Spirit in Action

Sociology of Sustainability

A visit with Nels Paulson, sociologist in the Social Science Department of UW-Stout about his research & presentations on Old Ideas, New Knowledge, Sustainable Communities, on trophy hunting, and on influences of religious/spirituality in disaster relief.

Duration:: 55m
Broadcast on:: 29 Nov 2015
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Today for Spirit in Action, we'll welcome a sociology professor from one of the universities in my area, about environmental issues. And I want you to keep in mind, wherever you're listening to this, that there is likely someone in your area, perhaps an expert or researcher, maybe an activist or a writer or a leader of some sort who would enrich Norton Spirit radio listeners with their stories, experience, or input. So if you know of someone, please contact me, Mark helps me, and you can find the contact details on northernspiritradio.org. But today's guest, Nils Paulson, is in the social science department of the University of Wisconsin Stout. And I have him here because his work, in general, addresses global civil society and the environment. And we need all of the resources at hand to deal with the numerous environmental issues of our day. I heard him speaking locally about creating sustainable communities, and figured we could all benefit from such insights. So Nils Paulson joins us now, by phone, from Menominee, Wisconsin. Nils, thank you so much for joining me today for Spirit in Action. - Thanks for having me. - It was good to catch your talk at UW-O-Claire. Again, the topic was old ideas, new knowledge, sustainable communities. Which of those are you most interested in? The old ideas, the new knowledge, or the sustainable communities? - Well, my hope is that for everybody, the thing we're most interested in is sustainable communities. Old ideas are valuable, and certainly new knowledge is valuable, but only in so far is actually makes life better, right? Crews call it a life, and we can maintain our finite resources sustainably, right? So I guess the last, the first to be last, last should be first, right? - Okay, boy, you're getting religious on me already. You're in the social science department at the University of Wisconsin in Stout. Where does your interest in sustainable communities come from? Is that something you started into college or into your master's PhD, with a particular interest in it? Or is that an outgrowth of something else? - Yeah, I kind of came into the backwards. I was always big into the outdoors growing up, and really into fishing, hunting, camping, and all that. And when I was in college, I ended up majoring in history, and I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do with that, wanted to do what I could make a world better place in some way. So what I did is I took a job in Phoenix, Arizona teaching junior high for inner city school, 'cause that was someplace I didn't know anybody and thought I could make an impact. I started working at fly fishing shops on the weekends and try to spend as much time on nature as possible, and realized that my passion is not just for people, but for nature, and ended up one of my friends that I ran track with as an undergraduate. She started a doctoral program that focused on environmental sociology at Arizona State, and I was down there living, and hung out with her a few times and met some really cool graduate students and professors, and especially this cool Marxist professor, Bob Bowen, started talking about environmental sociology and what it was, and realized that sociology is the best way for me to combine both my interests in the natural world and the social. So I actually had never had a sociology course as an undergraduate. Luckily, they didn't take a look at my transcripts or something like that, just focused on my GRE scores and whatever else. So I ended up getting funding for this doctoral program at Arizona State. Yeah, it's just kind of funny how you can't really predict what direction you're gonna go in life. Sometimes I end up discovering I love sociology, 'cause it answers a lot of questions about why. Is our natural world not necessarily sustainably being used and related to? You have to understand how we structure society first. Realize that through teaching and research, I would have my own unique form of advocacy that could be more effective than other avenues I could think of at the very least. And so, yeah, I researched quite a few different topics under this general genre of environment and society, ranging from disaster relief to hunting, trophy hunting to now, just in Menomie, Wisconsin, that moved here, took on studying phosphorus pollution and moving algae, moving water quality. Not necessarily 'cause that was the number one thing I was interested when I went into graduate school, but it seemed like the most pertinent social environmental problem here locally. And so, that's my story of how I ended up edging into this. It wasn't something pretty conceived from the start. Well, I wanna take each of those topics and talk a bit about 'em, because overall, again, you said you went in sociology, you wanna effectuate change, you want to help clean up and you have to understand how the world works, how people work, how our interactions work in order to make change. The first topic that I wanna talk about, your research title was something about NGOs, hunting and conservation. And frequently, I would say that a lot of people of a liberal ilk will oppose the two. If you're a hunter, you're opposed to conservation, which is very much a false dichotomy. Talk about your experience about that and what your research was about. - Yes, what struck me about hunting is, as a conservation tool, it's one of the most important resources for conservation funding. Certainly in the United States, but globally as well. And that was really, until you got the Pittman-Robertson Act in the United States, where earmarks all sorts of, all the hunting funds that the taxes go towards. Conservation purposes, and globally, the narrative goes that if we put values on these animals to be hunted, then they'll be incentive for local people to protect the natural habitat in order to make sure that these animals survive in order to bring income into their communities, right? And so the idea behind trophy hunting is a conservation tool, I think, is really wonderful. But what I sort of discovered is that in practice, a lot of