Browsing by Subject "Environmental studies"

There are currently 22 states with full or partial disclosure requirements for their electricity suppliers. These requirements differ significantly across states, in terms of the specific information content, structure, and presentation, but all have the potential of increasing customers' awareness about the links between their electricity consumption and air emissions, and perhaps create incentives for utilities to reduce those emissions or for customers to reduce their consumption or to switch to a different electricity supplier.

How effective this policy has been is still unclear. The main criterion for effective communication strategies is that they include relevant information for the readers in a usable form. Information needs as well as the ability to process and apply it vary significantly across individuals. However, people are limited in their information-processing capabilities. Policy makers therefore face the trade-off between a large amount of potentially relevant information that ideally needs to be included on the label on the one hand, and decrease in usability as more information is included on the label, on the other.

This paper examines the design, readability and usability of sample labels from 18 different states with information disclosure requirements. The labels are compared and rated according to how they balance the two main dimensions of label design, information content and usability, demonstrating the difficult trade-off between the two. In addition to this, the labels are analyzed along several key aspects: information load, focus on environmental impact, comparability, understandability, and materiality of information. As part of the analysis, measures for these different aspects of label effectiveness are created. The main finding of the analysis is that there are difficult trade-offs between information content and label usability. However, this trade-off can partially be avoided by carefully designing the labels, easing the cognitive burden of users while still conveying relevant information to the decision maker.

The results of the analysis can help evaluate the various existing disclosure policies, and offer approaches to improve upon them. It will also be shown that while preferred levels of information content are incommensurate with maximum usability, certain structures and form elements succeed at making more complex information content easier to use, improving the overall performance of the labels.

A cost-effective pathway towards net-zero electric power systems requires an extraordinary deployment of new solar and wind generation assets. This aggressive expansion driving unprecedented investment entails a fundamental understanding of the challenge ahead of us. This dissertation seeks to provide a multidisciplinary perspective of research questions that shine the light on rapid and cost-efficient strategies for the energy transition. Integrating operations research and geospatial analysis methods, the dissertation utilizes a multidisciplinary approach when addressing three questions.

First, the dissertation examines the role of battery energy storage technologies (i.e., utility-scale lithium-ion batteries) on reducing the greenhouse gas emissions of an electric power system while simultaneously achieving a reduction in carbon abatement costs. The study uses a cost-based production model (day-ahead unit commitment and a real-time economic dispatch) to simulate the optimal operation of all the generation resources in the largest vertically-integrated electric service region in the U.S. The study explores a multitude of configurations to identify optimal sizing of battery energy storage systems when paired with utility-scale photovoltaics.

Next, the dissertation studies the effect of incorporating high-resolution data when identifying suitable land for renewable energy projects over a geographically defined region. Using a python-based user-friendly siting tool implemented in ArcGIS Pro to perform suitability and cost analysis of utility-scale photovoltaic projects in North Carolina under three scenarios (representing conditions ranging from favorable to restrictive). The study finds that the land suitable for utility-scale photovoltaics reduces substantially when parcel-level data reflecting local land-use restrictions are incorporated. The study's findings highlight the necessity of integrating detailed land-use data that reflects local regulation (zoning ordinances) into siting models while simultaneously increasing their spatial granularity.

Lastly, the dissertation analyzes the benefits of weatherizing wind power farms enabling their operation under extreme climates (winter storms). The study uses global reanalysis data with operational information from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) during the 2021 winter storm Uri to simulate a continued operation of wind power farms under low-temperature environments. The study finds that the financial benefits that winterized wind turbines would have received during winter storm Uri would have outweighed the capital costs required to implement ice-accretion mitigation actions (before winter storm URI).

