Environmental Studies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/26311

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Access status: Open Access ,
Local Sustainability Assessment for Human Well-being Using Global Ecological Footprint Data
(2026-03-10) Paudel, Kamal; Bunch, Martin J.
This proof-of-concept study examined an approach to downscaling the ecological footprint (EF) at the local level. In this study, an EF disaggregation methodology was applied, using national EF data and adjusting them to the local level (Dissemination Area (DA)) using ratios informed by recent data. The study then employed a citizen science methodology to enhance and calibrate the EF data at the DA level. Data from 429 participants (403 complete) on consumption habits were analyzed using the Greater Golden Horseshoe Area (GGHA) average EF as a baseline. Linear regression, correlation analysis, t-tests and Cohen’s d tests validated findings across two Canadian demographic groups. The methodology focused on the Region of Peel in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) to compare the EF of consumption and related health and well-being outcomes between two demographic groups: recent immigrants and established Canadians. The study aimed to address a gap by utilizing a citizen science method to gather local insights. The relationship between those two methods and two community groups was explored. The disaggregation method differed significantly from the citizen science method (p < 0.05). For example, despite having a national average of 7.42 gha/cap, established Canadians in the study area exhibit an EF of 11.5 gha/cap, while recent immigrants have an EF of 10.75 gha/cap, exhibiting a statistically significant difference (p ≤ 0.05) using the disaggregation method, with a ratio adjusted to reflect more recent data. The citizen-science-based approach revealed that established Canadians in the study area exhibit an EF of consumption of 8.73 gha/cap, compared to 8.07 gha/cap for recent immigrants, exhibiting a statistically significant difference (p ≤ 0.05). Thus, it was found to enhance the granularity and relevance of EF measurements, revealing important differences between population groups. As a proof-of-concept, the study demonstrates the value of local sustainability assessments, revealing differences between recent immigrants and established Canadians in the Region of Peel. Future attempts to employ this disaggregation approach to calibrate EF estimates should have sufficient citizen science data to adequately represent local phenomena.
Access status: Open Access ,
Wild Bee Conservation in Pollinator-Independent Crop Systems
(2026-03-10) Dorin, Briann Christina; Fawcett, Leesa K.
Wild bees are undergoing global declines due to multiple interacting stressors including habitat loss, pesticides, climate change, and interactions with managed and non-native species. These threats are especially prevalent in agricultural landscapes, where natural habitats are replaced with intensively managed monocultures and bees are exposed to agrochemicals and managed pollinators. Pollinator-independent crops - those not reliant on animal pollination for yield or quality - may still support wild bee communities. Chapter 1 presents a systematic review of wild bee conservation research in pollinator-independent crop systems. The review shows strong geographic and crop biases, with commonly studied factors influencing wild bees including ground vegetation management, pesticide use, and surrounding landscapes. Chapter 2 explores how management practices influence wild bee communities in one such pollinator-independent crop, the wine grape (Vitis vinifera). Bee surveys across commercial vineyards showed that reduced between-row mowing consistently supported higher bee abundance and diversity. In contrast, practices like uniform cover cropping, organic production, and certified sustainable management had limited or sometimes negative impacts, suggesting the need for more targeted approaches and further research. Chapter 3 further examines how vineyard bee communities are impacted by local- and landscape-scale variables. Surrounding land-uses and soil factors within a 300m radius around vineyards were analyzed to determine their influence on bee abundance, diversity, and functional traits. Results reveal that wild bees were positively associated with a higher proportion of surrounding semi-natural habitats while sites with coarser soils supported more ground-nesting bees, highlighting the importance of considering both nesting and foraging resources for wild bee conservation and research in agroecosystems. Chapter 4 investigates whether wild bees use floral resources provided by pollinator independent crops by documenting foraging activity on wine grape flowers. Very few bees were observed using grapevine pollen, though some species from Apidae, Andrenidae and Halictidae were recorded. This suggests that wine grapes alone provide minimal floral resources for bees, emphasizing the importance of non-crop vegetation for sustaining bee populations in vineyard landscapes. Together, this thesis provides new insights into bee conservation within pollinator-independent crop systems and highlights practical strategies and research gaps for enhancing wild bee communities in agroecosystems.
Access status: Open Access ,
Carbon Convoys: Extractive Populism and the Canadian Far Right
(2026-03-10) McLean, Jacob Allen; Scott, Dayna N.
