Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- end of 2024

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 16, 2023, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter (now X) @jefftoddtiton and bluesky @jefftoddtiton.bsky.social profiles I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. Here is the list of publications and works in progress:

1. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” Written in 2021, I drew on some earlier writing ("The Nature of Ecomusicology," 2013) on relationality and reciprocity by proposing that the concept of ecojustice includes social justice by extending respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. It was published in Ecomusicology Review, Vol. 8 (2020-2021).

2. "Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology," was published in January of 2024 in the Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 137, No. 543, pp. 61-84. The article was derived from my 2021 oral presentation on folklife, heritage and environment for an American Folklore Society Fellows-sponsored webinar. 

Coal loadout, near Hazard, Kentucky, 1996. Photo by Jeff Titon.

 3. In January of 2023 Ross Cole invited me to contribute a chapter on “Observing and Collecting” for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music. I completed a draft in November. It took another year for all the authors to complete their draft chapters. Currently the book manuscript is under the usual external review process. Depending on the suggestions from reviewers, I will make revisions and return the chapter to Cole. I imagine publication will occur sometime in 2026.

4. In January of 2024, Portia Maultsby invited me to contribute a chapter on blues to the 3rd edition of the textbook, African American Music: An Introduction, edited by Maultsby and Cheryl Keyes. Before accepting the invitation I requested and received permission from the publisher Cengage, to write what might have seemed to be something similar (in subject) to my chapter on North America/Black America in the ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music, which took on blues as a case study. I was careful to write it with a much different emphasis, completed the chapter shortly before Christmas and sent it to the book's editors.

5. Late in the spring of 2024 a Cengage editor wrote to ask for a 7th edition of the introductory ethnomusicology textbook, Worlds of Music. This book has been in print continuously since 1984, with the 6th edition having been published in 2015 and the shorter version of the 6th edition in 2017. I've been a contributor (3 chapters) and general editor ever since Dave McAllester, Jim Koetting, Mark Slobin, David Reck, and I wrote the first edition in the late 1970s. I polled the current co-authors to see whether they would be willing to revise their chapters for a new edition. I decided, additionally, that given my age it would be wise to become a co-editor for this edition, so I asked Tim Cooley (one of the co-authors) if he would be willing to share the task of editing, and he kindly said yes, he would. The upshot was that we needed two new co-authors to replace two from the previous edition, while five others were willing and able to continue. By November we had the two new co-authors in place, and in December the contract was completed. Cengage is eager to bring out the new edition and wants us to finish the revisions by the end of 2025. We will do our best, but I've warned Cengage that this would be an unusually quick manuscript completion time, given that the past revisions have taken from two to three years, and given that we will have two fully new chapters to replace two of the current ones. 

6. In the fall of 2024 I accepted an invitation from Sabine Feisst to write a chapter for The Oxford Handbook of Ecomusicology, which in her words "brings together (ethno)musicologists, music theorists, and sound scholars to critically examine the interrelationships between music, sound, and human and more-than-human environments. It aims to consolidate existing knowledge about ecomusicology and significantly broaden the scope of ecocritical studies of music. The handbook also seeks to decenter the Western music canon and expand the geographical scope of ecocritical music studies." This is a re-start of a stalled project that was in the works about eight years ago when I'd also accepted an invitation to write. I said that I would most likely write about ecomusicology and a sound ecology, with some reference to the idea of a sound commons--ideas that I'd been developing for more than a decade.

Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- end of 2023

Robert Winslow Gordon, founder of the Archive of American Folk Song, c. 1923, examining an archeological artifact in California. Courtesy of the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since my last update, on Dec. 28, 2022, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter (now X) profile @jefftoddtiton I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. Several projects that I'd been working on for years were published in 2023, while one more is in press, and another has been completed but must go through further stages before publication. Here is the list:

1. I’d finished a short essay on musical icons, introducing a section of a book entitled Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe, edited by Levi Gibbs, in 2021.  That book was published in September this year by the University of Illinois Press.