the money that's supposed to filter down to local communities to incentivize them to protect the natural habitat isn't actually filtering down to them, right? So the question is, for me, this is low-hanging fruit. This is a really great way to not only improve natural habitats, but to improve the lives of impoverished communities globally, is to try to make sure that this trophy hunting conservation tool is working properly, and to try to explore why it isn't. And so what I did is I researched a non-governmental organization who seemed most connected to trophy hunting potentially as a conservation strategy and tried to figure out, why aren't we doing more, I guess? So I studied fire club international, World Wildlife Fund, IUCN, International Union for Conservation Nature, and Conservation International. Interviewed a lot of people, spent a lot of time at their headquarters or at the World Conservation Congress or different places like that. Now, basically, what we have going on is sort of what you were talking about, this division in terms of values that is a result of the ways in which we've reconceived civil advocacy. So historically, as I talked about in my TED talk, the best way to try and make a vibrant democracy that's sustainable and promote social justice is that people spend their leisure time civilly talking with one another and relating with one another. And what's happened is a result of, you know, it's part of the modern condition. Over time, the idea of what it means to be participating in civil society has come to mean formal, organized NGOs, right? And so these organizations end up falling into this trap of trying to fit into a particular mission that reflects their donors and reflects certain norms of how they're supposed to operate that end up making it really hard for them to work well with people of divergent values. And so you have organizations like Humane Society who don't recognize, for the most part, trophy hunting is a valuable tool at all. It's like-- I remember talking with this one guy. He's-- he's related to Vietnam. It's sort of like the animal rights crowd. They see it as a narrative. But we got to kill these dudes to save them. There's this part of that environmental civil society that's completely opposed to trophy hunting and unwilling to communicate with those who are promoting. This is a tool like Safari Club International. And then on the opposite side, Safari Club International thinks that, you know, all these environmentalists are idiots, so I don't even try. So this is the lowest hanging fruit in the conservation world, globally, trophy hunting to try to make it work the way it's supposed to. And we're not actually making a really good attempt at doing so. So I guess that's basically my dissertation was about-- Actually, one of the impressions that I have is oftentimes hunters and fishers really like being in the outdoors. And they're really concerned if you destroy the outdoors. So there are a lot of people. I, as a matter of fact, one of the people active in our city government here in Eau Claire, he moved up to Eau Claire because he loves the outdoors. That's why he moved here. And then he's involved in development of the city. That's how he works. And so in some ways, he's helping the city grow in a way that is counter to what he actually came here for. It's a fine line to walk sometimes. Yeah, for sure. Internationally, what areas were you checking out about this trophy hunting? Of course, in the news, just a couple months ago, there was the big news about the lion that was shot by the Minnesota dentist, I believe. Yeah, and it was really interesting, the narrative that grew out of that. It wasn't surprising at all for my research that you had people that were stepping in and saying, you know, what a tragedy this guy, you know, just kills this innocent lion. And essentially, there's this dentist who's engaged in this hyper masculinity, trying to show off his prestige through killing some sort of seemingly exotic animal that's dangerous and he can overcome it and all this kind of stuff. And they're not wrong, right? That is really problematic. The sort of idea perhaps behind this dentist going after a seat of the lion and killing him. But on the other hand, then you have the other group of people who are saying, listen, this was a problem in this particular case. But trophy hunting is like the closest to nature everyone gets. And just, you know, don't let the one bad apple ruin the whole batch rate, which I definitely could have predicted that many of the conversations they were having were being had, at least among my friends on Facebook. And I'm kind of in one of those lands where half my friends are very, very conservative. Half my friends are very liberal. And so on one hand, I've seen these conversations that were among the same types of people like, oh, this is the most ridiculous thing in the world. What a jerk. And on the other hand, the whole other group of people are saying, these idiots don't even understand that while this is a bad particular case, trophy hunting is so wonderful. You know, it's one of the more interesting things that isn't explored enough in environmental sociology. A lot of times the focus is on environmental justice in terms of pollution or climate change, because these are really serious things. But I kind of thought that this trophy hunting thing is interesting and similar in different ways as well. This is not a case of trophy hunting that I'm going to bring up. But I think it relates directly to the kind of conservation that maybe the trophy hunting can actually support. I've been to Kenya visiting Quakers over there. And so my wife and I arranged to go on a safari. Most people think that's hunting, but in fact, you know, we're just driving out. We're in a van and we go amongst these hundreds, thousands of animals. And we spent about an hour at one point observing and at one point getting very close to watching a face off between a cold buffalo and a lion. And they ended up wandering away and around and eventually the cold buffalo, which had been partially wounded, got away and the lion disappeared and our driver was trying to find where he went and we come around a corner. And from my nose to the nose of that lion was less than eight feet when we came around. He was sitting right behind a tree. It was pretty impressive. It was powerful and moving, but what they did there in Kenya, and they've done some