đżWild Ones #66: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental Keyword: Topophilia + The Territory + The Global South Climate Database + Freya the Walrus + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a (usually) weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in environmental communication. If youâre new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
đ±Environmental Keyword
Keyword: Topophilia
âThe word âtopophiliaâ is a neologism, useful in that it can be defined broadly to include all of the human being's affective ties with the material environment. These differ greatly in intensity, subtlety, and mode of expression.â â Yi-Fu Tuan, in Topophilia: A study of environmental perceptions, attitudes and values. (1974)
The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan developed the notion of topophilia in his book of the same title. He described the book as âa systematic study of how people come to be attached to place.â Yi-Fu Tuan passed away this month on August 10th at the age of 91. Itâs been a good while since I read Yi-Fu Tuanâs Topophilia â I think it was during my comprehensive exams for my PhD several years ago. But âtopophiliaâ is one of those memorable keywords that has stuck with me after a brief encounter. A bit like âsolastalgiaâ or âUmwelt.â In a 1988 lecture, Yi-Fu Tuan writes about his surprise at the bookâs (brief) popularity with the environmental movement when it was published:
âTopophilia's popularity may be gauged by the fact that at one college bookstore, it was put on a shelf labeled "Astrology and Occult." To my surprise, late-blooming Flower Children found it sympathetic, as did their bible The Whole Earth Catalog. Topophilia's romance with Counter Culture was, however, brief, and would have been even briefer had Counter Culture not dovetailed into the environmental movement.â
In his book Topophilia, Yi-Fu Tuan described himself as a âhumanistic geographerâ. The aim of the book, he wrote, was to explore the powerful role that emotional attachment to our local environment plays in forging our âsense of place,â and in particular, the diverse ways we endeavor to make our home in the world. The geographer Tim Cresswell, a former graduate student of Tuanâs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says Yi-Fu Tuanâs notion of topophilia was a reaction to a dominant âspatial scienceâ of objective coordinates and grids in geography at the time. Hereâs how Tim puts it in his book, Place: A short introduction:
âWriting in 1974 (before humanistic geography was well known) it is obvious that Tuan was struggling with the abstractions of spatial science. Spatial science simply missed out too much of the richness of human experience for Tuan and despite the lip service paid to 'place' in definitions to geography no-one was really bothering to figure out what it was. It could not be measured or mapped and laws could not be deduced about or from it.â (pp. 20-21).
In contrast to abstract space, Topophilia explores the lively âaffective bond between people and placeâ.1 Tuan's division between abstract space and lived place has not been without its critics. The geographer, Doreen Massey, for example, writes that Yi-Fu Tuan's idea of Topophilia â the love or attachment to concrete, local places (like a garden or even just a cozy room in our house) risks romanticizing our emotional connection to âthe local.â In the process, we lose sight of how ââthe lived reality of our daily livesâ is utterly dispersed, unlocalised in its sources and repercussions.â This is the point environmental philosopher Val Plumwood also makes when she warns us about how our love for a specific place can actually obscure our interdependence with other places, especially those âshadow placesâ (âdenied placesâ or âsacrifice zonesâ ) that allow for nice places to be nice.2
Iâd have to read more of Tuanâs work to see how, or if he thought about these problems that âlove of placeâ thinking creates for environmentalism: or why we protect some places and sacrifice others. But in addition to writing about âthe love of placeâ in his book about topophilia, he also wrote about topophobia, or âthe fear of placeâ in a 2013 book called Landscapes of Fear. As Tuan puts it, âLove and fear are basic human emotions transformed to varying degrees by imagination and culture,â and how we communicate these culturally-mediated emotions, he later wrote, has the tremendous power to render some places visible, and others invisible.