Coastal eutrophication is a complex process that is caused largely by anthropogenic nutrient enrichment. Estuaries are particularly susceptible to nutrient impairment, owing to their intimate connection with the contributing watersheds. Estuaries experiencing accelerating eutrophication are subject to a loss of key ecological functions and services. This doctoral dissertation presents the development and implementation of an integrated approach toward assessing the water quality in the Neuse Estuary following the implementation of the total maximum daily load (TMDL) program in the Neuse River basin. In order to accomplish this task, I have developed a series of water quality models and modeling strategies that can be effectively used in assessing nutrient based eutrophication. Two watershed-level nutrient loading models that operate on a different temporal scale are developed and used to quantify nitrogen loading to the Neuse Estuary over time. The models are used to probabilistically assess the success of the adopted mitigation measures in achieving the 30 % load reduction goal stipulated by the TMDL. Additionally, a novel structure learning approach is adopted to develop a Bayesian Network (BN) model that describes chlorophyll dynamics in the Upper Neuse Estuary. The developed BN model is compared to pre-TMDL models to assess any changes in the role that nutrient loading and physical forcings play in modulating chlorophyll levels in that section of the estuary. Finally, a set of empirical models are developed to assess the water quality monitoring program in the estuary, while also exploring the possibility of incorporating remotely sensed satellite data in an effort to augment the existing in-situ monitoring programs.

Since their creation, the multilateral development banks have accumulated performance records that include both substantial successes and stunning failures. Nowhere have their performance records been more mixed and controversial than with respect to environmental management issues. The multilateral development banks have financed projects that are widely considered to be environmental disasters, but have also financed projects that successfully included best practice environmental mitigation measures. They have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars financing unsuccessful environmental protection programs, while at the same time they have supported programs that contributed to the rapid development of environmental management capacity in less-developed countries. The purpose of this dissertation is to explore when and why monitoring and evaluation can prompt the multilateral development banks to move away from poor performing projects and towards high performing projects.

This type of performance-based allocation has been repeatedly highlighted as a key element in the successful delivery of development assistance. To test when the multilateral development banks practice performance-based allocation, I assembled a team that coded environmental performance information from 960 project evaluations, 174 program evaluations, and 74 civil society complaints. I use the resulting data to model when four multilateral development banks - the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and African Development Bank - make performance-based allocation decisions about environmentally-risky and environment-improving operations. In addition, I visited the headquarters of each of these organizations and conducted interviews with 54 staff members about the processes that are in place to use monitoring and evaluation information as part of decision-making.

I find that the establishment of monitoring and evaluation systems at the MDBs has not created incentives for staff to practice performance-based allocation. Instead, performance information influences allocation decisions when it helps MDB staff approve future projects more quickly. It does so by helping staff identify development projects that are likely to face significant delays due to the inability of the borrowing country to manage negative environmental impacts and to identify the borrowing countries that are likely to successfully implement environment-improving operations.

The West African coast is prey to an erosion washing away communities’ houses, livelihoods, and ancestral temples. By studying locals’ lived experiences and state resilience efforts my research investigates environmental and social issues and possibilities emerging from this climate disaster. I focus on Aneho, a historic town and former site of transcontinental commerce during the precolonial period, and a center of the famous African Print Textile trade since the early colonial period—which today risks disappearing into the sea. While the situation is dire, Aneho has a long history of survival and resilience to, among others, local wars, the slave trade, and colonialism. Reproduced through collective festivals and rituals, these traits are deployed today in their fight against coastal erosion. The ontological turn shows how native knowledge in the Amazonia and beyond offer alternative ways of being and knowing; however, this literature fails to answer the fundamental question of how this form of knowledge can influence our collective response to the current global climate crisis and change our ways of living. By analyzing Aneho’s biopolitical terrain where both scientific and ontological knowledge intersect, my work addresses this question through the examination of power relations underlying the way policymakers and traditional leaders address coastal erosion. The intersections I am exploring generate new possibilities for local agency and innovation in the face of climate catastrophe while also enabling my work to address the uncanny absence of West Africa’s rich cosmology in the canon of ontological literature. My research essentially pushes environmental anthropology beyond its theoretical limits by engaging the field in a pragmatic conversation with public policy on resilient development.

This dissertation focuses on the relationship of industrial shrimp aquaculture and shrimp diseases, with an emphasis on the agency of disease in shaping the history of shrimp production. Shrimp aquaculture is concentrated in developing tropical economies, with the significant majority of shrimp exported to consumers in the Global North. The rise of shrimp aquaculture has been accompanied by the development of new technologies and practices, designed to facilitate and govern the growth of the industry. While successful in making aquaculture the single largest production method for shrimp, these innovations also created ideal environments for the emergence and spread of shrimp diseases, which have caused significant and persistent production losses. Disease has brought volatility and risk to producer livelihoods, while also necessitating further technological modernization and development interventions to curb disease outbreaks.

