🌿Wild Ones #26: Environmental Communication Digest
Counter-mapping + Visual risk communication + "Greentrolling" + Ecolinguistics & Ecocriticism + 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
‘Counter-Mapping’: ‘counter-mapping’ (also called ‘cartographies of resistance’) is a way of remapping a landscape with a view to pushing back against power.
The nature writer Robert Macfarlane, in an interview during the first British Council Nature Writing Seminar held in Munich, Germany in 2018, suggests some ways ‘new nature writers’ might counteract eco-culturally destructive stories about places and landscapes.
Early in the interview (see video below around 18:00) Macfarlane is asked about his method of creating a ‘new map’ of places as an unconventional method in new nature writing. He then suggests the idea of “counter-mapping” as a writing strategy for new nature writers:
Andreas Rötzer: “In your book the Old Ways, you describe a kind of method…you try to describe the countryside in another way… [you write] ‘Description is a map’ for example, and you want to do it in another way, in a literary way, to create a new map, a new way of description. Is this a way to do nature writing? To replace descriptions?”
Robert Macfarlane: “Well, I’m very interested in what is often called counter-mapping, and counter-mapping is a form of, you could say ‘resistant cartography.’ So, often politically motivated, often a way of remapping a site that has had its predominant cartography carried out by a power group of some kind.
So an example of that might be, uh, where I first met this idea was in the extraordinary book Maps and Dreams by Hugh Brody the anthropologist. [Brody] worked up in Northwest Canada with Indigenous people there, with First Nations people at the same time as — and we see many versions of this at work today — multinationals were seeking to push an oil pipeline down through Native land. And [Brody] describes this extraordinary incompatible mapping, this exchange of cartographies that went on between these two groups. The pipeline implementers would bring their maps and unroll them. And these were satellite-based grid maps…
…The First Nations people would bring their maps, they were dreaming maps, they were hunting maps, they were resource maps. The oil pipeline maps were a type of resource map as well, but [the First Nations’ maps] were alert to where the food sources were to be found in a particular month, following a particular moon. They moved between a form of natural history, a form of mythology, a form of community. And these two mappings were just incompatible.
So ‘counter mapping’ is a way of remapping a landscape with a view to pushing back against power. I’m not sure if that’s what [my book] The Wild Places does, but I certainly thought of it as unrolling a different kind of map.”
I wrote more about this interview on my Wild Ones publication on Medium. You can read it here: ‘Counter-Mapping’ As A Nature Writing Method
Also, if you’re interested in why I think environmental keywords like counter-mapping (and many others) will be important tools in helping us tell new stories about environmental problems and their intersectional solutions – improving stories we already tell, but also helping us tell the stories that go untold – I’ve written more about this idea here in a short piece: The Case for Environmental Keywords.
🔭 Tools & Tips
Top blogs on nature, wildlife and the environment from James Common
Visual risk communication: Evidence-based tips for crafting powerful visual messages: “In this blog post, Alice Fleerackers reviews tips on creating effective visual aids and data visualization that can help people understand risk.”
The Washington Post's Climate Quiz is a great way to test your knowledge, by Lyndsey Layton for The Washington Post
📰 News & Events
Environmental Humanities Reading Group at Oslo University: “The Environmental Humanities Reading Group organises monthly meetings at Oslo University to share humanities perspectives on the relationship between humans and the environment, as well as contemporary discourses surrounding climate change.”
Bill McKibben and Elizabeth Kolbert on the Pandemic and the Environment: “McKibben and Kolbert believe that the pandemic could remind the public to take scientific facts more seriously and even change our values for the better.”
ICA Pre-conference 2021: ‘Visions of Change: Communication for Social and Environmental Justice.’ Conference date: 27 May 2021
Learning how to talk: What climate activists must do in the Biden era, by Bill Mckibben in Grist
New Zealand declares a climate change emergency: Jacinda Ardern calls climate change ‘one of the greatest challenges of our time’ and pledges carbon-neutral government by 2025. Learn more about the movement to get more local and national governments to declare a climate emergency, at Climate Mobilization
How to talk about the environment? Heroes/heralds and environmental communication” - online conference. December 9-11
📚 Research
Patchy Anthropocene: Frenzies and Afterlives of Violent Simplifications (open access special issue in Current Anthropology)
The Shadow Places Network is a network of scholars, artists and activists who collaborate to document, co-produce and reimagine connections between places and peoples in an era of climate change. Read their manifesto as well as a recent research article: A manifesto for shadow places: Re-imagining and co-producing connections for justice in an era of climate change
An interview with Shaylih Muehlman on her research article: Rhizomes and other uncountables: The malaise of enumeration in Mexico’s Colorado River Delta. Shaylih Muehlman Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Canada Research Chair in Language, Culture and the Environment at the University of British Columbia.
