Doctoral Dissertation Research: Response Diversity and Environmental Change

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Around the world, societies confront the effects of changing climatic environments. Newspapers report melting polar ice caps, warming lakes and oceans, rising sea levels, ocean acidification, expanding polar vortices, worsening droughts, and intensifying super typhoons. In the face of this, all nations, including the United States, are strategizing how best to evaluate, adjust, and plan. Doing so, however, is complicated by the fact that although change is global, its effects are experienced and responded to locally. How people perceive the environment and its effects on their lives is mediated by culture, language, and geography. Thus effective planning requires understanding not only global forces but also local variability and the response diversity it produces. The research supported by this award will investigate response diversity in the Philippines, a microcosm of environmental shifts. The Philippines has been struck by a series of super typhoons of increasing frequency and intensity, including Super Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013, the strongest hurricane to hit landfall in recorded human history. The Philippines also faces altered hurricane paths, rising sea levels, sinking islands, mass species extinctions, erratic flooding, and droughts. It is the simultaneity of these developments and the pervasive public awareness that has resulted, all in a single, relatively small arena, that makes the Philippines an illuminating site for investigating responses to environmental change. The research will be carried out by University of California, Los Angeles, doctoral candidate, Bradley Cardozo, under the supervision of Dr. Jessica R. Cattelino. Cardozo will focus on two different groups with contrasting responses to the environmental crisis: (1) an urban-based political organization, and (2) a rural farming cooperative whose formerly landless peasant members are now experimenting with organic farming and clean energy technologies. Cardozo will employ a combination of ethnographic research methods, including participant observation in the daily lives and activities of group members; structured and semi-structured interviews; and sustained cultural immersion over the six months to be spent at each site. Using text analysis software, he will catalogue his observations, interviews, and recordings, identify themes, and chart key words and phrases, to delineate the most salient and consequential features of these different responses to common experiences. Cardozo's findings will contribute to improved social scientific understanding of how people's varying perceptions and experiences interact with common events. Much attention has been focused on the destructive physical effects of the extreme weather phenomena connected to environmental change; this project seeks to document and understand the social and cultural aftermath, as well, and thereby to identify lessons for planners everywhere.