🌿Wild Ones #29: 2020 in Review
A recap of some of the memorable keywords, tools, research, ideas, and quotes in ecowriting, ecolinguistics, and environmental communication I explored this year in Wild Ones 😊✏️🌲
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:
This week, I thought I’d recap some of the ideas I’ve explored here on Wild Ones since I first started writing this digest way back in May, what seems like a million years ago. After digging through my archive of posts, I selected 10 items from each category I write about each week: environmental keywords, helpful tools, interesting research, neat ideas, and memorable quotes.
And if you’re still looking for more ideas, I’ve also included 10 pieces I wrote this year on a range of topics in ecolinguistics, ecowriting, and environmental communication. I hope you find them interesting/helpful in your own life and work!
It’s been a challenging and crazy year for many of us, to say the least. But starting this digest has been a nice source of motivation, learning, and even fun in my life, so I really appreciate your interest in Wild Ones.
I’m looking forward to discovering and sharing more ideas in environmental communication in the coming weeks and months, so I hope you’ll join me for another trip around the sun in 2021! 😊
🌲10 Environmental Keywords
🗞️10 Environmental Stories, Films, and Creative Projects
Bear 71 by Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes, a documentary made in 2012. This is an interactive documentary about Bear 71, the “story of a female grizzly bear monitored by wildlife conservation officers from 2001–2009” in Banff National Park.
How Efforts To Save Hawaii’s Forests Are Preventing A ‘Freshwater Crisis.’ This is a great example of multimedia environmental communication being done by local news organizations, in this case, Civil Beat Honolulu.
Water Flows Together by Taylor Graham, Palmer Morse, and Matt Mikkelsen. “Colleen Cooley is one of the few female Diné river guides on the San Juan River. This short documentary follows her down the river as she reflects on the profound responsibility we have to treat water with reverence and care.”
“A Message From the Future II: The Years of Repair” is an animated short film that dares to dream of a future in which 2020 is a historic turning point, where the lessons of the Covid-19 pandemic and global uprisings against racism drive us to build back a better society in which no one is sacrificed and everyone is essential.
UNNUR, directed by Chris Burkard. This is a beautifully-shot short (19 min) documentary by an outdoor and surf filmmaker whose work I’ve admired for a while now, Chris Burkard.
Picturing Nature: “As both art and activism, landscape photography shows how nature changes, and how our perceptions of nature change with it.” By Michael Engelhard
Rise: a poetry expedition to Greenland’s melting glaciers: “Climate activists and poets, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and Aka Niviana, travel to the latter's home of Greenland to recite their collaborative poem, Rise, on a melting glacier that might threaten the former's home nation of the Marshall Islands in the Pacific.”
Have rogue orcas really been attacking boats in the Atlantic?A fascinating new report from BBC on a pod of boldly playful orcas.
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.
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
🔭 10 EcoWriting and Communication Tools
The Stories We Live By: A free online course in ecolinguistics
How to Talk About the Ocean so that People Will Listen: A Quick Guide
Positive Communication Toolkit: A Guide to Reframing Conservation Messages to Empower Action (pdf).
Blue Habits. An initiative from the Oceanic Society that focuses on using behavioral science and design to bridge the ‘knowledge-action gap’ (or motivation-behavior gap) in developing communication strategies and tools for promoting ocean conservation.
📚 10 Research Articles
Nature documentaries and saving nature: Reflections on the new Netflix series Our Planet.
‘Constructing the Millennial “Other” in United States Press Coverage of the Green New Deal’
I Am Ocean: Expanding the Narrative of Ocean Science Through Inclusive Storytelling
Anthropomorphism in the Anthropocene: Reassembling Wildlife Management Data in Bear 71
Broaching the brook: Daylighting, community and the ‘stickiness’ of water
Collaborative Ecologies: Anthropologies of (and for) Survival in the More-Than-Human City
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.
💡 10 Ideas
How to grow liveable worlds: Ten (not-so-easy) steps for life in the Planthroposcene, from anthropoloigst Natasha Myers.
A million blue marbles, from sea turtle scientist Wallace J. Nichols.
Metaphors for Environmental Sustainability, from sustainability researcher Brendon Larson.
