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Environmental Communicator Spotlight 🔆
Thom van Dooren, Associate Professor at the University of Sydney explores the ethics of human relationships with threatened wildlife around the world, with a particular focus on crows, and more recently, snails. In his most recent book, The Wake of Crows, he examines the cultural and ecological factors shaping how humans and crows converge in different places around the world, sometimes in healthy and cooperative ways, but often in conflicting ways too.
In traveling to different places around the world – Australia, Hawai‘i, The Netherlands, Mojave Desert, and the Mariana Islands – he investigates how culture, history, and communication influence how people interact with crows: sometimes to save them as protected ‘endangered species’ (like the ʻAlalā in Hawai‘i) but also to exterminate them as ‘pests’ (like the house crow in Holland).
To better tell the story of these diverse human-crow relationships, he enlists the help of some environmental keywords. Keywords like ‘hospitality,’ ‘community,’ ‘inheritance’, ‘recognition,’ and ‘hope.’ van Dooren’s interest is not just to pontificate on these philosophical ideas from a library, but to go ‘into the field’ to interview, observe and ask questions of people (and crows!) about how each of these keywords helps to characterize the different kinds of worlds people and crows are creating with one another.
Thom’s work is fascinating to me because it’s at the cutting edge of a new area of research called ‘the environmental humanities’ that brings philosophy, anthropology, and the natural sciences into conversation to better address the ecological challenges of our times, from climate change to species extinction.
Read some of Thom’s fantastic writing on crows here in the Atlantic. Or watch Thom talk more about his new book The Wake of Crows, and how he uses environmental keywords in this online book talk:
Tools 🔭
I’m a big fan of ScienceDirect’s database of research summaries on key terms from a wide range of fields in the social and natural sciences. These summaries help me better understand the research behind keywords I often see used in popular communication about the environment, such as ‘ecological footprint,’ but also help me discover new words I was unfamiliar with before, like ‘ecotone.’ As their website describes it:
These pages provide concept definitions and subject overviews for researchers who want to expand their knowledge about scholarly and technical terms. Each synopsis provides a series of short, authoritative, excerpts from highly relevant book chapters written by subject matter experts in the field.
New Research Updates 💡
“Wildlife communication interventions”: An area of research I’m increasingly exploring in my own work are wildlife conservation initiatives to reintroduce endangered apex predators (wolves, lions, tigers, bears) into their original habitats, places often inhabited by people too. For example, An interesting project currently underway is a so-far successful effort to reintroduce the Mariscan brown bear in Italy. One of the issues, though, as you might imagine, is resistance from local communities due to deep-seated fear of these reintroduced predators. While the risk of getting harmed by these predators is extremely low, when they do happen, media attention can be enormous, amplifying people’s fear of these animals (and reducing support for conservation efforts.
In a new study, “Communication Interventions and Fear of Brown Bears: Considerations of Content and Form,” environmental communication researchers from Sweden and Norway explored the benefit of communication interventions to reduce a prevalent fear of brown bears.
The study uses three communication interventions:
Informational meetings
Tours of educational exhibits
Guided nature walks with exposure to brown bears
A key takeaway from the study: Guided walks are the most effective intervention in reducing fear among community members most resistant to the Swedish bear reintroduction program because of their fear of the animals. But, as the authors point out, “it seems practically and economically impossible to bring over 100,000 Swedes on guided walks in groups of three to five participants.”
Research Archive 📜🔍
The inspiration to develop a collection ‘keywords’ to help environmental communicators tell more effective and compelling stories about our environmental challenges can be traced back—at least in part—to the work of Raymond Williams (1921 - 1988). Williams was a Welsh academic and literary theorist who popularized the notion that we need ‘keywords’ in his book: “Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society.”
For example, Williams writes that the keyword “nature” is one of the most complex words in the English language. Here is rare footage of Williams at a linguistics conference making this very point:
Writings from my desk ✍️
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