Fieldnotes: 'This Land is Our Land'
What can an environmental law professor teach us about environmental communication?
Photo of the Blue Ridge Mountains by Wes Hicks on Unsplash
What I’m reading:
This Land Is Our Land: The Struggle for a New Commonwealth by Jedediah Purdy. Purdy is a professor of environmental law at Columbia University and is also the author of another book I hope to read eventually, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene.
I’m only into the first couple chapters of This Land is Our Land, but the book offers a convincing perspective for why we need more communication about environmental issues through the lens of (unequal) land distribution and justice.
As Purdy puts it: “Land is perennially the thing we share that holds us apart.” The main argument of the book is that we desperately need to imagine a new kind of economy based on an understanding of land as uniting us, rather than dividing us, or a ‘common-wealth,’ in order to solve the range of social and ecological crises we face today. Here are a couple of quotes that I’m pondering:
“This book’s themes are how American earth has always held the people on it apart together, and how the borders at the country’s edges and the borderlines that fracture “the homeland” are linked in a single web.”
“A commonwealth might be an economy where no one gets their living by degrading someone else, nor by degrading the health of the land or the larger living world. In such a community, the flourishing of everyone and everything would sustain the flourishing of each person.”
And here’s a great interview with Purdy about his book in the Nation.
What I’m watching:
George Marshall, co-founder of climate outreach, explains some of his thinking on why climate communication so often fails, what we need to do about it, and how values can be the way to unlock resistant audiences. Filmed at the Cambridge Global Conversations Climate Ethics event in July 2019.
Eco-Tool(s) I’m using:
Speaking of values, The Common Cause Handbook, developed by the Commons Social Change Library in Australia, is a great resource for environmental communicators. The handbook provides an easy to digest overview of recent research on values in environmental communication. If you’re curious about how environmental values influence our environmental behaviors, and therefore which values we should emphasize to improve our environmental communication efforts, I highly recommend checking it out (the diagram below helps gives you an idea of the different values the handbook explores). From the Common Cause Foundation website:
“The Common Cause Handbook makes the case that civil society organisations can find common cause in working to engage and strengthen intrinsic values – such as concern for others, social justice, creativity, self-acceptance, and a connection with nature – whilst working to diminish the importance of extrinsic values – for example, social status, material success, image, wealth, and power.”
See you Sunday!
Gavin