The profile expansion in Fig. 1 shows that inventory can be transported in different segments using different crafts which changes the value of Leq. This is supported by non-ESM logistics methods.This dissertation examines the production of the Bahama islands as a site for interrelated forms of field research, field education, and environmentally oriented tourist visitation. Recent developments in international climate science and politics have cast small islands as particularly vulnerable and susceptible to the threat of global warming and its planetary effects while the global economic crisis is blamed for the downturn in tourist arrival numbers to The Bahamas and for the ever-increasing cost of living in the archipelagic nation. As a result, redesigning the country’s tourism product to compete in new travel markets has come to coincide with reconfiguring the country’s energy, agricultural, and fishing industries under the sign of island sustainability. The very idea of what it means to be a nation of islands is in question, and the conditions of possibility therein are undergoing dramatic change. The dissertation has three constitutive themes. First, it shows that recent events in The Bahamas bring into relief the continual reformulation of the experimental space of the Caribbean as field laboratory and site for knowledge production about human social evolution and economic reorganization. My attention to the emergent ecological milieu of islands in crisis highlights this history and the modes of inclusion and exclusion for bringing particular people and ideas of the social into more recent science-based problems. Second, focusing on the increased call for interdisciplinary,grow table hydroponic integrated environmental research in The Bahamas involving social science, I argue for revisiting the concept of biopolitics.

This concept, historically rooted in 19th Century developments concerning the knowledge produced about and the governance of human bodies and populations, loses analytic purchase in an arena where the prefix, “bio,” can be interpreted as signifying a scientific rearticulation of the problem and object of biological research in which the life processes of the human and the non-human become holistically co-constituted in particular ways. Finally, this dissertation engages with recent political ecology and scholarship on cultures of nature in order to describe contemporary ecological and conservation science as a nature making practice with political ramifications in The Bahamas, and to bring further attention to a concern for the scientific productions of nature and value within those fields.The Bahamas have always been many things at once. Geographically, the Bahama Islands are an archipelago of over 700 islands and 2,500 cays and rocks, stretching for 650 miles just East of Florida and just North of Cuba in the Caribbean region of the Atlantic Ocean, but with a land area that is only the size of Connecticut. Politically, The Commonwealth of The Bahamas has been a sovereign nation since 1973, comprised of a Constitutional Parliamentary government with a population of approximately 300,000, spread over 30 islands, with the vast majority living on the island of New Providence in the capitol city of Nassau and in the city of Free port on the island of Grand Bahama- the other 28 islands with permanent settlements are referred to as the Family Islands or the Out Islands. Socially, The Bahamas is a majority black country, with a minority white population and a much smaller population of those of Asian and Hispanic descent. Most Bahamians identify as Christian, and the majority of Bahamians practice some denomination of Protestantism; The Bahamas government defines the country as a Christian Nation. The official language is English and 95% of the population is literate. Geologically, The Bahamas are composed of calcium carbonate platforms accreted from the seawater due to the continuous activity of coral reef organisms over millennia, and are therefore almost entirely flat and mostly devoid of surface fresh water with the highest point only 200 feet above sea level- Mt.

Alvernia on Cat Island. Economically, The Bahamas is one of the wealthiest Caribbean nations, relying on its Tourism Sector for the majority of its GDP and for the employment of over half of the labor force.Over 80% of all tourist arrivals are Americans, and the annual tourist arrival numbers in the millions far exceed the resident population. Financial services account for the second largest sector of the economy , another service-based industry, and The Bahamas has over 300 offshore banks, making it one of the Caribbean’s largest Offshore Financial Centers . Climatologically, the average high and low temperatures over the past 30 years range from 77 degrees to 71 degrees, with average high peaks reaching the upper 80’s in the summer, and the hurricane season has typically spanned from June through November. Ecologically, The Bahamas is said to have the clearest waters in the world, with visibility of over 200 feet due in part to the presence of the third longest coral reef system on Earth which contains 5% of the planet’s corals. 109 species of birds breed in the island, and 120 species of plants are endemic to the island chain. The Bahamas is home to the oldest marine park in the world, the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park, which was created in the 1950’s, and to a large underwater cave system protected as the Lucayan National Park on Grand Bahama. These are the basic categories of information which commonly delineate the multiple and coexistent contours of a nation-state as a particular sort of place for some people today, such as those who compile information about states- the American Central Intelligence Agency for example- and those who use that information to compare states. Through categories like these, nation-states and their citizens are asked to recognize themselves and to compare themselves and their state to other states and other citizens. I have begun with these categorizations in order to evoke this form of recognition and comparison, to allow for and even to elicit this familiar process of orientation, location, and contextualization. But this dissertation both is and is not about The Bahamas in the sense that it does not attempt to pin down or describe a “true” definition of The Bahamas today.The Bahamas and Bahamians might simultaneously coalesce as ideas and as modes of subjectivation. This dissertation is based on 15 months of doctoral research in The Bahamas, from 2007 to 2009, and on three prior shorter visits to the country in 2002, 2005, and 2006.

