In common with most of its neighbors, the foreign policy of Peru after independence in 1821 focused on core interests that can be summarized as political sovereignty, territorial integrity, continental solidarity, and economic independence. Over the next 200 years, Peruvian foreign policy expanded in scope and direction; nevertheless, these four tenets continued to encapsulate the nation's external policy. Consequently, the permanent interests of Peru remain a logical place to begin an assessment of Peruvian foreign policy in the modern era.

Political Sovereignty

In the early years of independence, Peru struggled to decide whether it would divide, federate with Bolivia, or stand alone. Like most newly independent states, Peru achieved statehood long before it achieved nationhood, and it sometimes struggled to retain the former as it strived to develop the latter. From the outset, the Peruvian Diplomat Service played a decisive role in the legal defense of the national inheritance often in vast, encyclopedic defenses of Peruvian territorial claims. Over time, Peru faced nine wars (two with Chile, two with Colombia, two with Ecuador, and three with Bolivia). After each one, Peruvian diplomats negotiated a peace mostly on terms favorable to Peru. Having achieved political sovereignty in the nineteenth century, there was little serious challenge to it, apart from a few territorial issues, in the twentieth century.

The issue of political sovereignty surfaced again during the Castillo administration. In late 2021, former Bolivian president Evo Morales announced his intention to hold a meeting in Cuzco of RUNASUR, an organization that entertained vague plans of constructing a plurinational nation from Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. In response to efforts to organize the Cuzco gathering, the Foreign Relations Committee of the Peruvian congress condemned what it termed the political activism of Morales and called for President Castillo to declare Morales persona non grata. A few days later, three former foreign ministers and eight former vice foreign ministers issued a joint statement denouncing the proposed RUNASUR forum as a clear threat to the national sovereignty, independence, and security of Peru. The Cuzco forum was later postponed; nevertheless, the declared objectives of RUNASUR remained a latent threat to the political sovereignty of Peru. The RUNASUR issue surfaced again during the demonstrations that swept Peru in 2022–23.

It is a critical commonplace to suggest that the Gothic is ‘a means of anti-Catholic expression’ (Purves 2009, 3), which, if it has a theology at all, has a single dominant ‘predominantly if not exclusively’ Protestant one (Sage 1988, xxi–xxii). This idea of a monolithic Protestant identity, self-defined in contrast to a feudal and barbaric Catholicism as monstrous Other, leads to the Gothic being read as denominational propaganda with anti-Catholicism as a key ‘Gothic ideology’ (Hoeveler 2014a, 5). However, the Gothic is far from uniformly and universally anti-Catholic. Maria Purves argues for a positive vision of Catholicism and a pro-Catholic impetus in a number of Gothic works and Alison Milbank builds on this by suggesting that the Gothic performs a double movement of ‘critique and appropriation’ (2018, 5) that mirrors the extra-fictional relation of the Anglican to the Catholic Church. These readings add complexity to a binary opposition between Protestant (Anglican) and Catholic and the assumption of a monolithic anti-Catholicism. They also offer insightful readings of a number of key Gothic texts. However, moving beyond the reproduction of a monolithic Protestantism/Anglicanism, arrayed against (or in relation with) a Catholic other allows us to more fully understand the complexity of the Gothic's depiction of the Catholic.

Understanding the Gothic as Anglican retains an implicit emphasis on the Gothic as anti-Catholic by rewriting the Protestant/Catholic binary of anti-Catholic accounts onto a distinction between Anglican and Catholic. The Gothic becomes a form of complex apologetics that justifies the Anglican Church's retention of Catholic elements and emphasises a shared history (and an apostolic succession) at the same time as reinforcing the rejection of Catholicism as an institution and of those Catholic doctrines not supported by the Anglican Church. In reality, however, the period was one of theological diversity within the Anglican Church and among Dissenting groups, involving fierce debates surrounding religious toleration which extended beyond Catholic/Anglican and broader Catholic/Protestant relations. Any focus on the Gothic as representing a single ideological focus risks eliding its engagement with wider questions of theo-politics, theology and institutional critique.

