Microsociological Perspectives for Environmental Sociology

Bradley H. Brewster, Antony J. Puddephatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472462589
• eBook ISBN: 9781317096757
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Environmental sociology tends to be dominated by macrosociological theories, to the point that microsociological perspectives have been neglected and ignored. This collection of original work is the first book dedicated to demonstrating the utility of microsociological perspectives for investigating environmental issues. From symbolic interactionism to actor–network theory, from dramaturgy to conversation analysis, from practice theory to animism, a variety of microsociological perspectives are not only drawn upon but creatively applied and developed, making this collection not only a contribution to environmental sociology, but to microsociological theory as well. The authors address such topics as the treatment of waste, human–animal relations, science and industry partnerships, environmental social movements, identities, and lifestyles, eco-tourism, the framing of land, water, and natural resources, and even human conceptions of outer space.

Bringing together diverse scholars, perspectives, and topics, Microsociological Perspectives for Environmental Sociology opens the field up to new approaches and initiates much needed dialogue between environmental sociologists and microsociologists. It will appeal not only to sociologists, but to environmental scholars across the social sciences interested in enriching their theoretical repertoire in studying the social aspects of the environment.

1
Micro-interactions of cosmic proportions

Mediating human–cosmos relationships in the planetarium¹

Megan S. Albaugh Bonham

In 1994, after an early morning earthquake awakened Los Angeles and knocked out the electricity, authorities and the local astronomical observatory received numerous phone inquiries regarding strange lights in the sky (Lin II, 2011). These lights were hundreds of stars, and many Los Angeles residents were seeing them for the first time. The Milky Way—our galactic home and a celestial object that has inspired humans for millennia—was so unknown to these residents that its presence felt strange and foreign. How might we rebuild a relationship with an object that many humans no longer even recognize? In this chapter I examine how planetariums foster a relationship between humans and the cosmos—an object that can seem abstract because it is distant, vast, largely intangible, and seemingly insignificant to our daily lives.

We possess a connection to the cosmos within our Earthly environment: the night sky. For millennia, when humans went outdoors at night, they “came face-to-face with the universe” (Bogard, 2013), seeing a couple thousand stars in the night sky. As night became the next frontier (Melbin, 1978), and significant human activity expanded into the nighttime hours, artificial light brightened the night sky. Today, light at night negatively affects human health (Schernhammer et al., 2001), animal and ecological health (Rich and Longcore, 2005), and the practice of astronomy (Riegel, 1973). It is no surprise then that planetariums tend to be located in cities; they simulate the dark night sky that urban environments no longer provide. Just as “nature is the zoo” in many urban areas (Mitman, 1996: 117; emphasis original), so too planetariums have become the night sky.

A growing number of institutions, including planetariums, “substitute for, or compete with, outdoor nature” (Čapek 2010: 217). Yet environmental scholars claim that facilitated and/or virtual nature experiences are insufficient for the development of a human–nature relationship. For example, Pyle (2003: 209) wrote, “The shimmering pixels on a computer screen can never substitute for the shimmering scales on a butterfly’s wing. Direct, personal contact with other living things affects us in vital ways that vicarious experience can never replace.” Similarly, Kellert (2002: 125) asserted, “Zoo and museum experiences lack the intimacy, challenge, creativity, and active participation afforded by more direct encounters with the natural world.” However, these and other environmental scholars have always written in reference to Earth-based nature where direct, physical interaction is possible. When our conception of nature is expanded to incorporate the cosmos, I argue that the simulated, indirect experiences offered by the planetarium, combined with engaged visitor–employee interactions, can be sufficient to foster relationships between humans and the cosmos. Although experiences in museums, where visitors are inside a building and still within the realm of society’s judgments and constraints, are not typically framed as “out-in-nature” (Brewster and Bell, 2009), the planetarium show itself can offer a brief escape into a simulated nature. With high-definition graphics, and a little visitor imagination, enthusiastic show operators can help visitors briefly to forget their physical location and consider their connection to the cosmos.

