Matching Items (110)
Description
People have known about mass biodiversity loss and the human actions that drive it for decades now, and yet we have largely failed levels to change our behavior to protect the environment. What’s failing to motivate people to change? Some conservation psychologists have partially blamed the negative way we communicate about environmental issues for paralyzing audiences into doing nothing because they feel helpless to change such a big problem. Instead, many psychologists have called for using positive emotions in communication to motivate an audience, but there’s still little research showing whether that’s a more effective approach or not. To study whether positive or negative emotions are really more motivational for inspiring change, I looked at how different emotions were used in the discourse about an emerging conservation technology called de-extinction as a case study. De-extinction claims to be both a tool for fighting biodiversity loss and for inspiring more positive and inspiring narratives in conservation. In this thesis, I examine those claims by exploring five emotions that the discourse around de-extinction elicits: fear, guilt, grief, awe and hope. I examined the motivating power of those emotions and what kind of actions de-extinction discourse motivates or fails to motivate through the way it uses those emotions. I found that de-extinction discourse erases negative emotions and boosts positive ones as many conservation psychologists recommend. However, de-extinction discourse accomplishes this in misleading ways: it minimizes the sense of importance of ongoing extinctions by framing extinction as a reversible phenomenon, and it overstates the ability of technology alone to combat the extinction crisis without requiring societal change. As a result, de-extinction discourse could risk making the public less motivated to take personal action to forward conservation goals. I conclude that positivity or negativity should not be the central concerns for motivating action, but rather efficacy and honesty.
ContributorsSchnebly, Risa (Author) / Minteer, Ben (Thesis director) / Lynch, John (Committee member) / Rojas, Christopher (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Since the Convention on Biological Diversity was established in 1992, more importance has been given to the conservation of genetic resources in the international community. In 2001, the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (PGRFA) focused on conserving plant genetic resources, including crop wild relatives (CWR). Some of these genetic resources hold desirable traits--such as transfer of plant disease resistance, improvement of nutritional content, or increased resistance to climate change--that can improve commercial crops. For many years, ex situex situ conservation was the prevalent form of protecting plant genetic resources. However, after PGRFA was published in 1998, in situ techniques have increasingly been applied to conserve wild relatives and enhance domesticated crops.In situ techniques are preferred when possible, since they allow for continued evolution of traits through natural selection, and viability of seed stock through continuous germination and regeneration. In my research, I identified regions in Bolivia and rated them according to their potential for successful programs of iin situ conservation of wild crop relatives. In particular, I analyzed areas according to the following criteria: a) The prevalence of CWRs. b) The impacts of climate change, land use change, population growth, and economic development on the continued viability of CWRs in an area. c) The socio-political and economic conditions that might impede or facilitate successful conservation programs and outcomes. This work focuses on three genera of particular importance in Bolivia: Peanut (Arachis spp.), Potato (Solanum spp.) and Quinoa (Chenopodium spp.). I analyzed the above factors for each municipality in Bolivia (the smallest scale for which appropriate data were available). The results indicate which municipalities are most likely to successfully engage in CWR conservation projects. Finally, I present guidelines for the creation of conservation projects that pinpoint some of the potential risks and difficulties with in situ conservation programs in Bolivia and more generally.
ContributorsGonzalez-Paredes, Cecilia (Author) / Kinzig, Ann (Thesis advisor) / Aggarwal, Rimjhim (Committee member) / Chhetri, Netra (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
More than 90 million Americans suffer from low health literacy levels that can lead to detrimental health practices. One of the greatest issues stemming from low health literacy is the misuse of medication, which results in 125,000 deaths per year and close to $200 billion dollars in health care funds (Ngoh 2009). With their implementation into neighborhood settings and consequently the everyday lives of individuals, pharmacies show potential in being great assets towards increasing health literacy on an individual and societal level. However, pharmacists must first be made aware of the opportunities and challenges that exist concerning this effort. Through a three step literature review and corresponding comparative analysis, the results of this study show that pharmacists should focus on four main areas: overall assessment of health literacy in a pharmacy setting, individualization and tailoring of health/ medication plans, development of verbal and written communication tools, and the pharmacist-patient relationship. Each area presents a set of opportunities and challenges that must be accounted for in order to design more effective initiatives and tools in the pharmacists' aim to increase health literacy.
