This thesis is a case study of a small agricultural community located along the eastern edge of Everglades National Park, The purpose of this study was to document the way land use decisions have been made and how these decisions have affected this community and the Everglades ecosystem. This research demonstrated that decisions made by the involved agencies have negatively affected both the community of Pariah, Florida and the Everglades ecosystem. Research methods included extensive document research, participant observation and formal and informal interviews. It appears that public concern over “saving the Everglades” has been used to provide a legitimating framework for the achievement of a plurality of personal goals and unstated agency agendas that have little or nothing to do with either the Everglades or the environment in general.

Overabundance and scarcity of water are global concerns. Across the world’s low-lying coastal plains, flooding brought on by sea level rise acts as an existential threat for a multitude of people and cultures while in desert (and increasingly non-desert) regions intensifying drought cycles do the same. In the decades to come, how people manage these threats will have important implications not only for individual and cultural survival, but also for questions of justice. Recent research on flooding and flood management probes the histories of survival, and adaptation in flood threatened regions for insights into emergent flood-related crises. However, scholars have thus far overemphasized the technical aspects of how engineered flood control systems functioned, overlooking both the specific social, political, and economic contexts within which past practices emerged and the social worlds that they helped create. This dissertation examines the social, economic, and political histories of flood control projects in the South American country of Guyana in order to understand the long lasting social, political, and environmental impacts of colonial-era projects. To do this, I utilized archival data collected from the National Archives in London, UK, historical newspaper articles collected through online newspaper databases, press release statements from Guyana’s major political parties, and unstructured and semi-structured interviews with residents from coastal Guyana. These data were imported and analyzed using qualitative data analysis software in order to make connections across spatial and temporal scales. The key finding of the dissertation is that, in Guyana, flood control engineering has historically played multiple social, political, and economic roles beyond the functional explanations assumed in many present environmental management discourses. Colonial engineering projects served as a way to protect colonizers from economic crises and social upheaval and were not just a means for protecting the coast from flooding. Additionally, the dissertation found that these projects were key to creating the racial geographies that helped to protect colonialism in its final years and which continue to shape coastal life today. Finally, the dissertation found that, after the end of colonialism, flood engineering projects were incorporated into larger projects of racialized regime survival.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how residents of communities located on the flanks of Kilauea, Hawai'i view the hazards associated with volcanic events taking into account hazard proximity, cultural beliefs, municipal trust, and evacuation planning. The study was conducted in the lower Puna district, an area with a rapidly growing population but limited infrastructure. Data were collected though a questionnaire survey undertaken at venues throughout the district, including grocery markets, bakeries, farmers markets, the public pool, and other gathering places. Overall, the results indicated that people understand the natural hazards of the place but are generally not concerned about the potential impacts of these hazards on their livelihoods; few could determine whether or not they lived in a lava zone, the impacts on health, and the need for evacuation planning. Cultural considerations appear to play major role and many residents believe that Madam Pele, Goddess of Fire, has a stake in the events of Kilauea. Both hazard understanding and cultural belief systems varied by gender, age, income, and education. When compared to findings from earlier studies within the lower Puna district, it was noted that opinions have shifted over time and that belief in Pele had strengthened. This study demonstrated that understanding the opinions and patterns of belief within communities must be ongoing and municipal planning must be altered over time to accommodate evolving needs and beliefs of a community to obtain optimum community support.

This thesis is not intended to be an indictment of our leaders — well, not entirely, anyway. This thesis is meant to be an exercise in listening. I talked to a lot of people on every side of this issue, and tried hard to listen. I obviously have my biases, but I did my best to understand where everyone was coming from. I tried to evaluate groups instead of individuals as participants in this issue. My interviewees were requested to express views on behalf of the community group to which they belonged. I tried to find the opinions that best defined the majority of each group. Sometimes these came from resolutions, sometimes surveys, and other times analyses of local newspaper letters. In writing this up, I hoped to express the the voices I heard from a common ground. It seems that we've let our voices become antagonistic — that we've lost the will to embrace new opinions and engage in debate. I hope that people reading this might listen to the voices that are speaking — understand where they come from instead of preparing a rebuttal of their opinions. Consider our own actions and how they affect the situation. Think about whether we’re prepared to let this battle divide our community into the dreamers who get their way and those who don’t — or if we are ready to listen to one another, offer compromises, and do what really benefits this community the most. This thesis is an effort to explore different perspectives on a common issue and document the voices that have been cast aside and ignored. I originally wanted to speak for the Bernard Field Station, because I wasn’t sure how much longer it would be around to speak for itself. But I now realized it is futile. If you are willing to listen, the place speaks for itself ... and the story it tells is remarkable.

Due to its high levels of concern and awareness of environmental issues, rural character, and sparse population, Vermont would at first glance appear to possess the ideal recipe to become a national leader in renewable energy development. Renewable initiatives have focused primarily on wind energy, as over a dozen wind farms have been proposed in the last few years across the state. However, in spite of the widely held belief in Vermont’s wind energy future, its proponents have run into vehement opposition at every proposed site, often successfully impeding the planned developments. This report develops a wide-level framework of the motivations of and complaints presented by wind opposition groups around the state, followed by an analysis of opposition strategies commonly employed. These are contrasted with the tactics used by wind developers and their supporters to remediate or overcome this opposition. Next, this essay will offer a view of the state and local institutional settings in which these battles take place, and finally conclude with a brief analysis of various alternatives to utility-scale wind, offering suggestions for wind’s role in the future of energy in Vermont.

