Consuming Communities: U.S. Women's Regionalism and Consumer Culture, 1870-1930

Literary regionalism has always faced critical devaluation, both at the time of its greatest popularity in the late nineteenth century and during its critical rediscovery in the past twenty years. Even those critics who seek to laud regionalist texts for offering alternatives to dominant national narratives assume that regionalism is removed from centers of power and authority and not involved in the creation of national identity. Regional literature's peripheral communities, inhabitants, and localized lives were seen as somehow more authentically American than urban scenes and city dwellers, but paradoxically regionalism's purported authenticity also doomed the genre in the face of the rising changes brought by modernity and literary modernism. My dissertation argues that regional literature by American women of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not only a product of the expanding consumer culture, but was also fundamentally engaged with this culture, using consumer goods to attempt to define and control the communities they depict. This claim challenges concepts of regionalist literature as a marginal generic category as well as traditional beliefs about the consumer economy's destructive impact on regional community identities. Through my examination of texts by Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, Anzia Yezierska, and Willa Cather, I challenge prevailing notions of regional literature's marginal status. In these texts, individuals consume to both validate their sense of community and attempt to realize their ambitions for social mobility. In doing so, regionalist authors use consumer objects and material exchange to reimagine communities that transgress the presumably fixed margins of the local to promote fluid, permeable notions of modernity and national identity

Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming

Global mean surface temperatures are rising in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of this warming at equilibrium for a given radiative forcing—referred to as specific equilibrium climate sensitivity (S)—is still subject to uncertainties. We estimate global mean temperature variations and S using a 784,000-year-long field reconstruction of sea surface temperatures and a transient paleoclimate model simulation. Our results reveal that S is strongly dependent on the climate background state, with significantly larger values attained during warm phases. Using the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for future greenhouse radiative forcing, we find that the range of paleo-based estimates of Earth’s future warming by 2100 CE overlaps with the upper range of climate simulations conducted as part of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Furthermore, we find that within the 21st century, global mean temperatures will very likely exceed maximum levels reconstructed for the last 784,000 years. On the basis of temperature data from eight glacial cycles, our results provide an independent validation of the magnitude of current CMIP5 warming projections

Nonlinear climate sensitivity and its implications for future greenhouse warming

Global mean surface temperatures are rising in response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. The magnitude of this warming at equilibrium for a given radiative forcing-referred to as specific equilibrium climate sensitivity (S)-is still subject to uncertainties. We estimate global mean temperature variations and S using a 784,000-year-long field reconstruction of sea surface temperatures and a transient paleoclimate model simulation. Our results reveal that S is strongly dependent on the climate background state, with significantly larger values attained during warm phases. Using the Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 for future greenhouse radiative forcing, we find that the range of paleo-based estimates of Earth's future warming by 2100 CE overlaps with the upper range of climate simulations conducted as part of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). Furthermore, we find that within the 21st century, global mean temperatures will very likely exceed maximum levels reconstructed for the last 784,000 years. On the basis of temperature data from eight glacial cycles, our results provide an independent validation of the magnitude of current CMIP5 warming projections

Blue Food Demand Across Geographic and Temporal Scales

Numerous studies have focused on the need to expand production of ‘blue foods’, defined as aquatic foods captured or cultivated in marine and freshwater systems, to meet rising population- and income-driven demand. Here we analyze the roles of economic, demographic, and geographic factors and preferences in shaping blue food demand, using secondary data from FAO and The World Bank, parameters from published models, and case studies at national to sub-national scales. Our results show a weak cross-sectional relationship between per capita income and consumption globally when using an aggregate fish metric. Disaggregation by fish species group reveals distinct geographic patterns; for example, high consumption of freshwater fish in China and pelagic fish in Ghana and Peru where these fish are widely available, affordable, and traditionally eaten. We project a near doubling of global fish demand by mid-century assuming continued growth in aquaculture production and constant real prices for fish. Our study concludes that nutritional and environmental consequences of rising demand will depend on substitution among fish groups and other animal source foods in national diets

The vital roles of blue foods in the global food system

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can often be produced in ways that are more environmentally sustainable than terrestrial animal-source foods. Capture fisheries constitute the largest wild-food resource for human extraction that would be challenging to replace. Yet, despite their unique value, blue foods have often been left out of food system analyses, policies, and investments. Here, we focus on three imperatives for realizing the potential of blue foods: (1) Bring blue foods into the heart of food system decision-making; (2) Protect and develop the potential of blue foods to help end malnutrition; and (3) Support the central role of small-scale actors in fisheries and aquaculture. Recognition of the importance of blue foods for food and nutrition security constitutes a critical justification to preserve the integrity and diversity of aquatic species and ecosystems.Additional co-authors: Christopher D. Golden. Benjamin S. Halpern, Christina C. Hicks, Malin Jonell, Avinash Kishore, J. Zachary Koehn, Rosamond L. Naylor, Michael J. Phillips, Elizabeth R. Selig, Rebecca E. Short, Rashid Sumaila, Shakuntala H. Thilsted, Max Troell, Colette C. C. Wabnit

