Why subscribe to Wild Ones?

Welcome to Wild Ones by me, Gavin Lamb, Ph.D.

Wild Ones is a weekly digest of thought-provoking research, creative and inspiring ideas, and practical tools from ecolinguistics and environmental communication.

• Every week (usually Tuesday or Thursday…but sometimes Sunday) I share educational, inspiring, and creative ideas in ecowriting, ecolinguistics, and environmental communication: it might be new research updates, thought-igniting theories, helpful tools, or inspiring quotes from compelling writers, activists, and researchers. I gather all these communication resources here for you to consider in your own life and work as an advocate for a more healthy, just, and sustainable world.

In addition to the weekly digest, from time to time I’ll also run essays on important topics and debates in environmental communication, interviews with compelling people doing work in fields related to environmental communication, reviews of books on ecolinguistics and environmental communication, and even high-stakes items like tips on sustainable surf travel:)

Whether you’re a journalist, community activist, science communicator, academic researcher, outdoors enthusiast, animal advocate, urban gardener, soul surfer, or just someone wondering how to promote happier, healthier, and more sustainable relationships between yourself, other people, and the natural world, then I believe Wild Ones has something of value for you.

About Gavin Lamb, Ph.D.

Hi there! I have a Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the University of Hawai‘i, and I’m currently based at the University of Oslo.

Much of my Ph.D. training is in sociolinguistics, a sub-branch of linguistics. Most people I’ve talked to think that linguists’ main job is to learn languages, and although that’s not really our focus, we often end up learning new languages anyway as a consequence of the work we do. In reality, our work as language scientists is focused on studying how language works: why people speak the way they do, and how different ways of speaking are influenced by cognition and culture.

Sociolinguists, in particular, focus on how the tools of language and communication enable us to do ‘social stuff.’ Think of this ‘social stuff’ as all the ways we speak, the clothes we wear, the stuff we acquire, the communities we build, the activities we engage in, and the goals we strive to achieve through spoken, written, and visual communication. 

Since my work is focused on environmental communication, I bring my background in sociolinguistics to bear on the question of how people use communication to get ‘environmental stuff’ done.

If there’s one takeaway from all of my research and writing, it’s this: our ability to address the environmental challenges of our time – from climate change to mass extinction – depends on our ability to use communication as a tool for building collective movements around our shared hopes for a more just, healthy and ecologically sustainable world.

With this in mind, my research explores three basic questions:

1. What stories do we tell about our relationship to the natural world?

2. How and why do we tell these stories?

3. How do these stories help or hinder our ability to address the environmental challenges of our time?

As this suggests, environmental communication explores not just how we communicate environmental concerns and hopes, but what ideas about human-environment relationships inform these concerns and hopes, problems and solutions, or values and emotions we strive to express to others, from interpersonal conversations to international politics. Most of my research investigates these questions in the contexts of wildlife conservation and ecotourism. Here, I focus on how different forms of communication (spoken, written, online, visual) influence how people interact with threatened wildlife and places around the world. (This research interest of mine first started during my Ph.D. when I investigated sea turtle conservation and ecotourism in Hawai‘i). But my research interests today have spilled over into a whole bunch of other areas too, areas that inform the wide range of topics I’ll be covering here on Wild Ones.

You can also learn more about my academic research here, read my Medium blog here, or find me on Twitter here! 

Thanks so much!
Gavin