Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is arguably the greatest environmental, infrastructural, and social challenge of the 21st century. Belief and perception of the natural environment shape social norms, material culture, and... [ view full abstract ]
Anthropogenic climate change (ACC) is arguably the greatest environmental, infrastructural, and social challenge of the 21st century. Belief and perception of the natural environment shape social norms, material culture, and entrenched practices, and these, in turn, influence individual and collective ACC-mitigation behavior. The Energy Cultures Framework (Stephenson et al., 2015), which outlines this relationship in detail, has much potential to be applied within the United States of America (USA), where recent climate-related events have underlined the need for community-level resilience and acknowledgement of future risk.
Within the Dakotas, perceptions of ACC, extractive industry, and humans’ relationship with the natural environment are particularly polarised on geographic and cultural grounds, and the recent protest of the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation brought this divide to the forefront of international awareness. However, the DAPL was but one among many environmental and cultural impacts throughout the region’s colonial past, and perhaps nowhere is this history more apparent than at the Mount Rushmore National Memorial in the Black Hills.
Will Stovall’s doctoral dissertation focuses on how widespread public perspectives on ACC and the natural environment shape social norms, and how these factors influence individual behaviour and notions of responsibility. Through a series of semi-structured interviews in May-October of 2018, he will investigate public sentiments surrounding ACC, pipelines in the Dakotas (KXL and DAPL), and Mount Rushmore, and what parallels exist between these anthropogenic environmental alterations. He will engage with residents and stakeholders of the Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, and Cheyenne River Sioux Reservations, with residents (Native and non-Native) of Rapid City and Bismarck, and with visitors to Mount Rushmore from the Dakotas and from further afield.
This presentation will outline the unique social and environmental characteristics of each study site, and preliminary themes that have emerged in the first round of interviews. Ultimately, Will aims to explore insights on ACC belief and receptivity to mitigation in the region through an examination of cultural environmental philosophies within the Cultures Framework and apply his conclusions to the development of community-specific outreach strategies.
