đżWild Ones #40: Environmental Communication Digest
Re:Imagining Change from the Center for Story-Based Strategy + The new 'Seaspiracy' documentary + The Hemingway App + 'Why authors are saying the ânatural worldâ no longer exists' + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in environmental communication. If youâre new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
đ What Iâm reading
This past week I started reading the second edition of Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the World by Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (2017). The book comes out of The Center for Story-Based Strategy, a great resource for environmental communicators to check out. They also have a neat collection of âtools and resourcesâ on their website too.
The book covers a lot of territory on key communication strategies for social movements, non-profits and advocacy groups, including elements of storytelling, frames and framing, narrative analysis, and a fascinating chapter on selecting a âpoint of interventionâ for changing a story.
âThe story-based strategy approach outlines how well-crafted stories that communicate a cohesive set of strategic frames can dramatically boost the impact of advocacy, protest, and organizing.â
â Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning, in Re:Imagining Change
Why do we need story-based strategy? The basic premise of the book is that the dominant economic, social, and political systems that structure how we live in the world are exploiting people and destroying the planet. We need to change these systems, and quick. But to change these systems, we need to change the stories that support them. Therefore, to do this, we need to create new stories: âhistory suggests that shifts in symbolic power always precede shifts in structural power.â
The deeper problem is, the authors argue, that the most powerful stories are the ones we take for granted, the stories that define the status quo: stories like mass consumerism, anthropocentrism, and unlimited growth. Unfortunately, most people donât recognize them as stories, as those in power who benefit from these stories strive to assert them as common sense. As a consequence, these stories have become âmythologiesâ: stories we no longer recognize as stories but live in the middle of, as common sense. But as Jonathan Matthew Smucker writes in the foreword to the second edition:
ââŚâcommon senseâ is always itself a political achievement, typically normalizing, naturalizing, justifying, or even invisibilizing status quo power relations. As organizers and movement builders, one of our central tasks is to change the common sense. Thatâs what changing the story is all about.â
What I find unique about the book is the diverse mix of ideas in communication strategy for social movements that it brings together: âfrom Alinsky to Zapatismo; from critical pedagogy to advertising, branding, and communications; from grassroots organizers on the frontlines to scholars at the Harvard Kennedy School.â I think this openness to different communication strategies is one of the great strengths of the story-based strategy approach outlined in the book.
And I see a lot of areas for cross-pollination between story-based strategy and research in environmental communication/ecolinguistics too! For example, the ecolinguist Arran Stibbe develops the notion of âstories-we-live-byâ in his wonderful introductory book to ecolinguistics. Stories-we-live-by, writes Stibbe, are stories that are ânot immediately recognisable as stories, and need to be exposed, subjected to critical analysis, and resisted if they are implicated in injustice and environmental destruction.â
But just as itâs important to be critical of destructive stories, says Stibbe, itâs also important to apply our storytelling strategies and tools to building new, positive stories to live by.
Thereâs a lot to digest in Re:Imagining Change, so next week Iâll dive deeper into the specific tools for communication developed in the book, and where I see helpful interconnections with environmental communication. Stay tunedđ
đ What Iâm watching
Seaspiracy, on Netflix: âSeaspiracy examines the global fishing industry, challenging notions of sustainable fishing and showing how human actions cause widespread environmental destruction.â
Here are some first thoughts I had about the documentary after watching:
I thought the film was overall compelling, and I especially liked the interviews the filmmaker, Ali Tabrizi, did with the environmental journalist George Monbiot and ocean scientist and advocate Sylvia Earle, two people I draw a lot of inspiration from myself when it comes to environmental communication. Also, Tabriziâs montage and interviews on the blue-washing behind labeling of so-called âdolphin safeâ certifications given by the Marine Stewardship Council was illuminating, as was his look into slave labor in the Thai fishing industry (see also the documentary âGhost Fleetâ about this).
But I was curious about the wave of critical response to the film in its aftermath, so I looked into it a bit more. It wasnât surprising to see organizations called out in the documentary for blue-washing sustainability in the fishing industry, like the Marine Stewardship Council and the Earth Island Institute, criticized Seaspiracy for spreading inaccuracies about âsustainable fishing.â Also, a number of marine scientists who research the fisheries industry said the film is misleading and âdoes more harm than good.â
Most criticisms of the documentary Iâve read seem to center around 1) the director Ali Tabriziâs sensationalist style of investigative journalism, as a dismissive NYTimes review wrote. And 2) the documentaryâs âelitistâ solution to stop eating fish when âfish remain critical to food & nutrition security in many vulnerable geographies,â as tweeted Dr. Christina Hicks, a professor of environmental science at Lancaster Environment Centre who appeared in the film. This criticism was also echoed by, Angelo Villagomez, campaign manager for Blue Nature Alliance, who wrote a similar criticism in a live-tweet thread that the film glosses over how âthe global conservation burden is carried by rural, indigenous, and the global south, whereas [Marine Protected Areas] in the global north are tiny to non-existent.â
On the positive side, George Monbiot tweeted a thread explaining why the documentary is a âbrilliant expose of the greatest threat to marine life: fishing.â And climate activist Alexandria VillaseĂąor said the film âwill change my activism and work from now on. If you can, watch #Seaspiracy!â
As an important piece of visual environmental communication, I'll be following the reception of Seaspiracy in the conservation community over the coming weeks. But from the perspective of environmental communication, I recommend checking out the film with an eye towards a few key questions:
What does the film frame as the main problem and the real-world impacts this problem creates?
