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This chapter continues the discussion of post-disaster reconstruction and fire mitigation efforts by presenting two examples that illustrate the continued extraction of profits from these high-risk areas. First, home reconstruction data in California and Colorado reveal that rebuilt homes are both bigger and more proximate to one another than prefire structures. Not only do these larger homes increase property values; they also increase overall fuel load and potential fire spread between structures. The chapter reviews important political economic considerations leading to this reconstruction outcome that has in turn injected more fuel and value onto the landscape. Second, it considers the emergence of the private firefighting industry to illustrate yet another group seeking to extract profits from high-risk residential landscapes across the West. The chapter shows that fire-prone landscapes like the Tunnel Fire area are notable for their ability to generate wealth both before and after hazard events. Over time financial opportunism has contributed to the formation of vulnerable communities while simultaneously incentivizing efforts to mitigate those very same risks. This marks a financially viable self-fulfilling prophecy: profits in production, profits in protection.

In the March 2009 issue of this journal, we published an essay entitled ‘BeyondLeave No Trace’ (Simon & Alagona, 2009). Our paper investigated the developmentof Leave No Trace (LNT) in the United States, explored the historical andgeographical assumptions that underpin LNT as an environmental ethic, describedits strengths and accomplishments, explained its logical and normative weaknesses,and identified opportunities to expand this already successful approach beyond itsartificial and self-imposed limitations. We were not the first authors to explore thehistory of LNT (Turner, 2002), and we joined a growing chorus of researchers whohave called for a more effective integration of critical humanistic scholarship intoland management and environmental education (Cachelin, Rose, Dustin, & Shooter,2011; Havlick, 2006; Lockhart, 2006).Yet our essay touched a nerve. It became the subject of a vigorous debate amongthe staff and sponsors of the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Education(LNTCOE), the leading non-governmental organization that promotes LNTprograms, practices, and principles. It generated a controversy at LNTCOE’sannual board meeting (Personal communication with LNT staff). And it elicited acritical response paper, entitled ‘Revisiting ‘‘Beyond Leave No Trace’’’ (Marion,Lawhon, Vagias, & Newman, 2011).Our objectives in the current essay are threefold. In the first section, we addresscritiques from the Marion et al. (2010) response paper. In the second section, werearticulate the argument from our original paper, including the major shortcomings

Achieving win-win outcomes in environment–development programs is a laudable goal, but frequently difficult to realize. In this paper we review the possibilities for win-win climate and development outcomes in programs that distribute improved cookstoves with the use of carbon finance. We show that improved cookstove technologies form an important, if asymmetrical, environment–development interface, and illustrate the mutually supported local (development) and global (climate change) benefits of continued improved stoves use—where success in one program area is directly tied to benefits in the other. We also describe how program results are highly contextual and that, in practice, there are a number of challenges to achieving effective ‘win-win’ outcomes—including cultural, financial, governance and technological barriers. While carbon finance provides an opportunity to fund scaleable and enforceable stove programs, it may also introduce mutually supported impediments—where progress towards one set of program objectives, directly compromises progress towards other objectives. Drawing on development debates for improved cookstove use, scientific reports on stove-based greenhouse gas reductions, and preexisting case studies of carbon and non-carbon financed cookstoves in Peru, Uganda and Cambodia, we conclude that the challenge for future carbon financed improved cookstove projects will be to leverage inherent symbioses between climate and development arenas in order to overcome mutually supported impediments. Achieving substantive win-win conditions will require further scholarly and practical engagement to tackle the many outstanding challenges and uncertainties reviewed in this essay.

Fuzzy and investigative ecological boundaries are reconstituted as absolute and tangible when used to inform natural resource management policies. The process of treating symbolic representations of ecological discontinuities as if they were authentic reflections of reality represents a process of reification and may lead to inappropriate policy provisions with adverse local ecological and social consequences. This essay describes how the United States Department of Agriculture's Conservation Reserve Program takes the 100th meridian—a simplified representation of the ambiguous gradient between the non-arid East from the arid West—and hardens it into a concrete boundary where farmers follow different rules depending on what side of the boundary they reside.

In this progress report we call for nature-society geographers to give greater attention to indoor environments as active political-ecological spaces. Nature-society geographers often treat such spaces as fixed and unnatural. Yet a growing body of research attests to the active role played by sites ranging from homes to factories to shopping malls in the production of nature, scale, and environmental citizens. Furthermore, environmentalist and public health projects have increasingly targeted indoor spaces for scrutiny and action, yet these projects and scientific literature typically lack a critical geographical perspective on scale, space, power, and nature. We argue that exploring indoor environments is necessary to fully encompass socio-natural assemblages that include flows of energy and knowledge, embodied subjects, technologies of power and resistance, and a variety of non-humans.

Domestic cookstoves in rural India have long been targeted by development programs dedicated to solving a diverse range of problems from deforestation and indoor air pollution to global warming and rural market inefficiencies. Theories on how technologies are mobilized in these design and diffusion innovation projects and what this presages for development outcomes can be improved by explicitly detailing the composition and structure of program governance frameworks. I develop a ‘dual adoption analytic framework’ to interrogate two technology innovation programs in Western India. This framework underscores the collaborative nature of technology mobilizations and, more specifically, how power is distributed across partnerships at different stages of the development process. Local partners are shown to function as influential mediating agents operating between extrinsic agencies and targeted village groups. They reinforce funding agency planning commitments while also activating economic contingencies and generating alternative development pathways. I also reveal how the structure of technology innovation projects—as either administratively heavy handed or committed to free market principles—influences intermediary behavior, intrapartnership structures of control and, ultimately, development outcomes for targeted artisan communities and households.

