đżWild Ones #81: Environmental Communication Digest
Attending the Linguistic Landscape Workshop + Environmental Keyword: The Orbis Spike + The Animals are Talking + Polar Bears and Climate Communication + More!
Hi everyone, after taking a short break in September, Iâm happy to welcome you back to a new season of Wild Ones, a weekly-ish 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 below to get these digests in your inbox:
đ What Iâm reading (and where Iâm goingđ)
Since 2023 was officially declared the Year of the KÄhuli (snail) in Hawaiâi, letâs talk about snails. In his fascinatingly slimy book, A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (2022), the environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren documents the unfolding extinction crisis that Hawaiâiâs threatened snails are facing. In the introduction, he explains his approach to environmental writing, and in particular, to telling âextinction storiesâ in a time of immense loss:
âFor the most part, humans tend to appear in one of two main guises in popular writing about extinction: either they take the form of an individual conservationist or a group of such individuals, struggling, often heroically, against the lost of species, or they are present in the form of an amorphous, threatening, âhumanityâ whose actions are in one way or another causing these losses. But if we look a bit closer, things are always more complex on the ground. Missing from such stories are the diverse and unequal ways in which different communities are exposed to and suffer through extinction, as well as the very particular systems of political, economic, and cultural life that are responsible for any given extinctionâŚâ (p. 16).
An important aim of the book, van Dooren writes, is to push back against stories of extinction that tend to depict humanity as one big amorphous âanthropogenic threat.â The Anthropocene has become an increasingly popular way to frame our global environmental crisis, but in portraying humans as a species-level calamity for the planet, a growing number of scholars argue that the idea does more to obscure than to help clarify the root causes of our contemporary environmental challenges. In the case of Hawaiâiâs kÄhuli (snails), âthe main factors driving the disappearance of snails in Hawaiâi,â Thom van Dooren argues, is not humanity in general, but âparticular forms of human life that are responsible, in most cases processes of extraction, appropriation, and wealth generation.â As he goes on to write,
In recent years, the notion that we have entered a new geological epochâthe Anthropoceneâhas risen to global prominence, being taken up everywhere from scientific discussions to gallery exhibitions. According to this view, human activity is now playing an increasingly significant role in shaping environments all over the planet, including impacts on climate, biodiversity, the nitrogen cycle, and much more. On one level this framing is helpful, drawing attention to the scale of contemporary destruction. But at the same time, as numerous scholars have noted, âAnthropocene talkâ risks covering over significant differences between human communities and the particular ways in which they are responsible for and exposed to escalating environmental change. Attending to this kind of difference means moving beyond stories about "humanity" and "anthropogenic extinctionâ (p. 16).
As an alternative to âAnthropocene talk,â van Dooren develops an approach to environmental philosophy grounded in fieldwork (rather than an armchair) that he and a group of other like-minded environmental researchers are calling âfield philosophy.â Doing feld philosophy with snails involves spending large chunks of time in snail labs, museums and âexclosuresâ (protected spaces that keep unwanted critters out rather than wanted critters in) in order to better tell the stories of the many people working to avert, or at least hold off snail extinction for a little longer. He also spends time with the snails themselves, and through the help of snail biologists, attempts to relay to curious humans stories about their slimy worlds too. Iâll never think of slime in the same way. While a seemingly âhumble mucus,â writes van Dooren, for snailsâŚ
ââŚslime is a complex communicative matrix, forming a key element of a snailâs landscape of meaning: mapping out a terrain of familiar places, of potential mates, of homely aggregationâ (p.41).
Drawing inspiration from Thomâs field philosophy approach to environmental writing âan approach that zooms in on the local snail stories unfolding in Hawaiâi as a way to give new kinds of traction to understand and address the enormous global challenges we face todayâin my own work Iâve been trying to pay a bit closer attention to the real life stories taking shape around the world between humans and marine species like sea turtles, seals and walruses. These interspecies encounters can be problematic, sometimes convivial, and sometimes they can be deadly. Climate change also presents new challenges for these multispecies relationships as both humans and nonhumans are adapting to a changing world. What kinds of stories about human relationships with wildlife and the wider natural world does âAnthropocene talkâ lead us to tell and with what consequences for the the kinds of desired, hopeful futures we strive to imagine and work towards building?
