Incorporating equity into climate resilience planning, especially through participatory processes, is important to adequately address social vulnerability and avoid reproducing inequities. Recent analyses of resilience and adaptation plans in the United States suggest that there is increasing attention on equity and justice, but a wide variation in how it is being incorporated and implemented. Available studies of resilience planning are limited by their focus on larger urban areas and on plan contents. This research contributes a qualitative analysis of participatory engagement for resilience planning in smaller cities and rural areas. It presents findings from community case studies used as part of human-centered design research to develop an equitable resilience planning tool. Materials from the tool were used to conduct participatory engagement activities including storytelling, mapping, and brainstorming actions that elicited community members’ experiences with hazards and disasters and ideas for equitable resilience actions. Themes that emerged from the qualitative analysis of the workshop discussions were: community members’ include both environmental and social concerns in addressing resilience, challenges associated with social vulnerability framing, the underlying social systems that perpetuate inequities, recognizing different types of trauma, the power of convening, and challenges with sustaining engagement without dedicated resources. This article provides insights that inform efforts to better incorporate equity into resilience planning and advance the study of equitable resilience.

We investigate the potential of the 'discarding well' concept to productively reframe technomanagerial solutions to the operational challenges of disaster waste and debris management. Drawing from interviews and focus groups with government practitioners, we examine institutional and operational norms in decision-making regarding disaster debris sorting, staging, transit, treatment, and final disposal. Findings expose tensions among competing implicit and explicit 'goods' such as urgent recovery, environmental protection, and sustainability. The characteristics of 'discarding well' illuminate a need for relational accountability in disaster waste management, especially a centering of 'who' (alongside 'what') is discarded by conventional siloed management practices. We put forth disaster discards as a boundary object for furthering applied anthropology.

Building community resilience requires centering equity in resilience planning processes. Tools and resources for strengthening community resilience need to address equity in both their content and the process for using them. This is especially so for communities living in proximity to contaminated lands that face compounding hazards (i.e., environmental, disaster, and climate -related); legacies of institutional or structural disenfranchisement; challenges with inclusion of minority populations in planning; and constraints on doing data-intensive planning and man-agement in under-resourced and underserved jurisdictions. A research team from the U.S. Envi-ronmental Protection Agency is developing a new resource, the Equitable Resilience Builder, which will serve communities with intersecting social and environmental vulnerabilities, in pursuit of creating resilience plans and developing the intra-community connections to imple-ment them. This article details how the team used human-centered design to develop the Equi-table Resilience Builder. Our objective in doing so is to share the evolution of equity in the project and demonstrate key inflection points in the discovery, synthesis, and ideation phases of human -centered design. The team was able to expand their understanding of what it means to undertake resilience planning in an equitable way during engagements with state, local, tribal agencies, foundations, non-governmental organizations, and academia and through participatory work-shops. It developed design principles for how the tool might use storytelling and other techniques to address emotions and trauma, ensure local voices are heard, and encourage relationship building. This article offers lessons learned for others seeking to address resilience and equity in climate risk management, particularly when working with communities in proximity to contaminated lands.

As resilience and adaptation considerations become mainstreamed into public policy, there is an overarching desire to measure and quantify metrics and indicators that seek to evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and justness associated with outcomes of such processes. While much research has sought to develop specific indicators that may serve as proxies for these considerations, less research has focused on those normative aspects of indicator design that support a variety of goals associated with the accuracy, reproducibility, proxy value and multi-stakeholder translation of indicators, among various other goals and values. This perspective article sets forth a range of potential considerations that may be useful for those who seek to design and develop novel resilience and adaptation indicators ("RAIs"). These considerations are explored through a range of hypothetical examples that may be applicable to coastal communities that seek to address the practical challenges facing the design, execution, management and modification of RAIs.