More on Tuanâs work:
Watch: Legacy of Yi-Fu Tuan: A Panel Discussion: âIn honour of Yi-Fu Tuanâs 90th birthday, geographers from around the globe discuss the impact of Tuanâs work and teaching on their own.â
Valerie Hansen, Professor of History, Yale University: âThe great geographer Yi-Fu Tuan died in Madison, WI, on August 10th. His 1998 lecture in the ACLS Charles Homer Haskell series, "A Life of Learning," was extremely moving. I recommend it to everyone.â
Reflections on Yi-Fu Tuan, by Tim Cresswell: â[YiFu Tuan] kept bringing me back to big geography questions of space, place, landscape, and mobility â questions I have pursued ever since as fundamental aspects of what it is to be human on earth. Asking such questions is not to deny politics and difference but to insist on the power of geography in ongoing struggles over how we make a home in the world and how we should make a home in the world.â
âPlace can be as small as the corner of a room or as large as the earth itself: that the earth is our place in the universe is a simple fact of observation to homesick astronauts... It is obvious that most definitions of place are quite arbitrary. Geographers tend to think of place as having the size of a settlement: the plaza within it may be counted a place, but usually not the individual houses, and certainly not that old rocking chair by the fireplace.â
âYi-Fu Tuan (1974), cited in Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (2013, p. 20)
đ What Iâm reading
Rocky Mountain Massacre: Was Yellowstoneâs deadliest wolf hunt in 100 years an inside job? By Ryan Devereaux in The Intercept. I wrote about the U.S. politics of wolf conservation and reintroduction in early July, and if you found that interesting, I really recommend this incredible reported piece on the recent wolf hunts in Yellowstone. Also check out this fascinating recent interview with the author, journalist Ryan Devereaux, on the Wolf Connection Podcast:
On Wandering Angels and Lost Landmarks. By Daegan Miller in Emergence Magazine: âOn a visit to the tree that marks the thousandth westward mile of the Transcontinental Railroad, Daegan Miller considers how our historical landmarks have shifted in meaning, leaving us adrift and disoriented in the Anthropocene.â
đ§Â What Iâm watching
The Territory | Official Trailer | National Geographic Documentary Films: âThe Territory, from director Alex Pritz, provides an immersive on-the-ground look at the tireless fight of the Indigenous Uru-eu-wau-wau people against the encroaching deforestation brought by farmers and illegal settlers in the Brazilian Amazon.â
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
The Global South Climate Database: âThe Global South Climate Database is a publicly available, searchable database of scientists and experts in the fields of climate science, climate policy and energy. The goal of the project, set up by Carbon Brief with the support of the Reuters Institute's Oxford Climate Journalism Network, is to ensure that journalists from all over the world can contact scientists from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific.â
Check out some of the eco-tools (and other stuff) I was exploring last yearđ âđżWild Ones #55: 2021 in Review: A recap of 2021 with some of the memorable keywords, tools, research, ideas, tweets, and quotes in ecolinguistics and environmental communication I explored this year in Wild Ones!â
đ° News, Events, and Workshops
đPakistan floods revive a debate: Should U.S. pay for climate disasters? By Shannon Osaka in the Washington Post: âEven as Pakistan turns to donors around the world asking aid to cope with deadly and costly flooding, many politicians and activists demand the United States and others compensate poor nations for global warming damagesâ
âFreya the walrus euthanized after crowds at Oslo fjord refuse to stay awayâ by Agence France-Presse, in The Guardian.
As you might know, I live in Oslo, so Iâve been following the journey of Freya closely, a walrus that had spent this summer cruising around the Oslo fjord and lounging on boats. Freya had journeyed across several countries in Europe for many months, becoming an international celebrity in the process, until she was killed by the Norwegian Fisheries Authorities in Oslo, Norway on August 14. I plan to share more of my thoughts about Freya here on Wild Ones soon. But in the meantime, among the many views expressed after Freya was killed, I thought Jeff Sebo, Director of the NYU Animal Studies M.A. Program, had an insightful take in his Twitter thread:
đWorkshop: Nature Writing Workshop: Writing from the Roots: Part II with staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder:
âThis fall, join our virtual course âWriting from the Roots: Part II.â With several guest teachers, we'll explore practices that can deepen our engagement with the living world and add surprising dimension to our writing.â
Indigenous farmers reclaim time-honored techniques: Growing traditions in northern New Mexico. By Lyric Aquino in High Country News.
