đżWild Ones #42: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental Keyword: 'Wildness' + Rights of Nature Concept + Mapping the field of Climate Communication + Afro Surf: The Book + 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±Environmental Keyword
âWildnessâ
ââŠwe need a post-wilderness concept of wildness. A wild life is characterized by openness, possibility, a degree of choice, and self-determination, in which beings are understood to have their own familial, social, and ecological networks, their own lookouts, agendas, and needs.â
In his essay Walking, published in The Atlantic in June of 1862, Henry David Thoreau writes one of his most famous lines, âIn Wildness is the preservation of the world.â
But this line is also one âthat is still misquoted as a defense of untouched wilderness,â writes Deagan Miller. Miller, a historian of American environmentalism, argues that ââŠthere is perhaps no way Thoreau has been more misunderstood than as an advocate for humanless wilderness, and such misunderstandings often branch from this concept of his â the wild.â This is because âwildness, a quality, and wilderness, a place, are not the same things.â Or as Jack Turner captures this idea: âWhat counts as wilderness is not determined by the absence of people, but by the relationships between people and place.â
Since the 1990s, the ideal of âwildernessâ as an ideal for environmetnalism and conservation has been questioned by a range of researchers, writers and activists. As Iâve written about before, the climate crisis, âthe Anthropocene,â and claims about the âend of nature,â have accelerated these criticisms about how to go about protecting âthe wildâ in a human-influenced world.
For example, the geographer Rosemary-Claire Collard writes that wilderness ideas of Nature as pristine and untouched by humans âhave come under justifiable scrutiny in recent decades, largely due to their starring role in ongoing land dispossessions worldwide.â
And in his 1996 essay, The Trouble With Wilderness, environmental historian William Cronon writes that âThe time has come to rethink wilderness.â
Cronon argues that Thoreauâs notion of wildness has often been taken as a synonym for wilderness. But for Thoreau, wildness isnât a place absent of human influence. Itâs a relationship of responsibility and care where we understand ourselves not outside of nature, but as he puts it, âas an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature.â In this way, Cronon argues that cultivating wildness in our relationships with the world is about âlearning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other.â
The most common image of Thoreau is a romantic nature writer who praised self-reliance, admonished city-life, and embraced a return âto the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of lifeâŠ.â
But Thoreau also spent a lot of time working as a land surveyor, surveying the Concord River. He created dozens of maps and in the process, became an expert scholar of surveying. Thoreau spent weeks at a time on the river, documenting every nook and cranny of it. He spent so much time floating down the river, in fact, it actually started worrying his writing companion, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Emerson felt Thoreau was wasting his time; time that he could be spending writing more serious things instead. In a letter to a freind, Emerson writes, âHenry T. occupies himself with the history of the river, measures it, weighs it, strains it through a colander to all eternityâ (cited in Miller, 2018, p. 23).
Thoreau loved working as a surveyor. But in mastering the job, it also led him to realize some new connections about the role of surveying in the U.S. Reviewing Thoreauâs writings about his work as a surveyor in Walking and other work, Miller writes that Thoreau describes surveying as a profit-driven force that transforms wild places into a grid of abstract spaces. And â[t]he ultimate problem with abstraction is that it relies always on violence â one of the wordâs many meanings is âto stealâ â and one of the purposes of [Americaâs] nineteenth centuryâs great federally funded land surveys was to prepare for stealing land from othersâ (Miller 2018).
When wilderness is valued as peopleless places, it âgets us into trouble,â says Cronon: âWilderness gets us into trouble only if we imagine that this experience of wonder and otherness is limited to the remote corners of the planet, or that it somehow depends on pristine landscapes we ourselves do not inhabit. Nothing could be more misleading.â
Instead, we should value âWilderness [as] the place where, symbolically at least, we try to withhold our power to dominate.â And fostering wild relationships will look very different from place to place and from species to species, as local communities intervene in nature to help âfacilitate freedom of movement, play, social life, and the ability of animals to work for themselvesâ (Rosemary-Claire Collard).
