🌿Wild Ones #78: Environmental Communication Digest
The Word For World is Forest + The Art of Activism + The Cataclysm Sentence + Elk calls have regional dialects + Poetry & The Environment + more!
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📚 What I’m reading
The Word for World Is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin
“The work must stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or wit. or grace, or liberty.”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, on writing her novel The Word for World is Forest.
At the end of last year, I put Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word for World is Forest on my booklist for 2023. I was inspired to do so after Paige West, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University, and author of Dispossession and the Environment: Rhetoric and Inequality in Papua New Guinea, mentioned it as one of the assigned books for her Fall 2022 course on Place/Space/Nature. I actually added a few of those books from West’s syllabus to my reading list this year. Some I’ve read and written about here, like Hollow Kingdom by Kira Jane Buxton, and some I plan to read and write about later this year, like Loss and Wonder at the World’s End by Laura Ogden (read the introduction here). I’ve been trying to introduce more fiction into my reading list, and I’m especially curious about how environmental or ‘climate’ fiction writers are imagining what role their fiction should play (or shouldn’t play) in making sense of and responding to our current moment of ecological crisis.
The Word for World is Forest tells a story in Le Guin’s series of ‘Hainish’ science fiction novels. In Le Guin’s telling, humans on Earth are descendants of the Hainish, ancient ancestors of humans who populated planets throughout the universe, including Earth, and many others, like the planet Athshe light years away from Earth. A few hundred years from now, humans from Earth, or ‘yumans,’ travel to Athshe—a world enveloped by forest and from which the planet draws its name—to colonize and enslave the Athsheans and exploit the planet for resources to bring back to an ecologically devastated Earth.
I suppose I came into the book hearing about its comparison to the film Avatar. I’m not sure if James Cameron actually based the film on the novel or not, but the general idea of both bear similarities. One difference is that instead of giant Na’vi, the Athshe in Le Guin’s novel, as the book’s villain Captain Davidson explains, are about
“a meter tall and covered with green fur. As ETs they were about standard, but as men they were a bust, they just hadn’t made it. Give ’em another million years, maybe. But the Conquistadors had arrived first. Evolution moved now not at the pace of a random mutation once a millennium, but with the speed of the starships of the Terran Fleet.”
In fact, Le Guin notes that the original title for the book was ‘Little Green Men’ but her editor changed the title to The Word for World is Forest.
But there are other key differences between Cameron’s Avatar and Le Guin’s book. Le Guin, and the novel The Word for World is Forest, has been an important influence in the work of the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, who has explicitly compared Avatar with The Word for World is Forest. Haraway writes how Le Guin’s story
“…took place on another planet and is very like the tale of colonial oppression in the name of pacification and resource extraction that takes place on Pandora in the blockbuster 2010 film Avatar. Except one particular detail is very different; Le Guin’s Forest does not feature a repentant and redeemed “white” colonial hero. Her story has the shape of a carrier bag that is disdained by heroes. Also, even as they condemn their chief oppressor to live, rather than killing him after their victory, for Le Guin’s “natives” the consequences of the freedom struggle bring the lasting knowledge of how to murder each other, not just the invader, as well as how to recollect and perhaps relearn to flourish in the face of this history.”
I’m sure there are many other insightful takes on The Word for World is Forest, better than I could muster up here (Wikipedia even has a fairly in depth overview of the book with an interesting section on the theme of ‘language and communication’ in the novel). But I was especially struck by the introduction to the book that Le Guin wrote, so I thought I would focus on that here. In the introduction, Le Guin reflects on the circumstances in which the book was written in England in 1968. As Le Guin puts it, she “never wrote a story more easily, fluently, surely— and with less pleasure.” Up until 1968, she had been involved in the anti-war movement in the U.S., marching “first against atomic bomb testing, then against the pursuance of the war in Vietnam…”
“I don’t know how many times I walked down Alder Street in the rain, feeling useless, foolish, and obstinate, along with ten or twenty or a hundred other foolish and obstinate souls…Anyhow, there was a peace movement, and I was in it, and so had a channel of action and expression for my ethical and political opinions totally separate from my writing.”