2. I’d completed the chapter “Eco-trope or Eco-tripe? Music Ecology Today” in 2021 for the book  Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, edited by Aaron S. Allen and myself, which was published in September of this year by Oxford University Press. Aaron and I also co-wrote the first chapter, “Diverse Ecologies for Sound and Music Studies.” The book contains fourteen essays written by scientists, scholars, environmental activists, and musicians, each concerned with music, sound, nature, culture and the environment in a time of environmental crisis.

3. In 2019 I’d completed my section of “The Sound Commons and Applied Ecomusicologies,” an article co-authored by Aaron Allen, Taylor Leapaldt, Mark Pedelty, and myself, for The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology, edited by Chris Dromey. The book was published in 2023.

4. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” This was part of an E-seminar that the Ecomusicology Review has been conducting in the fall of 2021 within the ecomusicology Google Group. Kimberly Marshall and Emma DeAngeli wrote an essay to which Sebastian Hochmeyer responded, whereupon they wrote a rejoinder. Mark Pedelty followed with a second response. Aaron Allen asked me if I too would respond, and so I wrote a brief response, starting with my reaction to a disagreement between Marshall and DeAngeli on one hand, and Hachmeyer on the other, over the relevance of the so-called ontological turn in anthropology to the project of social justice. Rather than take sides, I proposed that ecojustice would resolve the disagreement by including social justice in the larger framework of relationality and by extending reciprocity and respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. Whether these essays and responses and rejoinder will be published in Ecomusicology Review, as Aaron Allen had intended at the time, I don't know.

5. In early 2022 Robert Baron, on behalf of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, invited me to contribute an essay to a forthcoming issue of the Journal of American Folklore, to be derived from my 2021 oral presentation on folklife, heritage and environment for an American Folklore Society webinar. I completed the essay in October, 2022. Its title is "Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology." This 10,000-word essay is in the proof stage now and is scheduled for publication in the Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 137, no. 543, pp. 61-84, sometime in the spring of 2024.

6. In January of 2023 Ross Cole invited me to contribute a chapter on “Observing and Collecting” for The Cambridge Companion to Folk Music. Other prospective authors included Phil Bohlman, Rachel Mundy, Peggy Seeger, Caroline Bithell, Dave Harker, and Jake Blount. I haven’t often accepted invitations to write on assigned topics, but this one interested me and, as Ross and I discussed why he’d asked me, and as I thought about what I might say about the history of observation, collecting, and fieldwork in folklore, folklife, and especially folksong studies, I decided to see if I'd find the writing congenial. As I began I found myself with quite a bit to say. I completed a draft over the summer, then revised it a little in November to bring it within the 7000-word limit. It contains the swashbuckling illustration, which stands atop this blog entry, of folksong collector Robert Winslow Gordon, who in 1928 established the Archive of American Folksong at the Library of Congress. Ross was happy with the chapter and has it now. After he gathers up all the chapters for the book, I assume it will go through an external review process, then further revision, and finally it will be published, I'm guessing sometime in 2025 or 2026.

Among the lectures and seminars I gave during this past year was a webinar lecture for the Society for Ethnomusicology. The title was “Applying ethnomusicology: from the study of people making music to the study of beings making sound,” and it was broadcast on May 4 and 11. The lecture contrasted my 1989 definition of ethnomusicology as the study of people making music, first presented in 1989 at an ethnomusicology conference and later published in the 3rd edition of Worlds of Music (1993), with my shifting interests in this century toward the study of beings making sound. I've put the text of the lecture in the section on conference presentations on my academia.edu page.

Mid-year update on a couple of writing projects

    Two of my long-term writing projects are finishing up now: a book that has been in production at the publisher (Oxford University Press) for several months, and the other (an article to be published early in 2024 in the Journal of American Folklore) has just undergone copyediting.

    The book, Sounds, Ecologies, Musics, which I've co-edited with Aaron Allen, now has a website. Rather than describe the book and contributing authors here, may I suggest that readers check out the website where that information is available? Regarding the production, it's been a pretty long slog, what with having to work with our contributing authors (and ourselves) through revisions at the copyedit and proof stages, and also to work with the production company that Oxford is using, which is located in India. There have been numerous backs-and-forths, most of which were routine although time consuming. The one exception was a late reflection by one of the authors that something written could possibly result in a slap suit, so as a result several paragraphs had to be re-written at the last minute, the number of paragraphs in the chapter increased, and the changes rippled through the rest of the production. Luckily, that wasn't Aaron's and my problem to take care of. But we did have to make various corrections and additions to the Index, which we had (wisely) farmed out to a professional indexer. At the moment the production team is working with our corrections to the second proofs, and we will need to make sure these are properly implemented, before we can sign off and they can put the book further along and into the queue for printing later this summer. 

