Comprised of independent yet globally networked local initiatives, Transition is a movement-of-movements that cultivates community resilience in the face of climate change and resource depletion. Although non-Indigenous participants recognize Indigenous rights, perspectives, and knowledge as essential to the post-carbon transition, there has been inadequate attention to how constructive connections could be cultivated. In a contemporary context of climate crisis, ecological degradation, and socioeconomic injustice, what does it mean to be a good ally? How can we ensure that Indigenous rights and perspectives are respected and amplified during this time of rapid cultural and technological transformation? This article begins to answer these questions. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research on the North American Transition movement, previous work on Indigenous/non-Indigenous alliances, and a review of literature on alliances' historical problems and future prospects, I explore how movement participants' commitments to long-sighted temporalities, emplaced connections, and equitable interactions make Transition a promising site for decolonizing alliances.

This chapter explores optimism’s role in shaping how participants in the Transition movement for climate change resilience approach the future and the actions they take to create it. Drawing on ethnographic research, reflexive experience as a “native anthropologist” in her own Transition group, and a comprehensive review of transition-related literature, the author considers movement participants’ future-oriented assumptions and conscious future-creation practices in order to trace the significance of optimism in Transition culture. The phrase optimistic futuring is introduced to indicate a positive, purposive, and active relationship with the future as a temporal frame. Conceptual as well as concrete ways in which optimistic futuring is expressed within Transition culture are described. Optimism is conveyed in participants’ belief that change is both inevitable and directable. It is displayed more tangibly through daily practices that enable participants to put pieces of a sustainable and fulfilling next world in place. Ultimately, this chapter argues that optimism guides the “everyday activism” that distinguishes Transition from other contemporary environmental social movements, as it manifests in forms ranging from waste reduction and gardening to community building and creative expression. It concludes by calling for—and suggesting options for actualizing—increased anthropological attention to optimistic futuring.

Sustainability and Climate ChangeVol. 15, No. 6 ViewpointEverybody Hurts: Embracing Plurality and Empathy in the Climate Anxiety ConversationAnna J. WillowAnna J. WillowAddress correspondence to: Anna J. Willow, Department of Anthropology, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, USA E-mail Address: willow.1@osu.eduDepartment of Anthropology, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, USA.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:21 Dec 2022https://doi.org/10.1089/scc.2022.0118AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 15Issue 6Dec 2022 InformationCopyright 2022, Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishersTo cite this article:Anna J. Willow.Everybody Hurts: Embracing Plurality and Empathy in the Climate Anxiety Conversation.Sustainability and Climate Change.Dec 2022.370-379.http://doi.org/10.1089/scc.2022.0118Published in Volume: 15 Issue 6: December 21, 2022PDF download

This article calls on sustainability researchers to place visions of the future at the center of their analyses. Recognizing humans as reflexive elements of socio-ecological systems, it proceeds from the premise that how people think about the future has significant consequences for the realities that ultimately ensue. The ideas presented here are informed by a qualitative/open-form survey designed to illuminate respondents’ visions of the future. Completed by participants in the Transition movement for climate change resilience, survey responses indicate that Transition participants’ visions are both exceptionally holistic and consciously connected to their present actions. These findings have important implications for the development of sustainable programs and systems. More broadly, this article argues that exploring how individuals and groups envision the future offers (1) a new appreciation of conceptions of the future as distinctive (sub)cultural attributes, (2) an understanding of how visions of the future influence actions in the present, (3) an enhanced capacity for anticipation and proactive response, and (4) opportunities to inspire diverse audiences by conveying the possibility of positive futures. Acknowledging the ability of engaged scholarship to change not only how people imagine the world but also how the material world takes shape, this work underscores researchers’ moral obligation to contribute to the creation of more sustainable futures.