Integration of the social sciences into climate assessments enhances report content and actionable science. The literature has identified the benefits and challenges in achieving coequal intellectual partnerships between the social and biogeophysical sciences in climate research. Less has been written on how to rectify the issue in the particular institutional context of a climate assessment. This article uses qualitative research methods to analyze social science integration in the United States' Fourth National Climate Assessment. It presents findings from focus groups held with social science-and nonsocial science-trained report authors. It finds that knowledge governance, or the formal and informal mechanisms shaping how information is produced and used, and cultural worldviews about the role of social sciences in assessments and assessments in society, affected social science integration. Report authors' principal orientation toward the social sciences was as a means of achieving what they saw as the assessment's public function, namely, to support education, decision-making, and action. Author expertise, report framing, and knowledge systems were other key themes that emerged. Based on this analysis, we propose potential pathways toward coequal intellectual partnerships in assessments by expanding the diversity of chapter teams' expertise, enhancing connections between authors and society, reconsidering report framing, and broadening inclusion of knowledge systems. We also discuss the potential role of applying social science theories and methods throughout the report life cycle from framing and engagement to evaluation.

Our article analyzes interdisciplinary literature within the social sciences on outcomes of environmental cleanups at Superfund, brownfield, and other contaminated sites. By focusing on postremediation sites and outcomes, we expand the understanding of the sociopolitical life of contaminated sites over time. First, we examine the technoscientific practices of how scientists and environmental managers seek to make cleanup outcomes legible and meaningful. Next, we engage with a wider array of literature on pollution/toxicity, uncovering circular temporalities in cleanup processes along with continuities in pollution/toxicity and in political struggle. Finally, we examine the social worlds of postremediation landscapes, drawing attention to how cleanups create new relationships among people, history, and nature. In conclusion, we identify areas of opportunity for these insights to inform the conceptualization and evaluation of cleanup outcomes in ways that better incorporate the complex dynamics of postremediation social worlds.

The scrutiny of environmental cleanups within the United States has been a growing area of interest for social scientists. Scholars have used case studies and modeling to analyze struggles for environmental justice and the economics of stigma associated with Superfund sites. This research has primarily analyzed community perspectives on remediation and removal, such as local strategies for participating in cleanup decisions. There has been less work on analyzing organizational perspectives on the social and institutional dynamics at play during cleanups. Our study addresses this gap by analyzing insights gained through interviewing U.S. Environmental Protection Agency staff who do cleanup work in brownfields, Superfund, and emergency response. This ethnographic research excavates the sedimented layers of social histories of contaminated sites: local and regional contexts, institutional power and authority, and stakeholder relationships and networks. It interrogates how these sedimented social histories affect cleanup decisions, including the temporal and spatial boundaries of sites themselves. We find that the making of relationships is as important to cleanup strategies and outcomes as the scientific and technical aspects of cleanup are. This finding highlights the importance of tools and resources to excavate these social histories during environmental remediation, removal, and decontamination work.

Solving complex environmental problems requires interdisciplinary research involving the social and environmental sciences. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is working toward solutions-driven research and interdisciplinary integration within its Office of Research and Development. This article details the history of this process and discusses lessons learned from other federal agencies seeking to integrate social and biophysical research: finding the right combination of top down and bottom up approaches; balancing objectives of advancing science and/or supporting programmatic operations; using social science methods to inform the process; and engaging multiple stakeholders. Attention to the social context of scientific practice, including research processes and research use, fosters success. Three strategies for integrating social sciences to support solutions-driven environmental research are: weaving social science throughout the research process, strengthening social networks, and fostering interdisciplinary hubs. Integration into planning and carrying out research has greater transformative potential than integration into product development and distribution. This article provides insights into institutional considerations for advancing interdisciplinarity and the social context of scientific practice in government agencies. It illustrates the multiple decision contexts and inclusion of social science at the science-policy interface.

This report is an authoritative assessment of the science of climate change, with a focus on the United States. It represents the second of two volumes of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, mandated by the Global Change Research Act of 1990.

This article compares and contrasts resilience frameworks to identify commonalities and gaps. It proposes use of a coupled human-natural systems framework (CHNS) to analyze community resilience to disasters. CHNS builds on the human ecosystem model that analyzes how institutions and social order shape fluxes and flows of resources between and within social and environmental systems. It expands on the model by including anthropological concepts of culture, agency, power, and discourse. The framework covers environmental and social legacies, pre-disaster trends and conditions, resilience measures, and system changes provoked by a disaster. The article proposes eleven categories of variables that affect resilience and discusses research steps for putting the framework into action. The CHNS framework can be used to predict system changes and identify resilience measures that allow communities to articulate and achieve their resilience goals.