But in the winter of 1968, Le Guin traveled to England for a year to finish writing The Word For World Is Forest, and as “a guest and a foreigner” in London, she withdrew from protesting on the street, and turned to her fiction as an outlet for protest: the book was “forced out, in a sense, against my conscious resistance,” she writes. In retrospect, she feared the story had become too infused with a ‘moralizing’ message, resulting in characters and a plot losing complexity, and the novel as a whole sliding into a simplistic allegory for the devastation caused by the U.S. war in Vietnam:
“American involvement in Vietnam is now past; the immediately intolerable pressures have shifted to other areas; and so the moralizing aspects of the story are now plainly visible. These I regret, but I do not disclaim them either. The work must stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or wit. or grace, or liberty.”
After reading The Word for World is Forest, I went on a bit of a Le Guin YouTube binge, as one does, watching talks and interviews she has given over the years. Here are a few I enjoyed watching:
Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet with Keynote speech by Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin Guest of Honor Speech at AussieCon 1975 a couple of years after The Word for World is Forest was published.
Le Guin on the role of storytelling as communication, and in the environmental movement
In one interview from just a few years ago, Le Guin is asked a range of questions: on the ecological crisis and techno-fix solutions to climate change, on the dominant voices that have led us to this moment of crisis, and on how notions of ‘progress’ influence science fiction writing. She answers that she doesn’t quite know what ‘progress’ means, even though science fiction writers often express ideas about what progress might look like in their imaginings of the future. She goes on to argue that “the future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now.” This reminded me of how Le Guin warns against ‘serious people’ that ridicule science fiction as ‘escapism.’ By this I understand her to mean that the radically alternative futures that science fiction novels present us with serve to inspire readers to imagine alternative possibilities for social worlds, and against the desire of ‘serious people’ who seek to limit what is imaginable at all. (On a side note, the science fiction writer Cory Doctorow also says something similar in arguing that science fiction as a genre aims to offer the polar opposite of neoliberalism’s ‘there are no alternatives’ worldview).
Le Guin has described her writing, or any work of art, as an effort to establish a ‘potential relationship’ with readers: writing, she says, is like “offering a thing to a stranger, your book, your poem, is really what you’re doing. It’s called communication, but I think that word confuses the issue.” I suppose I would debate whether this is a useful distinction to draw between the act of communicating with others and the act of creating a relationship with others. But it seems that she sees communication as too forceful a word that has a transactional connotation of trying to convince, persuade, or educate others. At least this is the sense I get when she comments on a poem on artistic liberty by Emily Brontë (1818 –1848):
“The desire for power, in the sense of power over others, is what pulls most people off the path of the pursuit of liberty…Emily did not give a damn about other people’s morals. But many artists, particularly artists of the word, whose ideas must actually be spoken in their work, succumb to the temptation. They begin to see that they can do good to other people. They forget about liberty, then, and instead of legislating in divine arrogance, like God or Shelley, they begin to preach.”
This reminded me of a similar point Robert Macfarlane makes in an essay from 2013 about the role nature writing should (and shouldn’t) play in a time of climate crisis. He paints a somewhat ambivalent picture about what environmental writing, or nature writing, should inspire readers to do when they read it:
“Writing that aims to provoke specific behaviours has a name: propaganda. And writing that seeks to provoke specific emotions also has a name: kitsch. Literature, by contrast, does not deal in deliverables. It stirs the sediments of thought and morals, setting them strangely aswirl.”
Reading Le Guin’s introduction, she appears to share Macfarlane’s view of good and bad forms of environmental writing, and is why she expresses regret in her introduction that ‘the ethic of exploitation’ she was protesting as a supporter of the anti-war movement in 1968, and her desire to convert this protest into a novel, became ‘plainly visible’ in The Word for World is Forest. As she puts it, “I succumbed, in part, to the lure of the pulpit. It is a very strong lure to a science fiction writer, who deals more directly than most novelists with ideas, whose metaphors are shaped by or embody ideas, and who therefore is always in danger of inextricably confusing ideas with opinions.”
Le Guin points to a long history of poets, writers and artists who worried about this problem: how a desire to persuade, convince or please others can contaminate one’s art, and is probably also why Le Guin titled her introduction: “On What the Road to Hell Is Paved With.”1
While reading The Word for World is Forest, I also happened to come across a recent essay by science fiction writer Jeff VanderMeer in Esquire: Climate Fiction Won't Save Us: “As the world burns, readers increasingly look to climate fiction for hope, predictions, and actionable solutions. But can the genre really be a manual for useful change?”
