Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability

Terre Satterfield is an anthropologist by training, though one who borrows from many disciplines. Her work concerns “sustainable thinking and action” across different public groups as manifest in the context of specific environmental controversies. In particular, she examines the conditions under which humans take action or invest their energies in environmental policy debates. She also studies the links between environmental values and specific management policies.

Her research, supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the US National Science Foundation, has included an ethnography of the dispute over old-growth logging in western Oregon (published with the University of British Columbia Press as The Anatomy of a Conflict). Co-terminously, her interest in the environmental values field has focused on an examination of the cognitive and linguistic limitations of conventional (willingness-to-pay) measures of environmental values. Along with colleagues, she has developed the use of linked (“pathway”) question sets that reflect features of good decision processes so as to provide a richer, more context-specific, base of “value” information when surveys or large population samples are required. She has also begun developing narrative-based, value-elicitation techniques. These demonstrate that the articulation of environmental values are best examined via the contextually and morally rich stories and conversations through which we define ourselves and our actions in relation to natural systems. Dr. Satterfield has also used field interviews to examine natural history writers’ use of narrative form to articulate noneconomic expressions of value. Additionally, she has developed experimental evidence to demonstrate that individuals are more responsive and sensitive to ethical and technical ‘value’ information (and more likely to apply that content to judgments about policy), when that content is expressed in narrative form as opposed to the utilitarian language of cost-benefit analysis.

A related program of research, also supported by the National Science Foundation, explores the links between the environmental justice, risk, and social movements fields. Beginning in 1997, Dr. Satterfield collaborated with colleagues on a national study of the relationship between environmental risk, social vulnerability, and structural patterns of discrimination. From 1996 through 1998, she also conducted ethnographic and survey work in a rural African American community experiencing sustained contamination attributed to a local chemical plant. The intent of the later study was to expand the definition of health and impact to include the devastating social and psychological consequences of exposure and subsequent remediation (“clean up”) efforts.

In the current period, Dr. Satterfield is studying community involvement in decisions regarding the de-contamination of Cold War era bomb production sites. A second study examines how New Zealand’s Maori bring traditional cultural principles of whakapapa (rules of descent, genealogy, ecology and taxonomy) to the debate about appropriate policy for the management of genetically modified organisms. A third project will look at the success of UBC’s Sustainable Research Initiative’s Georgia Basin Futures Project’s Quest Program. Several of those at the initiative are examining Quest’s capacity to broaden public thinking about sustainability because users of the program are faced with the consequences for sustainability of both their world views and their explicit policy choices. Finally, in the health fields, Dr. Satterfield is engaged with colleagues in a WHO-funded cross-national study of the perception of disease and environmental risks in Chile and China.

Research Interests

The Social Study of Environmental Conflicts

Environmental Values and Public Policy

Environmental Justice

Social Theories of Risk

Risk and Remediation; Political and Human Ecology

Sustainability Movements & the Anthropology of Environmentalism

Cross Cultural Perspectives on Risk

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