Through Her Own Eyes: Environmental Rhetoric in Women’s Autobiographical Frontier Writing identifies frontier women, those who traveled overland to the West and those who homesteaded, as historical ecofeminists. The purpose of this study is to analyze frontier women’s environmental rhetoric in their journals and letters, which encouraged readers to become closer to nature and get to know it while encountering new land in the West. Promoting a close relationship with nature, frontier women’s writing also implied conserving and protecting nature for future generations, which demonstrates how they can be retroactively labeled ecofeminists. Frontier women’s environmental rhetoric reveals their alignment with Carolyn Merchant’s theory for harmony between humankind and nature: partnership ethics. Although many historians have mentioned frontier women’s emphasis on nature in their narratives, few have explored frontier women’s nature writing at length. Glenda Riley has completed a book-length study of early American women environmentalists, but she mentions only women whose environmental work led to documented activism or membership in conservation organizations. Annette Kolodny’s work focused on frontier women’s fantasies about the west, rather than their environmental rhetoric as a way of persuading readers, whereas my work uses frontier women’s daily writing to demonstrate an evolving environmental ethic that helps to categorize them as historical ecofeminists. An archival project, this study relies upon the archived overland journals of Sarah Sutton and Nancy Sherwin, both housed at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library as well as the letters of female homesteader Elinore Pruitt Stewart, archived at the Sweetwater County Museum. A visit to the archives at the Sweetwater County Museum yielded the treasure of Elinore Pruitt Stewart’s numerous unpublished letters. Frontier women’s philosophical alignment with ecofeminism made it possible for ecological philosophies to begin taking root in the American West. As historical ecofeminists, frontier women’s writing laid the foundation for the modern-day ecological conscience that makes individuals work to conserve nature for future generations.

This study is an urban history of Denver, Colorado, viewed through the lens of its constantly evolving physical, political, cultural and economic relationship with its mountain hinterland. From the town's early years as a 19th century mining and ranching depot to its 20th century emergence as a hub of tourism and technology, that relationship informs every aspect of the city's urban, cultural and environmental history. This study seeks, first, to analyze Denver's historical appropriation and utilization of its mountain hinterland, whether for water, wealth, recreation and cultural identity. Second, it highlights how access to and control over the Rocky Mountain hinterland shaped Denver's evolving political, class and racial landscapes throughout the city's history. Integrating the methodologies of environmental, urban, and social history, it demonstrates how different social groups competed for access, control, and the ability to vii assign value to the mountain hinterland. Every Denverite in the city's history, regardless of station, has lived within the context of this tense and constantly changing relationship. Since the city's founding, that relationship has been the constant object of human agency, accommodation, and change, and in it can be read the story of Denver itself.

In recent decades the canon of environmental aesthetics has expanded beyond its primary concern of understanding what is beautiful in the fine arts to the appreciation of natural and cultural landscapes. Corresponding with society's growing interest in conservation, environmental aesthetics has emerged as relevant to many conservation discussions. The preservation and interpretation of cultural landscapes is complicated by resources that are in a constant state of change. Traditional cultural landscape preservation practices have had mixed results. A focus on interpretation rather than preservation is generally considered a strategy for improving cultural landscape practices. Applying theories developed in the field of environmental aesthetics to cultural landscapes may lead to principles helpful to their preservation and interpretation. In this study, an environmental aesthetic framework is developed and applied to the Canoa Ranch, a historic property south of Tucson, Arizona, to evaluate the potential of using environmental aesthetics in appreciation of cultural landscapes.