Lobster fishing in a peapod, as was done in the 1800s. Courtesy of the Northeast Folklore Archives, University of Maine.

    The article for the Journal of American Folklore, which I've mentioned on this blog before, is a critique of the natural capital/ecosystem services philosophy of environmental planning which in turn affects the way natural (environmental) heritage is framed for tourism, an activity (tourism, especially cultural tourism) that public folklorists have been deeply involved in for several decades. In effect, ecosystem services (that is, the services that the natural environment provides for people) has for more than a hundred years been regarded in terms of costs and benefits, an economic equation that does not play well with the cultural values that tourists, particularly ecotourists, place upon travel. At the same time, the natural capital/ecosystem services framework is applied to certain extractive industries, such as ocean fishing, downplaying the experiential folklife of the workers themselves, whose relationship with the work often transcends economic considerations, especially when the work becomes a way of life and forges cultural value beyond price for a close-knit community, while simultaneously damaging the environment. This summary is of course very abstruse, and so in a later blog post closer to publication I will offer some more concrete detail about this critique; but its major outline should be familiar to readers of this blog because these ideas about the tension between economic value and cultural values have been swirling around here for a dozen or more years. Meanwhile, the article has just undergone copyediting and my review, and the ball is back in the editors' court as the manuscript moves toward the proofs stage.

     

Keeping Track of Writing Projects -- End of 2022

Scholar with his books. Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (17th c.)

 

An update to keep track of my writing projects has become an annual event. Since the last update, on Dec. 31, 2021, which writing projects have progressed, which have been published, and which have seemingly stagnated? On my academia.edu page and also in my twitter profile @jefftoddtiton I suggest that readers who want to know the answer to the question “What research and writing are you working on?” come to this blog to find out. Here is the list:

1. “Ethical Considerations for Ethnomusicologists in the Midst of Environmental Crisis.” In August, 2020 I’d finished this essay for a book in progress edited by Jonathan Stock and Beverley Diamond called the Routledge Companion to Ethics and Research in Ethnomusicology. Routledge published the book a few months ago, and it's available from Routledge and other sources. I'm hoping that in a year it will be available in paperback at reasonable price.

2. A short essay on musical icons, introducing a section of a book entitled Social Voices: The Cultural Politics of Singers Around the Globe.  I finished up the essay in the spring of 2021. The book is in production now and scheduled for publication by the University of Illinois Press in 2023.

3. “Eco-trope or Eco-tripe? Music Ecology Today.” I completed this chapter in 2021. It’s for the book edited by Aaron S. Allen and myself, Sounds, Ecologies, Musics. I also co-wrote the Introduction with Aaron. The book contains thirteen essays written from diverse ecological perspectives, by scientists, scholars, environmental activists, and musicians, each concerned with music, sound, nature, culture and the environment in a time of environmental crisis. Since I wrote about it in my blog entry a year ago, it received a positive external review from Oxford's referees and has just been put into production at Oxford, with expected publication toward the end of 2023.

4. “The Sound Commons and Applied Ecomusicologies.” This is an article co-authored by Aaron Allen, Taylor Leapaldt, Mark Pedelty, and myself, for The Routledge Companion to Applied Musicology, edited by Chris Dromey. I completed my section (on my concept of the sound commons) of the article in 2019, and the others followed with their sections; we revised in 2020 and sent the manuscript to Chris, who returned it with suggested revisions in the spring of 2021. We responded to those and revised yet again, and sent them back to Chris. The book is in the latter stages of production and should be available in the spring of 2023. I'm hoping that a year later it will be available in paperback at reasonable price.

