Tarla Rai Peterson
Biographic Data
| ID | 4865836 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tarla Rai Peterson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tarla Rai |
| FAMILY NAME | Peterson |
| SIGNATURE | PETERSON T R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at El Paso |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2864-0013 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 32 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
The North American model of wildlife conservation is an inappropriate basis for formulating conservation policy
The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation (NAM) allegedly describes principles critical to successful wildlife conservation in North America. The NAM is promoted by numerous hunting-related interest groups, some of whom use it as a source of legal authority to advocate for the supremacy of state governments over federal and tribal governments. We demonstrate why such prescriptions are inappropriate. Specifically, we show: (i) the NAM prov…
Trust in science: A critical review of the complex interactions between credibility and trust associated with conservation science
The credibility enjoyed by natural science and scientists during most of the 20th Century has been challenged in the 21st Century. Philosophers of science have noted waning trust in science as an appropriate foundation for sociopolitical decisions. Conservation science literature explores credibility-trust relationships to understand how these interactions contribute to or detract from scientific legitimacy. We conducted a content analysis of pro…
Environmental Communication
Energy Communication: Theory and Praxis Towards a Sustainable Energy Future
This essay comments and expands upon an emerging area of research, energy communication, that shares with environmental communication the fraught commitment to simultaneously study communication as an ordinary yet potentially transformative practice, and a strategic endeavour to catalyse change. We begin by defining and situating energy communication within ongoing work on the discursive dimensions of energy extraction, production, distribution, …
Shoot shovel and sanction yourself: Self-policing as a response to wolf poaching among Swedish hunters
Self-policing is essential for addressing wildlife-related crime where illegal activity is extremely diffuse, and limited resources are available for monitoring and enforcement. Emerging research on self-policing suggest key drivers including economics, folk traditions, and socio-political resistance. We build on this research with a case study evaluating potential drivers of self-policing illegal wolf killing among Swedish hunting teams. Swedish…
Under Pressure: Coal Industry Rhetoric and Neoliberalism
Under Pressure presents a rhetorical analysis of the coal industry’s campaign to maintain its hegemonic position in Western society, including a critical examination of connections between rhetoric
Voice as Entry to Agriculturalists’ Conservationist Identity: A Cultural Inventory of the Yellowstone River
We explored the communicative construction of a conservationist identity among primary producers by excavating voices of agriculturalists operating along the Yellowstone River (Montana, USA). We used a cultural inventory approach to discover and then listen to informants’ voices as they constructed their conservation identity. Those who self-identified as conservationists talked about their ecological and social responsibilities, and described ch…
Social-ecological system resonance: A theoretical framework for brokering sustainable solutions
Framing of customer engagement opportunities and renewable energy integration by electric utility representatives
Distributed and renewable energy technologies are changing the electricity sector and altering traditional relationships between electric utilities and their customers. This analysis involving focus groups with fourteen electric utilities in seven U.S. states (California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Vermont) demonstrates divergence in framing among utility representatives in terms of how they characterize customer eng…
Discourses on illegal hunting in Sweden: The Meaning of Silence and Resistance
The first rule to poaching is that you do not talk about poaching. If you do, you do so behind a veil of anonymity, using hypotheticals or indirect reported speech that protect you from moral, cultural or legal self-incrimination. In this study of Swedish hunters talking about a phenomenon of illegal killing of protected wolves, we situate such talk in the debate between crime talk as reflecting resistance, reality or everyday venting. We identif…
Illegal hunting
This chapter explains with the phenomenon of illegal hunting to differing diverse contexts for hunting violations. In response to shortcomings of instrumental approaches, normative perspectives examine the role of values, norms, legitimacy, cultural influences and socialisation in generating compliance with regulation. Importantly, uncovering the root causes of illegal hunting bears on the perceived criminality of perpetrators, which in turn dete…
Environmental Conflict Management