This dissertation analyzes the creation of national parks in Mexico between 1934 and 1940 as a program of national unity and federal resource control on the heels of revolutionary upheaval. In radical new ways, national park formation marked a complementary relationship between revolutionary social change and the environment. The creation, administration, and defense of these parks symbolized larger processes reordering how regulatory legitimacy came about and what factors shaped policy implementation. The parks, mostly within one or two hours of Mexico City, protected temperate forests but overlapped with longstanding communities. While some scientists critiqued peasant forest use techniques, the inclusive politics of the revolutionary government and the vibrant opinions of residents prevented their eviction from these national spaces. By articulating visions of their patrimony and zealously debating their rights to national territory, peasants, scientists, industrialists, and bureaucrats transformed revolutionary reforms into conspicuous environmental policy. This purposeful inclusion allowed citizens to forge national identity with explicit attention to the natural world.To demonstrate the assertion that social change had an environmental component, I use four case studies of Lagunas de Zempoala, La Malinche, Popocatepetl and Iztacci­huatl, and Tepozteco National Parks. These examples demonstrate the similarities and differences among the parks and their particular social, political, economic, and cultural implications. Tourists to Zempoala, communal property holders in Malinche, resin collectors on Popo and Izta, and activists in Tepozteco remind us that environmental issues pervaded the life stories of thousands of people. Parks were not whimsical oases for wealthy urbanites--they became tangible representations of how revolutionaries nationalized their natural territory. Revolutionaries planned their agenda for change based on the endowments of nature, they envisioned overcoming differences through the wealth of their surroundings, and they configured a revolutionary state to oversee that process.My study engages Mexican historians who have failed to consider the environment as a crucial factor in the construction of the new regime and revises world histories that underestimated conservation efforts in lesser developed countries. Rather than a story of environmental declension, it provides fresh insight into the everyday working relationships among communities, governments, and their resources.

This thesis examines the early years of marine mammal captivity at Marineland of the Pacific and its impacts on the oceanarium industry, cetacean science, and public perceptions of whales. Opening in 1954, Marineland was the first oceanarium on the Pacific coast of North America, the largest oceanarium in the world, and the lead institution in cetacean capture, entertainment, and marine mammal research. In 1957, Marineland captured and displayed the first pilot whale, “Bubbles,” and ignited the whale capture industry that still exists sixty years later. Although often overlooked in scholarly work, Marineland developed innovative capture and display techniques while expanding animal husbandry knowledge. The park also revolutionized the marine mammalogy field by providing unprecedented opportunities for scientists to closely observe, study, and interact with live whales. Furthermore, Marineland’s capture, display, and portrayal of pilot whales in popular media generated public empathy toward cetaceans and transformed public perceptions of the animals. Through examinations of scientific papers, popular publications, interviews, and the Kenneth S. Norris Papers from the University of California Santa Cruz, a collection containing Norris’s personal scrapbooks, field notes, and unpublished research, this thesis will show that Marineland of the Pacific was the crucible of change for marine entertainment, cetacean research, and public perceptions of whales. / Graduate / 2019-07-27

Utgångspunkten för vårt arbete har varit att undersöka om ekologisk mat används som ett verktyg till undervisning i miljöhistoria. Dagens didaktiska forskning kring miljöhistoria motiverar ämnets betydelse på flera plan. I skolans verksamhet är det tänkt att ämnet ska kunna användas för tolkning av de lokala och globala förhållandena i världen. Vi börjar arbetet med att lyfta fram olika forskares motiv för miljöhistoria i skolans verksamhet. På fältet intervjuar vi verksamma lärare och elever för att se hur stora deras kunskaper kring ekologisk mat och svensk jordbrukskultur är. I arbetet lyfter vi fram och diskuterar begrepp som miljöhistoria, historiemedvetande, ekologiskt tänkande och lokalhistoria vilka är vanligt förekommande för oss som blivande lärare i historievetenskap och lärande. Resultaten i undersökningarna visade på ett svagt intresse för ekologisk mat och svensk jordbrukskultur bland lärare, elever och hushåll. I intervjuerna kom vi fram till att eleverna har ett visst historiemedvetande gällande koppling från dagens ekologiska jordbruk till hur jordbruk sköttes förr i tiden innan kemiska besprutningsmedel och konstgödsel fanns tillgängligt. / The starting-point for our study has been to investigate if organic food is used as a tool in the teaching of environmental history. The research of teaching in environmental history motivates it’s purpose in many levels. The subject is supposed to be used in schools for interpretation of the local and global environmental situations in the world. We begin our study by uplifting different researchers motive for teaching environmentalhistory in schools. By interviewing teachers and students on the field it’s possible to see how good their knowledge is in organic food and Swedish history of agriculture. In our study we discuss subjects like environmental history, historical consciousness, ecological thinking and local history which are common subjects for us as future history teachers. The result of our investigations showed that there is weak intrest for organic food and Swedish agriculture among teachers, students and households. From our interviews we could tell that our students has a certain history consciousness to the connection between organic farming and Swedish history of agriculture before pesticides and industrial fertilizers.

