Abstract
Climate change and exurban development present significant social, economic, and environmental challenges in Southern Appalachia. Addressing those challenges—whether to prevent them, mitigate them, or prepare for them—will require individual action and collective action at community and regional scales. However, the coordination necessary for such action will be difficult to achieve in a region long opposed to regulation, suspicious of newcomers, and characterized by increasing social diversity. One particularly salient difference that is likely to shape collective responses to climate change is the distinction between “newcomers” and “multigenerationals,” descendants of people who have lived in the region for generations. In this chapter, we draw on nearly 80 interviews to address three questions: What indicators and consequences of climate change do people observe in their everyday lives and view as relevant? How does one’s connection to this landscape shape the indicators and consequences they observe and care about? And what differences exist in how people theorize the causes of climate change? By examining this diversity of climate knowledges and climate cultures in Southern Appalachia, we hope to identify complementarities, bridges, and provocations that might help natural resource managers and community members identify effective and inclusive responses to climate change.
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Notes
- 1.
We initially divided our sample across three residential groups (“multigenerational residents” whose families had lived in the region for more than two generations, “new natives” whose families had lived in the region for one to two generations, and “newcomers who had moved to the region during their lifetime) and further subdivided each of those residential categories into two different ways of engaging with nature (livelihood-centered engagements and recreation-centered engagements). We made two changes to this during preliminary analysis. First, after finding that the “new native” category was not sufficiently distinct from either of the other residential categories, we decided to conduct most analysis only on multigenerationals and newcomers. This of course suggests that there may be a spectrum of knowledges rather than two poles, but it is analytically useful to focus on the poles. Second, we decided to split the livelihood category into those whose livelihoods are oriented around the use of nature (e.g., farming or logging) and those whose livelihoods are oriented around environmental education, conservation, and nature-based tourism.
- 2.
For example, many interviewees expressed the belief that their neighbors are climate skeptics, despite having not discussed the issue with them. We think they would be surprised to find such high levels of acknowledgment of climate change across our interviews.
- 3.
Note that there is some degree of selection bias in this sample; 49 of these 57 interviewees (86%) reported being certain that climate change exists versus 70% among those excluded from this subsample.
- 4.
This category includes mentions of CO2, greenhouse gases, fossil fuels, cars, electricity, pollution, industry, chemtrails (per one informant), and lifestyles (which was grouped here because they were most often described as fossil-fuel intensive).
- 5.
“Local land use” includes farming practices, forest management, development, an increase in asphalt or pavement, and “cutting the mountains” to build roadways. “Other national and global issues” included overpopulation, urbanization, policy, globalization of trade, broad cultural change, and Amazonian deforestation.
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Acknowledgements
We are deeply appreciative of the people of Southern Appalachia who opened their homes and their lives to us. We hope that this work will be of use as they chart their path forward.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grants BCS 1558929 and 1558930, as well as DEB 1637522. Funding support was also provided through the ANR Young Researcher Program no. ANR-13-JSH1-0005-01.
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Burke, B.J., Welch-Devine, M., Rzonca, S., Steacy, C. (2020). Using Local Observations of Climate Change to Identify Opportunities for Community Conversations in Southern Appalachia. In: Welch-Devine, M., Sourdril, A., Burke, B. (eds) Changing Climate, Changing Worlds. Ethnobiology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37312-2_10
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