Wild Ones #16: Environmental Communication Digest
The sociology of environmental problems, urban heat islands, ecolinguistics of the weather, communicating wildlife management data through the story of bear 71, 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 🔆
John Hannigan is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. His landmark book is Environmental Sociology: A Social Constructionist Perspective.
A key idea we learn from John’s work is that environmental problems are ‘socially constructed’: we come to know, understand, worry, and find solutions to environmental problems through a communicative process of ‘claims-making’ involving people with different and competing interests trying to convince us what the ‘real’ problems are, and therefore how we should go about addressing them (if at all).
John writes,
“Central to the social construction of environmental issues and problems is the idea that these do not rise and fall according to some fixed, asocial, self-evident set of criteria. Rather, their progress varies in direct response to successful ‘claims-making’ by a cast of social actors that includes scientists, industrialists, politicians, civil servants, journalists and environmental activists.”
Put another way, whatever people understand “the environment” to be, this understanding is deeply entangled with our very human ways of communicating, interacting with, and knowing the wider world around us. Some environmentalists reject this perspective of social constructionism (and putting the ‘environment’ in quotation marks). For example, Norwegian environmentalist Arne Naess, who introduced the phrase ‘deep ecology,’ famously said, “Having been taken at least twice by avalanches, I have never felt them to be social constructions. But every word I utter about them may have social origins.”
If you’re interested in learning more about the idea of ‘social construction of nature’ as an important topic in communicating environmental issues, I recommend starting with historian William Cronon’s classic 1996 essay, The Trouble with Wilderness (pdf).
Tools 🔭
Urban Canopy’s project to map urban heat islands. They’re looking for volunteers to participate in an Urban Heat Hackathon in October to map urban heat with satellite data. Behind the project is Katie Patrick, someone who’s doing some really creative work bringing technology and data to solving environmental problems.
What is an Urban Heat Island?: “Cities have a lot of asphalt and concrete. This makes them get hot in summer – really hot. Cities can get up to 20 degrees F hotter than surrounding rural areas. This increase in temperature that cities experience is called an urban heat island. It's a big deal for many reasons, including threats to public health and excessive air conditioning use, leading to even more carbon dioxide emissions.”
Environmental Communication News 📰
The idea of a ‘natural’ disaster is going up in flames, from Grist: “These are not just wildfires,” Washington Governor Jay Inslee said during a press conference last week. “They are climate fires.:”…The supposed “naturalness” of disasters has been questioned since the phrase first appeared in the English language a couple hundred years ago.”
How Animals Are Affected By Habitat Fragmentation from faunalytics: The effects of habitat fragmentation on wildlife are far from clear. Species, along with the type, cause, and speed of fragmentation all play a role.
We Need to Learn to Love All Kinds of Weather: It's not true that "only sunny weather is good” from Treehugger. Ecolinguist Arran Stibbe applies his linguistic toolkit to discussions about the hotter weather in the UK.
Research 📚
This article explores the storytelling effectiveness of an interactive web documentary on Bear 71 to reframe the data-driven communication of wildlife management in a more compelling way.
Ideas 💡
Can anthropomorphism be a good communication strategy for conservation? Anthropomorphism Favors Coexistence, Not Deadly Domination: Research shows that anthropomorphism challenges traditional wildlife management, from Psychology Today. Animal Emotions research Mark Bekoff asks if anthropomorphism – "the attribution of human traits, emotions, or intentions to nonhuman entities" –can help conservation efforts.
Bekoff offers an interesting quote to make his case too: "For the longest time, science has depicted animals as stimulus-response machines while declaring their inner lives barren. This has helped us sustain our customary 'anthropodenial': the denial that we are animals. We like to see ourselves as special, but whatever the difference between humans and animals may be, it is unlikely to be found in the emotional domain." –Frans de Waal
Writings from my desk ✍️
The Enduring Scientific Mystery of Animals’ Magnetic ‘Sixth Sense’: A new study reveals a surprising answer to the decades-old scientific question of how an animal becomes a living compass
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work!