Seeing Like a Publicist

Chapter 1, Seeing Like a Publicist, locates the origins of public relations alongside emerging environmental narratives at the beginning of the twentieth century. The United States Forest Service, a federal bureau established during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, represented a vision of nature as resource for development, at odds with the romantic spirit of wilderness preservationists such as John Muir. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot developed sophisticated mechanisms and messages to promote his commitment to a distinctly American culture of nature, qualifying and transforming the character of environmental information to the news-reading public in the process. Pinchot developed foundational concepts and practices of public relations that would leave deep grooves in the American experience of environmentalism.

Environmental counter-narratives of Mapuche and Māori primary school children

<p>Scholars working from decolonial perspectives examine how processes of colonisation have marginalised local and contextualised knowledges in favour of dominant, usually Western, monological claims to ‘Truth'. These monological truths are characterised by binaries of separation such as nature/culture, adult/child and human/environment which subjugate non-binary ways of knowing. Around the world, children’s, and particularly indigenous children’s, environmental knowledges are rendered incomplete and non-scientific within processes of State-sanctioned monocultural formal education. Decolonial scholars argue that this subjugation lies at the heart of humans’ destructive ecological practices and the current crisis of sustainability. In this thesis I explore the environmental narratives of two groups of indigenous primary school children in Chile and Aotearoa New Zealand in an effort to contribute to decolonial research and explore counter-narratives. I use a Critical Pedagogies of Place analytical lens to understand how concepts of cultural decolonisation and ecological reinhabitation were represented within the children’s audio-visual environmental narratives and consider how these counter-narratives may help us to practice more creative and inclusive 'border thinking' to address environmental problems.</p>

Environmental counter-narratives of Mapuche and Māori primary school children

<p>Scholars working from decolonial perspectives examine how processes of colonisation have marginalised local and contextualised knowledges in favour of dominant, usually Western, monological claims to ‘Truth'. These monological truths are characterised by binaries of separation such as nature/culture, adult/child and human/environment which subjugate non-binary ways of knowing. Around the world, children’s, and particularly indigenous children’s, environmental knowledges are rendered incomplete and non-scientific within processes of State-sanctioned monocultural formal education. Decolonial scholars argue that this subjugation lies at the heart of humans’ destructive ecological practices and the current crisis of sustainability. In this thesis I explore the environmental narratives of two groups of indigenous primary school children in Chile and Aotearoa New Zealand in an effort to contribute to decolonial research and explore counter-narratives. I use a Critical Pedagogies of Place analytical lens to understand how concepts of cultural decolonisation and ecological reinhabitation were represented within the children’s audio-visual environmental narratives and consider how these counter-narratives may help us to practice more creative and inclusive 'border thinking' to address environmental problems.</p>

Virtual Recollection: Artifact Engagement in Three-Dimensional Environments

<p>Cultural institutions, specifically libraries, museums, and archives, have long been recognised for their collection and preservation of artifacts as a means of conserving cultural memory. With an emergence of digital modes of archiving, an emphasis has been placed on reproducing existing physical artifacts as digital representations and archival of born-digital media. Within the common practice of representing three-dimensional digital artifacts as two-dimensional counterparts, only a facet of the original artifact is represented; omitting valuable spatial and contextual information while precluding opportunities for new forms of artifactual engagement. By adopting the gaming engine Unity3D, software for interfacing with archive collections was developed to explore how digital three-dimensional spatiality within cultural institution practice may enhance interaction between users and artifacts. Using a combination of configuration, probe, and abstract experimentalist devices, this research explored ways users may engage with digital artifacts in their native spatiality, and the opportunities or limitations these interactions may give rise to. By exploiting diegetic space intrinsic within interfaces, environmental narratives may become powerful tools when communicating and understanding artifactual information. This paper delineates aspects of narrative potential within artifacts and their surrounding environment possible through three-dimensional representation.</p>

Virtual Recollection: Artifact Engagement in Three-Dimensional Environments

<p>Cultural institutions, specifically libraries, museums, and archives, have long been recognised for their collection and preservation of artifacts as a means of conserving cultural memory. With an emergence of digital modes of archiving, an emphasis has been placed on reproducing existing physical artifacts as digital representations and archival of born-digital media. Within the common practice of representing three-dimensional digital artifacts as two-dimensional counterparts, only a facet of the original artifact is represented; omitting valuable spatial and contextual information while precluding opportunities for new forms of artifactual engagement. By adopting the gaming engine Unity3D, software for interfacing with archive collections was developed to explore how digital three-dimensional spatiality within cultural institution practice may enhance interaction between users and artifacts. Using a combination of configuration, probe, and abstract experimentalist devices, this research explored ways users may engage with digital artifacts in their native spatiality, and the opportunities or limitations these interactions may give rise to. By exploiting diegetic space intrinsic within interfaces, environmental narratives may become powerful tools when communicating and understanding artifactual information. This paper delineates aspects of narrative potential within artifacts and their surrounding environment possible through three-dimensional representation.</p>

HUMANISTIC ASPECTS OF ECOLOGICAL VALUES IN BUDDHISM AND TAOISM AND THEIR SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE

The tendency to seek the harmonization of the relationship between nature and man is as relevant as ever. In the social value discourse, increase in the role of religion and religions in public space encourages religions themselves to become useful to society with their environmental narratives, and society – to be more attentive to their potential. After all, now the answers to the question of how to save humanity without global losses and how to move from a destructive type of development to a regulated one are as relevant as ever. How to mobilize moral and intellectual potential? It is obvious that global problems affect absolutely all segments of the population: Christians and Buddhists, agnostics and atheists. Undoubtedly, these issues concern churches and their spiritual leaders. In the article, the author reveals humanistic aspects of ecological ideas of the East (on the example of Buddhism and Taoism), explains the resource of Buddhist and Taoist environmental wisdom in its heuristic possibilities for today. Relevant guidelines are important for analysis and reflection, at least because they have mentally shaped the ecological culture of its adherents. And as is known, the ecological construct of a number of Eastern countries is recognized in the West as worthy of approval and imitation for the formation of a model of sustainable development and potential establishment of environmentally friendly society. The author focuses not so much on the dogmatic features of the substantiation of Buddhist and Taoist ideas (in tendencies and directions), as on the identification of their common humanistic logic, which can be understood and accepted by Western people (they do not have to become the followers of relevant Eastern doctrines). The researcher also considers the value potential of the worldview cultures in the aspect of sacralization of the rhythms of nature, reverence for its beauty as an image of wise cosmic “industry”. The article implements the disciplinary interaction of religious studies, applied ethics, aesthetic hermeneutics.

Understanding Conceptions of ‘Nature’ for Environmental Sustainability: A Case Study in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand

Empirical research that inductively investigates lay conceptions of ‘nature’ is scarce, despite global environmental narratives around sustainability calling for humans to have harmonious relationships with ‘nature’. This paper presents inductive research that attends to the empirical knowledge gap by exploring how respondents self-reportedly conceive ‘nature’ using Auckland, New Zealand as a case study. Results suggested that conceptions of ‘nature’ within the respondent group are diverse and range across 17 themes. Most commonly, respondents conceived ‘nature’ as being something that neither humans nor human influence or activities are a part of. This finding is consistent with what has been found by previous deductive research approaches to understanding conceptions of ‘nature’. However, this research provides a deeper understanding by identifying that respondents form associations with over 60 ‘aspects’ of ‘nature’. By highlighting the complexity of ‘nature’ from a human perspective and being able to identify significant components of ‘nature’ that people associate with, this study not only provides valuable insight for environmental management in the New Zealand study site, but also has potential to support improved management of human–nature interactions that can have a more targeted impact towards achieving sustainability goals at the global scale.

Exploring the Interconnection between Native American Land/Environment and Women

This article explores the relationship between Native American lands/environment and the women from ecocritical /ecofeminist perspectives. It has been postulated that while the Euro- American accounts of the history, culture, indigenous women and their relation with nature/land project stereotypical, negative images, Louise Erdrich, through the employment of hybrid narrative techniques combining Eurocentric and Native American modes of narration, has reconfigured the Native American women's environmental identity/subjectivity. This study conducts discourse analysis of the two richly thematic environmental narratives of Louise Erdrich to establish the interconnectivity between women and lands within the realm of ecofeminism. The primary texts explored include Tracks and Love Medicine. The study's contribution is it's highlighting the significance of the Native American Ecofeminist narratives that consider environmental issues to be human issues and thus positively affect the human attitude towards nature.

Connecting with landscapes: intentional access to green space.

This book chapter begins with a discussion of environmental narratives and the ways they shape their collective beliefs about natural landscapes, and then presents conservation and preservation ideas and strategies followed by a variety of approaches to integrating nature into the places and landscapes where people live, focusing on (1) environmental narratives, (2) conservation and preservation, (3) green by design, and (4) socioecological approach to human health. People from many disciplines have an opportunity to bring nature and people together in forms that can be experienced through everyday life. Simultaneously, we can continue to protect larger conservation areas in ways that are socially just, helping to combat global warming while protecting ways of life, Indigenous knowledge, and human dignity. The future of the planet depends on acting both locally and globally while helping individual people access a sense of connection to the natural world that translates to action to safeguard it for future generations.

Third-Spaces and the Creation of Socio-Spatial Identity

This chapter provides a polite critique of the conventional ways of thinking about space and the intertwined dialectics of the socio-spatial narratives. Conventionally, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) main document on the Creative Cities Network (UCCN) emphasizes two crucial pillars of sustainable development and urban regeneration which are creativity and culture. The first term deals with creative cities and urban areas, while the second addresses culture as the human product that takes either a tangible or an intangible form. Regarding the meaning of activities in contemporary human society, one of the aims of this chapter is to decode the cultural activities in the city of Basel in Switzerland. In other words, this chapter is about exploring some aspects of the cultural life and creativity in the ancient city of Basel from a sociological perspective. Theoretically, Basel's culture of festivals and carnivals could be seen as the fundamental quality that brings the people of the city together. For instance, the cultural features of Basel Fasnacht, Morgenstreich, and Basel Herbstmesse reveal highly important aspects of the tangible and intangible dimensions of the culture of Basel as an ancient, medieval European city dating back to the 4th century AD. Methodologically, this chapter aims to represent and produce anthropological knowledge using visual media of research through the methodology of the “Actor-Network Theory”. This method of research comprises three main steps: 1) collecting visual ethnography, 2) designing the Actantial model based on Aristotle's semiotic square, 3) creating visual storyboarding to finalize the Actantiality map through analyzing power dynamics among the human narratives, the historical and cultural narratives, the spatial-environmental narratives, and the official narratives of the state. The main findings of this chapter may confirm or rebut the author's two hypotheses, stating “the city's identity is a mutual manifestation of human-spatial interaction,” and “not all creative cities have to be modern ones; some ancient cities are indeed creative cities based on their cultural, historical and social uniqueness.”