The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture

Acknowledgments

vii Acknowledgments I often hear the criticism that humanistic scholars are so solitary in their work. We don’t socialize in the lab or work in teams to collect data. We don’t often publish multi-author work, and we spend a lot of time alone in the virtual stacks of research databases, reading and thinking. But as I sit to write this acknowledgment and imagine all the people, funds, and other forms of support that went into the production of this manuscript, I realize that this project has been decidedly collective, not solitary at all. Each page bears the influence of teachers, mentors, editors, conference discussants and fellow panelists , colleagues, students, and loved ones. I am rich in mentors and humbled by their indefatigable cheerleading . I am grateful to professors who inspired me to pursue my doctoral degree, for which I wrote the dissertation that has evolved into this book: Steve Hopkins, Mark Wallace, Diana K. Davis, and Janet Davis. A handful of scholars have been particularly inspiring in their work and generous of their time and advice since I began graduate school: Joni Adamson, Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands, and Diana K. Davis. I seek to emulate their generosity and activism in my own approach to scholarship and students. I am especially grateful to my dissertation committee for polishing my thoughts and having faith in the import of this project, despite its sometimes-unwieldy interdisciplinarity: Shari Huhndorf, Louise Westling, Susan H. Hardwick , David Vazquez, and Juanita Sundberg. The communities of students, staff, and faculty in both the Environmental Studies Program (Gayla WardWell, Alan Dickman, and Lise Nelson especially) and the English Department at the University of Oregon (Elizabeth Wheeler, Karen Ford, and William Rossi especially) were essential to fostering the intellectual conditions necessary to produce a meaningful dissertation. In particular, I thank the students and faculty of viii Acknowledgments the University of Oregon’s Literature and Environment Discussion Group, Mesa Verde. Close friendships with Janet Fiskio, Chaone Mallory, Teresa Coronado, and Kelly Sultzbach, among others, helped blur the line between intellectual stimulation and psychological health, a requisite for getting through graduate school. Funding support from the American Association of University Women allowed me to work on writing my dissertation in my final year. This dissertation fellowship helped shift my goal from getting a degree to publishing my dissertation as a book. Research grants from the Center for the Study of Women and Society, the Coeta Barker Foundation, the Center on Diversity and Community, the University of Oregon, and the Evelyn Rhoads Wilson Endowment Fund all helped immensely to conduct research for and share various chapters at conferences. I am grateful for the fruitful feedback I received from the University of California–Davis’ Environment and Societies Workshop, and the follow-up feedback from Diana K. Davis, Louis Warren, Traci Voyles, and Mary Mendoza that the workshop precipitated. Thanks are due to University of Arizona Press, especially Kristen Buckles, who championed the book from the start, and to the publishing , editing, and marketing staff at the Press. I always tell my students not to be afraid of work returned covered in ink; it means I am taking their ideas seriously and want them to be expressed as well as possible. This is precisely how I received the extensive revision suggestions from two anonymous, incisive reviewers, whom I thank for the time they took to show me how to make my arguments better. At the University of Alaska Southeast, colleagues from the Faculty Research Colloquium, especially Kevin Maier, have been seminal in developing my thinking, and the enthusiasm and help of administrative staff Virginia Berg and Margaret Rea buoyed me as I frantically worked on the book over the past year from within my windowless office. Thanks are due to the School of Arts and Sciences for funding an undergraduate Research Assistant, Kristie Livingston, who deserves commendation for her attention to detail in helping revise the final manuscript, and to Dominic Lodovici for indexing help. Finally, my family’s support in my degree, career, and book project has been humbling. I thank my dad, Dave Jaquette, and my brother, ix Acknowledgments Chris Jaquette, who shaped the environmentalist in me through years of rafting, kayaking, hiking, camping, and living simply. It is perhaps trite but still an understatement to say that I would not have done any of this—graduate school, the dissertation, the book, much less writing my first essay for...