Overfall / 'Common Heritage': The Limits of Public Trust and the Commons In the Great Lakes

This is an interdisciplinary, split dissertation, between a poetry collection and an essay on environmental humanities. The poetry engages in ecopoetic themes while working in the tradition of the Romantic lyric. The essay interrogates the public trust doctrine and the commons as approaches to water governance and engagement in the Great Lakes. It argues that, contrary to popular discourse that connects the two, public trust and the commons should be considered as separate institutions, evoking different relationships to water.