This research draws on qualitative interviews and contextual economic analyses to explore the role of disease at multiple scales. Chapter 2 examines how disease has shaped industry discourses and he practice of shrimp aquaculture across contexts. The role of the concept of biosecurity is examined to highlight the territorial nature of disease prevention. Chapter 3 explores the context of shrimp aquaculture development in Aceh, Indonesia. This chapter applies the general ideas explored in Chapter 2, to a real-world case, highlighting how the pairing of shrimp and disease is managed as a single commodity. Chapter 4 explores the reach of disease globally, and across methods of production. The economic effects of disease on U.S. wild shrimping are explored, along with the role of disease as a narrative element in resisting global aquaculture.

It is argued that shrimp disease shapes commodity relationships, influencing production decisions, and development priorities at multiple scales. The unsympathetic quality of disease makes disease prevention an ideal project for enrolling broad coalitions of human and non-human actors, and negating the politics embedded in the relationship of disease prevention with commodification more broadly.

High levels of partisan polarization on environmental policies, and on climate change in particular, have led to policy gridlock in the United States. While most Americans rely on their partisan identities to guide their policy preferences on highly polarizing issues, other non-partisan identities may also be relevant in informing environmental policy attitudes. This dissertation investigates the role that partisan and non-partisan identities play in driving attitudes on climate change and environmental policies broadly. In a first paper, I use a survey experiment to test how identity salience influences the effectiveness of a persuasive message about climate change. I find that priming a non-partisan (parental) identity decreases partisan polarization on climate change policy support, while priming a partisan identity increases polarization. In a second paper, I use focus groups, participant observation, and interviews to identify four strategies that individuals use to reconcile conflicting identities and form attitudes on climate change. In a third paper, I use focus groups with rural voters in North Carolina to understand how rural identities inform unique environmental policy preferences. Each of these studies contributes to the broader understanding of the role that non-partisan identities play in driving environmental attitudes and offers a potential way to build more bipartisan agreement in this policy area.

This dissertation examines everyday life and storytelling in Peru's Huaylas Valley: a transnational mining hub beneath melting Andean glaciers. During one year of ethnographic fieldwork, I listened to citydwellers and villagers narrate personal stories, gory rumors, and mythic tales: of a ruined Inca city that glows at night, a disappearing water devil, wild lakes turning tame, a Christ whose powers are shrinking. Rather than evincing ontological alterity, Huaylas stories reveal distinctive capitalist imaginaries and their ancient genealogies. They convey a popular sense of marginalization at a time of rapid, mineral-fueled growth, along with high hopes for a wealthy, developed future. And, their motifs and imagery attest to centuries of intercultural exchange, showing how capitalism took root in the Andes through indigenous cosmology, even as it developed through American colonization. Today, storytellers imagine and relate to their once-animate landscape as a banal means of accumulation, enlivening it through modern dreams that herald this future by banishing the superfluous—fantastic beings, and even themselves— from their Valley. If only by aspiration, then, storytellers in the Huaylas Valley form part of a planetary capitalist culture that accelerates global warming, raises mass living standards, and circulates fantasies of material redemption. While climate change is typically construed as a problem for scientists and consumers to solve, this dissertation shows instead that global warming is a historical, cultural problem about the ends that more and more of humankind imagines, and strives to achieve.

By combining literary, ecocritical, and media techniques with a mindfulness of the environment, “Digital Environmental Metabolisms: An Ecocritical Project of the Digital Environmental Humanities” contributes to the urgent task of re-orienting media theory toward environmental concerns. It is informed by the premise that, in our present Anthropocenic age defined by humans acting as a geophysical force, human bodies, cultural technologies, and the earth are intersecting material practices. I argue this intersectionality is neither cyborgian nor posthuman, as some media scholars insist, but is something far more natural: it is a metabolic relationship wherein each system is inherently implicated in the perpetuation of the others. Through a series of chapters that dispense with standard maps of cyberspace and the social network replacing them with a digital geography of wires, workers, warehouses, and waste, this project shifts the media theoretical focus from one grounded in computation to one fully rooted in the earth. Unlike others, like those mentioned here within, who are contributing to what may be called an emerging environmental media studies, I offer several practical and theoretical interventions, including Permaculture and Ecocritical Digital Humanities, that are capable of moving us toward more sustainable digital practice and a more robust Anthropocene Humanities.

