Abstracts

Monday, February 26

8:30 – 10:30 Session 4

4A. Forum on Interdisciplinary Environmental Teaching and Learning

Fir Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Frieda Knobloch, University of Wyoming

While many people within and outside the academy call for interdisciplinary approaches to environmental issues, the classroom is among the last places one may expect to actually find them. Teachers at all levels have important work to do in effectively educating students about the relationships between society and the environment. Teaching is an important component of taking nature seriously, especially in moving beyond the culturally constructed barriers of disciplines environmental educators themselves have inherited. Our forum will discuss goals and effective methods for environmental education. We will open the forum with a brief presentation about the college sophomore-level course we designed in 1999 and taught in Spring 2000: "Environment and Society." We designed assignments for which different kinds of information-from ecology and economics, to policy, personal experience and cultural history and difference-were interwoven components of students' research and understanding. In our attempt to create a truly interdisciplinary learning experience, we inadvertently created an unusual (and unusually productive) learning environment. We are eager to share and discuss experiences in environmental teaching and learning with other interested people.

Panelists: Gregg Cawley, Political Science, Steve Gloss, Zoology, Rob Godby, Economics and Finance, and Frieda Knobloch, American Studies, University of Wyoming

4B. Community Instincts: Public Participation and Public Process

Gerlinger Lounge, Gerlinger Hall

Chair: Chair: Viviane Simon-Brown, Oregon State University

Expert-Led Participation: Scientific Authority and the (Changing) Meanings of the Public’s Role in Environmental Responsibility

Gwen Ottinger & Reuben Deumling, Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley

In our political culture, expertise and participation are often posited as fundamentally in tension: expert authority is thought to undermine the possibility of citizen participation, while democratic processes are sometimes said to come at the expense of rational decisions. Yet it is not clear that "participation" can be thought of as a static concept, nor is it clear that participation and expertise can be thought of as independent, let alone fundamentally opposed, concepts. In this paper, we hope to demonstrate the ways in which participation and expertise exist in a much more complex relationship than a simple oppositional one, in both the evolution of government-sponsored energy conservation efforts, and the situated relations of a professional development program for science educators.

In recommendations for domestic energy conservation, we find a changing articulation of what participation means, along with an increased reliance on expertise over the past 30 years. In the course of the gradual replacement of "conservation" with "efficiency" as guiding principle in official discussions of energy consumption, the contribution of consumer/citizens is importantly abridged, but "participation" comes to signify exactly those highly circumscribed, expert-guided contributions. The intertwining of expertise and participation are also found in a contemporary professional development program for science teachers which emphasizes science education for environmental responsibility. There, while scientific authority and environmental issues are successfully linked, the ability of scientific education to empower students to participate in environmental problem-solving is less successfully demonstrated; in fact, the demands of maintaining a scientific focus often conflict with empowerment.

Women's Role in the Ukranian Environmental Movement

Valentyna Pidlisnyuk & Tatyana Stefanovska, Center of Sustainable Development and Ecological Researches, National Agricultural University, Ukraine

Ukraine is one of the most environmentally degraded republics of the former Soviet Union with 70% of its population living in environmentally dangerous areas. The most typical Ukrainian ecological problems are as follows: radioactive contamination from the Chernobyl disaster; soil degradation and high levels of area pollution. The most dangerous areas are located in the Eastern part of country because of mining production, steel and metal industries. Much effort has been made by governmental and non-governmental organizations in order to create and implement new approaches to ecological policy. The ecological rights for Ukrainian citizens were adopted in the Constitution. Ukrainian ecological scientific institutions as well as NGOs address the failures of government intervention. There are more than 300 NGOs in Ukraine today which deal with ecological issues. In spite the fact that Ukrainian women are ones who are most impacted by environmental degradation and have the most to gain by protecting local ecosystems, there are few environmentally-oriented women’s organizations that play an important role in defending ecological rights. Environmental activities have been a daily part of women’s life worldwide for centuries. Every day women in the Ukraine use the knowledge and skills of taking care of their homes to manage their environmental household. That is why Ukrainian women are often the first to lead protests against water and air pollution. They usually take part in environmental and civic actions, resulting in important political decision-making. However, the Ukrainian women’s ecological movement has not yet become fully developed. Gender sensitive ecological activities, especially in the local level, need to be initiated. The most important would be to build a community movement to establish practical activities for change.

