🌿Wild Ones #54: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental keyword: 'enabling entanglements' + Writing auto-eco-biographies + 'Understory' documentary + an interview with Amitav Ghosh + more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a weekly-ish digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in 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(s)
‘Enabling entanglements,’ ‘active hope’ and ‘stories of connection’
“…re-reading these activist stories inspired me to examine the geneaological roots of my own ‘enabling entanglements’ (Tsing), life experiences and choices that today help me to resist the hopelessness of the Anthropocene narrative, and to imagine and lean towards creating more critical, embodied, collaborative and life-affirming curricula, theories and community engagements in this time of great uncertainty and in the face of a damaged Earth”
– Giovanna Di Chiro, in Seaweed, ‘soul’-ar panels and other entanglements (2017).
I spent the day reading through this great collection of essays from a range of scholars and activists in environmental studies and humanities.
In a fascinating chapter, ‘Seaweed, Soul-ar Panels and Other Entanglements,’ Giovanna Di Chiro, Professor of Environmental Studies at Swarthmore College, writes about a recurring dilemma she experiences in trying to encourage hope in her environmental studies courses.
Di Chiro asks, How do you avoid the familiar territory of ‘well-informed futility syndrome’ that often haunts classroom discussions in environmental studies?: that sense of hopelessness that seeps into semester-long courses engaging with the science and politics of worsening environmental breakdown? “Despite my best effort, I am often accused of triggering despair and hopelessness,” says Di Chiro.
In experimenting with ways to address the pedagogical dilemma of hope-diminishing environmental syllabi, in 2014, Di Chiro refocused her environmental studies course on reading the memoirs and autobiographies of environmental and social activists from diverse backgrounds: people “who encountered difficulties, forged hard-won lessons and patched together the critical tools enabling resilience, empowerment, and creativity.”
“Activist memoir, and life-writing in general, calls on readers to explore their personal histories and trajectories…I envisioned that one of the learning outcomes of the course would be for students to imagine and give voice to the idea that they themselves were endowed with historical agency, a proactive identity that might interrupt the habitual turn to despair and cynicism.”
–Giovanna Di Chiro, in Seaweed, ‘soul’-ar panels and other entanglements (2017).
The aim was not just to cultivate a sense of hope in course discussions, but ‘active hope,’ building on Rebecca Solnit’s notion of hope in the dark. Active hope is kind of hope that takes an honest “account of complexities and uncertainties, but with openings.” (see also biocultural hope).
“Reading (and, perhaps, writing) activist stories and life narratives helps to move us beyond the declensionist narratives so favoured by the gloomy greens or the salvation stories championed by ecomodernists, which are two of the dominant narrative tones common to the fields of Environmental and Sustainability Studies.”
– Giovanna Di Chiro, in Seaweed, ‘soul’-ar panels and other entanglements (2017).
Di Chiro gives an example of her own ‘auto-eco-biography,’ arguing that by connecting our life stories to others, the genre can create openings for active hope. Di Chiro tells about her own life trajectory, from a marine biologist specializing in seaweed and reef ecology in the 1970s (and as a newcomer to the ‘the seaweed sisterhood’ of scientist-activist like Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010)), to an urban environmental justice activist and professor of environmental studies.
At the same time, the life story genre, while bringing focus to her past, also enabled Di Chiro to reflect on entanglements excluded from her life experience, and why. For example, Di Chiro remembers that, “[w]hile my reef diving expeditions allowed me to notice the dazzling complexity of this marine ecosystem,” she was “blissfully unaware of social activism happening nearby,” involving the wave of Native Hawaiian activism against military and colonial exploitation of Hawai‘i that rose up in the 1970s.
An important reason for reading and writing activist autobiographies, Di Chiro suggests, is not just to know which entanglements with the world made your life trajectory possible, but which excluded entanglements did too.
This reminds me of something Barry Lopez said once in an interview, insisting that autobiographical writing shouldn’t just be about you, but about connecting your life story up with others’ stories: “So, if you’re going to tell a story, and you want it to be an authentic story, it seems to me it’s got to do two things: First of all, it’s got to help, the story has to help. And the second thing is, it’s got to be about us [not just about me].”
More resources to check out:
Here is a cool ‘Zine’ created by Giovanna Di Chiro and her students at Swarthmore College for her 2014 Environmental Communication course (pdf). And this one for 2021 (pdf).
What autobiographies/memoirs have inspired you? I’d love to hear your recommendations in the comments:
🎥 What I’m watching
🎧 What I’m listening to
Beings Seen and Unseen: An interview with Amitav Ghosh. Interviewed by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee in Emergence Magazine (Nov 30, 2021):
“Wisdom exists in the context of stories, in the context of storytelling, in the context of songs. And all of that is what we’ve lost and what we have to try and bring back.”
– Amitav Ghosh
📰 News, Events & Opportunities
Webinar: Society of Environmental Journalist Webinar: “Learn how to apply for 100+ job openings — including many environmental positions — with Report for America” (recorded Dec 8, 2021).
Job: Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication, American University School of Communication, Washington D.C.
Film Screening🎥: ‘Finding Gulo’, by the Cascades Wolverine project
Conference: First International online conference on "Ecolinguistics and Ecological Narratives" Thursday 10th March, 2022 (abstract submission deadline December 30).
Course🎓1-week PhD-course: Environmental Storytelling and Narrative: April 25-29 2022. Offered by The Norwegian Researcher School in Environmental Humanities (The course is free but applicants need to be enrolled as Ph.D. students).
📚 Research
Incendiary Humor: Climate Change, Biodiversity, and Politics in Wildfire Cartoons. By Diana Moret-Soler, Anna Mateu & Martí Domínguez in Environmental Communication: “Cartoonists focus their critics on political leaders and economic interests. Fire always seems to be caused by political mismanagement, and is rarely presented as a natural, ecological phenomenon or as a direct consequence of climate change.”
Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril. by Deborah Bird Rose, University of Edinburgh Press (coming February 2022): “Deborah Bird Rose explores the shimmer of life – the iridescent pulse of beauty and power, the processes of transition and transformation – that flows across and between generations. Grounded within this insight, she develops and advocates for an ethics of attention, that is in the world within everyday practices, and in this case for and with flying foxes and their worlds. A deeply personal book, her struggle with cancer is gently woven into the account she offers of flying fox life and death.”
New and forthcoming books in the Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture book series, edited by Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Salma Monani:
💡 Ideas
How Indigenous Peoples Are Fighting the Apocalypse. By Julian Brave NoiseCat in Emergence Magazine:
“I’m thinking through the convergence of these apocalypses: the genocide of colonization and the ecocide of climate change. I’m trying to understand how Indigenous Peoples have persisted in the face of existential threats, because I believe that our survival ought to matter to more people than just ourselves. That it ought to matter to you.”
A thread on “media outlets being willing pawns to [fossil-fuel] industry”:
Conservatives Have a New Bogeyman: Critical Energy Theory
Inside ALEC’s new campaign to push anti-climate legislation across the country. By Kate Aronoff in The New Republic (December 7, 2021)A great thread (and resource for teaching) on the history of fossil-fuel ad campaigns aimed at blocking climate action:
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“[Hope] is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence
is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The
hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities,
ones that invite or demand that we act ... You could call it an account of
complexities and uncertainties, with openings.”- Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Stories, Wild Possibilities (2016). In Seaweed, ‘soul’-ar panels and other entanglements by Giovanna Di Chiro (2017).
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