To learn about this relationship-building process, I conducted ethnographic observations of employee–visitor interaction and interviews with employees at Adler Planetarium. The planetarium’s task is a difficult one: facilitating a connection—at times even a sense of closeness or intimacy—with a cosmos that is geographically distant from, and not very salient to, its visitors. To ensure that visitors leave feeling a sense of connection to the cosmos, rather than alienation from it, planetarium employees create sensory simulations with distant places, translate unfamiliar scales of measurement, and evoke feelings of awe in their visitors.

Mediating connections with nature

Nature was once understood as endless; it incorporated the cosmos—the entirety of matter and space. However, as conceptions of nature and environment were conflated in contemporary Western thought, nature was reduced to Earth’s environment (Franklin, 2002). Environmental sociology emerged long after this conflation and, although environmental sociologists have studied topics ranging from consumer attitudes to state policies, the context has been limited to Earth. Despite recent growth in astronomical tourism (Collison and Poe, 2013) and the increasing humanization of the solar system for communication, military, and commercial purposes (Dickens and Ormrod, 2007a), the cosmos has been excluded from our existing sociological conceptions of nature. In this chapter I expand nature once again to incorporate the realm beyond Earth.

Common macro-historical perspectives characterize human relationships with nature in terms of distance, but a micro-level interactional approach can allow us to recognize more nuance, including relationships grounded in experiences of closeness and intimacy (Angelo, 2013). Angelo (2013: 353) defined intimacy in human–nature interactions as “the forms of attachment that grow from literally close, physical connections to objects,” a definition that seems to exclude the possibility of intimacy with distant objects. I will show how Adler Planetarium facilitates a (sometimes simulated) physical connection to the cosmos, which bridges the geographical divide and allows this distant object to feel emotionally closer. It might be impossible for a planetarium to facilitate intimacy between visitors and the cosmos during the timespan of one six-hour visit, but it is not unreasonable to assume that they might broker a connection that develops into intimacy, for example, by making the abstract idea of the cosmos—the entirety of the universe—more concrete.

As with our interactions with Earth-based nature (Fine, 1998), we experience emotional responses to the larger cosmos (e.g. awe, wonder, fear), organize the cosmos into cognitive categories (e.g. star, nebula, planet), and use the cosmos in defining our own identity (e.g. feeling special or insignificant). However, in contrast to nature on Earth, the cosmos’s distance from us limits our options for direct, sensory interactions with it at the same time that its immense size overwhelms our imaginations. Although we might choose not to be physically close to a bear, a cactus, or falling rocks within nature on Earth, we do not even have the option to be close to Saturn’s icy rings or the rocks of an exoplanet.

Our personal relationships with nature are often mediated by others. For example, family and friends often introduce children to nature through hiking, fishing, and other nature-focused activities. In an ethnographic study of mushroomers, Fine (1997: 69) described how “social actors individually and collectively make sense of and express their relationship to the environment, dealing with perceived threats to that environment,” a process he called naturework. Grazian (2012) explored how the producers of nature within zoos engage in nature making—a series of impression management strategies used to navigate conflicting obligations of zoos in their production of naturalistic exhibit spaces. However, the producers of nature in “edutainment” organizations, such as zoos and planetariums, do not simply stage naturalistic displays, but they also attempt to facilitate particular connections between their visitors and the natural world. In other words, they also make our relationship to nature—a process I call nature brokering.

The planetarium encounters particular challenges in nature brokering due to the cosmos’s vast size and physical distance from us, but it attempts to overcome these challenges through micro-level processes and interactions that foster closeness and connection between visitors and the cosmos. Planetarium employees use three mechanisms to help make the cosmos “real” to visitors: they facilitate sensory experiences, translate unfamiliar scales of measurement, and construct feelings of awe in their visitors. The usefulness of these mechanisms may extend beyond the planetarium. For example, comparable mechanisms could be employed to make large-scale environmental degradation and climate change less abstract and more real to the public, a point I will return to in the conclusion.