In our understanding woman’s traditional role as manager of the individual households provides a script for how we should better manage our Ukrainian environmental household. Women have usually been leaders in environmental education and citizen action leading to political decision-making or policy. Ukrainian women should take all possible steps in order to make an exciting ecological government and to make non-government institutions more effective in carrying out their legal responsibilities for protecting and managing environmental resources.

It Can Be Done: Fair-Open-Honest Public Process

Viviane Simon-Brown, Forestry, Oregon State University and Tony Faast, US Fish & Wildlife Service

Fifty years after Leopold penned those words, the human component of natural resource science is “so new and intricate” that the path of social expediency is, indeed, “not discernable.” The authors suggest that a definable ethic is the “mode of guidance” for effectively meeting the social dimension of natural resource decision-making of the future.

Expanding the philosophy of Leopold’s land ethic, the authors offer Fair-Open-Honest Public Process as an ethics-based framework for addressing tough, value-laden public policy issues. Designed to improve public meetings to the point where average citizens will once again be active in community decision-making, it reduces polarization and antagonism. It provides the ethical foundation for all public/resource agency interactions. Real success is achieved when all the participants, whatever the outcome, retain a level of trust and respect during the public involvement process.

Drawing on their extensive public process experience, the authors contend that if natural resource professionals, as a community, embrace the fair, open and honest philosophy as the cornerstone of public process, then, Leopold’s “mode of guidance” will have been defined for the coming century.

4C. Contested Knowledge and Salmon Policy

Ben Linder Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Wendy Kotilla, University of Victoria

Echo of Water against Rocks -- Remembering Celilo Falls

Steve Mital, Public Policy, Planning and Management, and Ian McCluskey, Journalism, University of Oregon

On March 10th, 1957, the newly constructed Dalles Dam closed its floodgates, backing the Columbia River over Celilo Falls. Regional newspapers heralded it as the era of hydropower, but upstream hundreds of people paid their final respects to the passage of a 10,000-year-old way of life. The flooding of Celilo Falls was an important day in Pacific Northwest history. It changed people personally and collectively. Two generations later, the memory of Celilo still resonates, like the echo of water against rocks.

"Echo of Water Against Rocks: Remembering Celilo Falls" documents the loss of Celilo

Falls through the stories of eye-witnesses to the flooding, the children of Celilo fishing families, and several local residents. Using never-before-seen historic footage and original interviews, this 13-minute documentary captures the enduring memory of Celilo Falls-one of the most sacred and legendary places in the Pacific Northwest.

Remaking Salmon: Technologies of Space and Place in the Pacific Northwest

Barbara Poore, Geography Department, University of Washington

The Genius of This Place: A History of the Natural River Option

Vincent Mulier, Geography Department, University of Oregon

A salmon run embodies the genius of a place. Each salmon run is the genetic signature of a unique place. Each contains the active memory of a specific set of problems overcome, a specific set of conditions adapted to. With the loss of every salmon population comes the loss of a perpetually self-renewing stream of values, and the loss of a singular, irreplaceable place.

The health of a salmon run is contingent on the health of the watershed which engenders it. So much the worse for salmon. In 1948, officials in charge of the river stated that "the benefits of thoroughgoing hydrodevelopment along the Snake and Columbia Rivers are such that the current salmon run must, if necessary, be sacrificed." Salmon were protected only to the extent that they could be forced to survive in the engineered river. By the 1970s, however, the dominant tradition of watershed management began being called into question. A series of legal and political events led policymakers to begin viewing restoration as a legitimate policy option.

Acceptance among policymakers of the natural river option represents a major shift in priorities. How should we account for this shift? The common thread uniting the many reasons supporting the natural river option is a growing appreciation of the relationship between healthy salmon runs and a thriving sense of Place. Scaling back the dams and restoring the natural river has become a legitimate policy option because we are finally beginning to understand the genius of this Place.

