Edward C. Fritz was one of the most influential environmentalists in Texas history. Although he took a circuitous route to environmental activism, Fritz evolved into a powerful force fighting on behalf of Texan nature. Participating in substantial actions throughout the second half of the twentieth century, Fritz's contributions to environmental activism resulted in the successful preservation of thousands of acres and multiple wildlife species. Fritz parlayed his legal background into effective activism, beginning his career with a successful lobbying campaign for protection of Harris Hawks. He led the campaign to stop a decades old plan for canalization of the Trinity River. The creation of COST combined Fritz's environmental focus with the concerns of economic conservatives to prevent a billion dollar government funded project that would have significantly altered the river. Fritz then led a cadre who took over efforts to establish a preserve in the Big Thicket national forest. He oversaw the foundation of a protected area far larger than original expectations, capitalizing on the growing awareness of environmental issues in the 1970s. Fritz's interest in the Big Thicket led to a fight against the Forest Service's practice of clearcutting and its effect on Red Cockaded Woodpeckers. Through litigation and legislation, Fritz fostered a grassroots movement aimed at reforming management of the national forests, saw the establishment of the state's first wilderness, and saved the declining population of the woodpeckers. For his tireless approach and lifelong achievements, Fritz was given the title of "Father of Texas Conservation."

Thich Nhat Hanh is one of the key actors in the contemporary engaged Buddhist practice. With his understanding of the traditional Buddhist doctrine, tradition and practice he constructs a view of ecology that he thinks encourage both the individual and the collective to environmentalist action. His cosmology is based on an understanding the reality as a non-dual, interconnected, interdependent and impermanent and sees all beings and the nature equal in their nature. He also bases his ethical and moral views on this cosmology and is an advocate for traditional Buddhist ethical and moral principles such as non-violence and non-judgementalism. The traditional doctrine of the 4 noble truths and the dependent co-arising is the base for his thought of why we should practice mindfulness with the goal of raising awareness of the true nature of reality and the environmental issues. According to him it is possible to stop the global warming with the use of mindfulness and action that are based on on the traditional Buddhist perception of cosmology and moral and ethical principles.

The relationships between gender and the environment have been explored most fully throughout the field of ecofeminism, which examines environmental problems through the lens of gender, revealing the ways that the oppression of women and the exploitation of nature are conjoined and mutually reinforcing. However, ecofeminism has often been ignored, re-named, or subjected to critiques of gender essentialism. As a result, I return to the 1993 Clayoquot Sound protests on Vancouver Island, British Columbia to re-examine the theory and praxis of ecofeminism. I argue that the main environmental organization, the Friends of Clayoquot Sound (FOCS), consciously invoked ecofeminist principles of equality, consensus and non-violence to direct the camp and campaign. Ecofeminism within Clayoquot Sound kept gender equality at the forefront of the environmental movement while challenging traditional hierarchical power relations and systems of dominance that many social movements experience. Clayoquot Sound was therefore a watershed social movement that integrated a gendered perspective into environmental discourse, analysis, and action. I urge further research and reflection among both activists and academics regarding the intersections between environmentalism and feminism, especially in today’s worsening climate crisis. / Graduate

The January 2021 edition of PMLA housed an entire cluster on "Indigenous Literatures and the Anthropocene," in which at least four of the eight non-Indigenous contributors directly addressed and supported a call for learning from and collaborating with Indigenous voices. The unanimity of the discussion dissolves somewhat drastically when considering exactly how this should be done, leading Melanie Taylor to voice one of the framing questions of the cluster: "If it is increasingly clear that not all members of Anthropos are equal drivers of the Anthropocene, and that not all are uniformly compromised by its havoc, how can we begin to manufacture a communal will to redress it?" (Taylor 10). My thesis presents as a potential solution collective environmental guilt—collective guilt responding to the specifically ecological violence enacted by settler-societies. William Kent Krueger's This Tender Land and Geraldine Brook's Caleb's Crossing, two works of settler-authored historical fiction, utilize collective environmental guilt to manufacture a communal will in their popular readerships by demonstrating and assigning guilt to the settler-collectives of their protagonists before guiding readers to embrace and center Indigenous ecologies as a potential path to mitigating that guilt and promoting positive environmental change. As settler-authored works, the texts offer an alternative mode of engagement with Indigenous knowledges for an audience traditionally outside of scholarly discourse's reach in a way that models a path for ally authorship supporting Indigenous environmental movements.