In A Backward Glance Wharton, weighing her own reactions to the stifling atmosphere of New York City, asks: “How could I understand that people who had seen Rome and Seville, Paris and London, could come back to live contentedly between Washington Square and the Central Park?” Central Park, the green lung of New York City was designed in 1858 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Clavert Vaux. “The two envisioned” the 800 acres of uninterrupted rurality “as a pastoral retreat from the pressures and aesthetic monotony of a growing city, and historians and landscape architects have seen it reflected in their eyes, as a work of landscape art.” Central Park reveals a juxtaposition and tension between nature and the urban, pointing to a “threshold motif” in pastoral cosmopolitanism. “I pause on its threshold”—as Wharton mused in A Backward Glance, regarding her father's library to which she was perpetually drawn. We too, as readers, are invited to pause on New York City's green verge to assess how it resonates in her fiction. Rather than a permanent, immovable divider or partition, the park acts as a lush permeable membrane within the urban sprawl of imposing townhouses. What social contacts take place through it and despite it?

This chapter addresses how Central Park, which covers about six percent of Manhattan, becomes a vital site of environmental enquiry for Wharton. Pointed references to, and reflections upon, this serene area of woods, sweeping meadows and ponds are sprinkled throughout her novels, published journalism, novellas and short stories alike. In The Age of Innocence, set in the 1870s, the matriarch Mrs. Manson Mingott builds a house “in an inaccessible wilderness near the Central Park.” There is impish wit in Wharton's lexis. This brand of “wilderness” pokes fun at that specific mode of American exceptionalism that separates a “New World” synonymous with cultural-nationalist vigor and pride from the “Old” and tired green spaces of Western Europe. The phrasing also acknowledges, and pays tribute to, the artificiality of Central Park, an audacious facsimile of untrammeled nature bounded by busy streets—an ingenious man-made enclave of pristine lakes that pretends to be a zone largely uncorrupted by man.

In 2019 I was working for a small non-profit on the northern coast of Haiti, near the port city of Cap-Haïtien. Historically, Cap-Haïtien was nicknamed The Paris of the Antilles for its great wealth and beauty as a former French Colony (see figure 1.1) (Liss & Knight, 1991). Today, Cap-Haïtien remains quite beautiful, retaining much of its colonial-era architecture, which is now steeped in vibrant Haitian culture and nestled between lush mountains and a sprawling turquoise bay. My work there involved coral reef restoration, or replanting coral to help bring the reef back to its former glory, and thus the brilliant blue waters are where I spent most of my time. Despite Haiti's rugged beauty, environmental degradation is abundant, and its coral reefs are heavily impacted. Much of the loss of coral reefs is due to there being a lack of ways to manage waste, pollution, overfishing, coastal development and a lack of cohesive environmental governance, which we define as political management combining government, non-profits, public participation and private-sector interests (Creary et al., 2008). Governance and government are not the same things, and this distinction is necessary for our book's central arguments to unfold. Government intervention includes actions like a fish and wildlife agency instituting catch-limit regulations on a fishery, whereas governance includes the activities of other actors such as communities, businesses and non-governmental organizations or NGOs (Lemos & Agrawal, 2006).

On an otherwise tranquil morning dive, I began to witness these impacts firsthand. A large shadow passed slowly over me, which turned out to not be a floating patch of Sargassum, a genus of seaweed commonly found in the Caribbean. Instead, it was an enormous floating mass of single-use plastics, such as the small yellow plastic vinegar bottles typical of Haiti (see figure 1.2). This marine debris had washed down from the mountains during a storm the night before, and was symbolic of the immense challenges facing Haitian coral reefs. Beachgoers as far as Corpus Christi, Texas, in the United States commonly find these same yellow vinegar bottles washed up on Gulf of Mexico beaches nearly 3,000 kilometers away, with missing diamond shapes, from bites taken from the bottles by sea turtles. The interconnectedness between coastal communities can often be traced in such a way.

