abstract: ABSTRACT Human and wildlife behavior, governance, and economics are often cited obstacles to wildlife conservation. Accordingly, conservation research has historically been conducted in the exterior terrains of behavior and systems, which can be empirically observed or known through systemic analysis and applied through institutional or technical fixes. However, conservation interventions are failing because they do not adequately address the influence of individual and collective interior phenomena including psychological states, worldviews, values, and identities of stakeholders, which can bear decisively on conservation outcomes. This critical analysis of wildlife conservation science and the social and political histories of Southwestern landscapes illustrates the mechanism of social, cultural, and media narrative linking four irreducible perspectives of the natural world: the I, WE, IT and ITS, or the psychological, cultural, behavioral and structural/systemic terrains, which ground contemporary conservation. Through the conceptual [Re]animation of conservation, this research justifies a more-than-human approach to wildlife conservation that resists the ontological privilege of the human and contemplates human and non-human animals as vitally linked in their mutually relational, perceptual and material environments. The approach extends the human to the natural environment and also accounts for the individual and social needs and perspectives of wild animals, which shape their adaptation to changing environments and conservation interventions. A qualitative analysis of emotion, metaphor, and narrative utilizing an Integral Ecology framework explores how psychological and cultural terrains link to, and influence, the behavioral and systemic terrains of Mexican gray wolf (Canis lupus baileyi) conservation in the U.S. Southwest. This research disentangles and comprehensively maps influential elements in the four terrains; enhancing relational knowledge on human-predator coexistence and conservation governance in the Southwest. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Environmental Social Science 2019

Gary Snyder has offered, in poems and essays, ways to acknowledge the interrelationships of humans with the more-than-human. He questions common notions of selfness as well as understandings of what it is to be human in relationship to other species and ecosystems, and he offers new paradigms for the relationship between cultures and the ecosystems in which these cultures reside. These new paradigms are rooted in a reevaluation of our attitudes toward our physical bodies which impacts our relationship to the earth and raises new possibilities for an ecological spirituality or philosophy. The sum of Snyder's endeavors is a foundation for an understanding of ecopoetics. Snyder's poem "The Trail is Not a Trail" is an interesting place to begin examining how human perceptions of the self are central to the kinds of relationships that humans believe are possible between our species and everything else. In this poem there is a curious fusion of the speaker and the trail. In fact, with each successive line they become increasingly difficult to separate. The physical self is central to Snyder's poetry because his is a poetry of the self physically rooted in ever-shifting relationship with the biosphere. The relationship of the self to the biosphere in Snyder's poetry also points toward a spiritual experience that can be called ecomysticism, by which I mean the space where new ecological paradigms and mystical understandings of the world overlap. Ecomysticism goes beyond mysticisms that describe a spiritual being longing for supernatural experience while being "unfortunately" trapped in a physical body. Ecomysticism emphasizes the spiritual and physical interrelatedness or interconnectedness of all matter, the human and the more-than-human. The integration of the spiritual and physical aspects of the self is only possible through an awareness of the interrelatedness of the self and the non-human. New paradigms for the self are thus central to ecopoetics, a poetics that seeks to heal the rift between humans and the biosphere.

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In The Pearl Button, Patricio Guzman explores the role water played in shaping how the Selk’nam inhabited the coasts of the Tierra del Fuego in Patagonia through “cosmovisions,’ sequences that extend beyond human perception, even as they link the habitation of indigenous peoples to subsequent colonial and political projects. Guzman’s “cosmovisual aesthetic” warrants dissection in the form of a video essay because of its complicated interplay between editing and shot distance, which establishes a critical bioregionalism that acknowledges the unique qualities of place, here the Tierra del Fuego, as well as the forces of globalization that threaten it. Guzman’s cosmovisual aesthetic ranges from extreme close-ups to reveal minute details in objects to aerial shots that articulate the shapes of coasts and even to telescopic shots depicting planets and nebulae. He works with archival photography and the superimposition of images/sounds in order to create a pluriverse of peoples and environments, which moves beyond human audiovisual and temporal perception. In doing so, The Pearl Button links the ways in which the Selk’nam inhabited Chile, depending on its waters, to the ocean as the source of the colonial project of Spain and site of political murders under the later dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Guzman’s cinematic elaboration of Indigenous worldviews resonates with contemporary Chilean philosophers Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and Ricardo Rozzi. From cybernetics to ecological philosophy, this video essay weaves the insights of these Chilean philosophers with Guzman’s cosomovisions in order to highlight the complex ecological insights at the intersection of Indigenous thought and film form. In particular, it extends Rozzi’s practical model of Field Environmental Philosophy to communicating ecological philosophy through media.

The hegemonic Eurocentric culture that dominates the United States accultures African American men into an ideal of Manhood that is antithetical to their being. “Man-Up” an emotional deflective and dominating command, has been a bedrock of African American dislocation to their journey towards Manhood. By returning to an African epistemology and culture rooted in the search for Ma’at, African men throughout the diaspora and within the United States can recover a humane and culturally dislocated definition of Manhood that works in concert with their women, environment, and the cosmological order. This dissertation examines the standard of Manhood in Kemet; whether African American men have sought Ma’at in their description of Manhood; and finally, explores how the Maatian standard of Manhood may reorient African American men into a cultural norm that harmonizes families, communities, and ecologies. There is no overarching question for this work. Still, one central focus is to liberate African men from colonizing cultural models of Manhood and reorient them with an African cultural idea founded on the principle of Ma’at. / Africology and African American Studies

In response to the human-centered contours of care in the mainstream ethical frameworks of Nel Noddings, Eva Feder Kittay, and Virginia Held, I consider the possibility of including plant life in care ethics. This dissertation argues for inclusion of plant cared-fors in care ethics based on the capability of human carers and plant cared-fors to meet central criteria at the core of the caring relationship: carers’ valuing-attitudes for plants, caring affect towards plants, human-plant interdependency, responsive interactivity between humans and plants, and plant success conditions. These factors establish the coherency of plant cared-fors in care ethics. After offering the argument for a plant inclusive care ethic, I demonstrate in three case studies that ethical care between human carers and plant cared-fors indeed is substantiated in the world. Through interviews and other empirical research, I provide sketches of contemporary relationships in the United States between human carers and plant cared-fors in three contexts: bonsai, tomato plants, and giant sequoia trees. Despite context-relevant challenges of each (aesthetic, consumption, and wild, respectively), the case studies highlight the possibility, and in some cases actuality, of ethical care in human-plant relationships of care. / Philosophy

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