5. “Ecojustice and Ontological Turns: a Response to Marshall and DeAngeli.” This was part of an E-seminar that the Ecomusicology Review has been conducting in the fall of 2021 within the ecomusicology Google Group. Kimberly Marshall and Emma DeAngeli wrote an essay to which Sebastian Hochmeyer responded, whereupon they wrote a rejoinder. Mark Pedelty followed with a second response. Aaron Allen asked me if I too would respond, and so I wrote a brief response, starting with my reaction to a disagreement between Marshall and DeAngeli on one hand, and Hachmeyer on the other, over the relevance of the so-called ontological turn in anthropology to the project of social justice. Rather than take sides, I proposed that ecojustice would resolve the disagreement by including social justice in the larger framework of relationality and by extending reciprocity and respect to all living beings, not just humans. This is congruent with the writings of Indigenous scholars such as Robin Kimmerer and Zoe Todd in past dozen years or so as well even though they don’t use that term. Aaron intends for all these to be published in the Ecomusicology Review, though I’m still not sure when.

6.  An essay on music and sustainability that I wrote as an invited forward for the book Music, Communities, Sustainability, edited by Huib Schippers and Anthony Seeger, was published this year by Oxford University Press. 

7. My essay "Sustainability and a Sound Ecology," the latest published description of my sound ecology project, was kindly translated into Spanish by Chilean musicologist Mauricio Valdebenito, and published in El oído pensante, vol. 10, no. 1, 2022, pp. 131-156. It can be downloaded from the journal's website, here. The English version had already been published in my book Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020). 

8. Earlier this year Robert Baron, on behalf of the Fellows of the American Folklore Society, invited me to contribute an essay to a forthcoming issue of the Journal of American Folklore, to be derived from my oral presentation on folklife, heritage and environment for the American Folklore Society webinar on "Heritage, Folklore, and the Public Sphere" on March 10, 2021. I completed the essay (a little more than 10,000 words) in August, and then revised it a little in response to suggestions from Robert and also from Mary Hufford and returned it to Robert Baron at the end of October. Its title is "Folklife, Heritage, and the Environment: A Critique of Natural Capital, Ecosystem Services, and Settler Ecology." It's to go into a future issue of the Journal with a group of other essays related to the topic of heritage, folklore, and the public sphere. I have no timeline yet on publication.

9. I continue to work on my book-length manuscript, A Sound Ecology.

Among the lectures and seminars I gave during this past year, one in particular was memorable: an invited video lecture for the Festival El Aleph, in Mexico City. The festival was organized by CulturaUnam with the National Autonomous University of Mexico, and broadcast on TV UNAM. I was one of three scholars from the US invited to present at this festival, a hybrid (partly online, partly in-person) extravaganza that unites science with art and music by means of lectures, workshops, and performances by scientists, scholars, artists and musicians. The theme this year was sustainability and environment, and I was asked to speak about my sound ecology project. The Festival recorded the lecture over Zoom in March, and then broadcast it during the festival itself, on May 25. I was pleasantly surprised to find, when I began watching the broadcast itself, that Festival producers had located video footage and inserted it, intercutting with my "talking head" so as to illustrate the ideas that I was discussing. The result was that instead of seeing a talking head on the screen for 45 minutes, the viewer saw the lecture intercut with a variety of illustrative video clips that made the presentation more interesting to watch and listen to. I'm grateful to the producers for doing this. I was, also, told by several friends and colleagues who saw it, that it was the clearest and best explanation of my sound ecology project to date. As it happens, it can still be seen from the Festival website, via this link in case anyone reading this blog entry would like to take a look.

Settler Ecology 1

Bingham Canyon Copper Mine, 1942, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

     What is the relationship between settler colonialism and settler ecology? At first glance it might be thought that because ecology is the study of nature as a whole, ecologists would not be in the business of exploiting nature for the purpose of empire. But Indigenous scholars--Vine DeLoria and others who have followed in his footsteps--have indicted Western science for its role in aiding and abetting colonialism and empire. More: Kyle Powys Whyte explicitly identifies settler colonialism as an expression of settler ecology. What is the basis for this claim? It will require a few entries to explore this theme. Moreover, is ecology uniform? Or are there many ecologies, and even within ecological science, are there different, even opposing, schools of thought? Is there an ecology that is opposed to settler colonialism?