4D. Contesting the Binaries of Nature/Culture

Walnut Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Maralee Mayberry, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Towards a Multicultural Ecology: Taking Ecology through the 'Posts'

Adrian Ivakhiv, Religious Studies and Anthropology/Environmental Studies, University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh

The debate between realists and constructivists has polarized certain sectors of environmental scholarship in recent years. The dilemma raised by constructivists (or ‘postmodernists’) is this: if nature, ‘the environment,’ ecology, and wilderness are all socially and culturally constructed ideas about the world, rather than the world itself what is it exactly that environmental protection efforts are fighting to defend and preserve? This paper sets out to take seriously the postmodern, poststructuralist and postcolonial challenges to ‘nature’ in order to map out some directions for a critical ecological theory beyond the ‘posts’ an analytical method for understanding ecological practices across cultural divergence. Situating the realist/constructivist debate within the longstanding modernist tradition of categorically distinguishing ‘nature’ from ‘culture’ and ‘subject’ from ‘object’ a tradition broadly reflected in the intellectual division of

labor between the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences I suggest that we need to find a space of provisional ‘neutrality’ for rethinking cultural-ecological relations. Such a space has been articulated by actor-network theory, but ANT leaves certain gaps in its understanding of agency and of macro-scale socio-structural and cultural-ecological relations. To fill in these gaps, I draw on perspectives which theorize perception, psychology and agency as embodied and ecological (ecological psychology, biology of cognition) and those which theorize socio-structural processes and socio-ecological relations as highly differentiated, discursively shaped, causally multi-directional and multi-scalar (political ecology, historical ecology, and recent work in environmental anthropology and sociology). The resulting mix, though a theoretical hybrid, may help to build connections between currently disparate fields of social and environmental scholarship.

Dark Sands or Green Forests? Legimating Principles In the Discourse on Use and Protection of Nature in Iceland in the 1990s

Ingolfur Asgeir Johannesson, Department of Education, University of Akureyri

What is the image of Iceland? In the paper, there are discussed different images of Iceland: as a country of black sands, a country that used to be wooden between mountain and coast, and a country with low-cost energy and the minimum of environmental red tape.

Using Foucaultian analysis of legitimating principles and Bourdieuean analysis of social strategies to gain symbolic capital, the discourse on use and protection of nature in Iceland is investigated. Four issues and events are analyzed: the debate over growing forests and grass to reclaim the land that our predecessors destroyed versus Iceland with dark sands and lava is beautiful; the struggle over building huge hydroelectric power stations in the North East interior; the role of nationalism in the debates; and the ways in which references to global concerns are gaining capital.

One particular focus in the dark sands—green forests debate is the controversy over the use of the Alaska lupine to reclaim land. Both camps use patriotism: we can reclaim what our predecessors destroyed versus we destroy sensitive eco-systems with Icelandic plants that ought to seen as symbolic for Iceland rather than the lupine or forests.

Reasoning with Nature: Toward New Models of Reason and Nature and their Interrelationship

Phyllis Rooney, Department of Philosophy, Oakland University

The phrase “reasoning about...” has been a familiar one, and it has regularly marked a distinction between mind which reasons and whatever it is that is being reasoned about. In the case of “reasoning about nature,” it has often implied that nature is something other than reason. I argue that work drawn from naturalistic, feminist, and pragmatist projects on knowledge and reason suggests that the phrase “reasoning with...” is a more accurate and fruitful one.

From a naturalistic perspective, the concept of reasoning with nature takes a very specific and literal form: we are always reasoning within the contours of (natural) brains and bodies and social and cultural structures that are themselves the site of naturalistic study in the various cognitive and social sciences. Yet, the way in which “nature” is construed in many of these studies lends itself to specific feminist reconstructions, inspired, in part, by challenges to some traditional scientific and social concepts of “nature” that assigned women to limited “natural” roles. The gender-marked aspects of the reason/nature dichotomy is also one that has come under special scrutiny in feminist theory. Pragmatists add another important perspective in rethinking the relationship between reason and nature: they argue that reasoning is a natural byproduct of our interactions with nature– with others and with the natural physical world, and from this perspective reasoning is also a fact of nature. These project together suggest that the types of reasoning we promote and develop reflect and in turn reinforce the relationships we seek with nature in its various forms.

