Fieldnotes in Environmental Communication
Erin Brokovich on the global water crisis, mangroves as 'blue carbon' offsets in Madagascar, Ursula K. Le Guin on climate change, and more...
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
Tahiry Honko: The communities pioneering mangrove conservation. By Diego Jiménez. Tahiry Honko means ‘to preserve and protect mangroves’ in the local Vezo dialect in Madagascar.
“In southwest Madagascar, communities of the Bay of Assassins are at the helm of the world’s largest mangrove carbon conservation project. Their leadership is helping tackle climate breakdown and building community resilience through the restoration and protection of mangrove forests.”
I was drawn to this story because it explores how a particular ecosystem, in this case, mangroves or ‘blue forests’ as the Vezo people in Madagascar call them, are being promoted as a climate solution: these blue forests are talked about as ‘blue carbon’ sinks by conservation campaigns to gain traction. The financial incentive at work here is that local communities can sell their ‘blue carbon credits’ (in the form of mangrove conservation projects) on an international marketplace to companies wanting to offset their greenhouse gas emissions. Is this a viable solution to actually addressing climate change? So far, from what I can tell, it depends.
This and many other interesting stories about potential solutions to ocean conservation are being explored on the new Only One Platform, a fascinating new project created by a collective of environmental advocates, writers, and photographers, including world-renown conservation photographer Cristina Mittermeier and the National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen.
Interested in more mangrove storytelling? Don’t miss anthropologist Laura Ogden’s fascinating 2011 book: Swamplife: People, Gators, and Mangroves Entangled in the Everglades.
What I’m listening to
I really enjoyed listening to this fascinating discussion between Erin Brockovich and Rich Roll on the of the state of the world's drinking water (spoiler alert: it's not good). You may have likely seen the 2000 biopic about Erin Brockovich’s (played by Julia Roberts) successful legal fight against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E). The PG&E contaminated the groundwater in the community of Hinkley, California with devastating effects.
Watching the interview, it's clear Erin’s decades of activism and expertise on community water issues has made her a powerful environmental communicator, and an important voice in the growing environmental justice movement. She has a new book coming out called Superman’s not coming. I’m especially looking forward to seeing Erin's new project, 'The Community Healthbook' come online soon too (which aims to crowdsource water quality data and their connection community health issues from around the world visualized in an easy-to-access map).
What I’m watching
Well, it hasn’t come out yet, but I’m looking forward to watching the new documentary ‘Sidik and the Panther’ (link to trailer). Here a synopsis:
“the viewer is shown that nature conservation is not only about nature, and species protection. Nature conservation is also about hope, hope for a better future, in an area that has always been known by the Kurds for its conflict. Hope for light after a dark period of time. In this documentary the main character, a man called Sidik, takes you on his pursuit for hope: finding the Persian leopard. If the leopard is documented again in Northern Iraq, the region can be declared a national park and the mountains can be protected.”
Eco-Tool I’m using
How can we gain a birds-eye view of the enormous amounts of language and communication about the environment swirling around us in the world? One set of tools I often share and talk about here on Wild Ones comes from corpus linguistics, an area of research that analyzes large amounts of text about a topic (like climate change) to find interesting patterns that would otherwise escape us.
One user-friendly entry point to explore texts you are interested in your own work is Voyant Tools, a free and easy to use text-based corpus analysis. It was designed by researchers in the digital humanities looking for a simple way to gain a quick overview and insight into works of literature. You simply copy and paste some text, or upload a document, and Voyant Tools goes to work, giving you a range of tools to analyze your text, including bubbles for word frequency, word clouds, collocates graphs, scatterplots of word clusters, correlations, and a whole bunch of other tools for analyzing texts and documents. If you’re new to corpus analysis, this is a great little tool to get your feet wet!
Quote I’m thinking about
“The future in science fiction is just a metaphor for now”
– Ursula K. Le Guin, in a 2015 public conversation about climate change.