Environmental Toxicity, Narrative Ecology, Perspectivism and a Sound Ecology: The 2018 AFS Conference

The annual conference of the American Folklore Society took place in Buffalo, New York last week. It is always good to connect and re-connect with folklorist friends and colleagues in person, especially now that I’ve fully retired and don’t see the students and my friends and colleagues at Brown on a daily basis anymore. Of course I connect via email, but the internet doesn’t provide anywhere near the same feeling of presence that in-person does. For folklorists this is felt especially strongly because one of the best definitions of folklore was Dan Ben-Amos’ in the 1970s as “artistic communication in small groups” that were present face-to-face. Besides, presence by means of sound plays a very important role in my developing theory of a sound ecology. 

I went to a number of presentations, especially those where folklore is shading over now into the environmental humanities, and activists are increasingly concerned with ecojustice. I was present at the founding meeting of the folklore and science section, a group of folklorists interested in the interface between the two areas. And I presented on a panel called “Sensate Worlds,” in which four of us in turn summarized our research in areas related to folklore and sense perception. 

Several panels were devoted to folklore, oral history and environmental toxicity. They took up the question I addressed in my Yoder Lecture last year; namely, how can folklorists, whose skills in interpreting life stories of so-called ordinary citizens have been well developed, contribute to society’s recognition and amelioration of the environmental damage that unfairly targets rural areas and disadvantaged populations? The flood waters from Hurricane Florence only weeks ago released many tons of toxic metals, including mercury, in the coal mining waste into the Cape Fear River. It’s been an open secret that the mining corporations that blast off the tops of mountains and the electric utilities that burn coal store this waste in vulnerable sites. The Obama Administration strengthened regulations of coal waste storage, but under the current Administration the EPA has relaxed these (and other) regulations, and the resulting harm was far worse than it otherwise might have been. One panelist addressed the environmental and human health impacts of fracking in eastern Ohio, through interviews with farmers whose land and water was poisoned. Stories like this have been in the news, but folklorist activists have long-term listening and policy-influencing skills in the public arena that journalists who report on fracking and other environmental impacts do not. It’s heartening to see folklorists move back, after decades of work inside academia adding to the storehouse of knowledge, and decades of work in the public sector celebrating the diversity of community folk arts, into the activism that characterized folklore in the US during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This activism fell victim to the mobilization for World War II and the fear of Nazism and Communism after the War, accompanied by a nativist turn, the HUAC hearings, and a retreat among folklorists to the safety of the ivory tower. Today’s nativism, however, is resulting in the feeling that this is not normal, and among folklorists as others who celebrate cultural diversity, it is a time to resist. 

The “Sensate Worlds” panel brought me together with Danille Patterson (who organized it as part of her folklore and science initiative), Mary Hufford, and John McDowell. All of us had participated in the groundbreaking folklore and environmental humanities panels that ran throughout an entire day at the meetings two years ago; and John was one of the organizers of the DERT (Diverse Environmental Research Team) group of folklorists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists and ecomusicologists who got together in the spring of 2016 (I could not attend on account of knee surgery) and who will be bringing out a book edited by John and the other founders sometime next year, we hope. Mary has been pursuing several research projects simultaneously; she presented here on her “narrative ecology” project, linking it with the senses, phenomenology, and Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh of sensibility” theory. Like me, Mary is especially interested in the natural environment; and for more than 25 years she has been studying the ways people tell stores about environmental history and change as it impacts various named places, particularly in Appalachian West Virginia, with a time depth going back to pre-European contact. John’s presentation was both an acknowledgment and critique of de Castro’s perspectivism, a theory of New World native Americans’ ideas about the relations of humans with plants and animals that is far more sophisticated than anthropological theories of animism. As we increasingly recognize that we are in a post-human era, with a relation to the environment that can no longer be exploitative, indigenous perspectivism offers a possible pathway to a new and healthier relationship to nature. Is the Western world ready to learn from our Native brothers and sisters at last? Danille spoke about how the use of the senses (especially smell, and of course taste) was an integral part of cooking as revealed by cookbooks prior to the scientific revolution wtih recipes ushered in by Fannie Farmer’s Boston Cooking School, where precise measurements and ingredients and directions largely supplanted the uses of the senses along with less precise indications of the amount of ingredients along with more general directions. This scientific revolution in cooking occurred in the late 1800s, and I believe it ushered in a trend that peaked in the mid-20th century with its gleamingly modern, clean kitchens and grade-school classes in home economics. My own presentation represented a small portion of my sound ecology project and asked whether a phenomenological approach to animal sound communication would yield information and insights. I described recent research in the field of ecological psychology, specifically the so-called phenomenological proposal theorizing direct social perception and direct perception empathy, and in the area of mirror neurons that, combined with a phenomenology of umwelt and affordances offered a way of thinking about the expressive culture of nonhuman animals in their own terms.