Communicating the hidden: toward a framework for drought risk communication in maritime climates: “This paper explores stakeholder perspectives on the drought discourse in the UK, where climate change is predicted to increase drought risk.”
Discovering the weatherworld: Combining ecolinguistics, ecocriticism, and lived experience, by Arran Stibbe, in the Routledge Handbook of Ecocriticism and Environmental Communication.
💡 Ideas
AnthrozooPod Podcast: Episode 5 Animals as Immigrants: “In this episode, we look at Animals as Immigrants. Animal movement across the globe and boundaries happens within contested spaces leaving animals wanted, unwanted, forced, coerced or in liminal landscapes of uncertainty.”
Greentrolling: A ‘maniacal plan’ to bring down Big Oil
“A Nature Writer for the Anthropocene” A review of the book Underland by Columbia Environmental Law Prof. Jedidah Purdy: “In Underland, Robert Macfarlane gives readers new ways to experience the richness and strangeness of a damaged world.”
Land and language: Indigenous cultures key to protecting Amazon biodiversity
Plastics in the Gut: A search for sand on a rocky shoreline upends colonial science by Max Liboiron, associate professor in geography at Memorial University, where she directs Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research, a marine science lab dedicated to anticolonial methods: “Plastic profiles, like dialects, are unique to their regions…The singular term “plastic” is horribly misleading, given the hundreds of polymer types and blends and the many more chemical additives they harbor and leak.”
The Botanist Daring to Ask: What If Plants Have Personalities?
The idea of plant intelligence is still controversial, but Rick Karban is already well beyond that. By Zoe SchlangerHow Youth Climate Activists Are Empowering Campaigners From Countries Suffering Most From Global Warming. By Abhishyant Kidangoor in Time Magazine.
The idea of a ‘natural’ disaster is going up in flames. By Kate Yoder in Grist
The Social Life of Forests: Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another? By Ferris Jabr, Photographs by Brendan George Ko
Listen to a narration of The Social Life of Forests on the NYTimes Daily Podcast
💬 Quotes
Amy Westervelt, co-author of the newsletter Hot Takes and creator of Drilled, a podcast investigating fossil fuel propaganda:
“Last week, one of the Axios newsletters described me as an “advocacy journalist” and frankly, it ticked me off. The term “advocacy journalist” is mostly used to discredit the journalist in question. It implies bias, an agenda, perhaps some sort of formal attachment to a campaign, cause, or organization.
…It’s annoying to me that the label gets thrown at journalists who write about some topics—climate, race, the justice system—and not, say, business reporters who advocate various theories about capitalism and markets. It plays out in who gets quoted in the media too, with most reporters seeing CEOs as, somehow, neutral, while advocates are biased.”
Ghassan Hage, Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia. The quote below is cited from an essay entitled, The last snail: Loss, hope and care for the future, by Thom Van Dooren (2016).
“we need to look at what kind of hope a society encourages rather than simply whether it gives people hope or not.”
Favianna Rodriguez, interdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and social justice activist. Below is an excerpt from her chapter, Harnessing Cultural Power, in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, a new anthology of writing from women at the forefront of the climate movement, edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson.
“Culture is power. The music we listen to, the social media we consume, the food we eat, the movies and television shows we watch—these all inform our values, behaviors, and worldviews. Culture is in a constant battle for our imagination. It is our most powerful tool to inspire the social change these times demand…We need our storytellers—a mighty force—to help us shift our mythology and imagine a future where together we thrive with nature. That is a power we must harness, if we are to find our way out of the climate crisis. We must build a cultural strategy for the climate movement.”
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:)
Gavin, you should check out the new book: Ecomedia Literacy by Antonio Lopez (https://news.johncabot.edu/2020/11/ecomedia-literacy-antonio-lopez/). His work is pioneering connections between media education and environmental justice. All the Best, Jeff