Tangled up in knots: An emotional ecology of field science

Over the past 20 years, wildlife biologists, birders (bird watchers), and environmental activists have converged on the Delaware Bay, New Jersey USA every spring to study a migratory shorebird called the red knot (Calidris canutus rufa). Linked intimately with the spring-time landscape of the Bay and dependent on another species, the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus), for survival, the population of this bird has declined precipitously with the advent of a horseshoe crab fishery in the eastern U.S. – a situation studied extensively by state biologists. Following the work of Lorraine Daston and Kay Milton on moral economies and ecologies of emotion, respectively, this article takes these studies as its central concern, showing the constitutive role of emotion in the generation of environmental knowledge. I describe field sites on the Delaware Bay as spaces where human and nonhuman actors create an "ecology of emotion" that serves to cohere social groups and motivate actions. These actions, however, move scientists from research sites on the bay into public decision-making fora, requiring the translation and obfuscation of the values underpinning their work into forms socially acceptable in bureaucratic contexts. I suggest, therefore, that the selective filtering of emotion and value in such contextual shifts impoverishes the quality of public environmental discourse and policy.