This project is about the visual ways people represent the nonhuman world, and the struggles over its meaning. It is the story of how the Canadian government used the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) to manufacture and sustain a national identity that was defined by its encounters with nature, and how those definitions morphed over time. The NFB was established in 1939 by the federal government. It was to be the eyes and ears of Canada, a way for Canadians to experience the nation. As a cultural institution supported by the state, the NFB is fertile ground for an examination of state discourses about nature. In particular, I analyze NFB films as vehicles for the Canadian government’s long-running nation-building project. Between 1939 and 1974, NFB filmmakers aligned their representations of nature with the views of the government. They imagined nature as a unifying symbol of national identity and as an object to be surveyed, rationalized and exploited by government institutions. Utilitarian narratives about natural resources and wilderness management served other ideological motives too. Specifically, NFB films about nature in the postwar period privileged a high modern way of seeing the environment. This project also seeks to discern instances of ideological conflict between filmmakers and official “environmental” viewpoints, where government strategies are questioned, ridiculed or reformulated in the films themselves. Although the NFB is a product of state policy as well as an interpreter of it, it was also actively involved in producing grass-roots narratives about the environment. The NFB’s directive to “interpret Canada to Canadians” unwittingly created opportunities for independent filmmakers to share their own visions of nature that often diverged from the state. This project therefore investigates moments where filmmakers used the camera as an apparatus of reflection to challenge and subvert state modes of thinking. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) was established and financed by the federal government to be the “eyes of Canada.” It is therefore a valuable site in which to examine, among other things, how the state defined the limits and uses of nature. While NFB discourses about the environment often mirrored state ideology, they also reflected alternative voices and perspectives. Filmmakers made documentaries within the NFB production system that challenged, questioned, or even ridiculed state ideology. In other words, nature was not only imagined as a national resource to be exploited and controlled through technology and science, it was also envisioned as something to be appreciated for its ecological diversity and its wildness.

Since the 1950s, more than 6 million dolphins have died as by-catch in the American yellowfin tuna fishery. These deaths were not caused by accidental incidents between fishermen and dolphins but resulted from a method of fishing that purposefully targeted these animals in order to catch yellowfin tuna. Referred to as “fishing on porpoise,” this technique remained an industry secret for decades. By the early 1970s, however, dolphin by-catch had become a major environmental issue in the United States, thanks to the work of William F. Perrin. In the following years, politicians, scientists, environmentalists, and members of the tuna industry struggled with how best to resolve the problem. While the debates that arose from the “tuna-porpoise controversy” helped to dramatically reduce dolphin by-catch, these solutions did not come easily. This thesis looks to bring this forgotten moment in American environmental history to the historical forefront by exploring the origins and early years of the tuna-porpoise controversy. By examining this period, this thesis will show why fishermen first used dolphins to catch tuna in the 1950s, how and why dolphin by-catch became such a major environmental issue in the 1970s, and what various groups and individuals did to ameliorate the problem during the period. / Graduate

<p>This dissertation traces both professional and public concerns about the Earth’s environmental limits from the late 1960s to 1990s, at the intersection of reproductive rights and aerospace technology. It considers two rather ‘radical’ and opposing grassroots activist approaches for how to best address the environmental and population crises that gained public traction at the turn of the 1970s: zero population growth and space settlement. The current scholarship has examined the ‘era of limits,’ and modern environmentalism and population control activism from both U.S. and global perspectives, considering how policy, science, gender, politics, and the media shape public understandings and both local and state responses. Zero growth proponents, through both coercive and voluntary campaigns, sought to demonstrate and halt the damage that unchecked economic and population growth was causing the planet. Yet these histories rarely consider the rise of new spaceflight technologies and thought during the same period, which promised a pro-growth, technology-infused solution to the limits to growth, one that would not impose restrictions on consumptive, environmental, or reproductive behavior. Responding to recent scholarly efforts to better contextualize aerospace technology into social and cultural histories of the post-Apollo era, this dissertation focuses on the grassroots activism of two organizations: Zero Population Growth (ZPG), which advocated for zero growth, and the L-5 Society (including a student-run affiliate chapter called the Maryland Alliance for Space Colonization), which promoted space settlement and the manufacturing of clean, pollution-free energy and mining resources for Earth. In this dissertation, I argue that in order to fully understand the implications of ‘Earthly limits’ on American society, we need to look at the role of grassroots activists. How did their concerns form, persist, and change over the course of the late twentieth century? Using primary and archival material and oral histories of the members, it analyzes their dynamics, goals, and stakes in ideas about limits to growth and a finite Earth. Centering on the diverse personal stories and experiences of former activists reveals their unique motivations for joining their respective groups, why they advocated for such different approaches to the limits to growth, and how their drive for a better future continued long after popular enthusiasm for zero growth and space settlement waned by the late 1970s.</p>