Four ways blue foods can help achieve food system ambitions across nations

Blue foods, sourced in aquatic environments, are important for the economies, livelihoods, nutritional security and cultures of people in many nations. They are often nutrient rich, generate lower emissions and impacts on land and water than many terrestrial meats, and contribute to the health, wellbeing and livelihoods of many rural communities4. The Blue Food Assessment recently evaluated nutritional, environmental, economic and justice dimensions of blue foods globally. Here we integrate these findings and translate them into four policy objectives to help realize the contributions that blue foods can make to national food systems around the world: ensuring supplies of critical nutrients, providing healthy alternatives to terrestrial meat, reducing dietary environmental footprints and safeguarding blue food contributions to nutrition, just economies and livelihoods under a changing climate. To account for how context-specific environmental, socio-economic and cultural aspects affect this contribution, we assess the relevance of each policy objective for individual countries, and examine associated co-benefits and trade-offs at national and international scales. We find that in many African and South American nations, facilitating consumption of culturally relevant blue food, especially among nutritionally vulnerable population segments, could address vitamin B12 and omega-3 deficiencies. Meanwhile, in many global North nations, cardiovascular disease rates and large greenhouse gas footprints from ruminant meat intake could be lowered through moderate consumption of seafood with low environmental impact. The analytical framework we provide also identifies countries with high future risk, for whom climate adaptation of blue food systems will be particularly important. Overall the framework helps decision makers to assess the blue food policy objectives most relevant to their geographies, and to compare and contrast the benefits and trade-offs associated with pursuing these objectives

The vital roles of blue foods in the global food system

Blue foods play a central role in food and nutrition security for billions of people and are a cornerstone of the livelihoods, economies, and cultures of many coastal and riparian communities. Blue foods are extraordinarily diverse, are often rich in essential micronutrients and fatty acids, and can often be produced in ways that are more environmentally sustainable than terrestrial animal-source foods. Capture fisheries constitute the largest wild-food resource for human extraction that would be challenging to replace. Yet, despite their unique value, blue foods have often been left out of food system analyses, policies, and investments. Here, we focus on three imperatives for realizing the potential of blue foods: (1) Bring blue foods into the heart of food system decision-making; (2) Protect and develop the potential of blue foods to help end malnutrition; and (3) Support the central role of small-scale actors in fisheries and aquaculture. Recognition of the importance of blue foods for food and nutrition security constitutes a critical justification to preserve the integrity and diversity of aquatic species and ecosystems

The ABC130 barrel module prototyping programme for the ATLAS strip tracker

For the Phase-II Upgrade of the ATLAS Detector, its Inner Detector, consisting of silicon pixel, silicon strip and transition radiation sub-detectors, will be replaced with an all new 100 % silicon tracker, composed of a pixel tracker at inner radii and a strip tracker at outer radii. The future ATLAS strip tracker will include 11,000 silicon sensor modules in the central region (barrel) and 7,000 modules in the forward region (end-caps), which are foreseen to be constructed over a period of 3.5 years. The construction of each module consists of a series of assembly and quality control steps, which were engineered to be identical for all production sites. In order to develop the tooling and procedures for assembly and testing of these modules, two series of major prototyping programs were conducted: an early program using readout chips designed using a 250 nm fabrication process (ABCN-25) and a subsequent program using a follow-up chip set made using 130 nm processing (ABC130 and HCC130 chips). This second generation of readout chips was used for an extensive prototyping program that produced around 100 barrel-type modules and contributed significantly to the development of the final module layout. This paper gives an overview of the components used in ABC130 barrel modules, their assembly procedure and findings resulting from their tests.Comment: 82 pages, 66 figure

