🌿Wild Ones #32: Environmental Communication Digest
“Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language" + Storygram of 'The Tree Coroners' + Re-MEDIAting the Wild Conference + More!
Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day and 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
‘Nature’
“A simple measure of the importance of ‘nature’ as an idea is to imagine us dispensing with the term and its meanings altogether. The ‘hole’ in our language would be enormous. We’d be rendered both inarticulate and incapable in large areas of our thought and action. In short, if we didn’t already have the term in our present-day vocabulary, we’d probably have to invent it.”
“Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language.”
When the Welsh literary theorist and novelist Raymond Williams published Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society in 1976 it became an instant classic. In Keywords, Williams brings his deep historical lens and cultural insight as a literary scholar to over a hundred commonly used words in English: from ‘art’, ‘humanity,’ ‘genius’ and ‘violence’, to ‘capitalism’, ‘sex’,’ ‘democracy’ and ‘revolution’.
For a word to become a keyword, Williams argued, it should have three characteristics:
First, it must be ordinary. We should be able to encounter this word being used by all kinds of people using it in all kinds of situations and in all kinds of ways.
Second, rather than fads and buzzwords, keywords endure the test of time. They stick around through the decades, even if their meanings may have shifted.
Finally, because keywords are often taken for granted, they come to deeply shape how we think about the world: the reality we perceive. But in shaping our thinking, keywords have social force. In other words, they shape how we act in the world too.
In coming to the conclusion that ‘Nature is perhaps the most complex word in the language,” Raymond Williams writes that “Any full history of the uses of nature would be a history of a large part of human thought.”
For more on why Raymond Williams viewed ‘Nature’ as the most complicated keyword in human thought, you can read my short essay here: Nature: The Most Complex Word in the English Language
And here’s Raymond Williams discussing the keyword ‘nature’ at the Linguistics of Writing conference, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, in 1986. More videos of Raymond Williams can be found at the Keywords Project, University of Pittsburgh.
🔭 Tools & Tips
Storygram (Story Diagram) of Cally Carswell’s “The Tree Coroners” in The Open Notebook: “The following story diagram—or Storygram—annotates an award-winning story to shed light on what makes some of the best science writing so outstanding.”
📰 News and Events
Re-MEDIAting the Wild: The 16th Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) “as you’ve never seen it before” Online everywhere June 21-24, 2021. Deadline for submissions February 1.
Six corporations that talk green and spend dirty. By Emily Atkin in Heated
The Water Desk: “The Water Desk’s mission is to increase the volume, depth and impact of journalism connected to Western [U.S.] water issues, with a focus on the Colorado River Basin. An initiative of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado Boulder.”
The lessons on storytelling that William Kittredge taught: “The beloved teacher and writer was preoccupied with the particular.” By Kate Schimel in High Country News.
Call for Entries: Society for Environmental Journalism's Awards for Reporting on the Environment: Deadline: March 1, 2021, 11:59 p.m. EST
Connecting to Nature & Birds - A Writing Workshop Webinar. By The Bird Conservancy of the Rockies (recorded webinar): “Bring your notebook and a pen -- nature writing is a wonderful way to connect to the world around you! Join Bird Conservancy for a writing workshop to engage with birds in a new way. This workshop/webinar is for all ages and all writing levels. Even if you're not a writer, this is a great way to stretch your brain and try something new. We will read some nature themed writing, do some writing exercises, and talk about ways to incorporate nature writing in all your outdoor adventures.”
📚 Research
Language, Coffee, and Migration on an Andean-Amazonian Frontier, by Nicholas Q. Emlen.
“The book brings together a fine-grained analysis of multilingualism with urgent issues in Latin America today, including land rights, poverty, drug trafficking, and the devastation of the world’s largest forest. It offers a timely on-the-ground perspective on the agricultural colonization of the Amazon, which has triggered an environmental emergency threatening the future of the planet.”
Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? By Kari Weil
“Kari Weil provides a critical introduction to the field of animal studies as well as an appreciation of its thrilling acts of destabilization. Examining real and imagined confrontations between human and nonhuman animals, she charts the presumed lines of difference between human beings and other species and the personal, ethical, and political implications of those boundaries.”
Beyond fortress conservation: The long-term integration of natural and social science research for an inclusive conservation practice in India. In the journal Biological Conservation:
“The separation of people from their landscapes undergirds conservation action, especially in the global south. Such a ‘fortress conservation’ approach is based on the flawed idea that local people's use of forests endangers biodiversity and therefore habitats should be protected by force if necessary. Such a conservation approach runs contrary to the recent understanding that ecosystems once perceived as ‘wilderness’ have been transformed by people.”
The Fifth Estate: Analyzing Climate Change Punditry in the Zimbabwean Newspaper Columns. By Mthokozisi Phathisani Ndhlovu in Environmental Communication.
💡 Ideas
What the environmental justice movement owes Martin Luther King Jr. By Paola Rosa-Aquino in Grist.
Finding My Climate-Conscious Tribe: Black Nature Lovers and Writers
An Appraisal (and Update) of Lit Hub's Climate Library. By By Kim-Marie Walker in Lit Hub.The Tree Coroners. An award winning report by Cally Carswell in High Country News.
Animal Studies Cross Campus to Lecture Hall by James Gorman in the NYTimes.
Environmental Historian Keith Makoto Woodhouse on Ecocentrism and Radical Environmentalism in the U.S., on the U.S. Intellectual History Blog.
How Far Does Wildlife Roam? Ask the ‘Internet of Animals.’ By Sonia Shan NYTimes: “An ambitious new system will track scores of species from space — shedding light, scientists hope, on the lingering mysteries of animal movement.”
Work is drudgery for a lot of people, but it can be different and meaningful, if radically reorganised. By In Uneven Earth: Where the Ecological Meets the Political.
MLK's dream was about environmental justice, too. By Eric Holthaus in The Phoenix.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
✏️Writings from my desk
‘Ecocentrism’: A Brief History of The Radical Environmental Movement
4 Benefits of Walking In 2021 (#1: Walking as a ritual to reconnect with the natural world)
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