This CAREER project investigates how people make descriptive, explanatory, and moral sense of biodiversity loss at local to global scales. The objective of the research component is to begin to clarify and compare conceptions of environmental change held by two major actors in contemporary biodiversity protection efforts: the scientists who play a key role in establishing conservation strategies and the people who live in communities where the strategies are being implemented. The research will examine the descriptions of environmental change, explanations of major human driving forces, and evaluations of moral significance. It will consider global, regional, and local scales: the empirical focus for the latter will be a UN. Biosphere Reserve located in the US. Pacific Northwest. The conceptual basis stems from contemporary cultural geography and human dimensions of global environmental change theory. Major methodological components, which will be evaluated as a part of the program, include visualization-based group interviews, narrative analysis of biodiversity literature and map representations, and a survey. The educational objective is to develop World Wide Web (WWW) based learning resources and opportunities for interaction beween students in college-level geography programs as well as for people living in sites where biodiversity conservation efforts are taking place. Components include development of collaborative WWW networks, information resources for the study site, an interactive module on cultural dimensions of biodiversity loss and conservation, and the conversion of existing human dimensions modules from the American Association of Geographers to WWW format.
