🌱🐋Fieldnotes in Environmental Communication: Week of January 22
Amanda Gorman's "Earthrise" + the eco-discourses of grace versus dystopia + climate visuals resources + more!
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
Grace versus dystopia, an essay by Eileen Crist in the Ecological Citizen’s Earth Tongues blog. Crist is an Associate Professor Emerita of the Department of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech.
In the short essay, Crist offers a fascinating perspective on the contrasting discourses of ‘grace’ and ‘dystopia’ that inform the two recent Netflix documentaries ‘My Octopus Teacher’ and ‘The Social Dilemma.’
I’ve been following Crist’s work ever since I read her incredible book Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind, which brings a rich historical lens to the technical language of animal behavior, and its enduring consequences for how we conceive of nonhuman lives and minds today.
At some point, I’d also love to read Crist’s newest book Abundant Earth (2019). Here’s a great interview with Crist about the book’s main argument in Psychology Today.
🎧 What I’m listening to
The Valve Turners from the NYTimes The Daily podcast:
“Most Americans treat climate change seriously but not literally — they accept the science, worry about forecasts but tell themselves that someone else will get serious about fixing the problem very soon. The Valve Turners, on the other hand, take climate change both very seriously and very literally. In the fall of 2016, the group of five environmental activists — all in their 50s and 60s, most with children and one with grandchildren — closed off five cross-border crude oil pipelines, including the Keystone…who are the Valve Turners and what are their motivations?”
👀 What I’m watching
If you enjoyed watching Amanda Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet in U.S. history, read her inspiring poem “The Hill We Climb” at the January 20th presidential inauguration, you should definitely check out her 2018 poem about climate change, ‘Earthrise’. Here are a brief excerpt and full video of the poem below:
Where despite disparities
We all care to protect this world,
This riddled blue marble, this little true marvel
To muster the verve and the nerve
To see how we can serve
Our planet. You don’t need to be a politician
To make it your mission to conserve, to protect,
To preserve that one and only home
That is ours,
To use your unique power
To give next generations the planet they deserve.”
🔍 Communication Tool I’m exploring
Why are there so few people in pictures of climate change? On the visuals of the crisis, representation and immediacy. An intro and selection of resources to improving climate change visuals.
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
“To elucidate how dissonant portrayals of animals are produced, I focus on the work of language, such as uses of concepts and grammar, sentence construction, modes of description, logic of explanation, qualifying devices, and rhetorical strategies. The divergent uses of language of behavioral texts may be likened to maps with which the reader navigates through landscapes of animal life. Though the focus of my analysis is on language use, in spirit this work does not side with the so-called linguistic turn, or with the notion that "everything is text." The guiding interest is always in the places that the reader is taken with animal behavioral writings. For this reason, my emphasis throughout is on seeing, on how language is a medium of travel for the reader to look upon animal life.”
– Eileen Crist, in her introduction on the language of behavioral science in Images of Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind (1999, p. 3).
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, so feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest:)