What kind of animal was a black bear? Were black bears primarily pests, pets, furbearers or game animals? Farmers, conservationists, tourists, trappers, and hunters in early twentieth-century Ontario could not agree. Even as the century progressed, ideas about bears remained twisted and there was often very little consensus about what the animal represented. These varying perceptions complicated the efforts of the provincial Department of Game and Fisheries and its successor agencies, the Department of Lands and Forests and the Ministry of Natural Resources, to develop coherent bear management policies. Perceptions about black bears often conflicted and competed with one another and at no one time did they have a single meaning in Ontario. The image of Ontario’s black bears has been continuously negotiated as human values, attitudes, and policies have changed over time. As a result, because of various and often competing perspectives, the province’s bear management program, for most of the twentieth century, was very loose and haphazard because the animal had never been uniformly defined or valued. Examining the history of these ambiguous viewpoints towards the black bear in Ontario provides us with a snapshot of how culture intersects with our natural resources and may pose challenges for management. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This dissertation argues that from 1880 to 2010 the American natural and artificial Christmas tree industries remodeled themselves after one another. Artificial tree companies modeled their products after the natural tree, hoping to make them look, smell, and feel like the real thing. As these replica trees became popular, scientists, extension agents, and farmers worked to control the natural Christmas tree crop unlike ever before. Those efforts stemmed from a desire to wrest from nature the same kind of idealized silhouettes their plastic counterparts celebrated. Both industries tried to convince the country’s consumers to buy what they were selling. Through Americans’ shifting Christmas tree experience, this dissertation highlights the evolution of particular cultural and environmental ideas. It reveals how both the natural and artificial tree industries intentionally misled the public about the ecological implications of their businesses. Further, it demonstrates that although many Americans believed that the natural Christmas tree ritual could instill the children’s youth with an appreciation of the outdoors or the value of the hard work symbolized by the felling of a tree and dragging it into the living room, by the 1960s such an outlook became contested unlike ever before. As fake tree companies promised convenience, many citizens looked upon their ersatz tree as a symbol of progress and good environmental stewardship just as others worried that modernity would alienate the nation’s youth from the wild spaces and hard work of their ancestors. This dissertation also considers how gender animated the trade by showing how farmers frequently blamed the nation’s women for their reliance on pesticides. That chemical dependency, farmers maintained, was the only way to grow the shapely trees the nation’s women supposedly demanded. Growers also trivialized the work of women within the business in an effort to bolster their own masculine image. As the crop spawned festivals in some communities, locals equated tree bodies with those of women, overtly implying that beauty was most important in both.

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Making Water Pure: A History of Water Softening from Potash to Tide, is a history of water softening in the United States from 1860 through 1970. Water’s materiality, specifically its tendency to dissolve geological features, consistently interfered with labor processes, especially those that relied on the use of soap or steam. For this reason, the management and control over the quality of water in both domestic and industrial spaces was regular and in many cases economically imperative. Nineteenth-century laborers dealt with hard water on the individual level. They experimented with a variety of different chemicals and methods, including the addition of lye, coffee, blood meal, and wool fiber to water. Throughout the twentieth century, the requirements of industrial efficiency as well as new consumer technologies demanded fast, easy, and standard ways to soften water. This motivated manufactures to produce mechanical water softening systems and synthetic chemicals. This dissertation traces this change and asserts that the history of getting water soft is a history of environmental control and management. Water softening is a lens through which to explore often overlooked actors in the history of managing nonhuman nature such as women, domestic workers, laborers, home economists, advertisers, and commercial chemists. Hard water is a thread that connects usually separate categories such as the home and the factory, industrial chemicals and household cleaners. The control over water was uneven and incomplete and allows for the exploration of the tensions intrinsic in the attempted mastery over nature. The regularity of making soft water reveals not only society’s relationship with water, but the social nature of water itself. Water is a product of ecological, social, and technological discourses and practices-- a hybrid of both environment and culture. To soften water was to make nature fit; it was an effort to standardize nonhuman nature so that it would cooperate with certain technologies, processes, and cultural assumptions. / History