Climate Concerns
Multidisciplinary Knowledge Integration to Support Louisiana Coastal Indigenous Communities’ Response to Natural and Technological Disasters and Adaptation to Climate Change
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tara Lambeth, Matthew Bethel, Jessica Parfait, Kasha Clay, Rachel Billiot Bruleigh
The project team is collaborating with two United Houma Nation Indigenous communities in south Louisiana to document how environmental stressors affect the livelihoods of these communities, and shape the mitigation strategies they use. Utilizing a systematic process known as Sci-TEK (Bethel et al., 2014) the team combines local community knowledge with science-based datasets and GIS to produce maps informed by tribal members. With this information the team will produce a story-map tool for the UHN and other Indigenous communities facing similar challenges. This work may encourage other adaptation planning efforts and increase communication between communities and policymakers. The first goal of the project is to integrate policy, science and local knowledge to aid in adaption to chronic and acute environmental stressors. The second is to analyze the adaptive capacity of the UHN using physical science, social science, and TEK, and further examine and compare structural and nonstructural mitigation measures implemented in the area by the tribe and policymakers. The third goal is to assist the tribe in honing its adaptive capacity to adapt to chronic and acute environmental stressors by preparing a timeline of historical events in collaboration with the tribe, and sharing the analysis with the tribe so that the tribe can hone its adaptive capacity for future chronic and acute environmental stressors, and influence mitigation policy implemented to lessen those stressors. The final goal of the project is to engage local agencies in the adaptive capacity analysis, and disseminate the results beyond the case study communities.
Spiraling Archaeology of Culture and Climate: Creating a New Imaginary of the Future
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stop Scamming
Climate and culture are entangled in a spiraling archaeology of regeneration. It is my hypothesis that climate change events are followed by a Dark Age marked by mass migrations, cultural collapse, intolerance, and reduced literacy. A Dark Age ends when there is a paradigm shift that creates the conditions for new cultures to emerge in a period of regeneration. These new cultures retain sub-strata of old cultural knowledge, including cosmologies, where that knowledge is useful and effective. I draw evidence from six climate change events in the Holocene to support this hypothesis. Using the term ‘Dark Age of Intolerance’, I describe the Dark Age that followed the Little Ice Age and hypothesize that this Dark Age has not yet ended insofar as there has been no paradigm shift from darkness to light, from death to flourishing, from intolerance to acceptance of plurality. I argue that settler colonialism was a mass migration of humans, diseases, plant, and animal species from Europe to colonized continents. The dark forces of intolerance continue to manifest as genocides, religious extremisms, racism, rape culture, monoculture, species extinctions, and degraded landscapes. Using the spiral to represent timespace allows us to disrupt linear time upon which capitalism depends and to address the loss of cosmology so that we can begin imagining new cultures that value natality and flourishing.
