The subject relates involvement with Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Program (GCDAMP). Subject was Principal Investigator monitoring vegetation and wildlife in lower Grand Canyon from 1994 to 2007 working with the Hualapai Tribe. From 1997 to present has been a representative on the Technical Work Group (TWG), and from 1997 to 2017 was an Adaptive Management Work Group (AMWG) alternate.

Located in Southwest Alaska on the Bering Sea, Bristol Bay covers the area of land and water that lies north of the Alaska Peninsula. The Bristol Bay region consists of more than 40 million acres and is home to approximately 7,400 people of mostly Alaska Native descent. Many Natives still maintain a subsistence lifestyle. The region’s Indigenous inhabitants include Aleuts, Eskimos, and Indians. Bristol Bay’s Indigenous cultures developed around the abundant salmon runs. The Bristol Bay watershed, with its extensive lake and river systems, provides the ideal breeding grounds for all five species of Pacific salmon. As a keystone species, salmon directly or indirectly impact many species in the ecosystem. This dissertation focuses on the ecology and environment, culture, and economy in the Bristol Bay salmon fishery from its beginnings in 1884 until the present. The arrival of Euro-Americans altered the human/salmon relationship as Alaska Natives entered the commercial salmon fishery. The commercial fishery largely marginalized Alaska Natives and they struggle to remain relevant in the fishery. Participation in the subsistence fishery remains strong and allows Bristol Bay Natives to continue their cultural traditions. On a global scale, the sustainable Bristol Bay’s salmon harvest provides over half of the world’s wild sockeye salmon. Salmon cultures once existed throughout the Atlantic and Pacific. With the decline of salmon, few viable salmon cultures remain today. I argue that because of the ecological, cultural, and economic factors, salmon in Bristol Bay deserve protection from competing resource development and other factors that threaten the valuable fishery. The unique ecology of Bristol Bay needs clean water to continue its bountiful production. As a member of the Bristol Bay community, I include my own experiences in the salmon fishery, incorporating “writing from home” as one of my primary methodologies. I also include ethnohistory and oral history methodologies. I conducted interviews with elders in the Bristol Bay community to incorporate Indigenous experiences as Natives faced changes brought on by the commercial salmon fishery.

The Energiewende aims to drastically reduce Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions, without relying on nuclear power, while maintaining a secure and affordable energy supply. Since 2000 the country’s renewable-energy share has increased exponentially, accounting in 2017 for over a third of Germany's gross electricity consumption. This unprecedented achievement is the result of policies, tools, and institutional arrangements intended to steer society to a low-carbon economy. Despite its resounding success in renewable-energy deployment, the Energiewende is not on track to meet its decarbonization goals. Energiewende rules and regulations have generated numerous undesired consequences, and have cost much more than anticipated, a burden borne primarily by energy consumers. Why has the Energiewende not only made energy more expensive, but also failed to bring Germany closer to its decarbonization goals? I analyzed the Energiewende as a complex socio-technical system, examining its legal framework and analyzing the consequences of successive regulations; identifying major political and energy players and the factors that motivated them to pursue socio-technical change; and documenting the political trends and events in which the Energiewende is rooted and which continue to shape it. I analyzed the dynamics and the loopholes that created barriers to transition, pushed the utility sector to the brink of dissolution, and led to such undesirable outcomes as negative wholesale prices and forced exports of electricity to Germany’s European neighbors. Thirty high-level energy experts and stakeholders were interviewed to find out how the best-informed members of German society perceive the Energiewende. Surprisingly, although they were highly critical of the way the transition has unfolded, most were convinced that the transition would eventually succeed. But their definitions of success did not always depend on achieving carbon-mitigation targets. Indeed, Germany jeopardizes the achievement of these targets by changing too many policy and institutional variables at too fast a pace. Good intentions and commitment are not enough to create economies based on intermittent energy sources: they will also require intensive grid expansion and breakthroughs in storage technology. The Energiewende demonstrates starkly that collective action driven by robust political consensus is not sufficient for steering complex socio-technical systems in desired directions.

Greater cross-disciplinary collaboration between the fields of sustainability and clinical psychology could lead to improved outcomes for both. Moreover, some forms of mental disorder, such as PTSD and Moral Injury, constitute serious challenges that require the attention of sustainability’s interdisciplinary, systems-focused, solutionsoriented approach. My research frames the impacts of combat-related psychological trauma on military veterans as a sustainability problem according to criteria put forward by Arnim Wiek’s Transformational Problem Solving framework. I also provide a review of studies demonstrating the treatment benefits of agricultural therapy for veterans diagnosed with PTSD or symptoms associated with Moral Injury. I then describe my own efforts investigating the connection between trauma and sustainability using survey measurements, interviews, and participant observation onsite at Growing Veterans farm in Mt. Vernon, Washington. The results strongly suggest that sustainable agricultural can be of powerful clinical benefit to traumatized veterans and that sustainable behaviors and values in general increased as trauma symptoms decreased. More broadly, the project indicates that slight shifts in how we approach solution formulation and how we articulate and disseminate sustainability messages could have profound positive effects on the sustainability’s success.

This paper argues that the use of masculine rhetoric in the expansion of the United States derived from a larger ideological system that glorified masculinity through imperialism. The United States relied on the frontier myth, a belief that asserted that the nation was formed through the struggle of settling the frontier. The American man possessed the strength to conquer the wilderness and the people who already inhabited it. This version of masculinity combined not only elements of nationalism but also of race. As the United States continued to expand its borders through imperialism, the masculine identity associated with the frontier myth persisted in the psyche of the American male. The conquering man became the ideal of the American man, and rhetoric regarding the national need for this figure in the continual expansion of America justified wars of imperialism. In order to observe recurring patterns of masculine rhetoric, this thesis adopts a comparative approach to American imperialism by analyzing two wars separated by time and political climate; the U.S.-Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. Systems of ideology are always embodied by people; consequently this thesis applies a biographical approach to the key political figures who influenced the United States’ route to war. These men serve as examples of the internalization and intersectionality of masculine rhetoric as well as the outward expression of those systems in the form of imperialism.