Building Place-Based Stories About Climate Change Locally: Ecocultural Calendars

Abstract

As climate changes in unprecedented ways, humans need tools to understand and adapt to this change. Observing and experiencing cycles and seasons of a place over time (phenology) represents a way to understand and practice adaptation through diverse cultural lenses. Biocultural stewardship is a framework that nurtures a sense of care-taking and experiencing in place through many modes and languages while examining critically more traditional academic concepts of natural resource science and management. Socially-engaged ArtScience practices represent a positionality and array of methods which seek to be inclusive of community knowledge, modes of expression, and partnership building. I focus on ecocultural calendars as a tool within these frameworks, positionality, and methods to explore the understanding, development, and practice of shifting climate change from a more mechanistic, abstract concept to one that is felt in place here and now. Specifically, ecocultural calendars, their analysis and development are a way for communities to identify and track important biocultural stewardship activities, and changing patterns within these relationships. They identify important embodied experiences that connect people with place by displaying seasonal rounds and culturally important plants’ and animals’ in relation to community practices, behaviors, and values. They are also a place-based tool for future adaptation to climate change through the collection and building of social-ecological memory in community to interpret how things might be changing. While ecocultural calendars have been used and practiced throughout various cultures, time, and space, they are not widely used or practiced as a climate change adaptation tool in “modern” society as a tool to connect to climate change in a present and local context. In this thesis, I (1) construct a theoretical frame, (2) examine positionality and methods of these practices in intermingling of academic and community spaces, (3) analyze observations collected from interviews to assess ecocultural calendar formation, (4) develop multimedia and educational approaches to highlight and promote ecocultural calendars. The project combines arts, sciences, and decolonizing methodologies and practices to develop participatory approaches to include diverse voices in knowledge production through the theory and practice of ecocultural calendar development situated in biocultural stewardship frameworks and methods.