VanderMeer points to Amitav Ghosh’s book The Great Derangement published in 2016 as a key moment sparking debate about the potential for climate fiction to foster positive change. Ghosh’s book brings particular focus to the emotion of ‘uncanniness.’ According to Wikipedia, that refers to “the psychological experience of an event or individual as not simply mysterious, but frightening in a way that feels oddly familiar.” I wrote about this a few years a ago, exploring how Ghosh sees the uncanny as an important keyword for climate literature because “No other word comes close to expressing the strangeness of what is unfolding around us.”
Strangely though, Ghosh proclaims in his 2016 book that science fiction is a genre ‘evicted’ from ‘the mansion of serious fiction,’ and consigned to live in the ‘generic outhouses’ of “‘fantasy,’ ‘horror,’ and ‘science fiction.’” For Ghosh, it seems, science fiction can’t seriously deal with the climate crisis, although it’s unclear to me why. This is a position science fiction writer VanderMeer rejects of course, but genre battles aside, VanderMeer raises an interesting question to consider for practitioners of environmental communication:
“Should or can fiction be a manual for useful change? And if so, do we mean in terms of a “vibe,” or having a material effect on policy decisions? Or should it fall somewhere in-between?”
Like Le Guin, VanderMeer suggests that the recurring urge among writers to persuade can have a dampening effect on a story’s richness and potential, and risks reducing stories to simplistic binaries between good and evil, hope and despair. He argues that if we really want to make a dent in our shift towards a more just and sustainable future, more ‘useful’ forms of art than climate fiction will likely resemble other kinds of artistic interventions into public discourse, like Ling-Li Tseng’s Disaster as Opportunity. But if climate fiction does have something to offer, “For me, the best ‘climate fiction’ uses its knowledge of the subject as underpinning, not foreground,” VanderMeer writes. He points to Omar El Akkad’s American War as a recent example. He goes on to suggest, however, that regardless of what the writer imagines their artistic motivations to be, “all fiction is political, even if just by turning away from this and deciding to show us that instead.”
A couple of years ago, I was reading through an assortment of books from different fields and genres —like Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World — that were attempting to write nature back into human-centered stories in various ways. Le Guin’s essay on ‘The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction seemed to capture an impulse running through those books to tell stories with ‘nature in the active voice.’ I understood her notion of the ‘Carrier Bag’ to be an effort to counter-map a world packed with human-centered dramas where nature primarily figured as an inanimate backdrop, a prop, or a resource in both fiction and nonfiction storytelling. Le Guin describes such stories as ‘killer stories,’ and instead, calls for writers to tell more ‘life stories’:
“It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another kind, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished. Maybe. The trouble is, we’ve all let ourselves become part of the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject, words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.”
I’m a newbie to climate (science) fiction but I feel my first impulse has been to figure out not just what to read, but how to read it. Should a climate novel strive to persuade or offer guidance on how to feel, communicate, and act in a time of climate crisis? Or instead, should it simply generate a particular narrative ‘vibe’ with the only aim to ‘set our thoughts aswirl’ as VanderMeer, Macfarlane and Le Guin seem to prefer? I don’t write environmental fiction, or unfortunately read that much either, but I’ve been interested in recent discussions in environmental communication on the potential of climate fiction to shape people’s environmental beliefs and attitudes. And scholars and educators are creating and sharing climate literature syllabi designed to explore such questions like: how can climate fiction create a counterfactual space of “scenario-planning” that enables us to better imagine more livable futures; or how can climate fiction help us “sustain attention to climate change” in a time when our collective attention seems increasingly fragmented by a digital attention economy with other plans. Here, I’m especially intrigued by Min Hyoung Song’s expansive view of what can count as climate fiction in his book Climate Lyricism, a term he develops that
“names both an active mode of making (trying to write literature that is relevant to an understanding of the environmental troubles plaguing the present) and an active mode of attending (making sense of how literature, regardless of its manifest content, might have something relevant to say about these troubles)” (p. 3).
I have a couple more ‘cli-fi’ books on my reading list for 2023, so I hope to follow up on some of these ideas later this year. But if you have reading recommendations please share in the comments:)
👀What I’m watching
“Italian fisherman Paolo Fanciulli tried everything to stop bottom trawlers from destroying the precious underwater meadows and corals of his beloved Mediterranean Sea. For 37 years, he’s denounced them publicly in newspapers, linked arms with environmental organizations and even attacked the trawlers with dinghies himself. Nothing worked—until Paolo comes up with a plan to place more than 800 concrete sculptures on the ocean floor. The art doesn't just create habitats for the fish. It inspires a movement to save the sea from destruction.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
A couple of recent episodes from the consistently fascinating RadioLab podcast:
The Cataclysm Sentence: “What’s the one sentence you would want to pass on to the next generation that would contain the most information in the fewest words?” What came back was an explosive collage of what it means to be alive right here and now, and what we want to say before we go.”
