Ph.D., Antioch University, 2011, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

Aristotle says our best moral guidance comes from considering the lives of exemplary individuals. I explore John Muir, as an exemplar of environmental virtue, and consider the role of Nature in his conception of the good life. I argue his conception consists of a web of virtue including various goods, values, and virtues. I suggest three virtues are cardinal: attentiveness, gratitude and reverence. I explore how Muir cultivated these virtues in Nature. I argue Muir sought freedom from a popular conception of the good life, grounded in the gilded age values of money and materialism, and was sensitive to the harms these brought to both Nature and individuals. I show that Muir was particularly aware of the effects of what he called the vice of over-industry. I argue Muir was willing to suffer extreme loneliness in order to cultivate his conception of the good life in Nature. I show that he struggled, especially in his thirties, to find a balance between freedom and community. I show how in Nature Muir cultivated attentiveness to both his intuition and the observable world and I explore the relationship between them. I show that his rejection of anthropocentrism was based, in part, on his observations as a fully-engaged scientist. I argue attentiveness lead Muir to view wild animals as exemplars. He was especially drawn to the skill, beauty and true instinct of wild mountain sheep. I explore the relationship between gratitude and celebration and Muir's exuberant expressions of ecstasy. I argue that while many of his friends remained stoic, his observation of the celebration of Stickeen, a small black dog, lead him to important insights into the commonality of all “our fellow mortals.” I make the case that Muir was most grateful for beauty as expressed in natural harmony. I distinguish gratitude from appreciation and thankfulness by suggesting gratitude implies reciprocity, as in a debt of gratitude, and that Muir's environmental activism was motivated by wanting to rec (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Mitch Thomashow Dr (Committee Chair); Phil Cafaro Dr. (Committee Member); Joy Ackerman Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Ecology; Environmental Education; Environmental Philosophy; Environmental Studies; Ethics; Philosophy; Religion; Wildlife Conservation

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2008, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

This narrative inquiry, which draws on my experience as a land use decision maker, environmental educator, and scholar, examines the complexities of our human-nature relationship as we use and protect the life of the land in local communities. I began this research by interviewing seventeen land use decision makers representing a range of land use perspectives in New Milford, Connecticut, focusing on their views of land as a living community, their connections to land, and their sense of duty and responsibility.Their responses led me to further inquiry and drew me into a process that transformed my views of both land use policy and environmental education. This dissertation focuses on four processes: using a narrative approach to address land use conflict in order to better understand differing aspects of our relationship to land; finding new ways to talk about land and land use, drawing on our connections with nature and our awareness of ourselves as part of a larger community; shifting land use conversations from individual interests to our role as citizens in a community in order to gain new perspectives and begin to define land as more than a personal asset; and extending our consideration to resident natural communities as contributing members of our community, while moving towards a relationship with nature that is a conscious and integral part of our land use decision making. I conclude that learning and talking about our relationship with nature is integral to land use decision making as a democratic process. This knowledge and expression enables us to consider what we value about our resident land communities and what interests we will uphold. Otherwise, by default we will continue to make human-oriented land use decisions where the life of the land is ignored. The electronic version of this dissertation is accessible through the OhioLINK ETD center (http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/).

Committee: Mitchell Thomashow PhD (Committee Chair); Meade Cadot PhD (Committee Member); Averell Manes PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Adult Education; American Studies; Ecology; Environmental Science; Philosophy

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2022, History

In September of 1858, a mob of Staten Islanders burned down a quarantine station in order to protect their own health and safety. Though Richmond County citizens destroyed over thirty acres of New York State property in the two-day riot, legal authorities determined that a crime had not been committed. It was an act of "salutary violence." This seemingly paradoxical event shaped the course of health system development in the nation's premier city. Scholars have overlooked the riot's significance or characterized it as an outburst of xenophobic violence. This dissertation argues that the riot was not spontaneous or reactionary. It did not follow a major outbreak of epidemic disease, and it occurred when immigration was at an all-time low. It presents layered contexts to recast the riot as the climax of a longstanding movement that crystalized in the wake of administrative changes at the institution. The polarized political climate of antebellum New York deepened existing tensions, as the quarantine controversy split along party lines. Understanding how momentum for the quarantine relocation movement was gathered through state legislation, sustained through regional support, and ultimately cemented when Staten Islanders became unified by the threat of quarantine expansion, presents a better causal framework for the riot than shallow arguments of fear and xenophobia alone. In the event's aftermath, communities united to resist State conscription to host the "dangerous" institution and lobbied for their own protection. The riot and quarantine relocation movement raised questions about the nature of public health that we still grapple with today: What public does public health protect? This dissertation demonstrates that community level activism, violent protest, and even the will of the mob, shaped the trajectory of public health in the United States.

