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In a town in northern Norway, the sailors on whale-watching boats meet whales in their daily work. Many have up to 30 years’ experience in locating the whales, through sight or submerged microphones, and in positioning the boats in non-intrusive ways that respect the whales’ life in the open water. But in spite of this continued, long-lasting contact, the sailors agree that there is not much that can be known about the whales. This study, based on interviews to the five seamen of one whale-watching company, explores the resources on which the sailors can draw to make sense of the underwater beings they interact with. Departing from the ontological paradigm that sees the world as made up of overlapping realities, the author draws on different aspects of multispecies theory to explore how anthropomorphism, technology, and kinship are key elements that make up the sailors’ relational ontology with whales. This is analysed in the light of the doctrine of opacity, which posits that it is not necessary to know the mind of others to have successful relations. This study hopes to further the exploration of topics within maritime anthropology, and to contribute to a better understanding of human/underwater beings that leads to the preservation of their environment.

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This dissertation studies literary modernism’s philosophies of nature. It examines how historical attitudes about natural environments and climates are codified in literary texts, what values attach to them, and how relationships between humanity and nature are figured in modernist fiction. Attending less to nature itself than to concepts, ideologies, and aesthetic theories about nature, it argues that British modernism and ecology articulate shared concerns with the vitality of the earth, the shaping force of climate, and the need for new ways of understanding the natural world. Many of British modernism’s most familiar texts, by E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells, reveal a sustained preoccupation with significant concepts in environmental and intellectual history, including competition between vitalist, holist, and mechanistic philosophies and science, global industrialization by the British Empire, and the emergence of ecology as a revolutionary means of ordering the physical world. “Modernism, Ecology, and the Anthropocene” uncovers these preoccupations to illustrate how consistently literary works leverage environmental ideologies and how pervasively literature shapes cultural and even scientific attitudes toward the natural world. Through the geological concept of the Anthropocene, it brings literary history into interdisciplinary conversations that have recently emerged from the Earth sciences and are now increasingly common in the humanities, social sciences, and in wider public debates about climate change. The dissertation’s first chapter, “Connecting Earth to Empire: E. M. Forster’s Changing Climate,” argues that E.M. Forster’s fiction apprehends the global implications of local climate change at a crucial time in environmental and literary history. By relating Forster’s Howards End and A Passage to India to his 1909 story, “The Machine Stops,” it attends to the speculative aspects of Forster’s work and presents Forster as a keen observer who foresaw not only the passing of rural England and the arrival of a new urban way of life, but environmental change on a global scale. Its second chapter, “The Call of Life: James Joyce’s Vitalist Aesthetics,” explores the connotations “life” gathers in Joyce’s early fiction and proposes a new reading of his aesthetics that emphasizes its ecological implications by pairing Joyce with his contemporary “modern” vitalism and current new materialisms. The third chapter, “Make it Whole: The Ecosystems of Virginia Woolf and A.G. Tansley,” revises critical conceptions of Woolf as an ecological writer and environmental histories of early ecology by showing how Woolf’s philosophy of nature and Tansley’s ecosystem concept run parallel and represent a shared intellectual project: advocating theories of form and of perception that navigate the tension between holist and mechanistic conceptions of nature and mind. A final chapter, “Landlord of the Planet: H. G. Wells, Human Extinction, and Anthropocene Narratives,” establishes Wells as an early environmental humanist whose ecological outlook evolved with his perception of the rapidly increasing pace of climate change and its threat to the human species. By digging into a rarely-read scientific textbook he co-authored, The Science of Life, this chapter analyzes how the natural world is managed in three Wellsian utopias and traces the development of his writing in concert with ecology. / English