The contemporary concept of wilderness, which is central to environmental theory and activism, is both a help and a hindrance to government policy and to popular environmental beliefs. The Judeo-Christian religious tradition and Locke's property theory provides much of the western cultural and historical basis of humans' environmental attitudes that basically engender exploitation. I argue that a more precise interpretation of Genesis and of Locke reveals that both sources actually promote environmental stewardship while decrying ecological abuse. Next I analyze the history and shortcomings of various wilderness concepts. These shortcomings are all forms of an exclusionist mentality and result in some harmful theoretical and practical applications. Some of these applications include the separation of humans from nature, and the propensity of governments and the public to allow ecological degradation in non-wilderness areas. Yet there are beneficial aspects to wilderness that contribute to a deeper understanding of human nature and our place in the world. Wilderness helps us to remember our wild and primal aspects that provide a connection with nature. In light of the perils and power of wilderness I offer a new, radical, inclusive, and expansive notion of wilderness that I name "dwellness." Dwellness is a normative ethical position where all areas upon the earth ought to be viewed by people in the same way as wilderness areas are currently viewed, but with some modifications. Unlike wilderness, dwellness includes humans within nature and also contains the idea of sustainable living practices. To support dwellness I turn to Martin Heidegger. By identifying the world as a place where we dwell and in which we belong, we come to a more profound understanding of Being, or existence, in general and of our own particular modes of being. By learning to look at the world in this new, yet old, way we may then understand how important and central is the world, a mode of Being, to the existence and maintenance of our Being. Finally, I answer some possible objections to dwellness. These objections revolve around problems of industrial pollution (waste), which, under dwellness, would have to be considered natural.

This dissertation offers a reappraisal of twentieth-century dystopian fiction in the roughly thirty years after World War II by identifying the environmental dimensions of many of the most genre-defining authors and novels of this period. Given the escalating climate emergency and the growing popularity of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), it would be difficult to imagine critical conversations about twenty-first-century dystopian fiction that overlook environmental anxieties in the genre. Yet, in scholarly discussions of postwar dystopian fiction, there is a limiting sense that environmental “themes” emerge only periodically, or are of secondary importance to the genre’s more typically “Orwellian” themes like totalitarianism, propaganda, the Cold War, automation, censorship, and conformism. In contrast, my dissertation shows how dystopian fiction from this period develops in conversation with emerging conceptions of environmental degradation in the anti-nuclear, anti-population growth, and modern environmental movements. By developing a history of dystopian fiction’s mutual imbrication with growing anxieties about ecological degradation, my dissertation shows that texts in the genre have grappled for decades with socioecological questions that still perplex us today: can nuclear energy power a safe and abundant future? Should there be hard limits to humankind’s population? How should humans interact with/in non-human nature? If there are ecological limits to economic growth, is humankind (a problematically capacious term) approaching ecological limits? If so, are we (another problematically capacious term) courting disaster? Over three chapters, I trace the co-emergence of dystopianism and environmentalism in the roughly three decades after World War II as major Western cultural heuristics for thinking about the future. In this historical context, my dissertation puts dystopian novels like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) in conversation with trailblazing environmental texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). As I will show, dystopian fiction produced during this period was influenced by and participated in debates about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, overconsumption and overpopulation, and the degradation and disappearance of non-human nature. At the same time, the anti-nuclear, anti-population growth, and modern environmental movements borrowed rhetorical strategies from dystopian fiction to warn about the (in)habitability of the future. In developing these arguments, I draw heavily from primary sources and historical accounts of these movements, utopian and dystopian studies criticism, Marxist ecology and Critical Theory, and a growing collection of scholarship in the Environmental and Energy Humanities that emphasizes the centrality of energy to modern societies. This history will contribute to a better interdisciplinary understanding of how modern environmental thinking is influenced by dystopianism, and how dystopian fiction warns readers about what John Brunner calls environmental “survivability” in an age when the spectre of climate breakdown looms large in the public’s imagination.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of a variety of factors on environmental attitudes and behaviors. Studies have addressed a number of issues that are related to environmental matters. This examination extends the research in this area by incorporating educational attainment, political ideology, gender, marriage and family formation, religiosity and subjective spirituality, race and ethnicity, as well as several sociodemographic influences. The 2010 General Social Survey is selected for the analysis because it is the most recent data available and contains items pertaining to environmental concern and behavior, and the independent and control variables. Directions for future research in the area will be discussed.

