This dissertation argues that from 1880 to 2010 the American natural and artificial Christmas tree industries remodeled themselves after one another. Artificial tree companies modeled their products after the natural tree, hoping to make them look, smell, and feel like the real thing. As these replica trees became popular, scientists, extension agents, and farmers worked to control the natural Christmas tree crop unlike ever before. Those efforts stemmed from a desire to wrest from nature the same kind of idealized silhouettes their plastic counterparts celebrated. Both industries tried to convince the country’s consumers to buy what they were selling. Through Americans’ shifting Christmas tree experience, this dissertation highlights the evolution of particular cultural and environmental ideas. It reveals how both the natural and artificial tree industries intentionally misled the public about the ecological implications of their businesses. Further, it demonstrates that although many Americans believed that the natural Christmas tree ritual could instill the children’s youth with an appreciation of the outdoors or the value of the hard work symbolized by the felling of a tree and dragging it into the living room, by the 1960s such an outlook became contested unlike ever before. As fake tree companies promised convenience, many citizens looked upon their ersatz tree as a symbol of progress and good environmental stewardship just as others worried that modernity would alienate the nation’s youth from the wild spaces and hard work of their ancestors. This dissertation also considers how gender animated the trade by showing how farmers frequently blamed the nation’s women for their reliance on pesticides. That chemical dependency, farmers maintained, was the only way to grow the shapely trees the nation’s women supposedly demanded. Growers also trivialized the work of women within the business in an effort to bolster their own masculine image. As the crop spawned festivals in some communities, locals equated tree bodies with those of women, overtly implying that beauty was most important in both.

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Making Water Pure: A History of Water Softening from Potash to Tide, is a history of water softening in the United States from 1860 through 1970. Water’s materiality, specifically its tendency to dissolve geological features, consistently interfered with labor processes, especially those that relied on the use of soap or steam. For this reason, the management and control over the quality of water in both domestic and industrial spaces was regular and in many cases economically imperative. Nineteenth-century laborers dealt with hard water on the individual level. They experimented with a variety of different chemicals and methods, including the addition of lye, coffee, blood meal, and wool fiber to water. Throughout the twentieth century, the requirements of industrial efficiency as well as new consumer technologies demanded fast, easy, and standard ways to soften water. This motivated manufactures to produce mechanical water softening systems and synthetic chemicals. This dissertation traces this change and asserts that the history of getting water soft is a history of environmental control and management. Water softening is a lens through which to explore often overlooked actors in the history of managing nonhuman nature such as women, domestic workers, laborers, home economists, advertisers, and commercial chemists. Hard water is a thread that connects usually separate categories such as the home and the factory, industrial chemicals and household cleaners. The control over water was uneven and incomplete and allows for the exploration of the tensions intrinsic in the attempted mastery over nature. The regularity of making soft water reveals not only society’s relationship with water, but the social nature of water itself. Water is a product of ecological, social, and technological discourses and practices-- a hybrid of both environment and culture. To soften water was to make nature fit; it was an effort to standardize nonhuman nature so that it would cooperate with certain technologies, processes, and cultural assumptions. / History

This project is about the visual ways people represent the nonhuman world, and the struggles over its meaning. It is the story of how the Canadian government used the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) to manufacture and sustain a national identity that was defined by its encounters with nature, and how those definitions morphed over time. The NFB was established in 1939 by the federal government. It was to be the eyes and ears of Canada, a way for Canadians to experience the nation. As a cultural institution supported by the state, the NFB is fertile ground for an examination of state discourses about nature. In particular, I analyze NFB films as vehicles for the Canadian government’s long-running nation-building project. Between 1939 and 1974, NFB filmmakers aligned their representations of nature with the views of the government. They imagined nature as a unifying symbol of national identity and as an object to be surveyed, rationalized and exploited by government institutions. Utilitarian narratives about natural resources and wilderness management served other ideological motives too. Specifically, NFB films about nature in the postwar period privileged a high modern way of seeing the environment. This project also seeks to discern instances of ideological conflict between filmmakers and official “environmental” viewpoints, where government strategies are questioned, ridiculed or reformulated in the films themselves. Although the NFB is a product of state policy as well as an interpreter of it, it was also actively involved in producing grass-roots narratives about the environment. The NFB’s directive to “interpret Canada to Canadians” unwittingly created opportunities for independent filmmakers to share their own visions of nature that often diverged from the state. This project therefore investigates moments where filmmakers used the camera as an apparatus of reflection to challenge and subvert state modes of thinking. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was established and financed by the federal government to be the “eyes of Canada.” It is therefore a valuable site in which to examine, among other things, how the state defined the limits and uses of nature. While NFB discourses about the environment often mirrored state ideology, they also reflected alternative voices and perspectives. Filmmakers made documentaries within the NFB production system that challenged, questioned, or even ridiculed state ideology. In other words, nature was not only imagined as a national resource to be exploited and controlled through technology and science, it was also envisioned as something to be appreciated for its ecological diversity and its wildness.

