🌱🐋Fieldnotes in Environmental Communication: Week of February 5
Why is science so polarizing? + Environmental Narratives of Risk and Adventure + 'My Climate Story': A public climate storytelling project + 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! Today, in my mid(ish)-week update, I share my ‘fieldnotes’ in environmental communication, with ideas, tips and tools I’m exploring at the moment. 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
Why is science so polarizing? Blame the way we talk about it. By Kate Yoder in Grist.
“We need to get away from the idea that logic and rationality is always the most persuasive argument,” said Hollie Smith, an assistant professor of science and environmental communication at the University of Oregon. Hearing a message that’s counter to your beliefs can even result in what’s called a “boomerang effect” — when an attempt to persuade someone ends up doing the opposite.”
Death of a Mountain: Radical strip mining and the leveling of Appalachia (pdf). By Erik Reece Harper’s Magazine (published 2005). I learned about this incredible piece while listening to a fascinating interview with Luke Mogelson on the Longform podcast (Mogelson most recently wrote a piece for the New Yorker, “Among the Insurrectionists”). During his interview, Mogelson mentions Reece’s piece, which chronicles an entire year of strip mining and the leveling of an Appalachian mountain, as one that inspired his writing career as a novelist and journalist.
🎧 What I’m listening to
Living to Tell a Tale: Stories of Risk and Adventure with Kristin J. Jacobson on the official podcast of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE).
“ASLE EcoCast kicks off the new year with an episode talking with Kristin J. Jacobson, Professor of American Literature at Stockton University to discuss her recent book The American Adrenaline Narrative.”
👀 What I’m watching
My Climate Story: A public climate storytelling and story sharing project supported by Penn Program in Environmental Humanities. I discovered this video after reading about Tsemone Ogbemi’s work on sharing the important role of the arts in comprehending climate.
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
Coronavirus Multispecies Reading Group: I’ve enjoyed following this interdisciplinary effort to understand and talk about the coronavirus pandemic bringing together a range of perspectives in the natural and social sciences, arts and humanities. Here is their youtube channel with previous talks.
“This weekly reading group, hosted by Associate Professor Eben Kirksey (Deakin) and coordinated by Dr. Rachel Vaughn (UCLA), spontaneously formed on Facebook early in the coronavirus pandemic. Together the group is delving into the primary literature—reading papers from journals like Science and Nature—alongside classic essays from the field of multispecies ethnography. It has become a forum where established coronavirus researchers, veterinarians, and molecular biologists have entered into conversation with leading social scientists, artists, historians, philosophers, and cultural theorists.”
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“A strip [mining] job is more than a moral failure; it is a failure of the imagination. It is time we stopped thinking like those who conquer a mountain and started thinking like the mountain itself.”
– Erik Reece, in the conclusion to his essay, Death of a Mountain: Radical strip mining and the leveling of Appalachia, Harper’s Magazine (2005).
In her fascinating book on the global Matsutake Mushroom trade, The Mushroom at the End of the World, environmental anthropologist Anna Tsing shares her perspective on the environmental keyword ‘The Anthropocene’:
“Geologists have begun to call our time the Anthropocene, the epoch in which human disturbance outranks other geological forces. As I write, the term is still new—and still full of promising contradictions. Thus, although some interpreters see the name as implying the triumph of humans, the opposite seems more accurate: without planning or intention, humans have made a mess of our planet. Furthermore, despite the prefix “anthropo-,” that is, human, the mess is not a result of our species biology. The most convincing Anthropocene time line begins not with our species but rather with the advent of modern capitalism, which has directed long-distance destruction of landscapes and ecologies. This time line, however, makes the “anthropo-” even more of a problem. Imagining the human since the rise of capitalism entangles us with ideas of progress and with the spread of techniques of alienation that turn both humans and other beings into resources” (p.19).
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