What solutions are proposed based on the problems/impacts identified?
What images, metaphors, narratives, and frames are used to emphasize particular problems and solutions to viewers? What problems and solutions are ignored?
Why are certain ways of visualizing this issue chosen over others?
What concrete actions does the film want the viewer to take? And does the scale of these actions correspond to the scale of the problem(s) identified?
đ§Â What Iâm listening to
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
The Hemingway App. If youâve been reading my newsletter thus far, thank you, I have a feeling my writing can be a bit long-winded/dense sometimes, a bad habit acquired from my years toiling away in academia. I recently watched a dissertation defense on climate communication and community outreach that mentioned the Hemingway App as an important tool for climate communicators to make their writing much more accessible in community outreach projects. It basically allows you to assess the reading level of your writing, and adjust accordingly for your audience. Hopefully Iâll be able to locate the recording of the dissertation defense to share soon as it was filled with many great insights into community-based climate communication.
đ° News and Events
Language, ecology and the stories we live by. A recent profile of ecolinguist Arran Stibbeâs work by Sarah Wood in Punchline.
Humpback whales change their migration patterns as the climate warms. In Yale Climate Communications Blog.
Reminder: Writing Beyond the Environment: Emergence Nature Writing Course 2.0. With staff writer Chelsea Steinauer-Scudder. (Starts April 7).
Threatened species and how we might save them: Michelle Nijhuis details historyâs successes as a road map for todayâs conservationists in her new book âBeloved Beasts.â By Rachel Love Nuwer in High Country News.
Environmental Journalism Grant: Investigating Environmental Policy in Latin America from The Wilson Center and Earth Journalism Network (I came across this in the excellent Science Writing News Round-Up Newsletter run by Marianna Limas.
đ Research
Ecosystem integrity is neither real nor valuable. By Yasha Rohwer and Emma Marris in Conservation Biology: âWe argue that âecological integrityâ is a bad fit as a value for conservation biology and restoration ecology.â
Roundtable Animal Personhood: perspectives from continental law (video). From the The Animals & Biodiversity Think Tank Programme at the Global Research Network.
What If: multispecies justice as the expression of utopian desire by Mathias Thaler in Environmental Politics.
A few interesting research summaries on the topic of conservation in the global fishing industry on the EnviroSociety blog:
Fish, men and sea, about a photojournalism project called âMore to Seaâ exploring the negative narratives surrounding small-scale fishers in Sydney. By MariĂŤlle Klein Lankhorst
Shifting Baseline and Factish Resilience. About the dominant (and invented) discourse of fish stock recovery in Japanâs domestic herring fishery. By Shingo Hamada.
Governance for The Anthropocene Ocean. By Prof. Ana K. Spalding: âWe have a unique opportunity to redefine ocean narrativesâŚThe global community is faced with addressing critical questions about how we deal with climate, public health, economic, and racial justice crises. The Anthropocene Ocean is now part of that future with calls to elevate equitable conservation and sustainability within the ocean economy.â
đĄ Ideas
Why authors are saying the ânatural worldâ no longer exists. By Zoya Teirstein in Grist. The piece delves into Nathaniel Richâs new book Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade, as well as another book Iâm really looking forward to by Emma Marris: Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World (coming in June 2021. If you read Nathaniel Richâs nonfiction writing on climate change, youâll notice he promotes an environmental discourse that frames human nature (and therefore all humans) as the main problem. For critiques of this âhuman nature badâ environmental discourse, I recommend checking out Naomi Kleinâs piece, Capitalism Killed Our Climate Momentum, Not âHuman Nature,âor Roy Scrantonâs review of Richâs climate change writing: Wonk Quixote: Nathaniel Richâs climate-change fairy tale.
What a Songbird Lost at Sea Taught Me About Survival. By JoAnna Klein in Audobon.
Itâs all Greek to me: The terms âpraxisâ and âphronesisâ in environmental philosophy. By Bill Dennison in the University of Maryland, Center for Environmental Science Blog.
đŹÂ Quotes Iâm thinking about
âStories are never neutral. At its fundamental level, a story is an assertionâeither a reinforcement or a contestation of our interpretations of reality. And today, the contest between competing narratives to explain the present state of our world has never felt so consequential.â
âJonathan Matthew Smucker, in the foreword to the 2nd edition of Re:Imagining Change.
âIf you want to build a ship, donât herd people together to collect wood and donât assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.â
âAntoine de Saint-ExupĂŠry, cited in Re:Imagining Change: How to Use Story-Based Strategy to Win Campaigns, Build Movements, and Change the Worldby Patrick Reinsborough and Doyle Canning (2017).
And this tweet resonated a little too closely with me these days:
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 toođ 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 youâre involved in/most interest you, or anything youâd like to see more of in Wild Ones:)