Fieldnotes in Environmental Communication
What trees have to say, multimedia environmental advocacy from ecosong, event: planet on the precipice...
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
‘Listening to What Trees Have to Say,’ a book review by Dr. Solvejg Nitzke – of Valerie Trouet’s new book Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings. Nitzke writes,
“Tree Story is not the only recent book that ventures into the vegetal world as a source for a better understanding of environmental relationships. As a cultural studies researcher, I’m interested in the ways that arboreal voices attract human attention. When trees begin to talk—even if it is “only” in human narrative—we humans are no longer the sole standard of meaning making….A surge of tree-narratives from all ranges of science, culture, and art bring to the fore that trees and their ecosystems do much more than diligently labor for the more mobile living beings: they form the world in which we (humans and more-than-humans) live.”
What I’m listening to
Ecosong. Music, video, documentaries, art…It’s a bit of a smorgasbord of environmental advocacy, but this is definitely a site I’m keeping my eyes on for innovative approaches to environmental communication:
“Ecosong.Net involves musicians, media makers, scientists, and community organizations in collaborations that combine outreach, education, art, and entertainment, all aimed at advancing local stewardship.”
What I’m watching
‘Water Flows Together’ by Taylor Graham, Palmer Morse, and Matt Mikkelsen. This short documentary (11 min) follows Colleen Cooley down the San Juan River, one of the few female Diné river guides on that river, as she reflects on the profound responsibility we have to treat water with reverence and care.
“Water Flows Together focuses on Colleen’s work to highlight Indigenous views on water resource management, which are often missing from larger discussions of conservation…We hope that Water Flows Together inspires viewers to consider the impact of recreation on Indigenous lands, listen to Indigenous voices, and include their perspectives on conservation and land management.”
Event I’m attending (online)
Planet on a Precipice: Histories and Futures of the Environmental Emergency
“The 2020-2021 Feinberg Series explores the climate and environmental emergency in historical perspective. Events address the historical origins of ecological destruction and mass extinction; the implications of these phenomena for human and nonhuman survival and ways of life; the role of human politics; the connections between the environmental emergency and histories of capitalism, colonialism, genocide, and white supremacy; human entanglements with the nonhuman world; and the past, present, and future of resistance movements. The series seeks to deepen our understandings of this singularly important set of problems through historical analysis and, in doing so, to envision constructive paths forward.”
Quote I’m thinking about
“When I consider our attempts to speak the Anthropocene, I think of that
watchman with the ox on his tongue, unable to cry out his warning, so that the danger draws ever closer. The idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb. In the complexity of its structures and the range of its scales within time and space - from nanometric to the planetary, from picoseconds to aeons - the Anthropocene confronts us with huge challenges. How to interpret, or even refer to it? Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures are withdrawn. We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Anthropocene, difficult. It is, perhaps, best imagined as an epoch of loss - of species, places and people – for which we are seeking a language of grief and, even harder to find, a language of hope."– Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A deep time journey