places in Rwanda, for instance, in a number of other countries, they've established reserves where large numbers of animals happen. In the United States, I think it's much harder to get consensus to make such large areas, although I think they're doing it with some bison and other things. Could you talk about what supports that kind of conservation? I think in Kenya, it's one of their biggest sources of income with all of the people who come to go on these safaris, like what I went on. Yeah, no. And Kenya is a unique case in Sub-Saharan Africa in that it's the country that limits the trophy hunting the most. Yeah. I mean, the net gain of focusing on photography safari versus the traditional safari, perhaps with actually trophy hunting. I don't know enough about my general impression in talking to people is that Kenya is not generally celebrated in the conservation world as being a better solution to animals and animal habitat than encouraging more trophy hunting. You don't actually necessarily see the improvement of habitat and species in Kenya comparatively to other places, but I don't know enough about Kenya to be able to speak at length about that particular country, so that's my general impression on that. Are there other countries where you could speak more knowledgeably about what they do? You know, so my field work, I decided to focus on the NGOs themselves instead of individual countries. So my knowledge about individual countries working or not working well is based off of other people's studies. So Namibia and Botswana are often celebrated as success stories. A large part of that is so that the big idea is to have community supported conservation initiatives regarding trophy hunting. In other words, where the communities run the show and they have some sort of democratically established group of people who are working with ecologists and other experts to try to make sure that the system is not only best for nature but for their own communities, the places where this has been more successful, of course, are where you have less issues of corruption as well as more active attempts to maintain the community as the basis and have a stakeholder group that's really representative of the community driving the show. And so places like Botswana, which are relatively stable and low on corruption, of course, are going to be more successful, but beyond that, there's this interesting program that World Wildlife Fund does which doesn't promote that much in terms of advertising because there's so many donors to World Wildlife Fund that don't like hunting, but they have this life program. And Namibia really tries to make sure that the stakeholder groups who are in charge of the hunting are local and it's not just some outfitter from somewhere around the world who's making a bunch of money and doesn't really care about the local people who's determining the conditions of the trophy hunting endeavors. And I think that both conditions, you know, stable, democratic, pluralistic kind of democracy coupled with participatory community-driven approach to the trophy hunting is where it's going to be most successful. We just don't see certainly the former as prevalent in sub-Saharan Africa because of all sorts of extractives, exploitative kind of issues, of course, of the tradition of colonialism and so on. But that really needs to be one of the things that needs to be developed first and foremost rather than just better science about how do you manage these habitats. It is really interesting for me the difference in attitudes. The us versus them attitudes that come, some people who are conservationists who think that any kind of a hunter is not a conservationist, I happen to have in my own family a couple of steps on who are hunters, one who works for the Department of Natural Resources as his wife. So they're very avid outdoors people including hunting and fishing and they're very environmentally tuned. So they end up feeling themselves caught in society. Now you talk about a breakdown of society where we slice society differently. We talk about organizations as the placeholders for contact. How do we get to a better place where we actually meet and respect each other? I see this, by the way, in the campaign there were questions that went to Bernie Sanders's presidential democratic campaign. He isn't sufficiently anti-NRA for a lot of liberals because his home state. People do believe in having guns but they don't use them to kill people. They are typically used for hunting, I think. Sure, I think that these kind of litmus tests of being a true conservative or true liberal are pretty dangerous. I think that trying to fit into that type of identity is sort of a central problem. I think a better identity is to try to see yourself as an empathetic listener first and foremost and this can go a long ways in terms of moving us beyond that disconnected and almost haughty kind of existence. If you're worried too much about your own status in this world and whether you're right or not, this is where we get into a lot of problems. A lot of trophy hunters actually are unwilling to admit or even think about any of their views sometimes and this isn't all of them of course but a lot of them, some of their views on different things like gender and poverty and even nature as being wrong. Even though I think that there's a huge problem in our perception of these groups of people being anti-environment because they're hunters at the same time, part of the problem is that when you interact with some of them they seem like the type of people who wouldn't be doing things that were actually for the betterment of the environment. They're focused on domination and we know that the ideologies of domination have been really, really terrible for our environment historically. I kind of get why people are suspicious about hunters but at the same time I think that the suspicion is coming from the same sort of problematic space as perhaps hunters have and in terms of trying to think about ways to win argument or to be correct or be better rather than being listeners and empathetic human beings first. And so I guess that it doesn't solve all of our problems to focus on being good listeners but it's a necessary condition to start, right? Yeah, it is a very good place to start and at a certain point that means that communication can happen, common values can be discovered and change can happen, which is of course why I have you