This dissertation offers the first comprehensive analysis of the second phase of the pro-fossil fuel, “extractive populist” movement in Canada across a largely Alberta-based cycle of protest, from 2016 to 2022, with particular attention on the emergence and diffusion of the convoy as a signature protest tactic. Placing Marxist political ecology, Gramscian approaches to far-right populism, and conventional social movement theory into conversation, I ask what the relationship is between “corporate grassroots” campaigns, climate obstructionism, and the rise of the far right. Drawing on a corpus of data including interviews with convoy organizers and far-right activists as well as the social media output of numerous pro-fossil fuel groups, I trace the personnel, organizational, and ideological overlaps between the corporate grassroots ‘extractivist action coalition’ responsible for an increasingly robust pro-oil and gas protest movement from 2016 to 2018, and three subsequent far-right movements: Yellow Vests Canada (from late 2018 to 2019), Alberta separatism (from 2019 onward), and the “freedom” movement (from 2020 onward). In doing so, I document radicalization at multiple levels across the cycle: in movement tactics, as the convoy underwent an “upward scale shift” from the local to regional then national levels, and was converted from a tactic of demonstration into one of occupation; in ideological frames, as climate denial, nativist and Islamophobic opposition to migration, “western alienation,” opposition to public health measures, and evangelical Christianity, became linked in a chain of equivalence to the globalist conspiracy theory, which served as a “master frame” across the cycle, spreading from the far-right fringes to the mainstream; and finally, in the transformation of electoral politics in Alberta, manifested in the movement-ization of the ostensibly mainstream United Conservative Party. Ultimately, I find that corporate grassroots campaigns can play a critical role in fuelling broader cycles of protest marked by radicalization and an uneasy alliance between fossil capital and the far right. Furthermore, I find that, while extractive populism may have originated as a top-down movement, over time this changed as segments of the population, especially from within the fossilized petty bourgeoisie, became capable of relatively autonomous mobilization. Ultimately, I argue that, without Canadian fossil capital’s corporate grassroots efforts to subsidize a pro-oil and gas movement, the convoy would not likely have emerged as a hallmark of far-right populist protest in Canada.
Access status: Open Access ,
On the Possibility of Justice: Disrupting the Coloniality of Law
(2025-11-11) Zwicker, Teanna Dawn Marie; Winfield, Mark S.
From industrial pig farming to the dredging of ocean floors for sand, our world sanctions the exploitation of nature for the endeavours of humans. To understand why this is, we must be more judicious – whose world sanctions this and for which human? The thesis investigates this through the discourse of ‘modernity/coloniality’. ‘Modernity’ refers to the hegemonic epistemic frame that unjustly holds a specific kind of world for a specific kind of human over and above other worlds and other humans (coloniality). In regard to legal studies, this begs the question: ‘To what extent do dominant ideas of justice and the systems of law they espouse necessarily uphold injustice?’ The thesis argues that dominant ideas of justice, referred to as rules-based justice, are insufficient to address the injustice of the coloniality of law. The thesis calls for the intervention of an alternative conception of justice it refers to as place-based justice.
Access status: Open Access ,
Energy Democracy as a Prefigurative Social Movement: Reshaping Social Relations in Energy Systems
(2025-11-11) Wyse, Susan Morrissey; Winfield, Mark S.
This dissertation examines the “energy democracy” movement, which seeks to socialize energy by transferring ownership to workers and communities in a sector long dominated by corporate control. While the movement has achieved successes in local contexts, it faces challenges. Theoretically, it has been criticized for lacking clarity and for doubts about whether democracy alone ensures justice. Practically, it has encountered co-optation and difficulties scaling to achieve systemic transformation. These challenges lead to the central question of this study: “Which practices are energy democracy actors enacting, and how are they extending these practices to contribute to broader transformation?” To address this question, the study investigates the experiences of on-the-ground energy democracy actors. Drawing on semi-structured interviews across five cases, it conducts a qualitative thematic analysis of the transcripts. The experiences of these actors are examined through the lens of prefigurative social movements, which experiment with democratic social relations in the present to model a desired future society. This framework emphasizes (1) the enactment of alternative practices—how actors structure themselves locally—and (2) the extension of those practices beyond the local to challenge systemic constraints. Since energy democracy is a prefigurative movement, this connection, underexplored in existing literature, offers a novel way to analyze the movement on its own terms. Findings reveal both potential and limitations. Actors enact democratic practices such as decentralized leadership, egalitarian approaches responsive to local needs, and collective ownership accountable to communities rather than shareholders. They also attempt to extend these practices through political engagement, movement-building, and cultural change. Yet a crucial challenge remains: scaling with limited capacity against vast corporate resources. While energy democracy offers an alternative vision, localized organizations alone are unlikely to counter entrenched corporate power. Often framed as isolated local initiatives, this study situates energy democracy within broader movements prefiguring a democratic economy, revealing it as a coherent political project. This alignment creates pathways for collaboration, solidarity, and shared strategies with these movements that can reduce burdens on individual actors. Importantly, the study highlights how academics can advance transformation by fostering networks, strengthening coalitions, and investigating questions that support structural change.
