Tarla Rai Peterson

A TALE OF TWO SPECIES: HABITAT CONSERVATION PLANS AS BOUNDED CONFLICT

Abstract Worldwide human population expansion and rising standards of living place increasing pressure on wildlife populations and their habitats. Conflict regarding conservation and preservation of endangered species is among the greatest challenges of the 21st century. Endangered species management on private lands magnifies the problems encountered by natural resource policy-makers and managers. Given that conservation of endangered species increasingly depends on securing cooperation of private property owners in local communities, understanding how to secure that cooperation is important. We used an ethnographic approach to critically review the Habitat Conservation Plan (HCP) processes used in attempts to develop regional HCPs to benefit the Houston toad (Bufo houstonensis) and the Florida Key deer (Odocoileus virginianus clavium; hereafter, Key deer). In both cases, the process was framed as a search for the optimum solution through collaboration and consensus building, and in neither case was the solution achieved. The paradoxical nature of liberal democracy precluded the possibility of a single, ideal solution. Failing to find the optimal solution led to disillusionment and pessimism with the process among HCP participants. We suggest that within democratic political contexts, approaches to conservation planning that center around bounded conflict, which is rooted in acknowledgment of the paradox inherent to the ideals of liberty and equality, are more likely to produce satisfactory results than are consensus-based approaches.

Credibility and advocacy in conservation science

Abstract Conservation policy sits at the nexus of natural science and politics. On the one hand, conservation scientists strive to maintain scientific credibility by emphasizing that their research findings are the result of disinterested observations of reality. On the other hand, conservation scientists are committed to conservation even if they do not advocate a particular policy. The professional conservation literature offers guidance on negotiating the relationship between scientific objectivity and political advocacy without damaging conservation sciences credibility. The value of this guidance, however, may be restricted by limited recognition of credibilitys multidimensionality and emergent nature: it emerges through perceptions of expertise, goodwill, and trustworthiness. We used content analysis of the literature to determine how credibility is framed in conservation science as it relates to apparent contradictions between science and advocacy. Credibility typically was framed as a static entity lacking dimensionality. Authors identified expertise or trustworthiness as important, but rarely mentioned goodwill. They usually did not identify expertise, goodwill, or trustworthiness as dimensions of credibility or recognize interactions among these 3 dimensions of credibility. This oversimplification may limit the ability of conservation scientists to contribute to biodiversity conservation. Accounting for the emergent quality and multidimensionality of credibility should enable conservation scientists to advance biodiversity conservation more effectively.

social control frames: opportunities or constraints?

Environmental managers are simultaneously responsible for guiding appropriate stakeholder involvement in natural resource conflicts and enhancing the trust that non-governmental stakeholders have in each other and in government. Underlying both of these responsibilities is the desire to produce legitimate policies that will likely be successful, that is, policies that are substantively and procedurally legitimate. It is unlikely that legitimacy can be satisfied by environmental management policies that are uninformed by relevant facts; therefore, expert analyses of impacts and the likely outcomes of policy interventions are essential. Despite the best technical and economic validity, however, agreements that lack social acceptability will fail to achieve broad legitimacy, and will, therefore, be difficult to implement. Rather, environmental managers must integrate diverse stakeholders into the policy dialogue, at the same time they recognize the ongoing challenges posed by differential power. This paper reviews the characteristics of legitimate agreements, examines four social control frames commonly encountered in environmental conflicts, and discusses how these frames developed and then affected conflict dynamics in three major environmental conflicts. It further suggests ways that environmental professionals might use an understanding of social control frames to more effectively identify and implement appropriate strategies for achieving legitimate agreements, thus contributing to conflict tractability.

Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis

We review energy communication, an emerging subfield of communication studies that examines the role of energy in society, and argue that it is dominated by a crisis frame. Whereas this frame can be productive, it can also be limiting. In response, we propose three areas for future energy communication research—internal rhetoric of science, comparative studies, and energy in everyday life—as starting points for rethinking and expanding energy communication. This expanded focus will continue to contribute to communication theory, add to interdisciplinary energy studies, and supply practical resources for the creation and deployment of just and sustainable energy futures.

Energy Communication: Theory and Praxis Towards a Sustainable Energy Future

ABSTRACT This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that shares with environmental communication the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of energy extraction, production, distribution, and consumption. We then offer three generative directions for future research related to energy transitions as communicative processes: analysing campaigns’ strategic efforts, critically theorizing energy’s transnational power dynamics, and theorizing the energy democracy movement.

Putting the U in carbon capture and storage: rhetorical boundary negotiation within the CCS/CCUS scientific community

ABSTRACT This paper examines responses to a framing shift from carbon capture and storage (CCS) to carbon capture, utilization, and storage (CCUS) within science and engineering professionals’ communication. We argue that the framing shift is a breach in the rhetorical boundaries of the CCS professional community that calls forth negotiation through responses that proactively support, resist, or acquiesce. This study offers a heuristic for examining scientific framing in expert-to-expert internal scientific rhetoric. It also contributes to contemporary research on the intersection of rhetoric of science and science, technology, and society; the social dimensions of CCS; energy communication; and applied communicative practices in scientific communities.

