This study explored whether Montana agricultural stakeholders’ perceptions and observations of climate change vary according to four socio-ecological variables: income, political view, agricultural occupation, and production region. A survey including 27 questions was developed into five sections: (1) agricultural background information; (2) perceptions about climate change; (3) observed changes in climate-related variables; (4) adaptation practices and strategies; and (5) demographic information. The survey included Likert-scored responses and multiple-choice questions, and was completed by 452 participants, including conventional and organic farmers and ranchers, extension agents, crop consultants, and researchers. The results indicate that while a notable fraction of agricultural stakeholders are alarmed about climate change and optimistic about the human capacity to reduce climate change, the degree of concern and optimism significantly varies depending on the stakeholder’s political views, production region, and agricultural occupation group. We found that observations of changes in climate, perceptions about climate change, and potential risks to agricultural production are driven mainly by political views. Both perceptions and observations drive the choice of adaptation and mitigation practices. It is thus essential to understand farmers’ socio-ecological characteristics when designing agricultural outreach programs in order to reduce barriers for the adoption of climate-resilient agriculture.

A burgeoning body of scholarship is attempting to understand, normalize, and ameliorate the emotional strain of victim service provision. The literature, however, has yet to fully theorize the hazardous process of empathetic engagement with victims. As a result, concepts, mechanisms, and outcomes are often conflated, making it difficult to understand the etiological path of this occupational risk. The goal of this article is to attend to this gap by accomplishing three objectives. The first is to engage with the perspective of symbolic interaction to theoretically ground a conceptual model of secondary trauma. The second objective is to propose a model of secondary trauma that acknowledges its inherently interactional, interpretive, and, thus, vicariously transmissible nature. The third objective is to begin the work of empirically supporting this model with data from a sample of victim service providers (n = 94) collected using in-depth interviews, focus groups, ethnographic participant observation, and community-based participatory research. Our findings suggest that victim service provision, in the form of empathetic engagement, can blur the boundary between self and other, and lead to a sense of damage in the self that manifests in unreliable self-agency, untrustworthy coherence of other, desensitized self-affectivity, and fractured self-history. This work has significant implications. We illustrate an important paradox by showing how victim service provision can be helpful to victims but harmful to providers. We also offer a pathway for reducing this harm. By specifying mechanisms of damage, the model can be used to inform policies and practices supportive of victim service providers’ health and well-being.

Lawrence, P. G., B. D. Maxwell, L. J. Rew, C. Ellis, and A. Bekkerman. 2018. Vulnerability of dryland agricultural regimes to economic and climatic change. Ecology and Society 23(1):34. https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-09983-230134

This article uses qualitative and ethnographic methods to trace the beef production chain. An analysis of bovine artificial insemination, calving, and the trafficking of cattle as commodities reveals the various ways kinship and economic bonds are created between ranchers and cattle. These bonds are dynamic and at different times position cows as capital, calves as babies, and ranchers—both male and female—as inseminators, mothers, and traffickers of nonhuman animal bodies. Looking seriously at the ways love, connection, and kinship operate in the context of cattle production shows how animal treatment is experienced at different stages of production and by different members of the ranch family.