Access status: Open Access ,
Shallow Depths: Reproductions of Nuclear Landscapes and Anomalies of Consent at Chalk River
(2025-11-11) Tanguay, Laura Annalise; Scott, Dayna
Scholars and Indigenous communities increasingly urge courts and regulators to uphold the principle of “free, prior, and informed consent” (FPIC) as articulated in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In Canada, the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) has ostensibly embraced FPIC through its “willing host model,” designed to identify potential sites for a deep geological repository (DGR) to house radioactive waste. In this doctoral research, I examined the siting process for a Near Surface Disposal Facility (NSDF) in Chalk River, Ontario. I attended public hearings and community meetings as part of close empirical work documenting opposition to the proposed NSDF. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how opposition, and Indigenous refusal in particular, is generative in terms of political and regulatory shifts toward asserting and advancing Indigenous rights. The research raises the question of why the willing host model is appropriate for the DGR, but not the NSDF. I argue that consent, in this framework, is used a tool to manage and generate legitimacy in order to secure a bare minimum social license to operate. In practice, the willing host model exhibits the hallmarks of a “divide and conquer” strategy, with people in neighbouring communities being pitted against each other as they weigh the very uncertain costs and benefits of nuclear waste storage proposals. My research demonstrates that a major barrier to workable consent processes is the significant time and resources required to implement them. Effective frameworks must account for the complex and differentiated geographies of risk and impact, the intergenerational effects, and the cumulative social and financial costs, including the exacerbation of intra- and inter-community divisions. This dissertation disentangles tensions of the NWMO's willing host model, with the ultimate vision of 'scaling up' consent-processes to broader extractive contexts.  This research advances critical human geography and environmental justice literatures by teasing out how spatial and local political-economic-social contexts shape both decision-making and its outcomes—specifically, how these contexts influence the operationalization of consent-based policies, the mechanisms through which consent is negotiated, and the extent to which the nuclear waste siting process is deliberative, fair, and just.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Production of Iran as National State Space: An Historical Geography
(2025-07-23) Torkameh, Aidin; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas
In existing literature, ‘Iran’ is often represented as a pre-existing and unified (Persian) nation, enclosed in a perennial national territory and history. I argue that this conception of ‘Iran’ is rooted in dominant (internalist and ahistorical) conceptions of space as static, pregiven, and passive, and time as monorhythmic and linear. ‘Iran’ is thus largely understood – even in critical analyses of Iranian nationalism – as a pregiven entity external to its constituent elements including Farsi and the ‘spatiotemporal matrices’ of capitalist nation state. This dissertation examines scholarly and other forms of literature, as well as the social practices, that have contributed to the production of Iranian-ness in both popular and scholarly consciousness. I argue that ‘Iran’ did not exist prior and/or external to the historical formation of ‘Iranian nation’. Iran as a national state space has been made possible through a set of very recent political, scientific, infrastructural, and technological processes in the imperialist and colonial context of late development and formal subsumption of labour under capital. My core research question, therefore, is: how has Iran been produced as a national state space within this context? To address this, I critically examine the historiographic, Farsist, and cartographic practices of the state as fundamental mechanisms in the production of Iran. These tripartite practices of the state have resulted in an entrenched Irancentric philosophy of (geo)history translated into the commonsensical Farsist worldview of ‘Iranians’. This has negatively impacted the formation of a progressive political strategy of change. It is then strategically imperative to articulate a radical geohistory of Iran as a multiscalar and multitemporal entity rooted in the everyday lives of the subaltern subjects. My dissertation is an initial step in mapping such a geohistory that highlights the contingent, positively heterogeneous, and open-ended nature of geohistory and spacetime in general, and of the nation state and Iran in particular.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Survivance of Water and Rock: An Environmental History and Settler Autoethnography of Nishnaabeg Thought Worlds, Other-than-Human Personhood, and the Trent-Severn Waterway
(2025-07-23) Kapron, Benjamin Joseph; Stiegman, Martha
