A sociological understanding of natural resource management decisions traces the links between historical change (How does this historical period differ from other periods?), society (What social relations exist at this time and how do they persist or change?), and individuals (What types of conduct and discourse prevail in this society and in this period?). The papers submitted for this dissertation examine the connections between identity, social milieu, and historical change relative to three resource management issues: (1) The promotion of nature play areas as a novel landscape form. Analysis of agency materials suggests that these spaces are advertised as bucolic settings for children's healthy development. Online and on-site communications about nature play guide both children's and adults' conduct according to specific ideas about nature, parenting, and education. (2) The sway of the instrumental rationality inherent in the ecosystem services approach to planning and management. Traditional sociological theory suggests that, for all of its promise to internalize environmental externalities in decision-making, the ecosystem services approach reduces society's capacity for engaging critically with the forces that shape our world. The recent "nonhuman turn" in social theory offers alternatives to the utilitarian ethic and quiescent character of ecosystem services. (3) The impact of changing demographics in amenity-rich towns on community wellbeing. This resident survey of four Vermont towns experiencing different rates of growth examines the utility of categories such as permanent and seasonal residents, and newcomers and longterm residents, in understanding attitudes toward community development and preservation of natural and cultural resources.

"Shifting Terrain" is about the theater's potential to offer crucial resources to resist ecological crisis. Despite the efforts of a number of theorists over the past twenty years, ecocritical theater, which draws upon ecological language and concepts, has failed to thrive in part because it lacks a cohesive, discursive framework to organize its ideas. This dissertation seeks to define the goals of this nascent ecocritical theater along topical, discursive and formal lines by establishing two distinct ecocritical genres: landscape theater and ecology theater. Theater theorists have argued that, formally and ideologically, landscape and ecology are roughly synonymous. In the first half of "Shifting Terrain," however, I argue that landscape resists ecological concerns, contributing to anthropocentric attitudes by delineating the natural world from humans and the theater they make. Using Maurice Maeterlinck's The Blind (1890), Anton Chekhov's The Seagull (1895) and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1949) as examples, I argue that landscape theater performs nature as a framed, aesthetic creation in order to criticize the "ruptures" between humans and the ecosystem generated, at times, by the theater itself. Conversely, through readings of ecologically oriented plays including Henrik Ibsen's An Enemy of the People (1882), Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard (1904) and Heiner Müller's Despoiled Shore / Medeamaterial / Landscape with Argonauts (1982/83), I argue that ecology theater seeks connections between ecosystems, their inhabitants and the theater, pointing beyond the theatrical frame, physical or conceptual, to the ecosphere. In the latter half of the dissertation, I investigate the genres of landscape theater and ecology theater in the context of environmental or, more specifically, immersive staging. I first challenge the notion that immersive staging inherently resists the aesthetic distance between theatrical worlds and the ecosphere, using productions of Maria Irene Fornes' Fefu and Her Friends (1977) and Punchdrunk Theatrical Experiences' Sleep No More (2011). Both performances surround their audiences with rich environments, but they are also insular, engaging only the synthetic spaces created by performers and designers. Then, I examine the ways in which the outdoor, immersive productions of Robert Wilson's KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDENIA TERRACE (1972) and Big House Theater's Across (2000) apply ecological ideals by emphasizing theater's capacity to make direct contact with the ecosystems the plays present. No production entirely eliminates the theater's mimetic division from the surrounding world, but performances such as KA MOUNTAIN and Across represent significant movement toward limiting the aesthetic distance between audiences, worlds of performance and the world itself.

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The lower Chesapeake Bay and adjacent coastal waters serve as the primary summer nursery areas for juvenile sandbar sharks (Carcharhinus plumbeus) in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. The large population of juvenile sandbar sharks in this ecosystem benefits from increased food availability that fuels rapid growth and from limited exposure to large shark predators. Juvenile growth and survival is the most critical life history stage for sandbar sharks, and juvenile nursery grounds will continue to play an important role in the slow recovery of this stock from severe population declines due to overfishing. The goal of this study was to assess the possible impacts of juvenile sandbar sharks as apex predators on the lower Chesapeake Bay ecosystem and to evaluate the energetic benefits of using this nursery. The bioenergetics model was used as a tool to predict energy consumption rates of individual sandbar sharks based on their energetic demands: metabolism, growth, and loss of waste. Metabolic rate is the largest and most variable component of the energy budget, particularly for species such as the sandbar shark that must swim continuously to ventilate their gills. The standard (basal) and routine metabolic rates of juvenile sandbar sharks were measured in two laboratory respirometry systems, using oxygen consumption rate as a proxy for metabolic rate. These data span the entire range of body sizes and water temperatures characteristic of the Chesapeake Bay population. Standard metabolic rates of sandbar sharks were similar to values obtained for related shark species by extrapolation of power-performance curves. The effects of body size and temperature on standard metabolic rate were similar to previous results for elasmobranchs and teleost fishes. In fifteen sharks, routine metabolic rate while swimming averaged 1.8 times the standard metabolic rate when the sharks were immobilized. Data obtained from the literature support the theory that limited gill surface areas and narrow metabolic scopes of many elasmobranchs help to explain their slow growth rates, since growth has the lowest rank of the multiple metabolic demands placed on the oxygen delivery system. These new metabolic rate data were then combined with other species-specific data to construct a bioenergetics model for juvenile sandbar sharks for the time they spend in Chesapeake Bay each summer. This model predicted higher daily rations than previous estimates for this species that were based on simple bioenergetics models or stomach contents and gastric evacuation rate models. However, the predicted rations agree with reconstructed meal sizes of juvenile sandbar sharks and are comparable to those of ecologically similar shark species. When extrapolated from individuals to the population level, the model predicted a negligible effect of predation by juvenile sandbar sharks on the lower Chesapeake Bay ecosystem; the consumption rate of juvenile sandbar sharks pales in comparison to other carnivorous fishes and to humans, the true apex predators in the system.

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