Browsing by Subject "Forest"
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Item Changing Chapultepec: construction, consumption, and cultural politics in a Mexico City Forest, 1934-1944(2013-12) Moerer, Andrea Kristine"Changing Chapultepec: Construction, Consumption, and Cultural Politics in a Mexico City Forest, 1934-1944" asks to whom does the forest belong? A study about how Chapultepec Forest in Mexico City became an emblematic space filled with didactic institutions, it argues that actors involved in social stabilization and economic modernization institutionalized the concept of "nature" in the urban environment, propagating social divisions through metaphors of naturalness to shape subjects in an era of heightened concern with both Mexicanness and foreign investment. Thus it documents the shifting understandings of what constituted nature through four thematic chapters looking at a failed international exposition, two foundational museums, an exhibition-, print- and legislative-based crusade against the use of charcoal, and out-of-doors sporting and consumer activities. These chapters detail conflicts among symbolism and materiality, popular access and privatization, and national goals and an effort to appeal to foreigners. Criminals, presidents, elite and working women, foreign businessmen, schoolchildren, entertainers, scientists, and civil servants among others demonstrate that though Chapultepec is considered a public space, its meaning and usage have been highly constructed and restricted.Item Fleshing out conservation: performative ecologies and embodied practice in Chilean temperate rainforest management(2012-08) Pratt, Kathryn C.This dissertation brings recent theories of embodiment, practice, and performance to bear on community-based conservation in the temperate rainforest region of Southern Chile. The goal of the project is to respond to a problem that conservation scientists often call the “implementation crisis.” Essentially, we have abundant knowledge of conservation models, strategies, and best practices, but yet we still struggle to implement effective community-based projects on the ground. Political ecologists have tried to address this issue by unpacking the cultural politics of conservation, explaining the fate of projects in relation to, for example, competing understandings of community, conflicts around gender and social difference, or clashes between different knowledge systems. Problems occur, it is argued, when conditions on the ground do not conform to pre-given categories, such as when the lines between “local” and “expert” become blurred, or when complex and unbounded social relations contradict our notions of bounded, homogeneous communities. This dissertation works to challenge and extend these critical perspectives by “fleshing out” environmental practices in Chile. I argue that in emphasizing contentious cultural categories, practitioners and scholars alike have tended to neglect the everyday lived experiences of making conservation happen. The dissertation draws on fieldwork conducted with two projects based near the town of Valdivia, Chile: a newly formed private reserve that was partnering with local communities on conservation and development projects and a firewood certification program working with small landholders on sustainable forest management. The focus of my research is on the actual performance of conservation. I start not with cultural categories but with the material interactions that make projects tick. For example, I trace the movements of actors as they negotiate project work, study skills as they are learned and practiced in the field, examine collaborations as they take form, and explore how everyday misadventures can turn into creative solutions. To support my claims, I draw on a growing interdisciplinary body of research that addresses the creative, corporeal, and emergent nature of practice, including non-representational theories in geography, practice theories from sociology and anthropology, theories of embodied cognition from the cognitive sciences, and materialist feminisms. These literatures all contend that social processes are not just the outcome of competing ideas and representations, but also emerge from the actions of people physically engaged in their environment. Each chapter explores a different way in which practice plays a significant role in conservation projects. Chapter 2 presents a re-examination of the environmental politics of vision and representation by showing that vision is much more tied to bodily movement than has previously been assumed. Chapter 3 considers another central area of political ecology critique: the politics of environmental knowledge, especially clashes between “expert” scientific and “local” indigenous knowledge. Political ecologists claim that one of the problems of community-based conservation is that too often it involves imposing scientific modes of understanding on local groups whose indigenous forms of knowledge are not equally valued. I argue that what often gets ignored in these discussions is the role of embodied skill in constituting environmental know-how. Chapter 4 examines how collaboration works in conservation projects. Although there has been considerable discussion of the problematic use of the term community within grassroots conservation initiatives, I argue that these conversations too have tended to neglect the embodied, relational aspects of practice. As an alternative to the logic and counter-logic of community, I suggest developing a performative understanding of togetherness which I call “associating.” While chapters 2-4 all emphasize the novel and serendipitous qualities of conservation practice, Chapter 5 addresses repetition. I show that mundane, routine, and habitual aspects of conservation work are important for instilling the sensitivity and awareness to unspoken aspects of environmental projects. Moreover, I show how such tedium actually contributes to the creative process, rather than, as we might assume, introducing complacency in conservation. I conclude by reflecting on what is gained by developing a more “fleshy” understanding of conservation and environmental management.Item The Forest and Social change in Early Modern English literature, 1590–1700.