This dissertation is a combination of environmental history and autoethnography exploring what it means and looks like for the author to earnestly try to take Indigenous Nishnaabeg understandings of other-than-human personhood seriously, when he is a settler, living within a dominant settler Canadian thought world. Within Nishnaabeg thought worlds, other-than-human beings—plants, animals, waters, rocks, and other beings—can be persons, kin, and nations possessing capacities including agency, animacy, and spirit. As a case study, the author contrasts dominant settler narratives of the Trent-Severn Waterway (TSW) with Nishnaabeg understandings of the other-than-human persons that the waterway was built onto and into, gathering information through a walking methodology, semi-structured interviews with Nishnaabeg knowledge keepers and settlers working in solidarity with Nishnaabeg communities along the TSW, textual analysis, and archival research. The TSW is a 386-kilometer-long system of locks, dams, and canals built onto waterbodies throughout what is now considered central Ontario, Canada, to connect Chi’Nibiish (Lake Ontario) with Waasegamaa (Georgian Bay) on Odawa Zaagigan (Lake Huron). Analyzing and applying concepts of settler colonialism, the author demonstrates the settler-colonial imposition and violence of the TSW against Nishnaabeg Nations and their other-than-human relations. The author then considers how settlers might redevelop relationships with other-than-human persons by critically reflecting on his practice of using a walking methodology to spend time with and learn from other-than-human persons impacted by the TSW. Finally, the author explores other-than-human survivance, speculating on how various other-than-human persons actively and agentially survive against and resist the TSW. Through these inquiries, the author centers other-than-human persons in an analysis of settler colonialism and examines how settlers might take other-than-human personhood seriously, in order to develop ethical relationships with other-than-human persons, better align settlers with Nishnaabeg and other Indigenous efforts to dismantle settler colonialism, and explore what possibilities there are for settlers to realize new thought worlds. The dissertation closes with the author considering further areas of inquiry that arise out of this research project and sharing insights on how Nishnaabeg thought worlds might provide inspiration and aspirations for settlers striving to realize new thought worlds.
Access status: Open Access ,
Park Perceptions and Racialized Realities: Visualizing Social and Health Equity in Public Urban Greenspaces
(2025-07-23) Hassen, Nadha; Flicker, Sarah
The growing literature indicates that natural environments, such as urban greenspaces, can promote health and wellbeing. However, the pathways are still unclear. The tendency to romanticize nature, without considering issues of equity and marginalization, presumes that everyone experiences greenspaces in the same ways, with universal positive impacts. Park Perceptions and Racialized Realities is a community-engaged and participatory photovoice study that critically examines the experiences of racialized people in public urban greenspaces in two underserved neighbourhoods in Toronto, Canada. This research took place during the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, a time when inequitable access to high-quality, safe urban greenspaces was amplified. Methods were adapted to take place online and grounded in feminist and anti-racist community-engaged principles. Participants attended online sessions, took photographs and videos on neighbourhood greenspace visits, and debriefed their experiences in individual interviews. First, a collaborative analysis process was facilitated with community residents and advisors. This process then informed a deeper thematic analysis of the photographs and narratives. Eight key themes are identified: (1) belonging and social connection, (2) exclusion, (3) mental health and wellbeing, (4) right to play and children’s recreation, (5) maintenance inequities, (6) access and accessibility, (7) safety, and (8) gentrification and complex use of public space. These findings are outlined in a community report, alongside policy and practice recommendations. Furthermore, public urban greenspaces influence three dimensions of wellbeing for racialized residents: (1) mental, (2) physical, and (3) social. These dimensions are unpacked in nine key domains to posit an aspirational framework. However, there are social and structural barriers that hinder these pathways to wellbeing. Residents also described issues of inequitable urban greenspace distribution and maintenance, lack of meaningful participation for racialized communities in greenspace planning and design, the lack of understanding of the diverse needs of racialized communities and the macro-level forces that create complex inter and intra-racial dynamics in greenspaces. This dissertation provides novel qualitative and visual insights into the experiences of racialized people to support public health professionals, landscape architects, planners, parks professionals and others in related fields to center equity and justice in public urban greenspace scholarship, policy, and practice.
