Lake Effects Transnational History and the Making of a Valencian Landscape.

[摘要] This dissertation examines the ongoing physical transformations in and around the Albufera, a large, shallow lagoon on the Spanish Mediterranean coast just south of the city of Valencia, the social, economic, and cultural factors that have contributed to that transformation, and the ways in which the shifting landscape has given rise to new uses and new relationships between local people and their environment. Its approach to Valencian history is shaped by the underlying principle that local environmental changes, both physical and ideological, can only be understood as part of larger systems. The Albufera’s recent history thus provides an entrée to the broader story of Spanish modernization, defined here as the ongoing efforts of successive political regimes to bring Spanish cultures and economies more into line with those of the country’s neighbors in Western Europe, and the attendant changes in popular attitudes towards nature, productivity, and the state.For millennia, Iberian environments have been transformed by processes of land reclamation, agriculture, urban and industrial development, conservation and restoration. The Franco regime undertook a nationwide development campaign that involved massive technological transformations of nature, leading to crises of biodiversity and habitat destruction that were exacerbated by the tourist and development booms of the late 1960s and 1970s. Spanish scientists, building on transnational networks of knowledge and ideas, worked throughout this period to protect spaces and species, and in so doing carved out a space for political dissidents to use environmental issues as means of opposing the regime. In the post-Franco period, European notions of conservation drove legal reforms across Spain, while changing agricultural policies and attitudes driven by the European Union led to economic and personal redefinition among many Spanish farmers. Through a combination of ethnographic study and a review of print archives, this dissertation reveals the way that these large-scale processes played out in the Valencian environment. Understanding these events as not only local or national, but as part of transnational and global networks, offers a way to incorporate Spain’s twentieth-century history into the broader narratives of Europe and the world.

[发布机构] University of Michigan

[效力级别] Transnational Environmental History

[关键词] Environmental History;Transnational Environmental History;Modern Spain;European Union;History (General);Humanities;History