| Chapter 1: | The Milltown Cleanup |
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Community Involvement” webpage: 1) encourage and enable community members to get involved, 2) listen carefully to what the community is saying, 3) take the time needed to deal with community concerns, 4) change planned actions where community comments or concerns have merit, 5) keep the community well informed of ongoing and planned activities, and 6) explain to the community what the EPA has done and why (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2010a). Further, the EPA Community Involvement Toolkit offers a number of useful instructions to practitioners (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2010b). However, none of the toolkit documents provide methods for how to analyze the textual data gathered when community members engage agency personnel in conversations or in public meetings.
Given that resource managers are often called upon to manage a variety of public inputs, we follow Depoe (2007), who argued that approaches such as the one outlined in the following chapters can help those who are charged with facilitating public conversations. We believe that this book addresses a major gap in the various “toolkits” available to practitioners. Thus, each of the following chapters ends with “Notes to Practitioners.” In these sections, we hope to help readers consider the ways that people involved in the ongoing business of environmental or natural resource management can use either our methods or our conclusions to address some very specific issues. We offer the notes to practitioners as a way to demonstrate what can come from a careful analysis of the patterns of talk one finds among community members. Our methods can be used to synthesize and formulate talk, texts, and open-ended survey responses into coherent themes.
Furthermore, we believe that many of the themes illustrated in this book may be recurrent. That is, we expect that practitioners will find evidence of these same themes when they engage locals concerned about restoration or remediation efforts found elsewhere. With that in mind, we believe we will collectively begin to more fully understand the importance of living “in place” and of striving to correct environmental harm in places we call “home.”