Access status: Open Access ,
Urbanizing The Countryside? The Governance Of Rural Restructuring In Bancroft And North Hastings County, Ontario
(2025-04-10) Bedford, William; Keil, Roger
This dissertation comprises a case study of local governance in the Town of Bancroft, Ontario, and the surrounding municipalities of North Hastings County. The capacity for strategic agency by local governance actors, regarding economic development initiatives and mitigation of inequality, is the central object of analysis. The contexts of economic change - from lumber production, through mining, to tourism and recreation - and political structures - considering colonial origins, Canada’s hierarchical system of government, and the recent impacts of amalgamation and downloading in Ontario in the late 1990s - are shown to be profoundly structure the agency of local governance actors. The dissertation demonstrates a resulting intensification of “urban” phenomena in a traditionally “rural” space - while new forms of work encroach, and development pressures intensify - and highlights the limitations of existing structures of local government regarding the maintenance of a cohesive and inclusive community. A fundamental social disjuncture is shown to correspond to mixed land tenures of the sub-region: public Crown Land supports a generational rural economic culture at odds with the dynamics inherent to urbanizing spaces governed by municipal corporations. Semi-structured interviews with actors in local governance and key economic sectors, alongside document analysis of plans, reports and local histories provide the methodological foundation. To the field of rural geography, the dissertation contributes an early analysis of post-COVID 19 rural transformation, demonstrating the effects of North Hastings being brought into the metropolitan space economy of Southern Ontario to an unprecedented extent. The distinctive analytical perspective - centring structured agency - offers a new approach to rural research in Ontario. Regarding the study of local government, the dissertation contributes an important case study in intergovernmental relations under twenty first century neoliberalism. Analysis of a small municipality - in relation to horizontal and vertical governmental dynamics and with regard to the management of essential infrastructures - provides a clear demonstration of the pressures driving institutional change. Finally, the dissertation interjects into contemporary urban theory debates, presenting an empirically grounded argument that planetary urbanization is best understood as a process inherent to the particular land use and political systems of the municipal system, spread by European colonization.
Access status: Open Access ,
Clowning Canada: Performing the Structured Innocence of Settler Colonial Domesticity
(2024-03-16) Johnson, Morgan Brie; Ford-Smith, Honor
This dissertation is a research-creation project that involves both creative and written outputs. The creative project is an original short film, Land Hunger—a dark, feminist, clown satire of settler colonial nation-state building that explores how gendered histories of domestication were foundational for colonization in Canada and are still viscerally haunting the present. The written component incorporates critical theory, personal reflection, creative writing, and historical research to explore the question: What performance praxes are needed right now for settler artists to create work that pushes against hegemonic yet invisibilized structures of Canadian nationhood? While my research looks at the potential for settler performance practices to unsettle our cultural stories of Canadian-ness, my inspirations and theoretical anchors come from the fields of Indigenous resurgence and decolonization, which centre relationality to the land within research. My theoretical framework grapples with the question of settler artist accountability and responsibility within performance practice, stemming from the argument that culture is integral to the creation and maintenance of power structures (Said, 1994). I follow a genealogical process in the Foucauldian sense, which entails sifting through hauntings between the past and present to find not the origin of nation but rather its palimpsestic and discursive formation on the land and the gendered body. This project originated in the messy, personal, and creative questioning of my relationship to the land I am on, to the nation-state of Canada, to the histories that brought me here, and to the discourses of power that weave through them. I argue that theories of settler colonialism, gender, and whiteness are not just the subject of my research, coincidentally resulting in a creative output; rather, these theories drive the foundational way that I come to understand my relationship to the land and to my performance practice. I attempt to chart an approach to performance practice that makes this central, arguing that settler theatre artists are structurally implicated in the ongoing reification of the colonial project of Canada. Therefore, as storytellers, we can work to make visible and imagine alternatives to white settler structures of nation and subjecthood that are often normalized in settler culture as invisible and unchangeable.
Access status: Open Access ,
Youth Community Arts Experiments and Theories of Change
(2023-12-08) Lombardo, Charlotte Evanthe; Flicker, Sarah
This dissertation asks: how do diverse emerging artists engage community arts in public space to express and enact place and change? It is a case study of the Making With Place project which mobilised youth identifying as QT/BIPOC (queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and/or of colour) to create public art activations. This work began amidst transformations of personal and public space mandated by orders to contain Covid-19, and growing awareness and organising to address anti-Black racism. Grounded in methodologies of participatory action research, I collaborated with the Making With Place youth artist-researchers to engage in cycles of creative sharing, public art experimentation, and reflection and theorizing. The resulting dialogues, artworks and analyses surface underrepresented histories, systems of inequity, internal landscapes of isolation and trauma, and regenerative relationships of resilience and mutual aid. I draw on participant observation, individual interviews, group dialogues, and co-writing to develop a series of academic journal articles and community ‘zine style publications that synthesise and unpack these findings. In these pieces, we discuss emergent creative articulations of place, processes of (re)search, and embodied and affective theories of change. This dissertation deepens understandings of critical pedagogies of place from the margins as a place of radical possibility, with a view towards new, more equitable social relations.
