🌿Wild Ones #70: Environmental Communication Digest
An Ecotopian Lexicon + Cooling the Tropics & 'Thermal Language' + How researchers navigate between scientific truth and media publics + Climate TRACE + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a (usually) 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
“What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. The sheer breadth of this range is all by itself extremely confusing, to the point of inducing a kind of mental and emotional gridlock. Anything could happen! So what should we do? Maybe nothing! Maybe we can’t do anything!
But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge— lots of them.”
– Kim Stanley Robinson, in the Foreward to An Ecotopian Lexicon. Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. Minnesota University Press. (2019).
Like many books in my growing ‘read someday’ collection, I just skimmed An Ecotopian Lexicon when I first got it last year, with plans to definitely(!) read it at some point this year, but I never quite got around to it. That is, until a couple of weeks ago when I started thinking about the idea of ‘utopias’ (and dystopias) in environmental communication, sparked by my interest in a Linguistic Landscape workshop I’m hoping to attend next year on the theme: “Utopia and Dystopia.” So, I remembered this interesting book exploring an ‘ecotopian lexicon.’
In the introduction to the An Ecotopian Lexcion the editors Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy share a bit about their rationale behind the book drawing on the concept of the ‘loanword’:
“As environmental critic Ursula Heise has noted, “The environmentalist ambition is to think globally, but doing so in terms of a single language,” or a single culture, “is inconceivable.” …In this sense, the loanword is a fruitfully relational linguistic category. Loanwords are terms that are adopted into one language from another without translation. Their irregular spelling and pronunciation thus advertises their difference, demonstrating that language, like culture, is always heterogeneous and historied.”
The book contains entries for 30 ‘ecotopian loanwords’ and ‘artistic responses’ to 14 of these entries. The editors asked each contributor to submit a word/phrase that “would aid us in our collective task of living well in the Anthropocene” including the term’s history, it’s “ecological, ecopsychological, ecosocial, or ecopolitical potential,” as well as examples of how to use it in everyday conversation. Here are a few entries that caught my attention to give you a sense of the ecotopian loanwords explored in the book:
(1) Misneach [English: ‘Courage’] “Provenance: Gaeilge,. Example: It took a bit of misneach to say no, but it helped with staying put, with humbly and ambitiously weathering the Anthropocene” (by Evelyn O’Malley):
“Misneach in Irish (Gaeilge) is most commonly translated into English as “courage.” But the word belongs to an oral tradition and can mean much more in spoken conversations, where it encompasses a blend of courage, hopefulness, bravery, and spirit. It can allude to pushing forward, one paw in front of another, through doubt or snow.”
(2) Shikata ga nai (しかたがない). [English: ‘It can’t be helped’'] “Provenance: Japanese and speculative fiction (Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy) Example: “To those who say that transforming our petroculture is too big a task, we say shikata ga nai.” (by Brent Ryan Bellamy and Sheena Wilson):
“Shikata ga nai asks all of us to recognize that in the face of the seemingly insurmountable, we have to be resolute and willing to redefine what is inevitable. In the current and coming moments of climate crisis, this lesson will offer some shelter to weather the storm.”
(3) Ildsjel. [English: enthusiast, literally ‘fire soul’] “Pronunciation: ilshail…Provenance: Norwegian Example: The new community recycling project owes its existence to Shevek, a passionate ildsjel” (by Karen O’Brien and Ann Kristin Schorre):
“An ildsjel is literally a “fire soul.” The word communicates both energy and spirit. It conveys a burning force that is powerful and productive, a force ready to spread like wildfire, making way for new seeds to germinate.”
An Ecotopian Lexicon is a fascinating book that, as the editors put it in their introduction, “offers buoyant linguistic and conceptual tools for the collective construction of a future that is more just, equitable, pleasurable, and truly sustainable for Homo sapiens and the millions of species with whom we gratefully share this planet.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
“For over a decade, a pair of mugshots have lived side by side on the FBI’s website, on its list of America’s Most Wanted Domestic Terrorists. The government says these fugitives were part of an eco-terrorist movement that in 2005 the then Deputy Assistant Director of the FBI called the number one domestic terrorism threat in America. And now one of them has been caught. For the past eighteen months journalist Leah Sottile and producer Georgia Catt have been recording with him across a case that ventures into some of the thorniest questions of our time:
What is the most effective way to bring about change?
How far is too far to go to stop the planet burning?
What happens when you step over that line?”