Iâve been thinking more about these questions after I recently presented some of the early stages of my research at the 14th Linguistic Landscape Workshop - Utopia and Dystopia held at Universidad Complutense de Madrid from September 6th to 8th. It was a fascinating conference and also great to be back in Spain too! Back in 2016, I attended the Sociolinguistics Symposium in Murcia, and also spent some time in the wonderful Asturias region in northern Spain 2017. But I had never really spent much time in Madrid (except passing through to go to the airport).
This was the first time I attended the Linguistic Landscape Workshop, but I thought the theme for the workshop this year was especially intriguing: Utopia and Dystopia. As the conference organizers put it in their explanation for choosing this theme for the 2023 workshop:
âThe desire for a better future is changing the physiognomies of our cities, generating protest performances, artistic creations, renewing discourses and practices, and strengthening our hope for a more equal and caring society. Utopia and dystopia contrast light and darkness, the possible and the impossible, equality and inequality, hope and fear.â
The organizers also asked participants to consider âHow utopias and dystopias are constructed in public spaces.â For me, this made me reflect on how certain utopian and dystopian visions for human relationships with other species like sea turtles and seals are actually enacted in landscapes and seascapes around the world. What role might environmental communication play in helping us to imagine utopian futures of mutual flourishing? And what role might environmental communication play in helping us stave off dystopian futures of relentless socio-ecological extractivism and exploitation? The Anthropocene is a powerful generator of utopian and dystopian stories. Sometimes the appeal of dystopia seems to win out, as the environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth has eloquently written about, there is a seduction of quelling our uncertainty about the future that stories of environmental apocalypse play into. As Demuth puts it,
âThe core of apocalyptic thinking is nihilism: this world is too despoiled to continue. The seduction of such stories is how certain they make the teller feel. An apocalyptic narrative is like looking at a horizon with no clouds or hills: the way forward is terribly assured. To walk it, there is no need to mind the lives of others, rendered invisible by the power of imagining they are already gone.â
I shared some initial ideas from my research on the forms of âAnthropocene talkâ shaping problematic human-seal interaction in the U.S. and Europe on a panel with some great contributors entitled âAnthropocenic landscapes.â The panel organizer, Sean Smith, opened up the panel by giving an compelling overview of the scientific and critical debates swirling around the notion of the Anthropocene, in particular debates around whether the Anthropocene should be officially recognized as a new epoch (after the Holocene epoch that has encompassed the past 11,000 years or so), and if so, what date should officially be designated for this new epoch of âAnthropos.â
Iâve explored the idea of the Anthropocene quite a bit here in earlier editions of Wild Ones, but Iâve mostly focused on debates among scholars in the social sciences and humanities on whether we should embrace, reject, or rename the Anthropocene (âCapitalocene,â âAnthropo-scene,â âPhonosceneâ). In a previous post, for example, I noted that âThe Anthropocene is a controversial term and a number of alternative proposals have been suggested (some have pointed out at least 80 alternative names so far).â Rather than dismissing the term, others have suggested that we might recognize how the Anthropocene offers both pros and cons for how we communicate environmental crises. For example, the environmental writer Robert Macfarlane, in his recent book Underland, helpfully captures this dual potential of the Anthropocene in environmental communication, suggesting that, on the one hand, the Anthropocene âgeneralizes the blame for what is a situation of vastly uneven making and suffering,â but âfor all its faults [the Anthropocene] also issues a powerful shock and challenge to our self-perception as a speciesâŚâ
đżEnvironmental keyword
âThe Orbis Spikeâ
In his opening remarks at our panel at the LL workshop in Madrid, Sean Smith also described a proposed start date for the Anthropocene I hadnât heard of before called the âOrbis Spikeâ which represents a measurable âdipâ or decrease in global atmospheric CO2 around 1610. I feel like I should have heard of the orbis spike before, but somehow missed the widely cited 2015 article in Nature, âDefining the Anthropocene,â where co-authors Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin propose the idea as an official start date for our ânew human-dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene.â As Lewis and Maslin write,