Nonlinear Rectification of Quaternary Climate Drivers at High and Low Latitudes

Ph.D. University of Hawaii at Manoa 2015.Includes bibliographical references.Variations in earth’s climate are externally driven by changes in earth’s orbit around the sun – orbital forcing, namely precession, eccentricity and obliquity – on timescales of 104–105 years. During the Quaternary, from 2.6 million years ago to present, these orbital drivers caused large oscillations of earth’s climate system between cold glacials and relatively warm interglacials. The evolution of earth’s climate however is not directly proportional to this orbital insolation forcing. For instance, reconstructions of (annual mean) paleoclimate show substantial variability on precessional time scales, even though there is no change in annual mean insolation associated with the precessional forcing. This means that nonlinear mechanisms rectify the zero-annual-mean precessional forcing into an annual mean climate response. Further, during the Late Quaternary (beginning roughly 800,000 years ago (800 ka)), glacial cycles have had a dominant period of ~100 ka, a period not associated with a dominant orbital parameter. Feedbacks internal to the earth system thus amplify and modulate the external drivers. The Northern Hemisphere ice sheets are thought to be most directly sensitive to orbital insolation forcing, while other parts of the climate system – such as the tropics and the southern high latitudes – might respond more indirectly to the 100 ka earth system response. This dissertation explores the nonlinearities of precessional rectification and 100 ka modulation throughout the Late Quaternary at low and high latitudes. Many records of tropical hydroclimate show substantial variability on precessional timescales. Part I of this dissertation aims to identify the nonlinear mechanisms responsible for rectifying the seasonal precessional forcing into an annual mean precipitation response. The traditional view of precessionally-forced precipitation changes is that tropical precipitation increases with summer insolation. By comparing two simulations with an earth system model (CESM1.0.3), this paradigm is found to be true for continental but not for oceanic changes in precipitation. Focusing on the Atlantic Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), it is found that the continental temperature and precipitation response to precessional forcing are key rectifiers of annual mean precipitation over the ocean. A boundary layer response to temperature changes over northern Africa affects the meridional position of the ITCZ over the North Atlantic in boreal spring and summer, but not in fall and winter. Over the equatorial and South Atlantic, the intensity of precipitation is strongly impacted by diabatic forcing from the continents through an adjustment of the full troposphere. Although the top of atmosphere insolation forcing is seasonally symmetric, continental precipitation changes are largest in boreal summer, thus skewing the annual mean response. While the precessional forcing has only meridional gradients, the climatic response has strong zonal components. An important implication of this work is therefore that traditional zonal mean frameworks for assessing the ITCZ response to external forcing do not apply in the case of strong tropical insolation forcing. The response of tropical precipitation to external forcing thus depends on the ratio of tropical (i.e., precessional) to extratropical (i.e., 100 ka) forcing. The Antarctic ice sheet (AIS) has varied substantially during the Late Quaternary, contributing more than 10 m to glacial sea level drop, and an estimated 3–6 m to interglacial sea level highstands. With its large marine margins, the AIS is sensitive to oceanic as well as atmospheric forcing, but the relative contributions of Quaternary climate forcings remain poorly constrained, with previous modeling studies relying heavily on parameterizations of past climate evolution. The evolution of northern and southern polar ice sheets appears to be synchronous on orbital timescales, which is somewhat unexpected given that precession – essential for Northern Hemisphere glacial terminations through its impact on summer insolation – is anti-phased between the hemispheres. Part II of this dissertation studies the drivers of AIS evolution over the last 800 ka by forcing an Antarctic ice sheet model with spatially and temporally varying climate anomalies from a transient simulation with an earth system model (LOVECLIM), in addition to reconstructions of global sea level change. The simulated AIS evolution has a glacial-interglacial amplitude of 10–12 m sea level equivalent. Sensitivity experiments in which atmospheric, ocean temperature and sea level forcing are applied individually show that the full ice sheet response is a non-linear superposition of the individual drivers. The Northern Hemisphere sea level forcing impacts Antarctic ice volume by driving changes in the grounding line position. This grounding line migration modulates the Antarctic response to other climatic drivers: for both accumulation and oceanic melt rates the changes in configuration of the grounded ice sheet dominate over the glacial-interglacial climate forcing. Surface melt rates peak when austral summers are long, especially during periods of high annual mean temperature corresponding to high CO2. These melt peaks provide a critical contribution to Antarctic deglaciation and are in phase with Northern Hemisphere summer insolation. Thus, on glacial timescales, Antarctica and the Northern Hemisphere ice sheets vary in unison through their respective orbital forcings, changes in global sea level, and CO2

Work adaptations insufficient to address growing heat risk for U.S. agricultural workers

The over one million agricultural workers in the United States (U.S.) are amongst the populations most vulnerable to the health impacts of extreme heat. Climate change will further increase this vulnerability. Here we estimate the magnitude and spatial patterns of the growing heat exposure and health risk faced by U.S. crop workers and assess the effect of workplace adaptations on mitigating that risk. We find that the average number of days spent working in unsafe conditions will double by mid-century, and, without mitigation, triple by the end of it. Increases in rest time and the availability of climate-controlled recovery areas can eliminate this risk but could affect farm productivity, farm worker earnings, and/or labor costs much more than alternative measures. Safeguarding the health and well-being of U.S. crop workers will therefore require systemic change beyond the worker and workplace level