🌿Wild Ones #35: Ecocultural Communication Digest
Environmental Keyword: 'Degrowth' + Beloved Beasts + 25-year review of The Gunung Palung Orangutan Project + EcoJournaling + 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 ecocultural 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
The language of ‘degrowth’
“Degrowth is a planned reduction of energy and resource use designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality and improves human well-being.” – Jason Hickel
Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist from the University of London, whose most recent book is Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.
Hickel explores ‘the language of degrowth,’ and clarifies some common misconceptions about this environmental keyword in his short and concise 2020 article in the journal Globalisations. Read the full article here: “What does degrowth mean? A few points of clarification”
For ecolinguists and environmental communicators, an interesting part of the article is Hickel’s discussion about the positives and negatives of the ‘language of degrowth.’ He writes, “Some people think the term is confusing because it does not mean the opposite of ‘growth’”:
“When people say ‘ growth’ they normally mean growth in GDP, so one might reasonably assume that degrowth is likewise focused on reducing GDP. Proponents of degrowth are therefore condemned to perpetually clarify that degrowth is not about reducing GDP, but rather about reducing material and energy throughput. It would seem that this creates unnecessary problems.”
The problem isn’t the word ‘degrowth,’ says Hickel. Instead, the real problem is with the word ‘growth’: Here are some interesting points he makes about this:
“…when economists and politicians talk about growth they really mean an increase in materials and energy (and specifically an increase in commodified materials and energy), even though this is not stated outright.”
In other words, economists’ and politicians’ preoccupation with GDP is “not in order to increase an abstract number (GDP), but because they want to consume or do more [like ‘increase military spending’ or ‘buy bigger homes’] which of course requires using more materials and energy.”
‘Green growth,’ according to Hickel, is based on empirical evidence is ‘unlikely to be achieved.’ So we need a new word that distinguishes his position from ‘green growth’: degrowth! As he puts it, “‘degrowth’ is a simple, handy term that allows us to clarify what is at stake, and concentrates the mind on what is required…a planned, coherent policy to reduce ecological impact, reduce inequality, and improve well-being.”
For more on the environmental keyword ‘degrowth,’ here are some interesting videos to check out:
“Inequality Is Killing Us All. Are We Going To Stop It?” - An interview with Jason Hickel on Russell Brand’s podcast ‘Under The Skin’ (video).
Degrowth, explained (with oranges!) from Grist
A healthy economy should be designed to thrive, not grow. A fascinating TED talk by economist Kate Raworth on a related environmental keyword she created related: “doughnut economics”
📰 News
Beloved Beasts: Fighting for Life in an Age of Extinction, a forthcoming book by Michelle Nijhuis.
Blue whales threatened by ship collisions in busy Patagonia waters. By Dan Collyns in The Guardian. Here is the visualization from the research paper (the blue dot is the whale avoiding vessel traffic):
‘He Left His Mark’: The Yale School of the Environment Remembers Kevin Jiang
Chesapeake Conservancy Applauds Introduction of the Comprehensive Conservation Finance Act in Maryland Senate. Apparently the first bill of its kind in the U.S. I’ll be following this story to see how ‘conservation finance’ initiatives are communicated and enacted.
📚 Research
Communicating Climate Change in Russia: State and Propaganda (2018). By Marianna Poberezhskaya. “This book explores how issues to do with climate change are handled by the Russian media.”
Ireland and the Climate Crisis (2020). Edited by Dave Robbins, Diarmuid Tourney and Pat Brereton, in the Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication. “Long regarded as a ‘climate laggard’, Ireland’s response to the urgent societal challenge of climate change has seen new momentum in recent times.”
The Gunung Palung Orangutan Project (2021). Twenty-five years at the intersection of research and conservation in a critical landscape in Indonesia. By Cheryl D. Knott and many others, in the new issue of Biological Conservation. Here is the website for the project, with interesting sections on their approach to ‘environmental education’ and ‘conservation awareness.’
“We describe our project's direct conservation interventions of public education and awareness campaigns, sustainable livelihood development, establishment of village-run customary forests, investigation of the illegal pet trade, and active engagement with Indonesian government organizations. These efforts, in concert with the development of local scientific and conservation capacity, provide a strong foundation for further conservation as orangutans face a challenging future.”
Achieving international species conservation targets: Closing the gap between top-down and bottom-up approaches (2021). In Conservation & Society.
“In 2010, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) outlined an international strategic plan, which included the twenty Aichi Biodiversity Targets to be met by 2020. Target 12 refers to preventing extinctions and halting species declines. Despite some local conservation successes, this target is not on track to be met at the global level. We aimed to understand what is needed to achieve this target according to two invested but contrasting groups: species conservation experts and global conservation policy makers…We suggest that improved communication, collaboration and data sharing among institutions should be a priority to help overcome the perceived knowledge-gap” (emphasis mine).
Contesting Coal, Contesting Climate: Materializing the Social Drama of Climate Change in Australia and Germany. By Tom Morton, in Environmental Communication:
This analysis reveals how small-scale struggles against coal mining, and the scripts or storylines employed by different actors, can make the sites of struggle morally meaningful in the drama of climate change. Such struggles, I argue, are themselves an important theater in which the global risk of climate change is staged. They foster solidarity between different actors and allow the emergence of exemplary narratives, “shared storylines” of resistance to the fossil-fuel economy and agitation for climate action.”
💡 Ideas
Dissecting stories about garbage in popular culture. Why they matter. By Mehita Iqani, Professor in Media Studies, University of the Witwatersrand. in The Conversation.
Black Bears, Black Liberation: A wildlife biologist uncovers an unexpected, intersectional legacy of slavery. By Dr. Rae Wynn-Grant in Patagonia Stories
Earthly Love: Stories of Intimacy and Devotion from Orion Magazine. “Earthly Love is Orion’s most ambitious anthology yet, a combination of poetry and prose that illuminates the nature of love in the Anthropocene.
With an introduction by Barry Lopez…”Future Land: An interview with Rebecca Hosking, regenerative farmer, writer and consultant. By Sophie Yeo in the Inkcap. An interesting conversation about the role of language in shaping tensions and entanglements among conservation, rewilding and regenerative agriculture in the UK. And here is an interesting piece by Rebecca Hosking on the ‘8 principles of agriwilding.’
Get Outside: Sour mood getting you down? Get back to nature. “Research suggests that mood disorders can be lifted by spending more time outdoors…If you can't make it outside, listening to nature sounds can have a similar effect.” In Harvard Health Publishing.
She Colors Nature. An environmental justice blog and outdoor initiative created by Chelsea Murphy: “Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in the outdoors. Normalizing conversations about racism.”
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“Ultimately, what we call ‘the economy’ is our material relationship with each other and with the rest of the living world. We must ask ourselves: what do we want that relationship to be like? Do we want it to be about domination and extraction? Or do we want it to be about reciprocity and care?”
– Jason Hickel, in ‘Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.’
✏️Writings from my desk
A Quickstart Guide To EcoJournaling: Get started with EcoJournaling following these 4 steps
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