Citizen Discourse on Contaminated Water, Superfund Cleanups, and Landscape Restoration: (Re)making Milltown, Montana

This book traces the primary concerns of Milltown locals as they discussed the contamination and the cleanup in 2005. The purpose of this study was to investigate a public engaged in discussions about a local landscape, expressly to determine the degree to which intersecting and diverging notions of place could be understood as a coherent discourse. In stark contrast to the two to three minutes citizens are typically afforded at public hearings, the authors set out to expose the details of how locals combined information and logics into sense-making narratives. They employed an in-depth interviewing technique that encouraged the participants to elaborate rather than truncate their concerns. In doing so, the authors exposed distinct sets of interpretive resources employed by locals both as means of understanding their situation and for projecting into the future. Environmental resource managers, geographers, and scholars interested in communication about the environment will all find this book of particular relevance. In addition, scholars interested in the political implications of such work will also find this book a unique resource for coordinating public opinions.