ContributorsMergens, Rianna Lynn (Author) / Robert, Jason Scott (Thesis director) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Kinzig, Ann (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
Human activity has increased loading of reactive nitrogen (N) in the environment, with important and often deleterious impacts on biodiversity, climate, and human health. Since the fate of N in the ecosystem is mainly controlled by microorganisms, understanding the factors that shape microbial communities becomes relevant and urgent. In arid land soils, these microbial communities and factors are not well understood. I aimed to study the role of N cycling microbes, such as the ammonia-oxidizing bacteria (AOB), the recently discovered ammonia-oxidizing archaea (AOA), and various fungal groups, in soils of arid lands. I also tested if niche differentiation among microbial populations is a driver of differential biogeochemical outcomes. I found that N cycling microbial communities in arid lands are structured by environmental factors to a stronger degree than what is generally observed in mesic systems. For example, in biological soil crusts, temperature selected for AOA in warmer deserts and for AOB in colder deserts. Land-use change also affects niche differentiation, with fungi being the major agents of N2O production in natural arid lands, whereas emissions could be attributed to bacteria in mesic urban lawns. By contrast, NO3- production in the native desert and managed soils was mainly controlled by autotrophic microbes (i.e., AOB and AOA) rather than by heterotrophic fungi. I could also determine that AOA surprisingly responded positively to inorganic N availability in both short (one month) and long-term (seven years) experimental manipulations in an arid land soil, while environmental N enrichment in other ecosystem types is known to favor AOB over AOA. This work improves our predictions of ecosystem response to anthropogenic N increase and shows that paradigms derived from mesic systems are not always applicable to arid lands. My dissertation also highlights the unique ecology of ammonia oxidizers and draws attention to the importance of N cycling in desert soils.
ContributorsMarusenko, Yevgeniy (Author) / Hall, Sharon J (Thesis advisor) / Garcia-Pichel, Ferran (Thesis advisor) / Mclain, Jean E (Committee member) / Schwartz, Egbert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Sustainable urbanism offers a set of best practice planning and design prescriptions intended to reverse the negative environmental consequences of urban sprawl, which dominates new urban development in the United States. Master planned developments implementing sustainable urbanism are proliferating globally, garnering accolades within the planning community and skepticism among social scientists. Despite attention from supporters and critics alike, little is known about the actual environmental performance of sustainable urbanism. This dissertation addresses the reasons for this paucity of evidence and the capacity of sustainable urbanism to deliver the espoused environmental outcomes through alternative urban design and the conventional master planning framework for development through three manuscripts. The first manuscript considers the reasons why geography, which would appear to be a natural empirical home for research on sustainable urbanism, has yet to accumulate evidence that links design alternatives to environmental outcomes or to explain the social processes that mediate those outcomes. It argues that geography has failed to develop a coherent subfield based on nature-city interactions and suggests interdisciplinary bridging concepts to invigorate greater interaction between the urban and nature-society geographic subfields. The subsequent chapters deploy these bridging concepts to empirically examine case-studies in sustainable urbanism. The second manuscript utilizes fine scale spatial data to quantify differences in ecosystem services delivery across three urban designs in two phases of Civano, a sustainable urbanism planned development in Tucson, Arizona, and an adjacent, typical suburban development comparison community. The third manuscript considers the extent to which conventional master planning processes are fundamentally at odds with urban environmental sustainability through interviews with stakeholders involved in three planned developments: Civano (Tucson, Arizona), Mueller (Austin, Texas), and Prairie Crossing (Grayslake, Illinois). Findings from the three manuscripts reveal deep challenges in conceptualizing an empirical area of inquiry on sustainable urbanism, measuring the outcomes of urban design alternatives, and innovating planning practice within the constraints of existing institutions that facilitate conventional development. Despite these challenges, synthesizing the insights of geography and cognate fields holds promise in building an empirical body of knowledge that complements pioneering efforts of planners to innovate urban planning practice through the sustainable urbanism alternative.
ContributorsTurner, Victoria (Author) / Gober, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Kinzig, Ann (Committee member) / Talen, Emily (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Irrigation agriculture has been heralded as the solution to feeding the world's growing population. To this end, irrigation agriculture is both extensifying and intensifying in arid regions across the world in an effort to create highly productive agricultural systems. Over one third of modern irrigated fields, however, show signs of serious soil degradation, including salinization and waterlogging, which threaten the productivity of these fields and the world's food supply. Surprisingly, little ecological data on agricultural soils have been collected to understand and address these problems. How, then, can expanding and intensifying modern irrigation systems remain agriculturally productive for the long-term? Archaeological case studies can provide critical insight into how irrigated agricultural systems may be sustainable for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Irrigation systems in Mesopotamia, for example, have been cited consistently as a cautionary tale of the relationship between mismanaged irrigation systems and the collapse of civilizations, but little data expressly link how and why irrigation failed in the past. This dissertation presents much needed ecological data from two different regions of the world - the Phoenix Basin in southern Arizona and the Pampa de Chaparrí on the north coast of Peru - to explore how agricultural soils were affected by long-term irrigation in a variety of social and economic contexts, including the longevity and intensification of irrigation agriculture. Data from soils in prehispanic and historic agricultural fields indicate that despite long-lived and intensive irrigation farming, farmers in both regions created strategies to sustain large populations with irrigation agriculture for hundreds of years. In the Phoenix Basin, Hohokam and O'odham farmers relied on sedimentation from irrigation water to add necessary fine sediments and nutrients to otherwise poor desert soils. Similarly, on the Pampa, farmers relied on sedimentation in localized contexts, but also constructed fields with ridges and furrows to draw detrimental salts away from planting surfaces in the furrows on onto the ridges. These case studies are then compared to failing modern and ancient irrigated systems across the world to understand how the centralization of management may affect the long-term sustainability of irrigation agriculture.
