A few announcements are in order before I introduce this month’s climate change researchers, AAA Climate Change Task Force member Susie Crate (Associate Professor of Anthropology, Dept of Environmental Science & Policy at George Mason University, Fairfax, VA), and President of the Culture & Agriculture section of the AAA, Richard Moore (Professor and Executive Director, Interdisciplinary Environmental Sciences program, Ohio State University, Wooster, OH).
First, please look for our call for papers for the Climate Change Task Force panel at the 2012 AAA meeting in San Francisco. The call is posted on our webpage, where you can also find contact information for individual Task Force members, as well as earlier Changing the Atmosphere columns. You may also have seen this call on the E-Anth listserv or on other section lists or websites. If you have suggestions about where we should post such announcements, or if you would like to be included in our climate change researcher database for direct email contact, please let me know (Strauss@uwyo.edu).
Cows, Crabs, and Coral Atolls: Susie Crate’s Research on Climate and Culture
When I asked Susie Crate about how she got involved with climate change research, she said that she had been aware and concerned about the issue since James Hansen’s 1988 testimony to Congress. However, it was only in the summer of 2005, during the final year of a project focused on defining future sustainability with Sakha communities in northeastern Siberia, Russia, that the significance of this issue became clear. Crate commented that “90% of inhabitants talked about changes in temperature, weather, precipitation patterns and seasonal timings that they had not known or heard of before. In response, I made the most of the last few weeks of field time to interview 33 elders, those who had the longest experience to draw from, about the changes. It was in the context of these interviews that I heard repeated concern about the Bull of Winter not arriving and started my investigation of the cultural implications of climate change.” With these data, community support, and NSF funding, she returned in 2008 to begin a formal project, examining climate change impacts on the cattle-based culture of the Sakha. That research has spun into two more climate change related projects. The first, with historical climatologist Astrid Ogilvie, focuses on understanding of how changing seasonality is affecting northern ecosystems and human-environment interactions in Sakha, Siberia, and Labrador, Canada. The second, collaborating with anthropologists Shirley Fiske and Michael Paolisso, engages three populations on Maryland’s eastern shore: watermen, farmers and newcomers. Crate is especially excited about the latter, because she thinks that we need to develop our ways of working on climate change in areas close to home.
In addition to researching the cultural implications of climate change, Susie also began seeking out other anthropologists working on this topic. Pam Puntenney and Lenora Bohren’s session A Roundtable Dialogue on Climate Change: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, at the 2006 SfAAs in Vancouver, made a great impact, but Susie notes that “however inspiring our discussion was, it was also clear that we needed to become more active in asking the questions about just what role(s) anthropology has in the issue.” Following up on this thought, she organized four more national panels on climate change in 2007 and 2008; became senior editor for the excellent volume Anthropology and Climate Change: From Encounters to Actions; and finally contributed a very useful chapter on “Climate and Culture: Anthropology in the Era of Contemporary Climate Change” for the 2011 Annual Review of Anthropology.
Crate has also worked to bring greater understanding about cultural impacts of climate change to a broader public. She was instrumental in bringing a full-time sustainability coordinator to her home university, George Mason, and published a general interest piece on the Siberian fieldwork in Natural History magazine. Her latest project is a documentary film on climate change. Ironbound Films had contacted Crate several years ago about making a documentary, saying that they wanted to get the message out to a wider audience. “They came to the field in 2010 to document our ongoing research in Siberia,”
As the lake expanded, this house in a Siberian Sakha community was abandoned. Photo courtesy Susie Crate
and during winter holiday of 2011, Crate says, “we traveled to Kiribati, an island atoll in the South Pacific that is threatened by sea-level rise. Finally, this summer we will travel to the Andes to work with communities there whose lives and livelihoods are threatened by rapid glacial melt.”
Kiribati inhabitant shows former village site, now under water. Photo courtesy Susie Crate
Corn, Climate, and the Kuwait Declaration: Richard Moore’s Climate Change Work
Richard Moore began work on climate change research more recently, starting in 2011 with planning for a grant titled “Climate Change, Mitigation, and Adaptation In Corn-Based Cropping Systems.” But isolated events in previous decades had piqued his interest in climate. For example, during doctoral fieldwork in northern Japan in 1981-83 farmers told Moore about the melted snow patterns on mountains and how they used those patterns to know when to plant rice. He said, “In each farming community, when I talked to farmers they had a different pattern: horse (Aizu), a school of fish (Nakada in Miyagi Prefecture), or “Old Man Planting Seed” (Shonai, Yamagata Prefecture). They also mentioned that they didn’t use them as much now because more long-season varieties of rice had been developed and because the snow seemed to melt more quickly than in the past.” In 1999, Moore transferred from the Department of Anthropology at OSU to the College of Food, Agriculture, and Environmental Sciences. “I found that anthropologists can play a pivotal role bridging the social and natural sciences in colleges of agriculture across the US. Serving this role, I’ve had a number of grants from the EPA, NSF, and the USDA. Currently we have two anthropologists and another two with undergraduate degrees in anthropology in our School of Environment and Natural Resources
Moore’s current project focuses on climate change and corn across the Midwest of the United States. This climate and corn systems project involves the participation of a group of farmers called the Sugar Creek Farmer Partners that he has studied since 2000. Most of his earlier research with this group involved farmer learning circles focusing on water quality. This USDA AFRI grant totals about $20 million, and engages a large interdisciplinary research group. Eleven land grant universities are involved in measuring greenhouse gas emissions from corn and soybean rotations, the connection to water quality, and how to tinker with the rotation such as introducing new crop or soil management practices in the face of increasing temperatures and higher frequency of severe climate events. Moore points out that “most of this research is conducted on experiment stations. For instance, at OSU we have the Triplett-Van Doren no-till plots with continuous corn-soybean rotations established in 1962 giving us a solid baseline for experiments. Another objective of the grant is a survey to measure farmers’ attitudes and willingness to change practices. This survey will be conducted in watersheds that have either intensive corn production or intensive irrigation for corn production. There is also an on-farm component involving watershed groups of farmers. Because corn production involves such high levels of energy inputs and nitrogen and phosphorus runoff especially during heavy storm events the project has a lot of potential when coupled with the social dynamics of rural communities.” The project has also attracted a lot of industry interest, ranging from Monsanto to Organic Valley. You can read about the project at www.sustainablecorn.org. As research on the project progresses, Moore hopes to address more of the history of maize in the Americas, from the “three sisters” to its first domestication in Mexico.
Most of the categories of grant opportunities in the USDA have an outreach or social science component, so the natural and physical scientists are continually looking for social scientists to be part of their grants, making it a good area for anthropologists to seek collaboration. It is also possible for social scientists to take the lead in these grants. USDA, EPA, and NSF all have increased their numbers of climate-related grant opportunities. Moore suggests that “another area for anthropologists to become involved in is local, state, national, and international policy regarding climate change.” Last November, he was involved in a conference on climate change and food security in Kuwait sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Ohio State University, and several other groups. During the discussions to formulate the Kuwait Declaration, Moore found that anthropologists were the ones who could help agronomists, climatologists, and planners realize the importance of teaming up with local farmers regarding local farming practices, and varieties of plants that are drought-resistant or which fare better in uncertain weather patterns.
Moore is fifth from the right in the front row in the Kuwait Declaration conference. Photo courtesy Richard Moore