Committee: Jonathan Sadowsky (Committee Co-Chair); John Broich (Committee Co-Chair); Erin Lamb (Committee Member); Peter Shulman (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Environmental Health; Environmental Justice; Health; Medical Ethics; Public Health

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2002, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2002, Natural Resources

The need for instruments to objectively and deeply measure public beliefs concerning environmental values and ethics, and relationship to environmental protection led to a project to integrate analytical techniques from ethics and educational psychology to identify beliefs in theories of value and obligation (direct and indirect), develop a 12-category system of environmental ethics, and a psychometric instrument with 5 scales and 7 subscales, including a self-assessment instrument for environmental ethics. The ethics were tested for ability to distinguish between beliefs in need to protect environment for human interests versus the interests or rights of animals and the environment. A heuristic for educators was developed for considering 9 dimensions of environmental and the ethics, and tested favorably. An exploratory survey (N = 74, 2001) of adult moral beliefs used 16 open-ended questions for moral considerability of, rights, treatment, and direct and indirect moral obligations to the environment. A 465 - item question bank was developed and administered (N = 191, 2002) to Ohio adults, and reduced to 73 items in 12 Likert-type scales (1-7, 1 strongly disagree) by analyzing internal consistency, response variability, interscale correlations, factorial, and ANOVA. The results (beliefs concerning the general environment): Scale 1) Environmental Capacity (suffer mentally and physically) u= 5.0, a= 0.85; 1.1) Conativity, u= 4.2, a= 0 .84; 1.2) Sentience, u= 5.0, a= 0.85; Scale 2) Value, u= 5.0, a= 0.92 ; 2.1) Intrinsic Value, u= 3.4, a= 0.84 ; 2.2) Animal and Environment's Rights, u= 4.95, a= 0.90; Scale 3) Moral Need to Protect, u= 5.0, a= 0.84; 3.1) Moral Acceptability of 4 Uses (medical research, zoo's, eating, killing to eat) u= 4.8, a= 0.89; 3.2) Usefulness, u= 5.54, a= 0.89; 4) Environmental Ethic a= 0.73 (95% in ethics 7-12, the ecological ethics), highest population mean: “Ecological Phenomenalism”, then “Ecological Ecocentrism”), modal category: “Ecological (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Joe Heimlich (Advisor) Subjects:

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2010, Antioch New England: Environmental Studies

This dissertation concerns a widely recognized natural area, New York's Adirondack Park, that serves both as an international model for conservation and as a context for persistent conflict over natural resources, space, wealth and esthetics. It employs narrative inquiry as a method to examine the sources and the function of narratives or stories explaining the history and the present status of social groups in the Park. Narrative theorists maintain that we borrow from such socially circulating narratives to craft our own identities, and then repeat them until we believe them, almost without regard for the factual basis in history or science. The dissertation follows the progress of the author, a professor of environmental studies at a small Adirondack college, as he delves into the formation of his own Adirondack identity and values while traveling with his family from the state capital, Albany, deep into the Adirondack interior. The interdisciplinary approach includes a critical overview of environmental history as it pertains to class and conflict in the Adirondack Park, an exposition of narrative epistemology, interviews with four subjects, a praxis-oriented exploration of environmental virtue, and targeted memoir. This narrative dissertation is at once an intellectual, philosophical, personal and spatial voyage toward a set of answers, or more clearly articulated questions, concerning how one regional community struggles toward finding a satisfactory balance between nature and culture. The author identifies a set of themes that help to bound and conclude the inquiry: Landside and Lakeside, Camps and Camping and the Virtues of the Caretaker.

Committee: Mitchell Thomashow PhD (Committee Chair); Joy Ackerman PhD (Committee Member); Philip Terrie PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; American Studies; Area Planning and Development; Environmental Science; Philosophy; Social Research

MA, Kent State University, 2019, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of English

In the epoch of Anthropocene, scholars of environmental ethics urge a radical reevaluation of our understanding of ecosystems and a platform of protest to fight against the slow violence triggered by human-caused environmental disaster omnipresent across the globe. One of the effective means to achieving this goal is to foreground the cognitive and emotive value of ecocinema in furthering both ecocentric imagination and discourse. In a media-saturated, fast world, by forming an alternative media-spectatorship/readership, ecocinema can potentially help create an ecocentric environmental ethics, allowing us to question long-held notions of anthropocentrism, speciesism, and other ecological issues of both biotic and non-biotic entities. Analyzing the films, A Plastic Ocean, Silent River, Ponyo, and The Shape of Water, that essentially foreground tales of water, this thesis explores the complex portrayal of water in an attempt to investigate its agency and dynamism, revealing to humans the problems connected with their strong anthropocentric ethics. This thesis, therefore, examines the authority of ecocinema in its capacity to ignite a respect for nature and reciprocity in humans towards the non-human world. In the process, it proposes the efficacy of pluralistic eco-aesthetics of ecocinema in creating a powerful cultural and political visual narrative, making environmental slow violence perceptible to human imagination and taking us one step further to environmental justice activism.

Committee: Ryan Hediger (Advisor) Subjects: Literature

BA, Oberlin College, 2013, Religion

I argue that Ted Toadvine's Ecophenomenology presents a concept of difference that is totalizing and has a concept of the body that is a-historical and universal. By using Yuasa Yasuo's ideas that the body is culturally constructed and can be reconstituted through repeated bodily practices, I revise Toadvine's totalizing difference, emphasizing that we can use our bodies to increasingly learn about difference. I call this a Virtue of Attunement.