Beware the Sand Striker: “In this episode, Imbler discusses how they balance maintaining scientific rigor while also drawing inspiration and metaphor from the animal world. Then they read a stirring essay from their new book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.”
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
If you’re a writer, especially if you need to do research-based writing in your work whatever that may be, Dr. Raul Pacheco Vega’s website is a treasure-trove of great writing tips and resources. Here’s a new one he recently shared: the Abstract Decomposition Matrix Technique for writing literature reviews.
📰 News and Events
Holly Jean Buck | After "Net Zero:" What New Frames for Climate Action? “2023 Redekop Lecture in Environment and Society, part of the inaugural CEGU conference, Environmental Emergencies, Emergent Environments: Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, held April 20–21, 2023 at The University of Chicago.”
"Synching Justice" by Dr. Max Liboiron. The public keynote for the “Ecologies of Justice: Wasteland, Wastewater, and Human Disposability” symposium at Arizona State University.
Christian Cooper and Amy Tan Discuss How Birding Brings Them Joy (An NYTimes virtual event held June 22, 2023.)
Turtle news!: New experiment to test whether ocean warming opens a pathway for sea turtles: “Scientists are tracking the epic migration of 100 endangered North Pacific loggerhead turtles from Japan to test a hypothesis that warm water events like El Niño unlock a corridor allowing some turtles to ride ocean currents all the way to North America.” By Josie Garthwaite in Stanford News. (July 12, 2023).
Covering Climate Now Event: The Ever-Shifting Climate Misinformation Landscape (July 13, 2023). Moderated by Amy Westervelt, award-winning investigative climate journalist and founder of the independent podcast network and production company Critical Frequency. Panelists:
Melissa Aronczyk, professor of Media Studies at Rutgers University.
Jennie King, head of Climate Research and Policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue and co-founder of Climate Action Against Disinformation.
Marco Silva, senior journalist for BBC News, specializing in climate change disinformation.
📚 Research
Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ. By Eleana J. Kim. Duke University Press (2022). (Read the introduction here (pdf)
“The proposition that the Korean DMZ, one of the most heavily fortified and militarized spaces in the world, has become a site of rare biodiversity seems, on the face of it, paradoxical. This notion—that war and nature or militarization and preservation, when juxtaposed, coexist in ironic tension—has informed assertions that the DMZ, once representing national division, war, and death, now represents communication, peace, and life. These binaries were difficult to escape during my fieldwork in South Korea, emanating from local and regional governments, tourism ventures, government ministries, environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the media…Yet, however alluring it may be, the framework of paradox is conceptually limited, for its rhetorical force depends on an ahistorical logic that holds two ostensible, yet incommensurable, truths in tension: ecology and war or, put another way, nature and culture…I sought to understand how knowledge of the DMZ’s nature and the biodiversity that it hosts was being produced, valued, and leveraged.”
“Hope dies – Action begins”: Examining the postnatural futurities and green nationalism of Extinction Rebellion. In the Journal of Language and Politics (2023):
“In this paper, I analyze – through a critical discourse analysis (CDA) – how XR’s postnatural visions shape (and limit) the movement’s demands and proposals for change. My analysis reveals how XR’s calls for action are guided by a sense of loss and mourning for a future after nature’s end that are embedded with nostalgic undercurrents of a very particular mode of green nationalism. The potential exclusions and limitations of XR’s green nationalism are explored in this paper.”
Unsettling Languages, Unruly Bodyminds: A Crip Linguistics Manifesto. By Jon Henner and Octavian Robinson. In the Journal of Critical Study of Communication and Disability. (2023):
“Hamraie (2013) asks us to think about the politics of access through the framework of interdependence. Languaging, as an important site of access—to the world, to politics, to belonging, to citizenship—thus demands that we think about this through the lens of collective access and care. Rejecting monolingualism and mono-modality are two beginning steps. Embracing time, space, and material environments in meaning-making are also preliminary steps. Interdependence also asks us to think about our built environments and how that impacts access (Hamraie, 2013), and in our case, language.”
