🌿Wild Ones #89: Environmental Communication Digest
Back from summer travels + Change: How to make big things happen + Nuisance bear + Fossil fuel industry influence in higher education + 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 you’re new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Oh, and if you're on BlueSky you can now find me here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
It’s hard to believe it's mid-September already, the summer seemed to just fly by for me this year. I meant to get back on board with writing here on Wild Ones last month, but as the new semester arrived, a lot of scrambling to meet writing commitments and teaching new courses ensued, so it's been a bit of a blur the past few weeks. But it’s nice to finally be getting back into the groove of writing here in rainy Bergen! A famously rainy city already, Bergen broke a new rain record for August, hitting 434.6 millimeters, which is a little over 17 inches. I’m not sure how those numbers stack up to other rainy cities, but I can confirm, it’s a new level of consistent sogginess I have not experienced up to this point in my life, and I grew up on the Oregon Coast, so I'm familiar with wet weather:) The slogan for a week-long climate festival in the city earlier this year was “Warmer, Wetter, and Wilder” (Varmere, Våtere, Villere). I'm not sure about the warmer or wilder part, but the ‘wetter’ prediction seems accurate so far.
We did have a few beautiful summery days earlier this month in Bergen though! It was also fun/exhausting to finally experience the Stoltzekleiven hike/stair climb for the first time, and got some great views of the city! It was also a blast attending the annual food and cider festival here in downtown Bergen where I discovered Norway apparently has a booming cider industry. Cider makers from all over the country descended on the city for a couple of days to share their brews.
Earlier in July, I attended the Critical Approaches to Discourse Analysis Across Disciplines (CADAAD) conference hosted at the Adam Mickiewicz University, in Poznań, Poland. This was the first time I had ever been to Poland but it was great to spend some time there with some local colleagues who could show us around the city a bit. I presented on a paper I wrote on the topic of ‘sustainability communication and multispecies democracy’ for an edited volume exploring new approaches to sustainability in language and communication research. The book is still under review so looking forward to sharing more about my chapter when the book is (hopefully) accepted for publication.
I also spent a few weeks in Hawai‘i this summer reconnecting with friends and colleagues at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and continuing with my fieldwork on wildlife conservation and tourism that I've been doing there for several years now. I spent a bit of time playing in the ocean too, trying to get my surf fix in before coming back to Norway, although I plan to explore the Norwegian coastline at some point. I just need a good chunk of free time and maybe a small boat to navigate all the fjords:) A couple of highlights for me during my time on O‘ahu were visiting the Bishop Museum, which I try to do whenever I'm back in Honolulu, and exploring Ka‘ena Point State Park. Bishop Museum is such a fantastic museum devoted to Hawaiian cultural and environmental history, and I'm only ever able to see a fraction of what I’d like to when I visit.
📰 News and Events
📣Conference: 18th Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment: call for proposals (deadline: 31 October 2024)
“The International Environmental Communication Association (IECA), in collaboration with the University of Tasmania's School of Creative Arts and Media (CAM), invites scholars, artists, practitioners, and activists to the 18th Biennial Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE). COCE 2025, taking place 23-27 June 2025 in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia, will be a hybrid conference, offering opportunities for in-person and virtual presentation and participation, as well as interaction between in-person and virtual attendees.”
📑Report: On Thin Ice: Disproportionate Responses to Climate Change Protesters in Democratic Countries. “As the climate crisis intensifies, Western governments are cracking down on climate protests. A new report from Climate Rights International reveals that demonstrators worldwide are being arrested, charged, and silenced for exercising their right to free expression.”
📑Report: Global Witness Annual Defenders Report 2023/2024. “Missing voices: The violent erasure of land and environmental defenders”
📚Online book talk: Reimagining the More-than-Human City: Stories from Singapore. By Jamie Wang, Research Assistant Professor at the Education University of Hong Kong. (The MIT Press, 2024). Date/Time: Monday, 23 September 2024, at 10:00 in Norway
The Science Is Clear: Offshore Wind Isn’t What’s Killing Whales: "Politicians and nonprofit groups have blamed offshore wind turbines for whale deaths, but the science doesn’t support those claims—at all.” By Josh Axelrod in Scientific American (June 26, 2024).
