Professor Tema Milstein on Conservation, Connection and Hope

We recently spoke with Tema Milstein, who is the Principal Investigator on a Project called ‘Environmental Communication for Whales, Dolphins, and Restorative Futures’, which will develop new national and global insights for promoting sustainability awareness through whale and dolphin watching.

Tema and her team are joining us aboard our Whale Tales boats to conduct research, and we are thrilled to support such an important project.

Tell us a bit about yourself and how you came to be working in your field?

I’m a Professor of Environment and Society at UNSW, and I’ve been studying the human–cetacean intersection for over 20 years.

I began my research in the highest concentration of whale-watching in the world, on the Pacific border between Canada and the US, where the first endangered orcas were also captured for the first marine parks.

So, it was a really interesting place to start studying whale watching, and it’s been really interesting to go from that first site to what can be seen as a success story in cetacean conservation with Australia’s humpback highway.

Humpbacks were almost gone in the 1970s when whaling was outlawed, and what’s happened since is really one of the few large-scale conservation success stories we can point to.

Has there always been an eco-focus for you, from when you were growing up to now?

I think early in life, it was very eco-focused. I grew up in New York State, by Niagara Falls, in the forest, with amazing forest animals and a creek, so I had that upbringing, which I’m eternally grateful for.

But what I found, and actually what I teach about as well, is that through childhood, and often through the education system, that’s often taken away from kids, right? We don’t generally study it, and when we do, it’s often something out there.

Even at university, and thankfully I think it’s changed a bit now, but when I was going to university more than 30 years ago, it was really hard to find a nature-oriented course that wasn’t biology-focused, one that had a cultural or social focus for those of us who weren’t going into those sciences.

So, it took me a while to get back to it. My master’s was in intercultural communication, and it was only when I started my PhD that I was like, “What do I really, really care about, and what needs the most attention right now?”

It just became really clear to me that it was our planet, our living planet, beyond the purely human realm.

I used to be a journalist; that was my first career.

I was a journalist for over a decade, in print and public radio. When I decided to go back for a second career, to do my PhD and teach and do research, I really wanted it to count.

Realising that it needed to be the environment, that it needed to be other species, really brought me back. It’s so important, so deeply important.

Since then, I’ve created programs at different universities focused on the environment, culture, and society in the US. Then, before I started this Future Fellowship, I spent seven and a half years revising and convening Australia’s first Sustainability Masters, the Master of Environmental Management at UNSW.

I’ve not just focused on research, but also on creating spaces in our education system where people can step in and bring forward the passion I think we’re probably born with, right? And where it can be legitimised in systems of education that so often either validate or invalidate what we care about.

With the research you’re conducting now, you’ve got a team around you. How is everything set up for the work that you do?

This research is supported by an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship and is a four-year funded project.

I have a small team that includes me as the PI (Principal Investigator), a PhD candidate, Martha Stokes, who previously worked on the United Nations Global Environment Outlook, and, soon, a research assistant.

So it’s a pretty small group, but we’re doing a lot, and we’re just three months into the four-year study.

Martha Stokes, PhD Candidate

What are you hoping to achieve over the four years?

Before this project, we completed a 2023 pilot study with Whale Tales and several other companies. That research helped us understand what was happening around whale watching in Australia and informed our successful ARC fellowship application.

Over the years, I have become a specialist in whale watching, but my specialty is really ecocultural understanding. Which means shifting our thinking from viewing human and environmental realities as separate to understanding them as always integrated and looking at all the ways humans are part of the ecosystem, not separate from it or above it.

Once you use that lens to understand the world, you start to shift from an anthropocentric society to an ecocentric one.

One of the major goals of this research is to understand how whale watching can improve human–whale relationships. How can it deepen our understanding of the ocean? How can it be ecologically restorative, and how can we help to do that in more effective ways, not only in Australia but around the world?

One of the end results of the research is to inform best practices for Whale Watching, and, hopefully, bring the industry together for workshops where operators and researchers can reflect on shared goals that go beyond simply running sustainable businesses.

We’re not going to have all the answers, and we’re going to have a lot of questions that people can then work through together to really reflect on.

I believe that most, if not all, companies are genuinely invested in creating a more restorative future for the well-being of whales and the ocean.

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge Whale Tales and the other operators hosting this research. I’m really grateful because we couldn’t do this research without the owner-operators and the companies around the country, and actually around the world, who are supporting this research by letting us come on the boats and do our research there. So that’s really fantastic.

How are you conducting this research?

I’m an ethnographer, so we’re participant observers. We take anonymised field notes covering passengers, crew and operators, and we’re amassing a ton of these.

The study also includes shore-based watching, and, in collaboration with others such as marine biologists and Indigenous Elders, I’m working with Randwick Council on things like signage.

Our major focus, in part because it’s the highest concentration of cetacean watching, is Sydney. Whale watching is booming here with tourists and locals alike.

But we’re also studying several other locations around Australia and internationally, including Japan, and, hopefully, New Zealand, Iceland, the US, and Canada.

While the focus is on Australia, it will be internationally comparative. Hopefully, at the end, we’ll be giving large-scale international presentations as well.

 

Do you feel like the work you’re doing could become a playbook that could be rolled out to other species?

Yes. Definitely. I have studied this with manatees and dugongs, and also on land with gorillas in zoos and people, and the patterns are generally very similar across species.

And also, of course, humpbacks and orcas, and dolphins. So yes, we’re really trying to hone in on the repeating patterns, even across countries and cultures. There may be some framings from different cultures that are really helpful, such as Indigenous framing here in Australia. Comparing experiences across countries and cultures will help us understand which patterns recur and which restorative approaches might be effective in different settings.

Have you also got a layer around warming waters, how that’s affecting migration, and those sorts of things?

Because I’m a sociocultural researcher, not a marine biologist, I’m really looking at the meaning we’re making.

But of course, part of that is: what are we talking about? Are we talking about krill? Are we talking about the warming oceans? What are the environmental impacts? What risks do people come onto the boats knowing about, and what do they leave knowing about? What are they talking about with each other, and what makes an impact?

So absolutely, these are really important.

I’m also collaborating with many natural scientists on this work. Most of that collaboration is still coming together, but I’ll be taking insights from them while also bringing insights from the sociocultural realm to them.

I think these are spaces that should not be separated, right? Really having a transdisciplinary lens on this, rather than siloing it, will be deeply important.

One last question. We hear about warming oceans, climate change and the way the planet is suffering. Do you feel hopeful?

Yes, I actually really do. I don’t think I’m being Pollyanna about this. Part of it is just how I’m drawn; I think we’re each drawn a certain way, but I also think it’s what I study and what I teach.

I’m not just focused on the risks and the horrible statistics. I am very much focused on our agency as human beings, and I think that’s a really hopeful place to look right now. Not empty hope, it’s agentic hope.

The way that I understand how knowledge is made is that we co-construct culture. We’re co-constructing our belief systems, and that is the space of immense possibility for change. It can happen quite quickly, and it has happened quite quickly in the past. We have lots of examples of that.

So, yes, I am hopeful.

Teaching and seeing all these amazing young people coming through makes me really hopeful. And frankly, studying and being around cetaceans, being around whales and dolphins, even though there are very upsetting things that you can learn in that space, it’s also really hopeful.

And seeing people around whales and dolphins, too, gives me so much hope, and that’s why I am so excited about the outcomes of this study.

 

Milstein T; Castro-Sotomayor J, (ed.), 2020, Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity OPEN ACCESS, Routledge, London, UK

Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity | Tema Milstein, José Castro-Sotomayor