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Chignell, Stephen

University of British Columbia

The increasing recognition that the Earth is deeply shaped by interactions between biophysical and social forces has resulted in a refrain for research that integrates biophysical and social sciences. The field of critical physical geography (CPG) offers one way forward, combining approaches from science and technology studies, political ecology, and environmental history with close attention to biophysical processes. This dissertation takes a CPG approach to examining the case of Ethiopia’s Bale Mountains and its national park, an internationally recognized area of endemism and the headwaters of several major rivers. The first section of the dissertation situates the science of the Bale Mountains, examining how socio-political histories extend into scientific practice. The second section explores alternative constructions of the landscape. The first section begins with a chapter on conceptual bridge-building, arguing why and how emerging network analysis and science mapping techniques should be adopted as core methods in CPG practice. Chapter 3 demonstrates this by using science mapping to identify the social, conceptual, and intellectual structures of the Bale Mountains corpus and how these have (re)produced the dominant framing of the landscape over time. Chapter 4 builds on this by scrutinizing the notion of the ‘Ethiopian Highlands’—a key element of how the region has been framed—and its associated metaphors. It traces the political-economic, biophysical, and epistemic factors by which this category came into use, and how these intersected to maintain a particular yet partial vision of the region. Chapter 5 highlights the region’s historical socio-cultural characteristics through an in-depth analysis of its placenames, challenging the dominant wilderness narrative perpetuated by the national park and conservation literature and pointing to the longstanding human presence and hydrosocial characteristics of the landscape. Chapter 6 uses remote sensing and geospatial data to explore the potential role of groundwater on the region's ecohydrology, proposing a new model of how water moves through the system. Collectively, this dissertation brings together socio-cultural and biophysical information to understand key overlooked aspects of the Bale Mountains including a reimagining of the region, while also demonstrating several mixed-methods approaches with relevance for CPG and related fields.

Text; Dataset

2025-01-31

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/87066

Resources, Environment and Sustainability

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/