Copyright (c) 2013 Macalester College All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors Recent documents in Honors Projects en-us Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:13:39 PDT 3600 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/8 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/8 Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:13:34 PDT As filter feeders, freshwater mussels (Unionoida) are important for maintaining the quality of freshwater ecosystems. Unionids are among the most imperiled organisms in North America. To maintain biodiversity, it is important to understand unionid population and habitat characteristics. This study investigated habitat variables and biogeographic variables associated with mussel distributions. Trends in our data indicated that higher mussel densities were associated with areas of low shear stress, and coarse substrate. Also, mussel density and richness declined from downstream to upstream. Both biogeographic and habitat factors were indicated as significant but more research is needed to confirm these trends.

]]> Cara S. Weggler http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/7 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/7 Wed, 12 May 2010 13:47:51 PDT How is wind power dynamically imbued with meanings, language, and images that seek to unevenly position the technology in relation to groups of humans, natures, and geographies? How are boundaries constructed and challenged through the production of knowledge, technology, and nature? This paper seeks to unpack the conditions of possibility that govern wind power development on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation in western South Dakota. By examining the production and circulation of discourses and texts, I show that narratives that position indigenous people within environmentalism are reproduced in wind power discourse. I argue that these discources overshadow the complex operation of heterogeneous networks of power, colonialism, race, nature, science and technology.

]]> Kai A. Bosworth http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/6 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/6 Mon, 10 May 2010 08:48:51 PDT This paper considers the material and semiotic realities in the lives of those whose bodies deviate from the female norms of thinness and symmetricality. I argue that the discursive formations of both obesity and breast cancer are a biopolitical practice, producing particular bodies as excessive, ill, or deficient in juxtaposition to normative notions of the moral citizen/consumer. For example, both the Body Mass Index and the Gail Model for breast cancer risk assessment pull women into the realm of risk and contamination, in need of monitoring and intervention. This entanglement of therapy and surveillance forecloses possibilities to live other lives. However, spaces of resistance open for and are opened by those struggling for legible ways of living with breast cancer and fat—in the radical potential of outed fat and bared breast and scalp, and in feminist successor science projects—so that a more unbounded politics of living well through difference may be found.

]]> Hannah Q. Rivenburgh http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/4 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/4 Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:22:05 PDT Lake cores record regional environmental and climate change, as well as stochastic changes in local surface processes. The climate and geomorphic history in the Northern Rocky Mountains is not well known, and analysis of lake cores is useful to further our understanding of Holocene climate change in the region. We analyzed a 4m long core from Lake Josephine and a 5m long core from Swiftcurrent Lake, downvalley from Grinnell Glacier, in an effort to constrain environmental change in the region. The Lake Josephine core is approximately 3000 years old, while the Swiftcurrent Lake core is approximately 4000 years old. C/N analysis was performed to quantify terrestrial versus aquatic input sources using an Elemental Analyzer. Percent TOC data was retrieved through carbon coulometry to consider its relevance as a proxy for climate change through solar forcing. Results show that there is a visual relationship between the variance of solar forcing and %TOC in Lake Josephine that should be verified through spectral analysis. C/N ratios reveal an increase of terrestrial inputs and rooted aquatic material in Lake Josephine and Swiftcurrent Lake over time. Percent TIC and dolomite act as proxies for intensity of glacial erosion and glacier fluctuation in Lake Josephine. Dolomite presence in Swiftcurrent Lake might act as a proxy for a threshold of glacial activity. Regional climate variability as recorded in C/N ratios were compared to Holocene climate periods, with good correlation during the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Climate Anomaly.

]]> Hannah C. Wydeven http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/3 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/3 Fri, 01 May 2009 12:36:33 PDT The National Park Service has begun the ecological restoration of areas along a 72-mile stretch of the upper Mississippi River known as the Mississippi National River and Recreation Area. These projects aim to ecologically restore degraded landscapes by removing invasive species and planting native vegetation. The Park Service uses species compositions from pre-settlement Minnesota to inform its restoration efforts. I have investigated what plant species grew in the region centered around the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota Rivers through extensive research into eighteenth and nineteenth century sources such as the journals and notes of Euro-American explorers, government land surveys, and Native American cultural uses of plants. My research has culminated in a list of vegetation that grew along the river before Euro-American settlement in what is now the Twin Cities, which the Park Service can use in its restoration of historical landscapes. My project illustrates the uses of a historical perspective to research and understand the underlying philosophy and values of the field of ecological restoration. I show that all ecosystems are the products of human economic activities, which change over time, which complicates efforts to restore historical, dynamic landscapes.

]]> Samuel M. Adels http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/2 http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/envi_honors/2 Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:19:16 PDT This paper examines three local case studies—Loring Park, Lake Harriet, and the Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary—which illustrate the dynamic relationship between humans and nature. Throughout history urban parks have variously served as pleasure grounds for moral uplift, recreational/entertainment facilities, abandoned sites of urban decay, and most recently sites of ecological restoration that promote a harmonious view of cities and nature. Regardless of their specific form and function, urban parks are not preserved pieces of nature within the city, but rather are contrived landscapes continuously evolving in response to changing social conditions.

]]> Ariel A. Trahan