The Arctic—warming at twice the rate of the rest of the planet—is a source of striking imagery of amplified environmental change in our time, and has come to serve as a spatial setting for climate crisis discourse. The recent alterations in the Arctic environment have also been perceived by some observers as an opportunity to expand economic exploitation. Heightened geopolitical interest in the region and its resources, contradicted by calls for the protection of fragile Far North ecosystems, has rendered the Arctic an arena for negotiating human interactions with nature, and for reflecting upon the planetary risks and possibilities associated with the advent and expansion of the Anthropocene—the proposed new epoch in Earth history in which humankind is said to have gained geological agency and become the dominant force over the Earth system. With the Arctic serving as a nexus of crosscutting analytical themes spanning contemporary history (the late twentieth and the early twenty-first century until 2015), this dissertation examines defining characteristics of the Anthropocene and how the concept, which emerged from the Earth system science community, impacts ideas and assumptions in historiography, social sciences and the environmental humanities, including the fields of environmental history, crisis management and security studies, political geography, and science and technology studies (STS). The primary areas of empirical analysis and theoretical investigation encompass constructivist perspectives and temporal conceptions of environmental and climate crisis; the role of science and expertise in performing politics and shaping social discourse; the geopolitical significance of telecoupling—a concept that reflects the interconnectedness of the Anthropocene and supports stakeholder claims across wide spatial scales; and implications of the recent transformation in humankind’s long duration relationship with the natural world. Several dissertation themes were observed in practice at the international science community of Ny-Ålesund on Svalbard, where global change is made visible through a concentration of scientific activity. Ny-Ålesund is furthermore a place of geopolitics, where extra-regional states attempt to enhance their legitimacy as Arctic stakeholders through the performance of scientific research undertakings, participation in governance institutions, and by establishing a physical presence in the Far North. This dissertation concludes that this small and remote community represents an Anthropocene node of global environmental change, Earth system science, emergent global governance, geopolitics, and stakeholder construction in an increasingly telecoupled world.

Through studying the intersections of sanitation and segregation in Brooklyn, New York in the post-WWII era, this thesis reveals a web of willful white negligence that constructed a narrative that supports continued environmental injustices towards black Americans. As a result of housing discrimination, the lack of sanitation, and the political and social climate of the 1950s, black neighborhoods in Brooklyn became dirtier with abandoned garbage. Institutional anti-black racism not only permitted and supported the degradation of black neighborhoods, but also created an association between black Americans and trash. In the present day, this narrative not only leads to the increased segregation of black Americans into dirty neighborhoods, but also justifies more environmental injustice in these vulnerable communities. Based on a case study of Brooklyn in the 1950s, this thesis asserts that environmental injustices are more than just siting landfills and toxic sites proximate to vulnerable neighborhoods, but rather they are dependent on the creation and preservation of narratives that claim minority communities are naturally predisposed to or deserving of living in dirty and unclean places.

<p>This dissertation explores the history of industrial fisheries in the Humboldt Current marine ecosystem where workers, scientists, and entrepreneurs transformed Peru and Chile into two of the top five fishing nations after World War II. As fishmeal industrialists raided the oceans for proteins to nourish chickens, hogs, and farmed fish, the global "race for fish" was marked by the clash of humanitarian goals and business interests over whether the fish should be used to ameliorate malnutrition in the developing world or extracted and their nutrients exported as mass commodities, at greater profit, as a building block for the food chain in the global North. The epicenter of the fishmeal industry in the 1960s was the port city of Chimbote, Peru, where its cultural, social, and ecological impacts were wrenching. After overfishing and a catastrophic El Niño changed the course of Peruvian fisheries in 1972, Chile came to dominate world markets by the early 1980s due to shifting marine ecologies along its coast that shaped the trajectory of the ports of Iquique and Talcahuano. As Peruvian anchoveta stocks recovered in the 1990s, new environmentalist voices--from local residents to international scientists--emerged to contest unsustainable fisheries practices. This study demonstrates how global, transnational, and translocal connections shaped Humboldt Current fisheries as people struggled to understand the complex correlation between fish populations, extractive activity, and oceanic oscillations within a changing geopolitical context.</p> / Dissertation

