Browsing by Author "McLees, Leslie"

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    Conserving the Spice of Life: Narratives of Za'atar Regulations in Israel and the West Bank
    (University of Oregon, 2023-05) Reynolds, Kate; McLees, Leslie; Brown, Samantha
    In 1977, the Israeli Ministry of Agriculture declared wild za'atar a protected plant in Israel, strictly regulating its harvesting. The criminalization of za'atar harvesting continues to be enforced in Israel and occupied territories of the West Bank by the Israeli Nature and Parks Association (INPA). The enforcement has disproportionately negatively impacted Palestinians, leading to debates about the policy's motivations and efficacy. The goal of this research is to understand the main themes of this issue through a lens of political ecology. I do this by isolating and analyzing narratives from the Israeli government and INPA, and from Palestinian foragers and scholars regarding the za’atar regulation and its continued enforcement. I perform a thematic analysis of the regulation, letters, articles, webpages, and a film from the two different narrative perspectives. The concept of green colonialism, which refers to the use of environmental conservation and protection to mask or serve colonial ends, is applied to the themes.The INPA emphasizes conservation concerns, while the Palestinian narrative situates the regulation within the context of the greater conflict. Joint Israeli-Palestinian efforts to address conservation in the West Bank are highlighted, and the importance of analyzing environmental conservation regulations to ensure efficacy and consideration of stakeholders is emphasized.
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    Understanding the Urban: The Role of Open Space Agriculture in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
    (University of Oregon, 2012) McLees, Leslie; McLees, Leslie; Cohen, Shaul
    There is a fundamental shift in the way people are living on the planet. Over half of the world's population now lives in cities, yet many of these cities continue to struggle to provide basic services, infrastructure and food security for the billions of people who live in cities. Despite decades of intervention by international and national development agencies, cities in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa are increasingly framed in apocalyptic and dystopian terms, serving as a warning of the dangers of overurbanization while being criticized for their lack of urban development. This contradictory framing poses the question of how a city and the people who live there actually survive. Building on emerging work in critical urban studies, this research examines how narrow definitions of what counts as urban hinder the understanding of cities in different regional contexts and limit our imaginations of how people survive and thrive in the face of the challenges that cities provide. To examine the idea of what is urban in the context of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I use the lens of urban open space farms, large lots of land in the built-up environment of the city used for farming, to explore what makes farming urban, how the practice of farming contributes to and is embedded within urban systems, and how farms and farmers can illuminate the material practices and ephemeral experiences that constitute the reality of people's daily life in cities. I employ a methodology based on interviews, photo voice, mental mapping, and observation over time to explore the dynamics of farms as spaces and farmers as agents in constructing these spaces over time. The purpose is to contribute to a definition of the urban that moves past associations with capitalism and industrialization as the defining processes of the city towards one more inclusive of the way people experience these spaces, how they remake them to fit the city, and what this means for interventions that focus on the marginalization of people and the ways that cities fail, rather than how they actually work.