Rebecca Witter
Biographic Data
| ID | 143089 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Rebecca Witter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Rebecca |
| FAMILY NAME | Witter |
| SIGNATURE | WITTER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Appalachian State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Advancing an Environmental Justice-Centered Approach to Understanding Cumulative Impacts: Community-Engaged Analysis of Industrialized Biogas Development from Rural Eastern North Carolina
In recent decades, environmental justice experts have advanced understanding of cumulative impacts, defined as the harm that can result when multiple forms of environmental and socioeconomic distress converge on a place and compound through time. Concurrently, U.S. industry leaders have launched climate mitigation projects that often exacerbate environmental injustice in overburdened communities. We consider this critical disconnect, drawing from…
Collaborative Research as Action: Advancing Rural Environmental Justice, Water Equity, and Well-Being in Eastern NC
The environmental quality in Sampson County, North Carolina (NC), is degraded by numerous polluting facilities. These facilities pose a contamination threat to groundwater quality, which poses a public health concern in a county where over half of its residents rely on private wells. This case study describes the work of a community–university partnership to understand private well water quality and water-related inequities across Sampson County.…
Renewable Ruse: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains
Rural communities in eastern North Carolina are responding to the emergence of bioenergy development as an extension of environmental injustices, rather than sustainable solutions to climate change as presented by state and industry actors. We examine how biomass and biogas development entrench logics of extraction, rather than transition, as they are built as extensions of pre-existing concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in a landscap…
Rhinos as “The Mine” and the Fugitive Meanings of Illegal Wildlife Hunting
Most scholarship and policy documentation that examines the problem of “rhino poaching” assumes that the potential for economic gain drives impoverished people to hunt threatened and endangered wildlife illegally. The amount of money illegal hunters can extract from the lethal trade in rhinoceros’ horn is extraordinary. Yet, the provocation of one convicted hunter, who referred to rhinos as “the mine” (as in a gold mine) reveals complicated meani…
Why militarized conservation may be counter-productive: Illegal Wildlife Hunting as Defiance
In response to the past decade's surge in the illegal hunting of rhinoceros for the global trade in their horn, conservation authorities in southern Africa have increased the securitization of protected area conservation. Political ecologists have warned that violent, militarized approaches are counter-productive, because they fail to address the root causes of "poaching"and may provide the moral justification for those already marginalized by co…
Storying Climate Change at Appalachian State University
A convergence of concern about climate change, the desire to engage students in more substantive critical discourse about climate (in)action, and the need for more generative responses kindled the creation of the transdisciplinary, university-wide Climate Stories Collaborative at Appalachian State University. We share the origin, rationale, and activities of the Collaborative, including the classroom experiences of several faculty participants. B…
The Ebb and Flow of Indigenous Rights Recognitions in Conservation Policy
At the 2003 World Parks Congress, diverse conservation actors called for the end of exclusionary approaches to conservation; recognition of customary forms of environmental protection; and restoration of losses to indigenous peoples whose lands were incorporated into protected areas without meaningful consent. A primary means to achieving such reforms has been the development of rights-based approaches to conservation, expressed at the time as th…
Rhino poaching and the “slow violence” of conservation-related resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park
Negotiating identity and heritage through authorised vernacular history, Limpopo National Park
In this paper, we assess vernacular history, traditional authority and the use of heritage places as mediums for negotiating ancestry, identity, territory and belonging based on conversations, interviews and visitations to heritage places together with residents in Limpopo National Park. We explore how particular vernacular histories become dominant village history through the authorisation of traditional leaders and their lineage histories and h…
Moments of influence in global environmental governance
International environmental negotiations such as the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) are state-dominated, and their outcomes are highly publicized. Less transparent is the role of non-state delegates who effect changes during negotiation processes through myriad strategies and relations. This article focuses on the influence of indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) delegates in official COP…
Everyone′s Solution? Defining and Redefining Protected Areas at the Convention on Biological Diversity
For decades, conservationists have remained steadfastly committed to protected areas (PAs) as the best means to conserve biodiversity. Using Collaborative Event Ethnography of the 10 th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/CoP), we examine how the PA concept remains hegemonic in conservation policy. We argue that, as a broadening base of actors frame their political objectives through PAs in orde…
Elephant-induced Displacement and the Power of Choice: Moral Narratives about Resettlement in Mozambique′s Limpopo National Park
Despite the centrality of moral assumptions to defining environmental crises and solutions, research in discursive political ecology has paid inadequate attention to conservation's moral dimensions. Conservation-related resettlement is a problem for people working and living in protected areas across the globe, around which diverse ideas, meanings, and narratives emerge and circulate. Drawing from participant observation and interview data, I ass…
On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation
Rhino poaching and the “slow violence” of conservation-related resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park
Why militarized conservation may be counter-productive: Illegal Wildlife Hunting as Defiance
In response to the past decade's surge in the illegal hunting of rhinoceros for the global trade in their horn, conservation authorities in southern Africa have increased the securitization of protected area conservation. Political ecologists have warned that violent, militarized approaches are counter-productive, because they fail to address the root causes of "poaching"and may provide the moral justification for those already marginalized by co…
Moments of influence in global environmental governance
International environmental negotiations such as the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) are state-dominated, and their outcomes are highly publicized. Less transparent is the role of non-state delegates who effect changes during negotiation processes through myriad strategies and relations. This article focuses on the influence of indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) delegates in official COP…
