Hi everyone, welcome back 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
The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another by Ainissa Ramirez from MIT press. I recently discovered this book on the Behavioral Scientist’s Summer Book List 2020, a great list of new books on the field of behavioral design and behavior science. As the editors of the non-profit magazine Behavioral Scientist write: “So far this year, books in behavioral science have explored the positives of peer pressure, unpacked the essentials of behavioral design, urged us to look upstream, immersed us in the game of poker, revealed boredom’s true call, and much more.” While my academic roots are in environmental anthropology and ecolinguistics, I view the role of behavioral science as an important piece of the environmental communication puzzle.
On a side note: If you’re curious about exploring the connection between behavioral science and environmental communication a bit more, I highly recommend checking out the amazing work the environmental non-profit Rare is doing.
What I’m listening to
School Food Politics: A Conversation with Jennifer Gaddis, on the Edge Effects podcast. Jennifer Gaddis, assistant professor of Civil Society & Community Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, talks with Edge Effects about her recently published book, The Labor of Lunch Why We Need Real Food and Real Jobs in American Public Schools. Here’s a blurb about the book:
There’s a problem with school lunch in America. Big Food companies have largely replaced the nation’s school cooks by supplying cafeterias with cheap, precooked hamburger patties and chicken nuggets chock-full of industrial fillers. Yet it’s no secret that meals cooked from scratch with nutritious, locally sourced ingredients are better for children, workers, and the environment. So why not empower “lunch ladies” to do more than just unbox and reheat factory-made food? And why not organize together to make healthy, ethically sourced, free school lunches a reality for all children?
What I’m watching
Nature is everywhere, we just need to learn to see it. A TED talk by Emma Marris, an environmental writer who wrote a somewhat controversial but important book for environmental advocates called Rambunctious Garden: Saving nature in a post-wild world. Here’s a description of her TED talk: “How do you define "nature?" If we define it as that which is untouched by humans, then we won't have any left, says environmental writer Emma Marris. She urges us to consider a new definition of nature -- one that includes not only pristine wilderness but also the untended patches of plants growing in urban spaces -- and encourages us to bring our children out to touch and tinker with it, so that one day they might love and protect it.”
Eco-Tool I’m using
The ‘Basic Toolkit’ in the Solutions Journalism Learning Lab (you may have to sign up for a free account to get access). Solutions Journalism aims to bring more attention to something often underreported in environmental journalism: “how people are responding to problems.” In their Learning Lab, they’ve created a whole bunch of free mini-courses. While created for reporters, in my view they are helpful for anyone wanting to tell more compelling stories about environmental issues they care about. In this Basic Toolkit, you’ll explore “the key tenets of solutions journalism. What is it? What is it not? Why is it important? And how to make it happen, from idea to reporting to completed story.”
Quote I’m pondering
“A simple measure of the importance of ‘nature’ as an idea is to imagine us dispensing with the term and its meanings altogether. The ‘hole’ in our language would be enormous. We’d be rendered both inarticulate and incapable in large areas of our thought and action. In short, if we didn’t already have the term in our present-day vocabulary, we’d probably have to invent it.”
– Raymond Williams, in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society