Nonfiction
Negotiating Mine Fields
My academic research, which combined my degree work in archaeology, environmental anthropology, communications and folklore, focused on natural resource conflict and public policy. My dissertation “Negotiating mine fields: Public policy, protest, and the proposed Penokee Mine” (2015) detailed the attempt to rewrite laws that endangered not only delicate environmental ecosystems, but the drinking water supply, food resources, and culture of an Ojibwe tribal nation. I completed that work with a mind toward goals of not colonizing information as I was working with an Ojibwe community.
(Photo, left: Caroline Lake, by Meg Turville-Heitz)
Abstract
Civil discourse is considered critical to democratic governance. Public perceptions of what that discourse entails – including a demand for a seat at the table – and the reality of what political elites and governments want from the public in the development and practice of public policy – the registering of an opinion—often conflict. Research suggests the conflict over unpopular government policy and the sense of disempowerment and disillusion in the public process often lead to apathy and a decline in public participation. Yet, in spite of a lack of sympathetic or even fair mainstream discourse, in other cases the public engages in sustained letter-writing and lobbying efforts, direct action and civil disobedience, leading to successful social movements. Using archival and historical review, content analysis of traditional and social media, interviews, and participant observation, this qualitative research explored the communications arena surrounding the attempts to site three different controversial mines in Wisconsin over the last 40 years to understand what moves people from apathy to protest and from protest to social movement. Complicating this issue in Wisconsin are treaty rights held by the Lake Superior Chippewa (Ojibwe) to hunt, fish and gather on public lands and waterways in the northern third of the state. With increasing global population, resource conflicts become more prevalent as extraction projects encroach on environmentally and culturally sensitive areas, leading to sustained conflicts and litigation. This research finds that historical precedent, past natural resource conflicts, and strong place-based identity prime communications about these conflicts and help structure a cultural sense of the worthiness of a struggle, but it is framing that shapes the perceptions of a civil taking via procedural, structural and environmental injustices that drives opposition to the streets. Predictive features include the perception of a powerful agent knowingly and even intentionally causing a perceived harm to citizens who have played by the rules. There must be concrete, broadly understood examples of perceived breaches of the social contract that erode trust in the agent, especially when that agent is representative government. The agent must be a clear perpetrator of the injustice, acting with perceived impunity, with identifiable victims with whom the public can empathize. Most critically, the victims must be deemed “worthy” of the moral outrage of those seeing the injustice, by following all the rules and having built up a history of struggle in the equivalent of the David vs. Goliath battle; and there must be a sense of efficacy based on a clear moral high ground to set the stage for hot button injustice frames.
Key words: procedural justice, environmental justice, civil taking, worthiness, Native American treaty rights, mining, social movement
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Water lily in Caroline Lake, headwaters of the Bad River
Tales from the Kitteh Resistance
In the depths of pandemic winter, a burgeoning rat problem in the chicken house, and the need to replace a no longer working working cat, led to the adoption of three feral kittens. I shared their stories on Facebook. I was told they could never be tamed. I had other ideas. The kitten resistance took on a following. We all needed to make that bleak winter brighter. A few of those readers asked me to compile these kitten tales into one document. With some light editing I’ve compiled them here: ferals
(Photo, left: Comrade. Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz)
Nonfiction
During my undergraduate work for a BA in Journalism I worked as the state news editor for the Badger Herald, one of two then-daily college newspapers. After graduating, I did stints as a reporter at the Portage Daily Register, as assistant editor of Today’s Distributor, a business magazine, and as a copy editor at the Waterloo (IA) Courier before beginning almost a decade at Wisconsin DNR as an editor/writer, then water quality planner. Overlapping, I had a lengthy freelance writing and desktop publishing career that included everything from reporting to aggregation to design. I wrote regularly for the Wisconsin State Journal and The Capital Times and placed items in everything from writing magazines and newsletters to Scientific American to Archaeology Magazine and Standard & Poor’s Industrial Outlook. I edited and designed publications for the Wisconsin Wetlands Association, UW-Extension, state agencies and more.
That all came to a screeching halt with grad school. As a writer I can’t help myself; even if it’s simply relaying a serial story of a trio of feral kittens I can’t stop myself from sharing words.
