Bringing Climate Politics Home: Lived Experiences of Flooding and Housing Insecurity in a Natural Gas Boomtown

As the extraction of shale gas and oil transforms localities, these places emerge as important if understudied sites of contemporary carbon politics. In this paper, we develop a new approach for examining lived connections between fossil fuel extraction and climate change. We propose the concept of carbon mobilization to describe the multiple stages of fossil fuel extraction and combustion that may be experienced separately (as an economic boom, climate disaster, or air pollution, for example) or simultaneously, in locally distinctive combinations – but until now have been considered separately in most scholarship and public policy. We explore lived experiences of carbon mobilization in Bradford County, Pennsylvania, a community that, in the last decade, has gone through a shale gas boom and bust and has suffered from severe flooding. Interviews with social service providers and county leaders indicated that connections between the fossil fuel industry and climate disaster manifested most saliently around housing security—particularly the loss of housing due to floods and economic insecurity related to boom-bust cycles. Economic changes that gas development brought to the community made flood resilience more challenging for some, and easier for others. Perhaps surprisingly, the natural gas industry was a “double winner,” benefitting from climate disaster by gaining a reputation for helping with flood recovery. We suggest that while global climate discourse may not resonate locally in communities that host fossil fuel extraction, people make locally-salient connections between different stages of carbon mobilization, and these connections have important public policy and social justice implications

From 'trading zones' to 'buffer zones': Art and metaphor in the communication of psychiatric genetics to publics

Psychiatric genetics has a difficult relationship with the public given its unshakeable connection to eugenics. Drawing from a five-year public engagement programme that emerged from an internationally renowned psychiatric genetics centre, we propose the concept of the Buffer Zone to consider how an exchange of viewpoints between groups of people – including psychiatric geneticists and lay publics - who are often uneasy in one another’s company can be facilitated through the use of art and metaphor. The artwork at the exhibitions provided the necessary socio-cultural context for scientific endeavours, whilst also enabled public groups to be part of, and remain in, the conversation. Crucial to stress is that this mitigation was not to protect the science; it was to protect the discussion

Creating positive environmental impact through citizen science

Interest in citizen science is growing, including from governments and research funders. This interest is often driven by a desire for positive environmental impact, and the expectation that citizen science can deliver it by engaging the public and simultaneously collecting environmental data. Yet, in practice, there is often a gap between expected and realised impact. To close this gap, we need to better understand pathways to impact and what it takes to realise them. We articulate six key pathways through which citizen science can create positive environmental change: (1) environmental management; (2) evidence for policy; (3) behaviour change; (4) social network championing; (5) political advocacy; and (6) community action. We explore the project attributes likely to create impact through each of these pathways and show that there is an interplay between these project attributes and the needs and motivations of target participant groups. Exploring this interplay, we create a framework that articulates four citizen science approaches that create environmental impact in different ways: place-based community action; interest group investigation; captive learning research; and mass participation census