In the United States during the last 30 years there has been a shift from extractive natural resource-based economies of the Old West to a New West defined by environmental protection. Over the past century, a growing national support for environmental protection has influenced a lengthening list of national and state parks, national monuments, national wildlife refuges, and wilderness areas in the western United States. Increasingly, urbanites seeking outdoor recreation and enhanced "quality of life" are attracted to the rural towns, or "gateway towns," bordering these protected natural areas. Boulder and Escalante, Utah, traditional ranching communities that became gateway towns to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument on September 18, 1996, are western rural towns currently experiencing such change. President Clinton created Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument (GSENM) by invoking the Antiquities Act and thus bypassing congressional approval and National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requirements. As a result, the local people of Boulder and Escalante have expressed anger and hostility toward the federal government and environmentalists, which has led to community dysfunction and polarization, leaving Boulder and Escalante in disadvantageous positions as gateway towns faced with the task of planning for increased tourism and population growth. In my thesis I utilize cultural survival theory and perspectives on environmentalism, tourism and growth management to explore the various impacts of GSENM on Boulder and Escalante's local culture and to identify possible remedies or alternatives to these impacts. Methods used in collecting data include background research, participant observation, recent related survey data, and in-depth interviews with Boulder and Escalante residents. Research findings show that GSENM threatens the local culture by infringing on local territoriality, introducing outside values, beliefs and ideas, forcing rapid and unwanted change on a traditional people, and leaving locals feeling voiceless and powerless in the face of change. In sum, I found that a lack of both trust and cultural sensitivity have played roles in fostering community dysfunction and polarization. However, I believe that common ground and community solidarity can be achieved in Boulder and Escalante through the re-establishment of trust, a greater sensitivity toward the local culture, and proper leadership. / Graduation date: 2001

The aim of this dissertation is to understand how worries over nature’s degradation, ensuing securitization practices, and emergent norms intersect in environmental protected areas. It concerns the Nilgiri Biosphere in Kerala, South India, and how regimes of nature protection effect the lives of its human inhabitants, the Kurumba, a so-called primitive adivasi tribe. Combining ethnography with archival research, it asserts that the labors and logics of nature protection, present and past, participate in a distinctly liberal problematic of competing securities, manifest in the tension between sovereign discretions and the freedoms of legal rights and market interests. This study makes two overarching claims. First, that during the colonial era, nature’s inessential character allowed for flexibilities in legal interpretation that furthered imperial ambitions. In the silence of the law, norms mediated by colonialist pejoratives operated to satisfy those ambitions, while supplementing the knowledge necessary for government. Second, analysis of recent environmental movements and ecological projects surrounding the Nilgiri Biosphere shows how norms derived from civil society are produced to intervene between security prerogatives and social freedoms. The upshot of these normative practices, I argue, is to depoliticize natures and agencies, while extending and intensifying security’s command of unruly natures. While ensuring lives lived in accordance to it, this normativity endangers those who fall short of or otherwise elude it. To understand this endangerment, I provide an interpretation of adivasi resistances and rejections, in particular the Kurumba turn to illicit cultivation of ganja in the Biosphere’s core area. I contextualize this turn within the history of forest-adivasi relations, recent adivasi actions elsewhere within the Nilgiri Biosphere, and the global discourses of indigenous peoples and the environment. I argue that by operating not through a putative politics of rights and interest, but through counter-conducts and illegalities, the Kurumba present a challenge to the political as such.

published_or_final_version / Environmental Management / Master / Master of Science in Environmental Management

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. April 2017 / Sustainable development is one of the major discourses of the twenty first century. In many instances sustainable development has been synonymous with the discourse of ecological modernisation. Ecological modernisation, as a discourse, has been proposed as an entreating means to reach the ideal of development that is sustainable, but has by and large only been tested within developed nations. There is, however, a prominent academic debate centred on the potential social and environmental justice concerns that may emanate from the promotion of ecological modernisation in environmental policy. This research project aimed to understand the degree to which ecological modernisation has been embraced in South Africa, and the environmental justice implications of this adoption. This was in an attempt to build an environmental justice policy framework for ecological modernisation in a bid to address environmental justice concerns. South African energy policy and practice was investigated in order to do this. Civil society hold an esteemed position in ecological modernisation, and as such in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a number of civil society activists who are involved in a range of campaigns for environmental justice. Their insights and solutions to potential environmental justice concerns that would result from using ecological modernisation were investigated. This was done in an attempt to build a list of environmental justice principles that can possibly be used to inform policies based on ecological modernisation in order to ensure just development. These criteria address the role of government, the role of society at large, as well as industry, and for the most part seek to understand if the disparate power dynamics that exist amongst these three actors can potentially be addressed. South African energy policies were analysed for evidence of these justice principles. It was found that South African energy policies do not address environmental justice in any measure that would truly allow for justice to be put into the practice of governing the environment. Therefore, by incorporating these environmental justice principles into ecological modernisation, ecological modernisation can potentially be stronger in approach to sustainable development than it presently is. / MT 2018

Modern cities are often perceived as the antithesis of nature; the built environment is understood as the transformation of raw and untamed nature into a rationalized human landscape. However, a variety of scholars since the nineteenth century have noted the persistence of nature in cities, not only in providing essential services but also resisting human control. Most recently, urban geographers and environmental historians have argued that processes of urbanization do not entail the replacement of natural with artificial environments, but are more accurately understood as a reconfiguration of human/nature relations. In this dissertation, I employ this relational perspective to study a specific form of urban nature: stormwater flows. Urban drainage or stormwater management activities in US cities are a vivid example of the tensions between nature, society, and technology. In this study, I present a comparative case study of two US cities--Austin, Texas and Seattle, Washington--where stormwater issues have been a central focus of public debate over the last four decades. Using textual analysis, in-depth interviews, and experiential research methods, I argue that stormwater management practices involve not only the rational management of technological networks but also implicate a wide range of seemingly unrelated issues, such as local governance, environmental protection, land use decisionmaking, community development, aesthetics, and social equity. To describe the relational implications of urban nature, I present a framework of ecological politics to characterize drainage activities as rational, populist, or civic. I argue that the latter form of politics has the greatest potential to relieve the tensions between urban residents and their material surroundings by embracing a systems perspective of human/nonhuman relations and engaging local residents in the hands-on management of environmental flows. It is through the development of deliberative and grounded forms of civic politics that urban residents can forge new relationships between technology and nature, and in the process, understand their place in the world. / text