     In its most literal sense, settler ecology refers to the Euro-American science of ecology. Ecology has been defined from the outset as the scientific study of the relations among organisms and the environment (originally, the inorganic and organic environment; in more modern terminology the biotic and abiotic environment). Connotatively, however, because the adjective settler implies a people who settle and colonize a geographical place, it implies a colonial and extractive attitude toward the land and its inhabitants. In this sense it resonates with a dominant strain within contemporary ecosystem ecology that finds its characteristic expression in “ecosystem services” (nature's contribution to people). Nature, conceived as ecosystems, is regarded as resource capital, the stock of goods and services that nature provides for human beings. As the 2018 IPBES (Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services) Report for the Americas delineates it, these resources include energy, and the raw physical, chemical and biological materials (including plants and animals) for making food, clothing, medicine, the built environment, industrial and consumer products of all kinds, and so on. Ecologists speak of natural capital, and ecological economists employ complex cost/benefit equations to predict and implement sustainable uses of natural capital that prevent its falling below carrying capacity, or the resource amounts necessary to reproduce and maintain a continuing sufficiency of supply.

     Viewing nature as capital is not the only strain within Euro-American ecological science, however. If we look at the history of ecology from its beginnings in Haeckel's pioneering definitions of oikologie in the 1860s, we find that most scientists have regarded their enterprise as a so-called pure science; that is, as the study of relationships in nature rather than the management of those relationships. That said, ecological scientists have not hesitated to act as outside consultants to industry, government, and other institutions concerned with the environment when asked to do so, something that they in fact encouraged after World War II. Advocacy, on the other hand, has been regarded by the majority as out of bounds for ecological scientists who believe that it compromises the otherwise presumably objective, unbiased and disinterested stance that a scientist must embody if their opinions are to be believed. On the third hand, a minority of ecological scientists have ventured into advocacy and some have ventured directly into management of natural resources. I shall have more to say about that in later posts. For now, suffice to say that Euro-American ecological scientists do not present a united front, and that the "settler" attitude (colonialism, extractivism) toward nature does not apply to the majority who consider themselves students of nature, not managers. Nor does it apply to an "arcadian" strain within ecology, one that can be traced back to Gilbert White, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir in which scientific reductionism is suspect while philosophical holism is prominent. This arcadian strain is sometimes disparaged as "Romantic" and idealistic, and it is (wrongly in my opinion) identified with settler colonialism and empire.

     To some extent the settler connotation aligns Euro-American ecology with the conservation movement’s doctrine of wise use (of resources), a doctrine identified with Gifford Pinchot in the early 20th century who advocated it in connection with forest sustainability by means of selective harvesting and other forms of stewardship. This doctrine can be seen as a precursor of ecosystem services. In the history of the conservation movement, Pinchot’s doctrine of wise use is contrasted with John Muir’s arcadian doctrine of set-asides, which is to say remote land that is left alone as natural wilderness, for the preservation of plant and animal species, to be used by humans only for contemplation and very light recreation such as hiking and canoeing. As we shall see, there were some ecologists who advocated for preservation of remote lands not for aesthetic contemplation or light recreation, but as natural areas to be left alone so that ecologists could study them over time.

Folk Knowledge and Environmental Sustainability: AFS Webinar March 10

Upcoming on March 10, 2021, six folklore/folklife specialists will be presenting briefly in a Webinar for the American Folklore Society, followed by open discussion. The topic of the Webinar is "Folklife, Heritage and the Public Sphere." It is free and open to all, but attendees must register by going to the AFS website. I was asked to speak on public folklore, heritage, and environmental sustainability. I've written a draft of my ten-minute presentation, which looks like it will be the last of the six:

“Public Folklore, Heritage, and Environmental Sustainability”

I begin with a story about folklife, heritage, the environment, and traditional, local ecological knowledge. This is the kind of heritage that is expressed in everyday occupational life. Although there’s a tourist product involved, my story is about scientific versus folk knowledges. I will ask you to bear my story in mind as I reference the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Regional Assessment for the Americas report from the Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). These collaborative, science-informed documents are major international efforts intended to guide policy and decision-makers towards wise and sustainable use of environmental resources, including cultural resources. I will end with a few discussion prompts for you about my folklife story and how it aligns and does not align with the UN and IPBES policy recommendations. 