For Karel Doing's Meni (1992–94)

There is an exacerbated form of scenography, of intense questioning of time and space through the body: dance. In choreography, bodies make the spatial relations amongst phenomena explicit and their trajectories intensify them. Dominique Païni has referred to the “choreographic fatality of cinematic invention”—in extreme cases, with dance, a character is its place and the body is the only place. How can two kinds of movement be confronted— that of movies and that of dance? What kinds of figures do these encounters produce? To what degree does dance shed light on cinema?

Several statements and preliminary observations are required. First, reflections on cinema have taken very little account of the extraordinary culture of movement dance has developed. One could even say these reflections have ignored dance to the point of exercising a kind of permanent hold-up on the question of movement—as witnessed, for example, by the title of the wonderful catalogue published by the Musée National d’Art Moderne’s film department: L’art du movement (The Art of Movement). Suggestive and appropriate as this title may be, it also seems singularly imperialist: “the art of movement” is also, first and foremost, a definition of dance itself. On the contrary, it is necessary to bring a bit of choreographic culture back into cinema, to consider how dance flourishes and blossoms in films, how it informs and even structures cinema—especially if the cinema does not want to know about it.

We will much more easily discern dance's deep inf luence on cinema if we avoid their typical disciplinary crossovers, that is, dance's three standardized uses in movies: filmed dance performances, musical comedy and ethnological recordings. It is therefore necessary to describe a field that has not yet been established: non-scientific instances of dance on film. Balls, surprise parties, celebrations, games and excitement expressed in dance: all opportunities to show non-skilled dancing when it is not yet an art, but still an exercise, not a repertoire but a bodily practice— while, symmetrically, cinema does not serve and is not ruled by dance the way musical comedies and ethnographic films tend to be.

Introduction

In this chapter I offer a scene-by-scene analysis of one of Hitchcock's most important films, his 1927 silent classic, The Lodger. This type of analysis is different from the approaches pursued in the other chapters in this book, but I have in mind the same ambition despite the shift in method. I want to illustrate several of the broader issues at work in Hitchcock's films as these are revealed not by placing the work under a specific philosophic or ideological lens, but by adhering strictly to the task of describing the film's various tableaux in sufficient detail as makes apparent the underlying principles on which the narrative is based. In other words, I construct my argument as a sequence of scenic analyses. However, rather than train my eye on a single scene, or mise en scène, I consider the film as Hitchcock might have described it: the arrangement of individual elements in the style of cinematic montage. The relative brevity of the film makes this a more feasible approach than is possible with one of his later, and thereby more complex, films. Moreover, the fact that the film is silent eliminates the need to consider the relevance of sound as a contributory element in the design of the production.

Yet I would be guilty of misdirecting my reader should I be understood as saying that these are the only reasons why I have selected The Lodger for this form of analysis. There is a further reason for choosing this film over the later, more mature works, and that is the fact that the argument can readily be made that The Lodger is the first of his films to define for Hitchcock the cin¬ematic aesthetic that would come to signify his style, his narrative interests, his directorial preoccupations – in short, his artistic vision.

This proposition is not an original proclamation. In 1966, Hitchcock himself commented that The Lodger “was the first time I exercised my style […] you might almost say it was my first picture.” In offering this description, Hitchcock was hinting at the idea that with this early, black and white, silent picture he had come to understand his role as a filmmaker; that is, he could look back to 1927 and see, in nascent form, the formal properties of all his later works.

