Another Way of Saying Enough: Environmental Concern and Popular Mobilization in Kyrgyzstan

This article is a foray into the understudied issue of environmental protest politics in Central Asia. Specifically, it uses Kyrgyzstan as a case study to test the argument that environmental concerns mobilized people to engage in protest and in ways different from other kinds of protest. This essay presents the first systematic study of public opinion about the environment in Kyrgyzstan. It includes results from a 2009 nationwide survey, over 100 expert and elite interviews, and newspaper content analysis. Furthermore, it spatially analyzes these results to identify geographical variation in public perception and political event occurrence patterns. Protest engagement is a complex process determined by the interaction of several factors, and is not explained solely by affluence, rationality, or grievances. Eco-mobilization - collective political action about the environment - represents a class of protest events that offers a different view into mass discontent in the former Soviet Union and neo-patrimonial societies. The study finds that these political actions about the environment are not necessarily elite driven; there is a basic foundation of national concern and salience of these issues, and demonstrated environmental beliefs do help to explain protest behavior.

Hinterlands

The poems in Hinterlands are products of my interest in landscape. They feature complex territories that are constructs of the mind, emerging from the language of place. The term “existential territories” seems to fit my work because it suggests that the poems are products of language, spaces, and existential states coming together. The territories exist not as geographic places, but in the psyche, and their physical texture comes from using both the substantive quality of language and the ways language points to place. I do not think the resulting dream-like quality renders them unreal, but rather presents the adventure of navigating a reality unique to the world of the poem. Readers and the personae in these poems map themselves onto the world as the world maps itself onto them.