An abstract of a dissertation: As humans increasingly alter the surface geomorphology of the Earth, a multitude of artificial aquatic systems have appeared, both deliberately and accidentally. Human modifications to the hydroscape range from alteration of existing waterbodies to construction of new ones. The extent and ecosystem services of these systems are underexplored, but likely substantial and changing. Instead of simply accepting that artificial ecosystems have intrinsically low values, environmental scientists should determine what combination of factors, including setting, planning and construction, subsequent management and policy, and time, impact the condition of these systems. Scientists, social scientists, and policymakers should more thoroughly evaluate whether current study and management of artificial aquatic systems is based on the actual ecological condition of these systems, or judged differently, due to artificiality, and consider resultant possible changes in goals for these systems. The emerging recognition and study of artificial aquatic systems presents an exciting and important opportunity for science and society.

Irrigation ditches are ubiquitous features of water networks in rural and urban settings in drylands, and are thus potentially important habitats within the modern hydroscape. The habitat value of ditches and other artificial systems depends on whether these systems respond to local and watershed-scale land use in similar ways to natural features, or whether artificial origin inherently constrains a system's ecological condition. The ditches and creeks of Bishop, California are fed by water from the same minimally developed watershed on the Eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and so served to test whether artificial and natural waters in the same watershed setting and with shared water can provide similar habitat. We sampled benthic macroinvertebrates at 52 sites within the town, stratified by substrate and season. Communities varied by substrate and season as expected, but did not differ significantly between artificial and natural streams. Instead, both types of streams changed as water flowed from undeveloped desert through town, suggesting that irrigation ditches respond to local urbanization in much the same way that natural streams do. Differences in finer-scale spatial structure of community similarity suggest that community assembly processes may differ between natural and artificial channels, but potential mechanisms for these differences are unclear. This study demonstrates that artificial aquatic systems may have substantial ecological value, and suggests that the poor condition of many artificial aquatic systems may reflect stressful watershed settings rather than something intrinsic to their artificiality.

The drainage ditches of the North Carolina Coastal Plain do not merely degrade wetlands; they themselves have ecological structural characteristics of wetlands. We surveyed 32 agricultural, freeway, and forested ditch reaches across this region for hydrologic indicators, soil organic matter, and plants. All showed some hydrologic indicators and had some soil organic matter, with easterly, swampy forests having the most, though with substantial variation across all and few significant differences between types. All had hydrophytic herbaceous plant communities in the sense of at least half their percent cover belonging to obligate, facultative wetland, or facultative taxa. These herbaceous communities differed significantly across site types (F=3.25, d.f.= 2, p=0.001), and responded to both landscape-level factors like nearby development coverage and local-level factors like apparent mowing. Sample sites were not well mapped in well-used federal aquatic databases; the National Hydrography Dataset only included one on a “CanalDitch” flow line, and the National Wetlands Inventory only included two within “partially drained/ditched” areas, and none as individual “excavated” features. Others were mis-categorized, but neither database included any highway sampling sites. Despite this limited information about extent, variation and management impact suggests that human potential to impact wetland structure of these manmade aquatic ecosystems throughout the North Carolina Coastal Plain, and beyond, could be large.

Artificial lakes are a dominant aquatic ecosystem type, but the processes controlling their condition are under-explored. Here we use structural equations modeling to compare the formation of algal blooms and associated water quality issues in 1,045 artificial and 870 natural lakes in the United States using the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Lakes Assessment data. We compare chemical and physical measurements associated with water quality and the relationships between them, and find that the processes are significantly different between natural and artificial lakes, in a way that suggests impacts of interference with thermal stratification through dam management in reservoirs. However, both the overall processes and the distributions of the data are roughly similar between the two origin types, and between 2007 and 2012 sample years. Artificial lakes are lakes, and process-based explorations of their behavior can help us better know management options.