Map the Commons, Protect the Planet: Helping Indigenous peoples to protect forests and other shared resources will keep us all safer from climate change and other threats. By Moushumi Basu in the Revelator. July 3, 2024.
The Supreme Court Ends Chevron Deference—What Now? For one, the ability of federal agencies like the EPA to set rules and enforce environmental protections now shrinks. By Jeff Turrentine in NRDC. June 28, 2024.
See also: Supreme Court Decision Jeopardizes Environmental Protections. Southern Environmental Law Center, June 28, 2024.
🎥Video: Is climate change to blame?: “After an extreme weather event, people often ask: is climate change to blame? On June 12, 2024, the Yale Center for Environmental Communication hosted an insightful discussion on attribution science — a field focused on determining the influence of human-induced climate change on extreme weather events.”
80 percent of people globally want stronger climate action by governments according to UN Development Programme survey. Landmark public opinion research reveals overwhelming majority around the world support more ambitious efforts and want to overcome geopolitical differences to fight climate crisis. In UNDP, June 20, 2024.
📚 What I’m reading
Change: How to make big things happen, by Damon Centola.
Damon Centola is a Professor of Communication and Director of the Network Dynamics Group at the University of Pennsylvania. I read this book in chunks over the summer, and enjoyed learning about Centola's research on the science of social networks and what it tells us about how (to make) ideas spread. This year I've been working with a few colleagues on a project looking into climate change knowledge networks who have a background in social network analysis, so it's inspired me to gain a better understanding of the field, and in particular, what it can tell us about how environmental ideas and actions spread (or not) through groups, organizations, movements and societies.
I first heard about the book after a guest on the great
podcast, Erin Remblance, recommended the book while discussing the topic of social tipping points with host Rachel Donald (here's a link to a video of their conversation). Overall, I found the book to be a helpful and accessible introduction to network thinking. The first section of the book in particular on ‘Pervasive myths (about how ideas spread) that prevent change’ has a lot of useful implications for environmental communication campaigns seeking to get their message out. In a future post I’d like to do a deeper dive into social network research and some key takeaways for environmental communication. I especially think there's a lot worth unpacking in the distinction that Centola lays out early in his book between simple contagions (how information or memes spread through ‘virality’ or ‘stickiness’) and complex contagions (how new behaviors, social norms and beliefs spread). If you're interested, Centola talks a bit about this distinction and other ideas from the book in this online talk from 2021. But for now here are a couple of memorable quotes from the book that I highlighted:“For decades, our standard ideas about social change have been based on a popular metaphor — that change spreads like a virus…But there's a big problem with the viral metaphor: to create real change, you need to do more than spread information; you must change peoples beliefs and behaviors. And those are much harder to influence. Viral metaphors are able to describe a world where information spreads quickly yet beliefs and behaviors stay the same. It is a world of simple contagions — catchy ideas and memes that spread quickly to everyone but lack any lasting impact on what we think or how we live” (p. 9).
“…The less familiar and more disruptive an innovation is, the greater the resistance to it will typically be. This is the primary reason why social change is so difficult. So, what do we do? The answer is not influencers, nor viral marketing, nor stickiness. It is the infrastructure of contagion. Social networks are not merely pipes that spread information or disease, but prisms that color how people receive new ideas and innovations…(p. 76)
“When it comes to social change, the myth of the influencer obscures the real pathways that have led challenging and even controversial social, commercial, and political initiatives to succeed. The first step to seeing how change really works is to stop looking for the special people in the network and instead start looking for the special places” (p. 27).
🎧 What I’m listening to
“After the unprecedented Exxon Valdez oil spill, a jury of ordinary Alaskans decided that Exxon had to be punished. However, Exxon fought back against their punishment. They did so, in-part, by supporting research that suggested jurors are irrational. This work came from an esteemed group of psychologists, behavioural economists, and legal theorists–including Daniel Kahneman, and Cass Sunstein. In this three-part series in partnership with Canada’s National Observer, we investigate the forgotten legacy of the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the research that followed. This first part, an Alaskan Nightmare, covers the spill and its immediate effects.”
Air Conditioning. By Hsuan L. Hsu (2024). Bloomsbury.
Hsuan L. Hsu is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and is a member of the fascinating sounding Centre for Sensory Studies. I found this interview intriguing, especially after reading another fantastic book on the eco-social histories and consequences of ‘temperature controlling technologies’: Cooling the Tropics by Dr. Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart.