A step-by-step guide connecting theory to practice Environmental Conflict Management introduces students to the research and practice of environmental conflict and provides a step-by-step process for engaging stakeholders and other interested parties in the management of environmental disputes. In each chapter, authors Dr. Tracylee Clarke and Dr. Tarla Rai Peterson first introduce a specific concept or process step and then provide exercises, wor…
Environmental Communication and Community: Constructive and destructive dynamics of social transformation
pt. 1. Introduction and conceptual framing for community constructivity and deconstructivity -- pt. 2. Constructing and deconstructing community -- pt. 3. Conclusion and summary
Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis
We review energy communication, an emerging subfield of communication studies that examines the role of energy in society, and argue that it is dominated by a crisis frame. Whereas this frame can be productive, it can also be limiting. In response, we propose three areas for future energy communication research—internal rhetoric of science, comparative studies, and energy in everyday life—as starting points for rethinking and expanding energy com…
Communicating the Science behind Carbon Sequestration: A Case Study of US Department of Energy and Regional Partnership Websites
Websites now serve as a dominant communication strategy for government. As such, the US Department of Energy (USDOE) incorporated websites into outreach efforts for their carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiative. In this study, we examined communication strategies demonstrated within USDOE and CCS partnership websites with a focus on the use of science and technology to influence public acceptance. We found expertise to be a dominant theme thr…
The radicalisation of rural resistance: How hunting counterpublics in the Nordic countries contribute to illegal hunting
Deconstructing the Poaching Phenomenon: A Review of Typologies for Understanding Illegal Hunting
of drivers of the deviance typologies As a consequence of the fundamental division between the normative and instrumental perspectives within the drivers of the deviance approach, little research here provides integrated theories across disciplines. Notably, cost–benefit analyses fail to be situated in a context of norms and values. As precedent for calls for multidimensional models of motivation, Smith ambitiously sought a model of drivers that …
Spreading the News on Carbon Capture and Storage: A State-Level Comparison of US Media
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has received abundant federal support in the USA as an energy technology to mitigate climate change, yet its position within the energy system remains uncertain. Because media play a significant role in shaping public conversations about science and technology, we analyzed media portrayal of CCS in newspapers from four strategically selected states. We grounded the analysis in Luhmann's theory of social functions,…
Culture as a means to contextualize policy
Rearticulating the myth of human–wildlife conflict
Human–wildlife conflict has emerged as the central vocabulary for cases requiring balance between resource demands of humans and wildlife. This phrase is problematic because, given traditional definitions of conflict, it positions wildlife as conscious human antagonists. We used content analysis of wildlife conservation publications and professional meeting presentations to explore the use of the phrase, human–wildlife conflict, and compared comp…
Views of Private-Land Stewardship among Latinos on the Texas–Tamaulipas Border
Successful conservation efforts require understanding predictors of private-land stewardship (PLS), its definitions, and what people feel they owe stewardship responsibility to. Various strands of research have touched on the concept, but there is little research focusing on how it is communicated and enacted among the lay public, especially among Latinos. We used a case study in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas to address this gap by identif…
Towards a Learning Model of Ict Application for Development: Lessons from a networked dialogue in Sweden
This paper reports on a two-day workshop held in Sweden (7–8 April 2008) to bring together researchers and professionals to share insights and experiences in the application of information and communication technology (ICT) to sustainable development (SD). The third in a series of events sponsored by the Swedish Program for Information and Communication Technology in Developing Regions (SPIDER), this workshop was aimed at fostering experience sha…
Results of the Nordic Hunting in Society Symposium
Mediated Modeling: Using Collaborative Processes to Integrate Scientist and Stakeholder Knowledge about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in an Urban Ecosystem
Technical experts often find they need to include critical information from local residents to address environmental issues. To access this information while simultaneously educating participants, we used a participatory process called mediated modeling. Mediated modeling provides a structured framework for enabling diverse stakeholders to use systems modeling to understand the multidimensional, dynamic, and interactive aspects of environmental p…
Discursive Constructions of Climate Change: Practices of Encoding and Decoding
