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ENGAGEMENT BLOG
- Designing Sacred Lands
- O-yama: Mountain Faith and Uncertainty in Late Capitalist Japan
- Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone
- Protecting Cultural Environments in Northern Wisconsin: Anthropology’s Contribution to a Tribal Initiative
- Gathering Divergent Forest Honeys: Collections and Commodity Flows in the Philippines
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- AAA 2012 – Anthropology and Environment Society Invited Sessions & Events
- Climate Change Task Force
- 2011 AAA Convention, Montreal
NEW & NOTABLE
- Environmental Anthropology Engaging Ecotopia: Bioregionalism, Permaculture, And Ecovillages
- Spiritual Ecology: A Quiet Revolution
- How Will New Models Shape Our Research?
- Bring heritage breeds to holiday table
- Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere
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Engagement Blog
Designing Sacred Lands
After four unsuccessful attempts, in June 2012 UNESCO approved a new World Heritage Cultural Landscape: the subaks and water temples of Bali. An innovative management plan empowers the elected heads of subaks and villages to manage the World Heritage as a Governing Assembly, with assistance from government departments. Implementation of this management system has been delayed, but it has been endorsed by UNESCO as a promising model for democratic adaptive management.
With millions of visitors arriving in Bali each year, there is obvious potential for the Governing Assembly to capture revenue from visitors to the sites, and in this way channel benefits from Bali’s enormous tourism industry to Balinese communities. The design of visitor facilities also offers an opportunity for people in the sites to decide what they would like to communicate about their cultural landscape, to Indonesian school children as well as foreign tourists. To that end, Sang Putu Kaler Surata and his students at Mahasaraswati University in Denpasar have just published a school book about the subaks and the World Heritage.
Landscape architect Julia Watson and I have prepared a design proposal, “Gateways to Sacred Lands”, offering initial suggestions for imagining educational facilities in the World Heritage. When the Governing Assembly comes into existence, the intent is to use these ideas as catalysts for discussions in the villages. Our hopes for the World Heritage are discussed in a recent posting at Agroforestry World, and plans for these design charrettes are outlined in a short video about empowering the Governing Assembly:
Photos from fieldwork:
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O-yama: Mountain Faith and Uncertainty in Late Capitalist Japan
Every year in July a small group of people gather on the summit of Ontake-san, a 3,067-meter volcanic mountain in the central Japanese prefecture of Nagano, to ceremoniously open it for the summer season. They do so with prayers to the gods, or kami, who dwell on the mountain. After Shinto priests have welcomed the kami with chants and offerings, representatives of several local constituencies come forward to offer prayers; included among them are employees of Japan’s national Forestry Agency and officials from local government and business offices. Continue reading
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Tagged conservation, development, engagement, forestry, japan, resilience, spiritual ecology, tourism
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Making Peace with Nature: The Greening of the Korean Demilitarized Zone
Through my ongoing research on the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), I am engaging with broader questions about the “nature” of militarized landscapes and the production of their ecological value. In this piece, I examine how South Korean state and NGO projects configure the DMZ as a unique site of biodiversity that could provide the basis for sustainable development and also peace on the Korean peninsula. Continue reading
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Tagged biodiversity, conservation, engagement, militarized ecologies, neoliberal nature, NGOs, South Korea
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Protecting Cultural Environments in Northern Wisconsin: Anthropology’s Contribution to a Tribal Initiative
In 2012, the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians engaged research specialists working in several different fields, including anthropology, the physical sciences, and law. Our assignment was to assemble a report to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about air quality on the tribe’s reservation in northern Wisconsin. With this report, the tribe aims to redesignate its reservation’s air quality from Class II to Class I under the “Prevention of Significant Deterioration” provisions of the federal Clean Air Act. Continue reading
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Tagged air quality, conservation, consultancy, engagement, EPA, food, indigenous people, mining, United States, wisconsin
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Gathering Divergent Forest Honeys: Collections and Commodity Flows in the Philippines
When I began researching honey collecting in the Philippines, I never anticipated that making visual collections of objects and images associated with marketing honey was going to become a powerful way of stimulating discussion about my study. But the clues were there all along. Collections are things brought together, in so many senses of the term. Such assemblages have a capacity for telling stories about how different products make their ways through the world, and into our homes, bodies and lives. Continue reading