Reviewed by: Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory by Brittany Luby Anna J. Willow (bio) Dammed: The Politics of Loss and Survival in Anishinaabe Territory by Brittany Luby University of Manitoba Press, 2020 BRITTANY LUBY'S INTEREST IN hydroelectric development's impacts on northwestern Ontario Anishinaabe communities is deeply personal. Herself a product of the diaspora of Dalles 38C First Nations members who left the reserve between the 1950s and 1970s, Luby's research originated in questions she asked her father as a child in the nearby off-reserve town of Kenora. Why had his family left the reserve? Dammed tells the compelling story of how First Nations peoples along the Winnipeg River responded to changes in their physical and political landscape between the 1873 signing of Treaty Three and the 1970s. Dammed integrates a multiplicity of perspectives over time and space. Luby introduces her paternal great-great-grandmother (Ogimaamaashiik/Matilda Martin) early and returns to her experiences often. Luby describes the importance of water and all it sustains, noting that Anishinaabe negotiators would not have agreed to Treaty Three without the promise of enduring access to their fisheries. The colonization of the region's waters began shortly thereafter, with Ontario claiming authority even as Anishinaabeg "refused to abide by provincial reimaginings of Indigenous lands" and instead "lived their lives in defiance of them" (39). Dammed's chapters proceed largely chronologically, covering hydroelectric development's impacts on ice travel, muskrat populations, wild rice harvests, and fisheries as well as Anishinaabe exclusion from decision-making processes. Through it all, Anishinaabeg resisted with whatever tools they had at hand, whether constructing a rock dam to protect wild rice beds or filing formal damage claims with the Indian Affairs Branch. The struggle for cultural and spatial continuity also took ironic forms, as Anishinaabe men worked in dam construction so they could remain home with their families and protect their claim to reserve lands even as their labor ultimately contributed to their community's displacement. The end result of the Winnipeg River dams—combined with the growth of industry and population in upstream Kenora—was a contaminated river and destroyed subsistence economy. No longer could the river flush waste away from the reserve. The decay of organic materials in mill waste elevated mercury levels. The tons of untreated human excrement that flowed past Dalles 38C exemplify the treatment of this and other First [End Page 164] Nations communities. Luby accords special attention to women's experiences (a topic that could itself fill an entire book), highlighting contamination's impacts on breastfeeding and customary diets. Dammed quietly, consistently, and impressively centers Anishinaabe perspectives and homelands. Luby weaves oral historical interviews (mainly nine interviews conducted with selected Elders) with archival research, using Elders' stories to guide her search for documentary sources. The occasional textual confusion that results is outweighed by the richness of Luby's narrative. Despite her comprehensive treatment of the case at hand, unanswered questions remain. Given the author's personal connection to the story, readers may wish to know more about her relationship with the Dalles community, how her positionality shaped the research experience, and how these things changed over time. Given that Luby concludes by pointing out the contemporary relevance of her historical study, the book begs for connections to recent and ongoing controversies surrounding hydroelectric projects across Canada and beyond. British Columbia's Site C Dam and Labrador's Muskrat Falls Dam would top this list. Scholars of Anishinaabe history and the Kenora region will be Dammed's most enthusiastic readers. They will be joined by historians and environmental social scientists interested in Canadian First Nations issues. University courses in environmental history and Indigenous studies that adopt this text will gain a useful case study and discussion catalyst. While more could be done to place this important story within a wider Canadian/global Indigenous context and additional theoretical connections could be made, the fact that such connections are left largely to the reader may enhance the book's efficacy in upper-level university classrooms, where students will feel empowered to undertake these tasks. Yet the value of Luby's work is not just academic. Dammed should be...

This article explores the Transition movement for climate change resilience as a cultural revitalization movement that is unfolding in response to the unique problems and prospects of the Anthropocene era. Drawing on ethnographic research, I suggest that personal well-being and community cohesion are essential motives for environmental movement participation. As Transition participants work to generate more satisfying cultural options, they relieve existential angst, reclaim the possibility of a positive future, create a safe space for radical resistance, and engender a simultaneously local and global sense of community. Ultimately, I argue that embracing environmental and (inter)personal action as both complementary and inextricably intertwined is essential if we are to catalyze the broad behavioral changes needed to evade catastrophic climate change and socioecological collapse.