Taken together, this dissertation examines an artificial version of each of the major aquatic ecosystem types: stream, wetland, and lake. It examines the processes controlling their ecological condition with increasing intricacy with each chapter, and finds ways that artificial aquatic ecosystems are both similar to and different from natural ones. This dissertation provides a new way of looking at the constraints and opportunities that artificial waterbodies afford those in charge of them and interested in their conservation potential.

Increasingly the challenges of environmental governance are understood as global in nature and scope. Within fisheries, industrial fisheries have long been the global priority in fisheries science, policy instruments, and management techniques. Meanwhile, small-scale fisheries (SSF) have historically been relegated to the margins, framed as local, place-based, static practices from the past rather than global priorities. This dissertation examines the conditions and consequences of transformation in SSF governance, as SSF are becoming a global concern. The passage of a recent internationally negotiated policy for the small-scale sector signifies this monumental shift underway in global fisheries governance priorities: The Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines).By ‘following the policy,’ this research examines the dynamics of policy mobility (e.g., who and what came together to make and implement this policy) across multiple sites and scales of policymaking and implementation as the SSF guidelines are mobilized at global, regional, and national levels. The movement to transform fisheries governance is examined against past patterns in fisheries science and policy, including through analysis of a large-N dataset. The mixed methods used provide needed insights into how different actors (e.g., scientists, policymakers, civil society organizations) have grappled with the questions “governance of what, by whom, to what ends” in SSF through time. While the passage of the SSF Guidelines in 2014 was considered a landmark moment for the SSF sector, attention has now shifted to what they will become; whether and how this policy will ‘scale down’ and to what effects. Studying policy implementation is critical to understanding how transformative change happens in fisheries governance and environmental governance more broadly. Developed with ongoing input from civil society organizations, the SSF Guidelines are the first global policy designed explicitly for SSF. Endorsing gender equality, decent work, and human rights as necessary tenets of sustainability, this policy’s core principles stand in stark contrast to the status quo in fisheries governance. But what these principles will become is uncertain because policy implementation was left intentionally open-ended in the text of the SSF Guidelines which were written without pre-determined implementation targets or definitions of success. This dissertation addresses the central question: How is such an unconventional and unlikely policy mobilized in practice, and how are the ideas within translated in place? To this end, this research engages with the literature on global environmental governance, theories of scale from human geography and common-pool resource scholarship, and the emergent field of critical policy studies, extending these insights to the dynamics SSF governance, an understudied common-pool resource system undergoing transformation here and now. Amidst the wider movement to transform fisheries governance to be more equitable, this research focuses on the principle of gender equality within the SSF Guidelines. Emphasis is placed on how the principle of gender equality came to be part of a global policy instrument in the first place, and later, articulated as the focus of national policy implementation. While this is a multi-sited and multi-scaled story, the dynamics of national-level implementation are followed in the context of Tanzania, one country working to implement this policy in their vast inland and marine fisheries with a chosen focus on gender. Tracing the multi-stakeholder process of developing a national ‘roadmap’ to implement the SSF Guidelines there, this dissertation reveals how the goal of gender equality was translated into specific strategies determined in place, including through a collaborative effort to ‘map’ existing women’s fishing organizations and networks among them. Conclusions demonstrate that flexibility intentionally built into the design of global policies can create room for new understandings of what small-scale fisheries are, how they should be governed, and what a sustainable and desirable future for fisheries looks like—making space to imagine and enact alternatives that are more just and inclusive. Following the indeterminate arc of policy mobility then is critical to determining who steps into the space created by policy change. In the story of creating and implementing the SSF Guidelines, civil society organizations played an outsized role in affecting multi-scalar policy transformation.

Since its founding in 1993, Taiwan’s Life Conservationist Association (LCA) advocates for laws supporting the “equality of life” as an alternative to “human equality.” According to European Enlightenment liberalism, “human equality” stems from the distinctly human capacity for rationality endowed by a creator, a reflection of a three-part ontology that separates humans from their creator and from the rest of creation. As this dissertation demonstrates, liberal humanism reproduces this three-part ontology as the distinctly separate domains of the religious, the (human) secular, and the natural. In contrast, Shih Chao-hwei, the Taiwanese Buddhist nun who co-founded LCA, asserts the equality of life stems from the capacity of all sentient beings to suffer. She rejects the entire Christian liberal cosmology, denying the existence of any eternal creator and only recognizing a distinction between sentient and insentient beings.

