Wild Ones #20: Environmental Communication Digest
The Great Unravelling, Environmental Communication and The Public Sphere, Climate Communication through the side door and 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:
Environmental Communicator Spotlight 🔆
Phaedra C. Pezzullo is an associate professor in the Department of Communication in the College of Media, Communication, & Information at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research in environmental communication explores environmental justice, social movements, tourist studies, qualitative methods, and public advocacy.
Notable book by Pezzullo: Toxic Tourism: Rhetorics of Travel, Pollution, and Environmental Justice: “Toxic Tourism is the first book length study of “toxic tours” as a mode of advocacy for environmental justice in North America. In order to challenge life-threatening policy decisions, such tours illuminate the linkages between pollution and environmental injustices.”
She also co-authored the excellent book Environmental Communication and The Public Sphere with Robert Cox.
I’m looking forward to reading her forthcoming book, Green Communication and China, coming out at the end of this year.
“As a care discipline, environmental communication involves research devoted to unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits. This means that we have not only a duty to prevent harm but also a duty to honor the people, places, and nonhuman species with which we share our world.”
– Phaedra Pezzullo and Robert Cox, in Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, p. 38.
Tips and Tools 🔭
Bill Mckibben on ‘neutrality’ and advocacy as a climate journalist:
“I was operating on another, related code: that if we assembled enough data, wrote enough articles, sponsored enough symposia, we would eventually win the argument, at which point the powers that be would take action and make the changes needed to avert disaster”…but what “began to belatedly dawn on me, was that we were not having an argument at all. We were having a fight. And fights are not about reason and data and research. Fights are about money and power.”
Communicating about Climate Change in the time of COVID-19 (infographic) via the Climate Interpreter.
Entering Climate Change Communications Through the Side Door: “Advocates can make progress on polarized issues by finding new ways into engaging people in different perspectives, rather than trying to knock down the front door with a barrage of facts.”
News 📰
Saving the Future for Biodiversity: Finding and protecting the most climate-resilient places—and the paths species will take to get there, via the Nature Conservancy.
All That Could Burn: Life as a Californian during the 2020 fire season by Dave Eggers in the New Yorker.
The great unravelling: 'I never thought I’d live to see the horror of planetary collapse’ by Dr. Joëlle Gergis, climate scientists with the ANU Fenner School of Environment and Society. “It breaks my heart to watch the country I love irrevocably wounded because of the Australian government’s refusal to act on climate change.” Part of a series in the Guardian on Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020.
The Most Important Global Forecast That You’ve Never Heard Of by Bill Mckibben in the New Yorker
Want some eco-friendly tips? A new study says no, you don't. By Kate Yoder in Grist
Philippines President Duterte is Waging War Against Environmental Activists by Josh Nova Lomax in Vice
This is my message to the western world – your civilisation is killing life on Earth by Nemonte Nenquimo in the Guardian.
Research 📚
‘Untangling the components of hope: Increasing pathways (not agency) explains the success of an intervention that increases educators’ climate change discussions.’ Uses ‘Hope Theory’ to examine environmental communication.
“Previous research suggests that many who are concerned about climate change self-silence on the topic; failing to engage in regular discussion about climate change despite their desires to do so. This research examines how a communication training program for environmental educators working at aquariums, zoos, and national parks might boost this population's willingness to discuss climate change with visitors via increasing hope.”
Science Communication in Multiple Languages Is Critical to Its Effectiveness in Frontiers in Communication.
Into the Digital Wild: Utilizing Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook for Effective Science and Environmental Communication in Frontiers in Communication
Animal Stories: Narrating across species lines (book): explores “How cross-species companionship is figured across a variety of media—and why it matters”
Ideas 💡
National Network for Ocean and Climate Change Interpretation: a network of scientists who, “rather than doom and gloom, are focused on hope and civic action.”
Sustain What?: A series of webcasts and videos focused on advancing sustainability through better communication, from the Initiative for Sustainability and Communication, Earth Institute, Columbia University.
The Stories Michael Shellenberger Tells. An informative and critical review in the LA Review of Books on Shellenberger’s new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.
Terrestrial Resilience Core Concepts from the Nature Conservancy.
Here Are 10 of the Best Climate Change Podcasts Out Right Now by Jody Serrano in Gizmodo.
The WE ACT Story and environmental justice: “The mantra of the environmental justice movement is that we speak for ourselves.”
Writings from my desk ✍️
How planting a tree became an act of defiance
“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own — indeed to embrace the whole of creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.….Recognizing that sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible is an idea whose time has come”
— Wangari Maathai, in her 2004 Nobel Prize acceptance speech
The cover image for this post is entitled “Blue crab (Lupa decanta)” illustration from Zoology of New York (1842–1844) by James Ellsworth De Kay. Original from The New York Public Library. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this useful, I'd love to hear from you, what do you think about this digest, how could it improve?