In this thesis, the work of Serge Moscovici on the human history of nature is made relevant to his theory of social representations. This theoretical synthesis breaks away both from the realist assumption of a given, immutable and non-socialised nature, and from the individualist conceptualisations of man-environment relations which still dominate environmental, ecological and social psychology. It is argued that social representations are not solely the concern of epistemology; they have ontological correlates and are involved in the social construction on nature. The empirical study investigates how social representations of nature functioned in Shetland - a society which combines traditional and late modern features - in the wake of the Braer oil spill in January 1993. The findings are based on the qualitative analysis of 17 individual interviews, five small group discussions, 375 articles from the newspaper The Shetland Times, the transcript of a public debate on the Cost of the Braer for Shetland and, more generally, participant observation. The analysis reveals the synchronic existence of three distinct, yet interrelated, social representations of nature: organic, mechanistic and cybernetic. Each of them is intrinsically related to a particular sense of identity, mode of knowledge, and mode of relations to nature. "Real Shetlanders" hold predominantly organic representations, whereby nature constitutes a repository of their history, a definer of their identity as a marginal but resilient community. It is known through direct engagement and participation in a life world. By contrast, "Sooth-Moothers" (outsiders) hold mechanistic and/or cybernetic representations which rest upon some universal, abstract knowledge of the systemic properties of "the environment". Their relations to nature oscillate between domination, mastery and protection. However, the imperatives facing the community, together with constant exchanges of information via the media, blur the boundaries between representations.

The empirical focus for this thesis research is Toronto, Canada where four case study sites are investigated and fifty-seven semi-structured interviews conducted with a range of actors both directly and indirectly involved in the creation of New Urbanist-inspired development projects. Two of the sample projects are situated in greenfield locations outside the administrative boundary of the City of Toronto, and two are situated in brownfield locations on formerly developed lands, both within the urban core of the City of Toronto. The contrasting contexts of the study units have been purposefully selected to explore the possibility of multi-factor causality involving contrasts of place, process, time, and social interaction. Underpinning this empirical research is the contention that the structures of provision model provides a useful approach for framing housing production research. However, it is argued that the evaluative power of this approach is limited by its inability to adequately account for how and why the New Urbanist form of provision has emerged, been legitimised, and normalised as 'best practice' within Toronto. In an unorthodox move, the final chapter of this thesis takes the level of theorisation enabled via the empirical framework of the structures of provision a step further to address this shortcoming. This is done by applying a 'rationalities' perspective to the investigation of how and why New Urbanism has become such a powerful force within Toronto's development cultures.

The sites and settings of structured youth work have been a neglected sphere of study in contemporary human geography. This thesis addresses this silence through an examination of The Boys’ Brigade – a voluntary Christian uniformed youth work movement. Limited in geographic scope to Scotland, the thesis draws upon a multiple-methods research strategy comprising: a mail-based questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, and a period of participant observation, incorporating participatory approaches with boys. Resting upon Foucouldian theoretical foundations, and written with audiences both within and without academia in mind, the thesis argues that a failure to appreciate the spatialities of structured youth work settings invariably results in partial accounts of both the motives underpinning their voluntary provision by adults’ and boys’ participation in them. More specifically, it suggests that the spaces of structured youth work are realised through small-scale processes of negotiation between boys and adults that stabilise a shared spatio-temporal regime – a structure – through which youth work is conducted by both adults and boys. It contends that it is space itself, and particularly its purposive ordering, that is both enlisted and resisted to achieve this fleeting stabilisation with its attendant disciplinary and developmental ends. In so doing the thesis delivers an analytical framework through which other spaces of structured youth work can be read that, by remaining alert to the interweaving of the geographies of voluntary provision and participation, neither overplays adults’ nor downplays young people’s agency in their creation.