Access status: Open Access ,
Truth and Reconciliation at the Bay: Environmental Discourse, Contested Notions of Human-Creation Relations in Mnidoo Gaamii/Georgian Bay, and Indigenous-Cottager Relations
(2023-12-08) Fraser, Clara MacCallum; Gilbert, Liette; Foster, Jennifer
How does environmental conservation land use planning, an endeavour that seeks to provide tools to combat climate change and protect habitat from destruction through development, contribute to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands/waters in Mnidoo Gamii/Georgian Bay? Through an exploration of the links between environmental planning, cottager conservation activism, and colonialism in Georgian Bay (and North America, broadly speaking), my dissertation explores the ways that conservation land use planning continues the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands. As a springboard for this exploration, I examine particular communities in Georgian Bay - Moose Deer Point First Nation, the nearby cottage community of the Madawaska Club at Go Home Bay, and the Georgian Bay Land Trust with properties along the eastern coast of Georgian Bay – their establishment, influence, and impacts on one another. While the surface layer of this dissertation is focused on environmental conservation planning and Indigenous rights, another layer is focused on how settler and Indigenous ideas of human-earth relations are formed by fundamentally different cosmologies and legalities. For this reason, I interview members of the First Nation, as well as members of the cottage community who are also volunteers for the Land Trust, to gain insight into Indigenous and settler perspectives on human-earth relationships and Georgian Bay and the undercurrents that shape the ways that lands and “resources” are managed through settler land use planning systems. This research provides insight into the impacts of land use planning in Georgian Bay on Indigenous communities, and enhances an understanding of how land use planning undermines processes of truth and reconciliation. My research is guided by Indigenous research paradigms, thus I work to "unsettle" my own settler worldview, exploring one way that decolonisation praxis can look and feel. I situate land use planning within the context of Indigenous ways of knowing, such as Creation stories, ceremony, and rooted law, giving non-Indigenous readers an opportunity to reflect on the ways that endeavours such as environmental conservation, which can seem universally beneficial, can in fact be harmful. This research adds to the literature by bringing into dialogue two different communities’ stories about identity in relation to land. I explore the historical context and cosmological foundations that help problematise certain assumptions and narratives. Secondly, as I do so, I employ a semi-auto-ethnographic approach, which both reveals my own relationship to this history, and sheds light on my own journey of trying to follow Indigenous research methods. I hope that this research can contribute to the discourse around settler researchers engaging with Indigenous methodologies.
Access status: Open Access ,
Applying Mixed Methodologies to Inform Urban Conservation: Policy, Knowledge and Behaviour at the Interface of Nature and Society
(2023-12-08) Van Vierssen Trip, Nyssa MacAllister; Bazely, Dawn R. A.
Globally biodiversity is in decline and the human population is urbanizing. The loss of species is so great, it has been dubbed the “sixth mass extinction.” Over half of the global population now live in cities. There is the loss of biodiversity coupled with the loss of experience of nature in our daily lives. Interacting with nature has been linked to improved health and well-being. Despite the co-benefits for both people and nature, there is an implementation gap between the science, policy and practice. My dissertation applied the concept of scale from spatial (landscape) ecology to an interdisciplinary context: peoples’ values of nature. At a local scale, I explored peoples’ emotions towards urban greenspaces in a large Canadian city, during a time of abrupt change and societal shock – the COVID-19 pandemic. Parks acted as an emotional buffer, as places of escape and recovery. Parks as a support to well-being can be leveraged and translated into political capital for park maintenance and for park and greenspace expansion in large urban centers. At a national scale, my coauthors and I investigated Canadians’ values towards native bees and perceived barriers towards their conservation. Canadians value native bees for their contribution to people and want the federal and provincial governments to take the lead in their conservation. This grassroots support for conservation should be communicated to decision-makers. At the global scale, I analyzed publications from two environmental organizations to study how the conversation about sustainability has changed over the past 25 years. Funding shapes sustainability communication. Expectations and priorities of donors can hinder capitalization on known science. Making knowledge accessible and relevant to funders informs sustainability practice. Collectively, these results provide insights into biodiversity conservation in urban contexts and sustainability practice.
Access status: Open Access ,
Migrant Plants: Arts-Based Inquiry into Plant-Human Relations
(2023-12-08) Gelis, Alexandra Cristiina; Barndt, Deborah
This dissertation is a multi-layered exploration of the process of research and the creation of four main projects containing ten multimedia artworks. While probing plant-human and more-than-human relations in the context of colonization, I use arts-based participatory methodologies, acknowledging different ways of knowing and plant agency as well as critical plant studies. The context of the artworks originates in San Basilio de Palenque in the Caribbean area of Colombia. Following my own migration and the migration of plants, the final work is situated in Toronto, Canada, where I probe in-depth plant-human relations through the concept of migrant co-relations.
