🌿Wild Ones #24: Environmental Communication Digest
Buen Vivir (Living Well Together) + Composing Worlds with Elephants + Climate Stories project + lots more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in ecolinguistics and 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
Buen Vivir (living well together): “Rooted in the cosmovisión (or worldview) of the Quechua peoples of the Andes, sumak kawsay – or buen vivir, to give it its Spanish name – describes a way of doing things that is community-centric, ecologically-balanced and culturally-sensitive” – Oliver Balch
I first heard about this concept in 2015 when I took a course with the climate journalist Naomi Klein to discuss her book on climate justice, This Changes Everything, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Hawai‘i. Recently, I came across this article from the Guardian on Buen Vivir, and it prompted me to dig deeper.
Here’s a helpful overview of the concept of Buen Vivir from the Beautiful Solutions website:
“Buen vivir (living well, or living well together) is an indigenous Latin American term describing alternatives to development rooted in community, ecology, culture, and a spiritual connection to the land.
The concept is radically different from the modern economistic view: whereas homo economicus sees nature as a resource to be exploited, even destroyed, for-profit, the convivial buenviviente sees other species, as well as forests and rivers, as having the same rights to prosper that she does.
The concept has been taken up by social movements and progressive governments across the Americas, serving as a philosophical and cosmological foundation for developing new and better ways of living well together.”
To learn more about Buen Vivir:
Buen Vivir: Today's tomorrow, an academic article by Buen Vivir scholar Eduardo Gudynas.
Buen vivir - the concept of good living - in a Bolivian context: Dr. Beat Dietschy and Carlos Larrea from Quito's Andina Simón Bolívar University talk about Buen vivir -- the concept of good living -- in a Bolivian context at the ACT Alliance conference.
Ecuador, Open Knowledge and Buen Vivir, By John Thackara
🔭 Tools & Opportunities
PhD research opportunity: Voices from Bushfire-Affected Communities, Research on diverse experiences of bushfire in Australia. New opportunity for a “PhD student to join a group of leading scholars to undertake research on the diverse perceptions, experiences, impacts, and responses of bushfire-affected communities in Australia.”
An introduction to Appraisal Theory. I find this approach to have some useful linguistic tools for analyzing environmental news and social media: Appraisal theory is “an approach to exploring, describing and explaining the way language is used to evaluate, to adopt stances, to construct textual personas and to manage interpersonal positionings and relationships.”
📰 News & Events
When the White House Was Full of Claws, Scales, Stripes and Tails: The long tradition of presidential pets, in the New York Times.
Composing Worlds With Elephants: 13 - 15 December 2020: An Online Academic Conference Exploring the Human-Elephant Relationship
Online book talk, Playing Nature: Alenda Chang, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at University of California Santa Barbara, will discuss her book Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Monday, Nov16, 16:00 Central European time)
Have rogue orcas really been attacking boats in the Atlantic? A fascinating new report from BBC on a pod of boldly playful orcas.
Dr Iara Lacher - improving decision making for positive environmental change (video talk)
Climate Reads: On N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season with Sheree Renée Thomas, Brooklyn Public Library, Nov 17, 2020 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm (EST).
American Politicians Who Vote Against Climate Get More Corporate Cash, great data visualization of anti-climate lobbying efforts via Bloomberg Green.
A fascinating Twitter thread from Radio Lab’s Latif Nasser on the ancient origins of a democratic ‘blue swoosh’ in the US south (Nov 3).
📚 Research
Communicating a “New” Environmental Vernacular: A Sense of Relations-in-Place
The new issue of the journal Language & Ecology: a journal of the International Ecolinguistics Association. Here are a few titles:
An analysis of linguistic choices in Kalenjin narratives relating to protection of animals
Disappearance of the Nile: Storytelling and environmental awareness
Linguistic Representations of wild salmon health emerging from the Cohen Commission Inquiry into the decline of sockeye salmon in British Columbia
What Are the Grand Challenges for Plant Conservation in the 21st Century? Here’s an interesting excerpt:
“Action needs to take place at all scales from local to global, underpinned by a willingness to overhaul radically our approach to consumption and production, and incorporating interdisciplinary research, and co-learning and transparent communication between scientists and practitioners (Norris et al., 2020). Perhaps above all, as we grapple with issues at the intersection of social and environmental justice, we must seek to be equitable and inclusive. Citizen science and knowledge co-production achieve another vital goal, of helping to educate and enthuse. In the words of Baba Dioum, “In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand” (Dioum, 1968).
Improving the use of calibrated language in U.S. climate assessments. Here’s an excerpt
“It is important for scientists to describe how certain they are about climate change science so that people can make informed decisions about how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or prepare for climate impacts. Scientists who evaluate and summarize key findings from a broad review of climate change literature describe their certainty in these findings in scientific assessments using calibrated language. Calibrated language uses specific terminology to express varying degrees of confidence in a statement and how statistically likely an effect or impact is to occur. However, many people outside scientific fields are unfamiliar with calibrated language and often misinterpret their meaning.”
💡 Ideas
What Aboriginal people know about the pathways of knowledge, by Stephen Mueckeis, professor of creative writing at Flinders University, Adelaide.
Elegy for a Country’s Seasons by novelist Zadie Smith. “It’s hard to keep apocalypse consistently in mind, especially if you want to get out of bed in the morning.”
Climate Stories Project (CSP) is an educational and artistic forum for sharing stories about personal and community responses to climate change. CSP focuses on personal oral histories, which bring an immediacy to the sometimes abstract nature of climate change communication.
Language, Place, Story, Memory, Myth, and So Much More. An interesting roundup of new articles and books exploring the connection between language and place.
2040: ‘Award-winning director Damon Gameau (That Sugar Film) embarks on a journey to explore what the future could look like by the year 2040 if we simply embraced the best solutions already available to us to improve our planet and shifted them rapidly into the mainstream.’
What the Climate Movement Can Learn From Indigenous Values: Tribal attorney and activist Tara Houska writes about the importance of diversity of thought on the frontlines of the climate movement.
The Storm We’ve Been Waiting For: Heritage, History, and Environmental Justice, an exhibition at the Natural History Museum, coming May, 2021.
Round Weather Museum: “Round Weather is an art gallery committed to alleviating the climate crisis. It directs funds raised through the sale of exceptional contemporary art to three organizations selected each year for their effectiveness in climate change mitigation. The gallery celebrates and utilizes the connective imagination, innovation, and courage of the art world, qualities required to counteract the destructive reshaping of global weather.”
✏️Writings from my desk
Solastalgia: A New Word For Our Climate Homesickness: ‘Solastalgia is a new concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress’
How ‘Biocultural Hope’ Can Energize Tiny Actions To Save The Planet:
‘In the aftermath of disasters, what are the possibilities of biocultural hope?’
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this useful, I'd love to hear from you, leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest:)