🌿Wild Ones #56: Environmental Communication Digest
Don't Look Up + The Greenwashing Files + Frack-Off: Social Media Fights Against Fracking in Argentina + More!
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:
📚 What I’m reading
The Great Uprooting: Migration and Displacement in an Age of Planetary Crisis. By Amitav Ghosh in The Massachusetts Review (2021):
“It is no coincidence that this great uprooting of people is occurring at the same time that the impacts of climate change are intensifying. The relationship between the two is so close that to ask if contemporary migrations are a consequence of climate change is, I think, to ask the wrong question. Climate change and migration are, in fact, two cognate aspects of the same thing, in that both are effects of the ever-increasing growth and acceleration of processes of production, consumption, and circulation. In this sense the dynamic that is driving the other uprootings that we are now witnessing — of trees, animals, plants, glaciers, and so on — is no different from that which is driving the movements of humans. This is another respect in which human history has once again converged with the history of the Earth.” – Amitav Ghosh
🎬What I’m watching
Don’t Look Up, directed by Adam McKay and co-written with David Sirota. You’ve probably heard of this film by now, but just in case here’s a link to the trailer:
The film’s plot follows the frustrated efforts of two astronomers (played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio) to communicate their discovery to greedy political elites and celebrity-infatuated media pundits that an extinction-level asteroid is coming for the earth.
And as you might have heard too, the film deploys the asteroid hurtling towards the earth as a metaphor for our climate crisis. Despite film critics claiming the metaphor is almost too obvious, I wonder if many people (especially in the U.S.) whose particular media ecosystems limit their exposure to information about the climate crisis might not see it as so obvious, as one commentary on the film suggested.
But just in case, to make sure their point gets across, the creators have also developed a ‘climate platform’ website with 9 (mostly lifestyle-oriented) ‘actions steps’ to take after watching the film:
I thought it was entertaining, brought focus to issues of political greed and media failures hindering collective action, and I was glad to at least see a ‘climate film’ being made, as climate writer Mary Heglar says. So I recommend checking it out, even if you feel the asteroid metaphor doesn’t quite work.
But to me, more interesting than the film itself is all the discourse it’s generating among climate researchers and journalists, both positive and negative (see some of the comments that stuck with me below). It’s also clear lots of people are tuning in to watch it, as the film apparently ‘smashed Netflix viewing records,’ a feat that ‘flabbergasted’ director Adam McKay:
Dr. Valérie Masson-Delmotte, climate scientist and co-chair of the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report, wrote this generally positive thread on Twitter about some of her main takeaways from the film based on her personal struggles communicating the science to politicians and policymakers. For example, she writes, “the film shows the discrepancy between the way scientists work and the way the media and political power work. I clearly felt it on several occasions” (read the entire thread here).
Stefan C. Aykut, Professor of Sociology at the Unversity of Hamburg, offered some constructive criticism of the film on Twitter – citing a recent paper he co-authored on the social dimensions influencing the (in)effectiveness of climate communication. He argues that the film finds “a reasonably good [asteroid] metaphor for the climate crisis, even though it’s not perfect….” For instance, when it comes to framing the problem: “the asteroid is so big & apocalyptic that everything else disappears. Inequality, racism, relations of exploitation are secondary in the film. Yet, these are fundamental features of the climate crisis & central to understanding inaction”:
Here are other comments/articles on the film that I found made some really interesting points too:
Finally, climate writer Mary Heglar, in the climate newsletter Hot Take, wrote about three ways “Don’t Look Up has changed the portrayal of climate change in Hollywood.” Here’s #3:
“3. Misinformation takes center stage. One of the big ways that Don’t Look Up fails as a metaphor for climate change is that the comet is a pure coincidence. It wasn’t created on earth as a product of capitalism and colonialism. So, that means the movie is freed of the task of creating and vilifying a counterpart to the fossil fuel industry, and that gave them room to place the blame at another just-as-guilty party: the media that under-informs the public and the politicians that actively misinform them. We need so, so many more people to understand that.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
Bathsheba Demuth on a More-Than-Human History. On the podcast For the Wild
“Wealth is being accumulated by very few people very unjustly and it doesn’t allow for social or ecological flourishing.” – Bathsheba Demuth
🔍 Tools & Resources
Resources for working with climate emotions. From the All We Can Save Project, and crated in collaboration with Britt Wray of the climate emotions newsletter Gen Dread: “As Susi Moser writes in All We Can Save, ‘Burnt-out people aren’t equipped to serve a burning planet … [so] the well-being of our hearts and souls must be reestablished to their rightful place as relevant, essential.’”