Do Whales Judge Us? Interspecies History and Ethics, from environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth.
Language Keepers: The Struggle for Indigenous Language Survival in California, from Emergence Magazine.
Ecolinguistics and economics: the power of language to build worlds, from ecolinguist Arran Stibbe.
Best Practices in Environmental Communication, from environmental communication scholars Paige Brown Jarreau, Zeynep Altinay & Amy Reynolds.
Hearing Greta’s Message. Review of the new film I am Greta from climate policy expert and professor Leah Stokes.
What the Climate Movement Can Learn From Indigenous Values by Tribal attorney and activist Tara Houska.
What Have We Learned in Thirty Years of Covering Climate Change? by environmental writer and activist Bill Mckibben.
💬 10 Memorable Quotes
“Wild animals, like wild places, are invaluable to us precisely because they are not us. They are uncompromisingly different. The paths they follow, the impulses that guide them, are of other orders. The seal's holding gaze, before it flukes to push another tunnel through the sea, the hare's run, the hawk's high gyres: such things are wild. Seeing them, you are made briefly aware of a world at work around and beside our own, a world operating in patterns and purposes that you do not share. These are creatures, you realise that live by voices inaudible to you.”
– Robert Macfarlane, in The Wild Places
“All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them.”
― Ed Yong, in I Contain Multitudes
“In terms of environmental messages and how to communicate them, it would be wise to look well beyond the current movement. We need a new set of ‘articulators’ to communicate a fresh, broad view of human relationships and actions toward the natural world. We need charismatic visionaries to spark new social change groups, even a new movement. The struggle over what environment means, the values it holds for all of us, and how we speak and act toward it, is being lost…We need to bring the environment home. The environment needs to be reconnected to our everyday lives, in work and leisure, in words and actions.”
– Julia Corbett, in Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages (2006, p. 310).
“Caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning.”
—Donna Haraway, in When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, p 36).
“The core of apocalyptic thinking is nihilism: this world is too despoiled to continue. The seduction of such stories is how certain they make the teller feel. An apocalyptic narrative is like looking at a horizon with no clouds or hills: the way forward is terribly assured. To walk it, there is no need to mind the lives of others, rendered invisible by the power of imagining they are already gone.”
– Bathsheba Demuth, environmental historian at Brown University, in her essay, Reindeer at the End of the World
“To use the world well, to be able to stop wasting it and our time in it, we need to relearn our being in it.”
—Ursula K. Le Guin, quoted in Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake.
“I have learned many words for ‘island’: isle, atoll, eyot, skerry. They exist in archipelagos or alone, and I have always understood them by their relation to water. The English word “island,” after all, comes from the German “aue,” from the Latin “aqua,” meaning “water.” An island is a world afloat; an archipelago is a place pelagic.
The Chinese word for island knows nothing of water. For a civilization grown inland from the sea, the vastness of mountains was a better metaphor: 島 dao (“island,” pronounced “to” in Taiwanese) is built from the relationship between earth and sky. The character contains the idea that a bird 鳥 (niao) can rest on a lone mountain 山 (shan).”
– Jessica J. Lee, in Two Trees Make a Forest.
"Earth hasn't evolved to host storytelling animals who forever try to run from it, to deny physical reality, to live outside life's many beautifully and delicately spun cycles of participation. Relationships are the primary reality. That is the baseline that the old story cannot erode, try as it might. Abundance for our own kind is within reach, but only when we forsake the compulsion to step outside the living world. True abundance is within reach only inside this Earth."
- Martin Lee Mueller, in Being Salmon, Being Human.
“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.”
– Favianna Rodriguez, an interdisciplinary artist, cultural organizer, and social justice activist. From her chapter, Harnessing Cultural Power, in the book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage and Solutions for the Climate Crisis.
“Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion.”
― Barry Lopez, environmental writer and storyteller. From an interview in Poets and Writers, 22:2. March/April 1994.
✏️10 Writings from my desk this year
8 Evidence-Based Principles For Impactful Visual Communication of Climate Change
5 Books That Transformed How I Think About Wildlife Conservation
Thanks so much as always for your interest in my work, and if you found this digest useful, please consider sharing with others who might find it interesting too😊 I'd also love to hear from you, so feel free to leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest:)