On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation
Negotiating identity and heritage through authorised vernacular history, Limpopo National Park
In this paper, we assess vernacular history, traditional authority and the use of heritage places as mediums for negotiating ancestry, identity, territory and belonging based on conversations, interviews and visitations to heritage places together with residents in Limpopo National Park. We explore how particular vernacular histories become dominant village history through the authorisation of traditional leaders and their lineage histories and h…
The Ebb and Flow of Indigenous Rights Recognitions in Conservation Policy
At the 2003 World Parks Congress, diverse conservation actors called for the end of exclusionary approaches to conservation; recognition of customary forms of environmental protection; and restoration of losses to indigenous peoples whose lands were incorporated into protected areas without meaningful consent. A primary means to achieving such reforms has been the development of rights-based approaches to conservation, expressed at the time as th…
On the coattails of climate? Opportunities and threats of a warming Earth for biodiversity conservation
Elephant-induced Displacement and the Power of Choice: Moral Narratives about Resettlement in Mozambique′s Limpopo National Park
Despite the centrality of moral assumptions to defining environmental crises and solutions, research in discursive political ecology has paid inadequate attention to conservation's moral dimensions. Conservation-related resettlement is a problem for people working and living in protected areas across the globe, around which diverse ideas, meanings, and narratives emerge and circulate. Drawing from participant observation and interview data, I ass…
Everyone′s Solution? Defining and Redefining Protected Areas at the Convention on Biological Diversity
For decades, conservationists have remained steadfastly committed to protected areas (PAs) as the best means to conserve biodiversity. Using Collaborative Event Ethnography of the 10 th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD/CoP), we examine how the PA concept remains hegemonic in conservation policy. We argue that, as a broadening base of actors frame their political objectives through PAs in orde…
Moments of influence in global environmental governance
International environmental negotiations such as the 10th Conference of Parties of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD COP10) are state-dominated, and their outcomes are highly publicized. Less transparent is the role of non-state delegates who effect changes during negotiation processes through myriad strategies and relations. This article focuses on the influence of indigenous peoples and local community (IPLC) delegates in official COP…
Negotiating identity and heritage through authorised vernacular history, Limpopo National Park
In this paper, we assess vernacular history, traditional authority and the use of heritage places as mediums for negotiating ancestry, identity, territory and belonging based on conversations, interviews and visitations to heritage places together with residents in Limpopo National Park. We explore how particular vernacular histories become dominant village history through the authorisation of traditional leaders and their lineage histories and h…
Rhino poaching and the “slow violence” of conservation-related resettlement in Mozambique’s Limpopo National Park
Storying Climate Change at Appalachian State University
A convergence of concern about climate change, the desire to engage students in more substantive critical discourse about climate (in)action, and the need for more generative responses kindled the creation of the transdisciplinary, university-wide Climate Stories Collaborative at Appalachian State University. We share the origin, rationale, and activities of the Collaborative, including the classroom experiences of several faculty participants. B…
The Ebb and Flow of Indigenous Rights Recognitions in Conservation Policy
At the 2003 World Parks Congress, diverse conservation actors called for the end of exclusionary approaches to conservation; recognition of customary forms of environmental protection; and restoration of losses to indigenous peoples whose lands were incorporated into protected areas without meaningful consent. A primary means to achieving such reforms has been the development of rights-based approaches to conservation, expressed at the time as th…
Rhinos as “The Mine” and the Fugitive Meanings of Illegal Wildlife Hunting
Most scholarship and policy documentation that examines the problem of “rhino poaching” assumes that the potential for economic gain drives impoverished people to hunt threatened and endangered wildlife illegally. The amount of money illegal hunters can extract from the lethal trade in rhinoceros’ horn is extraordinary. Yet, the provocation of one convicted hunter, who referred to rhinos as “the mine” (as in a gold mine) reveals complicated meani…
Why militarized conservation may be counter-productive: Illegal Wildlife Hunting as Defiance
In response to the past decade's surge in the illegal hunting of rhinoceros for the global trade in their horn, conservation authorities in southern Africa have increased the securitization of protected area conservation. Political ecologists have warned that violent, militarized approaches are counter-productive, because they fail to address the root causes of "poaching"and may provide the moral justification for those already marginalized by co…
Renewable Ruse: Bioenergy Development in North Carolina’s Coastal Plains
Rural communities in eastern North Carolina are responding to the emergence of bioenergy development as an extension of environmental injustices, rather than sustainable solutions to climate change as presented by state and industry actors. We examine how biomass and biogas development entrench logics of extraction, rather than transition, as they are built as extensions of pre-existing concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) in a landscap…
Advancing an Environmental Justice-Centered Approach to Understanding Cumulative Impacts: Community-Engaged Analysis of Industrialized Biogas Development from Rural Eastern North Carolina
In recent decades, environmental justice experts have advanced understanding of cumulative impacts, defined as the harm that can result when multiple forms of environmental and socioeconomic distress converge on a place and compound through time. Concurrently, U.S. industry leaders have launched climate mitigation projects that often exacerbate environmental injustice in overburdened communities. We consider this critical disconnect, drawing from…
Collaborative Research as Action: Advancing Rural Environmental Justice, Water Equity, and Well-Being in Eastern NC
The environmental quality in Sampson County, North Carolina (NC), is degraded by numerous polluting facilities. These facilities pose a contamination threat to groundwater quality, which poses a public health concern in a county where over half of its residents rely on private wells. This case study describes the work of a community–university partnership to understand private well water quality and water-related inequities across Sampson County.…
Political science (11 works) · Sociology (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Ecology (9 works) · Geography (8 works) · Economics (7 works) · Conservation, Biodiversity, and Resource Management (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Mining and Resource Management (5 works) · Politics (5 works)