Access status: Open Access ,
The Ontopolitics of Complexity: Toward Agonistic Democracy and Ecological Political Economy
(2023-12-08) Mallery, David Michael; Bunch, Martin J.
Complexity is among the most used yet rarely defined and often misunderstood terms in sustainability science. In this text, I argue that the conventionalization of the concept of complexity has resulted in the conflation of “thin” (i.e., reductionist) complexity and “thick” (i.e., perspectivist) complexity, and the resultant confusion surrounding these categories has created unnecessary tensions between sustainability science and environmental justice. Employing William E. Connolly’s ontopolitical-genealogical approach, I tease out implicit ontological commitments relating to complexity, holism, organicism, and environmental determinism, in the intellectual history of systems theory, cybernetics, and theoretical ecology. I critique key interlocutors in the pluralism debate within ecological economics to illustrate how conventionalized complexity has created barriers to pluralistic engagement between ecological economics and political ecology. Following radical democratic theorists, I argue that the distinction between thick and thin complexity is essential to fostering “agonistic pluralism” between sustainability science and environmental justice while also serving as a defence against the misuse of systems concepts by anti-pluralists, authoritarians, and technocrats. I argue that totalizing, functionalist expressions of systems theory exacerbate political violence by displacing political discourse and serving as a pretext for ecofascism. As an alternative to functionalist organicism, I articulate a relational ontology of life, in the tradition of Robert Rosen and Terrance Deacon, that creates affordances for agency that is both creative and reflexive. I explore how such an ontology destabilizes politically conservative, neoliberal, anti-pluralist interpretations of thin complexity, and I argue that thick complexity, relational holism, and teleodynamism can serve as core concepts for a more robust discourse in ecological political economy that is concurrently attentive to the dual imperatives of biophysical limits and environmental justice.
Access status: Open Access ,
Making Social Movement: The reproductive labour of organizing from Chiapas to Chicago and beyond
(2023-12-08) Schussler, Stuart Edward; Kipfer, Stefan Andreas
This is a dissertation about acting on inspiration. The Chicago-based Autonomous University of Social Movements (AUSM) coordinates one of the most long-standing, intensive engagements with the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, through its study abroad programs fomenting such inspiration among university students from across North America. Yet my research into the ensuing political activity of alumni of this program exposes a dilemma: despite the Zapatistas’ success in building autonomy on the land they reclaimed during their 1994 uprising, the great majority of alumni do not invoke them or replicate their organizing structures within their organizations back home. Rather than exposing a break in the chain of inspiration between the Zapatistas, AUSM, and its alumni, the continuity between the three lies in their common organizing activity. What does the activity of the Zapatistas, AUSM, and its alumni teach us about the collaborative practices that comprise “organizing”? I contribute to Social Reproduction Theory in finding organizing to be reproductive labour: collaborative activity producing use values in an effort to transform the distribution of abundance and scarcity across society, as to reproduce people with more life and less exhaustion. Secondly, I contribute to the practice of organizing by highlighting common activities across the organizing of the Zapatistas, AUSM and its alumni, including maintaining initiative, confronting “messes” by strengthening collaborative arrangements, practicing care on ever-broader levels, and building subjectivities of self-determination. Third, I contribute to Marxist theories by linking the everyday practice of organizing with an enriched understanding of “social movement,” as struggle to transform the relations shaping flows of health and wealth across society. This shows that inspiration continues, inasmuch as it feeds organizers’ initiative to do the difficult work of strengthening militant ways of being-with.
Access status: Open Access ,
Ballads for Remembering
(2023-08-04) O'Brien, Shelley Katherine; Fawcett,Leesa K.
