Environmental Science
It’s Complicated: Environmental Crises Reveal the Key to Long-term Sustainability By Megan Bishop
Image by Adonyi Gabor [CC0]
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umans engage in constant conversation with the environment; human prosperity is contingent upon having clean water to drink, pure air to breathe, and rich soil to harvest food. Perhaps, the Earth is our oldest friend. UNC-Chapel Hill environmental anthropologist Dr. Caela O’Connell first acquired this realization as a child attending nature camps. It was her volunteering with local stream water management testing that sparked her interest in the disconnect between people’s relationship with the environment and the environmentally harmful consequences of their actions.1 Though decisions pertaining to sustainability can quickly fall into the polarizing categories of “good” and “bad”, Dr. O’Connell knows human behavior is much more complicated than this. Her research is motivated by trying to understand this complication in which humans must both utilize and protect the environment—particularly as the environment undergoes unprecedented changes—so that long-lasting sustainability efforts can be put into place. By analyzing communities as they navigate environmental crises, Dr. O’Connell uncovers what secret, underlying environmental struggles surface amidst difficulty so that these issues can be addressed, resulting in resilient sustainability efforts. When UNC students think of Jordan Lake, they may immediately think of beautiful scenery and hiking trails. However, underneath the water, there is an ongoing crisis threatening the sustainability of local drinking water. In 2012, Dr. O’Connell began analyzing the problem of nutrient pollution in Jordan Lake—the primary source of drinking water for Cary and Apex, NC—in order to evaluate Dr. Caela O’Connell why current alleviation efforts are
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failing.2 The simple answer to this, is in fact, not so simple. Dr. O’Connell studied why mass disapproval of Water Quality Trading (WQT) policy implementation was evident within the Jordan Lake Watershed agricultural community, despite the extent of water pollution in Jordan Lake. Dr. O’Connell utilized ethnographic interviews with ninety farmers that revealed that only 26% of farmers would agree to be involved in the WQT program, but before jumping to the conclusion that they do not care for the environment, consider their situationally complex justifications.2 Farmers showed concern regarding the financial burden of losing property value, increasing income tax, and the fairness of doing more on their farms specifically so new business and housing developments could do less to protect the water.2 In fact, the interviews revealed that farmers supported policies to purify Jordan Lake, yet simply could not risk the financial or moral trade-offs. Identifying these complications is essential in order to establish sustainability practices that can fit the needs of a community in the long term, and therefore offering a permanent solution to an ongoing crisis.2
“There’s this idea that sometimes when
there’s a point of disaster or crisis it brings to the surface things that are going on all the time” The struggles of a community that prevent environmental action are not always ongoing; Dr. O’Connell has found that observing communities undergoing a more sudden crisis exposes underlying socio-environmental dilemmas that the community may not have been aware of before. Dr. O’Connell explains, “There’s this idea that sometimes when there’s a point of disaster or crisis it brings to the surface things that are going on all the time.” 1 Currently, Dr. O’Connell has taken the semester