The ‘era of interdisciplinarity’ heralds collaborative inquiry as effective for addressing complex issues at the nexus of disciplinary interests. Geographers have long argued that they are particularly well-suited to contribute to interdisciplinary endeavors because of the breadth and depth that the discipline enfolds. However, within the literature about geography and interdisciplinarity, we find only two rather limiting conversations. The first conversation is concerned with the role(s) and position of geography within academia and focuses on what geographers can do to distinguish themselves while also improving their interactions with scholars from other disciplines. The second conversation largely revolves around how best to conduct interdisciplinarity ‘in the lab and classroom’ and focuses on practical issues associated with making collaborative research operate smoothly for multiple, disciplinary participants. We propose opening up intellectual space for a third conversation about the benefits, challenges and contributions of individual disciplines in interdisciplinary environments. Using survey data, we analyze how geography was perceived by collaborators from various disciplines in an interdisciplinary Urban Ecology program at the University of Washington. We offer this pilot study as a heuristic for others wishing to perform similar small-scale reflexive exercises and advance this “third conversation”.

This paper argues that field courses can improve college students' interest and engagement not only in the environmental sciences, but also in the environmental humanities—including environmental history, philosophy, and literature. We base this argument on five years of experience teaching an environmental studies field course through the Wildlands Studies Program in the Sierra Nevada of California, USA. In the paper we draw from field notes, discussions with students, correspondence with other instructors, and a survey sent to all of our former students. We conclude that three factors—the field immersion experience, the small group dynamic, and the curriculum design—all contributed to an increase in our students' interest and engagement in the environmental humanities.

This paper explicates the role of community-level intermediaries in post-liberalized economic sectors. Focusing on nascent commercial markets for improved, smokeless cookstoves in southwestern Maharashtra, I describe how development is encountered by three analytic groups – artisans, female stove users and NGO field officers. This study highlights patterns of strategic intermediary action, or forms of brokering, used to negotiate the commercialization process for individuals involved in the fabrication, distribution and use of improved cookstoves. A close analysis of the mediating agent can strengthen theories on how individuals and communities encounter sector privatization and state retrenchment. This study reveals a diverse set of brokering activities and actors, and shows how intermediaries combine tasks associated with traditional conceptions of the political fixer and market broker by working within and between groups of market, village and state operatives to transform market supply chains. Mediating agents coordinate counter regulating activities within civil society in the absence of heavy state intervention and play a crucial role in activating and connecting community interests to latent neoliberal state resources.

Leave No Trace (LNT) has become the official education and outreach policy for managing recreational use in parks and wilderness areas throughout the United States. It is based on seven core principles that seek to minimize impacts from backcountry recreational activities such as hiking, climbing, and camping. In this paper, we review the history and current practice of Leave No Trace in the United States, including its complex role in the global political economy of outdoor recreation. We conclude by suggesting a new framework for building on the successes of Leave No Trace, while moving beyond its self-imposed limitations, and recapturing wilderness recreation as a more collaborative, participatory, productive, democratic, and radical form of political action.

This research responds to calls from within the field of urban ecology to explicitly incorporate humanities-based research in order to achieve robust interdisciplinarity. Our research provides an example of a place-based urban ecological analysis. We use this framework to analyze over a century of park planning and development within the city of Seattle. We identify four eras of park planning that are linked by a comprehensive 100-year park plan. This case study examines how the political, cultural, and economic aspects of park planning have produced and been influenced by long-term trends and historical contingencies. This research also offers practical insights for effective contemporary urban planning, emphasizing the need for flexible and adaptive long-term plans when confronted with unpredictable events, emerging political arrangements, changing cultural priorities, and shifting fiscal climates.

Achieving win-win outcomes in environment-development programs is a laudable goal, but frequently difficult to realize. In this paper we review the possibilities for win-win climate and development outcomes in programs that distribute improved efficiency cookstoves (ICS) with the use of carbon finance. We show that ICS technologies form an important, if asymmetrical, environment-development interface, and illustrate the mutually supported local (development) and global (climate change) benefits of continued improved stoves use. We also describe how program results are highly contextual and that, in practice, there are a number of challenges to achieving effective ‘win-win’ outcomes. While carbon finance provides an opportunity to fund scaleable and enforceable stove programs, it may also introduce mutually supported impediments. Drawing on development debates for ICS use, scientific reports on stove-based greenhouse gas (GHG) reductions, and preexisting case studies of carbon and non-carbon financed cookstoves, we conclude that the challenge for future carbon financed ICS projects will be to leverage inherent symbioses between climate and development arenas in order to overcome mutually supported impediments. Achieving substantive win-win conditions will require further scholarly and practical engagement to tackle the many outstanding challenges and uncertainties reviewed in this essay.

A widely held belief is that only through interdisciplinarity can academics effectively address today’s complex ecological problems, because these problems demand cross-disciplinary efforts and specialized knowledge from natural and social scientists. Innovative interdisciplinary research and curricula have been created to train a new generation of scientists to engage with complex issues. It seems critical that those most affected by interdisciplinary education—doctoral students—provide feedback about such innovations. Without understanding students’ experiences in interdisciplinary programs, faculty will not know whether they are “getting it right” for future generations of interdisciplinarians. From our experiences as doctoral students, we provide reflections and perspectives on the National Science Foundation‐funded Urban Ecology IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) Program at the University of Washington. We discuss the aspects of the program that provided the most beneficial interdisciplinary experiences, as well as those aspects that could be improved. We identify three stages of intellectual development, present questions encountered during each stage, and develop six core recommendations for interdisciplinary research and training programs.