As protected spaces for nature are becoming a key global policy for preserving biodiversity for the future, this thesis uses a novel theoretical approach to propose a multispecies history of conservation that re-evaluates their origins. I selected the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust’s reserve at Slimbridge, in Gloucester, England as my case study to demonstrate this. Slimbridge is well suited because of its early origins (1946 – present day) and strong archival record. The trust published annual reports every year from 1946 and these large documents containscientific reports, anecdotal observations, and administrative decision-making processes that are an untapped resource for writing histories of the development of conservation spaces. Looking for moments of tension between known and unknown nature, charismatic and mundane animal experiences, and the construction of multispecies political orderings within the reports drew my analysis towards a narrative around these zones that blends environmental history writing with theoretical analysis. Slimbridge is re-situated through this work as a complex process of creating, sustaining, and reproducing new relationships between the trust, semi-tame animals, and wild birds that came to constitute what I describe as a conservation space. Crucially, it is the relationships that conservation builds that it reproduces and protects, so we should think of conservation as a way to build new, more resilient, and just ecologies.

Since the 1950s, more than 6 million dolphins have died as by-catch in the American yellowfin tuna fishery. These deaths were not caused by accidental incidents between fishermen and dolphins but resulted from a method of fishing that purposefully targeted these animals in order to catch yellowfin tuna. Referred to as “fishing on porpoise,” this technique remained an industry secret for decades. By the early 1970s, however, dolphin by-catch had become a major environmental issue in the United States, thanks to the work of William F. Perrin. In the following years, politicians, scientists, environmentalists, and members of the tuna industry struggled with how best to resolve the problem. While the debates that arose from the “tuna-porpoise controversy” helped to dramatically reduce dolphin by-catch, these solutions did not come easily. This thesis looks to bring this forgotten moment in American environmental history to the historical forefront by exploring the origins and early years of the tuna-porpoise controversy. By examining this period, this thesis will show why fishermen first used dolphins to catch tuna in the 1950s, how and why dolphin by-catch became such a major environmental issue in the 1970s, and what various groups and individuals did to ameliorate the problem during the period. / Graduate

The Arctic—warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet—is a source of striking imagery of amplified environmental change in our time, and has come to serve as a spatial setting for climate crisis discourse. The recent alterations in the Arctic environment have also been perceived by some observers as an opportunity to expand economic exploitation. Heightened geopolitical interest in the region and its resources, contradicted by calls for the protection of fragile Far North ecosystems, has rendered the Arctic an arena for negotiating human interactions with nature, and for reflecting upon the planetary risks and possibilities associated with the advent and expansion of the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in Earth history in which humankind is said to have gained geological agency and become the dominant force over the Earth system. With the Arctic serving as a nexus of crosscutting analytical themes spanning contemporary history (the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century until 2015), this dissertation examines defining characteristics of the Anthropocene and how the concept, which emerged from the Earth system science community, impacts ideas and assumptions in historiography, social sciences and the environmental humanities, including the fields of environmental history, crisis management and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies (STS). The primary areas of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation encompass constructivist perspectives and temporal conceptions of environmental and climate crisis; the role of science and expertise in performing politics and shaping social discourse; the geopolitical significance of telecoupling—a concept that reflects the interconnectedness of the Anthropocene and supports stakeholder claims across wide spatial scales; and implications of the recent transformation in humankind’s long duration relationship with the natural world. Several dissertation themes were observed in practice at the international science community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, where global change is made visible through a concentration of scientific activity. Ny-Ålesund is furthermore a place of geopolitics, where extra-regional states attempt to enhance their legitimacy as Arctic stakeholders through the performance of scientific research undertakings, participation in governance institutions, and by establishing a physical presence in the Far North. This dissertation concludes that this small and remote community represents an Anthropocene node of global environmental change, Earth system science, emergent global governance, geopolitics, and stakeholder construction in an increasingly telecoupled world.