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
Climatebase: (non-academic) jobs in environmental and climate communications
Climate TRACE is a global non-profit coalition created to make meaningful climate action faster and easier by independently tracking greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with unprecedented detail and speed:
“Climate TRACE’s emissions inventory is the world’s first comprehensive accounting of GHG emissions based primarily on direct, independent observation. Our innovative, open, and accessible approach relies on advances in technology to fill critical knowledge gaps for all decision makers that rely on the patchwork system of self-reporting that serves as the basis for most existing emissions inventories.”
📰 News and Events
“What Is Ecocriticism and Why Does It Matter to Humanities and Social Sciences Teachers?” A talk by Prof. Scott Slovic, University Distinguished Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Idaho Moderated by Prof. Chia-ju Chang. (Recorded November 3, 2022).
Britt Wray's Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Change. Columbia University Book Talks in Medical Humanities. (Recorded October 20 2022). Here’s an excerpt from the video description:
“Climate and environment-related fears and anxieties are on the rise everywhere. As with any type of stress, eco-anxiety can lead to lead to burnout, avoidance, or a disturbance of daily functioning. In Generation Dread, Britt Wray seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world. The first crucial step toward becoming an engaged steward of the planet is connecting with our climate emotions, seeing them as a sign of humanity, and learning how to live with them.”
The most iconic predators in the American West are under attack, and top government officials and agencies are failing to uphold the law to protect them. Those are the allegations in a pair of lawsuits filed in federal and state court recently. By Ryan Devereaux in the Intercept (Nov 5, 2022).
This is an interesting commentary from the newsletter Heated about the role of Twitter in Climate communication, by Emily Atkin. Atkin also cites this Twitter thread worth a read by Caroline Orr Bueno, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maryland, on what the fall of Twitter would mean for disaster communication efforts:
Also related to Twitter/Disaster Communication: A Broken Twitter Means Broken Disaster Response. The loss of this crucial rapid-response platform could be crippling as climate change makes disasters worse. By Molly Taft in Gizmodo (November 19, 2022).
📚 Research
Climate communication: How researchers navigate between scientific truth and media publics. By Donya Alinejad and José Van Dijck, in Communication and the Public. (November 17, 2022).
“…scientific experts that are becoming more active participants in the public communication of knowledge are often keenly aware of the fact that their expertise can face various forms of forceful public contestation. The media environment shapes how they perceive their own science communication efforts, as their conceptions of their “imagined publics” are shaped by their experiences of direct contact with journalists, how they see their subject area covered in the news media, and an awareness that science-skeptical media audiences exist and may be exposed to their public messaging (Tøsse, 2013). The aim of this study was to show how such scientists navigate between gaining the trust of media publics in the complex landscape described, and how they articulate and seek to gain trust in their epistemic authority as practitioners of a scientific endeavor.”
Just Stop Oil: research shows how activists and politicians talk differently about climate change. By Clare Cunningham, Associate Professor in English Language and Linguistics, York St John University, in The Conversation. (November 16, 2022).
“Just Stop Oil and other activists are desperate to make clear that climate change is an issue caused by and impacting humans’ way of life. Meanwhile, our findings suggest that politicians – at least in parliament where they can ostensibly make important policy decisions – are focused more on the economic and industry side of the environment, not the human cost. Both groups have work to do to improve communication and align their message if we have any hope of tackling the urgent task ahead of us.”
Doing environmental justice: Prospects for sustainable engagement—From classroom to fieldwork. By Bilal Butt, In Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (Online First).
“Often researchers will end a project in exasperation over perceptions that people have been “unfriendly” or “uncooperative” or “difficult” when in reality this frustration comes from a lack of equitable communication—communication that tends to be written and delivered in a way that maintains existing power relations. There may be the use of technical terms that are not easily translatable, and researchers may not want to do the work of finding appropriate meanings for particular social and ecological processes. This is particularly difficult when two or more languages and dialects are involved. It is also driven by the de facto process of taking academic research findings and delivering them verbatim to communities that do not have the same level of training, thus rendering their findings less useful than they could potentially be.”
Cripping Environmental Communication: A Review of Eco-Ableism, Eco-Normativity, and Climate Justice Futurities. By E Cram, Martin P. Law and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. In Environmental Communication (October 17, 2022).
“Today is an age that is unsustainable, that is, unjust and ecologically unbalanced. To challenge this crisis, environmental communication scholars and practitioners have a duty to intervene (Cox, 2007). We also have an opportunity to honor “the value of a collective sense of dignity and interdependence – not as weakness, but as the strength of knowing the interdependent relationships we require to survive, to grow, and to thrive” (Pezzullo, 2023 in press). Cripping environmental communication means challenging some core normative assumptions of the field, while also embracing the profound creativity and world-making capacities of disabled lives, experiences, and kinship.”