This thesis provides new ways of thinking about human-bird encounters under domestication, providing the first substantive geographical study of ‘pigeon geographies’. It explores the spaces, practices, and human-pigeon relationships involved in pigeon showing and long-distance pigeon racing in Britain, from the mid-nineteenth century up until World War Two. The growth of fancy pigeon exhibitions was part of a wider Victorian passion for domesticating animals, at a time when human bodies were also subject to increasing aesthetic and moral scrutiny. Long-distance pigeon racing emerged at the end of this period, organised competitive sport more generally seen as an important means of moral improvement and identity expression. Like many other competitive pastimes in the second half of the nineteenth century, then, institutional bodies were formed to manage the expansion of showing and long-distance racing. The Pigeon Club and the Marking Conference were formed in 1885 to oversee British pigeon exhibitions, whilst the National Homing Union, formed in 1896, governed British long-distance pigeon racing. Both pastimes facilitated the formation of social worlds around varieties of domestic pigeon (Columba livia) and their respective practices. Whilst these pastimes historically had strong concentrations of male working-class followers – particularly in the north-west and north-east – they were both widespread throughout Britain and spanned all socio-economic classes, although accounts of female fanciers were rare. Through the exhibition of pigeons, fanciers debated and defined aesthetics, formulating breeding standards for each fancy breed, and questioning the ways in which pigeons were manipulated – sometimes contentiously – to produce the ‘ideal’. Long-distance pigeon racers, on the other hand, sought to understand and hone their birds’ athletic abilities, becoming entangled in scientific debate about homing, as well as geographical questions about the conduct and regulation of their sport. Racers were also drawn into aesthetic debates, exhibiting their racing birds during the off-season, the show pen becoming a fascinating frontier between showing and racing. Through the organisation of the spaces and practices that made up the fabric of these pastimes, pigeon showing and long-distance racing reconfigured both humans and their birds, the two becoming closely intertwined through collaborative encounters.

This thesis investigates the evolutionary ecology of Homo erectus, focussing on the differential impact of the environment on the species' life history strategy. Departing from previous studies in taking an integrated approach, it examines the related factors of age-specific mortality, encephalisation, and the rate and energetic burden of growth, in order to identify the mechanism by which H. erectus adapted to a diverse range of climates and environments, and how thoroughly that adaptation was achieved. An exploration of the environmental tolerance of H erectus is framed within a model that shows regions that comprised the core of the species, where tolerance is highest and conditions are optimum for growth and reproduction, and periphery regions which fall towards the extremes of tolerance and have repercussive effects on encephalisation, juvenile mortality and growth. Life history traits should vary accordingly, allowing the development of a model for the relationship between environmental variation and the differential evolution of H. erectus. The work is organised thematically. Having provided an overview of evolutionary ecology and introduced the concept of paleo-demes as a means of organising, grouping and understanding the fossils of H. erectus, I address the shortcomings of the r-K dichotomy with a study of age-specific mortality. This work is then applied to patterns of encephalisation, and the energetic implications bf increasing brain size are addressed. A comparative study of two modern human populations supports the prediction that stability of environment translates into stability of growth, and these findings are applied to H. erectus. I demonstrate that H erectus exhibited a long-term trend of an increasing cranial capacity, but that this was not uniform across the species and had varying success, with subsequent energetic stress in the young resulting in high juvenile mortality in some areas. I conclude that the model of core and periphery relates to the latitude of the environment, and that H. erectus was an adaptable and flexible species with a number of strategies available to maximise survival in a range of environmental conditions.

No description available.

No description available.

The investigation was formulated to clarify and supplement the limited palaeoenvironmenta1 evidence available from the chalklands of central southern England. Pollen analysis was the principal technique utilised. Only two deposits within the chalk outcrop contained sufficient fossil pollen for analysis: a riverine peat north of Winchester and a mire in clays overlying chalk at Snelsmore in Berkshire. Consequently, five sites peripheral to the chalk were also examined: Amberley in Sussex, Rimsmoor, Okers and Kingswood in Dorset and Woodhay in Berkshire, The sequence from Winchester provides evidence for the Boreal and Atlantic woodland of the chalk and exhibits an early Ulmus decline clearance. Open conditions appear to have prevailed in at least this area of the Hampshire Downs since the Early Neolithic. The Snelsmore data show that from the end of the UImus decline clearance, woodland was a more common feature of the local landscape. The peripheral sites in general exhibit phases of woodland clearance and regeneration similar to sites elsewhere in Britain. At several of these peripheral sites there is a good correlation between the chronology of episodes in the pollen diagrams and archaeological events on the chalklands, although the representation of pollen from vegetation on the chalk outcrop may have been low. The rapidly accumulating peat at Rimsmoor shows clearance episodes in considerable detail and at Kingswood a phase of Mesolithic disturbance may be recorded. It is proposed that certain areas of the chalk, such as that around Winchester, have been characterised by an essentially open landscape since the Early Neolithic. In other areas, however, as perhaps typified by the Snelsmore analysis, woodland was more common. Edaphlc and socio-economic reasons are advanced for these differences.