After the End of Nature

Steven Vogel, Philosophy Department, Denison University

Environmental theorists worry that science studies threaten to make nature disappear by turning it into (merely) a “social construct”; yet at the same time some theorists (McKibben, Katz) talk as though environmental problems derive from the fact that nature already has disappeared. The paper will investigate this odd situation, first by examining what conception of “nature” is at work in both views, but secondly by suggesting that we might be better off to develop an environmental theory without nature. Could such a theory remain true to environmentalists’ best intuitions about the harm caused by contemporary environmental practices without appealing to some impossible lost nature prior to the social? The paper will answer yes, suggesting that such a “postnaturalism” in environmental theory can solve many of the problems it currently faces. Rather than finding a normative basis for criticizing environmentally harmful contemporary practices in “nature,” with all the conceptual and historical problems thereby entailed, such a theory would find its normative basis in the practices themselves – in the degree of self-consciousness they evince about their own social and transformative character. This requires an understanding that environmental problems are always social and political ones; the call for an environmental philosophy after nature is also a call for a democratization of the processes through which the community determines the sorts of practices it will engage in.

4E. Realizing the Engaged Institution: A Research/Faculty Development Project for Building a New Theory and Practice of Public Scholarship in Land-Grant Education

Maple Room, Erb Memorial Union

Chair: Nicholas Jordan, University of Minnesota

Nationwide, many voices are calling for renewal of the civic mission and work of American higher education. In particular, colleges and universities are being challenged to enter into reciprocal exchanges in which knowledge and other resources held outside universities are surfaced and combined with university resources in order to accomplish public work. In response, we are conducting a research and faculty development project aimed at building a new theory and practice of public scholarship, in which universities cooperate with others to accomplish scholarship that contributes to public work. Our project focuses on one of the most urgent public work tasks of our time: development of sustainable, community-based food systems, and on land-grant universities, which have a special mandate to address the food system. In our project, we are working on (1) development of a theoretical framework and set of skills and capacities for the practice of public scholarship; (2) seven case studies that document and evaluate food systems related public scholarship involving land-grant institutions; (3) design and organizing of local, regional, and/or national faculty development workshops that build land-grant faculty’s civic spirit, skills and capacities for public scholarship; (4) organizing of a diverse base of faculty and staff committed to advancing the practice of public scholarship in land-grant institutions. In our panel, we will present our arguments for the necessity of public scholarship in development of sustainable food systems, describe our emerging theory; give an overview of the case studies, and report on our organizing work.

Panelists: Scott Peters, Department of Education, Cornell University; Nicholas Jordan, Agronomy and Plant Genetics, University of Minnesota; Margaret Adamek, Executive Director, Visions for Change, University of Minnesota; Peg Michels, Civic Organizing, Inc.

4F. Fundamental Justice: Equity and the Environment

Library Browsing Room, Knight Library

Chair: Robin Morris Collin, University of Oregon

Community Based Environmental Research

Julie Sze, Department of American Studies, New York University

My paper is an overview of community based environmental justice research in the United States, and is based on my work as an environmental justice activist and researcher. From the first groundswell of studies documenting environmental racism, significant developments in the field of environmental justice have taken place. The focus of community action has shifted from documentation of a particular environmental problem, to empowerment and research agendas. Academic research in the field has not examined the role and proliferation of community based research projects and agendas, and the concomitant insights on what kind of political and epistemological stakes are implicitly addressed through such community based research. My research systematically looks at a number of community based environmental justice research projects, and assesses what kind of new sources of scientific knowledge and research is emerging from this work, particularly in re-conceptualizing notion of risk and health. My paper provides a survey of the field, drawing from my interviews and contacts with the leading practitioners working on a wide range of issues and research projects. The focus on research per se crystallizes the political nature of knowledge as a key terrain for the environmental justice movement and for environmental studies more broadly. Through an analysis of environmental justice social movement organizations and their research projects, my paper also addresses the relationship between environmental justice policy, praxis and discourse, and seeks to bridge the divide between social science and humanities research on environmental justice, and environmental studies more generally.

