ASSEMBLY OF MAP‐BASED STREAM NARRATIVES TO FACILITATE STAKEHOLDER INVOLVEMENT IN WATERSHED MANAGEMENT1

ABSTRACT: Watershed stewardship activities throughout North America have evolved into a process that requires more involvement in planning and decision making by community stakeholders. Active involvement of all stakeholders in the process of watershed stewardship is dependent on effective exchange of information among participants, and active involvement of a wide range of stakeholders from “communities of place” as well as those from “communities of interest.” We developed a map‐based stream narrative tool as a means to: (a) assemble a wealth of incompletely documented, “traditional” ecological or natural history observations for rivers or streams; and (b) promote a higher level of active involvement by community stakeholders in contributing to information‐based, watershed management. Creation of stream narratives is intended for use as a tool to actively engage local stakeholders in the development of a more comprehensive information system to improve management for multiple stewardship objectives in watersheds. Completion of map‐based stream narrative atlases provides a valuable supplement to other independent efforts to assemble observations and knowledge about land‐based natural resources covering entire watersheds. We are confident that completion of stream narrative projects will make a valuable addition to the information and decision making tools that are currently available to the public and resource agencies interested in advancing the cause of community‐based approaches to watershed and ecosystem management.     

Meaning work: reworking institutional meanings for environmental governance

Effective environmental governance requires institutional change. While some actors work to change institutions, others resist change by defending and maintaining institutions. Much of this institutional work is ‘meaning work’, which we define as the practice of crafting, adapting, connecting and performing meanings to purposively create, maintain or disrupt institutions. This paper constructs a concept of meaning work that highlights agency in carrying meanings across scales and between discursive layers, while noting the structuring role of prevailing discourses. It grounds the concept using two environmental governance cases at very different scales: a local democratic innovation employed by Noosa Council in Queensland, Australia; and the international campaign to divest from fossil fuels. The cases demonstrate the diversity of meaning work and the difficulty of achieving deep discursive change. They point to the need for environmental governance practitioners to rework existing meanings to construct compelling stories for change, taking advantage of narrative openings.     

Made in conflict. Local residents' construction of a local environmental problem

The aim of this paper is to understand how local residents participate in the construction of local environmental problems and to evaluate a particular analytical approach in environmental sociology to study this phenomenon. The paper is based on an interview study with a sample of local residents. The analysis demonstrates how the local residents attempt to construct a local environmental problem. In particular, the study focuses on how involved actors are positioned, how different sorts of knowledge claims are used, and how the neglect the residents perceive from the authorities affects the attempt to construct a local environmental problem. The study shows that the local residents play a central role in the construction of the situation and that the evaluated model could be very helpful as an analytical tool in the investigation of local residents' participation in the construction of environmental problems.     

What's the Moral of the GM Food Story?

This paper is an attempt to examine issues and problemsraised by agricultural biotechnology by drawing on the richnessof contemporary ideas in ethical theory and thereby contribute tothe project of establishing new approaches to these problems. Thefundamental argument is that many of the negative aspects ofagricultural biotechnology are generated at the level of theunderlying conceptual frameworks that shape the technology'sinternal modes of organization, rather than the unintendedeffects of the application of an inherently benevolent set oftechniques. If ``food ethics' is to address the adverse impacts ofagricultural biotechnology, it must ultimately challenge theseconceptual frames, which, I argue, emerge from Enlightenment,liberal, political, and economic theory.The translation of traditional bioethics (focusing on principlessuch as autonomy and rights, justice, and well being) into foodethics does not produce the critical tools that are ableadequately to challenge the harmful legacy of Enlightenmentthinking. What is needed are reorientations of ethics that arecapable of formulating concepts and approaches that to someextent break with the presuppositions that underpin biotechnologyat its foundation. This paper suggests that narrative andfeminist critiques of medical bioethics are a good place to startin this project.     

Contested sustainabilities: assessing narratives of environmental change in southeastern Turkey

This article contends that there is a need to more fully assess convergences and divergences between local environmental narratives in studies of environmental change and evaluations of sustainability. While much work has established the importance of being attentive to local knowledges, the possibility of evaluating points of overlap and dissonance between diverse narratives of change offers a particularly fruitful path for future work. Drawing on survey data and interviews related to irrigation-related changes in southeastern Turkey, narratives of environmental change offered by different actors are analysed to highlight key points of overlap and tension. Specifically, there is general agreement that degradation is occurring, even as actors disagree on the causal explanations for these changes. More revealing, narratives also share a tendency to validate techno-scientific approaches and continued state intervention, thus revealing crucial insights related to future agro-ecological possibilities in this region. Apart from offering empirical insights from a context in the Middle East where social science evaluations of environmental change and sustainability remain relatively thin, the analysis also speaks to broader theoretical and methodological concerns at the intersection of debates related to local knowledges, narrative and discursive approaches to environment, and sustainability.     

The Role of Fictional Film Exposure and Narrative Engagement for Personal Norms,Guilt and Intentions to Protect The Climate

ABSTRACT

Using an integration of Norm Activation Theory, Value-Belief-Norm Theory and Narrative Persuasion, this study investigates the ability of an eco-dystopian science fiction film set in a world of excessive solar radiation to support intentions for pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, the influence of narrative engagement and explicit references to human responsibility for climate change are tested. A 2 (high vs. low narrative engagement) x?3 (human responsibility frame vs. temperature frame vs. no frame) plus control group (no film) experiment was conducted (n?=?257). Results show that compared to the control condition, the film had an indirect effect on behavioral intentions by raising the personal norm (a sense of personal obligation to act). The temperature change and human responsibility frames did not show any influence, while narrative engagement had an indirect effect on intentions by increasing guilt. The results are discussed with regard to their theoretical and practical implications.     

Imaging Toxins

This essay examines how toxins are visually represented in news and popular media. More specifically, it analyzes the function of visual narratives, identity, place, and uncertainty in the construction of the controversial toxicant Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the US military during the Vietnam War to reduce jungle cover and destroy cropland causing devastating health and environmental effects. Toxins present an interesting challenge for visual construction in that they are often invisible and banal in their esthetics. The essay concludes with five observations for understanding the relationship between images and toxins.     

Deconstruction of destruction stories: narrative,inequality, and disasters

A commonly‐held belief is that natural disasters do not discriminate. This paper, though, poses the following theoretical question: what does the elision of race, class, and gender in the news media say about disasters in the neoliberal era? It draws on the author's analysis of two prominent newspapers—The New York Times and USA Today—and their coverage of the recovery process after devastating tornadoes in two towns in the United States (Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and Joplin, Missouri) in 2011. The study asserts that the narrative of the news media is one with which people are familiar and that it fits into larger ‘formula stories’. It utilises theoretical treatments of narrative to demonstrate how differences are erased and how they lead to complicity in hegemonic representations. Critical theory is used to elucidate why this occurs, and the paper sources Goldberg (2002) in suggesting that the news media employs ‘fantasies of homogenisation’ when representing post‐disaster communities.     

重大自然灾害后心理干预行为教育对策

重大灾害对社会经济和生命财产安全都存在严重的影响,而灾区人们的心理变化和行为反应,与社会整体的抗灾救灾效果都具有较大的关联性。该文探讨重大灾害后心理干预行为教育对策,针对灾害对灾区人们产生的心理应激障碍问题,采用叙事疗法按照构建契约、故事重建、制图、探险、结束和复查五步骤,将灾区受灾人群从不良的生活模式中唤醒,并通过体育干预从主体、个体、群体三个角度指引灾区人群,建立正确、积极的人生价值观与社会价值观,采用阅读疗法优化灾区人群的认知结构。