Department of Writing & Rhetoric Studies
Amount Awarded: $2,000
Awarded for 2018-19
Title: Predators at the Door: Myth and Reason in Centennial Valley
For my benefit and for the benefit of Investigative Environmental Writing students, and as a continuation of the work I did as a 2017 John R. Park Fellow, I will document Centennial Valley community members' perspectives of predators to 1) understand the nature and implications of
those perspectives, and 2) gain and thereby share the experience needed to model the investigative techniques used to acquire those perspectives. This interdisciplinary project will present humanistic and scientific perspectives to students who will learn to employ the techniques in the context of their own research interests.
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Between May of 2018 and July of 2019 I made several trips to Centennial Valley, MT, where I continued to research perceptions of predators and their place on the landscape. During that time I also continued to develop my relationships with several members of the Centennial Valley community as well as with people from state and federal agencies who are responsible for the management of predators. I learned a great deal about the complexity of predator management through my interactions not only with the different people involved, but through my interactions with the landscape itself. This research has in turn enriched my approach to teaching Investigative Environmental Writing, which emphasizes the importance of working directly with other humans in order to solve the complex challenges we face. I worry that students spend too little time engaging other humans, and are instead focused almost exclusively on written texts that, while important, do not in themselves create the conditions for change. That requires sitting down with people with whom you disagree and having a civil conversation in hopes of finding common ground. Students have also benefitted from my own investigative writing, which I discuss with them from the earliest stages of conception all the way through to publication. Students respond favorably to professors who talk the talk and walk the walk, so I have worked very hard to model that behavior. One of the interesting things about wildlife management and other environmental issues is that it is not merely textual or constructed; that is, thanks to work being done in the sciences we know an extraordinary amount about predators and their biological requirements. Humans also have biological requirements, of course, but often the ways in which we attempt to fulfill them are ideological, political, religious, and therefore not necessarily founded upon the world as it is revealed through scientific inquiry. I am grateful to the Dee Council for giving me the support I needed to explore this difficult and fascinating reality, a process whose lessons I've enjoyed sharing with students. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not also mention that the Dee Council grant also played a role in the research I did for my book Wolves, Grizzlies, and Greenhorns--Death and Coexistence in the American West, which will be published next summer. I look forward to sharing this book with my students. As the product of over four years research and writing, it demonstrates not only how much time and effort is involved in doing the work we do, but it also provides an example of what that work involves.