Based on a total of two years of multi-species ethnographic field work conducted from 2015 to 2018, this study examines how LCA and its allies promote the equality of life as an alternative to human equality in Taiwan. The study responds to (1) recent post-colonial scholarship that demonstrates how colonial powers used the institutions of religious freedom and the separation of church and state to subjugate non-Christian teachings and (2) recent scholarship in political ecology that demonstrates how concepts of nature and naturalism denied alternative ontologies of life. In response to these critiques, I put Han teachings such as Buddhism on equal terms with sciences such as conservation biology, as well as the traditional knowledge of the indigenous minorities who have largely converted to Christianity.

As an ethnographic example of Taiwan’s indigenous peoples, I examine how the Tayal people are responding to a conservation law drafted by LCA as part of the colonial policies of the liberal state. The Tayal contend that unlike the Buddhist method of protecting life which prohibits killing, the method of protecting life in their own traditional law called Gaga is expressed through hunting. They resist both liberal policies that denied indigenous people’s full human equality and restrictive hunting policies based on LCA’s Buddhism-inspired equality of life. Yet, the Tayal also ally themselves with Christian churches and the global indigenous rights movement so that their arguments to restore Gaga are expressed in terms of the liberal institutions of human rights. The central argument of the dissertation is that, to resolve political disputes over the equality of life, Buddhists and indigenous peoples are both forced to appeal to and reinforce institutions based on human equality, institutions by which both were suppressed. Rather than accepting liberal narratives that frame questions of ecology in terms of competing human rights, this dissertation invites scholars to recognize liberalism as a product of Christian theology and to consider alternative notions of the ontology of life not simply as religions or forms of traditional ecological knowledge, but as contested but viable legal alternatives to liberalism.

This dissertation explores the history of industrial fisheries in the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem where workers, scientists, and entrepreneurs transformed Peru and Chile into two of the top five fishing nations after World War II. As fishmeal industrialists raided the oceans for proteins to nourish chickens, hogs, and farmed fish, the global "race for fish" was marked by the clash of humanitarian goals and business interests over whether the fish should be used to ameliorate malnutrition in the developing world or extracted and their nutrients exported as mass commodities, at greater profit, as a building block for the food chain in the global North. The epicenter of the fishmeal industry in the 1960s was the port city of Chimbote, Peru, where its cultural, social, and ecological impacts were wrenching. After overfishing and a catastrophic El Niño changed the course of Peruvian fisheries in 1972, Chile came to dominate world markets by the early 1980s due to shifting marine ecologies along its coast that shaped the trajectory of the ports of Iquique and Talcahuano. As Peruvian anchoveta stocks recovered in the 1990s, new environmentalist voices--from local residents to international scientists--emerged to contest unsustainable fisheries practices. This study demonstrates how global, transnational, and translocal connections shaped Humboldt Current fisheries as people struggled to understand the complex correlation between fish populations, extractive activity, and oceanic oscillations within a changing geopolitical context.

Climate change is thought to be one of the most pressing environmental problems facing humanity. However, due in part to failures in political communication and how the issue has been historically defined in American politics, discussions of climate change remain gridlocked and polarized. In this dissertation, I explore how climate change has been historically constructed as a political issue, how conflicts between climate advocates and skeptics have been communicated, and what effects polarization has had on political communication, particularly on the communication of climate change to skeptical audiences. I use a variety of methodological tools to consider these questions, including evolutionary frame analysis, which uses textual data to show how issues are framed and constructed over time; Kullback-Leibler divergence content analysis, which allows for comparison of advocate and skeptical framing over time; and experimental framing methods to test how audiences react to and process different presentations of climate change. I identify six major portrayals of climate change from 1988 to 2012, but find that no single construction of the issue has dominated the public discourse defining the problem. In addition, the construction of climate change may be associated with changes in public political sentiment, such as greater pessimism about climate action when the electorate becomes more conservative. As the issue of climate change has become more polarized in American politics, one proposed causal pathway for the observed polarization is that advocate and skeptic framing of climate change focuses on different facets of the issue and ignores rival arguments, a practice known as “talking past.” However, I find no evidence of increased talking past in 25 years of popular newsmedia reporting on the issue, suggesting both that talking past has not driven public polarization or that polarization is occurring in venues outside of the mainstream public discourse, such as blogs. To examine how polarization affects political communication on climate change, I test the cognitive processing of a variety of messages and sources that promote action against climate change among Republican individuals. Rather than identifying frames that are powerful enough to overcome polarization, I find that Republicans exhibit telltale signs of motivated skepticism on the issue, that is, they reject framing that runs counter to their party line and political identity. This result suggests that polarization constrains political communication on polarized issues, overshadowing traditional message and source effects of framing and increasing the difficulty communicators experience in reaching skeptical audiences.