In one way or another, all four of us were working at the interfaces of folklore and science. It might not seem as if John’s work with perspectivism did so, but consider that indigenous ecological knowledge does what Western science does in offering an explanation of nature and a means of prediction and, to some extent, control. The inaugural meeting of the folklore and science section revealed quite a variety of interests, matching the four of ours and extending them in various directions. It will be exciting to see how this develops. 

I would be remiss if I didn’t close by mentioning a supper and reunion that I had with some of the graduates of Brown’s doctoral program in ethnomusicology: Cliff Murphy, now head of the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts; Bradley Hanson, now the Tennessee state folklorist; and Maureen Loughran, deputy director of the Center for Traditional Music and Dance, in Manhattan, New York. We spoke about old times at Brown, and about new concerns. Each of them has their PhD in ethnomusicology and each is working in the field of public folklore, where ethnomusicologists have contributed mightily since, well, the 1970s as far as I know. It was in 1976 when I had been teaching ethnomusicology for only two years (and folklore for five) that I worked as a public folklorist for the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, in Washington, DC, in its bicentennial gala year when the Festival ran all summer long, with seven different performance stages and seven more interpretive stages showcasing and celebrating the expressive cultural diversity of the traditional folk arts in the United States along with their counterparts in other nations.  

Big Joe Williams and friend at 1976 Smithsonian FAF.
Photograph by Jeff Todd Titon

So, for example, there were music performances and crafts demonstrations from the Franco-American and Cajun communities side by side with the same from Quebec and from France. The synergy was something to behold. I couldn’t have had a finer introduction to the joys and problems of public folklore. In the next two decades I served as a consultant and panelist and site visitor for the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts, and when I began directing the PhD program in ethnomusicology at Brown, I could not—and didn’t want to—avoid introducing students to public folklore as well as to applied ethnomusicology along with their education in the more standard academic subjects of fieldwork, ethnography and musical analysis. It’s gratifying to know that some of our graduates—these three are by no means all—have found satisfying careers as ethnomusicologists working in the field of public folklore, while others have found more traditional careers as college and university professors.

Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy--A Conference at UCSB May 24-26, 2018

     In an earlier entry I mentioned the upcoming conference on cultural and musical sustainabilities, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, to take place later this month--May 24-26 to be exact. If you're in the Los Angeles/Santa Barbara area, it might be of interest to you. There is no admission charge. Here is the flyer advertising it:

Sustainability is Environmental, Economic, and Cultural

Three Spheres of Sustainability, from Joshua J. Yates, "Abundance on Trial," The Hedgehog Review, Summer 2012.

     Musical and cultural sustainability are inseparable from environmental ecosystem sustainability. That’s been one of this blog’s themes from the outset. I advanced an ecological approach to musical sustainability beginning about 2006 with the Nettl Lecture at the University of Illinois, followed by presentations and panels at the American Folklore Society and Society for Ethnomusicology conferences—the latter published in a 2009 issue of the journal, The World of Music. Now a dozen years later, in May 2018, there will be a conference at the University of California, Santa Barbara, based on this very same proposition, that environmental and cultural sustainability are inseparable. 

     The conference announcement reads, in part: “Cultural Sustainabilities is a two-day conference driven by the proposition that environmental and cultural sustainability are inextricably linked. This conference brings together leading social scientists, humanists, and activists to address the premise that reversing or ameliorating the negative impacts of human behavior on the globe’s environment is at its core a human cultural question.” The conference is sponsored by the University of California, Santa Barbara, departments of Music, Anthropology, Media Studies, and Environmental Studies, with support from UCSB’s Center for Interdisciplinary Study of Music and the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center. The list of sponsors indicates that sustainability today is considered an issue for the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. In 2006, of course, that was not the case; beginning in that year I spoke, and then wrote, that in the university world of theoretical and applied knowledge, sustainability discourses resided primarily in economics (particularly developmental economics) and ecology (particularly conservation biology), while in the public arena sustainability was associated with environmentalism, energy conservation, and living a “green” life. In addition, sustainability thinking led to ecological economics, an alternative to neoclassical economic theory. Today a robust discussion of sustainability is occurring in the arts and humanities. Indeed, sustainability is now mainstream enough for it to be critiqued in the environmental humanities, who (mistakenly in my view) believe that it promotes a version of deep ecology as the sustainability ideal. 