One of the biggest challenges of the current century for governments, corporations, and citizens alike, climate change has garnered significant political attention worldwide.Over the last two decades, it has acquired a quasi-paradigmatic character, often standing for a diverse range of dilemmas plaguing the relations between humans and nature.It is, therefore, a central problem to environmental communication and consequently to this journal.At th…
The radicalisation of rural resistance: How hunting counterpublics in the Nordic countries contribute to illegal hunting
Deconstructing the Poaching Phenomenon: A Review of Typologies for Understanding Illegal Hunting
of drivers of the deviance typologies As a consequence of the fundamental division between the normative and instrumental perspectives within the drivers of the deviance approach, little research here provides integrated theories across disciplines. Notably, cost–benefit analyses fail to be situated in a context of norms and values. As precedent for calls for multidimensional models of motivation, Smith ambitiously sought a model of drivers that …
Discourses on illegal hunting in Sweden: The Meaning of Silence and Resistance
The first rule to poaching is that you do not talk about poaching. If you do, you do so behind a veil of anonymity, using hypotheticals or indirect reported speech that protect you from moral, cultural or legal self-incrimination. In this study of Swedish hunters talking about a phenomenon of illegal killing of protected wolves, we situate such talk in the debate between crime talk as reflecting resistance, reality or everyday venting. We identif…
Telling the farmers’ story: Competing responses to soil conservation rhetoric
Although government and private agencies have invested heavily in discursive efforts to convince American farmers to implement conservation practices, farmers have not adopted such recommended techniques on a regular basis. This essay argues that resistance to conservation is rooted largely in the mythology of American agriculture, which creates for farmers a fundamentally conflicted sense of self that conservationists have neither recognized nor…
Jefferson's yeoman farmer as frontier hero a self defeating mythic structure
Social-ecological system resonance: A theoretical framework for brokering sustainable solutions
Shoot shovel and sanction yourself: Self-policing as a response to wolf poaching among Swedish hunters
Self-policing is essential for addressing wildlife-related crime where illegal activity is extremely diffuse, and limited resources are available for monitoring and enforcement. Emerging research on self-policing suggest key drivers including economics, folk traditions, and socio-political resistance. We build on this research with a case study evaluating potential drivers of self-policing illegal wolf killing among Swedish hunting teams. Swedish…
Culture as a means to contextualize policy
Framing of customer engagement opportunities and renewable energy integration by electric utility representatives
Distributed and renewable energy technologies are changing the electricity sector and altering traditional relationships between electric utilities and their customers. This analysis involving focus groups with fourteen electric utilities in seven U.S. states (California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Texas, and Vermont) demonstrates divergence in framing among utility representatives in terms of how they characterize customer eng…
Rooted in the soil: How understanding the perspectives of landowners can enhance the management of environmental disputes
This essay uses mythic criticism to examine missed opportunities for identifying with landowners in ways that would enhance the constructive management of environmental disputes. It focuses on the communicative implications of a policy for managing endangered species that fails to consider existing cultural practices, then offers an alternative mythic understanding of the American (U.S.) West that is drawn from the discourse of its central charac…
Mediated Modeling: Using Collaborative Processes to Integrate Scientist and Stakeholder Knowledge about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in an Urban Ecosystem
Technical experts often find they need to include critical information from local residents to address environmental issues. To access this information while simultaneously educating participants, we used a participatory process called mediated modeling. Mediated modeling provides a structured framework for enabling diverse stakeholders to use systems modeling to understand the multidimensional, dynamic, and interactive aspects of environmental p…
Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis
We review energy communication, an emerging subfield of communication studies that examines the role of energy in society, and argue that it is dominated by a crisis frame. Whereas this frame can be productive, it can also be limiting. In response, we propose three areas for future energy communication research—internal rhetoric of science, comparative studies, and energy in everyday life—as starting points for rethinking and expanding energy com…
Jefferson's yeoman farmer as frontier hero a self defeating mythic structure
Telling the farmers’ story: Competing responses to soil conservation rhetoric
Although government and private agencies have invested heavily in discursive efforts to convince American farmers to implement conservation practices, farmers have not adopted such recommended techniques on a regular basis. This essay argues that resistance to conservation is rooted largely in the mythology of American agriculture, which creates for farmers a fundamentally conflicted sense of self that conservationists have neither recognized nor…