Some Live More Downstream than Others: Cancer and Environmental Injustice

Jim Tarter, Department of English, University of Oregon

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Sandra Steingraber’s recent Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (1997) are unique in environmental literature: Featuring an environmental argument about the causes of cancer, they are both scientific and yet they have also been celebrated by feminists and environmental activists. They deliberately set out, not only to render objectively true scientific facts, but to reach wide audiences and change public policies in the face of clear and present danger we pose to ourselves and all living things.

While both writers maintain their documentation and rhetorical positions as scientists, their texts contain powerful political arguments, some of which are carried out in subtle ways that operate at the level of implicit assumptions. I shall focus my analysis on Steingraber’s deeper assumptions about issues of gender and about what we should call -- although she does not sue the term -- environmental justice. My task is to reveal a subtle interrelationship of cancer, gender, and environmental justice.

Cancer, as Carson and Steingraber represent it, may be an issue that can help link science and ecofeminism or gender-conscious environmentalism to environmental justice discourse and practice. The issue of cancer may even help to forge alliances between scientists, ecofeminists, and environmental justice activists, artists and scholars. In my presentation, I shall draw on personal narrative in order to help make this argument.

Environmental Justice: An Ecofeminist Approach

Karen Warren, Department of Philosophy, Macalester College

To date, environmental justice issues have been understood primarily as issues of distributive justice. Activists and scholars alike turn to distributive models of social justice to reveal and remedy gender, race/ethnicity, socioeconomic, and ethnocentric biases in such practices as the location of hazardous waste sites, the testing of nuclear weapons, deforestation, water pollution, and exporting monoculture farming from the First World to the “Third World.” This is not surprising. There are many strengths of a distributive model which make it invaluable for explaining and correcting environmentally unjust practices.

However, as I argue in this paper, an exclusive reliance on distributive models of justice to understand and correct environmentally unjust practices is also problematic. This is because some of the most important environmental justice issues are not, and are not reducible to, distributive issues. When this is the case, concerns to protect the nonhuman natural environment are to ensure equity among humans are not always best served by appeals to distributive models of justice. What is needed is a more inclusive notion of justice -- one which recognizes non-distributive factors as important to any adequate conception of social or environmental justice. Building on what I call “care-sensitive ethics,” I suggest that care-sensitive ethics provides a vehicle for understanding and evaluating the justice of environmental practices in just those cases where a distributive model is inappropriate or inadequate. I conclude that issues of diversity and integrity -- both ecological and cultural -- are often best-served by a non-distributive, care-sensitive approach to environmental justice.

Alternative Research Methods for Natural Resources Policy Research

JD Wulfhorst, Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology and Julia Dawn Parker, Idaho Forest, Wildlife & Range Policy Analysis Group, University of Idaho, and Chip Ward, West Desert H.E.A.L.

Scientific inquiry can really cause problems sometimes. In particular, the social sciences have the unenviable task of stirring the pot by the very nature of their questions—often focusing on social (dis)order, conflict, and change. Even more specifically, scientists focusing on social dimensions of natural resources issues face problematic levels of distrust and lack of faith in science among those studied. These contemporary problems listed above are not without good reason. Representatives of Science have not only often lied to us as a public, but Science encumbers large degrees of uncertainty inherently difficult for research on the social world. As a result, scholars, trained experts, and other professionals often muck up their projects simply because of formalized procedures, inflexible methods, lack of accountability for resources and actions, complex project designs, and formats for public participation that contradict the public’s expectations.

This paper uses several examples from case-study research to help others learn from previous mistakes and propose an alternative basis for research design on natural resources and community-related projects. Traditional research methods tend to exclude or alienate under-represented constituents just as traditional natural resources decision making methods often exclude non-traditional groups. The key components of an alternative include: multiple methods, flexibility, and placing value on local knowledge and culture. Each of these techniques is essential to capturing views of under-represented stakeholders in natural resources conflicts and incorporating different, non-traditional ideas. This paper also discusses the policy implications of a potential methodological shift as a means toward improving distrust and mis-communication.

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