O cultivo da mandioca possui uma estreita relação com o campesinato brasileiro, estando presente entre seus cultivos desde sua gênese e ainda hoje é parte obrigatória da alimentação de vários segmentos da população brasileira das áreas rurais. Atualmente a maior parte da produção do tubérculo provém de áreas econômica e ecologicamente marginais sendo cultivado por meio de práticas agrícolas tradicionais, denominadas de agricultura de corte-e-queima. Porém, nos últimos anos a produção de mandioca tem apresentado uma contínua queda, principalmente no Estado de São Paulo, onde as transformações agrícolas foram mais intensas. Assim, é mediante a importância histórica do cultivo da mandioca entre os camponeses e a atual situação deste cultivo que colocamos nosso problema da seguinte forma: O declínio do cultivo da mandioca apresentado hoje não é um fenômeno recente, mas sim histórico se iniciando em outras épocas. Assim nosso objetivo principal é localizar as bases históricas do declínio do cultivo deste tubérculo entre os camponeses do Estado de São Paulo. Para atingir nosso objetivo adotamos o referencial teórico-metodológico da Historia Ambiental, que nos fornece elementos para fazer esta análise na perspectiva das relações entre as sociedades humanas e o mundo natural, usando para isso dados de diversas áreas como a Economia, a Antropologia, a Arqueologia, a Ecologia, além da História Social e Econômica. / The culture of the cassava has a narrow relationship with the Brazilian small rural culture, being present among its cultures since its genesis and until today it is a mandatory part of the feeding in some segments of the Brazilian population in the agricultural areas. Currently most of the tubercle production comes from economic and ecologically outskirt areas being cultivated through traditional agriculturists methods, called slash and burn agriculture. However, during the last years the cassava production has presented a continuous fall, mainly in the São Paulo state, where the agricultural transformations had been more intense. Thus, due the historical importance of the cassava culture between the peasants and the current situation of this culture, we place our problem on the following form: The current decline of the cassava culture is not a recent phenomenon, but historical and initiating at other times. Thus our main objective is to locate the historical bases of the decline of this tubercle culture among the peasants of the Sao Paulo state. To reach our objective we adopt the theoretician-methodological referential of the Environmental History, that supplies us elements to make this analysis in the perspective of the relations between the human societies and the natural world, using for this data from several areas as the Economy, the Anthropology, Archaeology, the Ecology, and also Social and Economic History.

Submitted by Angela Maria de Oliveira (amolivei@uepg.br) on 2017-08-17T13:29:56Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Thiago Bohatch.pdf: 4547554 bytes, checksum: 514d96f24519064baa1b6b147d6760a8 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-08-17T13:29:56Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Thiago Bohatch.pdf: 4547554 bytes, checksum: 514d96f24519064baa1b6b147d6760a8 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2017-02-08 / No início do século XX, Ponta Grossa começou a crescer e a destacar-se como uma das cidades mais importantes do interior do Paraná. O desenvolvimento exigia muita água para suprir a demanda tanto da população ascendente quanto dos novos empreendimentos. Embora a cidade fosse servida por diversos arroios, sua capacidade de fornecer água era baixa. Poços e chafarizes não eram o suficiente, sendo obrigatória a busca por rios de maior volume d’água para construção de um sistema de abastecimento e esgoto. Durante todo o processo, da busca até a distribuição, o primeiro jornal da cidade, “O Progresso”, encarregava-se de informar a população sobre os trâmites legais, decisões da prefeitura, reclamações dos moradores, entre outras notícias da região. Para regrar a população, era preciso um Código de Posturas, o qual buscava impor certas normas necessárias para o convívio urbano e sobretudo, em tempos de expansão, evitar a proliferação de doenças. Contudo, os arroios sofreram os impactos da modernização, passaram a ser cada vez mais poluídos e vistos como carregadores de doenças. Seus cursos começaram então a ser canalizados com o intuito de mitigar o problema e levar o esgoto para longe da cidade. Para esta pesquisa, alguns moradores que viviam próximo aos arroios até a década de 1950 cederam entrevistas contando como era o ambiente durante a sua infância e juventude, suas lembranças sobre esses cursos d’água e como avaliam as transformações da paisagem urbana de lá para cá. / In the early 20th century, Ponta Grossa began to grow and stand out as one of the most important cities in the inland of Paraná. Development required a lot of water to supply the demand of both the rising population and the new ventures. Although the city was served by several streams, its capacity to provide water was low. Wells and fountains were not enough, being mandatory the search for rivers of greater volume of water for the construction of a system of supply and sewage. Throughout the process, from the search to the distribution, the city's first newspaper, "O Progresso", was in charge of informing the population about legal procedures, city hall decisions, residents' complaints, among other news in the region. To regulate the population, it was necessary a Code of Postures, which sought to impose certain norms necessary for the urban conviviality and above all, in times of expansion, to avoid the proliferation of diseases. However, the streams suffered the impacts of modernization, became increasingly polluted and seen as carriers of disease. Their courses then began to be channeled in order to mitigate the problem and take the sewage away from the city. For this research, some residents who lived near the streams until the 1950s gave interviews by telling how the environment was during their childhood and youth, their memories about these watercourses and how they evaluate the transformations of the urban landscape from here to here.