(2009-05) Weixel, Elizabeth MarieThe Forest and Social Change in Early Modern English Literature, 1590-1700 , recasts the green world of the early modern forest in a historical framework and in a literature of landscape that shaped conceptions of social power in England. I argue that Renaissance poets employ forest imagery and settings in ways that register a slow decline of land-based aristocratic influence and accompanying social markers. At a time of struggle between the Crown and the nobility, growing influence of the middle ranks, and evolving economic and political ideas, literary depictions of forests build upon the unrest associated with historical forests to suggest new social arrangements. The dissertation traces this convergence of landscape, literature, and social rank in forest law and forestry manuals, stage comedy, romance epic, brief biblical epic, and country house poetry. Chapter 1 examines forest law and an arboricultural treatise and demonstrates that their silent omission of aristocratic interests reveals a shift in thought about social power and influence tied to the English landscape. Chapter 2 examines dukes in the woods of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It and argues that forests harbor authority that transcends the social structure and is accessible to characters outside circles of power and privilege. Chapter 3 shows how the intertextual depiction of two failed forest squires in Book VI of Spenser's The Faerie Queene reflects doubt about the long-term efficacy of aristocratic social dominance and the promise it offers for personal and social advancement. Chapter 4 places the banquet temptation of Milton's Paradise Regained in the context of country house poetry by Lanyer, Jonson, and Marvell, and it traces how the poem subjugates the social hierarchy to an ideal of spiritual humility by blending religious dissent with the rumblings of social discontent latent in historical and literary forests.Item Forest Health Concerns and Management among Resort & Campground Owners in Minnesota(University of Minnesota, 2016) Bobick, Bridget; Russell, Matthew; Schneider, IngridItem The influence of natural disturbance-based silviculture treatments on northern hardwood forests in Northeastern Minnesota, USA.(2010-12) Bolton, Nicholas WilliamNatural disturbance-based silviculture (NDBS) has been suggested as an approach for promoting late-successional forest characteristics and maintaining native biodiversity in managed forests. Harvest gaps based on the natural disturbance patterns found in the upper Great Lakes (46 study gaps) were created throughout northern hardwood forests in northeastern Minnesota, USA, during the winters of 2002 and 2003. Gaps were measured 6- and 7-years post-treatment and subsequent analysis of these measurements was used to evaluate the success of these treatments at meeting structural and compositional objectives. Results indicated that these gaps have done little to increase tree diversity, including the recruitment of shade mid-tolerant species; however, the richness of herbaceous understory vegetation has responded positively to larger gap sizes. Herbaceous species increasing in harvest gaps included Actaea spp. L. (baneberry), Botrychium virginianum L. (rattlesnake fern), Mertensia paniculata Aiton (Northern bluebell), Rubus idaeus L. (red raspberry), Sanguinaria canadensis L. (bloodroot) and Cirsium arvense L. (Canada thistle). Results also indicated that subtle patterns were found among species spatial establishment within gaps (e.g., gap edge and gap center) and species that expressed no preference between the intact forest and harvest gaps. Levels of downed coarse woody debris (CWD) differed among gap size and all gaps had lower levels of CWD compared to the surrounding intact forest. Due to the historical importance of Betula alleghaniensis in these systems, the factors affecting the recruitment of this species were also investigated. Based on these investigations, it was found that B. alleghaniensis establishment was strongly related to highly decayed, large coniferous pieces of CWD with little recruitment occurring on the undisturbed forest floor. As such, providing appropriate seedbed conditions for shade mid-tolerant species and utilizing natural canopy gap sizes would improve the success of maintaining this species on the landscape.Item Role of leafing phenology in the invasion of forest ecosystems by Rhamnus cathartica(2015-04) Pretorius, AndrewBuckthorn breaks bud earlier in the spring and holds leaves later in the fall compared to co-occurring native understory species and the forest canopy. This phenology may allow buckthorn to take advantage of high light levels prior to canopy closure in spring and after leaf drop in fall. We hypothesized that this unique phenology is one mechanism that facilitates invasion of the forest interior by buckthorn. To test our hypothesis, we experimentally shaded buckthorn seedlings, reducing high light levels in the spring and fall to simulate intact canopy conditions. We measured spring and fall leafing phenology, light availability and seedling survival and growth. After a year and half of shading little mortality was observed but individuals receiving shading treatments had significantly decreased growth. Supporting our hypothesis that access to phenology-induced high light levels in the spring and autumn is one mechanism for buckthorn success in closed canopy forests.Item Spatial vegetation-environment relationships and distributional changes in the presettlement Minnesota prairie-forest boundary.(2009-02) Danz, Nicholas PThe prairie-forest boundary region in Minnesota spans 650 km along a northwest-southeast axis and is often considered one of the most abrupt grassland-forest transitions in the world. Historically, this region separated tallgrass prairie vegetation to the south and west from forest vegetation to the north and east, while land conversion since presettlement has eliminated over 95% of original prairie and continues to convert and fragment forested lands. Ecological boundaries such as the prairie-forest transition are considered critical landscape elements that control the fluxes of organisms, materials, and energy between ecosystems. While the significance and characteristics of ecological boundaries has been often discussed in scientific literature, there are few studies that provide empirical support for boundary concepts. In particular, studies are lacking that evaluate vegetation-environment relationships across boundaries. In this thesis, I use the presettlement prairie-forest boundary as an example of an ecological boundary to address the following issues: 1) the influence of spatial scale and spatial heterogeneity in the controls of vegetation, 2) the spatial nature of a vegetation-climate relationship across the boundary, and 3) range distributional shifts since presettlement in tree taxa common to the boundary region.