Based on an ethnographic investigation, the dissertation examines the emergence and significance of discourses around “the environment” in the Lake District of the Araucanía region of Chile (Araucanía Lacustre). These are understood as part of the discursive aspect of globalization – the process by which the territory and its population are integrated ever more tightly into the networks of global market society – and considered in conjunction with discourses around Mapuche indigenous identity. Drawing on mediacultural studies, actor network theory, and medium theory, the analysis seeks to advance an ecological concept of communication that does not privilege human consciousness and agency. Communication is argued to be the principle by which space (physical and metaphysical) is configured and connected. Through a discussion of the physical and human geography of the territory it is argued that discourse is mutually immanent with material realities, including human practice and pre-discursive, nonhuman elements (chapter 3). The connection between environmental discourse and Mapuche culture is examined through the stereotype of the ecologically virtuous indigenous subject – a stereotype whose significance is changing as parallel neoliberal multicultural and sustainable development discourses boost the prestige of both Mapuche culture and ecological responsibility, even as the steady expansion of market society undermines both (Chapter 2). A program run by an NGO, funded by the Chilean state, and intended to market the agro-ecological produce of Mapuche small farmers to tourists, provides a concrete case of the intersection of neoliberal multiculturalism with environmental discourse (Chapter 4). The concept of “postmaterialism” is adapted, with a critical edge, in an exploration of the environmental activism and a certain dissatisfaction with modernity among college educated immigrants to the District from Santiago, North America and Europe (chapter 5). The process of globalization, through which Mapuche campesinos come to use environmentalist discourses, involves interactions among old and new information technologies, transportation technologies, and the nonanthropogenic realities of physical space-time and geography (chapter 6). The dissertation concludes with a normative argument about the ethical and epistemological inadequacy of globalizing market society.

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Studien syftar till att undersöka ekologismen i den sociala rörelsen We Are What We Do, som försöker förverkliga samhälleliga förändringar genom kollektiva små handlingar. Genom en kvalitativ fallstudie analyserar författaren rörelsens strategier som ska inspirera och motivera människor att agera, hur den utnyttjar märke och marknadsföring för att mobilisera kollektiva handlingar och bygga en gemenskap, och rörelsens visioner i det subpolitiska sammanhaget. Studien har slutsatsen att We Are What We Do är ett uttryck av den reflexiva ekologismen, eftersom den utvecklar politik utanför den traditionella politiska arenan, samt syftar till att engagera nya aktörer och omfamnar självorganiserande och avcentraliserade utvecklingar. / This study aims to examine the environmentalism of We Are What We Do, a social change movement which aspires to making social impacts through aggregated individual actions. Through a qualitative single case study, the author analyses the movement’s strategies at inspiring and motivating people to take small actions, how it uses branding to mobilise collective actions and build a community, and the movement’s visions in the context of subpolitics. The study concludes that the We Are What Do embodies a reflexive form of environmentalism, as it chooses to deploy politics outside the conventional political arena, aims to engage new political agents and embraces self-organising and decentralised developments.