here folks. By the way, I'm speaking with Nell's Paulson, he is in the social science department at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, he's in his seventh year there. Originally from central Minnesota did a lot of his study down in Arizona and has been back here. In particular, I heard him speaking at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire to a sociology class and people from the public were invited in for a talk he had old ideas, new knowledge, sustainable communities. And there's also going to be very shortly a TED talk, a ten minute TED talk and it'll be up on the TEDx UW-Stout.com website. He's here on spirit and action because of his talk and because he's actually teaching us through his research, sociological research, how we can actually effectively make change. Sometimes it's not enough to be right, it's also necessary to be wise and hopefully this research is moving us in that direction. And before I get into a couple more topics that you've dealt with Nell's, I would remind our listeners that this program is a Nordenspirit radio production. It's on the web at Nordenspiritradio.org so you'll find connections to Nell's Paulson through that website including to uwstout.edu/lakes website which will have a lot of the information that we're going to talk about just shortly. On that site you can also find a place to post comments and we love two-way communication. It's part of this listening that we need to do to one another. You're hearing us right now and we'd love to hear you, so please post a comment when you visit Nordenspiritradio.org. Also on the site you can donate and that is how this work is funded. It's full-time work and we need your support to keep giving us an alternative. Even more important in terms of providing an alternative news source for the United States on our airways, support your local community radio station. Community radio provides a slice of news and of music that you get nowhere else on the airways and it is so, so, so important. I can't repeat that enough. Start by supporting your local community radio station. Again, Nell's Paulson is here, uwstout, social science department and we're talking about the material of various research that he's done and will kind of culminate, I think, in the Lakes Project, which is perhaps the crowning up-to-date achievement of his work. But let's talk about civil society and other environmental issues. In particular, I was taken by this other research that you did because it involves religion and because spirit in action, we try and look at what are those deeper motivations, sometimes called spiritual, sometimes just called values, but they have to do with our conception of the world and how we unite together to live out that conception. So could you talk a little bit about the research that you did comparing the United States and India? Yeah, sure. So for me, I became interested in civil society largely because I saw it as the avenue for really addressing not only environmental problems, but our social justice kind of problems. In general, but to me, one of the lynchpins of civil society is our spirituality and our institutionalized religious organizations. It seems to me, from what I've seen in terms of research and just kind of my own life experiences that, on one hand, religious groups and spirituality in general is a source for all sorts of social justice and a way for providing both a moral and ethical basis for building a better quality of life, but at the same time, it very often does the exact opposite. And so I think that the way in which religion as a part of civil society is engaged can be really, really fascinating. So after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, actually during it, I thought it would be really interesting to take a look at the role of religion in dealing with and interpreting that disaster. I took that on as a research project that was sort of a side project that I just wanted to explore how religion was discussed in the media. I was talking with another graduate student who was from India, he mentioned, well, there were floods in Mumbai at the exact same time as Katrina, and this was several months after Katrina, and just as many people died, maybe you should take a look at that too. And so it turned into an interesting project where I compared how disaster relief was framed in religious terms in both countries. And the thing that was fascinating to me is the difference qualitatively and quantitatively in terms of how disaster relief was filtered through religion in India and the United States. It was very, very organized and it had to feed through particular established formal organizations, had to follow particular rules and procedures, and what happened was a lot of the way in which religion provided relief to Hurricane Katrina was on a very large scale, but it was very delayed. And so we don't see a whole lot in the news about how spirituality was this important component to helping so many people who were at risk in New Orleans during the actual hurricane or slightly after, but after several weeks, once following this very organized path of working with FEMA and we saw massive financial support that started flowing in. In India, you didn't see these formal religious organizations a whole lot, but what you saw was a tremendous altruism and cooperation and coordination in this city of Mumbai, which is recently in the last couple of decades, become a development of squatters and slums. And so it's this metropolitan area where far more than 2,000 people probably should have died given the flood that happened, that August of 2005. But what people were doing, they were going around and trying to help one another actively and when they reflected upon that they were talking about their spirituality, but the long term support for the victims of that flood was not the quantity as you saw in the United States. And so what the paper ended up turning into is just how when we institutionalize and formalize our religion, it maybe consequently or maybe as a consequence makes religion less a part of our daily lives and the way that we think about things, and it becomes this expectation of this is what these organizations do, and that on one hand it has its benefits of having it be efficient and organized and calculable and predictable, which is great. In India, of course, is missing out on that part of it, but in India, the immediate disaster, there