Paul Berne Burow

PAUL BUROW, then a graduate student at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, was approved for funding in April 2021 to aid research on “The Ecology of Belonging: Settler Colonialism and the Cultural Politics of Environmental Change in the Great Basin,” supervised by Dr. Michael R. Dove. This project examines the social and cultural dimensions of environmental change in the rural North American West. Based on thirty-six months of field-based ethnographic and historical research in the Great Basin and Sierra Nevada regions of California and Nevada, it investigates the cultural politics of land and its stewardship in dryland forest and shrub steppe ecosystems as it intersects with a changing climate, land-use histories, and environmental governance regimes. Landscapes are undergoing material transformation due to climate change, land-use practices, and settler colonialism, in turn reshaping how people relate to land, substantiate their place on it, and make claims to territory. This is creating new socioecological configurations of people, land, and place called ecologies of belonging. The cultural and political dynamics that shape the construction and maintenance of the boundaries of belonging and non-belonging in these assemblages are explored through a series of interconnected chapters that show how Paiute people, federal land managers, and livestock ranchers navigate environmental changes and understand their changing relationship to the land through the work of constructing place and belonging for themselves and others.