     I’ll have more to say about that sustainabilities conference at UCSB as this coming May approaches—it is free and open to the public, and parts or all of it may be streamed on the internet—but what prompts this post is the assault on environmental and cultural sustainabilities underway by the current US federal Administration, personified by the policies put in place by the heads of the US Department of the Interior (Ryan Zinke) and the Environmental Protection Administration (Scott Pruitt). Yesterday, it was announced that 9 of 12 members of the US National Parks Advisory Panel resigned en masse, in protest, because during the year 2017, the first year that Secretary Zinke was head of Interior, he never once convened or consulted his advisory panel. After they resigned, a spokesperson for the Department of Interior told the board chair, Tony Knowles (former governor of Alaska) that their resignation was “welcome” because the board had ignored sexual harassment in the Parks, and that they had also ignored an invitation to meet on January 8th. Knowles told a NPR interviewer that these charges were laughable; no invitation for a meeting had ever come to the board, while they had in fact offered advice to the previous Administration on sexual harassment policy, which was a serious problem in the Parks (and in the Interior Department as a whole). Knowles suggested that the Adminstration’s spokesperson, associate deputy secretary Todd Willens, was inventing facts to fit the false narrative he wanted to present. Willens' moral condemnation of sexual harassment, like that of his boss, rings false considering the history of sexual predation that accompanies the nation's chief executive. Having served on an advisory board myself, and having experienced something similar when the organization got a new leader, I know what it means when the new head is unwilling to follow the advisory board’s advice. But seldom does the new leader ignore the board entirely. 

     The Parks represent natural ecosystems set aside for conservation and preservation, in a nation where for centuries economic development has exploited natural resources without much regard for sustainability. But now, according to former Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewel, even the Parks themselves are at great risk. They face a $12 billion backlog of deferred infrastructure maintenance already, and it is clear from the environmental policies being put in place by the current Administration, that the Parks will not receive much federal help. One “solution” to their financial problem, scheduled to be implemented this year, is a rise in the Parks’ admission fees, by roughly 350%. Where it used to cost $20 to visit Acadia National Park in Maine, for example, this year the admission fee will rise to $70. (The advisory board had opposed the rate raise.) For a working-class family of four, part of the voter base that elected this President, a cost of nearly $300 in admissions alone would put such a vacation out of reach. And yet, these were meant to be “national” parks, available to all, not private land. As Woody Guthrie wrote in the song, “This Land Is Your Land,”

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me; 

Sign was painted, it said private property; 

But on the back side it didn't say nothing; 

That side was made for you and me. 

This verse is not listed in the Wikipedia entry for this song, by the way. Someone should update it. 

      I’ve posted blog entries here about partnering with Scott McFarland at the Great Smoky National Park in the spring of 2016, on a soundscape project, part of the Park’s “natural sounds and night skies” initiative to preserve the sonic ecosystems of the Parks for visitors and also for the benefit of all Park inhabitants (plants, animals) that cannot survive without sound communication. But the assault on the Parks is just part of a larger agenda, a policy encouraging coal mining, timber cutting, oil and gas drilling, and so on, in environmentally sensitive areas such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as well as federally owned lands; and in areas where an environmental disaster such as an oil spill would have adverse economic impacts on local and regional industries. Opening up the Gulf of Maine, for example, to oil drilling—which the current Administration may well accomplish, despite opposition from all the state's Congressional representatives, including the very conservative Republican, Bruce Poliquin—could destroy the fishing and tourist industries that the state of Maine’s population greatly depends on. The impact of the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico stood as a warning to the previous Administration; but under the current one it’s open season on the environment, for the benefit of the oil corporations and the wealthy who have effectively bought the government (see Citizens United) at the expense of the people. 
     No clearer examples of the interlinks between environmental and cultural sustainability can be found than in the damage done to people and their ways of life caused by environmental disasters. The fact that these environmental disasters result in large part from human economic activity fueled by belief in maximizing material wealth in the short run, does not prevent those presently controlling federal policy from exacerbating the problem and causing further environmental injustice while mounting a propaganda campaign of denial and reversal. Such policies may yet trickle down to reduce and then eliminate federal support for the arts and humanities, for public media (NPR and PBS). The propaganda campaign infects the public sphere and threatens academic freedom while it gaslights scientific truth, and puts colleges and universities’ disinterested pursuit of knowledge at risk, in the same way that the Parks, the environmentally sensitive areas, and American cultural values (such as democracy, equal opportunity, civil rights, and human rights) are also under assault. It’s taken a dozen years, but now sustainability is understood to be cultural and social, as well as economic and environmental, with important connections among them. 