Since 2006 California has been pursuing the most ambitious climate change policy in the United States, implementing a suite of greenhouse gas reduction measures ranging from automobile refrigerant disposal rules to clean energy standards for electric power utilities. The most significant of these measures is the creation of a cap‐and‐trade program. Through this program, regulators seek to create a knowable price‐signal to incentivize emissions reductions among polluters. Using a suite of ethnographic methods, this dissertation looks at the people, ideas, and institutions that have been mobilized in the creation of California’s cap‐and‐ trade program. Substantively, the dissertation engages with three key aspects of the program. First, the way that economic theory is deployed in the creation of the rules of exchange, and how that theory is made to take a compromised but still structuring role in light of the political pressures on regulators in writing the rules of exchange in financial representations of greenhouse gases. Second, the dissertation examines the diverse values, economic and non‐economic, in play during the creation of financial representations of greenhouse gases; and third, the environmental and social justice ramifications of structuring an emissions reduction program around the motivation of doing so at the lowest possible cost to polluters. Theoretically, this dissertation is informed by political ecology on the commodification of nature, commodity theory drawn from economic geography and political economy, and sociological theories of economic practice primarily originating from the social studies of finance. The conclusion of the dissertation is that the result of countless hours of work by regulators and their interlocutors is a suite of market‐like mechanisms that ultimately function more like the administrative tool that environmental markets’ early advocates envisioned rather than the full‐blown financialization of the atmosphere, though with potentially detrimental environmental impacts for vulnerable communities.

Forest carbon projects seek to alleviate rural poverty and mitigate global climate change by facilitating the flow of capital from actors looking to offset CO2 emissions to land managers willing to engage in offset-oriented reforestation, afforestation, and forest preservation activities. In Mexico, forest carbon schemes have been pursued within the country’s national Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program, and through REDD+ pilot projects and separate voluntary initiatives. In this dissertation, I explore one voluntary project, Scolel’ Te, which is managed by the non-governmental organization (NGO), AMBIO. Focusing on the case of Scolel’ Te, I show how forest carbon projects undermine social relations in ways that weaken participating communities and threaten project success. First, I examine how carbon forestry market integration undermines social relations by pushing risk on participant labor and encouraging the establishment of disenfranchising labor arrangements. Second, I analyze how farmer participation in Scolel’ Te undermines social relations within broader community settings. Such effects, I argue, are only visible when analyzing the social ramifications of carbon forestry within the context of intra-community social relations. Finally, drawing on labor studies, I critically re- assess the role of participatory methods in carbon forestry, suggesting that they undermine the social relations of production between farmers and project managers, thereby threatening project success. This analysis demonstrates how shifting market dynamics, historical factors, and labor processes converge in the context of carbon forestry, and underscores the implications of such work for participating farmers and carbon forestry more broadly.

Through a qualitative analysis of the use of intestinal parasites for treating immune system disorders, this research illustrates how contingency emerges in the context of the human relationship to hookworms. The affect of the human–nonhuman relationship is an important part of understanding the direction of evolutionary medicine today, and has implications for the politics of biological health innovations. The shift from the bad parasite to a parasite that at least sometimes heals, discursively and materially, has opened new spaces for patients to change the way they relate to medical knowledge, medical professionals, and pharmaceutical companies. Hookworms are banned by the FDA, which sets the scene for lively, but sometimes rebellious, hybridity between host and parasite. Underground and do-it-yourself hookworm therapy cultures have sprung up in around the site of the gut. I argue that not only is material hookworm affect as important as human discourses in negotiating the rapidly advancing field of biome reconstruction, but it also plays a role in how that biome reconstruction takes place, conventionally or otherwise.

Commercial fisheries in the Florida Keys have experienced a significant decline in participation and harvest over the past two decades, with over half of the fishers exiting the fishery since 1990 and a 50-70% decline in annual landings compared to previous decades. The conventional narrative of fisheries management identifies overfishing and overcapacity as the malaise endemic to open-access fisheries systems, for which the remedy offered is technocratic management. Technocratic management, which seeks to restore ecological integrity and economic efficiency, has been increasingly employed in the Florida Keys, in the form of limited access and property rights measures. I contend that the technocratic management approach is flawed and in a large part responsible for the decline of Florida Keys fisheries because the approach has ignored social sustainability, leading to a significant reduction in fisher participation, the fragmentation of fishing communities, and erosion of social capital. Technocratic management has also underestimated the importance of non-fishery factors, unique to place, and these factors – including population, tourism, and globalization factors – have exacerbated the impacts of management measures. The net result has been the opening up of scarce and valuable coastal space, which was previously occupied by fishers, fish houses and processors, and other fisheries infrastructure, to conversion for non-working waterfront uses. While measures have been undertaken to foster fisher participation and slow down waterfront conversion, these have largely failed due to the measures’ inability to address the core problem, which is the flawed management approach that undermines social sustainability. I provide a revised, comprehensive fisheries management framework that, if implemented, can at least address some of the technocratic management’s shortcomings and prevent further decline in fisher participation and fisheries decline.

The way humans currently interact with the atmosphere and oceans around us is unsustainable, with pollution entering our waters faster than we are collecting it, and the sea level rising faster than we are building coastal barriers to protect our current infrastructure. This thesis explores the common methodology for communicating climate change and its future effects, and highlights an opportunity for using infrastructure to facilitate interaction with the urban-aquatic interface. By promoting experiential contact with the natural spaces that are most at risk to climate change’s impacts, a sense of stewardship for those spaces will spur behavioral change and activism. On a local level, this thesis explores the history of public access to San Onofre State Beach, and the possibility for the restriction of that access in 2021. Using a 3D topographic and bathymetric model of San Onofre State Beach, I attempt to highlight the beauty of the undeveloped California coastline, and the benefits of keeping this 6.5-mile coastline within the State Parks system.