Rooted in the soil: How understanding the perspectives of landowners can enhance the management of environmental disputes
This essay uses mythic criticism to examine missed opportunities for identifying with landowners in ways that would enhance the constructive management of environmental disputes. It focuses on the communicative implications of a policy for managing endangered species that fails to consider existing cultural practices, then offers an alternative mythic understanding of the American (U.S.) West that is drawn from the discourse of its central charac…
Environmental communication: Tales of life on earth
EARTHTALK: COMMUNICATION EMPOWERMENT FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTION. Edited by Star A. Muir and Thomas L. Veenendall. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1996; pp. xviii + 233. $59.00. ECOSPEAK: RHETORIC AND ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS IN AMERICA. By M. Jimmie Kffling‐sworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992; pp. xii + 312. $34.95. GREEN CULTURE: RHETORICAL ANALYSES OF ENVIRONMENTAL DISCOURSE. Edited by Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown. …
To Play the Fool: Can Environmental Conservation and Democracy Survive Social Capital
Two community-based conservation processes in the United States provide comparative case studies to examine how social capital relates to democracy. Following a summary of social capital research, we describe the cases: one designed to preserve an endangered species and the other to restore water quality. We discuss how social capital dampened democratic practice in one case, while invigorating it in the other. We conclude that, by relying indisc…
Environmental Communication: Why This Crisis Discipline Should Facilitate Environmental Democracy
The authors concur with Cox's claim that environmental communication (EC), like conservation biology, is a crisis discipline. Cox's proposed tenets for EC challenge the scientific norm of objectivity that has guided science for centuries, suggesting that today's environmental crisis requires us to travel a different path. The authors take Cox's essay as provocation to radically challenge magical notions of scientific objectivity. They briefly rev…
Narratives, Rhetorical Genres, and Environmental Conflict: Responses to Schwarze's “Environmental Melodrama”
The appearance of Steven Schwarze's essay, "Environmental Melodrama" (Schwarze, 2006) as the lead article in a recent issue of The Quarterly Journal of Speech marks an important moment of recognition for environmental communication scholarship. Schwarze's essay demonstrates how studies of environmental rhetoric can contribute to rhetorical theory more generally, while addressing practical questions regarding the rhetorical aspects of environmenta…
The Imperative of Praxis-based Environmental Communication Research: Suggestions from the Step It Up 2007 National Research Project
In this essay, we discuss our development and implementation of a national research project on the Step It Up 2007 campaign calling for political action to mitigate climate change. Specifically, we discuss this project as it relates to our goal to engage in praxis-based research that can be accessible to activists, publics, and practitioners. First, we discuss the practice of organizing a national praxis-oriented research project. We offer this p…
Discursive Constructions of Climate Change: Practices of Encoding and Decoding
One of the biggest challenges of the current century for governments, corporations, and citizens alike, climate change has garnered significant political attention worldwide.Over the last two decades, it has acquired a quasi-paradigmatic character, often standing for a diverse range of dilemmas plaguing the relations between humans and nature.It is, therefore, a central problem to environmental communication and consequently to this journal.At th…
Rearticulating the myth of human–wildlife conflict
Human–wildlife conflict has emerged as the central vocabulary for cases requiring balance between resource demands of humans and wildlife. This phrase is problematic because, given traditional definitions of conflict, it positions wildlife as conscious human antagonists. We used content analysis of wildlife conservation publications and professional meeting presentations to explore the use of the phrase, human–wildlife conflict, and compared comp…
Views of Private-Land Stewardship among Latinos on the Texas–Tamaulipas Border
Successful conservation efforts require understanding predictors of private-land stewardship (PLS), its definitions, and what people feel they owe stewardship responsibility to. Various strands of research have touched on the concept, but there is little research focusing on how it is communicated and enacted among the lay public, especially among Latinos. We used a case study in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas to address this gap by identif…
Towards a Learning Model of Ict Application for Development: Lessons from a networked dialogue in Sweden
