🌿Wild Ones #39: Environmental Communication Digest
Less is more by Jason Hickel + Is Your Carbon Footprint BS? + cultural context in emergency communication + A walrus in Ireland + more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in environmental communication. I’m back after a short ‘Spring Break’ (didn’t go anywhere but recharged my batteries a bit!). After some thought, I’ll be doing one Wild Ones digest per week (Sunday or Monday) as I gradually fine-tune this digest as I go:) 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:
👀 What I’m reading
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World by Jason Hickel. I just got started on this book so I’ll share some more thoughts about it as I dig a bit deeper over the next couple of weeks. But I’m already looking forward to recommending Hickel’s first chapter which offers an original take on an old story of extractivist capitalism spanning centuries of history and how it has led us to this point in the ecological crisis. Here are a few quotes that I underlined so far:
“Those of us who live in capitalist societies today have been taught to believe that there is a fundamental distinction between humans and nature: humans are separate from and superior to nature; humans are subjects with spirit and mind and agency, whereas nature is an inert, mechanistic object. This way of seeing the world is known as dualism. We inherit these ideas from a long line of thinkers, from Plato to Descartes, who primed us to believe that humans can rightfully exploit nature and subject it to our control.”
“It’s no wonder that we react so nonchalantly to the ever-mounting statistics about the crisis of mass extinction. We have a habit of taking this information with surprising calm. We don’t weep. We don’t get worked up. Why? Because we see humans as fundamentally separate from the rest of the living community. Those species are out there, in the environment. They aren’t in here; they aren’t part of us”
“Environmentalists sometimes have a tendency to speak in terms of ‘limits’, meagreness and personal puritanism. But this gets it exactly back to front. The notion of limits puts us on the wrong foot from the start. It presupposes that nature is something ‘out there’, separate from us, like a stern authority hemming us in. This kind of thinking emerges from the very dualist ontology that got us into trouble in the first place.
What I am calling for here is something altogether different. It is not about limits but interconnectedness – recovering a radical intimacy with other beings. It is not about puritanism but pleasure, conviviality and fun. And it is not about meagreness but bigness – expanding the boundaries of human community, expanding the boundaries of our language, expanding the boundaries of our consciousness. It’s not just our economics that needs to change. We need to change the way we see the world, and our place within it.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
Is Your Carbon Footprint BS? On How To Save A Planet. This was an interesting episode about whether to focus on individual vs. systemic action in the climate movement. But I wanted to share it here because at around the 25:00 mark the hosts, Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Alex Blumberg talk about the role of communication. Here’s a brief description of the episode and some interesting points they make about environmental communication:
“Do your individual actions matter when it comes to climate change? Or is it all about big, systemic change? In this episode, we break down both sides of the argument. We lay out the actions that have the biggest impact on your carbon footprint – and then ask if there's a better way to think about our individual roles.”
Blumberg: “The fact that these policy changes (such as a progressive flight tax that increases the more you fly) are being discussed are at least in some way due to the actions – individual actions - that people took. But it wasn’t just taking these actions, it was also communicating about the actions: it was sharing them with their friends and getting them to take the actions too. And that is the key: the communication that has to be part of the action. The action is important, but it’s the talking about it that gives it power.”
“And that’s one of the single most important things that anyone can do. When people say ‘what can I do about climate change’ my answer first and foremost is talk about it.” - Dr. Anthony Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
“The spiral of silence”: ‘When we believe that people who disagree with us are in much greater numbers than they are, we clam up.’
Katherine Wilkerson (co-host of the podcast a Matter of Degrees) on why shaming people to take action is a bad climate communication tactic: “Nobody wants to come to a finger-wagging party…We need to be welcoming people in, inviting them in, I don’t want people consumed with shame and guilt when we should be thinking about how powerful we can be together. And what makes me feel courageous and powerful and keeps me in the work, are the wins that we get when we do things together.”
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
Attaining Meaningful Outcomes from Conversations on Climate, from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
How to Save a Planet: Calls to Action & Resources. A google doc created by the How to Save a Planet podcast mentioned above with a list of tools and resources for taking action on climate.
🗞️ News and Events
Losing cultural context in emergency communication can be a matter of life and death. By Amer Hamad Issa Abukhalaf and Jason von Meding in The Conversation.
A group of climate journalists are launching The Uproot Project to support environmental journalists of color. By Hanaa’ Tameez in Nieman Lab.
Recognizing colonialism in the ecolinguistic landscape: Kew Gardens plant signs will acknowledge links to slavery. I came across this story over on Sophie Yeo’s great newsletter, Inkcap, which covers news about conservation in the UK.
(Nonhuman communication): Sperm whales in 19th century shared ship attack information: Whalers’ logbooks show rapid drop in strike rate in north Pacific due to changes in cetacean behaviour. By Philip Hoare in The Guardian.
📚Research
Environmental Humanities Book Talk Series. This is a really great (and eclectic!) book series bringing together a group of researchers exploring environmental issues from a range of scholarly backgrounds in history, anthropology, sociology, art, linguistics, and more. Some of the books I’ve read on the list, and that I highly recommend, include Bathsheba Demuth’s masterful Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Beiring Strait, probably one of my new favorite books. Another wonderful book on the list is by Jonathan Padwe (who also happened to be a committee member on my My Ph.D. dissertation!) called Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands. If you’re curious about the book, Padwe will be speaking about it via Zoom as part of the book series On Monday, 29 March 2021, at 10:00 CET.
Exploring human–nature interactions in national parks with social media photographs and computer vision, by Tuomas Väisänen, Vuokko Heikinheimo, Tuomo Hiippala, and Tuuli Toivonen. This looks like a fascinating new study out from this great Finnish Digital Geography Lab.
💡 Ideas
Ecoanxiety. I’ve been interested in this growing subfield of climate writing focused on how to deal productively with ‘ecoanxiety,’ an emotion defined by the American Psychological Association as the “chronic fear of environmental doom.” Margaret Klein Salamon, in her recent book on the topic, Facing the Climate Emergency calls it a ‘new genre of self-help' for reckoning with the climate crisis.’ Another interesting addition to this new climate self-help genre came out last year called A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety: How to Keep Your Cool on a Warming Planet. It’s written by Sarah Jaquette Ray, the Program Leader of the Environmental Studies Program at Humboldt State University. Interestingly, Sarah Jaquette Ray just published a piece today in Scientific American on the reaction to the book, and some of her misgivings about it. It’s called The Unbearable Whiteness of Climate Anxiety.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“Animism had endowed things with souls; industrialism makes souls into things.”
– Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, cited by Jason Hickel in Less is More
“…from a communication standpoint, successful environmental communication is not just about shifting a frame of reference and “talking” about the natural world in a different way. There is no magic bullet message or strategy that will transform the environmental movement and “save” the natural world. Given the public’s reaction to “environmentalists,” the hostile political environment, and the becalmed and coopted nature of some movement groups, what’s needed is an entirely new modality for how we think, speak, and act toward the natural world. What’s needed is a new vision.”
– Julia Corbett, in Communicating Nature: How We Create and Understand Environmental Messages
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. Leave a comment to let me know what you think about this digest, what areas of environmental communication you’re involved in/most interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Ones:)