Journal
WEATHER CLIMATE AND SOCIETY
Volume 14, Issue 2, Pages 585-595Publisher
AMER METEOROLOGICAL SOC
DOI: 10.1175/WCAS-D-21-0103.1
Keywords
Social Science; North America; Watersheds
Funding
- Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Water for Agriculture from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture [2017-68007-26584/Project Accession 1013079]
- USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture
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This research investigates environmental distress in a politically conservative and predominantly white farming community, and finds that lower concern over environmental change may have a palliative effect on reducing ecoanxiety. The study reveals that distress is related to social and material changes rather than environmental change itself.
This paper explores environmental distress (e.g., feeling blue) in a politically conservative (red) and predominantly white farming community in the southwestern United States. In such communities across the United States, expressed concern over environmental change-including climate change-tends to be lower. This is understood to have a palliative effect that reduces feelings of ecoanxiety. Using an emotional geographies framework, our study identifies the forms of everyday emotional expressions related to water and environmental change in the context of a vulnerable rural agricultural community in central Arizona. Drawing on long-term participant-observation and stakeholder research, we use data from individual (n = 48) and group (n = 8) interviews with water stakeholders to explore reports of sadness and fear over environmental change using an emotion-focused text analysis. We find that this distress is related to social and material changes related to environmental change rather than to environmental change itself. We discuss implications for research on emotional geographies for understanding reactions to environmental change and uncertainty.
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