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- All Subjects: Environmental Studies
- Creators: Adamson, Joni
- Creators: Minteer, Ben
Description
From Frankenstein to District 9: Ecocritical Readings of Classic and Contemporary Fiction and Film demonstrates how American studies methodologies, ecological literary criticism, and environmental justice theory provide both time-tested and new analytical tools for reading texts from transnational perspectives. Recently, American literary scholars have been responding to calls for collective interdisciplinary response to widening social disparities and species collapses caused by climate change in the new epoch recently being termed "the anthropocene." In response, I analyze canonical texts, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World in juxtaposition with Neill Blomkamp's South African science fiction thriller District 9 and contemporary US American novels such as Toni Morrison's Sula, William Faulkner's "The Bear" in Go Down, Moses and Richard Power's Generosity and The Echo Maker, to show how writers, filmmakers, and academics have been calling attention to dramatic climate events that consequently challenge the public to rethink the relationships among human beings to other species, and to ecological systems of low predictability, high variability, and frequent extremes. Rather than focusing solely on the "human," I examine how the relationships and livelihoods of multi-species communities shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural forces. As a whole, this dissertation seeks to make abstract, often intangible global patterns and concepts accessible by providing models for what I call "readings in the anthropocene" or re-readings of classic and contemporary texts and film that offer insights into changing human behavior and suggesting alternative management practices of local and global commons as well as opportunities to imagine how to live in and beyond the anthropocene.
ContributorsTurner, Kyndra (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Lussier, Mark (Committee member) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Growers and the USDA showed increasing favor for agricultural chemicals over cultural and biological forms of pest control through the first half of the twentieth century. With the introduction of DDT and other synthetic chemicals to commercial markets in the post-World War II era, pesticides became entrenched as the primary form of pest control in the industrial agriculture production system. Despite accumulating evidence that some pesticides posed a threat to human and environmental health, growers and government exercised path-dependent behavior in the development and implementation of pest control strategies. As pests developed resistance to regimens of agricultural chemicals, growers applied pesticides with greater toxicity in higher volumes to their fields with little consideration for the unintended consequences of using the economic poisons. Consequently, pressure from non-governmental organizations proved a necessary predicate for pesticide reform. This dissertation uses a series of case studies to examine the role of non-governmental organizations, particularly environmental organizations and farmworker groups, in pesticide reform from 1962 to 2011. For nearly fifty years, these groups served as educators, communicating scientific and experiential information about the adverse effects of pesticides on human health and environment to the public, and built support for the amendment of pesticide policies and the alteration of pesticide use practices. Their efforts led to the passage of more stringent regulations to better protect farmworkers, the public, and the environment. Environmental organizations and farmworker groups also acted as watchdogs, monitoring the activity of regulatory agencies and bringing suit when necessary to ensure that they fulfilled their responsibilities to the public. This dissertation will build on previous scholarly work to show increasing collaboration between farmworker groups and environmental organizations. It argues that the organizations shared a common concern about the effects of pesticides on human health, which enabled bridge-builders within the disparate organizations to foster cooperative relationships. Bridge-building proved a mutually beneficial exercise. Variance in organizational strategies and the timing of different reform efforts limited, but did not eliminate, opportunities for collaboration. Coalitions formed when groups came together temporarily, and then drifted apart when a reform effort reached its terminus, leaving future collaboration still possible.
ContributorsTompkins, Adam (Author) / Hirt, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Rome, Adam (Committee member) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Rosales, F (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This dissertation examines the development of grassroots environmental organizations between 1970 and 2000 and the role they played in the larger American environmental movement and civil society during that period. Much has been written about growth in environmental values in the United States during the twentieth century and about the role of national environmental organizations in helping to pass landmark federal-level environmental laws during the 1960s and 1970s. This study illuminates a different story of how citizen activists worked to protect and improve the air, water, healthfulness and quality of life of where they lived. At the local level, activists looked much different than they did in Washington, D.C.--they tended to be volunteers without any formal training in environmental science or policy. They were also more likely to be women than at the national level. They tended to frame environmental issues and solutions in familiar ways that made sense to them. Rather than focusing on the science or economics of an environmental issue, they framed it in terms of fairness and justice and giving citizens a say in the decisions that affected their health and quality of life. And, as the regulatory, political, and social landscape changed around them, they adapted their strategies in their efforts to continue to affect environmental decision making. Over time, they often connected their local interests and issues with more sophisticated, globalized understandings of the economic and political systems that under laid environmental issues. This study examines three case studies in the rural Great Plains, urban Southwest, and small-town Appalachia between 1970 and 2000 in an attempt to understand community-based environmental activism in the late twentieth century, how it related to the national environmental movement, the strategies local-level groups employed and when and why, the role of liberal democratic arguments in their work and in group identity formation, the limits of those arguments, and how the groups, their strategies, and the activists themselves changed overtime. These three groups were the Northern Plains Resource Council in Montana, Southwest Environmental Service in Southern Arizona, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Eastern Tennessee.
