🌿Wild Ones #23: Environmental Communication Digest
'Biocultural hope' + Free Climate Communication Guide! + New Research: Hot weather, hot topic + Shell’s Twitter fail + Fermentation as Metaphor + 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 Keyword
‘Biocultural Hope’: The act of grounding our environmental hopes in particular “communities of actual living animals, plants, and microbes.”
In his essay, ‘Hope’, the environmental anthropologist Eben Kirksey describes how his idea of biocultural hope was shaped by his experience working with environmental artists and activists who came to the Gulf Coast to help clean up and care for wildlife after the BP Deepwater Horizon explosion in 2010.
In New Orleans, Kirksey met with a collective of local artists to share conversation and artwork on the theme ‘Hope in Blasted Landscapes.’ The aim of their gathering was to explore the following question through prose and art:
“In the aftermath of disasters – in blasted landscapes that have been transformed by multiple catastrophes – what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?”
“Official rules blocked people from trying to help charismatic animals, like birds. Volunteers instead began caring for smaller animals, like hermit crabs, that fell through the regulatory cracks,” Kirksey writes. Observing the efforts of volunteers like Jacqueline Bishop to help with the Hermit Crab Survival Project led Kirksey to develop the notion of biocultural hope:
“I argue for the importance of grounding hopes in communities of actual living animals, plants, and microbes. Grounding hopes in living figures illuminates the possibilities that are emerging in an era of extinction and widespread ecological change…”
“To figure,” Kirksey says, “also means to have a role in a story.” By collaborating with what he calls 'living figures – in this case, the hermit crabs alongside the people helping to save them – “tinkers and thinkers are learning how to care for emergent ecological assemblages by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting them go.”
Partnering with living figures, like hermit crabs, Kirksey argues, provides a space for people to ground their collective hopes, disappointments, joys and angers in collaborative action to “produce hopeful events and concrete victories.”
In sum, the notion of biocultural hope focuses our attention on actual, multispecies communities where there is “the potential for tiny actions – like Jacqueline Bishop’s gestures of care towards hermit crabs – to make the world a more livable place…ripe with open-ended biocultural possibilities.”
Learn more about the project Hope in Blasted Landscapes here, and watch an interesting, short documentary on the Hermit Crab Survival Project below.
🔭 Tools
Infographic: A patchwork of lands fragments wildlife migration (new legislation helps connect private and public parcels for wildlife flow, from High Country News).
Brand New, Free Climate Communication Guide! from the Australian Association for Environmental Education
We’re all science communicators. Here’s how to do it better: Jen Heemstra on how to help those around you separate facts from myths
Positive Communication Toolkit: A Guide to Reframing Conservation Messages to Empower Action (pdf).
📰 News & Events
Orion Magazine presents Rebecca Solnit and Terry Tempest Williams: An Intimate Conversation About the U.S. Election, the State of Democracy, and The Most Radical Thing You Can Do (video).
“No persuasive conversation has ever started with, ‘You’re an idiot, now listen to me,’” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, says. “There’s not a single piece of social science research that suggests that will be effective.”
Tortoises: All the Way Down: The Nelson Institute invites you to a discussion and celebration of Vilas Associate Professor Elizabeth Hennessy’s 2020 book, On the Backs of Tortoises: Darwin, the Galápagos, and the Fate of an Evolutionary Eden. The event will be moderated by environmental writer Emma Marris and focus on the entangled social and natural history of the Galápagos Islands, and their namesake species the giant tortoise. (Wednesday, November 18, 2020 6:30-7:30 P.M. CST).
After Trump: The Silver Linings Playbook: Dr. Leah Stokes and Dr. Katharine Wilkinson open the playbook for climate action after Trump on the Matter of Degrees podcast
A Bug’s Life, a photoessay by Amit Roy: “I photograph insects because they are at risk, and visual recording of our natural world is a key conservation tool.”
📚 Research
‘“Narrative!” I can’t hear that anymore’. A linguistic critique of an overstretched umbrella term in cultural and social science studies, discussed with the example of the discourse on climate change.
What Adaptation Stories are UK Newspapers Telling? A Narrative Analysis
China’s Pathway to Climate Sustainability: A Diachronic Framing Analysis of People’s Daily’s Coverage of Climate Change (1995–2018)
The knowledge politics of climate change loss and damage across scales of governance
Straw wars: Pro-environmental spillover following a guilt appeal
Windows To The Soul: Dogs’ and Pigs’ Non-Verbal Communication
Faunalytics Index – November 2020: Current facts and figures for animal advocates
Hot weather, hot topic. Polarization and skeptical framing in the climate debate on Twitter
Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction, by David Farrier: This book asks “How poetry can help us think about and live in the Anthropocene by reframing our intimate relationship with geological time.”
💡 Ideas
The Overstory: The End of Oil Is Near (from The Sierra Club Podcast)
A Better Workplace With Dogs: “Good news for dog lovers – bringing your four-legged friend into the office makes you happier and more motivated at work”
Future Sea: How to rescue and protect the world’s oceans, by Deborah Rowan Wright:
“Future Sea is essentially concerned with the solutions and not the problems. Rowan Wright…gathers inspiring stories of communities and countries using ocean resources wisely, as well as of successful conservation projects, to build up a cautiously optimistic picture of the future for our oceans—counteracting all-too-prevalent reports of doom and gloom.”
Indigenous knowledge on climate change adaptation: a global evidence map of academic literature
The D.R.I.V.E. Framework For Identifying and Evaluating Nudges in Practice
7 Strategies for Better Group Decision-Making by Torben Emmerling and Duncan Rooders
Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, by Mark B. Barrow Jr.:
“A sweeping, beautifully illustrated historical narrative that unites the fascinating stories of endangered animals and the dedicated individuals who have studied and struggled to protect them, Nature’s Ghosts offers an unprecedented view of what we’ve lost—and a stark reminder of the hard work of preservation still ahead.”
Fermentation as Metaphor: An Interview with Sandor Katz
“This is another way in which the metaphor of fermentation really is powerful because fermentation is all about creating environments and it’s the environment that determines which among the many organisms that are present on any food, in any given situation, are going to be able to thrive. In the metaphorical ferment it’s the same thing. Our environment is shifting, and we have to shift the structure or some aspect of how we’re organizing our lives and our society in response to that.”
Year in Review: What the World's Top Behavioral Scientists Have to Say. (a discussion of the “intention-action gap” in communication, with some examples of how behavioral science can promote pro-environmental behaviors, from the “It's All Just a Bunch of BS” podcast.)
Melville’s Whale Was a Warning We Failed to Heed, an essay by ecological philosopher Carl Safina
Writings from my desk ✍️
Multispecies Communities: Living Together On A Planet In Crisis: Environmental Philosopher Deborah Bird Rose On ‘More-than-Human’ Storytelling In A Time Of Crisis
Blue Mind: How To Talk About The Ocean So That People Will Listen
Five Writing Tools For Compelling Environmental Communication
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