Angela C. Halfacre

Finding a “Disappearing” Nontimber Forest Resource: Using Grounded Visualization to Explore Urbanization Impacts on Sweetgrass Basketmaking in Greater Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina∗

Despite growing interest in urbanization and its social and ecological impacts on formerly rural areas, empirical research remains limited. Extant studies largely focus either on issues of social exclusion and enclosure or ecological change. This article uses the case of sweetgrass basketmaking in Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina, to explore the implications of urbanization, including gentrification, for the distribution and accessibility of sweetgrass, an economically important nontimber forest product (NTFP) for historically African American communities, in this rapidly growing area. We explore the usefulness of grounded visualization for research efforts that are examining the existence of “fringe ecologies” associated with NTFP. Our findings highlight the importance of integrated qualitative and quantitative analyses for revealing the complex social and ecological changes that accompany both urbanization and rural gentrification.

Identifying behavioral barriers to campus sustainability: A multi-method approach

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to assess the behavioral barriers to sustainable action in a campus community. Design/methodology/approach – This paper reports three different methodological approaches to the assessment of behavioral barriers to sustainable actions on a college campus. Focus groups and surveys were used to assess campus members’ opinions about the barriers that limit sustainable behaviors on campus. After identifying general barriers, behavioral assessment was used to assess specific barriers to energy conservation in a target location on campus and to develop an intervention to reduce energy use for that location. Findings – Across methodologies, four key behavioral barriers to sustainable actions were consistently reported: communication/awareness, inconvenience, financial concerns and lack of engagement. The intervention that was developed targeted the barriers of communication issues and lack of awareness and resulted in reduced energy use for a target campus location. Original...

Gathering, Buying, and Growing Sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea): Urbanization and Social Networking in the Sweetgrass Basket-Making Industry of Lowcountry South Carolina

Despite the visibility of natural resource use and access for indigenous and rural peoples elsewhere, less attention is paid to the ways that development patterns interrupt non-timber forest products (NTFPs) and gathering practices by people living in urbanizing landscapes of the United States. Using a case study from Lowcountry South Carolina, we examine how urbanization has altered the political-ecological relationships that characterize gathering practices in greater Mt. Pleasant, a rapidly urbanizing area within the Charleston-North Charleston Metropolitan area. We draw on grounded visualization—an analytical method that integrates qualitative and geographic information systems (GIS) data—to examine the ways that residential and commercial development has altered collecting sites and practices associated with sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia sericea [Michx.] P.M. Peterson) and three other plant materials used in basket-making. Our analysis focuses on the ecological changes and shifts in property regimes that result; we detail the strategies basket-makers have developed to maintain access to sweetgrass and other raw materials. This research highlights how land development patterns have disrupted historic gathering practices, namely, by changing the distribution of plants, altering the conditions of access to these species, and reconfiguring the social networking that takes place to ensure the survival of this distinctive art form.

Sewing Environmental Justice into African- American Sweetgrass Basket-Making in the South Carolina Lowcountry

This paper contributes to the evolving definition of environmental justice by applying insights from the interdisciplinary social science literature in political ecology. While early scholarly environmental justice examinations focused on distributive outcomes of risk, more recent studies have expanded the field to include the analysis of the environmental decision-making and environmental dispute processes. Building on insights in political ecology, including recent research from the Third World that argues for the importance of considering the distribution of environmental benefits and access by marginalized groups, we examine the ways that rural development and urban expansion have affected the tradition of sweetgrass basket-making in the greater Mt. Pleasant area of the South Carolina Lowcountry. The case of Mt. Pleasant basket makers demonstrates that in-migration and associated land-use change are also associated with historical (and divergent) understandings of private property rights, resource access, and the special case of African-American heirs’ property. To overcome these challenges, more meaningful participation in land-use decision making processes by affected communities is needed.

Growing a Campus Native Species Garden: Sustaining Volunteer-Driven Sustainability.

Purpose – This paper aims to examine the challenges of volunteer‐driven college campus sustainability projects through a case study of the development of an urban native plant species garden on the College of Charleston campus in Charleston, South Carolina, USA.Design/methodology/approach – The research used participant observation as the primary data‐gathering technique. The primary author coordinated this volunteer‐driven sustainability project, and recorded observations throughout the process. The authors used content analysis to examine garden volunteer interview data and campus/community documents. These methods allow the reader to view this case first‐hand, providing a unique look at undertaking projects of this nature.Findings – The paper provides specific guidance for creating sustainable sustainability projects in similar communities and college campuses, identifies challenges specific to this case study that are easily generalized to other volunteer‐driven sustainability projects, and provides s...