ContributorsStrawhacker, Colleen (Author) / Spielmann, Katherine A. (Thesis advisor) / Hall, Sharon J (Committee member) / Nelson, Margaret C. (Committee member) / Sandor, Jonathan A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Consideration of both biological and human-use dynamics in coupled social-ecological systems is essential for the success of interventions such as marine reserves. As purely human institutions, marine reserves have no direct effects on ecological systems. Consequently, the success of a marine reserve depends on managers` ability to alter human behavior in the direction and magnitude that supports reserve objectives. Further, a marine reserve is just one component in a larger coupled social-ecological system. The social, economic, political, and biological landscape all determine the social acceptability of a reserve, conflicts that arise, how the reserve interacts with existing fisheries management, accuracy of reserve monitoring, and whether the reserve is ultimately able to meet conservation and fishery enhancement goals. Just as the social-ecological landscape is critical at all stages for marine reserve, from initial establishment to maintenance, the reserve in turn interacts with biological and human use dynamics beyond its borders. Those interactions can lead to the failure of a reserve to meet management goals, or compromise management goals outside the reserve. I use a bio-economic model of a fishery in a spatially patchy environment to demonstrate how the pre-reserve fisheries management strategy determines the pattern of fishing effort displacement once the reserve is established, and discuss the social, political, and biological consequences of different patterns for the reserve and the fishery. Using a stochastic bio-economic model, I demonstrate how biological and human use connectivity can confound the accurate detection of reserve effects by violating assumptions in the quasi-experimental framework. Finally, I examine data on recreational fishing site selection to investigate changes in response to the announcement of enforcement of a marine reserve in the Gulf of California, Mexico. I generate a scale of fines that would fully or partially protect the reserve, providing a data-driven way for managers to balance biological and socio-economic goals. I suggest that natural resource managers consider human use dynamics with the same frequency, rigor, and tools as they do biological stocks.
ContributorsFujitani, Marie (Author) / Abbott, Joshua (Thesis advisor) / Fenichel, Eli (Thesis advisor) / Gerber, Leah (Committee member) / Anderies, John (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This dissertation analyzes the way in which leaders of certain Taiwanese Buddhist organizations associated with a strand of Buddhist modernism called "humanistic Buddhism" use discourse and rhetoric to make environmentalism meaningful to their members. It begins with an assessment of the field of religion and ecology, situating it in the context of secular environmental ethics. It identifies rhetoric and discourse as important but under acknowledged elements in literature on environmental ethics, both religious and secular, and relates this lack of attention to rhetoric to the presence of a problematic gap between environmental ethics theory and environmentalist practice. This dissertation develops a methodology of rhetorical analysis that seeks to assess how rhetoric contributes to alleviating this gap in religious environmentalism. In particular, this dissertation analyzes the development of environmentalism as a major element of humanistic Buddhist groups in Taiwan and seeks to show that a rhetorical analysis helps demonstrate how these organizations have sought to make environmentalism a meaningful subject of contemporary Buddhist religiosity. This dissertation will present an extended analysis of the concept of "spiritual environmentalism," a term developed and promoted by the late Ven. Shengyan (1930-2009), founder of the Taiwanese Buddhist organization Dharma Drum Mountain. Furthermore, this dissertation suggests that the rhetorical methodology proposed herein offers offers a direction for scholars to more effectively engage with religion and ecology in ways that address both descriptive/analytic approaches and constructive engagements with various forms of religious environmentalism.
ContributorsClippard, Seth (Author) / Chen, Huaiyu (Thesis advisor) / Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava (Committee member) / Bokenkamp, Stephen (Committee member) / Tillman, Hoyt (Committee member) / Minteer, Ben (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
In this paper, I analyze representations of nature in popular film, using the feminist / deconstructionist concept of a dualism to structure my critique. Using Val Plumwood’s analysis of the logical structure of dualism and the 5 ‘features of a dualism’ that she identifies, I critique 5 popular movies – Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Brave, Grizzly Man, and Planet Earth – by locating within each of them one of the 5 features and explaining how the movie functions to reinforce the Nature/Culture dualism . By showing how the Nature/Culture dualism shapes and is shaped by popular cinema, I show how “Nature” is a social construct, created as part of this very dualism, and reified through popular culture. I conclude with the introduction of a number of ‘subversive’ pieces of visual art that undermine and actively deconstruct the Nature/Culture dualism and show to the viewer a more honest presentation of the non-human world.
ContributorsBarton, Christopher Joseph (Author) / Broglio, Ron (Thesis director) / Minteer, Ben (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor)
Created2015-05