“In the English language, coldness is experienced relative to the human body; according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “cold” is an intuitive state. But while the measure of cold feeling belongs to the individual, the values attributed to it— pleasure, discomfort—coalesce through social practices that are acutely influenced by things like race, class, and gender….For Hawaiians, the relationship between temperature and emotion is sometimes inverted, with coolness illustrating happiness or sexual passion, as opposed to Western ideas of coolness as disaffectedness and detachment. Importantly, the tourism economy relies heavily on the language of warmth as one of the dominant descriptors of Hawai‘i and its people, equating its climate with romanticized notions of Hawaiian hospitality—what is commonly referred to as the “spirit of aloha.” This thermal language articulates affective states of being that underpin the environmental logics of colonial settlement.”
– Hi′ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart, in Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment. Duke University Press (2022).
💡 Ideas
“A High-Stakes Dance with Social Movements.” By Marcela Mulholland in Drift.
“A spirited debate has raged within the climate movement about the way we settled and what kind of victory the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] represents, especially in light of its oil and gas provisions. But recent modeling shows that for each ton of emissions increases generated by the IRA’s oil and gas provisions, at least 24 tons of emissions are avoided by the other provisions. That’s a ratio of 24 to 1 in our (and the planet’s!) favor.”
Video: "Broadening participation in environmental communication research: A Latin American perspective." A talk by Bruno Takahashi, at the the Center for Latinx Digital Media's Virtual Seminar Series (October 11, 2022).
Climate change disproportionally affects countries in the Global South. In this context, Dr. Bruno Takahashi discusses the extant research in environmental communication from and about Latin America. Latin American researchers have developed robust and unique contributions to the understanding of communication processes about the environment, some that can expand epistemic considerations in the Global North. Dr. Takahashi discusses strategies to overcome barriers to collaboration that could result in the consolidation of international environmental communication scholarship.
Antidotes for ecological forgetfulness Bear witness, make a record, pass it on. By Jason Mark, in High Country News (November 1):
“Attentiveness is the most important thing. “Attention is essential for creating a memory of anything,” writes Harvard neuroscientist Lisa Genova, and this applies to the declining state of the natural world, too. We forget how many red-winged blackbirds once nested in the pond for the same reason we forget that we parked the car on Level Red-B in the garage: We weren’t paying attention in the first place….Each of us can become, in our own modest way, an environmental storyteller, passing down the oral histories of the places we inherited. So an initial prescription for shifting baseline syndrome goes something like this: Be outside as much as you can. Bear witness. Make a record. Pass it on.”
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“In one of his final letters from detention, Saro-Wiwa assured his friend, the novelist William Boyd: “There’s no doubt that my idea will succeed in time, but I’ll have to bear the pain of the moment. . . . the most important thing for me is that I’ve used my talents as a writer to enable the Ogoni people to confront their tormentors. I was not able to do it as a politician or a businessman. My writing did it. . . . I think I have the moral victory.”
…Ken Saro-Wiwa wrote as a member of what I would call a micro-minority: he was one of 500,000 Ogoni in a nation of some 140 million, composed of nearly 300 ethnic groups. He produced tireless testaments to the devastation of his culture by the oil-driven avarice of vast forces beyond its control. He recognized, however, that the justice of a cause—particularly an African cause—is no reason to believe that it will gain the international attention it merits. As a writer and campaigner, he saw the strategic necessity of analogizing, of turning what he called the “deadly ecological war against the Ogoni” into a struggle emblematic of our times. His prolific writings thus lay the ground for a broader estimation of the global cost, above all to micro-minorities, of the ongoing romance between unanswerable corporations and unspeakable regimes.”
Rob Nixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press. (2011, p. 105).
For more on the environmental writing and activism of Ken Saro-Wiwa, see: A Continuing Struggle over Oil. By Zachary Gianotti, Environmental Ethics Fellow at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, Santa Clara University.
“The case of Ken Saro-Wiwa is one of many ups and downs. He dedicated the last years of his life for a cause that is still being fought today, twenty odd years later. In many cases the acts of large corporations seems to run unchecked, but as shown by Saro-Wiwa, with a loud voice, a just cause, and support from a strong community things can happen.”
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this digest useful, please consider sharing with others who might find it interesting too😊 I'd also love to hear from you. Leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest, what areas of environmental communication you’re involved in/most interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Ones:)
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An update on the lawsuit brought by WildEarth Guardians and Project Coyote
https://montanafreepress.org/2022/11/16/montana-judge-temporarily-rolls-back-wolf-hunting-regulations/