The 20th century will be remembered for many "firsts" and many 'revolutions'. One of these 'revolutions' was the process whereby issues surrounding 'nature', the non-human organisms that inhabit it, the human relationship to these organisms, and the human impact on the planet as a whole, came to occupy such a considerable amount of our individual and collective 'attention space' as the century progressed. In a nutshell, over the course of the 20th century 'the environment' became a 'thing' that almost everyone recognised, and which became associated with a wide range of qualities, dreams and fears that impacted, to varying degrees, on almost every human meaning-making system and institution. 'Environmentalism' has largely been a product of enlightenment, modernist thinking. From the romantic philosophers, poets and travellers of the 18th and 19th century, to the founders of the ecological sciences, to the eco-activists and 'green' political parties of the 20th century, a whole series of intertwining enlightenment systems of thought and practice have informed its discourses and narratives. The logics of these discourses are all around us in our newly networked global mediasphere at work in environmental organisations, informing government policy and they form the basis of the environmental story telling that have made green issues so prominent in the media in the last several decades. All this has implications for achieving environmental sustainability in a real biosphere that still supplies the 'ecosystem services' that allow humans, and the rest of the biomass, to actually survive (at the same time that its custodians of mind-us- are 'escaping' into customised neo-worlds). This thesis makes some preliminary enquiries into these new logics, the new 'selectors' at work in human meaning making ecosystems that owe little to those produced by billions of years of 'natural selection'. What seems to be at work at present is an enormously accelerated 'cultural selection' of winners and losers in the real and imaginary world. It would be unwise for the modernist systems of thought that still inform many of our institutional responses to the biosphere to ignore the pre-eminent affect of these cultural processes and the strange and possibly disturbing (at least to the ecosystemic biological purists) new weedy entertainment-ecosystems that might arise from their deployment. This thesis reviews some aspects of these 'new selectors' at work and begins to chart- with an Australian focus- the tentative development of institutional/legal responses and emergent socialites that acknowledge and even leverage, these new forces. It finally suggests a radical set of possibilities, which if they came to pass, would signal the end to the kind of 'public reservationism' that has characterised the 20th century response to nature, wilderness and the 'environmental crisis', and usher in a more chaotic (but still possibly sustainable) era of 'winners' and 'losers' mediated by new social selectors of post-consumption voluntary affiliation.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Bowling Green State University, 2009. / Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 194 p. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1998. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-225).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2006. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 198-211).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2002. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xiii, 159 p. Includes abstract and vita. Advisor: Kazimierz M. Slomczynski, Dept. of Sociology. Includes bibliographical references (p. 151-159).

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Bibliography: leaves 99-102. Identifies aesthetic knowledge as a fundamentally linked perceptual and ontological process. Aesthetic processes are identified as criteria relevant for locating and advocating ethics in 'eco-culturally sustainable development'. Cultural actions are ethical evaluations about valuing nature.

The focus of this thesis is to emphasise the lived experience of being a migrant, and of living in a multicultural society, and to acknowledge the multi-dimensionality of these experiences. The author conducted interviews with people from ethno-specific community groups in the Sydney suburb of Auburn. These interviews explored the physical, emotional and spiritual aspect of coming to terms with a changing sense of what is home and what is foreign. The tenor of the thesis is strongly optimistic and explores the social ecology of multiculturalism in Australia in the late 1990's, using Auburn, with its strong immigrant population and large Turkish community, as a case study. The contributions by the people of Auburn are woven through the thesis as voices in their own right, rather than as quotations for a line of argument. Social ecology, as a project, works to open up dimensions of awareness and to acknowledge complexity by addressing the physical and sensory levels of individual experience as well as the broader political and social contexts which frame people's lives. The thesis acknowledges that the success of contemporary Australian multiculturalism has something to do with the broad based policies that implement this social phenomenon. More importantly, multiculturalism succeeds because it has become the culture scape in which the soul of the community wanders. This thesis acknowledges that there is something intellectually difficult about the word soul, but there is an ecological value in James Hillman's idea of the soul as not an elevated idea but rather one 'down in the earth'; soul in this sense is about place, finding and taking root in a new place. / Doctor of Philosophy(PhD)

Thesis (M.Env.St.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of Geographical and Environmental Studies, 2000. / Bibliography: leaves 99-102.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Antioch University New England, 2008. / Title from PDF t.p. (viewed Oct. 24, 2008). "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England (2008)."--The title page. Advisor: Thomas Webler, Ph. D. Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-159).