O cultivo da mandioca possui uma estreita relação com o campesinato brasileiro, estando presente entre seus cultivos desde sua gênese e ainda hoje é parte obrigatória da alimentação de vários segmentos da população brasileira das áreas rurais. Atualmente a maior parte da produção do tubérculo provém de áreas econômica e ecologicamente marginais sendo cultivado por meio de práticas agrícolas tradicionais, denominadas de agricultura de corte-e-queima. Porém, nos últimos anos a produção de mandioca tem apresentado uma contínua queda, principalmente no Estado de São Paulo, onde as transformações agrícolas foram mais intensas. Assim, é mediante a importância histórica do cultivo da mandioca entre os camponeses e a atual situação deste cultivo que colocamos nosso problema da seguinte forma: O declínio do cultivo da mandioca apresentado hoje não é um fenômeno recente, mas sim histórico se iniciando em outras épocas. Assim nosso objetivo principal é localizar as bases históricas do declínio do cultivo deste tubérculo entre os camponeses do Estado de São Paulo. Para atingir nosso objetivo adotamos o referencial teórico-metodológico da Historia Ambiental, que nos fornece elementos para fazer esta análise na perspectiva das relações entre as sociedades humanas e o mundo natural, usando para isso dados de diversas áreas como a Economia, a Antropologia, a Arqueologia, a Ecologia, além da História Social e Econômica. / The culture of the cassava has a narrow relationship with the Brazilian small rural culture, being present among its cultures since its genesis and until today it is a mandatory part of the feeding in some segments of the Brazilian population in the agricultural areas. Currently most of the tubercle production comes from economic and ecologically outskirt areas being cultivated through traditional agriculturists methods, called slash and burn agriculture. However, during the last years the cassava production has presented a continuous fall, mainly in the São Paulo state, where the agricultural transformations had been more intense. Thus, due the historical importance of the cassava culture between the peasants and the current situation of this culture, we place our problem on the following form: The current decline of the cassava culture is not a recent phenomenon, but historical and initiating at other times. Thus our main objective is to locate the historical bases of the decline of this tubercle culture among the peasants of the Sao Paulo state. To reach our objective we adopt the theoretician-methodological referential of the Environmental History, that supplies us elements to make this analysis in the perspective of the relations between the human societies and the natural world, using for this data from several areas as the Economy, the Anthropology, Archaeology, the Ecology, and also Social and Economic History.

abstract: This research investigates the biophysical and institutional mechanisms affecting the distribution of metals in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona. To date, a long-term, interdisciplinary perspective on metal pollution in the region has been lacking. To address this gap, I integrated approaches from environmental chemistry, historical geography, and institutional economics to study the history of metal pollution in the desert. First, by analyzing the chemistry embodied in the sequentially-grown spines of long-lived cacti, I created a record of metal pollution that details biogeochemical trends in the desert since the 1980s. These data suggest that metal pollution is not simply a legacy of early industrialization. Instead, I found evidence of recent metal pollution in both the heart of the city and a remote, rural location. To understand how changing land uses may have contributed to this, I next explored the historical geography of industrialization in the desert. After identifying cities and mining districts as hot spots for airborne metals, I used a mixture of historical reports, maps, and memoirs to reconstruct the industrial history of these polluted landscapes. In the process, I identified three key transitions in the energy-metal nexus that drove the redistribution of metals from mineral deposits to urban communities. These transitions coincided with the Columbian exchange, the arrival of the railroads, and the economic restructuring that accompanied World War II. Finally, to determine how legal and political forces may be influencing the fate of metals, I studied the evolution of the rights and duties affecting metals in their various forms. This allowed me to track changes in the institutions regulating metals from the mining laws of the 19th century through their treatment as occupational and public health hazards in the 20th century. In the process, I show how Arizona’s environmental and resource institutions were often transformed by extra-territorial concerns. Ultimately, this created an institutional system that compartmentalizes metals and fails to appreciate their capacity to mobilize across legal and biophysical boundaries to accumulate in the environment. Long-term, interdisciplinary perspectives such as this are critical for untangling the complex web of elements and social relations transforming the modern world. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Sustainability 2019