This thesis is about an organised group or ‘squad’ of young men in Port Vila, the capital of the Pacific Islands nation-state of Vanuatu, and their practices of place making in the rapidly developing context of ‘town’. The young men studied are second-generation migrants and thus first-generation born and raised ‘urbanites'. Based on twenty months of fieldwork, this thesis examines how these young men are transforming Freswota Community - the residential area in which they live - from a place with no shared and relevant social meaning into a place imbued with greater collective significance. First, I demonstrate how these young men experience themselves as ‘unplaced’, a condition which entails two aspects. They are displaced from the social structure and kinship systems within which their parents previously ordered their lives and from which they have drawn their social identity. Additionally, the young men experience themselves as marginalised from the formal education and employment structures of town. Following this, I show that it is through practices of place making, which they refer to as ‘planting roots’, that these young men are emplacing themselves in the Freswota area. ‘Planting roots’ includes such processes as developing their own shared history, naming roads, building topogeny and developing their own community social structure and social order. I argue that these processes are leading to the emergence of a new phenomenon: primary town emplacement. By coming into relationship with Freswota land, these young men are not only transforming it from virtual no-place into some place, they are also transforming themselves from ‘unplaced’ persons into emplaced ‘Freswota men’. I conclude that this is generating a new locative identity: it is now the Freswota community rather than their parents’ home island places that is emerging as their primary location of belonging and the source both of their sense of self and their social identification. A central aim of this thesis is to draw attention to the positive and creative ways in which unemployed young men, usually criticised and stigmatised as delinquents in newly and rapidly urbanising contexts, are actively engaged in developing their community and their relationships in order to live more viable and socially productive lives.

Environmental histories are multi-dimensional accounts of human interaction with the environment over time. They observe how and when the environment changes (material environmental histories), and the effects of human activities upon the environment (political environmental histories). Environmental histories also consider the thoughts and feelings that humans have had towards the environment (cultural/ intellectual environmental histories). Using the methodological framework of environmental history this research, located in sub-tropical northern Belize, brings together palaeoecological records (pollen and charcoal) with archival documentary sources. This has created an interdisciplinary account which considers how the vegetation of northern Belize has changed over the last 3,500 years and, in particular, how forest resources have been used during the British Colonial period (c. AD 1800 – 1950). The palaeoecological records are derived from lake sediment cores extracted from the New River Lagoon, adjacent to the archaeological site of Lamanai. For over 3,000 years Lamanai was a Maya settlement, and then, more recently, the site of two 16th century Spanish churches and a 19th century British sugar mill. The British archival records emanate from a wide variety of sources including: 19th century import and export records, 19th century missionary letters and 19th and 20th century meteorological records and newspaper articles. The integration of these two types of record has established a temporal range of 1500 BC to the present. The palaeoecological proxies provide a low resolution record over a period of 3,500 years (c. 1500 BC – AD 2010) whereas the archival record provides annual resolution over a period of approximately 150 years (c. AD 1800 – 1950). This research also uses documentary sources to reconstruct temperature and precipitation for Belize City during the period 1865 – 2010, which is the first of its kind from Belize, and the oldest continuous record from Central America. It also provides the meteorological context for further exploration into British colonial interaction with ‘tropical’ climates. Perhaps because of its status as Britain’s only Central American colonial outpost, Belize has remained on the periphery of research concerning European interactions with tropical climates. This environmental history draws together a new account of health, place and space in the 19th century colonial tropics, drawing out how different understandings of the aetiologies and transmission of disease developed, in particular yellow fever. These different research strands are brought together to create an account that considers material, political and cultural aspects of environmental history. This has enabled the identification of eight phases of human interaction with the landscape at Lamanai, which are broadly indicative of general trends across northern Belize. These include the establishment of Maya field-based agriculture c. 1600 BC and a later phase of substantial Maya construction and site development c. 170 BC – AD 150. A period of active Maya management of forest, field, savanna and palm resources is also observed c. AD 500 – 1000. Polarised imaginings of the Maya as both destroyers and protectors of the tropical forest are challenged. Spanish interaction with the landscape is evident during c. AD 1500 – 1700 and this is followed by a period of substantial British colonial exploitation of timber resources, with logwood extracted c. AD 1660 – 1910 and mahogany extracted c. AD 1750 – 1945. These periods of extraction were only identifiable in the pollen record by combing the chronology from the documentary record with observed changes in the vegetation record and this demonstrates how these two contrasting methodologies can be usefully integrated. This environmental history rejects the binary opposition of benign, passive Maya landscapes and the violent, devastated European colonial landscape (Denevan, 1992). Analysis of the pollen and documentary records reveal that biodiversity is at the highest levels post AD 1950, which suggests that the forest can regrow even after multiple, diverse and prolonged periods of anthropogenic use in a matter of decades.