Humanity faces a number of wicked problems, from global climate change and the coronavirus pandemic to systemic racism and widening economic inequality. Since such complex and dynamic problems are plagued by disagreement among stakeholders over their nature and cause, they are notoriously difficult to solve. This commentary argues that if humanity truly aspires to address the grand challenges of today and tomorrow, then graduate education must be redesigned. It is no longer sufficient to train students only to be experts in their respective fields. They also must hone the interpersonal and professional skills that allow them to collaborate successfully within diverse teams of researchers and other stakeholders. Here the conceptual framework of wicked science is proposed, including what a graduate program in wicked science would achieve and why such training matters both to researchers and the communities where they work. If humanity hopes to effectively tackle the world’s wicked problems, then it is time to train a generation of wicked scientists.

Abstract:This essay investigates how genre petrofictions of the North American oil boom engage with Indigenous perspectives and narratives. We find that most of these texts mirror the abuses that created our petroreality through a process of Indigenous-washing, which involves dismissing Indigenous peoples as complex individuals and sovereign entities and replacing them with strapping petro-heroes. Yet, at the same time, a growing corpus of texts legitimate Indigenous perspectives and highlight Indigenous narratives and so promise to reshape petrofiction into a tool for significant and sustained Indigenous empowerment and environmental justice.

SummaryThis essay directs the theoretical energy of the emerging anthropology of the future genre toward the essential task of generating new anthropological prospects for making positive world contributions. Embracing visioning as a promising ethnographic technique, I develop an ethnography of the future drawn from central Ohio Transition participants’ prefigurative actions and descriptions of desirable futures. I suggest that temporal imaginings have very real effects on the world we ultimately (re)build and outline anthropology’s roles in the future‐making process.

In June 2016, BC Hydro (British Columbia's provincially-owned electric utility) opened a new exhibit at the W. A. C. Bennett Dam Visitor Centre. The Our Story, Our Voice gallery brought the hardships endured by the region's First Nations citizens as a result of the fifty-year-old dam to light. A carefully crafted apology from BC Hydro's Deputy CEO figured prominently in the gallery's opening ceremony. But with a controversial new dam threatening the province's last stretch of free-flowing Peace River, both the exhibit and the apology were deeply ironic. This article draws on my complex and contradictory experience at the exhibit's opening ceremony to ground an exploration of irony's analytical value: I examine the irony inherent in apologizing for past transgressions while perpetuating very similar new ones, investigate the exhibit itself as a paradoxical presentation, and acknowledge that my presence in British Columbia was possible because of a foundation established by a man-Axel Wenner-Gren-who was both an early proponent of damming the Peace River and an ethnographic enthusiast. Embracing reflexive attention to momentary, power-laden, and occasionally uncomfortable encounters with people, places, and evidence, I demonstrate how contemplating irony can serve as a compelling way to convert experience into understanding.