Voice as Entry to Agriculturalists’ Conservationist Identity: A Cultural Inventory of the Yellowstone River

ABSTRACT We explored the communicative construction of a conservationist identity among primary producers by excavating voices of agriculturalists operating along the Yellowstone River (Montana, USA). We used a cultural inventory approach to discover and then listen to informants’ voices as they constructed their conservation identity. Those who self-identified as conservationists talked about their ecological and social responsibilities, and described challenges they faced in protecting individual resources and system processes of the watershed. For these agriculturalists, conservation and production are inextricably linked, and enable them to provide a sustainable resource base for future generations. Insight from these voices enhances understanding of what sustainability could mean to those who self-identify as both conservationists and primary producers.

Discourses on illegal hunting in Sweden: the meaning of silence and resistance

ABSTRACT The first rule to poaching is that you do not talk about poaching. If you do, you do so behind a veil of anonymity, using hypotheticals or indirect reported speech that protect you from moral, cultural or legal self-incrimination. In this study of Swedish hunters talking about a phenomenon of illegal killing of protected wolves, we situate such talk in the debate between crime talk as reflecting resistance, reality or everyday venting. We identify four discourses: the discourse of silence; the complicit discourse of protecting poachers; the ‘proxy’ discourse of talking about peers; and the ‘empty’ discourse of exaggerating wolf kills as means of political resistance. Our hunters materialize these discourses both by sharing stories that we sort into respective discourses and by providing their meta-level perceptions on what they mean. Specifically we examine whether Swedish hunters’ discourses on illegal killing are (1) a means of letting off steam; (2) a reflection of reality; (3) part of a political counter-narrative against wolf conservation; or (4) a way of radicalizing peers exposed to the discourse. We conclude that illegal killing discourses simultaneously reflect reality and constitute it and that hunters’ meta-talk reveals most endorse a path-goal folk model of talk and action.

Social-ecological system resonance: a theoretical framework for brokering sustainable solutions

Sustainability science is a solution-oriented discipline. Yet, there are few theory-rich discussions about how this orientation structures the efforts of sustainability science. We argue that Niklas Luhmann’s social system theory, which explains how societies communicate problems, conceptualize solutions, and identify pathways towards implementation of solutions, is valuable in explaining the general structure of sustainability science. From Luhmann, we focus on two key concepts. First, his notion of resonance offers us a way to account for how sustainability science has attended and responded to environmental risks. As a product of resonance, we reveal solution-oriented research as the strategic coordination of capacities, resources, and information. Second, Luhmann’s interests in self-organizing processes explain how sustainability science can simultaneously advance multiple innovations. The value logic that supports this multiplicity of self-organizing activities as a recognition that human and natural systems are complex coupled and mutually influencing. To give form to this theoretical framework, we offer case evidence of renewable energy policy formation in Texas. Although the state’s wealth is rooted in a fossil-fuel heritage, Texas generates more electricity from wind than any US state. It is politically antagonistic towards climate-change policy, yet the state’s reception of wind energy technology illustrates how social and environmental systems can be strategically aligned to generate solutions that address diverse needs simultaneously. This case demonstrates that isolating climate change—as politicians do as a separate and discrete problem—is incapable of achieving sustainable solutions, and resonance offers researchers a framework for conceptualizing, designing, and communicating meaningfully integrated actions.

Results of the Nordic Hunting in Society Symposium

Representatives of the major Nordic hunter’s associations (i.e., Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden) met in February 2010 to identify key challenges for the future of hunting and develop a vision for how hunting would fit within society in the future. Most participants (7) represented national level hunters associations, but agricultural landowners associations (4), national wildlife management agencies (2), and researchers (5) were represented as well. We facilitated the symposium using the Critical Utopian Action Research approach and Future Creation Workshop model (Nielsen & Nielsen, 2006). Participants were asked to explore concerns and visions in the intersection of hunting and society, and propose strategies for achieving their visions. The process included plenary brainstorming, prioritization of keywords, thematic synthesis of keywords, and elaboration of themes in small groups. Participants identified five main themes among their concerns: negative public perceptions of hunting, conflicts between user groups, poor match between governance scale and management decisions, internal degradation of the hunting ethic, and problems recruiting new hunters. The group discussions focused on changing perceptions of the appropriate human role within ecosystems and wildlife management, on the role of hunting in rural socioeconomic development, on how divergent values impacted people’s acceptance of hunting, and on the democratic deficit in decisions made at national and European Union (EU) levels. The discussions of hunting ethics examined both negative changes in ethics among hunters and how these changes might create a backlash against hunting among the non-hunting public and the discussions addressing recruitment of new hunters identified challenges such as low levels of practical knowledge about hunting, economic constraints, people’s minimal contact with nature, and presentation of hunting in the media. Participants identified three main themes among their utopian visions: no bad press, opportunities for anyone to hunt, and better decision-making. The discussions of these themes focused on need for critical media as well as the need for more transparency within the hunting community and the need for the hunting community to become more proactive in forming new alliances. Also, a better understanding of the internal norms and behaviors of hunters, and society’s perspectives regarding the relationship between humans and animals was encouraged. The discussions on better hunting opportunities for everyone focused on improving relations between hunters and landowners, the need for developing better ways to distribute game meat, encouraging diversity among hunters, preventing