🌱Fieldnotes in Environmental Communication, EcoWriting, & Ecolinguistics Recap 2020
An interview with Barry Lopez + The Future of Conservation + How 2020 Became a Climate Election Year + Wildlife as Property Owners + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in ecowriting, ecolinguistics, and 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:
Happy New Year everyone! Earlier this week I sent out “🌿Wild Ones #29: 2020 in Review” recapping some of the memorable ideas, tools, resources, quotes, and more I came across in 2020. I thought I’d share one more recap of some of the memorable books, podcasts, and videos I discovered in 2020 that struck a chord with me. I hope they offer you some interesting perspectives and ideas on the role of language, communication, and storytelling to address the ecological crises impacting our world. Thanks so much for your interest in Wild Ones, I’m looking forward to delving into more ideas in ecowriting, ecolinguistics, and environmental communication in 2021!
🎙️10(ish) Memorable Podcast Episodes
The Environmental Justice Landscape in Hawaiʻi. An interview with longtime environmental justice activist, community leader, and scholar Kyle Kajihiro. On Root Cause Remedies.
An interview with Erin Brokovich on the state of the world's drinking water. On The Rich Roll podcast.
How 2020 Became a Climate Election Year. On How to Save a Planet.
Political Instability = Planetary Instability. On Hot Take.
A Snowboarder's Quest to Get Out the Vote. On the Outside Magazine Podcast.
The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance. An essay written and narrated by Robin Wall Kimmerer, Professor of Environmental and Forest Biology at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
An interview with the environmental writer and activist Rebecca Solnit. On On Being
An Interview with Dr. Natasha Myers on Growing the Planthroposcene. On For the Wild Podcast.
Killers: J pod on the brink. A new podcast series about the southern resident killer whale population in the Pacific Northewest.
An interview with Dr. BJ Fogg, founder and director of Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. He also runs a free training course for climate communication professionals called Behavior Design for Climate Action. He also wrote the book Tiny Habits. On It's all just a bunch of BS.
The Future of Conservation: A Conversation with Bram Büscher and Robert Fletcher exploring the idea of ‘convivial conservation.’
📚10(ish) Memorable Books
On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galapagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. By Elizabeth Hennessy, assistant professor of history and environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity. Edited by environmental communication scholars Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor.
Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday, by Julia Corbett, Professor of Environmental Humanities and Communication at the University of Utah.
Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education. By Antonio López, Chair and Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy: “Ecomedia is an emerging framework that views all media technologies and communications as embedded within a material and environmental reality.”
Wild Soundscapes, by soundscape ecologist, Bernie Krause.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake,
Wildlife as Property Owners. By Karen Bradshaw, Professor of Law at Arizona State University.
The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, by Keith Makoto Woodhouse, associate professor of history at Northwestern University.
Destination Anthropocene: Science and Tourism in The Bahamas. By Amelia Moore, Associate Professor in the Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island.
Two Trees Make a Forest: In Search of My Family's Past Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts by Jessica J. Lee, nature writer and editor of the Willowherb Review, “a digital platform to celebrate and bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour.”
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait, by Bathsheba Demuth.
Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds, by Thom van Dooren.
🎥10 Memorable Videos
“Do Whales Judge Us? Interspecies History and Ethics: Bathsheba Demuth, Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University, and author of the recent book Floating Coast mentioned above gave one of the most interesting talks I’ve ever heard in December, 2019 on whale-human relationships.
The Dark Divide, a new film featuring David Spade and Debra Messing. The film is based on the new book by Robert Michael Pyle, a lepidopterist and nature writer. A portion of the film's profits will be donated to the National Wildlife Federation’s mission to protect wildlife and wild places. Here’s the trailer.
An interview with ecolinguist Arran Stibbe about the second edition of his book Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology and the Stories We Live By. In this interview about the second edition, Stibbe “explores how the language we use can impact the ecological crises impacting the world today.”
An interview with Barry Lopez on storytelling. I saw Lopez speak in 2017 when he came to the University of Hawai‘i where I was a grad student. He spoke about his most well-known book Arctic Dreams, and its connections to a documentary film that was being screened at the university at the time called Standing on Sacred Ground, a four-part documentary series about Indigenous activism around the world, including Hawai‘i.
Russell Brand in conversation with Michael Meade, “mythologist, psychologist and anthropologist”
Let Them Drown: The Violence of Othering in a Warming World. A talk given by the journalist Naomi Klein in 2016. Naomi Klein is the author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. This is a speech she gave in 2016 for the Edward W. Said London Lecture for the London Review of Books. There is an essay accompanying the video adapted from her speech.
Rise: a poetry expedition to Greenland’s melting glaciers: “Climate activists and poets, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana, travel to the latter's home of Greenland to recite their collaborative poem, Rise, on a melting glacier that might threaten the former's home nation of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.”
An interview with Jessica J. Lee about her new book, with a fascinating discussion about the role of nature writing in different cultural contexts and across different languages:
COVID-19 and Science Communication with Liz Neeley and Ed Yong
The nature writer Robert Macfarlane, in an interview during the first British Council Nature Writing Seminar held in Munich, Germany in 2018, suggests some ways ‘new nature writers’ might counteract eco-culturally destructive stories about places and landscapes.
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:)