Weekly Fieldnotes in Environmental Communication
Environmental storytelling from writing to radio
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-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. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
What I’m reading
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake. I’ve been reading this book off and on over the past month. It’s a fascinating look into the cutting-edge biology of fungi, revealing how much is still unknown about mycelial networks, fungi-tree communication systems, and how all these organisms work together as ‘holobionts’ “an assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit. The word holobiont derives from the Greek word holos, which means ‘whole,” writes Sheldrake.
Merlin Sheldrake’s writing style is imaginative and unique, and among the many reasons to read this book is to see how he uses metaphor and goes off on imaginitive tangents to shift our perception of the natural world.
This is definitely a book to take note of for environmental writers looking to find new ways to communicate environmetnal science in compelling ways.
Also, here’s a great conversation held virtually a couple months ago between the writer Michael Pollan and Merlin Sheldrake about the craft of environmental storytelling and Merlin’s book Entangled Life.
“If you say that a plant “learns,” “decides,” “communicates,” or “remembers,” are you humanizing the plant or vegetalizing a set of human concepts? The human concept might take on new meanings when applied to a plant, just as plant concepts might take on new meanings when applied to a human: blossom, bloom, robust, root, sappy, radical…”
– Merlin Sheldrake, in Entangled Life
What I’m listening to
I’m not planning on starting a podcast on environmental communication anytime soon, but if I were, Radio Lab, hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich (recently retired), would definitely be a show worth drawing from inspiration from. If you haven’t listened to it before, this is a great episode that showcases the kind of environmental/science storytelling that Radio Lab specializes in: From Tree to Shining Tree.
I recently came across a great ‘storytelling manifesto’ written by Radio Lab host Jad Abumrad about the workings and inspriation behind the show’s approach to crafting science stories designed for an auditory audience. Here’s a summary:
“It's not everyone who manages to design new modes of storytelling. Jad, with his pal Robert Krulwich, have invented ways of blending sound and voice into something musical--both familiar and strange, primal and sophisticated. In his Transom Manifesto, Jad reflects on the birth of Radiolab, the ways we discover things without realizing it, the difficulty of changing, and the burdens of geniushood. You can hear early mock-ups, seminal conversations, inspirational moments, and thoughts about what to do next. Jad recently won a MacArthur Fellowship and it's brave of him to speak publicly, since all expectations from now on will be unreasonable, but this is very good stuff. Come check it.”
What I’m watching
Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World. A talk given by the journalist Naomi Klein in 2016. Naomi Klein is the author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. This is a speech she gave in 2016 for the Edward W. Said London Lecture for the London Review of Books. There is an essay accompanying the video adapted from her speech. Here’s a brief description:
“Naomi Klein examines how Said’s ideas of racial hierarchy, including Orientalism, have been the silent partners to climate change since the earliest days of the steam engine, continuing to present day decisions to let entire nations drown and others warm to lethal levels. The lecture looks at how Said’s bold universalist vision might form the basis for a response to climate change grounded in radical inclusion, belonging and restorative justice.”
Quote I’m thinking about:
“If you take the whole world and make it unstable, of course every sysem that operates on top of it is going to become unstable too, right? It’s like trying to write in your journal while the subway is moving. Like you can’t:)”
– Mary Annaïse Heglar, in a discussion with TIME magazine energy and environment reporter Justin Worland on how planetary instability leads to political instability. Check out the full discussion here: