Wharton's perception and relation to the mountain phenomena of her “homeland” differs markedly from her aesthetic engagement with Alpine topography. Sharon Dean notes how Wharton “preferred the rises and dips and curves against a backdrop of hills to the overpowering quality of mountains made visible in so many paintings and illustrations of America's western landscapes.” This is, however, a rather reductive view. It buttresses the stereotype of Wharton as a haughty cosmopolite who is far too genteel for North American soil, its rustic communities, earthy manners and idioms—an image that situates her as an advocate of James Fenimore Cooper's thesis that “any well-delineated view of a high-class Swiss scene, must at once convince even the most provincial mind among us that nothing of the sort is to be found in America, east of the Rocky Mountains.” In fact, Wharton's depictions of summits and ridges in the “New World” are dynamic, nuanced and highly variegated. A brief description of the landscapes of the American West, as in “The Journey,” is relevant here: “The train was rushing through a region of bare hillocks huddled against a lifeless sky. It looked like the first day of creation.” The stillness of this barren terrain is indicative of how Wharton views the American peak as a locus of unexplored possibility.

Wharton's rural New England narratives evoke and interrogate the second way of “writing peaks” that Leslie Stephen articulates in “The Regrets of a Mountaineer”—what he terms “the sporting view of the mountains.” He records how such authors “affect something like cynicism; they mix descriptions of scenery with allusions to fleas or to bitter beer.” Wharton's myriad accounts of the “New World” peaks often partake of this “cynical” element, incorporating the ornate yet ominous lexis synonymous with an “Old World” fin de siècle stylistic register. Nevertheless, it is not for the reasons Stephen alludes to: “they humbly try to amuse us because they can't strike us with awe.” Wharton's European texts furnish various expressions of “awe.” The New England narratives meanwhile reveal a different rhetorical and affective lexicon to portray these lofty landforms.

Stakeholder-driven Participatory Management Highlighted through Case Studies

Worldwide, coral reef management is increasingly becoming more participatory and drawing on adaptive management. As a reminder, participatory management refers to a form of management that shares the authority and responsibility of managing natural resources between the government and local communities and stakeholder groups (Kar, 2021). An important aspect is that it incorporates participatory governance which promotes and empowers the people (citizens and non-citizens alike) to participate in the decision-making process (). Often, only entities that significantly affect or are significantly affected by the proposed decision participate. Throughout this book, we’ve defined these entities as stakeholders (Decker et al., 2012). Our five case studies showcased stakeholder-driven policy-making at the national level through bipartisan legislation in the United States, at the sub-national level through participatory management in Florida, and at the local level through grassroots movements in Florida and the Cayman Islands, with Florida reefs depicted in Figure 10.1.

Our case study on bipartisan legislation in the United States showed that Republicans and Democrats are using coral reefs as symbols in policy-making to collaborate and cooperate on legislation regarding climate-vulnerable ecosystems and the impacts from climate change. For example, coral reefs are symbols of the unique cultural settings of American states across the nation. For Hawaii and Florida, coral reefs represent unique identities and are tied to their livelihoods and way of life. We also find that there is bipartisan consensus on the need to protect and conserve coral reef ecosystems through community-based management programs funded and supported by the federal government. This means that Congressional leaders are buying into the importance of enabling local communities to play a role in stewarding their coral reefs.

Our case study on the management of Florida's coral reefs examined two organizations: the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary (FKNMS) and the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative (SEFCRI). We found that both organizations enacted participatory management styles via stakeholder engagement and involvement. We also found evidence of iteratively learning, or learning as they go, from both organizations, indicating adaptive management strategies. Finally, we identified that the FKNMS engages in a formal and centralized approach to managing the Florida Reef Tract, while SEFCRI engages in an informal and collaborative approach to managing Florida's northern reefs.

For Françoise

In the meantime, an experimental Canadian filmmaker, Kirk Tougas, found the trailer for a film by Michael Winner starring Charles Bronson, The Mechanic (1972), worked on it until he gave it back its soul, added a critical preamble and entitled his polemical essay The Politics of Perception (1973). It was a good trailer: full of cinematic metaphors about erasure (still camera viewfinders and guns, photocopiers, photos, the body defined as material and human beings as machines…). Like lightning to a tree, it attracted the murderous treatment to which Kirk Tougas submitted it.

Tougas loops the entire trailer some twenty times, washing away a little more of the image and sound with each pass. At first imperceptible, the chromatic and sonic erasure speeds up, the loss of definition becomes exhaustive and the iconography typical of action films opens the field to a shadowy combat between figurative destruction and plastic abstraction. The image becomes earthy, then ashen, marbled, mottled and flecked. In the end, there is nothing more than a white screen and a sonic veil analogous to a beating heart.

African American women are one of the oppressed groups of humanity who suffer from triple jeopardy. They suffer because of their race, gender, and class. As they are black, they suffer because of their race and have been forced to believe that if you are white, you are right, if you are black, stay back and have been discarded from the mainstream life in the United States even today. Moreover, they have been forced to believe that this is the man's world and the woman's place is in home.

In her book, The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir has written about humanity. She has written, “humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as a relative to him, she is not regarded as an autonomous being …. He is the absolute, she is the other …. Man sets himself up as the essential as opposed to the other, the inessential, the object” (16–17). This kind of objectification or commodification of women is being created by men so that they can enjoy the upper hand over women.

African American women are the victims of racism, sexism, and poverty. Moreover, they were also denied to have access to knowledge and knowledge-generating enterprises because of their race, gender, and poverty. The African people were brought to America as slaves and were sold on auction blocks to the highest white bidder. As they were sold as slaves, their humanity was taken away from them. The position of enslaved African women was worse than that of men as every kind of liberty was taken with them by the white masters.

However, after the abolition of slavery and the passage of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments made to the constitution of the United States, they started gaining their humanity and access to knowledge and knowledge-generating enterprises. As a result, they started to read and write whatever they wanted to read and write in their own limited capacity. In due course of time, they also started to write autobiographies, poems, short stories, novels, and plays too. The autobiography was one of the basic literary forms which was handled by both African American men and women. Though late, plays were also written by them in due course of time.

Data analysis provided by Research Assistant Kampol Pannoi

In 2021, a group of prominent Democratic and Republican lawmakers from the bicameral U.S. legislature, or Congress, came together to call for new policy to defend American coral reefs from environmental change. In the words of Republican Senator Marco Rubio, “I saw the devastated condition of our coral reefs firsthand when touring the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and I promised a comprehensive response.” His perceptions on stressors to reefs and the need for their proposed policy, the Restoring Resilient Reefs Act, was nearly indistinguishable from his Democratic colleagues. Given how polarized American politics have been for the past decade, it is important to understand why lawmakers come together and agree upon the urgent need to protect coral reefs from stressors? Is there something inherently special to coral reefs that causes elected leaders to put aside typical partisan grudges and work together to ensure laws are passed to guarantee American reefs survive the era of climate change?

This chapter will review the history of coral reef policy in the U.S. Congress, including a focus on policies that had congressional support from both political parties, and a specific case of reauthorizing the fundamental coral reef conservation law in the United States. We argue that understanding why legislators decide to place coral reefs on the policy-making agenda is important for biodiversity conservation, but may also be a source of common ground over more contentious issues, such as the passing of climate change legislation. Our results can help interest groups message the importance of biodiversity and climate policy to lawmakers in a way that appeals to a range of political ideologies.

History of Coral Reef Policy in the U.S. Congress

The federal government of the United States is broken up into three branches of government: the Executive Branch, which is where the president and federal agencies carry out laws; the Legislative Branch, where laws are made in Congress; and the Judicial Branch, where laws are judged based on whether they follow the U.S. constitution. Congress is made up of two chambers or houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate. The House of Representatives is the lower house, which is generally characterized by early career politicians with more frequent elections every two years who represent a district within a U.S. state based on population.

Imagine the hustle and bustle of downtown Miami, teeming with live music, filled with flavors of Latin American cuisine, aromas of Cuban coffee and tourists and locals alike enjoying miles of pristine white-sand beaches. A short distance to the south, lies the Biscayne Bay, which is home to several listed species under the most important wildlife conservation policy on the books, the Endangered Species Act, including manatees, crocodiles, several sea turtle species, small-tooth sawfish and staghorn coral (Acropora cervicornis). Just a couple miles down the road on U.S. Route 1, the heart of the coral reefs of South Florida, or the Florida Reef Tract can be found where it stretches 300 miles south to the Dry Tortugas National Park, making it the third largest barrier in the world. To the west of Miami, we find Everglades National Park, which is a designated World Heritage site with one of the most unique wetland ecosystems in the world. Everglades National Park is also one of the wettest regions in the United States, with many of its waterways finding their final destination in the Biscayne Bay, and ultimately into the Florida Reef Tract ecosystem, showing the interconnectedness of all of these South Florida ecosystems. These tropical coastal seascape ecosystems are characterized by seven connected ecosystems that include coastal strand, mangroves, seagrass beds, coral reefs, hard-bottom habitat, silt-bottom habitat and rocky-bottom habitat. Right in the middle of this mosaic of ecosystems lies the Port of Miami, nicknamed the “Gateway to the Americas” and “Cruise Capital of the World.” In this chapter we explore how major infrastructure projects may degrade delicate and imperiled coastal ecosystems despite strict federal, state and local laws, and how people and interest groups are working to protect these ecosystems.

The Dredging History of the Port of Miami

To meet the demands of the burgeoning market, the Port of Miami has undergone many dredging projects to accommodate larger shipping vessels and cruise ships throughout its history. Beginning in 1990, Congress authorized the deepening of the Port to 42 feet, which was completed in 1993. Since then, every 10 to 15 years, another port expansion dredging project has been implemented.

In Twilight Sleep, the protagonist Nona Manford considers the extent to which “people” interact with, and are transformed by, the cultural “landscapes” they visit or occupy. One of the goals of this book has been to demonstrate that while the pastoral seems to portray troubling fractures between the social self and native soil, Wharton is more struck by how these ostensibly divergent cultural categories superimpose and interpenetrate to form an ecocritical palimpsest. This is a finding that resonates with Greg Garrard's recent claim that the methods, motifs and practices of American “pastoral can be radical.” Like Terry Gifford and Lawrence Buell before him, Garrard recognizes that for ecocriticism, pastoral tropes—yearning for a socially stable rustic elsewhere with its pristine lakes and isolated farmsteads, the poetic motifs of “retreat-and-return,” plus the ethical unease triggered by unregulated industries—are not simply elements of fanciful literary texts but decisively shape the way contemporary readers grasp and interpret their material surroundings. This notion is elaborated by contributions to the essay collection Ecocritical Theory: New European Approaches (2011), which develops Buell's attitude to pastoral by promoting a robust re-orientation of the mode triggered by current environmental anxieties. For Garrard, this makes it all the more crucial to interpret pastoral—and so-called “nature writing” more broadly—not as “a finished model or ideology” but as a literary mode that largely eschews nostalgic posturing in favor of alerting us to the presence of multiple, sometimes conflicting, cultural codes and values. The imagery of apparently carefree and simple rural populations throws into relief the urbane, highly cultured poetic entity that crafts such imagery. Pastoral is therefore, in Garrard's view, an insistent “questioning” regarding the formation of an ethical individual and a good society, “be/longing” and the “root of human being on this earth.” It is this type of “questioning” that lends the extract above from Wharton's Twilight Sleep a peculiar intensity. Indeed, one of the central aims of this book has been to treat pastoral as a kind of palimpsest—a “parchment” upon which successive generations of artist-pilgrims have etched their impressions, constantly revising its imagery, formal procedures and lyrical effects.

These threats described in Chapter 2 have led to the tragic loss of nearly 50 percent of reef-building corals worldwide in the past 30 years, and their status continues to decline (Bruno & Selig, 2007; Côté et al., 2005; De’ath et al., 2012, Eddy et al., 2021; Hoegh-Guldberg et al., 2019). We are currently in a coral reef crisis with one-third of our reefs threatened with extinction (IUCN, 2021). According to the latest Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network report (2021), from 1978 to 1997, the world's stony coral populations remained relatively stable, accounting for approximately 32 percent of reef cover, meaning that when you look at the seafloor when swimming along a reef, you see about one-third of the bottom covered in hard coral species. However, in 1998, a mass coral bleaching event resulted in the loss of 8 percent of that cover, though the reefs were able to rebound back to ∼33 percent by 2009. Since 2009 however, there has been a steady decline in stony coral cover globally and a shift from coral-dominated reefs to algal-dominated ones, with various species of algae supplanting the space on the seafloor where the stony corals used to be (Scouter et al., 2021a). Algae and coral fight for the same habitat as both need similar conditions, especially exposure to sunlight (Swierts & Vermeij, 2016). From 2009 to 2018, we lost 13.5 percent (4,579 square miles) of stony coral cover worldwide—the equivalent of losing all stony corals on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia (Scouter et al., 2021a). In contrast, algae cover on reefs, an indicator of stressed coral reefs, has increased by 20 percent in 2019 when compared to 2010, and the coral-to-algae ratio continues to increase in favor of algae. This is dire for the people who live next to reefs and depend on them for livelihoods. When people board an airplane and fly across the world to go diving, they do so for the coral species that are rapidly disappearing.

Caribbean Region

Coral cover and loss have varied across Earth's regions and time periods. The earliest observations of significant coral loss were documented in the Caribbean (Côté et al., 2005; Cramer et al., 2021). The Caribbean region represents ∼7 percent of the world's reefs (Jackson et al., 2014). Some of the largest barrier reefs in the world are found in the Caribbean Sea.