In a discussion of the hermeneutical problem of symbolism, Paul Ricoeur draws attention to the double-sided nature of discourse. Multivocality or polysemy, Ricoeur points out, is a constitutive feature of all human communication. Meaning is a plurality, a kind of semiotic surplus. “When I speak,” Ricoeur says, “I realize only a part of the potential signified.” This condition, as Derrida famously argued, is the “indefinite referral of signifier to signifier […] which gives the signified meaning no respite.” Meanings are excessive, spilling beyond the perimeters delimited by dictionary definitions. The problem of symbolism, according to Ricoeur, is how communicants make sense out of signs which are duplicitous by their very nature, for if “only a part of the potential signified” is realized in a communicational event, then what passes the outskirts of our understanding undetected is an infinity of interpretative

possibilities. When we communicate, it is by virtue of our capacity to limit ourselves to partial conceptions of the world that any comprehension can occur.

Yet despite this semantic partialness, our communications are intelligible, a consequence of the astonishing collaboration between symbols, reference, and contexts. But the fact that our semantic intentions are accomplished at all indicates that we manage to arrive at mutual understanding in the face of persistent alternative interpretations. Our concentration on a single intended meaning does not neutralize other potential interpretations, Ricoeur states, but is facilitated by the individualizing focus of specific units of speech, such as sentences. Indeed, Ricoeur maintains that

Introduction

One of the lessons my students have taught me over the course of many Hitchcock seminars is that The Birds (1961) can be a difficult film to interpret. There are several reasons for this opinion, of course, some focused on the surrealistic atmosphere Hitchcock achieves in the film, others concentrated on the way the narrative casually brings the quotidian world into contact with the fantastic. Naturally, my students recognize these issues and regularly bring them forward for discussion, but this is rarely their main concern. Indeed, their principal complaint regarding The Birds is that the film fails to conclude with the traditional offer of a unifying resolution.

This argument is not easily refuted, for there is no disputing that the film concludes on a bleak note, just as there is no disputing that the nature of the narrative's problematic all but guarantees no easy escape from the birds – figuratively, of course, and perhaps in a more literal sense as well. But then, Hitchcock's tendency was often to leave his viewers suspended between apprehension and frustration, at times preferring uneasiness to contentment as a concluding sentiment. The Birds follows this pattern closely, leaving its audience suspended over an abyss of terrifying uncertainty, with Hitchcock refusing the call for the satisfaction of release. Owing to the discomfort produced by being held in a state of suspension, it is hardly surprising that this feeling of deferment is experienced by many as a disappointment.

My students’ protest rarely includes displeasure that the film closes unhappily because the expected romantic liaison has potentially been frustrated, or because a beloved character has been sacrificed to the mayhem. Instead, they object to the fact that The Birds doesn't actually end – at least not in the conventional sense. And it is on this point that they frequently raise an interesting argument that focuses not on the conventions of the Hollywood film, but on the empirical problem of causation.

In this chapter, we address one of the most famous manifestations of the supernatural in the Gothic: the ghostly. First, to define terms; ‘ghostly’ refers broadly to supernatural manifestations of spiritual entities. I will throughout differentiate between ghosts (the spirits of the deceased) and apparitions (supernatural manifestations appearing human more broadly). The emphasis in Gothic dream accounts on the interpretation of an accepted ‘event’ cannot be directly transferred to a consideration of the ghostly. Outside the fictional world, the ubiquity and continued mystery of dreams left them firmly within the remit of theological interpretation. ‘Ghost’-sightings, on the contrary, were usually experienced at second hand. The ‘evidence’ for the ghostly was almost always ‘less than the evidence of our senses’ (Hume 1795, 17), and encountered, and challenged, as testimony. Ghost testimony was particularly suspicious as it was often related to private (rather than public) experience and associated with heightened, unpredictable emotions capable of distorting perception. It was moreover frequently declaimed a priori the result of ignorance and either enthusiasm or superstition. The enduring association of ghost stories, articulated in John Locke's ‘Of Education’ (1698), with the ‘indiscretion of servants’ and nursemaids’ tales (1727, 81) connected ghost ‘testimony’ with the lower classes, women and youth rather than the ‘ideal’ educated rational adult male subject. For Hume and other sceptics, moreover, ghost tales were a form of testimony in which ‘the incredibility of a fact…might invalidate’ the testimony (Hume 1795, 23). In both contemporary ghost discourse and Gothic fiction, then, the focus is not only on the interpretation of ghost-sightings but on their very possibility.