âDefining the beginning of the Anthropocene as a formal geologic unit of time requires the location of a global marker of an event in stratigraphic material, such as rock, sediment, or glacier ice, known as a Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), plus other auxiliary stratigraphic markers indicating changes to the Earth system.â
The authors argue that either the Orbis Spike or the Bomb Spike offer the two best candidates for an official Anthropocene start date (as opposed to the other candidates like the Industrial Revolution in the mid 18th century or the Great Acceleration in the mid-20th). They also highlight the very different understandings of ecological crisis that flow from choosing a particular start date or âspikeâ as an Anthropocene origin story:
âThe choice of either 1610 or 1964 as the beginning of the Anthropocene would probably affect the perception of human actions on the environment. The Orbis spike implies that colonialism, global trade and [fossil fuels] brought about the AnthropoceneâŚChoosing the bomb spike tells a story of an elite-driven technological development that threatens planet-wide destructionâŚThe event or date chosen as the inception of the Anthropocene will affect the stories people construct about the ongoing development of human societies.
The term orbis comes from the Latin word for âworld,â and is used by the authors to indicate the global consequences of âthe collision of the Old and New Worldsâ when âthe arrival of Europeans in the Americas led to a catastrophic decline in human numbers, with about 50 million deaths between 1492 and 1650âŚâ In his opening remarks at the workshop Sean Smith also pointed to a 2017 article by the scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd who argue for adopting Lewisâ and Maslinâs Orbis Spike as an official start date for the Anthropocene. As Davis and Todd argue, the 1610 Orbis Spike, in drawing focus to âthe decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide that measured the genocide of Indigenous peoples,â puts colonialism, extractivism and exploitation front and center in debates about the factors driving our current moment of ecological crisis.
However, it seems the âOrbis Spikeâ will likely not become the official start date for the Anthropocene. It appears the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) âthe official academic body tasked with determining the scientific evidence for a new geological epochâ will likely choose the year 1950 at their meeting next year, apparently based on their preference to use a measurable plutonium spike in the sediment in Crawford Lake, Canada due to hydrogen bomb testing at the time. In response, Erle Ellis, a prominent scientist of anthropogenic environmental change and former member of the AWG, posted a public letter in July this year declaring his resignation from the Anthropocene Working Group in protest of the 1950 start date. As he writes,
âTo define the Anthropocene as a shallow band of sediment in a single lake is an esoteric academic matter. But dividing Earthâs human transformation into two parts, pre- and post- 1950, does real damage by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earthâs unfolding social-environmental crisis. Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet? The political ramifications of such a misleading and scientifically inaccurate portrayal are clearly profound and regressive. Perhaps AWGâs break in Earth history will simply be ignored outside stratigraphy. But this is undoubtedly neither AWGâs goal, nor is it the way AWGâs narrative is being interpreted across the public media.â
While 1950 may be the AWGâs likely decision for a start date at their next meeting in 2024, it will be a controversial decision. It also raises questions about how the AWGâs decision will shape public discourse about our collective environmental crisis. Regardless of what the AWG decides, I agree with Davis and Todd that âby dating the Anthropocene to colonialism we can at least begin to address the root of the problemâŚâ and therefore âbegin to address not only the immediate problems associated with massive reliance upon fossil fuel and the nuclear industry, but the deeper questions of the need to acknowledge our embedded and embodied relations with our other-than-human kin and the land itself.â If anything, I think these debates about the Anthropocene are helpful to engage with in environmental communication as they allow us to reflect on utopian and dystopian dimensions of the environmental stories we tell, from the tiny stories of unfolding snail extinction in Hawaiâi forests, to the enormous stories of planetary crisis and climate change. It also encourages us to consider how such small and big stories are connected, and what possible actions to shape more desirable futures spring from recognizing these multiscalar connections and weaving them into our environmental storytelling. Or, as Davis and Todd put it more succinctly,
âThe story we tell ourselves about environmental crises, the story of humanityâs place on the earth and its presence within geological time determines how we understand how we got here, where we might like to be headed, and what we need to doâ (pp. 763-764).
