Dialogues All the Way Down

Abstract

Aldo Leopold's notion of the land ethic remains one of the clearest articulations of culture as the driver of ecological sustainability. Noting that ecological field sciences have long relied on communication with members of host communities, this chapter argues that what is needed is reflexive participation in the forms of communication that constitute and renew places. Using examples of speech genres drawn from story-dominated conversations among participants in a community-based science monitoring project, this chapter shows that conversational genres are interactional routines that function in multiple ways. Lending ourselves to such interactional routines, we consent to our initiation into worlds in common for which we may now co-exist, often well beyond the duration of conversations that are anything but beside the point.