wasn't this discourse about all these poor people deserving to die and if they just pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and all these kinds of things, it was narrative of their moral responsibility to help one another because of their Hinduism or their belief in Islam or there's some discourse about Christianity as well, but the larger idea was that the spirituality, they weren't leaving it to be formally organized, it was just a part of what they do, so I found that pretty fascinating. I'm not sure that I've quite fully grasped this, the difference, but let me take a stab at it, you tell me if I'm close, because they're less institutionalized, there's the general beliefs which are religious beliefs but they're widely distributed in India and it's less a part of which organization you're part of and it's more about the beliefs that you hold individually, that leads to individual motivation, individual can get up and go, whereas it takes some time for an organization to have its monthly meeting and make its decision or portion its money and then send forces and support, which it can do to a large degree and with a large impact, so one case you're sacrificing immediacy for size and effectiveness of organization, does that make sense? Right, yeah. Wow, that means I understand a sociologist, that's a step up for me. Yeah, well you know, I think it's important to recognize what we lose when we have to have things formally organized according to particular rules, because there is a lot of gain and I think a lot of us agree that the gain is very worth it to have these formal rules that are institutionalized and makes for a lot more order in our lives, which feels safer and in a lot of ways it is more secure, but we do lose that idea of your personal connection to other people, you know, Mark's favor, the same sociologist, he used to talk about how this rationality, this formal rationality, was going to be this iron cage that's going to pervade modern society and just dehumanize us and disenchant us with what it means to be human, right, and we're going to lose that magic of being human, which the magic is the connections that we have to one another, first and foremost, right, and our connection to rules but our connection to one another, and he argued nothing but a polar night of icy darkness and hardness awaits us now no matter what groups prevail, which is, you know, very depressing take on modernity because modernization has all these benefits, but it really is a danger, especially when you're talking about religion, when things have to be too formally organized, right, and I guess that's kind of what I was getting out with that research project, which I didn't intend to originally going into it. But it's what you learned and so that's what you share. Could you tell me a little bit now about yourself, religiously, spiritually, history to present, who is now Paulson from that religious spiritual point of view? The church I grew up in was the ELCA Lutheran Church, ended up going to the ELCA Lutheran College, Concordia College in Morehead, Minnesota, and sort of keep with that religious tradition because a large extent used to the rituals and so on and so forth. You know, for me though, I go to church on Sundays and have developed wonderful relationships with the other people in the church and I think that that's been more important to me than trying to fit into a particular genre of religion. So I live in Menominee, Wisconsin, currently. That's where UW-Stout is. We actually just moved up here about a year ago. My wife is a physician and she was working in Rochester, Minnesota, for four years while I was working here at UW-Stout and we lived in Wabasha, Minnesota, which is right in between the two towns and when we commute in opposite directions for an hour each day. And so I commuted up here to Menominee each day for four years with the kids until I have three small children. And on Sundays we would go to church in Wabasha, to this small ELCA church, Faith Lutheran Church, and the relationships that we developed there were very meaningful in that the focus for many of the people there, and I'm not sure if that was a reflection of the history of the congregation or the pastor, but the focus is to be warm and open and inviting. So, for example, the pastor and his wife are Godparents for our youngest. So these connections that we built with them were so meaningful that we actually still commute down there. Every single Sunday there's dozens of churches here in Menominee, but we commute down to Wabasha every Sunday so that the kids can go to Sunday school with our friends and we can still maintain that little bit of a connection with them and have like lunch with some of them afterwards. And, you know, a lot of the stuff that went into my head talk actually came from conversations I was having with a friend of mine who's a social studies teacher at the high school in Wabasha, who is amazing in me. He actually has brain cancer and continues to like every single day like coach, track and teach and just overcoming incredible odds there. Basically, from what I've been able to see, it's because he spends all the time focusing on other people and not himself. And our pastor gave this wonderful sermon about a month before I gave my TED Talker, a couple of months before I gave my TED Talk, that was, you know, with Mark chapter 9 and sort of how the disciples were spending all their time talking about who's the best and then Jesus said, you know, what are you guys even talking about? Look at this child. And so, like, there's this fear about losing our status, right, or being wrong. He really had this great message and a sermon. And so, I found by having discussions with those guys and just watching them the way they deal with their everyday lives has been inspirational for a lot of my research, you know, or at least it reflects a lot of my research interests and solidifies it a little bit more. So, I guess that's generally how my religion fits into my work. It's not directly instrumental and it's not dogmatic at all, but it's a way to think through things in a slowly different way perhaps than I would academically, but, you know, equally important. I have a couple questions which maybe are going to take us pretty far from your research, which is often environmentally queued. It's looking at what's going to make a difference to the glory of the earth around us. But since you do