         First, the story. In 1979 I bought a summer house on an island off the coast of Maine. In retirement I live here year round. The island where I live contains a working waterfront that is central to the state's lobster fishing industry which today is worth nearly half a billion dollars. More lobster is landed on this island than any other port on the east coast, quite an accomplishment for an island of less than three thousand people. You have all tasted lobster I hope; it is one of the great delights of this world. Lobster fishing on the Maine coast has been integral to the folklife of its inhabitants since the 1840s. The lobster fishery is a classic example of a commons. Until the 1930s it was an unregulated commons; anyone could set their baited traps in the waters near the shore and haul them up hand over hand with a pulley, using a traditional locally built skiff called a peapod on account of its shape. By the end of the 19^th century lobstering was Maine’s most valuable fishery. In the early 20th century the industry grew larger. Live and canned lobster was exported out of state, while boats became motorized, the trap ropes were hauled up with power winches, and productivity increased exponentially to meet the demand. But without a good understanding of how lobsters reproduce, the lobster population went through boom and bust cycles in the 20^th century until conservation measures were introduced. Some of these were science-informed state regulations such as bans on fishing during certain times of the year. This is still the most frequent conservation measure for fisheries, even though it is a blunt instrument. Only this past summer the state of Massachusetts initiated a so-called “pause” in lobster fishing, despite the likelihood that the population decline was not because of overfishing but the result of lobsters migrating northward on account of the warming ocean. Other conservation measures have been introduced by the fishermen and women themselves, such as limitations on the number of boats permitted in a given area; and the catch, release, and v-notching of egg-bearing females. Taken together these measures smoothed the up-and-down population cycles somewhat but did not eliminate them.

In the early 1990s, when the lobster population was in steep decline, the Maine state fish and wildlife scientists diagnosed the cause as overfishing and proposed to the legislature a severe moratorium on lobster fishing. A local lobsterman and citizen scientist, Ted Ames, was skeptical. A moratorium over a period of years might keep the fishery afloat but it surely would sink the fishermen. Like most of the people on the island he was convinced that the lobster population was down because scallop draggers were wreaking havoc with the ocean bottoms where the female lobsters laid their eggs. Ames knew lobsters had favorite spawning grounds but he didn’t know just where they were, so he interviewed the elder island fishermen and in their oral histories he found out where the spawning grounds most likely were to be. So Ames and the local representative to the state legislature proposed an alternative: that instead of imposing a blanket moratorium they prohibit all fishing in a few designated areas. The legislature agreed to give it a try, the lobster population rebounded, and Ted Ames received a MacArthur Genius Grant. With the money he started a lobster research institute.

         Next I discuss the 2005 UN Millennium Assessment Report on Ecosystems and Human Well-being and its more recent manifestation in the 2018 UN Intergovernmental Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. These assessments and recommendations impose an economic calculus upon human well-being and the environment. Their framework is economic rationality, which thinks of the environment as a natural resource for human beings; that is, as natural capital. Natural capital provides ecosystem services including materials for food, clothing, shelter, fuel, manufacturing, and recreation. These ecosystem services are quantifiable and valued in market dollars. However, in somewhat of an afterthought, these international, intergovernmental experts acknowledged that ecosystems provide human beings with qualitative cultural services. Some of these so-called cultural services are education, beauty and inspiration; physical and mental health; and what they term “identity support“ through sense of place, purpose, and the sacred. Also among the cultural services that ecosystems provide are Indigenous, traditional and local knowledges. This is one place where folklife culture fits, as for example in the knowledge that the old salts from the island provided about the lobster spawning beds. The IPBES report admits that the value of cultural services is often difficult to quantify, measure, and enter into an economic calculus of cost-benefit equations for policy and decision-making, especially when conflicts arise among stakeholder populations having different worldviews. The IPBES punts here, and I quote:

 

While attempts at monetization of ecosystem services may lead to some insights on the values of nature, broader considerations related to spirituality, cultural identity or social cohesion are not easily characterized in this value system, making them too often underrepresented in decision making and in scientific assessments at subregional and regional levels… (Chap. 2, p. 88). Thus a multiplicity of valuation methodologies will be needed, as well as methods for combining the results in ways that do not selectively favor one worldview over [an]other. Such methodologies and strategies for combining results are not yet fully developed.… (Chap. 1, p. 24).