Reviewed by: Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Dominic Boyer, and: Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene by Cymene Howe Anna J. Willow Dominic Boyer, Energopolitics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 249 pp. Cymene Howe, Ecologics: Wind and Power in the Anthropocene. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. 241 pp. We live in troubling times. Our climate is changing rapidly. A sixth great extinction is well underway. We are approaching—or have already surpassed—countless critical ecological thresholds (if you still need convincing, see Steffen et al. 2015). Alongside other conscientious scholars, anthropologists are searching for constructive ways to contribute to an uncertain new world in which humans play a dominant (and largely destructive) role in influencing global climate, landforms, and ecosystems (Crutzen 2002). Dominic Boyer and Cymene Howe are among those who have stepped up to chart an innovative and inspiring course. Their Wind and Power in the Anthropocene duograph revolves around a central paradox of the Anthropocene epoch. Arguing from distinct but complementary theoretical perspectives, Boyer and Howe examine how it is that something we hoped could solve our most pressing problems can fail [End Page 1261] to achieve any significant transformation. Specifically, these books are about how wind power—a renewable, non-carbon energy source—can reproduce the inequitable and unsustainable structures of the neoliberal extractive economy. Boyer and Howe take readers to the towns and terrains of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where they conducted 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork. Here, air moving from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean passes through a gap in the Sierra Madre mountains, making southeastern Oaxaca the windiest place in Mexico as well as one of the windiest in the world. Identified by developers as an ideal location to harness the wind, “power” in this case refers not only to generated electricity, but also to the political struggles invoked by efforts to convert moving air into a commoditized resource. This conjoined pair of books invites readers to enter emerging conversations about wind power and extractivism, climate change and post-millennial precarity, natural resource developments and disputes, and anthropology’s potential roles in navigating the complex realities that await. In their co-authored preface, Boyer and Howe tentatively define a duograph as a “conversation between researchers that materializes in two texts, which do not require analytic synthesis or consensus” (viii). By adopting an experimental ethnographic form that demands readers’ active engagement, the authors aim to reveal “the multiplicity of stakes and attentions existing within the practice of research collaboration” (viii). While Wind and Power in the Anthropocene draws on long-term participant-observation, hundreds of interviews, and a door-to-door survey conducted as a team, it thus consists of two separate books that are intended to be read in tandem.1 Boyer and Howe worked together to obtain a comprehensive understanding of wind power in Oaxaca, taking the views and actions of multiple stakeholders throughout the region into account. However, the authors engage with separate theoretical frameworks and deploy different textual structures in their quest to advance their overlapping arguments. Dominic Boyer’s book, Energopolitics, takes impetus from theories of capital, biopower, and energopower—a neologism he proposed and defined in an earlier review as “a genealogy of modern power that rethinks political power through the twin analytics of electricity and fuel” (2014:325)—with the goal of generating “an anthropological theory of political power for use in the Anthropocene” (xi). Boyer correctly [End Page 1262] maintains that making sense of contemporary contestations over wind power in Oaxaca requires tracing the region’s history of land tenure, labor, sovereignty, and colonial imposition. He takes up the challenge of reforming anthropolitics (an inevitably human-centered understanding of political practice) in a way that facilitates addressing the unique conditions and challenges evoked by the Anthropocene context (1). Thus, while his examination of energy inevitably expands into the environmental realm of the more-than-human, his central focus is deeply and explicitly political. Following a richly theoretical introduction, Boyer opts to show rather than tell, demonstrating what an anthropology of Anthropocene power can look like through a detailed ethnographic account that only occasionally...

This article considers why some people welcome externally imposed resource extractive development projects while seemingly similar others vehemently reject them. Informed by an understanding of human cultural and political undertakings as components of complex and conjoined systems that are simultaneously social and ecological, I identify economic, political, environmental, and cultural experiences and values that guide individuals’ decisions to embrace, accept, or oppose extractive industry. Drawing on recent ethnographic research in northeastern British Columbia—where First Nations and Euro-Canadian citizens concurrently confront ongoing logging, extensive oil and gas extraction, construction of a third massive hydroelectric dam, and renewed metallurgical coal mining—I suggest that diverse responses are significantly influenced by whether or not individuals perceive extractive industry as having adverse economic effects, the level of trust they place in governmental decision making, and whether or not they connect extractive industry to injustice and violations of citizens’ rights. In an era of unprecedented human impact, I ultimately argue, local outcomes of global resource extraction debates have an important role to play in shaping the future of our societies and our world.

Understanding ExtrACTIVISM surveys how contemporary resource extractive industry works and considers the responses it inspires in local citizens and activists. Chapters cover a range of extractive industries operating around the world, including logging, hydroelectric dams, mining, and oil and natural gas extraction. Taking an activist anthropological stance, Anna Willow examines how culture and power inform recent and ongoing disputes between projects' proponents and opponents, beneficiaries and victims. Through a series of engaging case studies, she argues that diverse contemporary natural resource conflicts are underlain by a culturally constituted 'extractivist' mind-set and embedded in global patterns of political inequity. Offering a synthesizing framework for making sense of complex interconnections among environmental, social, and political dimensions of natural resource disputes, Willow reflects on why extractivism exists, why it matters, and what we might be able to do about it. The book is valuable reading for students and researchers in the environmental social sciences as well as for activists and practitioners.