Committee: James C. Dobbins (Advisor); David G. Kamitsuka (Committee Chair); James Swan Tuite (Advisor) Subjects: Environmental Justice; Ethics; Philosophy; Religion

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2017, Theology

This thesis analyzes the ability of early Christian monastic spirituality to contribute fruitful theological principles and spiritual practices to the contemporary Christian response to climate change. To accomplish this task this thesis analyzes the threefold spiritual vision (i.e. liturgical, ascetical, and mystical) of the Desert Fathers and Mothers of fourth century Egypt. “Eco-theology” has followed the well-established trends of western theology and ethics, and with few exceptions, supports its conclusions with ethical arguments that use reason and natural law; these ethical systems tend to shy away from the various spiritual (i.e. liturgical, ascetic, and mystical) aspects of theology. This polarization in favor of strict ethical arguments transforms the Christian response to climate change into a mere moral obligation; however, the Christian's love and care for the created world is not just a moral obligation, but an ontological necessity. This thesis explores two major areas of interest in relation to the Desert Fathers and Mothers: (1) the liturgical (i.e. Baptism, Eucharist, and Confession), ascetical (i.e. fasting, prayer, and stability), and mystical (i.e. visions of the divine light and deification) traditions that form the threefold, yet singular, spiritual vision of early Christian monasticism; and (2) the manner in which this spiritual life is related to the numerous interactions between monastics and the created world that are portrayed in early Christian monastic literature. The intent of this thesis is not to reject or replace the work that has been accomplished in the modern field of ecotheology, but rather to add an alternative “voice” in the Christian conversation on the dignity of the created world. The ethical arguments made by eco- ethicists have produced much fruit in recent years, and those accomplishments are not to be overlooked; technological advancements, international trade/business agreements, and grassroots movements are essential (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Silviu Bunta Ph.D. (Advisor) Subjects: Environmental Philosophy; Religion; Theology

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Toledo, 2016, Foundations of Education: Philosophy of Education

The ecological crisis as defined by the scientific community raises questions that challenge contemporary ethical, political, and educational theory. Situating the problem in the tradition of democratic theory, this study lays out a Rawlsian political liberal conception of sustainability that hinges upon a liberal conception of justice that places moral duties on the state, the citizen, and the educational institutions of contemporary societies. As such the idea of ecological integrity rises to the category of a matter of justice which requires a political principle of sustainability that functions as a normative precommitment. This normative precommitment in turn places moral duties on the government of democratic peoples and concomitantly the citizenry that are the source of legitimate democratic authority. The demanding role of citizenship in this conception thus places an imperative on education which by its nature is a normative activity and thus demands a renewed civic purpose for education that entails the sustainability as well as the stability of democratic society.

Committee: Dale Snauwaert PhD (Committee Chair); Lynne Hamer PhD (Committee Member); Revathy Kumar PhD (Committee Member); Vicki Dagostino PhD (Committee Member); Fuad Al-Daraweesh PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Education; Education Philosophy; Environmental Justice; Environmental Philosophy; Ethics

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2015, Leadership and Change

This dissertation is a biographical study of the life of Dr. Helen Caldicott that details her life and work over the years from 1997 to 2014. The history of her significant role in the end of the Cold War and her influence in public opinion regarding nuclear power and nuclear arms has been well-documented through many books, films, and articles as well as her own autobiography up to this twenty-year-period. My study will help to fill the gap in her most recent life. In particular, I will explore the impact of her activism on society and her personal life in this period. Research methods include interviews with Dr. Caldicott, interviews with her collaborators, archival material, and deep reflection of the researcher. I am interested in what Dr. Caldicott understands now, about her work and her life, that may not have been apparent to her twenty years ago when she wrote her autobiography A Desperate Passion (1997) and was in the middle of her effort to educate a population about pending nuclear disaster. The electronic version of this Dissertation is at AURA, http://aura.antioch.edu/etds/ and OhioLink ETD Center, www.ohiolink.edu/etd

Committee: Carolyn Kenny PhD (Committee Chair); Laurien Alexandre PhD (Committee Member); Elaine Gale PhD (Committee Member); Timothy Mousseau PhD (Other) Subjects: Biographies; Business Community; Environmental Justice; Ethics; Gender Studies; Social Psychology; Sustainability

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2009, Environmental Studies (Arts and Sciences)

Aldo Leopold proposed a land ethic that extended moral values and principles to nonhuman entities of the biotic community. I argue that his land ethic can be integrated with an existing moral code, namely the Golden Rule interpreted as an ethics of empathy, which promotes altruistic benevolent acts towards the land.I demonstrate that the basic moral requirements necessary to practice the Golden Rule (i.e., empathy, comparability, relationship, benevolence) can be extended to nonhuman entities. I conclude that an ecologically-integrated Golden Rule satisfies Leopold's moral requirements necessary for the extension of ethics to the land and, if practiced, makes it possible to achieve Leopold's ultimate goal, which is land health.

Committee: Wendy S. Parker (Committee Chair); Mark Lebar (Committee Member); Geoffrey Buckley (Committee Member) Subjects: Philosophy