đ§Â What Iâm listening to
On Fire: Under Water. Future Ecologies Podcast.âWhat happens after the smoke clears? What does recovery look like when the disasters never end? In this episode, we're visiting the sites of some of BC's biggest burns of 2017 and 2021 â making the link between the mega-fires and the floods and landslides that followed. We'll hear about how the land is (and isn't) recovering, and the factors that spell the difference.â
Meet the shadowy global network vilifying climate protestors, Drilled Podcast. âItâs no coincidence that the backlash against climate protest looks the same from country to country. Not only is industry sharing tactics across borders, but also the Atlas Networkâa global network of nearly 600 libertarian think tanksâhas been swapping strategies and rhetoric for decades.â
đWhat Iâm watching
Outgrow the System (Trailer, Documentary)
ââChange the system, not the climateâ is a common demand in the climate movement. But what kind of system do we actually want? In the midst of humanity's worst crisis, the pioneers stand ready. Meet the new economic perspectives that have the potential to change the world at its core. Outgrow the system (2023) is a documentary feature film about transitioning to a sustainable economic system, directed by Cecilia Paulsson & Anders Nilsson.â
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
The Environmental Ideologies Map. Created through the MISTRA Environmental Communication Research Programme, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Charles University of Prague.
âThe Environmental Ideologies Map is a website that creatively communicates a map of competing ideological projects regarding the environment, sustainability, and, more generally, human-nature relationships. Generated through in-depth academic research, the website offers a visualization of the map of interconnected clusters of ideologies, allowing visitors to navigate clusters of meanings over nature, sustainability, and climate change. Each ideological element of the map is explained through a pop-up window with textual and audio-visual content, produced through the contribution of scholarly voices from the field of environmental humanities and communication and media studies.â
Climate analytics tools. Created by Climate Analytics, âa global climate science and policy institute engaged around the world in driving and supporting climate action aligned to the 1.5°C warming limit.â
đ° News and Events
Moulding Natureâ Discursive Struggles Over the Environment. An exhibition at Färgfabriken (Stockholm, Sweden) 26 August â 26 November.
âMoulding Nature raises questions about how we perceive our environment. In video works, collages, photos and installations, artists and other participants explore how different discourses* affect the way we give meaning to nature and the role of mankind in it. Discourses that often are in conflict with each other and compete for space, sometimes even fight each other. The exhibition is part of a project on environmental communication where researchers have identified voices, positions and ideologies that can be linked to the discussion about nature and the environment.â
California Sues Giant Oil Companies, Citing Decades of Deception. By David Gelles in the NYTimes. (Sept 15, 2023).
How many animals get slaughtered every day?: By Max Roser, Our World in Data.
No, Climate Scientists Arenât Being Forced to Exaggerate: A researcherâs claim that a prominent journal sensationalizes findings on global warming doesnât add up. By Mark Gongloff in Bloomberg. (Sept 8 2023).
Wetlands Most in Danger After the U.S. Supreme Courtâs Sackett v. EPA Ruling. A nice visual explainer on the state of wetland protections (or lack thereof) in the U.S. after the EPAâs May 25th 2023 ruling. From EarthJustice.
đ Research
Energy Citizens âJust Like Youâ? Public Relations Campaigning by the Climate Change Counter-movement. By Caroline Sassana, Priyanka Mahat, Melissa Aronczyk & Robert J. Brulle in Environmental Communication. (September 2023).