Before investigating the particularities of ‘ghost’ discourse in the period, it is worth noting that while I am writing separately on the ‘dream’ and the ‘ghost’, the contemporary distinction was not so clear cut. As a reflexive reaction, the idea of a ghostly encounter being ‘just a dream’ certainly appears in contemporary accounts. For example, in the anonymous Life after Death (1758), in the account of George Villiers' ghost, the ghost-seer ‘believed all this to be a Dream, and considered it no otherwise’ (1758, 45).

Bellomont

In “The Background,” the opening chapter of A Backward Glance, Wharton ties her ecological awakening to a specific moment in her childhood: “I cannot remember when the grasses first spoke to me, though I think it was when, a few years later, one of my uncles took me with some little cousins, to spend a long spring day in some marshy woods near Mamaroneck.” It is especially notable that she connects this awakening to the Hudson Valley, an area that features prominently in some of her novels. As an adult writing about an event that took place many decades before, Wharton includes vivid tangible detail regarding blossoms and sward. Westchester county was “where the earth was starred with pink trailing arbutus, where pouch-like white and rosy flowers grew in a swamp, and leafless branches against the sky were netted with buds of mother-of pearl.”

I propose here that Wharton's literary narratives restage and reassess this ecological awakening or moment of being through “garden plots.” She indicates how her creative faculty flows from a heightened consciousness of this natural terrain:

Wharton's conception of a “coiled” imagination—implying a living organism—invites comparison with Katherine Mansfield's “love” for a type of artistic “mind” that “must have wild places, a tangled orchard where dark damsons drop in the grass, an overgrown little wood, the chance of a snake or two” and “paths threaded with flowers planted by the mind”. For Wharton, as for Mansfield, gardens comprise “such a subtle combination of the artificial and the natural—that is, partly, the secret of their charm.” Wharton's garden imagery shows how she tunes her own aesthetic gifts to the frequency of “things” that make visible the point where domesticated (human) nature and the wild (psychic) hinterlands contend, negotiate and converge. Wharton crafts her own version of “negative capability” here—an acute responsiveness to “dream,” fancies, native auras and subliminal potencies that emanate from local soil.

Methods

Data included meeting minutes (i.e., transcripts recorded during advisory council/committee meetings), news documents (including newspaper articles, press releases, newspaper blogs and news transcripts), and remote interviews with representatives and participating stakeholders from the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative and the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Using the appearance of mass coral bleaching events along the Florida Reef Tract as a temporal threshold, denoting a shift from historical to contemporary ecosystem functionality and management needs, I compiled a total of 1,122 individual data points (n = 1,122) from both organizations, FKNMS (n = 541) and SEFCRI (n = 581), throughout the summer of 2021.

News document data were collected from the Nexis Uni database, which initially revealed over 10,000 results when searching “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” or “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative.” However, many of these results were irrelevant within the scope of this study; therefore, modifiers were added to narrow the search results. First, for the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, 179 documents were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary” AND “management.” These results were then filtered using the category “Newspapers” and the date range “1996 - present.” The reason I focused on newspaper articles was to make the amount of FKNMS news data more manageable. Additionally, 1996 was selected as a starting point because the first mass bleaching event to occur in Florida after the creation of the FKNMS was in 1997. Of the 179 results, 79 were deemed relevant to this study, and 100 were excluded. The results were manually sorted to determine their relevance to this research. Any articles that were outside the scope of this study were therefore excluded. For example, one article focused on new funding for habitat restoration in the Everglades National Park and mentioned both the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and “management” in that context. However, this had no direct relevance to the management of the Florida Reef Tract (Wadlow, 2010).

Second, for the Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative, 99 results were isolated using the “News” filter and the Boolean search “Southeast Florida Coral Reef Initiative” OR “SEFCRI” OR “Ecosystem Conservation Area.” Because SEFCRI is a newer organization (established in 2003), there was no need to limit the date range.