Environmental cleanup may involve decontaminating an area affected by a radiological release, containing an oil spill, or remediating a Superfund site or brownfield. It is a key component of how environmental agencies work to protect public health and the environment. There are many publications on technical protocols for cleanup and waste disposal. Additionally, there has been much social science work on the social problems of environmental contamination. However, social science research on cleanup itself has been much more scattered across disciplines and incidents. To date, there has not been a comprehensive review of the social factors that affect cleanup processes and outcomes. Such social factors may include cultural worldviews that shape stakeholder perspectives on 'how clean is clean' and social relationships among stakeholders. This article fills this gap by providing an interdisciplinary literature review of the social science of environmental cleanup. Three principal themes emerged from the 97 articles that met selection criteria: effects on cleanup worker health, public engagement and decision-making, and societal benefits of cleaned-up sites. The review points to areas where further research is needed. For example, there is a lack of mixed methods and interdisciplinary engagement within the literature. Additionally, few articles compare cleanup situations. There is also a need for further investigation into specific social science topics such as labor practices, gender, race, and power relationships. To address these gaps, we argue for the development of a comprehensive framework or model as well as the exploration of broader questions complicating cleanups. Overall, this area of research has significant potential to benefit environmental cleanup policy and practice worldwide, while advancing social theory about people and the environment.

Institutions need to adapt to ensure coequal social and biophysical global change science.

This book presents the history of mountaineering on Mount Aconcagua (9,692 meters above sea level), the highest peak in the Western Hemisphere, as well as a history of the mountain itself. It traces mountaineering routes from Mendoza, Argentina, to Aconcagua’s summit, with analytical stops at the base camps, Inca mummies, and memorials along the way. The book locates these routes within broader trajectories of neocolonial scientific and adventure expeditions, regional and national identity and economy, and flows of global capital and tourists. Joy Logan argues that Aconcagua mountaineering both constructs and disrupts how modernity and globalization have shaped concepts of identity (including nation, gender, and ethnicity), tourism, and adventure.Joy Logan shows how mountaineering’s roots are largely masculine and Anglo- European in origin, from nineteenth- century scientific expeditions to Dick Bass’s 1983 ascent that made Aconcagua part of a new, global Seven Summits route. Throughout the book, the author provides a nuanced characterization of mountaineering as imperial adventure by discussing how it has been linked to Argentine nationalism as well. General José de San Martín’s 1817 crossing of the Andes, for example, is still central to how promotional tourism literature characterizes the region. The author takes pains to connect militarization and democratization in Argentina to mountaineering and tourism on Aconcagua. She places particular emphasis on the role of the Generation of the Eighties. In the 1980s, a group of Argentine climbers forged new routes on Aconcagua and on other peaks abroad. Several of these climbers went on to found a guide school and trekking companies in Mendoza and continue to have a significant influence on Mendocino mountaineering culture and economy. The author also argues that Mendocinos have sought to reterritorialize the mountain’s social space and to reconfigure regional identity. She shows how this has taken place via tourism narratives, the mountaineering economy, and park management. Reterritorialization of the mountain is not without tension, however, particularly as Mendoza’s global connections allow it to bypass national economic strongholds and discourse. Moreover, the reconfiguration of regional identity is, the author argues, an incomplete and hybrid one. On the mountain, for example, there remains a largely strict labor hierarchy that privileges male guides over female base camp workers. Mendocinos and foreigners alike celebrate the Inca- era mummy found on the mountain as evidence of the mountain’s indigenous past but fail to recognize that a modern Huarpe presence remains in the region.The author tends to utilize broad- brush phenomena such as neocolonialism and globalization to explain how and why mountaineering evolved as it did on Aconcagua. Another tendency is to describe how existing theories apply to the case at hand instead of proposing a wholly new theory of the history of mountaineering, mountains, or Latin American identity politics. The book’s strength lies in its synthesis of multiple phenomena and in the details it provides as to how, precisely, these broader trends are tied to particular places and events on the mountain. The author weaves together evidence from an impressive variety of sources, including written accounts of scientific and mountaineering expeditions, tourism artifacts including postcards, museum displays, and YouTube videos, and government and newspaper archives in Mendoza. Her analysis is largely discursive in nature. She shows how written texts and material culture reveal how Argentine and foreign actors construct the space of the mountain. While the author does include some numerical data (e.g., park entrance permits), greater attention to these data and the inclusion of other quantitative and geographical evidence (e.g., route maps) would have served to ground the textual analysis. Her analysis of historical materials is complemented by an ethnographic study of contemporary mountaineering culture, which includes participant observation on treks and interviews with guides and base camp personnel.The writing is generally clear and compelling. Each chapter tackles a different historical era and narrative theme. Chapters are further divided into sections that usually provide diverse and engaging discussions of distinct events, people, and texts. In a few places, the relation of a section to the principal chapter topic is less apparent. Chapters conclude with “Debriefs” that are quite useful in tying together argument and evidence. The author often utilizes expansive sentences that weave together complex concepts but are carefully crafted to make the argument’s essence relatively easy to follow. The compelling topic, accessible writing, and skillful blending of historical and ethnographic evidence would make the book an appropriate choice for a graduate or undergraduate seminar. The book makes a significant contribution to the history of mountaineering, the environmental history of the Andes, and the history of tourism and identity politics in Latin America.

