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open access

Hermeneutic Environmental Philosophy: Identity, Action, and the Imagination

Description: One of the major themes in environmental philosophy in the twenty-first century has broadly focused on how we experience and value the natural world. Along those lines, the driving question I take up in this project is if our ordinary experiences are seen as interpretations, what is the significance of this for our moral claims about the environment? Drawing on the hermeneutic philosophies of Hans Georg-Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur, I examine environmental interpretation as it relates particularly … more
Date: December 2020
Creator: Bell, Nathan M.

Meeting Mosses: Toward a Convivial Biocultural Conservation

Description: In this dissertation I propose an ethical framework for "meeting mosses." At first glance, mosses are a tiny type of plants that have been uncritically understood as "primitive plants," to the extent that they are defined by negation as "non-vascular plants." Hence, mosses have been considered as "primitive" relatives of "true" vascular plants. This distortion is linked to the fact that mosses have been overlooked and represented as a radical otherness in Western civilization. To critically exa… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Zhu, Danqiong
open access

Ontology of Avulsion: Posthuman Freedom and Accidental Becoming

Description: Riverine avulsion is a radical divergence of a riverbed. In this dissertation, I take this movement as a paradigm for understanding the features of radical change. I develop a model for understanding the essential features of radical change. I argue that the main features involved in avulsion are tension, abandonment, and material freedom. In my analysis, tension provides the catalyst for change, such that it pressurizes complex systems of organization to the point of collapse. I use Catherine … more
Date: December 2021
Creator: Grossman, Jacob Wayne
open access

Participation in the Play of Nature: A Hermeneutic Approach to Environmental Aesthetics

Description: Within the environmental aesthetics literature, there is a noticeable schism between two general approaches to understanding the aesthetic value of nature: the ambient approach and the narrative approach. Ambient thinkers focus on the character of aesthetic appreciation of nature, the way in which one is embedded in multi-sensory environment. These ambient theorists emphasize the importance of those aesthetic experiences that are difficult to articulate. Narrative thinkers argue that aesthetic … more
Date: December 2020
Creator: Aloi, Michael Joseph
open access

Thinking Outside the Pipe: The Role of Participatory Water Ethics and Watershed Education Community Action Networks (WE CANs) in the Creation of a New Urban Water Narrative

Description: According to the United Nations, two-thirds of the world's population, approximately 4 billion people, experiences water scarcity at least one month per year. To avoid the water quantity crisis experienced in many regions of the world and the United States, a path to sustainability must be forged. My research aims to identify and critique the salient features of the narrative that drives contemporary urban water decisions and practices and to provide a meta-narrative about the role of narrative… more
Date: December 2022
Creator: Moss, Teresa Jo
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