“Danger of Death.” A sign suddenly opens up from the crotch of the hermaphrodite whose separated limbs appear one by one to the accompaniment of a drum roll against the black canvas of the Hotel of Dramatic Folies. In Le sang d’un poète (Blood of a Poet, 1930), Jean Cocteau invents graphic creatures that cannot be defined based on criteria of fullness or conservation but instead, criteria of dispersion, heteromorphism and redundancy contrary to any classical economy: He returns figures to their concrete state of corporeal sketches. Still, Cocteau does not renounce anything: In cinema, “[t]he two-dimensionality of film produces the illusion of the physical world without any need for supplementation,” in cinema, the slightest trace of a silhouette creates hope for a body full of its powers and faculties.

Horror, sci-fi and fantasy films use formal dynamics that deform or blur appearances; in some films, figurative syntax itself becomes the subject to the point of sometimes hindering effects of “corporal supplementation” and freeing up possibilities that allow the human silhouette to refer to other figurative forms. The ability of a figural movement to avoid crystallizing in order to continue on its own and proclaim itself an autonomous force is described in Cat People ( Jacques Tourneur, 1942) with a rigor that Charles Tesson has described. Tourneur's film is not only concerned with invisibility and irrepresentability, but also with the principles of cinematic figuration: How does a constellation of visual and sonic signs dispersed across the discontinuity of time and space form a figure? By sketching its incarnation, Cat People deals with the question in its formal purity.

“Pictures—Get Rid of Them”: Cat People, the Latticework

The swimming pool sequence quickly appears like a metaphor for cinema’s power of fascination: a play of shadows and sounds, silhouettes and light. But it is the strangest and most suspect being, Irena (Simone Simon), who turns the light back on so that all of reality finds itself infected by monstrosity: Anxiety leaves behind the plastic register to address the proliferation of motifs, their capacity to multiply, reproduce, contaminate each other. In the absence of an origin that draws together the traces that pretend to point it out, the sign acquires its full importance.

In a letter to Bernard Berenson's secretary Nicky Mariano on May 31, 1932, Wharton described the Sibylline mountains thus: “The run today was indescribably beautiful, with changing skies & such endless plays of mountain forms—.” Her response to the shape-shifting plasticity of this terrain is suggestive of the ways in which summits and peaks function in Wharton's fiction more broadly. Her writing project evinces an abiding and acute fascination with the metaphorical, aesthetic, and cultural aspects of mountains. Her eye-catching stress on “plays” here implies that these landforms become, in her oeuvre, much more than a source of creative inspiration. They operate as a “stage” for heroic striving or galling tragedy; a site of arduous, even transformative physical and emotional struggle; or a lyrical “performance” in which heightened states of feeling are converted into the sensuous particularities of narrative language. In the previous part of this book, Lily Bart saw the Maritime Alps from her window, as if it were a boundary, an unconscious demarcation of space. This second part considers not only the Alpine milieu but other specific examples of mountainous nature on both sides of the Atlantic that feature in Wharton's fiction. Given the dense mesh of cultural, biographical and philosophical concerns that emerge through the conjunction of Wharton and mountains, the challenge facing the researcher is the imposition of some cogent structure on a topic that rings with so many resonances. It is vital to remember that, as Linda Costanzo Cahir proposes: “Wharton was born amid the dark and bright energies of American romanticism.” I will show that Wharton's subtle evocation of the varied phenomena found among the snowy peaks and precipices often confronts—and rethinks—two legacies of what we might call “Romantic” mountain affect: the attribution of moral qualities to wild nature and awe of “sublime” vastness.

Astrid Bracke argues that “ecocriticism has long broadened beyond its original concern with wilderness and non-fiction writing to incorporate a wider variety of environments and texts.” The second part of this book construes key Wharton texts through this ecocritical lens, arguing that mountains and hills can be interpreted as “edgelands at an altitude.” According to Marion Shoard, “edgelands” exist between “town and country” where “there has developed a new type of landscape different from either and endowed with distinctive characteristics of its own.

