🌿Wild Ones #34: Environmental Communication Digest
spectacular nature + blue beads in the tundra + The Probiotic Planet + Let's talk about that Super Bowl ad + more!
Hi 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
‘spectacular nature’
In her 1997 book, “Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience,” communications scholar Susan G. Davis, a Professor Emerita of Communications in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois, tells the story of her decade-long research on Sea World in San Diego.
In the book, Davis explores the connections between corporate culture and the communication and education about marine wildlife at the Sea World theme park.
Here is Davis’s introduction to the main theme of her book:
“Sea World's versions of nature-carefully produced, manufactured, and coordinated from a mega-corporate point of view—are, of course, not the only ones available. But never before have images of nature had such a direct and powerful link to corporate capitalism or such wide dissemination through the mass media. The same forces involved in the biosphere's exploitation have an important stake in nature's definition and representation. Let's explore these unexplored connections.”
Davis describes how a corporate communication system of ‘spectacular nature’ organizes Sea World’s orca shows: On the one hand, orcas are trained to perform in ways that at once elicit displays of their ‘cuddly’ and friendly qualities, such as instructing them to wave with their flippers to the audience.
But at the same time, trainers also seek to evoke their ‘oceanic power’ and ‘wildness,’ portraying orcas as portals for people to reconnect with wild nature.
As Davis puts it, corporate communications at Sea World “simultaneously sacralize and trivialize Shamu: the whale is simultaneously a transcendent being and a souvenir” (p. 223).
In my own research, I draw on Davis’ research on mass-media communication of spectacular nature for thinking about the (mostly) negative effects of the global wildlife tourism industry. How do representations of charismatic species in media and advertising, as well as in situ in ‘tour-guide talk’ on wildlife tours shape how people understand, appreciate and interact with wildlife in diverse places around the world?
For more on this topic, there is an excellent National Geographic article on the role social media plays in fueling an exploitative global wildlife tourism industry: Suffering unseen: The dark truth behind wildlife tourism. I also recommend environmental communication scholar Tema Milstein’s fascinating work on orca tourism in the Pacific Northwest: The Performer Metaphor: “Mother Nature Never Gives Us the Same Show Twice.
📰 News and Events
Event: Talk with George Monbiot, “Dying from Consumption” (May 17 2021): “Covid has been the all-consuming topic of 2020. As we emerge from the pandemic, we will have a unique opportunity to reflect on how consumerism itself is at the heart of all our global crises.”
Obituary for sociolinguistics professor Jan Blommaert who passed away recently. I met Jan briefly at a sociolinguistics conference in Spain in 2016 and had a nice chat with him. His book, The Sociolinguistics of Globalization is a great intro to the role of language and discourse in society.
Biden’s Civilian Climate Corps comes straight out of the New Deal, by Kate Yoder in Grist:
“According to a December survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, some 85 percent of Americans support reestablishing the Civilian Conservation Corps, though that survey didn’t mention anything about the climate. A different poll from Data for Progress last May found that nearly 70 percent of the public supports the idea of a new, climate-focused corps. Even a majority of Republican voters, 62 percent, liked the idea.”
📚 Research
“We’re Going Under”: The Role of Local News Media in Dislocating Climate Change Adaptation (2021) by Vanessa Bowden, Daniel Nyberg, and Cristopher Wright: “In this article we explore the central role of a local newspaper in shaping public debate over the implementation of a climate adaptation plan in a coastal region of Australia.”
American Tropics: The Caribbean Roots of Biodiversity Science. By Megan Raby. Winner of Philip J. Pauly Prize, History of Science Society.
The American Adrenaline Narrative (2020) by Kristin J. Jacobson. “The American Adrenaline Narrative considers the nature of perilous outdoor adventure tales, their gendered biases, and how they simultaneously promote and hinder ecological sustainability.”
The Probiotic Planet: Using Life to Manage Life (2020) by Jamie Lorimer: “Jamie Lorimer offers a sweeping overview of diverse probiotic approaches and an insightful critique of their promise and limitations. Informed by deep engagement with microbiology, immunology, ecology, and conservation biology as well as food, agriculture, and waste management, The Probiotic Planet offers nothing less than a new paradigm for collaboration between the policy realm and the natural sciences.”
💡 Ideas
Got Climate Anxiety? These People Are Doing Something About It. By Susan Shain in the NYTimes. “Distress over global warming is increasing, but formal and informal support networks are springing up, too.”
They Want to Start Paying Mother Nature for All Her Hard Work. By Catrin Einhorn in NYTimes. “Ignoring the value of nature threatens humanity itself, according to a new British report on biodiversity and economics.”
Essential Climate Change Jargon/Buzzwords you need to be aware of. By Neelima Vallangi.
Let's talk about that Super Bowl ad by Emily Atkin in Heated. “GM's electric vehicle ad featuring Will Ferrell tries to erase years of anti-climate work in 90 seconds.”
How does the language we use affect our treatment of the planet? An interview with Arran Stibbe hosted by the Global Landscapes Forum.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“Sea World's experiences are manufactured by a relatively small number of people working for a very large organization; they are disseminated from a narrow point of origin for wide reception and consumption. In this sense, the theme park is industrially produced popular culture. Viewed this way, from its landscaping to its performing whales to its television commercials, Sea World is more than just another example of a universal human tendency to enjoy nature. Rather, the theme park's oceanscapes are an example of the private production of visions of nature and ideas about animals, images and ideas that spread out into the larger culture. To unpack the meanings of places like Sea World, it is useful to speak of theme parked nature as an industrial product and to look closely at the industry that produces it.”
– Susan G. Davis, From the introduction of “Spectacular Nature: Corporate Culture and the Sea World Experience” (1997, University of California Press)
“Our darkest fiction is full of Orwellian dystopias, shadowy cabals, and mind-controlling supervillains. But it turns out that the brainless, microscopic, single-celled organisms that live inside us have been pulling on our strings all along.”
― Ed Yong, in I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life
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Also o superbowl ads - did you see the Oatly one? :)