Interpreting amenities, envisioning the future: common ground and conflict in North Carolina’s rural coastal communities

Abstract

This paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the implications of rural change and amenity migration for members of diverse rural communities. We engage with recent amenity migration and political ecology literature that focuses on social constructions of nature and landscapes, and how these constructions affect the attitudes and opinions of community members. We use our case study of a mail-based survey in Down East, North Carolina to suggest that the ways in which people conceptualize the particular 'natures' and landscapes of a place matters in terms of shaping people's attitudes with respect to ongoing processes of change. We find that people's opinions about environment, culture, and land use are often superficially similar but that when conflicts arise or particular actions are considered, substantial differences in people's underlying conceptual frameworks are revealed. In particular we find that despite widespread shared appreciation of the environment and culture Down East, differing interpretations of these key terms lead to potential misunderstandings and land use planning challenges.

Local seafood: rethinking the direct marketing paradigm

“…Loggerhead sea turtle interactions in North Carolina are a source of ongoing tension because they are listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act (Boucquey et al 2012, Campbell et al 2014. The basic problem has been that as sea turtle abundance has increased in the region, gear interactions are becoming less avoidable.…”

Agreement on water and a watered-down agreement: The political ecology of contested coastal development in Down East, North Carolina

“…First, insider versus outsider delineations often are too stark; in the Nevada County case, Walker and Fortmann (2003) also show how unexpected alliances between insiders and outsiders arose around particular issues. Boucquey et al (2010) explore how attributes such as length of generational ties to the land and different types of residency (e.g. part-time versus full-time) combine to complicate insider-outsider categorizations.…”

“…For example, rural residents are portrayed as strong defenders of private property rights, but in the Rocky Mountains of Montana, it was newcomers who posted large tracts of ranch land as private, overturning long standing but informal agreements regarding community access to private lands among old-timers (Yung and Belsky, 2007). Boucquey et al (2010) argue that because residential status is not a consistent predictor of attitudes towards features like 'environment' or 'culture', it might be more useful to fully understand competing discourses of such features rather than work to associate them with particular groups. Finally, amenity migration occurs over time, and many rural places experience various waves of migration with each one playing different roles in processes of rural change.…”

“…The conflict was between groups of residents, property owners, developers, environmentalists, culture and heritage proponents, policy makers, the Carteret County Board of Commissioners and individual commissioners, with many individuals fitting into more than one category and all with varying stakes in the area's future. Although broad ranging concerns about development and the changes it implied for residents were at stake (Boucquey et al, 2010), the focus of the conflict was on a possible development moratorium proposed by a grassroots organization named Down East Tomorrow (DET). DET formed specifically to address concerns related to increased coastal development, and its mission, as printed on its stationary, is "to help unite the communities, give voice to the people, and cultivate a vision for the future of Down East Carteret County that allows for economic improvement without sacrificing the community integrity, cultural heritage, and environmental quality of our unique and blessed region."…”

“…We examine these formal institutional politics of the Down East conflict drawing on insights from political ecology, a broad field interested in "the political dynamics surrounding material and discursive struggles over the environment" (Bryant, 1998, 79), the various actors involved in such struggles, and the power relations between them. While political ecology was originally applied in 'Third World' contexts, it has also been used to study environmental conflicts in the First World, where processes of change and governance are often different than in Third World contexts, but where power, access, and knowledge similarly mediate conflict (Boucquey et al, 2010;Hurley and Walker, 2004;McCarthy, 2002;St. Martin, 2005;Walker, 2003;Walker and Hurley, 2004).…”