“…air conditioning isn't for everybody: its reliance on carbon fuels divides the world into habitable, climate-controlled bubbles and increasingly uninhabitable environments where AC is unavailable. Hsuan Hsu's Air Conditioning explores questions about culture, ethics, ecology, and social justice raised by the history and uneven distribution of climate controlling technologies.”
👀What I’m watching
Communicating the Climate Crisis in Word and Image: “A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning author and New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert and acclaimed illustrator Wesley Allsbrook, who have collaborated on Kolbert's new collection of climate change reporting.” Hosted by the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Nuisance Bear. “A documentary by Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden, follows polar bears as they clash with a gaggle of tourists, wildlife officers, and the residents of a small Canadian town.”
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
Against the Wind: A Map of the Anti-Offshore Wind Network in the Eastern United States: The ‘Against the Wind’ map “provides an unparalleled window into how fossil fuel interests are working with climate denial think tanks and community groups to obstruct offshore wind projects.”
The Anti-greenwash Guide for Agency Leaders: “The free guide covers the latest regulatory frameworks, a helpful pull-out ‘How Not to Greenwash’ checklist, and principles to guide agencies on their path away from misleading and unsubstantiated claims in communications campaigns.”
📚 Research
Fossil-fueled stories: an ecolinguistic critical discourse analysis of the South African government’s naturalisation of fossil fuels in the context of the climate crisis. By Julia Laurie and Miché Thompson in Critical Discourse Studies. (July 2024).
“In recent years, aging coal power plants, lack of maintenance, and issues of poor governance have resulted in a high frequency of rolling scheduled blackouts, throughout South Africa. This has led to greater urgency being placed on switching to renewable energy sources, which South Africa has great potential for…Despite this, and the current reality of the global climate crisis, South Africa continues to rely heavily on coal, not only as an energy source at home, but also as a key part of the country’s export economy. This paper utilises a corpus-assisted, ecolinguistically-informed critical discourse analysis framework to investigate the ways in which members of the South African national government construct the use of coal and other fossil fuels in light of a global climate crisis.”
Fossil fuel industry influence in higher education: A review and a research agenda. By Sofia Hiltner, Emily Eaton, Noel Healy, Andrew Scerri, Jennie C. Stephens, and Geoffrey Supran. In WIRES: Climate Change.
“…We report the first literature review of academic and civil society investigations into fossil fuel industry ties to higher education in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. We find that universities are an established yet under-researched vehicle of climate obstruction by the fossil fuel industry, and that universities' lack of transparency about their partnerships with this industry poses a challenge to empirical research. We propose a research agenda of topical and methodological directions for future analyses of the prevalence and consequences of fossil fuel industry–university partnerships, and responses to them.”
The challenge of abstaining in a culture of action points. By Nina Wormbs, Elina Eriksson, Maria Wolrath Söderberg & Maria Dahlin. In npj Climate Action. (June 2024). “Behavioural change is necessary in order to reach a sustainable society. Sometimes this will translate into doing less and it is likely that we need to stop some things entirely. We lay out the multiple challenges of making the act of abstaining count.”
The Political Organisation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST): “This dossier focuses on the MST’s tactics and forms of organisation and why it is the only peasant social movement in Brazil’s history that has managed to survive for over a decade in the face of the political, economic, and military power of Brazil’s large landowners.” By Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. April, 2024.
Planetary justice: a systematic analysis of an emerging discourse. By Agni Kalfagiannia, Stefan Pedersen, & Dimitris Stevis, in Environmental Politics. July 2024:
“Justice concerns have been central to contemporary social and ecological debates for decades but have only recently made inroads into the Earth system centric discourses on the Anthropocene and planetary boundaries. Our focus here is the emerging discourse on planetary justice which has aimed to be a corrective to this lacuna.”
Responsible environmental education in the anthropocene: Understanding and Responding to young people’s experiences of nature disconnection, eco-anxiety and ontological insecurity. By Ariane Gienger, Melissa Nursey-Bray, Dianne Rodger, Anna Szorenyi, Philip Weinstein, and Scott Hanson-Easey, in Environmental Education Research, July 2024:
“In times of deepening ecological crises, children and young people’s contact with nature, connection to nature, environmental awareness, environmental action and personal wellbeing thus affect one another in complex ways…Environmental education (EE) plays a key role in shaping each of these factors, and by extension, their interconnections. Here, it is useful to provide a definition of EE – a term that refers to diverse formal and informal educational activities that aim to achieve a ‘range of intended environmental and sustainability-related outcomes’ (Ardoin et al. 2022, 476).”