Methods and field site

I engaged in over 250 hours of ethnographic observation at Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois. Built in 1930, Adler was the first planetarium in the United States. Today the building contains three theaters and multiple astronomy-themed science and history exhibits. The Doane Observatory, the largest publicly accessible telescope in Chicago, is located immediately behind the planetarium.² Adler hosts approximately 500,000 visitors annually and has nearly 10,000 members. In addition to the typical museum staff of curators, educators, and administrators, Adler also employs an academically and publicly engaged team of astronomy and astrophysics researchers.

I focused my observations on daily, educational interactions between visitors and employees, such as the Astronomy Conversations when astronomers talk informally with small groups of visitors about their areas of expertise. To gain deeper insights into employees’ goals and strategies, I supplemented this participant observation with nine in-depth interviews with planetarium employees and affiliates who regularly interact with visitors in a teaching role.

Making the cosmos close

One Adler astronomer described our typical, Earth-based concerns as “What’s the shopping list? What’s the list of things I need to do?” If that is our perspective, the astronomer asked, “When do you get time to open yourself up to the fact that, yeah, the Earth is magnificent? And the Earth is a part of this much bigger story of the universe.” For many people that time is during their visit to the planetarium. Through their role as nature brokers, Adler employees facilitate sensory experiences with places that visitors will never physically visit, introduce unfamiliar scales of measurement, and evoke visitors’ emotions in an attempt to construct a sense of closeness and connection between visitors and the rest of the cosmos.

Facilitating sensory experiences with distant objects

Sensory experiences are essential for developing a sense of closeness to a place. While we might smell an ocean, feel raindrops, taste fruit, hear frogs, and see a forest, many of our senses become inadequate for engagement with nature beyond Earth. With the exception of sight (often aided by a telescope) and indirect touch (e.g. the warmth of the Sun’s rays or the movement of lunar tides), we do not typically have sensory experiences with extraterrestrial nature. One of Adler’s primary nature-brokering tasks is to create opportunities for visitors to have sensory experiences with distant places they will never physically experience in the same way as Earth-based nature.

The first way Adler accomplishes this is by utilizing pieces to simulate a distant whole. For example, while Adler visitors may not be able to visit Mars or asteroids Vesta and Ceres, they can touch a piece of each place at Adler’s “Touch the Solar System” kiosks. The planetarium uses the incongruity of the experience with our daily lives to entice visitors to engage with the objects. Via automated video, scientists enthusiastically repeat phrases such as, “Hey, this is an actual piece of Mars! Check it out!” and “How many of your friends can say they’ve touched Mars?” Additionally, the “Our Solar System” exhibit contains a meteorite weighing just over two kilograms that fell in Olympia Fields, Illinois, in 2003. Visitors are encouraged—by signage and employees—to touch and smell the meteorite. The written description, which contains the phrase “Fallen Asteroid Fragments in Chicago Suburbs” in large font, creates an even greater sense of closeness. Unlike the samples of Vesta and Ceres, which were found in Morocco and Mexico, this meteorite fell near the visitors’ current location. One astronomer described to me how this sensory experience creates a greater bond by “enhanc[ing] that connection to the larger cosmos. It takes people out of those everyday humdrum lives” and connects them with something much larger than themselves.

Second, Adler employees use analogies of sensory experiences on Earth to make complex and foreign cosmic phenomena seem more familiar (Arcand and Watzke, 2014). In a discussion about nebulae, one astronomer said

It’s a cloud, and they look like cloud structures, but it’s not the wind in our atmosphere that’s carving them. It’s a stellar wind. So you have the stars forming them, carving these cloud shapes. There are different interactions than what we see here on Earth, but there’s a familiarity with the way those clouds work. We understand that there’s something pushing from the left to the right or from the top to the bottom, and we do have an understanding—a physical understanding—of it because we see that phenomenon here. We go out on a windy day, and we are like “Oh!”, blown away, right? So we have a really visual, physical experience of things that are close, and the fact that some of those experiences help us understand what is so far away is so huge.