Environmental Humanities, Music and Sustainability

Photo by Jeff Todd Titon, E. Penobscot Bay, ME

    Environmental humanities is only six years old, one of a proliferating number of fields prompted by the current environmental crisis. My interests in sustainability and music have taken me, over the years, into a number of environmental areas: conservation biology, human ecology, ecological economics, and ecomusicology, to name a few; and now environmental humanities. Environmental humanities, according to one definition, is meant to integrate humanistic research on the environment from cultural geography, ecocriticism, cultural anthropology, environmental philosophy, and political ecology. The ideology behind it seeks to move beyond a “holistic vision of nature as a privileged place in the history of ecology,” to an understanding of humans and our concerns “within the everyday places in which we live.” It is said to turn away from a conception of an ideal nature constructed as unspoiled (by human culture and corruption) wildness, to an idea of an environment that humans have impacted for millennia, with problems such as climate change and environmental injustice. This conceptual shift turns away from the radical environmentalism of deep ecology, and toward an integration of the human, and humanities, into environmental thinking, at least inside the academic world. Instead of envisioning the restoration or preservation of wilderness ecosystems, “environmentalists are re-envisioning nature as pervasively and enduringly shaped by humans. These concepts are beginning to put pressure on the key concept of ‘sustainability,’ which has organized a good deal of environmentalist thought for the last two decades.”
    One way of looking at the way these developments are “pressuring” sustainability is to consider the critique of the sustainability from within resilience thinking. Advocates of resilience (and I am one) maintain that, first, sustainability is a goal, not a strategy; and second, that insofar as sustainability implies maintaining a climax equilibrium state of natural balance, it is out of step with current thinking in ecological science, which has abandoned the idea of the balance of nature. In chapter 5 of the Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology, I develop this critique of sustainability and discuss resilience as a better way of thinking about musical and cultural continuity and integrity. My thinking about resilience has, itself, changed over the years, from skepticism to a guarded optimism.
    Fall is conference season for me, and only last week I was asked to present about environmental humanities at the American Folklore Society’s annual meeting, in Miami. I spoke about how folklife studies, with its long history of ethnographic documentation of traditional beliefs, customs, and practices, including folk medicine, agricultural adaptations, and beliefs about the place of humans in the natural world, could contribute to the discussion of traditional ecological knowledges in the environmental humanities. I was asked, also, to speak about my own background in the disciplines related to the environmental humanities. I might have said something about studying with Leo Marx, my honors thesis adviser at Amherst College. Marx is surely one of the earliest environmental humanists, an ecocritic whose book, The Machine in the Garden, measures the impact of technology on the American pastoral ideal, as revealed in the literature of writers such as Melville, Hawthorne, and especially Thoreau.
    But I chose instead to speak about my background in ecology, mentioning my introduction to the subject when I spent the summer after my sophomore year working in a human ecology project, for Dr. Lawrence Hinkle, at the Cornell Medical School, in Manhattan. In the following academic year, I studied with Oscar Schotté, a biologist whose academic pedigree extended back to Ernst Haeckel, the German embryologist who in 1866 coined the term ecology and defined it as “the whole science of the relations of the organism to the environment including, in the broad sense, all the ‘conditions of existence.’”
    I went on to talk about my sound ecology project, and concluded (again, in response to my assignment) by repeating some of the conclusions I’d come to after decades of research in fields related to environmental humanities. These included the four principles of interdependence, diversity, limits to growth, and stewardship. They also included some of the conclusions I’m coming to from my sound ecology project, concerning the implications for communities, economies, and ecologies of a sound ontology and epistemology. I also spoke about these a few weeks ago in a keynote address to the southwest chapter of the American Musicological Society, while an earlier formulation of these ideas on a sound ecology are scheduled for publication in Ethnologies later this year, or early next.
    It was fascinating to see the explosion of the environmental humanities at the AFS conference. There were two days of panels on the subject last week, whereas in previous conferences not much if anything. On the panel with me were several friends and colleagues whose thinking has inspired me for many years, including Rory Turner, founder of the cultural sustainability MA program at Goucher College; and Mary Hufford, whose pioneering work in public ecology and folklife is finally getting the recognition that it has long deserved.
    The conference season is always stimulating, as I feel pulled in two directions: one, I want to be with my colleagues, learning from them and sharing ideas; two, I want to be back at home, developing those ideas, thinking, reading, and writing. I have one more conference this fall, the ethnomusicology meeting in Washington, DC in a week. For that, I was asked to speak about public ethnomusicology 25 years after the publication of the first (and only) issue of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s Journal that was devoted to the topic of ethnomusicology in the public interest. This topic falls within another relatively new field, public humanities. And all of this—environmental humanities, public humanities, and so forth—arises in a crisis period when “if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu,” as the saying has it.