In her 1934 autobiography A Backward Glance, Edith Wharton refers to her own literary production as her “secret garden”: “Therefore I shall try to depict the growth and unfolding of the plants in my secret garden, from the seed to the shrub-top—for I have no intention of magnifying my vegetation into trees!” It is a striking choice of metaphor, but not a surprising one: Wharton was passionate about the arts of writing and gardening. Parkland, subsistence plots and ornamental gardens feature conspicuously in her life and work. Indeed, Renée Somers contends that Wharton dedicated so much of her time to studying “the complex relationships that exist between people and their built environments,” as well as shifting conceptions of the garden's cultural meaning, scope and worth, that we should view her as a “spatial activist.” Somers rightly prioritizes Wharton as an author for whom the garden or park was an “imagined” as well as a “material” zone; and to get a better purchase on that imagined zone she became fluent in, and savvy about, the socio-economic discourses in which that imagining was expressed. Somers has proven useful in reminding scholars to look at Wharton's fictional gardens not only in terms of her deep knowledge of environmental history, or her appreciation of certain large-scale landscape designers. We should also consider how her characters, especially female protagonists, use these areas—to anchor themselves socially (in a world of money, marriage and fashion), emotionally, morally, even spiritually.

Wharton embraced the chance to develop ambitious estate designs for her myriad properties: The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts; the Pavilion Colombe and Castel Sainte-Claire in France. Her library contained work by the Michigan-born Liberty Hyde Bailey, one of the most industrious and eloquent horticulturalists, rural journalists and botanists in the early years of the twentieth century. Hyde Bailey's avowed ambition was to help America arrive on the world stage as a self-assured and robust civilization. This would be attained, he averred, by pushing gardening into the realm of a national art form: constructing “great pictures out-of-doors.” Wharton, like Hyde Bailey and Sarah Orne Jewett, saw intriguing links and contrasts between horticultural labor and cultivating unexpected configurations of narrative pathways.

In the face of rapid global environmental change, there has been an interdisciplinary movement among scientists to reconsider how ecosystems are managed. Governing in the Anthropocene, or the age in which human activity has become the dominant influence on the Earth's climate and environment, comes with novel considerations. As the human population continues to grow, interactions between people and the environment are becoming more common and more complicated. These interactions are often described as socio-ecological systems, or the relationships between linked human and natural systems (Folke, 2006; Folke et al., 2005; Ostrom, 2009; Walker et al., 2004).

Due to the fact that coastal communities rely on coral reef ecosystems, the relationships between them are important to consider as a single socio-ecological system (Cinner et al., 2012; Cinner et al., 2016; Kittinger et al., 2016). This means that impacts to the reef, through human action or natural change, can come back to impact human systems like economies and cultures. For example, fishermen access a reef for different species, such as conch, lobster, snapper and grouper. These different anglers might overlap in their target areas, limiting the ability of other reef users, such as divers, to view these species. People looking to develop stretches of the coastline for condos may clear coastal dunes, resulting in cloudier water that inhibits both angler and diver activity. A member of the public that may never even see a reef firsthand might place a high value on a healthy reef merely existing so that they can be passed down to their children. Decision-makers are tasked with understanding these overlapping uses, and designing management systems to balance uses while maintaining essential features of the reef ecosystem.

Dr. Elinor Ostrom, a pioneer of the socio-ecological system concept, likens the complexity of a resource system to the complexity of a biological organism, where many subsystems interact to produce feedback loops which compose a greater whole (Ostrom, 2009). While the idea of a socio-ecological system was initially developed to help explain the interconnected nature of people and their environment, it has since become a staple within the field of natural resources management being applied to topics as diverse as cattle ranching, forestry and coral reef conservation (Berkes et al., 2000; Fischer, 2018; Herrero-Jáuregui et al., 2018; Pendleton et al., 2016; Walker et al., 2004).