This paper reports on a two-day workshop held in Sweden (7–8 April 2008) to bring together researchers and professionals to share insights and experiences in the application of information and communication technology (ICT) to sustainable development (SD). The third in a series of events sponsored by the Swedish Program for Information and Communication Technology in Developing Regions (SPIDER), this workshop was aimed at fostering experience sha…
Results of the Nordic Hunting in Society Symposium
Mediated Modeling: Using Collaborative Processes to Integrate Scientist and Stakeholder Knowledge about Greenhouse Gas Emissions in an Urban Ecosystem
Technical experts often find they need to include critical information from local residents to address environmental issues. To access this information while simultaneously educating participants, we used a participatory process called mediated modeling. Mediated modeling provides a structured framework for enabling diverse stakeholders to use systems modeling to understand the multidimensional, dynamic, and interactive aspects of environmental p…
Culture as a means to contextualize policy
Spreading the News on Carbon Capture and Storage: A State-Level Comparison of US Media
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) has received abundant federal support in the USA as an energy technology to mitigate climate change, yet its position within the energy system remains uncertain. Because media play a significant role in shaping public conversations about science and technology, we analyzed media portrayal of CCS in newspapers from four strategically selected states. We grounded the analysis in Luhmann's theory of social functions,…
The radicalisation of rural resistance: How hunting counterpublics in the Nordic countries contribute to illegal hunting
Deconstructing the Poaching Phenomenon: A Review of Typologies for Understanding Illegal Hunting
of drivers of the deviance typologies As a consequence of the fundamental division between the normative and instrumental perspectives within the drivers of the deviance approach, little research here provides integrated theories across disciplines. Notably, cost–benefit analyses fail to be situated in a context of norms and values. As precedent for calls for multidimensional models of motivation, Smith ambitiously sought a model of drivers that …
Communicating the Science behind Carbon Sequestration: A Case Study of US Department of Energy and Regional Partnership Websites
Websites now serve as a dominant communication strategy for government. As such, the US Department of Energy (USDOE) incorporated websites into outreach efforts for their carbon capture and storage (CCS) initiative. In this study, we examined communication strategies demonstrated within USDOE and CCS partnership websites with a focus on the use of science and technology to influence public acceptance. We found expertise to be a dominant theme thr…
Illegal hunting
This chapter explains with the phenomenon of illegal hunting to differing diverse contexts for hunting violations. In response to shortcomings of instrumental approaches, normative perspectives examine the role of values, norms, legitimacy, cultural influences and socialisation in generating compliance with regulation. Importantly, uncovering the root causes of illegal hunting bears on the perceived criminality of perpetrators, which in turn dete…
Environmental Conflict Management
A step-by-step guide connecting theory to practice Environmental Conflict Management introduces students to the research and practice of environmental conflict and provides a step-by-step process for engaging stakeholders and other interested parties in the management of environmental disputes. In each chapter, authors Dr. Tracylee Clarke and Dr. Tarla Rai Peterson first introduce a specific concept or process step and then provide exercises, wor…
Environmental Communication and Community: Constructive and destructive dynamics of social transformation
pt. 1. Introduction and conceptual framing for community constructivity and deconstructivity -- pt. 2. Constructing and deconstructing community -- pt. 3. Conclusion and summary
Communicating Energy in a Climate (of) Crisis
We review energy communication, an emerging subfield of communication studies that examines the role of energy in society, and argue that it is dominated by a crisis frame. Whereas this frame can be productive, it can also be limiting. In response, we propose three areas for future energy communication research—internal rhetoric of science, comparative studies, and energy in everyday life—as starting points for rethinking and expanding energy com…
Voice as Entry to Agriculturalists’ Conservationist Identity: A Cultural Inventory of the Yellowstone River
We explored the communicative construction of a conservationist identity among primary producers by excavating voices of agriculturalists operating along the Yellowstone River (Montana, USA). We used a cultural inventory approach to discover and then listen to informants’ voices as they constructed their conservation identity. Those who self-identified as conservationists talked about their ecological and social responsibilities, and described ch…
Social-ecological system resonance: A theoretical framework for brokering sustainable solutions
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Climate Change Communication and Perception (10 works) · Ecology (10 works) · Public relations (10 works) · Rhetoric and Communication Studies (10 works) · Environmental ethics (9 works) · Politics (9 works)