The Greenwashing Files by Client Earth: “Following our world-first complaint against BP’s advertising, we've investigated some of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies and uncovered the truth. Our Greenwashing Files highlight how advertising doesn’t always match up to reality.”
📰 News and Events
Media report: As Afghan Humanitarian Crisis Spikes, US News Coverage Plummets. By Jim Lobe, in Common Dreams
Conference: Communicating Sustainability 2022: “a two-day conference on the theme of Communicating Sustainability taking place on the 6th and 7th September 2022. This event will be held in parallel across three international hubs: the University of Glasgow, Scotland; Goucher College in Baltimore, United States; and the Universidade Federal de Sergipe, Brazil.”
Online Conference: First International Conference on Ecolinguistics and Econarratives. March 10, 2022.
Commentary: Just a little too slow: Why journalists struggle to cover climate change. By Bill McKibben in NiemanLab (Jan 6, 2022): “…we still need to come to grips with the essential problem: the biggest news story of all time doesn’t quite fit our working definition of news, and hence is going remarkably undercovered. The comet, even now, is crashing into us, but we’re not quite able to see it.”
📚 Research
Frack-Off: Social Media Fights Against Fracking in Argentina. By
Malayna Raftopoulos and Doug Specht in Environmental Communication: “This article explores how the anti-fracking movements in the province of Mendoza, Argentina, have used Twitter to shape narratives around anti-fracking.”A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism by Melissa Aronczyk and Maria I. Espinoza. Oxford University Press: “Offers an as-yet untold account of the promotional agents who have influenced public perception of the environment since the beginning of the twentieth century.”
Helping Scientists to Communicate Well for All Considered: Strategic Science Communication in an Age of Environmental and Health Crises. A Special issue (2021) in Frontiers in Communication.
It’s not enough to be right! The climate crisis, power, and the climate movement: The demands of the climate movement ‐ for rapid and profound change ‐ are based on scientific findings and the political commitments to the Paris Agreement. The activists are, therefore, factually “right”. However, being right is not enough to justify or to accelerate the practical implementation of knowledge and decisions. We explain which social factors are at work, and how the climate movement can benefit if they incorporate these factors into actions for social change.
💡 Ideas
Fossil Fuel Companies Are Turning the US Into a Repressive Petrostate. By Branco Mercetic, in Jacobin.
The Rise in Forward-Looking Corporate Climate Cases: From Shell to Santos. By Dana Drugmand, Researcher at the Center for International Environmental Law. A great summary of the growing number of lawsuits being filed (and winning) around the world targetting fossil-fuel greenwashing in marketing around the use of terms like ‘clean’ energy and ‘net-zero’ emissions.
Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis. By Elin Kelsey: Kelsey “describes effective campaigns to support ocean conservation, species resilience, and rewilding, demonstrating how digital conservation is helping scientists target specific problems with impressive results.”
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
“The peculiarities of the vision of the Indian people are expressed according to the way in which they are related to each other. First, between human beings, through communication. Second, with the earth, as with our mother, because she gives us our lives and is not mere merchandise. Third, with nature, because we are an integral part of it, and not its owners. To us Mother Earth is not only a source of economic riches that give us the maize, which is our life, but she also provides so many other things that the privileged ones of today strive for. The Earth is the root and the source of our culture. She keeps our memories, she receives our ancestors and she, therefore, demands that we honor her and return to her, with tenderness and respect, those goods that she gives us. We have to take care of her so that our children and grandchildren may continue to benefit from her. If the world does not learn now to show respect to nature, what kind of future will the new generations have?”
– Rigoberta Menchú Tum (born this day, January 9, 1959), in her 1992 Nobel Peace Prize Lecture.
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