Matching Items (85)
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
The rights of American Indians occupy a unique position within the legal framework of water allocations in the western United States. However, in the formulation and execution of policies that controlled access to water in the desert Southwest, federal and local governments did not preserve the federal reserved water rights that attached to Indian reservations as part of their creation. Consequentially, Indian communities were unable to access the water supplies necessary to sustain the economic development of their reservations. This dissertation analyzes the legal and historical dimensions of the conflict over rights that occurred between Indian communities and non-Indian water users in Arizona during the second half of the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to negotiations involving local, state, federal, and tribal parties, which led to the Congressional authorization of water rights settlements for several reservations in central Arizona. The historical, economic, and political forces that shaped the settlement process are analyzed in order to gain a better understanding of how water users managed uncertainty regarding their long-term water supplies. The Indian water rights settlement process was made possible through a reconfiguration of major institutional, legal, and policy arrangements that dictate the allocation of water supplies in Arizona.
ContributorsKilloren, Daniel (Author) / Hoerder, Dirk (Thesis advisor) / Hirt, Paul (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
The act of moving water across basins is a recent phenomenon in Arizona water policy. This thesis creates a narrative arc for understanding the long-term issues that set precedents for interbasin water transportation and the immediate causes--namely the passage of the seminal Groundwater Management Act (GMA) in 1980--that motivated Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix to acquire rural farmlands in the mid-1980s with the intent of transporting the underlying groundwater back to their respective service areas in the immediate future. Residents of rural areas were active participants in not only the sales of these farmlands, but also in how municipalities would economically develop these properties in the years to come. Their role made these municipal "water farm" purchases function as exchanges. Fears about the impact of these properties and the water transportation they anticipated on communities-of-origin; the limited nature of economic, fiscal, and hydrologic data at the time; and the rise of private water speculators turned water farms into a major political controversy. The six years it took the legislature to wrestle with the problem at the heart this issue--the value of water to rural communities--were among its most tumultuous. The loss of key lawmakers involved in GMA negotiations, the impeachment of Governor Evan Mecham, and a bribery scandal called AZScam collectively sidetracked negotiations. Even more critical was the absence of a mutual recognition that these water farms posed a problem and the external pressure that had forced all parties involved in earlier groundwater-related negotiations to craft compromise. After cities and speculators failed to force a bill favorable to their interests in 1989, a re-alignment among blocs occurred: cities joined with rural interests to craft legislation that grandfathered in existing urban water farms and limited future water farms to several basins. In exchange, rural interests supported a bill to create a Phoenix-area groundwater replenishment district that enabled cooperative management of water supplies. These two bills, which were jointly signed into law in June 1991, tentatively resolved the water farm issue. The creation of a groundwater replenishment district that has subsidized growth in Maricopa, Pinal, and Pima Counties, the creation water bank to store unused Central Arizona Project water for times of drought, and a host of water conservation measures and water leases enabled by the passage of several tribal water rights settlements have set favorable conditions such that Scottsdale, Mesa, and Phoenix never had any reason to transport any water from their water farms. The legacy of these properties then is that they were the product of the intense urgency and uncertainty in urban planning premised on assumptions of growing populations and complementary, inelastic demand. But even as per capita water consumption has declined throughout the Phoenix-area, continued growth has increased demand, beyond the capacity of available supplies so that there will likely be a new push for rural water farms in the foreseeable future.
ContributorsBergelin, Paul (Author) / Hirt, Paul (Thesis advisor) / Vandermeer, Philip (Committee member) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
The State of California has made great strides in reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions through mandated, rate-payer funded Investor Owned Utility (IOU) electricity Demand Side Management (DSM) programs. This study quantifies the amount of reduced GHG emissions in Arizona that result from DSM in that state, as well as the DSM reductions within Southern California Edison (SCE), Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E;), and San Diego Gas and Electric (SDG&E;) during the 2010 through 2012 California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) DSM program cycle. To accomplish this quantification, it develops a model to allocated GHG emissions based on "operating margin" resources requirements specific to each utility in order to effectively track, monitor, and quantify avoided emissions from grid-based utility resources. The developed model estimates that during the 2010-2012 program cycle, 5,327.12 metric tons (MT) of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e) in GHG reductions (or 1.8 percent of total reductions) can be attributed to reduced demand from Arizona--based resources by California IOUs. By focusing on the spatial context of GHG emission reductions, this study models and quantifies the spill-over effect of California's regulatory environment into neighboring states.
