Browsing by Subject "Landscape"

Variously romanticized as the repository of American Protestantism, free market capitalism, and self-sufficient individualism, or defined by material actions of conquest and colonization, the history of the Rocky Mountain West is a complicated constellation of myth and reality. This dissertation evaluates the efforts of three religious communities to negotiate a place within that constellation. Northern Arapaho wage laborers in central Wyoming, Mormon merchants in Salt Lake City, Utah, and Roman Catholic hard-rock miners in Butte, Montana, leveraged their religious and ethnic identities to negotiate places of sovereignty in the western landscape. While each case study presents a distinct relationship between religion and labor, each is grounded in the materiality of exchange and economics in order to show the inseparability of religion from the economic practices that enabled the creation and endurance of nineteenth-century Western communities. Despite the concealing mechanisms of a single, idealized trajectory of American nationhood, the narration of national space was haunted and disrupted by the persistence of alternate, but interconnected, religious geographies, which re-scripted hegemonic narratives of American religious and economic exceptionalism. Using the tools of archival research and the collection of oral histories, this dissertation explores the tension of the familiar and the unfamiliar in the pastoral heartland of the American myth.

Topography, vegetation, nutrient dynamics, soil features and hydroclimatic forcing are inherently coupled, with feedbacks occurring over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. Vegetation growth may be limited by soil moisture, nutrient or solar radiation availability, and in turn influences both soil moisture and nutrient balances at a point. These dynamics are further complicated in a complex terrain, through a series of spatial interactions. A number of experiments has characterized the feedbacks between soil moisture and vegetation dynamics, but a theoretical framework linking short-term leaf-level to interannual plot-scale dynamics has not been fully developed yet. Such theory is needed for optimal management of water resources in natural ecosystems and for agricultural, municipal and industrial uses. Also, it complements the current knowledge on ecosystem response to the predicted climate change.

In this dissertation, the response of vegetation dynamics to unpredictable environmental fluctuations at multiple space-time scales is explored in a modeling framework from sub-daily to interannual time scales. At the hourly time scale, a simultaneous analysis of photosynthesis, transpiration and soil moisture dynamics is carried out to explore the impact of water stress on different photosynthesis processes at the leaf level, and the overall plant activity. Daily soil moisture and vegetation dynamics are then scaled up to the growing season using a stochastic model accounting for daily to interannual hydroclimatic variability. Such stochastic framework is employed to explore the impact of rainfall patterns and different irrigation schemes on crop productivity, along with their implications in terms of sustainability and profitability. To scale up from point to landscape, a probabilistic representation of local landscape features (i.e., slope and aspect) is developed, and applied to assess the effects of topography on solar radiation. Finally, a minimalistic ecosystem model, including soil moisture, vegetation and nutrient dynamics at the year time scale, is outlined; when coupled to the proposed probabilistic topographic description, the latter model can serve to assess the relevance of spatial interactions and to single out the main biophysical controls responsible for ecohydrological variability at the landscape scale.

This dissertation explores contemporary walking narratives – fictions formally organized around and guided by journeys “on foot” – in order to consider the deeply rooted literary-historical, aesthetic, and ethical relationships among practices of walking, writing, remembering, and haunting. By contemplating the ways in which contemporary authors reimagine the walking narrative as a historically embedded and physically embodied site of experimental spatial and social practices and radical modes of historical consciousness, this project encourages us to question the most obvious ways in which we encounter and represent the world. Walking narratives challenge readers and literary critics alike to reflect on the intimacies and intricacies of paths, place, pace, and point of view, thereby destabilizing familiar conceptualizations of perceptual, geographic, autobiographic, and historical knowledge. At the same time, these insistently and unsettlingly hybrid fictions also reconfigure the boundaries of genre, encouraging a theoretical and aesthetic reorientation of literary-critical knowledge guided by metaphors of spatial and temporal trespass, moments of historical surprise, recognition, and wonder, and networks of bodies in motion.

Integrating the critical-interpretive methods of literary studies with the practice-centered theories of cultural geography and performance studies, this project examines how texts by W. G. Sebald, Iain Sinclair, and Teju Cole engage with interdisciplinary questions of movement, personal identity, the philosophy of history, and place. Situating these works within the emerging critical field of “walking studies,” I argue that contemporary walking narratives become textual testing grounds for practices of wandering and wondering that (re)animate the histories embedded in landscape and allow the ghosts of the past to speak in ethically urgent ways. Through the linked practices of walking and writing, contemporary walking narratives open new routes through which to encounter literature and landscape and inspire spectral conversations designed to illuminate new points of entry into past and present, world and word.