"The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions," writes Thoreau: "Let us spend our lives in conceiving then." This dissertation depicts how Thoreau's fellow antebellum antislavery writers discerned the power of concepts to shape "the universe." Wishing for a new universe, one free of slavery, they spent their lives crafting new concepts. "Ground Plans" argues that antebellum antislavery writers confiscated the concept of nature from proslavery forces and fundamentally redefined it. Advocates of slavery routinely rationalized slave society by referencing a particular conception of nature--as static, transhistorical, and hierarchical--claiming that slavery simply mirrored the natural, permanent racial order. This dissertation demonstrates that to combat slavery's claim to naturalness, antislavery writers reconceptualized nature as composed of dynamic species and races, evolving in relation to one another. In four chapters on David Walker, Harriet Jacobs, William Wells Brown, and Gerrit Smith, it shows that this theory of nature enabled these writers to argue for the complete transformation of society to bring it into line with what they characterized as nature's true principles. This dissertation thus restores the concept of nature as a crucial intellectual battleground for abolitionism. Moreover, it shows these politically-charged antebellum debates over nature's meaning to be crucial to the story of natural science, showing that abolitionists speculated on the natural principles that would eventually constitute the founding insights of ecology.

This dissertation undertakes a black ecocritical study of the trope of water in African Diasporic Literature. Over the course of three chapters treating fiction, drama, and photography, in a study both multi-generic and interdisciplinary in scope, I illuminate the ways in which black literature recursively figures the problem of being black in terms of a recurring crisis of having no ground that originates with and is haunted by the waters of Middle Passage. However, beyond its traumatic associations with the slave trade, I also argue, following the aesthetic philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, that water provides the feature element of what I call the "material imagination of blackness." That is, a poetic and ethical imagination informed by the physiopoetic properties of water that inspires both black literary creation and enactments of black social life.

Transnational governance has been advanced as a viable option for regulating commodities produced in emerging economies—where incapable or unwilling states may undersupply institutions requisite for overseeing supply chains consistent with the quality, safety, environmental, or social standards demanded by the global marketplace. Producers from these jurisdictions, otherwise left with few venues for securing market access and price premiums, ostensibly benefit from whatever pathways transnational actors offer to minimize barriers to entry—including voluntary certification for compliance with a panoply of public and private rules, such as those promulgated by NGOs like the Fair Trade Federation or multinational retailers like Wal-Mart. Yet, such transnational “sustainability” governance may neither be effective nor desirable. Regulatory schemes, like third-party certification, often privilege the interests of primary architects and beneficiaries—private business associations, governments, NGOs, and consumers in the global North—over regulatory targets—producers in the global South. Rather than engaging with the international marketplace via imported and externally-driven schemes, some producer groups are instead challenging existing rules and innovating homegrown institutions. These alternatives to commercialization adopt some institutional characteristics of their transnational counterparts yet deliver benefits in a manner more aligned with the needs of producers. Drawing on original empirical cases from Nicaragua and Mexico, this dissertation examines the role of domestic institutional alternatives to transnational governance in enhancing market access, environmental quality and rural livelihoods within producer communities. Unlike the more technocratic and expert-driven approaches characteristic of mainstream governance efforts, these local regulatory institutions build upon the social capital, indigenous identity, “ancestral” knowledge, and human assets of producer communities as new sources of power and legitimacy in governing agricultural commodities.