In this way, although we cannot travel to space to feel a stellar wind, we can imagine the experience based on our encounters with wind on Earth. According to the astronomer quoted above, our Earth-based sensory experiences give us “a vocabulary to start with and to understand” these distant phenomena. However, for this vocabulary to be effective, visitors and employees must share similar sensory experiences on which the vocabulary is based (Fine, 1995).

Finally, Adler uses technology to facilitate sensory experiences. For example, solar telescope viewing allows visitors to look at the Sun, a celestial object with which we are all very familiar, but that we normally cannot view directly without harming our eyes. I observed that visitors’ understanding of their solar viewing experience often depended on the amount of interpretation that museum staff provided. For example, after a family finished taking turns looking through one of the telescopes, a volunteer told them that the dark spots they saw were sunspots. The visitors look surprised, and one of them replied, “Oh, I thought those were just on the image.” Although the telescopes themselves make the Sun visually accessible, visitors may not understand what they are seeing—sometimes even misunderstanding sunspots as merely dirt on the telescope lens—without sufficient interpretation.

Visualizations also allow us to see aspects of the cosmos beyond what our visual sense would normally allow. When interacting with visitors in the Space Visualization Laboratory, many astronomers take time to clarify that visualizations are different from regular films or animations. For example, one astronomer described a visualization as a “simulation based on science and physics. It’s a movie. But it’s not just art, but science too.” One of Adler’s visualization experts described visualizations to me by emphasizing that:

It has to do with the representation of something that is not naturally accessible through the human senses, especially the main one: vision … These representations are not figurative. It’s not trying to evoke something that is perceptually there. It’s something that’s not perceivable. Or not approachable, if you wish. So in translating that to vision or [touch] or sound, you sometimes have to change relationships to fit human perception.

For example, the creators of a visualization displaying a map of the entire universe increased the size of each galaxy to one pixel so the galaxies could be visible, even though they were no longer to scale. Additionally, a visualization of the eventual collision between the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies allows visitors to “see” the future. Through the use of visualizations, Adler employees enable visitors to visually experience parts of the universe that they otherwise could not see.

Technology even gave visitors the impression that virtual objects could be touched. The three-dimensional screens within the Space Visualization Laboratory and the dome theaters’ high-definition projection systems depict the cosmos as physically present. This “immersive view” can evoke the sensation of cognitive dissonance (Griffiths, 2013). Although visitors understood they were inside a museum, I regularly watched children and adults physically reach out in an attempt to touch the stars and planets they were viewing. Closeness is a prerequisite for tactile engagement, and the planetarium’s technology simulated this physical closeness.

Translating cosmic scales into common metrics

During an informal presentation about exoplanets, a visitor was shocked to learn that planets exist outside our solar system. She exclaimed, “How little we know! That is so amazing.” Then she remarked t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: awakening micro-theoretical perspectives in environmental sociology
• 1 Micro-interactions of cosmic proportions: mediating human–cosmos relationships in the planetarium
• 2 “This is not Sea World”: spectacle and insight in nature tourism
• 3 How to climb Mount Fuji (at your earliest convenience): a non-representational approach
• 4 Negotiating identity, valuing place: enacting “earthcare” and social justice at Finca La Bella, Costa Rica
• 5 Green lifestyles and micropolitics: pragmatist action theory and the connection between lifestyle change and collective action
• 6 Mead, interactionism, and the improbability of ecological selves: toward a meta-environmental microsociological theory
• 7 Present tense: everyday animism and the politics of possession
• 8 Wild selves: a symbolic interactionist perspective on species, minds, and nature
• 9 Dog shit happens: human–canine interactions and the immediacy of excremental presence
• 10 Sorting the trash: competing constructions and instructions for handling household waste
• 11 The utility of phenomenology in understanding and addressing human-caused environmental problems
• 12 The social psychology of compromised negotiations: constructing asymmetrical boundary objects between science and industry
• 13 Escaping the iron cage of environmental rationalizations: microsocial decision-making in environmental conflicts
• Index