💡 Ideas
It’s Wrongheaded to Protect Nature with Human-Style Rights. By Anna Grear in Center for Humans and Nature.
“Some might object that such a decentred approach is likely to be more complex and challenging than relying on existing assumptions about the centrality of “the human.” That’s certainly true. But such engagement is preferable—more empirically faithful to what’s there—than continuing to elevate the human as the ethical apex of the legal system. The “human” cannot continue to be the sole benchmark against which other beings must be measured in order to count.”
Empatheatre: “An unusual urban dweller is dividing communities and leaving residents frustrated by government inaction in South Africa. Building on Centre research, a new theatre play tells an emotional story to democratize research and address human conflicts over nature.”
Not ‘hard to reach’ but ‘hardly reached’: Empowering communities by engaging them in research. Dr Jasjit Singh ‘reflects on how universities can raise the profile of ‘hardly reached’ communities. By explaining how research works and embedding open dialogue in their projects, academics can make sure their work is relevant – and that it will make a real difference to society’:
“As academics and researchers, we often work with several public groups and external partners, including media and policy makers. We’re therefore in privileged positions to bring these different types of audiences and organisations together. We should use our privilege more to do this: lifting the voice of others can only enrich our research.”
What role does humour play in coping with the climate crisis?: In Gen Dread. ‘Author Andrew Boyd tells us why humour is the ultimate shock absorber in impossible times.’
“The job of the climate activist is not really to save the world in the way we’ve often cast the activist role. Maybe it was 20 years ago. But rather, it’s to help it get less worse, more slowly. So that's funny. It’s a pretty darkly funny take on what our job is. And so in the book I paint the scene of how basically we're knocking on doors saying, “uh, ma'am, would you please sign this petition to only destroy half the planet? It’s very important.”
The science of protests: how to shape public opinion and swing votes
Demonstrations are on the rise, and scientists are revealing which types work best. By Helen Pearson in Nature. June 26, 2024
“Some researchers are working to communicate the science of protests by writing books and working with activists. But, they say, it’s important not to preach academic findings — and to recognize that protesters are often expressing anger, grief and frustration as well as trying to drive change. “Sometimes, people have deep feelings that need a platform and a means of expression,” Wasow says. “The pragmatic concerns about ‘will this be effective or not’ are sort of second order.”
A controversial piece in npj Climate Action: The importance of distinguishing climate science from climate activism, by Ulf Büntgen in Nature npj Climate Action (May 2024). Some discussions/reactions to the piece:
Jonathan Tonkin: “So, are science and activism really at odds? To me, so long as science is performed in a robust manner, then there’s no problem. Adhering to good scientific practice means we keep our scientific credibility when doing things like publicly communicating science or giving policy advice.”
An interesting post from the Norwegian Refugee Council on their decision to end branding the services, infrastructure and items they provide with their logo. It made me wonder how/if this issue is discussed within environmental NGOs?
🗃️ From the Archive
“Being a vector calls attention to reasons humans may resist relationality…To understand being a human as being a vector shows that we are simultaneously vulnerable to, and accountable for, community’s contagions: a potentially transformative revelation.”
– Darcie DeAngelo, in Environmental Humanities ‘Living Lexicon’ (May 1, 2021).
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
M. Christensen: “…what would you say is the overall salience and relevance of [The Anthropocene] in research and also in communications?”
R. Nixon: “One of the positive things to come out of the Anthropocene is the rise of unprecedented conversations among a very broad spectrum of disciplines. Previously, it would have been pretty much a world historic event to have had a Victorian literature scholar in conversation with an atmospheric chemist. And, so I do feel that the type of conversations that are being generated within academe, and to a limited extend, have spilled over into public culture in terms of film and museum exhibitions, I do think that the Anthropocene has been an engine for connectedness.”
From Slow Violence in the Anthropocene: An Interview with Rob Nixon on Communication, Media, and the Environmental Humanities. By Christensen, M. in Environmental Communication, 12(1), 7–14. (2018).
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