🌿Wild Ones #31: Environmental Communication Digest
Climate Justice Literacy + eco-keyword: 'ecocentrism' + how to diagram science stories + analyzing climate change language + a climate reading list for 2021 + more!
Happy New Year everyone! Welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in ecowriting, 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
‘Ecocentrism’
In his 2018 book The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, environmental historian Keith Makoto Woodhouse traces the fascinating history of the environmental discourse of ecocentrism.
Ecocentrism was a key eco-discourse taken up and developed by the radical environmental movement in the U.S., especially by activists during the 1970s and 1980s. Woodhouse gives this definition of ‘ecocentrism’ as a starting point:
“Ecocentric thought assumed that trees, bears, fish, and grasshoppers should receive as much consideration as humans in decisions large and small about the shape of modern society. An ecocentric outlook granted no more value to people—at least in terms of a basic hierarchy of existence—than it did to plants, animals, and ecosystems…[the ecocentrists] believed, fundamentally, that as modern human society gradually destroyed wild nature it veered toward catastrophe, and that its self-destruction would take much of the planet with it.”
Woodhouse writes that “The simplicity of radical environmentalism’s claims made them elegant and inspiring if taken as rallying cries, but dangerous and malevolent if taken as unqualified truth.”
In other words, for radical environmentalists, embracing the discourse of ecocentrism often went hand in hand with embracing a discourse of antihumanism: “To reject ecocentrism, radical environmentalists argued, was to embrace anthropocentrism—human-centeredness. Beyond those two positions lay only equivocation.”
Woodhouse tells the story, in particular, about the radical environmental group Earth First! founded in 1980. He examines the language and activism of ‘direct action’ they embraced in an effort to protect wilderness areas from logging operations in the Western U.S. in the 1980s. For Earth First!ers, direct action meant chaining themselves to trees, blocking bulldozers with their bodies, living in tree-tops to prevent loggers from cutting trees down, and even using ‘tree spikes’ to break loggers’ chainsaws.
(On a side note, Richard Powers fictionalized some of these efforts by Earth First!ers in his recent novel The Overstory)
For ecolinguists and environmental communicators, Woodhouse’s The Ecocentrists offers a rich and complex history of the language and activism of ecocentrism. As Woodhouse writes,
“Environmentally minded scholars and activists have exposed the many ways an ecocentric environmentalism, originating in and privileging the United States, can gloss over social difference, cultural complexity, and economic inequality, and how it can draw a too-stark line between the human and the natural. By pushing green ideas to their extremes, radical environmentalists risked stripping those ideas of the sort of nuance and malleability that might help them fit into a diverse and complicated world.”
In practice, a discourse of ecocentrism tended to lead activists towards ‘wrongheaded’ and ‘antihumanist’ positions. However, Woodhouse argues, understanding the language of ecocentrism still holds “great relevance for the broad environmental movement and for the way that anyone might think about climate change and the Anthropocene.”
To explore more about the language of ecocentrism and Earth First!, The Rachel Carson Center’s Environment and Society Portal keeps an open-access archive of Earth First! movement writings.
And here is an interesting documentary made in the 1980s about Earth First!: Earth First! The Politics of Radical Environmentalism by Chris Manes
🔭 Tools & Tips
How to Diagram a Great Science Story. By Paul Raeburn in Undark.
Analyzing Climate Change Language. By Rick Beach & Allen Webb in English Teachers Concerned about Climate Crisis (ETCCC)
📰 News and Events
Covering Climate Now’s “Talking Shop: Countering Emotional Fatigue in Crisis Reporting”: “Join us for an hour of candid, collegial discussion about how journalists covering emotionally fraught issues from racial justice to climate change to war zones can cope with burn-out, emotional fatigue, grief, and the other manifestations of the psychological stress such work can bring.” With -- Matthew Green, Reuters Climate Correspondent, and Renee Lertzman, Climate Psychologist.
Exxon Knows Its Carbon Future And Keeps the Data From View. By Kevin Crowley and Akshat Rathi in Bloomberg Green.
The Last Two Northern White Rhinos On Earth: What will we lose when Najin and Fatu die? By Sam Anderson in the New York Times.
Activists, Scientists, and Poets: Your Climate Readings for January: Amy Brady Recommends Five Inspiring Books for a New Year. By Amy Brady in Literary Hub.
📚 Research
Climate Justice Literacy: Stories‐We‐Live‐By, Ecolinguistics, and Classroom Practice. By James S. Damico, Mark Baildon, Alexandra Panos in The Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy.
“A recent example from our work with current literacy teachers highlights what this can look like. A middle school language arts teacher, who works at a politically conservative religious school in Florida, designed a climate justice inquiry for her students to examine the water health of the state’s largest inland body of water, Lake Okeechobee, which is currently suffering from industrial pollution and toxic algae. Her inquiry took the form of critically evaluating the types of news stories being written about the issue, field trips to local parks and the lake, student-created photo-essays about the local environment and its health, and making connections with local environmental and climate-focused activist groups.
The project culminated in a whole-class podcast shared with their schoolmates. Although the teacher expressed concern about the political nature of climate change as a broad topic, she found that positioning the inquiry project with her students through a local environmental issue shifted the story to children’s lives and opportunities, rather than entrenched political debates” (p. 7).
Categorizing Professionals’ Perspectives on Environmental Communication with Implications for Graduate Education. By Karen L. Akerlof et al. in Environmental Communication.
An Open Letter to the Lead Authors of ‘Protecting 30% of the Planet for Nature: Costs, Benefits and Implications.’: “In August 2020 a draft working paper (PDF here) was released into the public domain which analysed ways of expanding and paying for new protected areas. This open letter, signed by authors from multiple institutions, explains a series of reservations about that working paper.”
💡 Ideas
Biden Should Establish an Office of Climate Mobilization: He needs to act with the same urgency that inspired FDR to create the Office of War Mobilization during World War II.” By Varshini Prakash, executive director and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement. In The Nation.
The Case for Climate Hope: Jedediah Purdy’s book “This Land” argues for a radical environmentalism. By Conor Dwyer Reynolds in The New Republic.
The State of Nature (writing). By Richard Smyth in The Fence.
Climate change: How strong whisky helped Scotland's efforts to persuade the world to take action. By Dr. Richard Dixon in The Scotsman
Nature Writing for the Common Good: A collection of essays on nature, ecological challenges, and connections between people and places. From The Centre For The Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity.
Writers & Artists on the Influence of Barry Lopez. In Orion.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“…an environmental point of view must wrestle with the vital questions that ecocentrism raises. The more I learned about radical environmentalists the more I understood them as serious thinkers, engaged in conversations that held great relevance for the broad environmental movement and for the way that anyone might think about climate change and the Anthropocene. Their ideas were sometimes deeply wrongheaded, but their conversations were often thoughtful and even urgent. And their false turns came from confronting issues that were and are complicated, distressing, and maybe even irreconcilable.”
– Keith Makoto Woodhouse, in The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism.
“Communication, to an extent, always involves communion. That is, communicating with others entails some measure of what Haraway (2008) calls “becoming with” these others.”
– Eduardo Kohn, in How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond The Human
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