have personal experience of religion, I'm just wondering if I can ask you a couple questions about that. Several years ago, I interviewed one of the authors of a book called American Grace, which is essentially a sociological study about what religion's doing, how it unites and divides us in the United States. One of the trends they pointed out which has continued since the book came out is something that's radically different for U.S. society, and that is the group of people who are not affiliated with any religion, who are spiritual but not religious, has started to grow. It was a steady, small number through most of the history. Unchurch religiosity. Yeah. And now it's growing dramatically. I'm wondering what implications that has for the kind of work that we do, caring for our environment, caring for one another, as in the case of Katrina or so on, what implications that that would therefore have for our country. You know, on one hand, a lot of people see it as dangerous in terms of we have this theoretical contribution from a milled Durkheim about 100 years ago, talking about the shift and how we're interconnected with people, that it's more impersonal kind of way where we have access to a lot more information, but the norms that we have that are shared with other people are weaker, right? And the argument that he makes, he calls us "anome," or "normlessness," is that without strong norms, we have unrealistic expectations, right? And this can be very, very problematic for social order, as well as for our own happiness. And so far, if we have unrealistic expectations, then we're going to be disappointed very frequently, right? And there's also this likelihood that we won't be able to trust people as much. We learn that likely to trust people will get anxious when we actually communicate with one another. I think this fear with a lot of people about this unchurched kind of spirituality is that it's leading us towards this sort of "normlessness." And so, my general impression is that a lot of this spirituality are avenues for people to actually be more connected to one another rather than disconnected. And so it's not necessarily that type of "anome" that some people are afraid is going to happen. If people were becoming more disconnected with one another by pursuing this unchurched kind of religiosity, then I think we have some tremendous things to worry about in terms of the place of religion in providing social order, security, stability, predictability, etc. But my general impression is that's not really where this is going. Just sociologically speaking, it seems like the more dangerous direction is those who are so fearful about that that they become so entrenched in certain dogma and doctrine and interpretations of their own scripture that they have a real hard time being empathetic or compassionate or just considerate of other people's perspectives. That, to me, is a little bit more of a danger that I am worried about in terms of the way religion is going, is this higher commitment to fundamentalism out of a fear about that unchurched religiosity that I think is generally unfounded in terms of a real risk? So that's, I guess, my general impression. It's surprising and perhaps maybe sad that we actually would connect a loss of empathy with an increase in religiosity. That is not what one normally would project from the teachings of many religions. And it's sad, sad and true, I'm afraid. Well, let's get on to the third and the area that actually I heard you speak about at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. Phosphorus and farmers is what your study is about but this is all about the red cedar watershed and water quality and how you actually get effective change, cohesiveness, working for a particularly good. So tell me what the research was about, how you implemented it and what the outcome of this is. The idea behind it was that I didn't know enough about the ecology of the problem or really what were some of the social and economic barriers to trying to address the problem of this blue green algae blue. It struck me as important to have, to start talking to people, of course, about what do we know about the ecology and the sociology of economics about this problem. Before we can start to develop a research project but also that I really needed to try to understand this not by developing complete expertise in geology or biology or economics but rather to bring in these kinds of expert researchers to do other angles on this project that are different than mine and we can all learn from one another. So we ended up establishing this Lakes project which is an acronym for linking applied knowledge and environmental sustainability to train undergraduates each summer and doing research on the Phosphorus pollution but in ways that reflect what questions not only have the academics but what questions the watershed had, what it did not know and it turns out the watershed didn't know a whole lot about the social and economic conditions of the water pollution and so this became a much bigger part of our project than, you know, a lot of the ecology which is what ordinarily people would focus on. Okay, we just need to find out a little bit more about the sources of the pollution and it turns out we already know quite a bit about that, right? It's more that a lot of other people who are using the land are not necessarily understanding their impact or they don't understand the accessibility of changing their land use. This is partially because we're so disconnected upstream and downstream from one another today and that's beginning metaphorically as well as within the red cedar basin and so what I decided to focus on from my research project and because of what I was basically seeing as I was talking with people were farmers and their social networks and so who did they trust for farming advice and how does this impact them using certain best management techniques like you know conservation tillage and cover crops and manure storage and containment and so on and so forth. So that is a bit more of my interest but we've had other projects have taken a look at well what is the natural phosphorus in the watershed and been able to start to measure that and Chris Ferguson who's an economist at UW-Stouge, he's the co-director of the Lakes Project. He helped direct an economic impact study of the lake this last summer with the lakes project that estimated where bare minimum about 