In "Between Mountain and Lake: an Urban Mormon Country," I identify a uniquely Mormon urban tradition that transcends simple village agrarianism. This tradition encompasses the distinctive ways in which Mormons have thought about cities, appropriating popular American urban forms to articulate their faith's central beliefs, tenants, and practices, from street layout to home decorating. But if an urban Mormon experience has as much validity as an agrarian one, how have the two traditions articulated themselves over time? What did the city mean for nineteenth-century Mormons? Did these meanings change in the twentieth-century, particularly following World War II when the nation as a whole underwent rapid suburbanization? How did Mormon understandings of the environment effect the placement of their villages and cities? What consequences did these choices have for their children, particularly when these places rapidly suburbanized? Traditionally, Zion has been linked to a particular place. This localized dimension to an otherwise spiritual and utopian ideal introduces environmental negotiation and resource utilization. Mormon urban space is, as French thinker Henri Lefebvre would suggest, culturally constructed, appropriated and consumed. On a fundamental level, Mormon spaces tack between the extremes of theocracy and secularism, communalism and capitalism and have much to reveal about how Mormonism has defined gender roles and established racial hierarchies. Mormon cultural landscapes both manifest a sense of identity and place, as well as establish relationships with the past.

This dissertation examines the development of grassroots environmental organizations between 1970 and 2000 and the role they played in the larger American environmental movement and civil society during that period. Much has been written about growth in environmental values in the United States during the twentieth century and about the role of national environmental organizations in helping to pass landmark federal-level environmental laws during the 1960s and 1970s. This study illuminates a different story of how citizen activists worked to protect and improve the air, water, healthfulness and quality of life of where they lived. At the local level, activists looked much different than they did in Washington, D.C.--they tended to be volunteers without any formal training in environmental science or policy. They were also more likely to be women than at the national level. They tended to frame environmental issues and solutions in familiar ways that made sense to them. Rather than focusing on the science or economics of an environmental issue, they framed it in terms of fairness and justice and giving citizens a say in the decisions that affected their health and quality of life. And, as the regulatory, political, and social landscape changed around them, they adapted their strategies in their efforts to continue to affect environmental decision making. Over time, they often connected their local interests and issues with more sophisticated, globalized understandings of the economic and political systems that under laid environmental issues. This study examines three case studies in the rural Great Plains, urban Southwest, and small-town Appalachia between 1970 and 2000 in an attempt to understand community-based environmental activism in the late twentieth century, how it related to the national environmental movement, the strategies local-level groups employed and when and why, the role of liberal democratic arguments in their work and in group identity formation, the limits of those arguments, and how the groups, their strategies, and the activists themselves changed overtime. These three groups were the Northern Plains Resource Council in Montana, Southwest Environmental Service in Southern Arizona, and Save Our Cumberland Mountains in Eastern Tennessee.