Suzie Q Wants To Know The Effect

[Oday Forster]

HostDaniel Raimi talks with Susie Crate, professor of anthropology at George Mason University. Susie discusses how she studies environmental issues through an anthropological lens and describes the community in northern Siberia that she's been studying since 1991. Daniel and Susie talk about how that community is being affected by climate change and how they are planning for the future.

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. This week, we talk with Susie Crate, professor of anthropology at George Mason University. Susie will tell us about how she studies environmental issues through an anthropological lens and describe the community in northern Siberia that she's been studying since 1991. We'll talk about how that community is being affected by climate change and how they are planning for the future. Stay with us.

Daniel Raimi: So Susie, you're the first anthropologist that we've had on the show and we're going to talk a little bit about your approach to thinking about climate change and the environment and how you study it. But first, can you tell us a little bit about how you got into the world of climate change and started thinking about it from the disciplinary lens that you have?

Susie Crate: Certainly. I had known and heard about the greenhouse effect probably from the late 80s. That's what it was typically termed back then. But it wasn't until the late 90s that I got climate change. In other words, I understood what the implications were and that was because I went to a very effective presentation by David Orr at the time, and also because my daughter was four years old and I was doing the math, figuring out how old she would be at some of the projected points out into the future.

I got interested in it professionally when after working with Viliui Sakha communities in northeastern Siberia for 15 years, they started asking me about how the winters were warmer, the summers were colder, the rain was coming at the wrong times, the seasonal timing was off, all things that I knew had to do with climate change and we decided to collaborate on a full fledged project in that area.

Daniel Raimi: Right. That makes sense. And we're going to come back to that community in Siberia and talk about them specifically in a couple of minutes. I'm going to ask you to say the name every time because I'm sure I'm going to mess it up certainly.

Daniel Raimi: But before we talk about the specifics of your work, can you just tell us a little bit about how you think about doing research on climate change? So as you know, RFF, we're mostly economists. Many of the people that we interact with are economists and policymakers. We think a lot about trade offs that are required to address environmental problems. As an anthropologist coming up and studying this issue, can you tell us just a little bit about how you think about the effects of climate change and what role climate policy sort of takes in your research, if it takes any role at all?

Susie Crate: Anthropology has four fields; archeology, linguistic anthropology, social or cultural anthropology, and biological or physical anthropology. Archeologists have been looking at climate change for a long time because in the past there have been events of climate change. Anthropologists, environmental anthropologists have also been interested in it for a long time, but it's only been in the last 20 years that anthropologists started really seriously looking at it in the field of environmental anthropology, which is one of the sub-fields of cultural or social anthropology. And now it's really taken off. You can find anthropologists working in all the four fields and in many of the sub-fields that I mentioned working on climate change because it really affects people in all aspects that anthropology looks at.

So I'm an environmental anthropologist. I also do cognitive anthropology. So in terms of environmental anthropology, I'm interested in human environment interdependence and interactions, how people make sense of their world based upon their cultural understanding, et cetera. And cognitive anthropology is really getting into perceptions, how people perceive what is going on around them and their interactions. So these are very good areas of anthropology to look at and investigate climate change. In terms of cognitive anthropology and environmental anthropology for that matter, too, a lot of what I look at are knowledge systems, so either indigenous knowledge or local knowledge and also narrative, so how people describe and talk about climate change.

Susie Crate: Climate policy definitely factors into it because for example, right now I'm a lead author on one of the special reports by the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It's the second special report. You probably heard that the first one on 1.5 degrees came out last fall. This is the second one, which is a special report on oceans and cryosphere and a changing climate. So ocean and cryosphere are all the frozen places of the planet. And within that, I'm helping to frame the section on knowledge systems.

So in my mind it's extremely critical, but it takes a little bit of doing because it's not business as usual for policymakers. So this is one of the key issues, key messages we're trying to communicate in the special report. And of course, this sets up a precedence. So these knowledge systems will be in all of the IPCC reports from this point on. So that's one area that I can think directly about how our work is very much engaged in policy.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's fascinating. There are so many questions I want to ask you about that. Maybe just one question would be, so when you're thinking about this issue of communicating in frameworks that, I guess to paraphrase it, make sense to people in their context, is it something where policy design needs to take that into account before the policy is developed, or is it the sort of thing where policymakers will make their decisions and then figure out how to communicate effectively? Basically I'm asking, does this knowledge need to be incorporated at the front end or the backend of the policy process?

Susie Crate: Oh, I would say that the place of knowledge systems in the front end, in the development of policy is really more about policymakers having an understanding of their audience, right? So when a speaker creates a talk, they think about their audience. A policymaker needs to understand, and of course policymakers know their audience, but what they need to understand about their audience is their capacity to understand or what kinds of narratives and language do they need to use for there to be an understanding. And then of course in the delivery, that's critical.

We're brought up on science. This is the kind of understanding that we're surrounded by all the time, numbers, crunching numbers. Economists are familiar with this, I know. And that's what we're brought up with. But we know for a fact, people respond to narrative. They respond to stories. And I'm not talking about children's stories. I'm talking about bringing people into an understanding via their being able to relate to it. And we'll talk about the documentary later, but that's one of the beauties I think of the documentary that we put together.

Daniel Raimi: Right. Fantastic. Right. So the documentary called The Anthropologist, which I think we'll touch on in a couple minutes. So, let's move on and let me ask you a question about another topic that you've thought a lot about and written about, which is the role of advocacy and the intersection between advocacy and research. So for someone to do advocacy around climate change, I think there's a certain amount of research that has to occur before advocacy will take place so that the advocacy is informed. But you've written and thought about sort of the relationship between advocacy and research for anthropologists. So can you talk a little bit about why you see advocacy or how you see the connection between advocacy and research in your own work?

Susie Crate: Well, anthropologists are trained to be what we could call cultural interpreters. So we're trained to understand how people live in their world, how they make sense of their world, their symbolic forms that they use to communicate the meaning, how they generate meaning in their lives. So when you are in a research context where you know certain things, I'll use the example of climate change because it makes sense to have an example, so for example, with the Viliui Sakha, in the process of doing focus groups and interviews where we were basically eliciting from inhabitants the kinds of changes they were observing, and by the way, we didn't use the term climate change in our research. We just were getting people to talk about the kinds of changes they were seeing, what they thought the changes were caused by, or what was causing the changes, the ways it was affecting their lives, et cetera. We found out that most people did not associate the changes they were observing with climate change because later we found out that there was no locally contextualized information about it.

They knew of of climate change. They'd heard about it for 5 or 10 years at that time. This was 2008. They'd read about it in the paper and heard about it on the radio and TV. But it was all about climate change happening in other parts of the world. So we understood at that point in time that it was critical to bring to them the understanding of climate change, and I'm not talking about the Al Gore talk. I was collaborating at the time with the permafrost scientist Alexander Fedorov at the Permafrost Institute in Yakutsk, and I mentioned to him that it would be great to do a knowledge exchange because their intimate knowledge of change was invaluable to him as a scientist to understand how climate change was affecting these very local ecosystems and cultures, but it was also valuable for them to have his research looking at how the permafrost was thawing, looking at the changes that were coming as a result of that for them to make sense of what was going on around them. So we did that.

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