The Rachel Carson Prize is awarded annually to the best article by an early career researcher in People and Nature. For full information on the prize’s history, please visit the BES website.
Winner of the Rachel Carson Prize 2023 – Marc Tadaki
Marc Tadaki, Joanne Clapcott, Robin Holmes, Calum MacNeil, and Roger Young (People and Nature, 5:2).
When we talk about water in hydrological cycles, wetlands as kidneys, or ecosystems at tipping points, we are using metaphors to describe the environment. Metaphors have the power to help us reform our relationship with the natural world, encouraging us to understand one phenomenon in terms of another. This use of language was the mindset that motivated Marc and his team to look at how metaphors shape freshwater science and policy with this study.
For the metaphors of ecosystem health, invasive species, and legal personhood, they wanted to know: what social and natural features do these metaphors draw attention to, and which relations do they obscure? Furthermore, and uniquely, they asked: how have these metaphors have been given specificity, permanence, and force in environmental policy? And finally: what roles do scientists play in generating and applying metaphors in environmental governance?
Across eight meetings over the course of a year, Marc and his team – consisting of himself, a human geographer, three freshwater ecologists, and a freshwater invasion ecologist –debated paradigms and ideas. “It was like we were in a graduate course on ‘metaphors in science and society!”, Marc said. “We were all invested in building our conceptual tools and stretching ourselves. It was a wonderful process grounded in love of knowledge.”
Marc came to ecology through physical geography. “After two years at university struggling to figure out what excited me (it definitely wasn’t electromagnetism or inorganic chemistry), I saw the 2006 Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth and was both horrified and intrigued about how the earth system was changing,” he said. “I switched to physical geography to study environmental change and became fascinated with rivers as complex and dynamic systems. Of course, studying rivers immediately confronts you with things like dams, channelisation, infrastructure, water extraction, anglers, harvesters, and Indigenous and other communities who derive meaning from these systems. To understand rivers and how they change therefore requires understanding society, so through my graduate studies and since I have been very interested in how society relates to rivers, including through creating science and policies regarding rivers.”
Marc is currently a social scientist at the Cawthron Institute in New Zealand, where he researches environmental values, freshwater management, and the social basis of environmental science and policy. In a current project, as part of an interdisciplinary team he is looking at metaphors of ‘belonging’ for introduced and native species – how is it that a species comes to ‘belong’ in a place, and what types of science are produced to shape thinking about belonging?
However, he also holds a BA in film studies, wrote a screenplay at university, and would love to one day teach a course on environmental politics in film. Here are three of his best recommendations for films with metaphorical themes:
Gojira (1954). “The original Godzilla film holds massive power for me, as a metaphor for Japan’s trauma from the atomic bomb and the perils of failing to hold science accountable to human values.”
Wolf children (2012). “A beautiful metaphor for the challenges and joys of motherhood, exploring the different ways that children want and need to be loved.”
Princess Mononoke (1997). “A troubling and profoundly nuanced metaphor for humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Humans and the forest spirits are literally ‘at war’ with each other, though ‘good’ and ‘evil’ exist on all sides and even within every character. How should we act in such a morally complicated world?”
Relational Thinking 