đ Research
Communicating climate change in âDonât Look Upâ. By Julie Doyle, in the Journal of Science Communication, 21(05). (2022):
âClimate communication needs to keep in place both climate mitigation and adaptation, making the historical and structural inequalities of capitalism and colonialism the interconnected stories of both [Sultana, 2022]. [Pheadra] Pezzullo states that, âImagination is a performative survival techniqueâ [2016, p. 804]. If climate justice is to become central to climate action, then popular communication on climate change needs to present such stories as central to the reimagination of a socially just world that responds equitably to the climate crisis, providing a âliveable and sustainable future for allâ [IPCC, 2022, p. 35, my emphasis].â
â Julie Doyle, in Communicating climate change in âDonât Look Up.â
When do environmental NGOs work? A test of the conditional effectiveness of environmental advocacy. By Raul Pacheco-Vega & Amanda Murdie in Environmental Politics (2020)
âIn short, we do not find environmental NGO advocacy to be a panacea for environmental improvement. Instead, environmental NGO advocacy works only when conditions are right or âripeâ for a state to make concessionsâŠTo the extent that other types of NGOs, like democracy or human rights NGOs, could help improve domestic organizational rights, their work within a state could have future payoffs for environmental NGOs in the area of environmental performance.â
Special Issue: Citizen Linguistic Landscape, bordering practices, and semiotic ideology in the COVID-19 pandemic. Edited by Jackie Jia Lou,
David Malinowski, and Amiena Peck.
new bookđ Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis: Towards a Greener Screen. Edited by Pietari KÀÀpĂ€ and Hunter Vaughan
đĄ Ideas
What Does It Mean to Study Environments in Ukraine Now? By Darya Tsymbalyuk, in Arcadia, Summer 2022, no. 12.: ââŠto think about the environments of Ukraine now means addressing petrocapitalist dependencies between Russia and the collective West. Only by disengaging from extractivist practices fueling this war, we can start envisioning ways of recuperating the more-than-human worlds and relations that will survive.â Â
The Principles of Environmental Justice: Drafted and Adopted by the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 in DC:
âThis is what reconciliation work can look like.â An interview with Bonnie McGill by B. Toastie in High Country News: âIf people want to support Indigenous sovereignty and those kinds of efforts, looking at place names is a place to start. Theyâre these windows into a deeper history than most of us know.â
new book!đ Water Always Wins: Thriving in an Age of Drought and Deluge, by Erica Gies, University of Chicago Press:
âWater Always Wins: Thriving in an age of drought and deluge begins by asking a revolutionary question: What does water want? Most modern development has erased waterâs slow phases â wetlands, floodplains, high altitude grasslands and forests â that soften flood peaks, store water for droughts, and keep natural systems healthy. What water wants, say water detectives exploring this question, is a kind of un-engineering that reclaims these slow cycles, offering us greater resilience. For that reason, author Erica Gies calls their efforts the âSlow Waterâ movement.â
đ Today in environmental history
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, author of the famous 1818 novel Frankenstein, was born on August 30th, 1797. Here is a piece I wrote on Medium about âthe climatic origin of Mary Shelleyâs Frankenstein,â and âhow climate change caused by the largest volcanic eruption in recorded history inspired the first modern science fiction novelâ: The Year Without A Summer
đŹÂ Quote Iâm thinking about
âPeople think that geography is about capitals, landforms and so onâŠBut it is also about place â its emotional tone, social meaning, and generative potential.â
â Yi-Fu Tuan
âFreya the walrus is neither the first nor remotely the last nonhuman climate refugee â or refugee of human activity more generally. There will be quintillions more where she came fromâŠIt will be a long time before we know how to build multispecies communities that can be accommodating for humans and nonhumans alike. But when human activity is changing the world, we have a responsibility to try. We should start learning and growing in these ways now.â
â Jeff Sebo, Director of the NYU Animal Studies M.A. Program and the NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Program, and author of Saving Animals, Saving Ourselves
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this digest useful, please consider sharing with others who might find it interesting toođ I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest, what areas of environmental communication youâre involved in/most interest you, or anything youâd like to see more of in Wild Ones:)
Yi-Fu Tuan, in Topophilia (1974, p. 4); cited in Tim Cresswell (2013). Place: A Short Introduction. p. 20.
Also see the Shadow Places Network.
I managed to get quite a few typos into this one! I think I caught most but thanks for reading through themđ