36 million dollars were losing that on by not having clean water just for monomony, right? This ended up being a bigger project than just us finding some publishable data because it turns out the community and this was intentional from the starting point is to integrate the community and government agencies and stakeholders on our research addressing questions that they had and then reporting the results in a way that's accessible to them but also encouraging them to talk with one another about the research findings as well as you know kind of come up with their own solutions as community from moving forward and so a lot of the initiatives we had in terms of Dun County establishing environmental sustainability is number one goal and establishing a water quality fund and a water quality specialist and us moving forward as a watershed and establishing these farmer-led councils is partially because at the end of each of the last two summers we've had our students report their research at a local coffee shop in the former research posters that are essentially encouraging the community and we've had several hundred people each year show up to learn about the research but also to talk with one other and we've seen these conversations blossom into actual initiatives we've you know got this one of the local county level land conservation division conservationists you know I think he's been amazed he's been doing this job for 30 some years and he's never seen such movement to actually try to fix the water quality in the watershed before like he's seen right now and I think that's partially because we just need to get people talking with one another the local lake association has been doing similar things that you know when they can prove the association they helped to establish a red cedar conference every March that gets not only a people in the nominee talking with one other but people in the nominee talking with farmers you know we had like 60 farmers attending that research conference or that conference last year and start to envision ways to move forward that is you know not really all that detrimental to a whole lot of people it's very low cost once we start talking about it to any individual person in trying to move forward to get clean water and I think that's basically where my initial interest in sociology came from and where my interest in civil society came from is you know a lot of the research suggests that the more that we connect people with one another the more that they tend to trust one another and develop their own solutions and so the more that I cannot not only identify these kinds of patterns with my research but also encourage those kinds of patterns of my research I think the more meaningful my life is going to be as an academic so that's the longest short story of the lakes project well there's a lot more detail to that and people can look at the TED talk on TEDx uwstout.com I'm going to have links to these of course in northern spirit radio org so you can find way to Nell's Paulson's website you can find to the lakes project and much more now you say though that the key I don't know it's the outgrowth it's what the research shows is that getting people to meet and talk to one another is what's important we have this wonderful thing called social media now and so we can all be on Facebook and we can all talk to one another does that actually happen I've heard that what it actually leads to is people friend and share and look at the posts of people who are of their same belief and persuasion and so they don't actually get that cross-cultural dissemination yeah I agree I think qualitatively the interactions in social media are quite a bit different than the face-to-face ones quantitatively they're different too you get a lot more interactions through Facebook with people than you'd ever have in everyday life but the meaningfulness in terms of actually developing that empathy and perspective taking is so different when you're just going through and scrolling to find stuff that you agree with and you click like and if you see some you disagree with and you post something about you're an idiot you know you're racist or whatever maybe defriend somebody and so you end up getting this highly selective kind of knowledge base that you know it's not like that you're always wrong about like selecting not listening to some things but the default to be that uber selective is you know very dangerous for the type of civil society that I think we really need for a sustainable community I'm on social media at least in terms of a Facebook account and it's very nice seeing friends their kids and you know birthday parties and announcing that they just had a book come out or you know other wonderful things in their lives but in terms of productive political kind of discourse I don't see that as much as I would in a face-to-face kind of interaction the personalization or this is almost feeling of anonymity or sometimes there's literal anonymity when you go online and just post up and that kind of opens up the doors for a lack of civility right mm-hmm yeah and that can be dangerous about online correspondence as well I'm imagining that if there was discussion about this issue of the algae bloom and the phosphorus in the water which is feeding the algae bloom you know I've been environmentally active for forty forty five years something like that and I remember those discussions way back in late 60s early 70s what you need to do of course is the phosphorus is coming from the fertilizer that they're putting on and so it's all the farmers fault you're involving farmers in this and so I assume you're not just going and shaking your finger you're listening empathetically what does that conversation turn into if it's not identifying that the phosphorus in their fertilizer is causing this well first of all there's a lot of variation from farm to farm so there's two dangers and just going up on a farm or hey you're destroying our water one is that they'll get defensive and say no I'm not and not actively try to change their land use but the second is presuming that you actually know more about their land than they do it might be that they have a particular situation where they slope their land and they proximity the water and that the land is porous or you know whatever isn't really as problematic right that there's some sources that are far more problematic than others and so that when you