If we see wildness, not as places absent of people, but as the expression of our respect for âthe autonomy of the otherâ in the places we already dwell in, then weâre on the right track, says Cronon:
âJust so can we still join Thoreau in declaring that âin Wildness is the preservation of the World,â for wildness (as opposed to wilderness) can be found anywhere: in the seemingly tame fields and woodlots of Massachusetts, in the cracks of a Manhattan sidewalk, even in the cells of our own bodies.â
For more on âwildnessâ:
Thoreauâs great insight for the Anthropocene: Wildness is an attitude, not a place, by Robert M. Thorson, in the Conversation.
WILD, by Rosemary-Claire Collard in the Multispecies Salon.
The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature, by William Cronon. In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature.
âAct One: At the Boundary with Henry David Thoreauâ by Daegan Miller, a chapter in his 2018 book, This Radical Land.
Living Through the End of Nature: The Future of American Environmentalism, by Paul Wapner.
The Abstract Wild, by Jack Turner.
đ§Â What Iâm listening to
Iâve been trying to catch up on past seasons of this fascinating podcast from climate reporter Amy Westervelt. In this most recent episode, she talks to the filmakkers of âInvisible Handâ that explores the concept of rights of nature as Here, âJosh Boaz Pribanic and Melissa Troutman, co-founders of Public Herald join to talk about their new documentary on the rights of nature, Invisible Hand. Check out Invisible Handâ
đ What Iâm watching
Invisible Hand: Rights of Nature Documentary (trailer), a documentary about the rights of nature concept. The full documentary can be viewed here.
đ° News, Events & Opportunities
5th International Conference on Ecolinguistics (ICE-5) was held this week. Here are some of the pre-recorded presentations from the conference.
The National Science-Health-Environment Reporting Fellowships. Journalists interested in building careers reporting on science, health and the environment are eligible to apply for new cross-cutting fellowships designed to provide training, networking, mentoring, new sources and story ideas, while allowing them to stay at their jobs.
đ Research
Wildlife Tourism Futures: Encounters with Wild, Captive and Artificial Animals, Edited by Giovanna Bertella.
Animal Traffic: Lively Capital in the Global Exotic Pet Trade, by Rosemary-Claire Collard.
Who Sets the Agenda? the Dynamic Agenda Setting of the Wildlife Issue on Social Media, in Environmental Communication.
Mapping the Field of Climate Change Communication 1993â2018: Geographically Biased, Theoretically Narrow, and Methodologically Limited, by
Sol Agin and Michael Karlsson in Environmental Communication.
đĄ Ideas
Did climate change cause societies to collapse? New research upends the old story: The untold history of how people survived the past 2,000 years. By Kate Yoder in Grist.
Afro Surf: The Book: âThe first book to comprehensively document and celebrate surfing and related street culture in Africa. Together with Selema Masekela and some of Africa's finest photographers, thinkers, writers, and surfers we explore the unique culture of eighteen coastal countries, from Morocco to Somalia, Mozambique, South Africa, and beyond.â
Belief Is Biased: Itâs vital to know how our values trump logic. (pdf) By Jay Ingram.
đŹÂ Quotes Iâm thinking about
âTo me, the problem is symbolised by two words I keep stumbling across in scientific and official papers: âunderfishedâ and âunderexploitedâ. These are the terms fisheries scientists use for populations that are not âfully fishedâ. The words people use expose the way they think, and what powerful, illuminating, horrible words these are. They seem to belong to another era, when we believed in the doctrine of dominion: humans have a sacred duty to conquer and exploit the Earth. I suspect some people are so angry because itâs not just malpractice Seaspiracy exposes, but an entire worldview.
Itâs time to see the oceans in a new light: to treat fish not as seafood but as wildlife; to see their societies not as stocks but as populations; and marine food webs not as fisheries but as ecosystems. Itâs time we saw their existence as a wonder of nature, rather than an opportunity for exploitation. Itâs time to redefine our relationship with the blue planet.â
â George Monbiot, in the Guardian
âïžWritings from my desk
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