My interviews, experiences, and participant observations informed the substance of this work, which consists of six chapters that variously and partially describe the multi-form practice and development of contemporary environmental research in The Bahamas and the continual generation of an environmental, ecological,grow table or planetary understanding of that place. Therefore, my attention to various forms of active experimentation in The Bahamas is an attention to the ongoing creation of a living laboratory– a site for the contemporary production and molding of knowledge about and categories of life, living, lifestyle, and livelihood, particularly newly emerging relations between the environment, biology, capital, and social life. As a country caught at the fringes of the 1st and 3rd worlds, economically, as a former British colony, as a designated Small Island Developing State with UN recognized vulnerabilities and needs, and as a questionably Caribbean nation, The Bahamas exists in a state of perpetual self-assessment colored by the understanding that its postcolonial status necessitates an almost unattainable self-sufficiency. In order to attempt to analyze this nexus that is The Bahamas today, the nexus that is the subject of this dissertation, I have had to draw upon a union of concepts and scholarly texts from the loose fields of Caribbean Studies and Caribbean Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies and the Anthropology of Science, Environmental Anthropology, and more. This introduction is an attempt to lay out this framework and the chapters that follow provide concrete instantiations of the ideas below. The argument mobilizing this dissertation is that throughout their history, the Bahama Islands have been partially created and conceived through diverse practices of arrival, departure, and visitation. Over the 20th Century, especially after independence, The Bahamas became almost entirely economically dependent on its service industry, mainly tourism, and today, tourism is an integral part of the legal economy that allows The Bahamas to exist as a sovereign nation. 4 Dependence on tourism has come to mean that the country must continually redesign itself as a unique destination in an increasingly global market for travel. This dependence and drive to redesign has lead the tourism industry, broadly defined, to collaborate and integrate in inventive ways with scientific researchers, consultants, and scientific disciplines involved in producing new knowledge about the archipelago, its biological and geological features, and its vulnerability to change and exploitation. Together, the natural sciences and the tourism industry are producing tenuous yet powerful frames in which to envision the re-conceptualization and redesign of the islands and the livelihoods they sustain, as well as frames through which visitors and Bahamians alike might imagine themselves existing there. This dissertation is an attempt to momentarily pin down and define some of these frames at work today, and the problem space in which this enframing happens in The Bahamas is what I am calling the living laboratory.

In order to examine this problem space, I take up thought itself as a contingent practice and an object of anthropological study, and this is why I tend to focus on the expression of certain ideas as much or if not more so than on specific events and actions. 5 This dissertation and my concepts of islands by design and the living laboratory have been built around three loose themes which animate the islands in various conjoined ways and which run through each of the chapters: Visitation/Arrival, Vulnerability, and Biocomplexity. The theme of visitation points to the constant play of arrivals to the islands and the ideas, economies, schemes, hopes, and needs arrivals bring with them, as well as to the opportunities and threats that arrivals pose. This leads to the next theme of vulnerability, a popular small island topic today, and to the ways in which vulnerability must be demonstrated in order to be addressed. Vulnerability in some small islands in the world is addressed in a wholly different fashion than in others, and in the living laboratory, present day small island vulnerability is sometimes construed as another potential resource; the threat is also produced as an opportunity for visitation. Finally, biocomplexity points to the ways in which life, the “bio” of terms like biology and biodiversity, is expanding in the natural field sciences to internalize the social and cultural aspects of the field into science-based designs for ecological management and entrepreneurial innovation involving island imaginaries and visitation. In a biocomplex frame,distinctions between the human and the non human are remediated and repositioned within a laboratory milieu defined by interdisciplinary collaboration. I see the work compiled here as contributing to three main fields of scholarship: Caribbean Studies, Science Studies, and Environmental Anthropology. I hope that this work opens up new doors for Caribbean scholarship in terms of building on postcolonial literatures by examining the ways in which the life sciences participate in the construction and production of what it means to be Caribbean in an era of island vulnerability. In terms of Science Studies, I hope to add to work on the bio-sciences and biotechnology and ongoing problematizations of life itself- to scholarship about what scientific productions about the facts of life mean for the way life is lived and the ways certain facts become valuable in moral and market economies. For Environmental Anthropology, I hope to contribute to work focusing on the politics and pragmatics of conservation and environmental management and to continue to open that field to a consideration of the way in which the life sciences in part determine what the environment is as well as what it is that needs conserving and managing. I owe a debt to scholars like Ian Whit marsh and Bill Maurer who have identified the Caribbean as an anthropological region that is in part defined by scientific biogenetic understandings of island belonging and isolation,and to scholars like Celia Lowe, Hugh Raffles, Cori Hayden, Stefan Helmreich, and Charis Thompson who already combine an attention to bioscience and environmental and natural politics in many aspects of their research.