empower the farmers to not only find out more about their land but to have discussions about that with other people with expertise not necessarily me you know actually people more like I don't know Amanda Hanson or Julie Olmsted or you know Paul Kibland or Dan Prestobock or you know there's a lot of conservation experts who aren't really engaging in dialogues of farmers largely because the farmers don't have the clear avenues to actually discuss their land with them and so that's the beauty about these farmer led councils I think potentially is that the more that we can make this seem like an empowerment kind of a resource and the more that it is an empowerment resource and not just a hey they're doing something different because listen to me I'm a sociologist the more likely you're going to actually see some rapid change in land use you know what we kind of see with norms is that they very slowly change over time until they get to sort of a critical point and then all of a sudden you see that sort of a tipping point where the norms are so massively different for everybody around you that you know you can't help but just follow the new norms and so I think that the types of seeds that have been planted with these farmer led councils is potentially going to have enormous payoff you know in five ten years maybe faster but the challenge of course is just to be patient at the beginning to try to allow farmers to take the ownership of it and allow that norm to expand from their networks is sometimes difficult to invest in because it means a lot of face time and less going out in rivers and sampling time but you know in the red sugar basin it definitely seems like we're prioritizing this a lot more than most other places in the country and certainly more than perhaps historically has been the case in this watershed as you know now is a very important part of spirit and action and what I'm trying to accomplish with this program what we and board of directors and all the people associated with this are trying to do is to effectuate change what has changed because of the work of the lakes project from UW Stout have people been changed specifically institutions is there change in water quality is there anything that you can point to that says this has actually done something oh yeah absolutely I mean it's hard for from me take credit for a lot of things in terms of my work or to say that the lakes project is entirely reason why we've seen changes but I think that our work has been important and central to seeing a more of a commitment not only towards environmental sustainability in the region but more of a commitment to working together with other stakeholders in meaningful ways in this region that I certainly didn't see here six years ago when I first arrived in terms of dealing with this phosphorus pollution and I think anybody who you'll talk to who has been trying to address this pollution problem in this watershed for the last 50 years would tell you the same thing that you'd seen some pretty massive changes in terms of starting to work with land users around the watershed you know even places like Colfax they're working on the meeting like this massive soil erosion site the local lake association the land water conservation division the DNR the army corps of engineers that have been sitting there for years as a huge problematic erosion site you know you really didn't see that moving forward until I think people started connecting up with one another and really started thinking through how to solve these problems collaboratively rather than just telling one another what they need to do and I think the lakes project is going to be part of that and contributed a lot to that mentality and it's been a paradigm shift currently even the DNR there's been a massive defunding of DNR this last year especially for the science that they do and in the face of that in spite of that there's still massive discussions in the DNR led by you know Bud Sorgi who's the sort of the regional director for the DNR to try to integrate more of these sociology kind of principles and practices and research into what they do which you know it's really hard to do in the face of budget cuts but people are really excited and committed to this kind of paradigm shift and I think you know Buds has suggested several times that the lakes project has been a big impetus behind this paradigm shift in the way that DNR is thinking about what they're doing so my hope is that that kind of feedback is accurate I don't want to arrogantly say that you know how much of an impact our kids had but I think it's been pretty significant well your advantage is that you can now design research to measure what the impact has been and we'll wait for that and I'll look forward to seeing that when it does come out again folks we've been speaking with Nell's Paulson he is in the social science department at University of Wisconsin Stout over in Menominee Wisconsin I saw him speak at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire with the sociology class and for the public about old ideas new knowledge and sustainable communities the other research that we've heard about Nell's has also been very interesting to me personally because I love to see what motivates changed and what gets it done so you're actually looking at that from a place that Ivy Tower is much closer to the ground than I'm used to thinking of so I appreciate so much that research for you working for the beauty of this country our environmental well-being and for changing our students thank you so much for joining me for spirit in action thank you very much I appreciate it find links to Nell's Paulson including his University of Wisconsin Stout TED Talk via the links on NorthernSpiritRadio.org and we'll see you next week for spirit in action the theme music for this program is turning of the world performed by Sarah Thompson this spirit in action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio you can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website northernspiritradio.org thank you for listening I am your host Mark Helpsmeet and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit may you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light this is spirit in action with every voice with every song we will move this world along with every voice with every song we will move this world along and our lives will feel the echo of our healing [MUSIC PLAYING]