Ecolinguistics and AI: Integrating eco-awareness in natural language processing. Jorge Vallego in the Language & Ecology Journal. (2023) (pdf)
Building bridges, not walls: exploring the environmental education ecosystem. By Judy A. Braus, Joe E. Heimlich, Nicole M. Ardoin & Charlotte R. Clark in Environmental Communication. (2022)
How climate change is causing a communication breakdown in the animal world. By Mahasweta Saha in The Conversation:
“Climate change is not just affecting individual species. A growing number of studies suggest that climate change-associated stressors which modify these chemical interactions are causing info-disruption across whole ecosystems.”
Open Letters and Climate Communication: The Professional Roles and Identities of Researchers in Times of Crisis. by Carin Graminius in Environmental Communication. (2022)
Carrier bag storytelling with coastal Kenyan families: sharing food, illustrations, and knowledge for tangible environmental justice impacts. By Rachel M. Cohn, Ruth Mbeyu, Catherine Sarange, Francis Mbogholi, Christopher Cheupe, Joaquim Cheupe, Andrew Wamukota, Elizabeth Kamau and Melva Treviño, in Frontiers in Communication. (2023).
Transepistemic English language teaching for sustainable futures. By Paul J Meighan in ELT Journal. (2023).
💡 Ideas
The First Must-Read Environmental Books of 2023 Have Arrived. From the Revelator.
Elk calls have regional dialects: Whales, bats and birds sound different depending on where they live. So do elk, according to new research. By Kylie Mohr in High Country News.
Poetry and the Environment: Recent poetic approaches to the natural world and ecology. From the Poetry Foundation.
Tyranny of the Tale: We’re told that story will set us free. But what if a narrative frame is also a cage? By Parul Sehgal in the New Yorker.
Linguistics and environmental analysis. By Benjamin A. Jones in the Swansea University Blog.
Power, Control, and Trust in Coalitions. By Madeline Talbott in the Forge: Organizing Strategy and Practice.
And some tweets I’m thinking about…
🗃️ From the Archive
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
"...it takes a lot of things to change the world: Anger and tenacity. Science and indignation, The quick initiative, the long reflection, The cold patience and the infinite perseverance, The understanding of the particular case and the understanding of the ensemble: Only the lessons of reality can teach us to transform reality.”
– Bertolt Brecht, Einverstandnis. Cited in the epilogue of Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, by David Harvey (1996).
“We can’t restructure our society without restructuring the English language. One reflects the other. A lot of people are getting tired of the huge pool of metaphors that have to do with war and conflict [and] the proliferation of battle metaphors, such as being a warrior, righting, defeating, and so on. In response, I could say that once you become conscious of these battle metaphors, you can start “fighting” against them. That’s one option. Another is to realize that conflict is not the only human response to a situation and to begin to find other metaphors, such as resisting, outwitting, skipping, or subverting. This kind of consciousness can open the door to all sorts of new behavior.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, in an interview with Jonathan White in Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity.
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Here I’m thinking about how persuasive environmental communication can foster more democratic modes of sustainability in a time when the urgency of ecological crisis is used to legitimize technocratic solutions that view democracy as an obstacle. And at the same time, how writers, and communicators more generally, should contend with this tension between useful and healthy forms of democratic persuasion on the one hand, and manipulative ‘propaganda’ or ‘kitsch’ on the other. This is a tension that Anand Giridharads recently explores in his book The Persuaders. He writes that a healthy motivation to persuade others sits at the core of a functional democracy, but that motivation is being increasingly eroded today:
The ascendant political culture, confrontational and sensational and dismissive, has many causes: the inflammatory incentives of social media; the cynical manipulations of billionaire-owned, divide-and-conquer news outlets; the growing confidence and voice of once-marginalized groups; the very real material crises that beg for solutions and continue to remain unsolved; the frustration with how little milder, kinder, more civil, more hopeful politics has delivered; the sense that, absent a politics of us and them, the them will continue to pillage the us. For these and other reasons, many Americans have grown alienated from an idea at the heart of democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds by persuading” (p. 13).
Good story telling climate fiction can open our imagination to new ideas, possibilities, and visions of the future. I discovered author Kim Stanley Robinson and recently read/enjoyed Aurora. Thanks for your post Gavin!
“Killer story” is an intriguing way to describe much climate fiction. I always wish for climate fiction that feels more like Star Trek and less dystopic--less killer. What I mean by “like Star Trek” is in the way that seeing Star Trek inspired so many tech inventions. Continually reading the dystopic or bleak stories can make it feel as though that’s the only path forward. I’d love to see climate fiction that focuses on a different story and inadvertently inspires new ways of operating. I haven’t found a book like that yet, but the search continues.