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Tagged Commodity flows, engagement, food, forestry, indigenous people, NGOs, Non-Timber Forest Products, Philippines, socio-environmental justice
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Cloaking, not Bleaching: the Back Story from Inside Bureaucracy
…good bureaucracies do not bleach out local context. Instead, they create big, simplified umbrellas that cloak the complex, dynamic range of local circumstances and thereby give the staff of government bureaucracies the space to address local circumstances despite changes in political direction. I base this assertion on twenty-five years’ experience working with USAID, and on the literature on good governance. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged biodiversity, bureaucracy, conservation, consultancy, development, engagement, United States, USAID
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Genese Marie Sodikoff on forest conservation, Malagasy worker-peasants and biodiversity
ENGAGEMENT editor Rebecca Garvoille recently caught up with Genese Marie Sodikoff, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, to discuss her new book, Forest and Labor in Madagascar: From Colonial Concession to Global Biosphere (2012, Indiana University Press), and its broader contributions to forest conservation and socio-environmental justice debates in Madagascar. This interview is the fourth installment in an ENGAGEMENT series exploring how environmental-anthropological book projects inspire meaningful engagements in study sites across the globe. Continue reading
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Tagged africa, biodiversity, books, colonialism, conservation, development, engagement, forestry, interview, Madagascar, socio-environmental justice, worker-peasants
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Settler Colonial Nature in the Everglades
Americans live in a settler colonial society, and this shapes how we understand and engage nature. In the vast expanse of slow-flowing water and drained agricultural lands known as the Florida Everglades, thinking about settler colonialism helps make sense of Burmese python hunts and Seminole water rights, of scientific restoration models and National Park policies. Doing so informs my own ethnographic research on the relationship between peoples’ sense of belonging and the ways that they value water in the Everglades. Continue reading
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Tagged colonialism, conservation, development, engagement, Florida Everglades, indigenous people, inequality, socio-environmental justice, United States
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Campus Food Projects: Engines for a More Sustainable System?
Back in 2005, as Emory University embraced sustainability as part of a new strategic plan, it was the physicians on the visioning committee who insisted on including food as a priority. Recognizing that environmental, economic, health, and social justice concerns intertwined with food, the committee encouraged local sourcing of vegetables, fruits, dairy, and poultry from farms with sustainable certifications. Imported items (bananas, coffee, tea) could contribute to campus goals by embracing products with Fair Trade or organic certification. Continue reading
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Tagged agriculture, education, engagement, food, United States
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Sustainability and Food Production in the Hoosier Heartland: Learning through Local Engagement
Once a booming agricultural and factory town, Muncie, Indiana, is today a post-industrial rustbelt city grappling with questions about its economic and environmental futures. As heavy industries left town, Muncie’s economy has flagged, leaving some 24% of its residents at or below the poverty line. To make matters worse, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) determined in 2007 that one-third of the city’s former industrial sites were brownfields that posed risks to human health and safety. In spite of these challenges, Muncie residents are transforming and revitalizing their city. In particular, they have shown renewed and growing interest in sustainably produced foods as a boon to overall health, safety and environmental restoration. Innovative partnerships have enabled Ball State University (BSU) professors and students to directly contribute to these community efforts. Inspired by Robert and Helen Merrell Lynd’s pioneering community study, Middletown, BSU professors and students are expanding this tradition of conducting engaged, local research to benefit the region. The result has been the transformation of former brownfields into public wetlands. Also through direct civic engagement, student volunteers have helped remove 70,000 pounds of trash from the White River watershed over the last six years. As significant as these restoration efforts are for the community, local residents are also finding ways to combine sustainable economic development with environmental restoration. Continue reading
Posted in Engagement Blog
Tagged agriculture, brownfields, engagement, food, industrial pollution, socio-environmental justice, United States, US Midwest
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