Community Participation in Preservation of Lowcountry South Carolina Sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia filipes [M. A. Curtis] J. Pinson and W. Batson) Basketry

Sweetgrass (Muhlenbergia filipes [M. A. Curtis] J. Pinson and W. Batson) is a coastal, nontimber forest resource ranging from North Carolina southwestward to Texas. The plant has special cultural and economic importance in coastal South Carolina, where the local Gullah community uses this resource in a form of coiled basketry. The plant is becoming increasingly unavailable to basket makers, however, because of habitat destruction, habitat limitation, and private ownership of the resource. This study examines stakeholder involvement in and perceptions of past and current sweetgrass management. Twenty-three interviews were conducted with Charleston, South Carolina area basket makers and were analyzed for emergent themes using content analysis, a technique permitting objective analysis of text. Survey respondents identified residential development as a major cause of sweetgrass inaccessibility and indicated that purchasing raw materials has become standard practice. Furthermore, respondents indicated several potential solutions to the problem and expressed their willingness to contribute time to management efforts.

Digging Deeper: A Case Study of Farmer Conceptualization of Ecosystem Services in the American South

AbstractThe interest in improved environmental sustainability of agriculture via biodiversity provides an opportunity for placed-based research on the conceptualization and articulation of ecosystem services. Yet, few studies have explored how farmers conceptualize the relationship between their farm and nature and by extension ecosystem services. Examining how farmers in the Southern Piedmont of South Carolina discuss and explain the role of nature on their farm, we create a detail-rich picture of how they perceive ecosystem services and their contributions to the agroeconomy. Using 34 semi-structured interviews, we developed a detail-rich qualitative portrait of these farmers’ conceptualizations of ecosystem services. Farmers’ conceptualization of four ecosystem services: provisioning, supporting, regulating, and cultural are discussed, as well as articulation of disservices. Results of interviews show that most interviewees expressed a basic understanding of the relationship between nature and agriculture and many articulated benefits provided by nature to their farm. Farmers referred indirectly to most services, though they did not attribute services to biodiversity or ecological function. While farmers have a general understanding and appreciation of nature, they lack knowledge on specific ways biodiversity benefits their farm. This lack of knowledge may ultimately limit farmer decision-making and land management to utilize ecosystem services for environmental and economic benefits. These results suggest that additional communication with farmers about ecosystem services is needed as our understanding of these benefits increases. This change may require collaboration between conservation biology professionals and extension and agriculture professionals to extended successful biomass provisioning services to other ecosystem services.

Place Matters: An Investigation of Farmers’ Attachment to Their Land

Place attachment research can shed light on how farmers form relationships with their land and therefore have implications for landscape management and food systems. Unknown is how farmers develop place attachment. In this qualitative study, we examine psychological and physical experiences as antecedents to place attachment using attachment theory. Following 29 semi-structured interviews with 34 respondents in Upcountry South Carolina, we examined farmers’ security-seeking and exploration behaviors. Farmers receive security through feelings of peace and safety while on their farm and provide economic security to their families and environmental security to their land. Farmers’ exploring behaviors include trying to be more innovative in sustainable management of their land. This research helps elucidate how farmers develop attachment. It has implications for how farmers manage their resources as well as understanding the environmental, social, and economic impacts of these decisions and land conservation in the American south.

Environmental Decision-Making and Community Involvement: The Case of Sandy Island, South Carolina

Environmental decision-making and mediation research has examined a range of approaches and has increasingly focused on the actors involved with this process. A central part of environmental decision-making is the incorporation of community participation within the decision-making process. The manner in which such participation occurs and its impact on the process is the focus of this paper. We examine the following research question: what type and extent of community participation in the environmental decision-making process led to the conservation of Sandy Island, South Carolina? Analysis of resident surveys and stakeholder interviews, complemented by examinations of minutes from agency meetings, government documents, and newspaper accounts suggest that federal and state partners successfully incorporated local resident opinion into the environmental decision-making process through resident proxies. This successful environmental decision-making process has raised community awareness and increased public agency ability to address community concerns. Such community involvement, if maintained, begins to fulfill a central principle of successful environmental decision-making.

Nostalgia as a catalyst for conservation in the Carolina Lowcountry

Critics argue that nostalgia involves viewing the past through a mental scrim that filters out all negative elements; thus, nostalgia is often dismissed as mere escapism. Yet nostalgic thinking is not always false or sentimentalized, impotent or distracting. We can come away from nostalgic remembering being inspired rather than heartbroken. To love what was and resolve to preserve what is endangered has become the animating element of nostalgic-driven conservation in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. The irony at the heart of environmentalism in the Lowcountry is that a presumptively “liberal” movement has benefited from the prevailing conservative narrative generated by a nostalgic yearning for the region’s presumably once pristine landscape. Nostalgia, in other words, can help inspire the preservation of threatened environmental places and human folkways by tapping not only pride of place but also the pride in the past that has long distinguished the Lowcountry region. At the most elemental level, conservatism and conservation intersect in their shared inclination toward nostalgia, especially the conviction that there is something transcendently superior about earlier modes of life and attitudes toward nature. Conservationists in other regions of the country and in other places have adopted quite different tactics from those used in the Lowcountry. While this essay explores one region’s experiences with conservation, it provides insights into how nostalgia may be central in understanding place-making, sense of place, and preservation of place.