 

The pecuniary value of the old salts’ ecological knowledge is calculable in terms of the dollar equivalent of the catch; but there are cultural aspects of lobstering that are incalculable. My late friend Hap Collins spoke of taking pleasure in the beauty of fishing when you're out in your lobster boat on the ocean alongshore at dawn, the ocean fog is clearing off, the air is warming and the water is calm, you have a cup of coffee in your hands and you're approaching the area where your traps are and you anticipate your catch of the day. I know something of what Hap meant because I went fishing with him and I experienced it for myself. The MA and IPBES reports acknowledge the incalculable value of what we would call an affecting presence, yet they think of it as another aspect of natural capital for the benefit of human beings; and don’t quite know how to factor in its importance. Does it make any sense to speak of an economy of contemplation?

Finally, some prompts. Consider my lobster fishing story in light of the UN and IPBES assessments and recommendations. What are the consequences for public folklorists of thinking of folklife and the environment as natural capital, providing ecosystem services whose pecuniary worth can be measured? Was it a given that the government would agree to give Ted Ames’ proposal a try? Would a different state legislature have sided with the state fish and wildlife scientists, laughing off Ames’ oral history project and the old salts’ superstitions? What are the advantages and disadvantages of thinking of the environment as natural capital that delivers to humans ecosystem services, including cultural services? Should public folklorists concerned with heritage endorse and work within this predominant contemporary policy paradigm that considers the environment to consist primarily of economic assets with measurable market values that enter into cost-benefit analyses during resource allocation planning and decision-making? More generally, how dependent is human well-being on economic success beyond a level of basic comfort? Should the well-being of other living creatures be considered? And is it folly to ignore that thinking of the environment as natural capital is what got us into our current environmental emergency—global warming, extinctions, pandemics—in the first place? Is it wise to think that having failed spectacularly in trying to control nature, the solution is for us to try to control nature more? Are other frames more desirable (e.g., deep ecology; rewilding; commons; environmental justice; etc.) and if so to what ends? You may recall the proverbial expression that the world does not owe you a living. Does it still make sense to think about rights and obligations relationally and interdependently: if the ecosystem owes us, what do we owe the ecosystem?

 

Music Ecology, Ecosophy and Ecosystem Services

Reviewing the controversy over the so-called music ecology trope, i.e., the idea that a music culture can be regarded as an ecological system, I think it may be helpful to re-orient the division I drew about fifteen years ago between ecological and economic discourses surrounding sustainability. At that time I thought that the ecological discourse was best represented by conservation biology and its approach to environmental sustainability, while the economic discourse was best represented by the Brundtland Report’s Our Common Future and its emphasis on sustainable development. But for the past eight years or so I’ve found it helpful to think of the ecological discourse surrounding sustainability as more diverse than what conservation biology represented. 

It may be useful to distinguish between two strands within the ecological discourse on sustainability. One is an ecosophical strand, represented to some extent by the deep ecologists, who retain the idea that there is an optimal state towards which nature, in the absence of human intervention, inexorably moves; and that therefore human beings ought to either get out of the way or if intervention for sustainability is necessary, one must “help nature along” or “do as nature does” and “follow nature.” Human beings are viewed as part and parcel of nature, as inhabitants or citizens of nature, not as superior to it or dominant over it. This strand of thought is also found among many environmentalists who do not think of themselves as ecologists, or who often conflate ecology with environment, as in usages like “ecological collapse” instead of “ecosystem collapse.”

The other strand is pragmatic, and it is represented by contemporary ecosystem ecologists who think of nature as a complex system that  moves through one environmental disturbance to the next, each one followed by a regime change, and a temporary equilibrium which may be more or less desirable than the one prior. There is no such thing as a “natural” tendency to move toward an optimal, climax state of dynamic equilibrium. Human beings are still part and parcel of nature, but nature can also be evaluated in terms of the “services” or benefits that ecosystems offer to humankind. To that end, ecosystems are managed for movement in more desirable directions, and when those are reached they are sustained insofar as possible by means of resilience strategies.