture, land, or quality of products. Today, there is a shroud the corporations have placed over food production to ensure a “what we can’t see doesn’t affect us” belief system. In this way, the thesis provides insight on past, current, and future methods of manufacturing. I conclude that although plausible alternatives are present, continued research and substantial producer and consumer changes must be our main priority.

Since 800 CE— long before the creation of the National Park Service (NPS) in 1905 — the Havasupai Tribe has depended on the natural resources and diverse ecosystem of the Grand Canyon. A deeper examination of how the national park came to fruition however demonstrates an often negated and harrowing history of land theft, forced assimilation via reservation systems, and genocide. Political ecology is a way of considering how power dynamics, resource management, and society intersect. In the United States, this approach exposes the ways that anti-Indigenous legislation originating in the Department of the Interior has functioned both as a driver of ecosystem degradation and structural barricades to Native American self-determination. In order to achieve a just and sustainable future for all, it is necessary to dismantle hegemonic discourses regarding Indigenous communities.