This work sets out to analyze stylistic changes in Anthropocene fiction over the past 60 years. The starting point for the analysis has been Rachel Carson, and the presumed beginning of the Anthropocene in the 1960s. The primary insight gained reveals the connections within these novel and relations of similar writing about climate change thereby contributing to the field of Environmental Humanities in a fundamental way, as so far, climate change fiction has only been investigated through a topic centered focus. The corpus compiled for scrutiny here extends to over 84 novels from these years. These novels have been selected based on a dual approach, looking at the secondary literature as well as a crowdsourced approach in looking at Good Reads’ cli-fi lists. The resulting texts are then analyzed with stylo, an R package that has been specifically created for stylometric analysis by humanists. The results are visualized in a network that allows easier interpretation and leads to an understanding of more detailed questions about the nature of the connection between works, the inspiration and representation of a specific genre of writing. Moreover, the thesis looks diachronically at clustering based on time and topic. Understanding the ways in which authors address and have addressed climate change is one indicator of how climate change is and has been comprehended. In terms of the digital approach applied here, the basis is a distant reading approach covering a larger number of novels and rather than close reading them, the task is to find patterns that extend throughout. However, for a thorough analysis, scalable reading is applied to contextualize and investigate the results in more depth. Overall, the results are meant to establish a baseline for discussing climate change fiction in the Anthropocene which although gaining more scholarly attention still is understudied. The hope is to not only gain insight but to generate visualizations that will provide a helpful resource for fellow scholars.

This thesis researches what the main ecocentric values and principles are from eco-artists and ecotherapy facilitators, and how they can promote ecocentric perspectives about the relation between humans, other beings and the planet. It starts with an overview of anthropocentrism, which is a human-centred perspective of humans and nature that sees them as separate, and believes humans to have more intrinsic value than nature and other beings. The more-than-human world is seen as resource capital for human use, enabling harmful practices like ecocide and over-extraction. Beliefs that form the roots of this rift are a perceived Western human superiority and power over human and non-human beings that are seen as inferior; and a worldly understanding based on simplification, separation and dualisms. Historically, this perceived superiority became symptomatic in harmful practices like colonisation and slavery. The thesis then moves on to explore six ecocentric perspectives and nature-centred values that stress equal intrinsic value of humans and other beings. Six main ecocentric themes are identified: humans are nature; the importance of pluriversality; presence and connection; cyclical change and dynamic transformation; co-creation and autonomy; and life as a subjective experience that values other ways of knowing. These ecocentric perspectives are illuminated and discussed through interviews with eco-artists and ecotherapy facilitators. Besides interviews and conversations with ecocentric practitioners, a complementary research method has been observatory participation, which both deepens and colours the findings of this research. Conclusively, an argument is made for the importance of personal and subjectively felt experiences that can steer humans towards shaping their own lived understanding of their relation to planet Earth. In moving away from a monistic worldview in a biodiverse world it is important to create space to honour and work with the many ways of learning, knowing, and living on planet Earth. There is no one right way to live well and be sustainable. Diverse ecotherapy and eco-art practices offer examples of how nature connection can be established in relatively simple ways, yet cause a profound shift in worldly perception, which is essential in acknowledging how human beings are dependent on a healthy, biodiverse natural environment.

abstract: This dissertation examines cultural representations that attend to the environmental and socio-economic dynamics of contemporary water crises. It focuses on a growing, transnational body of “hydronarratives” – work by writers, filmmakers, and artists in the United States, Canada, and the postcolonial Global South that stress the historical centrality of water to capitalism. These hydronarratives reveal the uneven impacts of droughts, floods, water contamination, and sea level rise on communities marginalized along lines of race, class, and ethnicity. In doing so, they challenge narratives of “progress” conventionally associated with colonial, imperialist, and neoliberal forms of capitalism dependent on the large-scale extraction of natural resources. Until recently, there has been little attention paid to the ways in which literary texts and other cultural productions explore the social and ecological dimensions of water resource systems. In its examination of water, this dissertation is methodologically informed by the interdisciplinary field of the energy humanities, which explores oil and other fossil fuels as cultural objects. The hydronarratives examined in this dissertation view water as a cultural object and its extraction and manipulation, as cultural practices. In doing so, they demonstrate the ways in which power, production, and human-induced environmental change intersect to create social and environmental sacrifice zones. This dissertation takes an interdisciplinary environmental humanities approach, drawing on fields such as indigenous studies, political ecology, energy studies, cultural geography, and economic theory. It seeks to establish a productive convergence between environmental justice studies and what might be termed “Anthropocene studies.” Dominant narratives of the Anthropocene tend to describe the human species as a universalized, undifferentiated whole broadly responsible for the global environmental crisis. However, the hydronarratives examined in this dissertation “decolonize” this narrative by accounting for the ways in which colonialism, capitalism, and other exploitative social systems render certain communities more vulnerable to environmental catastrophe than others. By attending to these issues through problem water, this dissertation has significant implications for future research in contemporary, transnational American and postcolonial literary studies, the environmental humanities, and the energy humanities. It demonstrates the potential for a focus on representations of resources in literary texts and other cultural productions to better grasp the inequitable distribution of environmental risk, and instances of resilience on a rapidly changing planet. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation English 2018