ContributorsLandry, Bryan (Author) / Pasqualetti, Martin J. (Thesis advisor) / Pijawka, K. David (Committee member) / Hirt, Paul (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This project examines the intersections between sexual/cultural cross-dressing and un/documented immigration from the point of view of folklore and immigration studies using Sui Sin Far's short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance and Karen Tei Yamashita's novel Tropic of Orange. Using the lenses of folklore theory and cross-dressing highlights aspects of immigration (and its intersection with gender and race) that are otherwise missed; it is necessary to examine the evolving ways in which fictionalized cross-dressers re-craft and occupy the spaces from which they are barred in order to address and redress questions of immigration today. Incorporating anthropology, history, folkloristics, and gender studies, this project shows that historical forms of cross-dressing and immigration lead to the development of unstable identities and pressures to "re-dress" and return to one's original space. More recent studies about gender, however, reveal a historical change in how cross-dressers negotiate their identities and the space(s) they inhabit. Therefore, it is crucial to inspect cross-dressing and immigration as both historical and contemporary phenomena. While Mrs. Spring Fragrance (published in 1912) represents more conventional ideas of cross-dressing and immigration, Tropic of Orange (published in 1997) offers alternative ways to navigate borders, immigration, and identity by using these concepts more playfully and self-consciously. Although sexual/cultural cross-dressing and un/documented immigration are not the same in every case, there are enough similarities between the two to warrant investigating whether some of the solutions reached by modern cross-dressers and gender-ambiguous people might not also help un/documented immigrants to re-negotiate their status, identities, and spaces in the midst of an unstable and at times hostile environment. In fact, an examination of such intersections can address and redress immigration by changing the perceptions of how, and the contexts in which, people view immigration and borders. Thus, this project contends that it is the combination of folkloristics, gender and immigration studies, Mrs. Spring Fragrance, and Tropic of Orange together that precipitates such a reading.
ContributorsZheng, Ding Ding (Author) / Sadowski-Smith, Claudia (Thesis advisor) / Adamson, Joni (Thesis advisor) / Horan, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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
As Arizona enters its fifteenth year of drought and Lake Mead hits historic lows, water management and policy planning will become increasingly important to ensure future water security in the Southwestern region of the United States. This thesis compares water demand trends and policies at the municipal level in Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona over the time period from 1980-2010. By analyzing gallons per capita per day (GPCD) trends for each city in the context of population growth, drought, and major state and local policies over the twenty year period, reasons for declines in per capita water demand were explored. Despite differences in their available water sources and political cultures, both the City of Phoenix and the City of Tucson have successfully reduced their per capita water consumption levels between 1980 and 2010. However, this study suggests that each city's measured success at reducing GPCD has been more a result of external events (supply augmentation, drought, and differing development trends) rather than conservation and demand reduction regulations adopted under the auspices of the Groundwater Management Act.
ContributorsSnyder, Rachel Claire (Author) / Larson, Kelli (Thesis director) / Hirt, Paul (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
As parallel revolutions in publishing and environmental discourse are underway, literary journals are increasingly home to a new kind of nature writing. These journals and the writers they publish are reinventing our old definitions of nature and place by positioning humans in the center of a highly endangered but vibrantly alive world. Each publication is a testament to the importance of literature in the conservation of the planet and the power of words in connecting us to our Earth.
ContributorsRegan, Erin Marie (Author) / Murphy, Patricia (Thesis director) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
This paper explores the relationship between wildfire management and the consideration of ecological and environmental concerns in Arizona. To get a proper perspective on the current state of wildfire management in Arizona, information on two wildfire management programs, the Four Forests Restoration Initiative and FireScape, was researched and analyzed, as well as contemporary fire policy, a history of wildfire in Arizona, and two recent fires in Sedona, AZ. The two fires in Sedona, the Brins Fire of 2006 and the Slide Fire of 2014, act as a focal point for this ecological management transition, as even within an 8-year period, we can see the different ways the two fires were managed and the transition to a greater ecological importance in management strategies. These all came together to give a full spectrum for the factors that have led to more ecologically-prominent wildfire management strategies in Arizona.
ContributorsGeorge-Sills, Dylan (Author) / Pyne, Stephen (Thesis director) / Hirt, Paul (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
The elements that connect humanity to the corresponding environments that we inhabit are diverse and complex. These connections are central to understanding human interaction, our environment, and ourselves. The purpose of this thesis is to establish how connection (or lack thereof) to a region, in this instance New England, is found through environment and family. This compilation of four short stories demonstrates environmental connections via technology and familial interactions.
ContributorsStrusienski, Amanda Nicole (Author) / LaCroix, Kristin (Thesis director) / Adamson, Joni (Committee member) / Pitts, Melanie (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Letters and Sciences (Contributor)
Created2013-05