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In the continuous search for sustainability, the exchange of diverse perspectives, assumptions, and values is indispensable to environmental protection. Through anthropological and ethnographic analyses, this collection addresses how interests, values, and ideologies affect dialogue and sustainability work. Drawing on studies from three continents - Europe, North America, and South America - the paradoxes and the plurality of meanings associated with the creation of sustainable futures are explored. The book focuses on how communication practices collide with organizational frameworks, customary practices, livelihoods, and landscape. In so doing, the authors explore the meanings of environmental communication, pushing beyond environmental advocacy rhetoric to emphasize stronger anthropological engagement within communities to achieve more impactful environmental communication practice.
Empirically the book's chapters explore a diverse set of issues, ranging from coastal management in the European north to Native American place naming in Alaska. They further share findings from studies of contaminated land remediation in Sweden, conflicts over water resources in Chile, management of heritage and national parks in Northern Arizona, and cultural transmission in Slovakia.This is an open access book.
List of contents
Introduction.- Dancing with Lava: Indigenous Interactions with an Active Volcano in Arizona.- Arsenic Fields: Community Understandings of Risk, Place, and Landscape.- Cultural Transmission in Slovak Mountain Regions: Local Knowledge as Symbolic Argumentation.- Community Voices, Practices, and Memories in Environmental Communication: Iliamna Lake Yup'ik Place Names, Alaska.- Demographic Change and Local Community Sustainability: Heritagization of Land Abandonment Symbols.- Living Stone Bridges: Epistemological Divides in Heritage Environmental Communication.- "The Sea Has No Boundaries": Collaboration and Communication Between Actors in Coastal Planning on the Swedish West Coast.- Power, Conflicts, and Environmental Communication in the Struggles for Water Justice in Rural Chile: Insights from the Epistemologies of the South and the Anthropology of Power.- Commentary.
About the author
Annelie Sjölander-Lindqvist is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Senior Lecturer in Human Ecology at the Gothenburg Research Institute and School of Global Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Ivan Murin is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Social Studies and Ethnology at Matej Bel University, Slovakia, and visiting scholar at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic.
Michael E. Dove is a lecturer at the Department of English and American Studies, Matej Bel University in Banská Bystrica, Slovakia.