This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet's engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare's poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological. This thesis is the first sustained study of the poet John Clare and his relationship to health. It considers health as an under-explored physical and mental state evoked across his poetry and prose that has heretofore been overshadowed by a critical preoccupation with his supposed madness. Under the banner of the Medical Humanities, I angle a critical lens on Clare and health beyond biographical readings of his mental deterioration and onto his written responses to the medical, cultural, and social understandings of health by which he was surrounded. Specifically, I argue that Clare articulates both his comprehension and also experience of health through poetic form. I take a thematic approach to the reach of Clare's works composed between 1804-1864, and focus on what I argue to be the most predominant 'forms' that health takes across his poetics: voice, breath, and place. The chapters unfold the poet's engagement with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century medical contexts such as nosology and theories of insanity, speech and elocution, climatic and atmospheric medicine, phrenology, and botany, in order to consider how the local formal techniques of his poems (metre and prosody, rhyme and other sonic devices, caesura, enjambment, and line-endings) shape and re-work the ideas of mental and physical health that these contexts put forward. Throughout the thesis I bring together formal and historical methodologies with modern phenomenological and cultural theories in order to draw out how Clare's exploration of health is both facilitated by the thinking of his own period, and also speaks to current research into health and illness as subjective experiences. Ultimately, I read health across Clare's poetry at the level of form in order to reveal how health inspires a textual mode that defies determinacy and unsettles distinctions between the healthy and the pathological.

Historically, American farmers have been identified as white, middle-aged, working- to middle-class, men who reside in rural environments to grow large expanses of corn, soybeans, or wheat. However, this dissertation questions this fraught representation of past farmers and introduces a new identity in contemporary American agriculture - Young Farmers. Usually, Young Farmers are first-generation agriculturalists, who hold small parcels of land, produce a diverse assortment of crops, and adopt items of rural material culture to better perform as farmers. Additionally, they believe their lifestyles and their existences are dependent upon interactions with their local environments and members of their communities. By focusing on these individuals, this study examines how American farmers, the environments they inhabit, the goods they produce, and the locations they distribute their products have changed, especially after the most recent Farm Crisis in the 1980s.<div><br></div><div>To best understand these alterations, this dissertation offers an exploration of three farmers market locations in Michigan's Lower Peninsula to highlight and compare the social, cultural, environmental, and economic shifts occurring in the agricultural community. Arguably, farmers markets provide Young Farmers a space to meet prospective consumers and to distribute their products to them. Likewise, these site are a venue for Young Farmers to develop successful systems of community with other people involved with small-scale farming. Throughout this dissertation, I layer ethnographic and historical archive data with quantitative metrics, such as U.S. Census Bureau data to better explain demographic shifts occurring across Michigan's farming landscape. Additionally, I critically analyze images associated with past and current representations of individuals involved with agriculture to address how Young Farmers redefine themselves culturally and participate in methods of food and economic sustainability. By studying and understanding the codependence of the people and place who comprise farmers and farming communities in a representative location like Michigan, I recognize the relevance of the Midwest as a crossroads of contemporary American agriculture. </div>

<p>This dissertation used a qualitative and interpretive lens to explore visitor and staff perceptions of the mission and purpose of Glacier National Park and the National Park Service as well as the interpreted environmental state of this park. Through the use of online survey data and participant observations, this study provides a deeper understanding of how individuals inside of Glacier National Park view the potential for this park to succeed or fail with its mission as well as how environmental concerns are communicated to those within the park during the summer of 2019. Strategic environmental communication strategies are provided at the conclusion of this study in order to aid Glacier and the National Park Service in more efficiently educating their publics about their core goals and environmental management efforts.</p>