Through studying the intersections of sanitation and segregation in Brooklyn, New York in the post-WWII era, this thesis reveals a web of willful white negligence that constructed a narrative that supports continued environmental injustices towards black Americans. As a result of housing discrimination, the lack of sanitation, and the political and social climate of the 1950s, black neighborhoods in Brooklyn became dirtier with abandoned garbage. Institutional anti-black racism not only permitted and supported the degradation of black neighborhoods, but also created an association between black Americans and trash. In the present day, this narrative not only leads to the increased segregation of black Americans into dirty neighborhoods, but also justifies more environmental injustice in these vulnerable communities. Based on a case study of Brooklyn in the 1950s, this thesis asserts that environmental injustices are more than just siting landfills and toxic sites proximate to vulnerable neighborhoods, but rather they are dependent on the creation and preservation of narratives that claim minority communities are naturally predisposed to or deserving of living in dirty and unclean places.

<p>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.</p> / Dissertation

O cultivo da mandioca possui uma estreita relação com o campesinato brasileiro, estando presente entre seus cultivos desde sua gênese e ainda hoje é parte obrigatória da alimentação de vários segmentos da população brasileira das áreas rurais. Atualmente a maior parte da produção do tubérculo provém de áreas econômica e ecologicamente marginais sendo cultivado por meio de práticas agrícolas tradicionais, denominadas de agricultura de corte-e-queima. Porém, nos últimos anos a produção de mandioca tem apresentado uma contínua queda, principalmente no Estado de São Paulo, onde as transformações agrícolas foram mais intensas. Assim, é mediante a importância histórica do cultivo da mandioca entre os camponeses e a atual situação deste cultivo que colocamos nosso problema da seguinte forma: O declínio do cultivo da mandioca apresentado hoje não é um fenômeno recente, mas sim histórico se iniciando em outras épocas. Assim nosso objetivo principal é localizar as bases históricas do declínio do cultivo deste tubérculo entre os camponeses do Estado de São Paulo. Para atingir nosso objetivo adotamos o referencial teórico-metodológico da Historia Ambiental, que nos fornece elementos para fazer esta análise na perspectiva das relações entre as sociedades humanas e o mundo natural, usando para isso dados de diversas áreas como a Economia, a Antropologia, a Arqueologia, a Ecologia, além da História Social e Econômica. / The culture of the cassava has a narrow relationship with the Brazilian small rural culture, being present among its cultures since its genesis and until today it is a mandatory part of the feeding in some segments of the Brazilian population in the agricultural areas. Currently most of the tubercle production comes from economic and ecologically outskirt areas being cultivated through traditional agriculturists methods, called slash and burn agriculture. However, during the last years the cassava production has presented a continuous fall, mainly in the São Paulo state, where the agricultural transformations had been more intense. Thus, due the historical importance of the cassava culture between the peasants and the current situation of this culture, we place our problem on the following form: The current decline of the cassava culture is not a recent phenomenon, but historical and initiating at other times. Thus our main objective is to locate the historical bases of the decline of this tubercle culture among the peasants of the Sao Paulo state. To reach our objective we adopt the theoretician-methodological referential of the Environmental History, that supplies us elements to make this analysis in the perspective of the relations between the human societies and the natural world, using for this data from several areas as the Economy, the Anthropology, Archaeology, the Ecology, and also Social and Economic History.