What is environmental media studies so far? Patrick Brodie, Juliet Pinto, Anne Pasek, and Alix Johnson. Journal of Environmental Media.
Towards interspecies pragmatics: Language use and embodied interaction in human-animal activities, encounters, and narratives. A special Issue in the Journal of Pragmatics (in Progress). (September 2023).
Negotiating climate change in public discourse: insights from critical discourse studies. By Guofeng Wang and Changpeng Huan, in a special issue in Critical Discourse Studies (April, 2023) (Open Access)
âThis Special Issue collects five articles that are located in the present global context, and draw on methods from across critical discourse studies (CDS) to examine the interaction between material realities of climate change and discursive communication between different Parties and non-Party stakeholders in multimodal ways and on multiple platforms. To this end, it draws on discourses such as the UN speeches, UN documents, EU green deal policy, official documents submitted by African countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and news reports in China and Australia.â
Public narratives of the relationship between post-pandemic economic recovery and decarbonization: A case study of Torontoâs media sphere. By Sibo Chen in Communication and the Public (September 2023).
đĄ Ideas
The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?: Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isnât so. By Sonia Shah in the NYTimes, Sept 20, 2023.
âThe quest for languageâs origins has yet to deliver King Solomonâs seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the âkinetic sea writingsâ of penguins and the âdelicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.â Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.â
Take a break from your screen and look at plants â botanizing is a great way to engage with life around you. By Jacob S. Suissa and Ben Goulet-Scott (Sept 20, 2023) in the Conversation:
âWe are plant scientists and co-founders of Letâs Botanize, an educational nonprofit that uses plant life to teach about ecology, evolution and biodiversityâŚBotanizing is spending time alongside plants in order to observe and appreciate them as living organisms â like birding, but with subjects that stay in place. When you botanize, a simple walk in the woods becomes an immersive experience shared with many species. Getting to know your nonhuman neighbors is a way to engage with a changing planet.â
Why the climate movement doesnât talk about polar bears anymore. Global warming moved from the North Pole to your backyard â and so did its symbols. By Kate Yoder in Grist (Aug, 2023).
âWhen the symbol gets bigger than the region itself and people donât realize that the polar bear is just one piece of a whole diverse web of life in the Arctic, then it can become almost a barrier,â Leanne Clare, at the time a communication manager for the World Wildlife Fundâs Arctic Program, said in 2018.â
The Otters and the Seaweed, a poem by Teddy Macker in Orion Magazine. Here are the first few lines of the poem:
This is what you need to know: you need to know that otters wrap themselves in seaweed so they wonât, while sleeping at night, float out to sea . . . Are you imagining this?
The Climate Crisis Speaks Volumes Without Saying a Word: Language is a primary factor for how we assess our relationship with nature. By Noor Chowdhury in Earthday.org (Sept 19, 2023).
đď¸Â From the Archive
âThe shortest distance between two people is not a straight line, but a comedic line. The power to engage people is something that Iâm working on harnessing in my research in an effort to get people to see the world in different waysâhumor being one of them.â
â Geo Takach, Associate Professor of Communication and Culture, Royal Roads University
đŹÂ Quotes Iâm thinking about
âAll words have the "taste" of a profession, a genre, a tendency, a party, a particular work, a particular person, a generation, an age group, the day and hour. Each word tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged lifeâ
âMikhail Bakhtin, in the Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, 1981, p. 293, cited in Living Language: An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology, by Laura Ahearn 2021.
âevery sensation of every being of the world is a mode through which the world lives and feels itself... [and when] a being is no more, the world narrows all of a sudden, and a part of reality collapses.â
â Vinciane Despret, from her afterword: It Is an Entire World That Has Disappeared in the edited volume: Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations, edited by Deborah Bird Rose, Thom van Dooren, and Manhew Chrulew (2017).
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