Ensuring access to adequate quantities of water for basic needs remains a fundamental goal and challenge in many world regions amid the ongoing climate crisis. Yet the uncertainties with existing water supplies coupled with management challenges and rising water demand have shifted attention towards unconventional water sources. Unconventional waters are alternative water sources obtained by using technologies, such as desalination, to transform previously untapped water into drinking water. While desalination is touted as a technical ‘solution’ to alleviate freshwater scarcity by policymakers, businesses, and the public alike, its high financial costs, intensive energy needs, local community impact, and harm to marine life, as well as other yet unseen effects, make it socially, economically, environmentally, and politically contentious. Before the shift towards unconventional waters, and desalination in particular, extends further, it is imperative for informed policymaking to understand how these water options emerge and what constitutes the knowledge base on them.

This dissertation examines how water management is shaped at the level of international organizations and what information on desalination is shared and debated across two other policy-relevant settings: the global media and a local community. It focuses on these three different settings to capture wide information streams that individually and collectively generate some of the corpus of knowledge on water management and desalination. The first chapter examines UN-Water, the coordinating body on international water policy for the UN system, and how it uses expert knowledge to shape the global water agenda, including the foundations upon which unconventional waters become part of this agenda. The second chapter applies automated content analysis to global news media coverage to examine which framings related to desalination’s adaptive and maladaptive features are most prevalent and in what combinations. The third chapter presents a discourse analysis of stakeholder statements and official deliberations tied to the Huntington Beach desalination facility in southern California, which was ultimately denied, to reveal the key storylines that arise both in favor of and in opposition to desalination during permitting debates. This dissertation’s key findings highlight the significance of expert knowledge in shaping global water policy, biases in the current information landscape of desalination as a climate adaptation strategy, and the opportunities for engaging with diverse stakeholders for collaborative decision-making on water management options like desalination.

Large-scale Marine Protected Areas (LSMPAs) have recently and rapidly proliferated as a tool in global conservation governance, despite growing concerns for the implications for social justice and equity. This dissertation contributes to the emergent scholarship on the “human dimensions” of LSMPAs through a qualitative, multi-sited ethnography of the process of establishing two LSMPAs in Rapa Nui (Easter Island, Chile), focusing on how politics and power affect outcomes for equity in marine conservation practice. It engages with the anthropological literature on conservation, using the framework of political ontology to explore the following three, thematic research questions:

1) Collapsing the Nature/Culture Divide: What are the “human dimensions” of large-scale marine conservation in sites characterized as “remote” and “pristine”?

2) Identifying Multi-natures in LSMPA Establishment: What are the effects of LSMPAs that purport to conserve remote and pristine spaces on indigenous ontologies of marine territory in Rapa Nui?

3) Multi-culturalism in LSMPA Establishment: How do the power relations and the politics of authority and recognition within participatory LSMPA establishment processes affect social justice outcomes for the indigenous Rapanui people?

Overall, this dissertation engages with anthropological theories of conservation and the emergent field of political ontology to provide an account of the human dimensions of LSMPAs, with a focus on how ontological politics and power relations affect indigenous participation in establishment processes. The dissertation is divided into three chapters, which are introduced with short, ethnographic vignettes that root this data within its ethnographic context and use storytelling to further develop the theoretical contributions of each chapter through the words and perspectives of the individuals who contributed to this ethnography. This dissertation contributes to anthropological analyses of conservation practice through an ethnographic account of the ontological dimensions of environmental conflict. It contributes to the burgeoning literature on the human dimensions of LSMPAs through an empirical engagement with participatory practice in LSMPA establishment processes.

Human-caused environmental destruction is the result of a life rhythm that requires numbing to ecological impact. Through my Embodied Interdisciplinary Praxis Thesis, I have developed my dance practice, begun a community practice, and curated a performance, portal obscura, all investigating ecological relations through dance. Ecological relation is defined as focusing attention on the relations between living creatures (flora, fauna, fungi, and bacteria) and their environment (including land, air, water, and objects). I propose an ecological dance aesthetic that moves with an expanded sense of time, space, and selfhood while interweaving worlds of reality and imagination. Through this research project, I developed a dance practice that honed my awareness and sensation of self and ecological relationality. I shared my practice in a solo performance, portal obscura, where I invited the audience to traverse the performance space and interact with poetry and sculptures devised to enhance the ecological awareness of situating, observing, and relating. I stress that noticing connections and making communities across differences are essential first steps to a less human-centric environmental ethic.