161 research outputs found
Political Identity as Ecocultural Survival Strategy
No full textChapter 19 of the Handbook of Ecocultural Identity builds upon recent research into the origins of political identity, outlining a broader preliminary hypothesis that the longstanding tension between ‘left’ and ‘right’ political biases has evolved, in part, to serve ecological purposes. Carr and Milstein engage in an experimental re-reading of pre-European contact Hawai’ian history, tracing how political disposition helped populations respond to changing relations between population size and ecological carrying capacity. Specifically, in times of plenty, there was a predominance of political approaches congruent with contemporary tenets of ‘left’ politics – including a broad definition of ‘in group’ belonging and openness to difference and novelty – all of which facilitated the growth of populations to meet available resources. In contrast, where populations met or exceeded ecological capacity, political approaches associated with tenets of today’s ‘right’ politics – including suspicion, hostility to outsiders, and aggression – came to the fore, as violent conflict enabled groups to increase access to resources, while simultaneously and incidentally reducing populations. The authors contrast the potential survival functions of these historic emplaced ecopolitical identities with the current era, in which increasingly urbanized populations are removed from the direct influence of ecological patterns of scarcity and plenty, which are instead produced by capitalist political economies. Carr and Milstein close by exploring the ecological and cultural regenerative capacity of both ‘left’ and ‘right’ political identities in the contemporary epoc
“Somethin’ Tells Me It's All Happening at the Zoo”: Discourse, Power, and Conservationism1
No full textThis study examines how certain Western institutional discourses reproduce particular human relationships with nature. The analysis focuses upon the institutional setting of the zoo, examining long-standing multi-voiced debates about zoos and exploring the contemporary zoo's conservation discourses and cultural, lexical, and spatial elements of gaze and power. The author contextualizes zoo discourses within Western ideological environmental dialectics, including those of Mastery–Harmony, Othering–Connection, and Exploitation–Idealism. The author relates these discussions to her empirical observations of how certain discursive themes are reproduced and complicated within a leading American zoo. In the tradition of critical research that advocates for social change, the essay concludes with analysis-driven discussion about possibilities for zoos to transform their core configurations to more progressively work as agents for systemic cultural and environmental change
When Whales "Speak for Themselves'': Communication as a Mediating force in Wildlife Tourism
No full textThe case study for this ethnographic investigation is communication within the highest concentration of whale watch operations in the world, located in transnational waters of the North Pacific. The author explores this Western cultural setting in an effort to expand upon the culturally and environmentally inclusive conceptual framework of communication as a mediating force of human–nature relations. The author finds that a range of study participants view communication as human–nature transactional. The interpretations point to ways in which Westerners in a wildlife tourism setting may value silence as communicative of a co-expressive existence with nature, may be frustrated by the limitations of culturally particular tools of language for conveying knowledge of or experiences with nature, may credit nature with “speaking” in ways that serve specific functions and may be used to justify tourism endeavors, and may position particular wildlife as icons that illuminate problematic human–nature relations or that isolate such wildlife from wider eco-cultural relationships
Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity
No full textThe Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity brings the ecological turn to sociocultural understandings of self. The editors introduce a broad, insightful assembly of original theory and research on planetary positionalities in flux in the Anthropocene – or what in this Handbook cultural ecologist David Abram presciently renames the Humilocene, a new “epoch of humility.” Forty international authors craft a kaleidoscopic lens, focusing on the following key interdisciplinary inquiries:
Part I illuminates identity as always ecocultural, expanding dominant understandings of who we are and how our ways of identifying engender earthly outcomes.
Part II examines ways ecocultural identities are fostered and how difference and spaces of interaction can be sources of environmental conviviality.
Part III illustrates consequential ways the media sphere informs, challenges, and amplifies particular ecocultural identities.
Part IV delves into the constitutive power of ecocultural identities and illuminates ways ecological forces shape the political sphere.
Part V demonstrates multiple and unspooling ways in which ecocultural identities can evolve and transform to recall ways forward to reciprocal surviving and thriving.
TheRoutledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity provides an essential resource for scholars, teachers, students, protectors, and practitioners interested in ecological and sociocultural regeneration.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity has been awarded the 2020 Book Award from the National Communication Association's (USA) Environmental Communication Division
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Insider Windows in Nepal: a critical pedagogy for environmental communication
No full textThis chapter explores ways in which participants engaging in a critical pedagogy praxis in Nepal generated subjective learning themes related to their environment and society. Generative critical education stands in contrast to top-down methods of formal teaching and learning. To begin the discussion, let us consider two of the functions of environmental communication: to be pragmatic and to be constitutive (Cox 2013, 19). As human society deepens its understanding of the implications of life in the Anthropocene, the current geological age in which humans are the dominant influence on the environment, the need for strategic pragmatic environmental communication has become increasingly evident. Whether in the form of public awareness campaigns, direct action and protest, or consumer education, many diverse institutions are arising to answer the call. Among these is the university, charged with developing the future stewards of our planet. Ironically, the pragmatic nature of environmental communication messages has also made them vulnerable to cooption and dilution in the form of greenwashing, manufactured uncertainty, and a deceptive corporate environmental and social responsibility agenda. It is out of the matrix of higher education and into a world of competing ecological problem/solution narratives that today’s graduates emerge. Will the environmental crisis we are facing be solved by market-based mechanisms, technological innovation, or blunt regulations? Unfortunately, this question is indicative of an understanding of ecological justice that does not interrogate the system as a whole
An efficient tamed Milstein Scheme for the Stochastic Allen-Cahn equation with multiplicative noise
No full text©The Author(s) 2026.The version of record of this article, first published in [Journal of Scientific Computing], is available online at Publisher’s website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10915-026-03218-7This paper investigates the strong convergence of a fully discrete scheme for the stochastic Allen–Cahn equation with multiplicative noise, combining a tamed Milstein method for the temporal discretization with the finite element method in space. The proposed method is shown to be unconditionally stable in spatial dimensions d ∈{1,2,3}. Beyond the inherent challenges caused by, see, e.g., [1], the cubic non-globally Lipschitz drift term and multiplicative driving noise in the convergence analysis, the Milstein scheme further complicates the error estimation of the noise term compared to the Euler-Maruyama discretization. By introducing a novel auxiliary process, we rigorously establish strong convergence rates in both space and time under mild assumptions for d ∈{1,2}. Our analysis shows that the temporal convergence order is doubled compared to that of tamed Euler-Maruyama scheme. Numerical experiments are provided to confirm the theoretical results and to demonstrate that the proposed scheme exhibits improved robustness over the pure semi-implicit Milstein method
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