The Diverse Environmentalisms Research Team, in association with the American Folklore Society Fellows, the Folklore and Science Section of the American Folklore Society, and the Climate Change Interest Group of the American Folklore Society, organized in September 2024 a webinar titled “Gathering at the Intersections of Folklore and the Environment.”
We announced the webinar in early September and by late September we had over 130 registrants, from some twenty nations and from every region of the United States (about half of those who registered would attend the webinar). We invited each registrant to upload a digital postcard describing connections to the webinar theme, and many did.
On September 26, 2024, we convened on Zoom a diverse assembly of scholars, community workers, artists, and activists, to share ideas our experiences, hopes, and strategies in arenas where expressive culture and traditional worldviews are brought to bear on concerns and conflicts tied to environmental degradation and ecological collapse.
We first gathered en masse for an orientation and then broke into several discussion groups organized around a set of core themes. Each discussion group had a moderator and a reporter, as well as several participants. This report on the webinar is drawn from the notes made by moderators and reporters in the discussion groups; it is our initial attempt to capture the drift of the webinar conversations.
Insights from the Zoom chat, assembled by Rory Turner:
“What is possible because we are all in this broken place?” — Valeska
“Thinking about the role of ruins and loss from Western cultural perspectives, which are not universal and often quite dangerous to historically marginalized peoples, is shaping the way we understand climate change.” — Tim Frandy
“We can build conversations across perspectives, groups, worldviews, practices, and places to emphasize that environmental conversations are not exclusionary.” — Jordan Lovejoy
“Inspired by shared goals and language.” — Violeta Duncan
“I was inspired to hear of the richness of peoples’ ideas of philosophical misogyny. Beautiful translations. In-betweenness.” — Rory Turner
“Inspiration: we created an expansive web with so many intersecting pieces. A motto emerged: leverage the pause, that is, be calm, take stock of the situation, devise rational responses.” — John McDowell
“Create more intercultural, intersectional, intergenerational spaces of exchange/collaboration on environmental justice research and community projects.” — Morgan Wittelsberger
“It was fascinating to observe the multiple dimensions of relationships between different beings, and how these phenomena are intricately woven into specific places, becoming rooted in them.” — Pâmilla Ribeiro
“As a personal challenge, I will listen and record more stories about the changing environments and the impact on the artists.” — Annie Hatch