Abstract This article shows how tourism has shaped Latin American environments by constructing touristic landscapes, causing environmental impacts, and affecting environmental problem solving. The author utilizes written records and interviews to document the environmental history of the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. The transformation of the Inca Trail from overgrown path to global hiking destination began in the early twentieth century. Foreign and Peruvian scientific expeditions socially constructed the trail as natural and cultural heritage. State and corporate actors sought to advance regional and national development via tourism. In Machu Picchu and the Inca Trail, this took the form of archaeological restoration and tourism infrastructure to showcase Cusco’s heritage and modernity. Backpacking guidebooks and trekking operators helped internationalize the trail in the 1970s. By the late 1990s, it had become an experiential pilgrimage for thousands of hikers. For state officials and tour agencies, it had become an environmental problem. In 2000, new regulations took measures to improve the trail’s environment and produce an aesthetic touristic landscape. The new rules also regimented commerce, labor, and trail users to promote tourism development. The author suggests new ways of conceiving heritage tourism and park policy as part of development as well as conservation.

This paper analyzes the material, discursive, and biophysical dimensions of fuelscapes, or energy landscapes. Ethnographic and ecological fieldwork was conducted in the Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, Peru. Andean land use studies have focused on agricultural patterns such as vertical production zones. Fuelscapes are an important, energy-based means of producing and representing landscape. They show how uncultivated lands fit into livelihood strategies and reflect historic sedimentation of landscape. Fuelscapes are shaped by ecological characteristics, historic settlement patterns and property rights, gendered and intergenerational divisions in household labor, and state conservation policies. Conservation policies delimit fuelscapes to privilege live trees, but the resultant denudation of dead wood may carry implications for ecosystem health. This study elucidates how official policies intersect with household and communal resource use strategies to produce Andean fuelscapes. It provides insight into how uncultivated ecosystems fit into land use politics, practices, and representation.

This study situates fuel collection and hearth activity in a rural village (Machu Picchu Historic Sanctuary, Cusco, Peru) as cultural practices essential to securing household and collective production and reproduction. The physical hearth is spatially fluid, allowing it to serve as material and symbolic center throughout the household's life cycle. All members from children to the elderly participate in fuel collection, providing a new means of defining household composition. Wood connects the house to uncultivated landscapes and supports reciprocal labor networks and community festivals. Gendered and intergenerational divisions of labor result in four types of collection trips involving different plant species, wood sizes, and source ecosystems. With increased tourism to Machu Picchu, daily and seasonal labor patterns are changing as men and women do tourism work and children are educated in town. The physical hearth becomes more mobile as houses are improved. Changing labor patterns mean women bear an ...

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsChristian C. Young. The Environment and Science: Social Impact and Interaction. (Science and Society Series.) xv + 299 pp., illus., index. Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC‐CLIO, 2005. $75.Keely MaxwellKeely Maxwell Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Isis Volume 97, Number 3September 2006 Publication of the History of Science Society Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/509966 Views: 29Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.