Ballads for Re-Membering is an examination of themes of consciousness such as time, space and emergence, set against the precarity of the climate crisis. Using an arts-and-Zen-practice-based methodology of research-creation, and a theoretical framework of New Materialism and Post-Humanism (“K(now)n Materialism”), this feminist response to the climate crisis manifests an otherwise-possible that is already right-here, taking cues from the emergent playful worlds of childhood studies and music, with interbeing as the net holding all. The dissertation is important because the climate crisis is one of (if not the most) pressing and crucial challenges of the present, and we must keep finding ways to address it using our imaginations. Because my work uses a research-creation process, the methodology provides a unique opportunity to look at a complex set of issues in a nuanced and artistic way. The form also belies the function: These creative and academic outputs fold and knead together conceptual spaces; playful and engaging imaginings that slip through our habitual systematic thinking in linear time, space, and forward progress. In the form of three Ballads, I look at time, space, and emergence (Ballad 1), offer a critical analysis of the New Nature Movement, look at childhood and time, and music (Ballad 2), and perform an audio story called Finding Solace (Ballad 3). This young adult story takes the research to the speculative: What if there was a world (mostly) without humans, where Artificial Intelligence was so intelligent, it went on “living” without humanity? The key results of this work include making new forms of knowledge as ways of understanding our precarity; innovative research methods like song, story, and letters to my daughter; engaging and accessible research outcomes, and contributions to the field of New Materialism, Research-Creation, and artistic responses to climate change. It is my hope that this work encourages other researchers to explore interdisciplinary approaches, allows for engagement due to its accessibility, and contributes to a greater understanding of our interbeing.
Access status: Open Access ,
Security in Uncertainty: Analysis of Climate Risks and Household Response to Food Insecurity in Northern Ghana
(2023-08-04) Osman, Balikisu; Perkins, Patricia Elaine
Ghana represents an important case study for food insecurity research because of the high concentration of hungry populations in the country’s north relative to the south. While the increasing climate change and weather variabilities in north Ghana explain the region’s widespread hunger, there are also non-climatic factors that undermine households’ vulnerability. This dissertation explores smallholder farming households’ experiences with climate hazard events by emphasizing their vulnerabilities and response behaviours to climate and seasonality-induced food insecurities. It adopts a micro-level food systems lens integrated with livelihoods, vulnerability, and disaster risk theories. It is also informed by fieldwork and engagement with farming households in northern Ghana. A key argument of this dissertation is that food insecurity in northern Ghana is influenced by not only the climate-dependency of food system activities in the region but also the vulnerability in how food is produced, harvested, stored, and marketed. The findings reveal that climate change events lead to food crop productivity losses, cause damage to stored grain, and disrupt food prices, which affects food security. It also shows how households’ and food systems’ vulnerabilities intensify these climatic impacts and the concomitant variations in yearly food availability and access. The study further finds that poor households are not passive victims; they strategically adopt various actions to manage climate-induced food insecurity risks. In particular, the households’ responses follow a sequential order to preserve critical assets for current consumption needs and for the sustainability of agricultural livelihood. However, some of the response actions are associated with excruciating costs that could rebound and erode efforts for sustainable food security, especially for women and youth. Overall, the research provides evidence-based knowledge to address climate-related challenges for food security in the northern part of the country and to minimize regional disparities, which have long-term political implications. It also makes a strong case to draw attention to the diversity, sequence, and gendered nature of household responses to food crises.
Access status: Open Access ,
Sacrifice or Salvation: How can Animal Lives be Spared and Human Health Improved by Toxics Reform?
(2023-03-28) Wordsworth, Anne Marie; Ali, Syed Harris
This dissertation investigates the complexities of the entwined relations between animal cognition, the use of animals in toxicity testing, and the proliferation and impacts of harmful chemicals in our society. It asks how, in light of the most current research on animal sentience and the ethics of responsibility, a reorientation of chemical testing at a theoretical, ethical and practical level could spare animal suffering and improve human health outcomes. Its starting point is the unfolding scientific research on animal cognition, and the consequent implications for reconsidering the ethical relationships, historically established and currently assumed, between human and non-human animals. The central issue, which infuses this dissertation, is whether humans are obliged by this knowledge to expand our moral arena to encompass animals, to acknowledge their entitlement not to be used for toxicity experimentation, and the implications of such an entitlement for the future use of animals in toxicity testing. The work is based on a social constructivist process centred on the multiple facets of toxicity testing – the philosophical viewpoints of those who have expressed concern for the well-being of animals, governments’ animal protection laws that fail to spare animals from painful experimentation, toxics laws that promote the use of animals in toxicity tests, the pain and suffering of the tests themselves, the championing of the mouse as the favoured animal for experimentation, and the limitations and failure of toxicity testing itself to safeguard public health and the environment from widespread contamination. In addition, this examination of toxicity testing looks at the potential differences between advocates of expanded testing of toxic chemicals and animal advocates concerned about the implications of expanded testing for the increased use of animals. Finally, building on qualitative methods for assessing the current state of knowledge regarding the use of animals in toxicity testing, this dissertation evaluates how this system could be redrawn to both spare animals and better gauge the toxicity of chemicals.

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