Meredith Welch-Devine

Acknowledging Trade-offs and Understanding Complexity: Exurbanization Issues in Macon County, North Carolina

We applied an integrative framework to illuminate and discuss the complexities of exurbanization in Macon County, North Carolina. The case of Macon County, North Carolina, highlights the complexity involved in addressing issues of exurbanization in the Southern Appalachian region. Exurbanization, the process by which urban residents move into rural areas in search of unique natural amenities and idealized lifestyles, can often have a dramatic impact on the local economy, culture, and environment. Within Macon County, complex debates and tensions among multiple stakeholders struggle to address local residential development. How can better problem definition benefit rural communities in addressing exurbanization pressures and effects? We asserted that a key factor in the shortcomings of previous solutions was the shortsightedness inherent in policy that attempts to treat individual symptoms without being able to adequately characterize the underlying problem. The goal of the integrative framework is to initiate an iterative process of transparent negotiation, which recognizes a range of potential choices to be considered and to embrace the social complexities that can at times overwhelm scholars and practitioners, inviting simplification and polarization of the issues. This new and emerging framework offers a novel way of approaching conservation and development issues where other frameworks have failed. It helps acknowledge the difficult choices, i.e., trade-offs, that have to be made in a material process like exurbanization. Trade-offs will be necessary in any negotiation related to conservation. Therefore, conflict surrounding specific values, e.g., cultural, financial, or ecological, must be acknowledged upfront to move deeper into issues of plurality. Given the complexity, understanding how the process of exurbanization is being played out within Macon County provided not only an opportunity to demonstrate the functionality of an integrative approach, but also a call for further study of exurbanization dynamics.

A pedagogical model for integrative training in conservation and sustainability

The benefits and challenges of interdisciplinary training are well documented, and several reviews have discussed the particular importance of interdisciplinary training for conservation scholars and practitioners. We discuss the progress within one university program to implement specific training models, elements, and tools designed to move beyond remaining barriers to graduate- level, interdisciplinary conservation education.

Sorting out roles and defining divides: Social sciences at the World Conservation Congress

Many conservation practitioners and scholars have called for increasing involvement of the social sciences in conservation and better integration among the various disciplines engaged in conservation practice. This research uses the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Fourth World Conservation Congress (WCC) as a site of ethnographic inquiry to explore in-depth how conservation researchers and practitioners view the social sciences in conservation. This paper situates those views in the context of the WCC itself and treats such themes as the appropriate role for the social sciences in conservation, conflicts between social and natural scientists, and sorting out differences between academic social scientists and those working within conservation organisations. It ends with a reflection on what changes new approaches to conservation might bring to the relationship between natural and social sciences in conservation.

People, Trees, and Parks: Is Agroforestry In or Out?

New conservation approaches challenge us to go beyond parks and protected areas to conservation in a matrix of land uses. Promoting the use of trees and woody species in landscapes and on farms is a frequently used but under-studied aspect of this approach. This article synthesizes recent field research at six sites in Africa on agroforestry in and around protected areas. It finds that the complex interactions among people, parks, and trees show that for agroforestry to contribute to conservation and livelihoods, policy, technology, and human rights issues have to be addressed.

Implementation and Resistance: Networking to Create and Renegotiate Natura 2000

Abstract The implementation of the European Unions flagship conservation initiative— Natura 2000—has been particularly drawn out and difficult in the French Basque province of Soule. Local actors have vigorously resisted the creation of Natura 2000 sites and the design of management plans for these sites. This article examines the network of actors and organizations that sprung up to resist Natura 2000 alongside the network designed for its implementation. It explores the role of ethnography in network analysis and discusses the implications of this analysis for conservation policy.

Nature Talk in an Appalachian Newspaper: What Environmental Discourse Analysis Reveals about Efforts to Address Exurbanization and Climate Change

As the people of Southern Appalachia confront the challenges of climate change and exurban development, their foundational beliefs about the environment and human-environment relations will significantly shape the types of individual and collective action that they imagine and pursue. In this paper, we use critical discourse analysis of an influential small-town newspaper to understand how the environment is being represented publicly and consider how these representations might affect local environmental politics and efforts to mitigate or adapt to climate change and exurban sprawl. We find that the environment is generally represented as an amenity to be enjoyed rather than a subject of concern, that environmental degradation, when represented at all, is often discussed in vague or distancing terms, and that human agency is typically presented in individualizing, hyper-local terms rather than in collective, community- or national-scale ones. In conclusion, we suggest that these representational styles are likely very effective for inspiring interest in and connection to local landscapes, but they do not provide a strong basis for collective efforts to understand and address climate change and exurbanization.

Can science writing collectives overcome barriers to more democratic communication and collaboration? Lessons from environmental communication praxis in southern Appalachia

Despite compelling reasons to involve nonscientists in the production of ecological knowledge, cultural and institutional factors often dis-incentivize engagement between scientists and nonscientists. This paper details our efforts to develop a biweekly newspaper column to increase communication between ecological scientists, social scientists, and the communities within which they work. Addressing community-generated topics and written by a collective of social and natural scientists, the column is meant to foster public dialog about socio-environmental issues and to lay the groundwork for the coproduction of environmental knowledge. Our collective approach to writing addresses some major barriers to public engagement by scientists, but the need to insert ourselves as intermediaries limits these gains. Overall, our efforts at environmental communication praxis have not generated significant public debate, but they have supported future coproduction by making scientists a more visible presence in the community and providing easy pathways for them to begin engaging the public. Finally, this research highlights an underappreciated barrier to public engagement: scientists are not merely disconnected from the public, but also connected in ways that may be functional for their research. Many field scientists, for example, seek out neutral and narrowly defined connections that permit research access but are largely incompatible with efforts to address controversial issues of environmental governance.