ContributorsFerguson, Cody (Author) / Hirt, Paul W. (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan E. (Committee member) / Pyne, Stephen (Committee member) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Professional environmental scientists are increasingly under pressure to inform and even shape policy. Scientists engage policy effectively when they act within the bounds of objectivity, credibility, and authority, yet significant portions of the scientific community condemn such acts as advocacy. They argue that it is nonobjective, that it risks damaging the credibility of science, and that it is an abuse of authority. This means objectivity, credibility, and authority deserve direct attention before the policy advocacy quagmire can be reasonably understood. I investigate the meaning of objectivity in science and that necessarily brings the roles of values in science into question. This thesis is a sociological study of the roles environmental values play in the decisions of environmental scientists working in the institution of academia. I argue that the gridlocked nature of the environmental policy advocacy debates can be traced to what seems to be a deep tension and perhaps confusion among these scientists. I provide empirical evidence of this tension and confusion through the use of in depth semi-structured interviews among a sampling of academic environmental scientists (AES). I show that there is a struggle for these AES to reconcile their support for environmentalist values and goals with their commitment to scientific objectivity and their concerns about being credible scientists in the academy. Additionally, I supplemented my data collection with environmental sociology and history, plus philosophy and sociology of science literatures. With this, I developed a system for understanding values in science (of which environmental values are a subset) with respect to the limits of my sample and study. This examination of respondent behavior provides support that it is possible for AES to act on their environmental values without compromising their objectivity, credibility, and authority. These scientists were not likely to practice this in conversations with colleagues and policy-makers, but were likely to behave this way with students. The legitimate extension of this behavior is a viable route for continuing to integrate the human and social dimensions of environmental science into its practice, its training, and its relationship with policy.
ContributorsAppleton, Caroline (Author) / Minteer, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Chew, Matt (Committee member) / Armendt, Brad (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones.
This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others.
By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet.
ContributorsHenry, Matthew S. (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ronald (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
In the face of what many scientists and cultural theorists are calling the Anthropocene, a new era characterized by catastrophic human impact on the planet’s geologic, atmospheric, and ecological makeup, Latin American writers, artists, and filmmakers today from various disciplinary and geographical positionalities are engaging in debates about how to respond ethically to this global crisis. From an interdisciplinary perspective that incorporates cutting-edge theories in multispecies ethnography, material ecocriticism, and queer ecology, this study examines multispecies relationships unfolding in three telescoping dimensions—corporealities, companions, and communities—in contemporary Latin American cultural production while uncovering indigenous and other-than-dominant epistemologies about human-nonhuman entanglements. I argue that contemporary cultural expression uncovers long, overlapping histories of social and environmental exploitation and resistance while casting the moment of encounter between individuals of different species as hopeful figurations of human-nonhuman flourishing beyond the Anthropocene. Instead of remaining hopelessly mired in the dire geographies of planetary decline, the works of Uruguayan writer Teresa Porzecanski, Mexican author Daniela Tarazona, Mexican textile sculptor Alejandra Zermeño, Argentine filmmaker Lucía Puenzo, Colombian installation artist María Fernanda Cardoso, Colombian poet Juan Carlos Galeano, Colombian graphic artist Solmi Angarita, and Brazilian poet Astrid Cabral dramatize a multitude of multispecies encounters to imagine the possibility of a better world—one that is already as close as our skin and as present as the nonhuman “others” that constitute our existence. These works imagine the human itself as a product of multispecies interactions through evolutionary time, multispecies companionships as formed around queer kinships, and biocultural communities as emerging through communicative, ethical encounters.
ContributorsColeman, Vera Ruth (Author) / Tompkins, Cynthia (Thesis advisor) / Foster, David (Committee member) / Urioste-Azcorra, Carmen (Committee member) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The Committee on Rare and Endangered Wildlife Species (CREWS) of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) made important and lasting contributions to one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation in U.S. history: the Endangered Species Act of 1973 (ESA). CREWS was a prominent science-advisory body within the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) in the 1960s and 1970s, responsible for advising on the development of federal endangered-wildlife policy. The Committee took full advantage of its scientific and political authority by identifying a particular object of conservation--used in the development of the first U.S. list of endangered species--and establishing captive breeding as a primary conservation practice, both of which were written into the ESA and are employed in endangered-species listing and recovery to this day. Despite these important contributions to federal endangered-species practice and policy, CREWS has received little attention from historians of science or policy scholars. This dissertation is an empirical history of CREWS that draws on primary sources from the Smithsonian Institution (SI) Archives and a detailed analysis of the U.S. congressional record. The SI sources (including the records of the Bird and Mammal Laboratory, an FWS staffed research group stationed at the Smithsonian Institution) reveal the technical and political details of CREWS's advisory work. The congressional record provides evidence showing significant contributions of CREWS and its advisors and supervisors to the legislative process that resulted in the inclusion of key CREWS-inspired concepts and practices in the ESA. The foundational concepts and practices of the CREWS's research program drew from a number of areas currently of interest to several sub-disciplines that investigate the complex relationship between science and society. Among them are migratory bird conservation, systematics inspired by the Evolutionary Synthesis, species-focused ecology, captive breeding, reintroduction, and species transplantation. The following pages describe the role played by CREWS in drawing these various threads together and codifying them as endangered-species policy in the ESA.
