This study is part of a larger conversation within environmental communication and interdisciplinary circles that assumes that, though nature is alive and material, human perceptions and practices of nature are mediated by social-symbolic processes, or communication. I explore communication in the highest concentration of whale watch tourism operations in the world, the activity that spans the western U.S.-Canada border and revolves around a community of endangered orcas who have played a central role in contemporary human-nature relations. The core research question is: In such an evocative nature-human focal point where people seek out an iconic aspect of nature, what are some of the ways communication mediates human relations with nature? In using the concept of "mediates" as an analytic lens, the study explores communication both as a culturally constructive force used in negotiating and producing meaning, and as a form of environmental co-presence, of humans and nature in forms of conversation. After describing the case study and the ethnographic methods, I explore how scholars have theorized communication as a mediating force in social, cultural, and environmental processes, as well as specifically in nature tourism settings.;The study's findings are organized into three over-arching themes: (1) the two-pronged theme that, in relating to nature, the absence of words is often meaningful, and the contrasting notion that there also is a "need" to verbally communicate about nature; (2) the key symbol of "show," its prevalent use among a wide range of participants in communication about nature (e.g., "It's a show"), its network of themes, and its alternatives; and (3) the uses and meanings of discursive labels for whales as they related to transformations in perception, communication, practice, and policy about human-nature relations. The theses that emerged from these themes included: (1) First, the absence of verbal was instrumental in knowing nature in different ways. Second, moments of silence were characterized as moments of embodied mediation that were nature-sourced, in which nature was interactive and, at times, "spoke." Third, there was an identified lack of publicly available symbols, or culturally shared "words," "vocabulary," or "language" to verbally mediate human-nature relations in meaningful or adequate ways. Fourth, despite silence being meaningful and the available "words" being inadequate, participants spoke of a "need" to verbally communicate with others. I put forth the notion that the paradox of the absence of words and the "need" to verbally communicate provided a foundational backdrop for the following theses about the prevalent use of one particular verbal symbol to express the experience of encountering whales and the strategic and meaningful uses of specific forms of discursive labeling for whales. (2) The former thesis in part addressed how participants describing human-nature relations at times rejected culturally available words, yet at the same time felt the "need" to verbally communicate about their experiences with nature. In the second thesis, I investigate the emergence of one term in particular within this communication, a term that had wide cultural acceptance, was used by a wide range of participants, and which I identified as metaphoric. A range of speakers' predominant use of "show" to describe experiences or moments with whales pointed to the deep cultural coherence of this metaphor. In identifying "show" as a metaphor, I also explore its cultural resonance and ramifications. (3) An exploration of the ways people discursively labeled whales in the forms of whale identification, whale naming, being "bilingual," and whale terms, resulted in certain notions about the power of these labels to mediate human-nature relations. This final thesis included three notions in particular: First, human-whale relations and communication changed in relation to the introduction of the act of identifying and naming whales, and also transformed in relation to a movement that changed popular nominal terms for the whales; second, particular participant choices among alphanumeric terms and names, as well as among nominal and pronominal terms, had social and human-whale relational significance; and, third, certain terms for whales emerged as ideologically dominant. Informed by this study, I offer a preliminary heuristic framework for considering communication as a mediating force, that of communication as a possibly regenerative environmental resource for human-nature relations. Finally, I discuss study limitations and future research, as well as implications for practice.
展开▼
