This thesis situates a discussion of Thoreau's later natural history essays in the context of the author's other writings. Beginning with an examination of the writings of Thoreau's friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, this paper examines Thoreau's relation to and departure from Emerson's understanding of time, place, and pattern...
The 13 personal essays in Water over Stones: Oregon Watershed Stories explore the author's experiences in dozens of Oregon watersheds. Using the genre of the personal essay, the author, a fifth-generation Oregonian and amateur ecologist, writes about her life and family relationships in stories that are saturated with the waters...
Doris Lessing and Tsitsi Dangarembga write fiction set in Zimbabwe, the former Southern Rhodesia. Although Lessing grew up as a white settler and Dangarembga, a generation later, as part of the colonized African population, the women sometimes address similar issues. Both write of young girls trying to find a speaking...
This thesis consists of four short stories and Chapter 1 of a novel in progress. Each of the four stories are thematically linked through a common protagonist, Nancy, and through a relatively chronological following of events in her life. I chose to tell Nancy's stories in an attempt to gain...
This thesis reviews theoretical and local understandings of sustainability and examines the contributions which the NGO, the Toledo Institute for Development and Environment (TIDE), makes to achieving sustainability in the district of Toledo in Belize, Central America. The study focuses mainly on the Port Honduras Marine Reserve, which TIDE manages...
Many countries around the world are looking to tourism as a sustainable solution for economic development and many individuals seek business opportunities in the tourism industry. Researchers in the field of anthropology and other disciplines alike have recorded findings of the environmental, economic and cultural impacts of tourism development that...
Many development organizations now recognize the importance of culturally sensitive project design and implementation. Unfortunately most of these groups continue to disregard the significance of gender. This qualitative research examines a women's cooperative in rural El Salvador which formed in order to find a means of generating income and to...
Based on the author's ethnographic research at the Karakuwa fishing community in Japan, this thesis explains a cultural process of the local people's synthesis of the values they place on nature and their everyday behavior in a modern industrial world. Explicated by ethnographic narrative, this study focuses on a revitalization...
Past research has categorized animal rights groups into three main categories; conservative, moderate, and radical. While a few studies exist on the animal rights movement as a whole, none have focused specifically on the radical groups. This research project uses an ethnography of communication approach to examine how language constructs...
Stable isotope analysis of human tissue can provide information about diet independent of artifactual remains. Food is broken down and used in the synthesis of body tissue, so the isotopic composition of hair keratin reflects the isotopic composition of foods consumed. Therefore, the analysis of hair can provide a window...
As a result of academic research into the effects of mass travel, an industry of alternative tourism has emerged. Application of this research has resulted in myriad forms of tourism, two of these being ecotourism and educational travel. Ecotourism represents a response to what is the destructive nature of the...
In this thesis, stature reconstruction of three prehistoric/protohistoric Native American populations (from Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and South Dakota) was performed using the Fully Anatomical method in order to formulate regression equations and analyze the ability of regression equations of other researchers to accurately estimate the statures within my study...
Lower rates of computer adoption and usage in rural areas has
been called a "digital divide." This work explores the current state of
connectivity within a rural town of the Pacific Northwest with a
quantitative and qualitative overview of computer usage and access
within civic and activity clubs, ranging from...
The Wanniya-laeto, often referred to as Veddas, are the indigenous people of Sri Lanka. They live primarily in governmental designated areas in the forest with a few Vedda villages on the eastern coastal region. In-depth, semi-structured interviews as well as participant observation were the methods used to access the perceptions...
In June 1999, I was a volunteer for a United States non-governmental organization, Crossroads Africa. I joined six other American women traveling to Ghana, West Africa to participate in a collaborative program designed by the Ghana Red Cross Society and Crossroads Africa. Specifically our group was assigned to work on...
Issues of diversity are receiving significant attention within the National Park Service recently, due in large part to a growing awareness that its future as a relevant and viable agency is dependent upon improving its response to and management of diversity. A diversity assessment of Fort Vancouver National Historic Site...
This study examines the utilization of health care by Korean American women in Pierce County, Washington. Pierce County, with its large population of Asian Americans, offers a variety of health care options, everything from biomedicine to acupuncture and herbal remedies. Regarding the multitude of options available, I asked the question...
This quasi-ethnographic research documents the autobiographical utterances of incarcerated women taking part in a narrative writing course, Life Writing, at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. The purpose of this research was to cultivate a better understanding of how incarcerated women move through different discourses of identity via narrative writing, and how,...
This paper explores the language theories of Gary Snyder, an important modern environmental author whose early work was associated with the Beat movement of the early 1950's. I am particularly interested in Snyder's thoughts on how language relates to nature. I focus primarily on Snyder's prose in attempts to understand...
Following World War II, the United States enjoyed unprecedented power and prestige. The wartime alliance with the Soviet Union quickly collapsed amid mutual suspicion and fear, however, resulting in the Cold War. Science was a significant political component in that ideological conflict. In the United States, inspired by Franklin D....