ContributorsWinston, Johnny (Author) / Hamilton, Andrew (Thesis advisor) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Henson, Pamela (Committee member) / Collins, James (Committee member) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Good food, or food that is good for people and planet, demands a different worldview and approach than the current industrial food system. As an ecofeminist researcher who values reciprocity, justice, and a holistic approach, my research investigates varying good food perspectives by integrating scientific evidence and practical experience. Specifically, I explore the opportunities climatic change have created for innovative and solutions-oriented small-scale food systems techniques in arid regions to define, identify, regulate and communicate good food and its related practices. A significant gap exists between current small-scale good food practices and how they can fit and be valorized into a wider food system. This dissertation combines social science and arts-based methodologies with the intention of digging deeper to understand what is required to support a food system that produces good food. This dissertation is broken down into three deliverables, bound by this introduction and a conclusion: (1) a theoretical research framework for regenerative food systems, grounded in biomimicry and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) defining and identifying good food and the systems that produce it, (2) a research paper that follows three traditional fermented foods in Arizona to contextualize their socio-cultural aspects within a regulatory framework and propose a way to make food governance more inclusive, and (3) an analytical autoethnographic exploration of the normative aspect of sustainability, and how it can be more regenerative. The narrative is an exploration through the author's past, present, and future in finding ways to instill more regenerative practices in their life in Arizona, as well as amplify the voices of others using podcasts. The dissertation aims to expand the field of food system sustainability to be more inclusive of diverse knowledge systems and arts-based methods in creating an understanding of good food in arid regions.
ContributorsAly El-Sayed, Sara (Author) / Cloutier, Scott (Thesis advisor) / Spackman, Christy (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Baumeister, Dayna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
In Writing the Goodlife Ybarra details the reasons why Mexican American Literature emphasizes domestic life while seeming not to address human relationship to the environment. Ybarra reveals how environmental relationships take shape within the domestic lives of characters in Mexican American Literature, rather than in ‘wilderness’ settings as is often the case with Anglo American literature. In my own reading of Mexican American novels, I have been interested in how affect, or the emotional, also illuminates the human-nonhuman relationships within and outside of domesticity. To explore this area of interest and analysis, I call upon Teresa Brennan’s Transmission of Affect, which provides a technical language for understanding emotion. Brennan writes that the transmission of affect occurs “via an interaction with other people” [and] that the emotions of “one person, and the enhancing and depressing energies these affects entail, can enter into another” (Brennan 3). Describing the limits of her work, Brennan states that the environment in which human affective interactions occur are always a factor but, in her book, she is not “investigating environmental factors” if the word “environment” means human-nature relationships. That area of analysis falls “outside the scope of [her] book” (Brennan 8).
Stepping into that opening, I bring Ybarra’s insights on ‘the good life’ together with Brennan’s technical language of affect to lay out the argument of my thesis. I build and expand understandings of domesticity, perceptions of environment, and transmission of affect with an analysis of three representative works of Mexican American Literature: Like Water For Chocolate 1989 by Laura Esquivel, So Far From God 1993 by Ana Castillo, and Bless Me, Ultima 1972 by Rudolfo Anaya. Linking analysis of affect to analysis of Mexican American domestic literary representations (that are replete with concepts of human-nonhuman relationships) highlights the intersectionality and multisubjectivity of these three important novels. I also trace Ybarra’s discussion of the “good life” to its South America roots in the concept of “buen vivir” as I explore how understanding traditional indigenous scientific literacies helps fortify Ybarra’s notion that the environmental is always at work within representation of the domestic in Mexican American literature.
ContributorsVaron, Alma Victoria (Author) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Maring, Heather (Committee member) / Jensen, Kyle (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Food production and consumption directly impacts the environment and human health. Protein in particular has significant cultural and health implications, and how people make decisions about what type of protein they eat has not been studied directly. Many decision tools exist to offer recommendations for seafood, but neglect livestock or plant protein. This study attempts to address these shortcomings in food decision science and tools by asking the questions: 1) What qualities of a dietary protein-based decision tool make it effective? 2) What do people consider when making decisions about what type of protein to consume? Using literature review, meta-analysis, and surveys, this study attempts to determine how the knowledge gained from answering these questions can be used to develop an electronic tool to engage consumers in making sustainable and healthy decisions about protein consumption. The data show that, given environmental and health information about the protein types, people in the sample of farmers market shoppers are more likely to purchase wild salmon and organically grown soybeans, and less likely to purchase grain-fed beef. However, the order of preference among the six types of protein did not change. Additional results suggest that there is a disconnect between consumers and sources of dietary protein, indicating a need for improved education. Inconsistency in labeling and information regarding protein types is a large source of confusion for consumers who participated in the survey, highlighting the need for transparency. Results of this study suggest that decisions tools may help improve decision making, but new ways of using them need to be considered to achieve this.
ContributorsGeren, Sarah (Author) / Gerber, Leah (Thesis advisor) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Wentz, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arvai, Joseph (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015