| Chapter 1: | The Milltown Cleanup |
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in charge, both in terms of formal authority and in terms of shaping local opinions?
Local concerns regarding how one knows the “right thing to do” are found in chapter 6. Specifically, locals explained how they came to justify the monetary costs and the disruptions to life in the hamlets that would be associated with the cleanup. Visions of the future, mostly positive, were also expressed and interpretive resources associated with what might be true were discussed. Embedded in these discourses were finer interpretive issues concerning normal life, fair negotiations, and unaccounted-for costs that would tax the local community.
Finally, as useful as it is to organize the interpretive resources into neatly defined categories of discussion, in reality, locals discussed the cleanup project by way of threading together a variety of interpretive resources. Chapter 7, then, demonstrates how reconstituted dialogues, taken from original interview texts, expose four primary interpretive frameworks for lumping resources into compositions of the place that residents know. Specifically, talk about the physical and built environments is threaded together with talk about the social environment, the past, the present, and the future. These conversations are, at first glance, erratic and taxing, yet they reveal that composed places are products of the totality of understandings. We conclude our analysis with comments concerning the value of understanding senses of place as emergent processes.
As a final note, over the past several years, there has been a call for increasing public participation in management decisions concerning natural resource issues (Fox & Miller, 1996; Bidwell & Ryan, 2006; Bonnell & Kootz, 2007). It is also increasingly common to find a person hired to fill the role of community liaison (e.g., “Superfund regional public liaison”). Such roles typically have duties that include explaining project issues, conducting workshops, and listening to community concerns. Federally funded projects depend on community advisory groups to function as both local sources of information and as bellwether groups that will keep officials informed of public concerns and sentiments. As recently as 2010, the EPA posted the following goals on its “Superfund