🌿Wild Ones #57: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental Keyword: 'Green-Grabbing' + Fabrice Monteiro's Prophecy series + Tips for academics on how to talk to journalists + A new vision for environmental learning
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a (usually) weekly 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: ‘Green Grabbing’:
Over the past 20 years or so, growing concerns that mainstream approaches to conservation are failing have converged and clashed in ‘the great conservation debate.’ This debate has been propelled in part by critical assessments of what’s gone wrong with conservation, as well as by a number of terrifying scientific press releases and reports of ‘species extinction accelerating’ and ‘Nature in decline.’ Some suggest the debate can be boiled down to two clashing positions on how best to save nature in a time of ecological crisis: ‘sparing vs. sharing’. Others argue that this is way too simplistic, as conservationists are a diverse bunch of people grappling with very different circumstances around the world, and therefore hold a much more complex range of positions. In their recent book on this debate, political ecologists Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher write that “[i]n analysing the great conservation debate, it is clear that the lived reality of the conservation community is a tense and pressurized one, imbued with a great sense of crisis and responsibility.”
So I had this ‘tense’ and ‘pressurized’ debate swirling around in the back of my mind recently when I was reading through a special issue on ‘green grabbing’ from 2012. In the introduction article, the authors define ‘green grabbing’ like this:
“Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance…Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances.”
The keyword ‘green grabbing’ was coined by environmental journalist John Vidal in a 2008 article in The Guardian, ‘the great green land grab.’ There, he documents how billionaires and big conservation organizations are buying up land around the world in the name of environmental protection. In the article, Kim Vacariu, then Western Director for the Wildlands Project (now Wildlands Network) tells Vidal: “It is too much to rely on governments to protect the land. The only way to make [conservation] happen in time is to buy it from willing sellers.” Vidal argues that ‘green grabbing’ – or buying up and cordoning off vast areas of nature to save it – is increasingly being adopted as a key conservation method in a time when conservationists are feeling a growing sense of crisis and urgency.
When it comes to green-grabbing, “The central idea is that we need to 'sell nature in order to save it,” writes environmental geographer Mellisa Leach. Giving examples of green grabbing, Leach says “the most striking ones are around forest carbon, known as Reducing Emissions Deforestation (REDD and REDD+) which is intended to protect existing forests and create new forest plantations to fix carbon. In practice, this sometimes means restricting access to land to people with many negative effects.”
“To understand how green grabbing unfolds in particular places, then, we must attend to both the nature of new political economies and discourses around nature, and how they play into regionally or locally specific histories of environments, land use, governance and agrarian relations,” the authors of ‘green-grabbing’ argue (emphasis mine).
So what ‘discourses around nature’ are influencing the idea that green-grabbing may be conservation’s best hope? That’s a complex question I’m still trying to figure out, but to start with one example: for The Wildlands Network, quoted in Vidal’s article on green-grabbing, a key environmental discourse is ‘rewilding.’
The Wildlands Network coined the keyword ‘rewilding’ in 1991, writes environmental historian Dolly Jørgensen in tracing the evolution of the term over the past 30 years. The concept of rewilding has shifted in meaning as different environmental organizations and activists have taken it up for local purposes. But most of these definitions, says Jørgensen, imagine nature as ‘wilderness’ – a place without people – and therefore ‘re-wilding’ to mean expanding protected spaces for nature with few or no people in them. For rewilders in Europe and North America where the idea is most popular, a key conservation method for rewilding has been to establish nature ‘cores’ and ‘corridors,’ primarily for ‘carnivores’ (with this being captured in the principle of ‘The Three C’s). Geographer Jamie Lorimer calls this “trophic rewilding.”
Researchers critical (or critically hopeful) of rewilding efforts point to its connections to colonial thinking about nature as ‘untouched wilderness.’ In practice, this has involved dispossessing Indigenous and local people of their land in the name of saving nature by creating cordoned-off national parks, carbon offsets, ecotourism enclaves, and militarized wildlife corridors. If saving nature depends on saving wilderness – “as wild without people and…oblivious to the problematic nature of the wilderness construct” (Jørgensen 2015) – then green grabbing too easily appears like ‘the only way to make conservation happen in time’ as Vacariu, quoted in John Vidal’s article claims.
However, rather than abandon the notion of rewilding because of its colonial ties to green-grabbing, environmental geographer Kim Ward writes that we instead need to ‘decolonize’ rewilding. For her, this means rejecting the discourse of ‘wilderness’ in favor of a discourse ‘wildness’:
“it is the notion of wildness, not Wilderness, that offers Rewilders the most potential in moving towards an inclusive, future-orientated conservation approach that doesn’t seek the ever-elusive goal to create pure spaces of Nature” (pdf).
What examples of rewilding wildness are there out there? Dolly Jørgensen suggests one alternative understanding of rewilding that could be taken up by conservationists is found in the example of Rewild Vancouver. Rather than separating people from nature, this model of rewilding envisions creating ‘wild places’ enabling both humans and wildlife to flourish, especially in human-full places like the city. This discourse of nature, as environmental writer Emma Marris puts it, might involve ‘learn[ing] to accept both nature that looks a little more lived-in than we are used to and working spaces that look a little more wild than we are used to’.
Beyond the city, another model could be the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). The Y2Y initiative aims to ‘knit together’ the landscape between Yellowstone and Yukon to enable ‘umbrella species’ like grizzly bears to thrive, but doing so in a way that “Recogniz[es] communities need equal opportunities and rights to thrive, Y2Y seeks to support human diversity, equity, inclusion; and environmental and social justice, and to oppose actions and policies that undermine these principles.” In his recent newsletter, Chris La Tray, enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians, cites this discourse of environmental justice in the Y2Y model, and suggests it’s a promising indication of organizations taking some steps toward decolonizing their conservation methods: by prioritizing Indigenous people and putting their efforts behind ‘land back’ (rather than land grabbing) initiatives.
More than 10 years after coining the term ‘green grabbing’ in his 2008 article, environmental journalist John Vidal wrote another article in the Guardian asking: “so why is conservation failing?” Interviewing conservationists, scholars, and activists responding to a new report at the time that species extinction and biodiversity loss is accelerating, Vidal suggests several reasons, from media failures to technocratic, top-down conservation approaches that disregard people on the ground. One conservationist tells him, “We need to re-imagine everything – rethink and challenge everything we do, how we do it and who does it.”
For ecolinguists and environmental communicators, I think an important ‘leverage point’ we can pull on in the ‘great conservation debate’ is to map out the language we use and the stories we tell to communicate both conflicting and shared visions for what healthy human relationships with nature should look like in the years ahead. With a better map of the language and values of this complex conservation terrain, we’ll be in a better position to develop a coherent set of principles to guide more environmentally just conservation initiatives.
🎧 What I’m listening to
Nocturne: A storytelling show that explores the night, the landscape of the unseen, and how thoughts, feelings and behaviors transform in the dark.
Dec 2021 Episode: Dogma. “Pedram's dog, KitKat, is the most important thing in his life - their close emotional bond is a source of comfort and delight. But this bond also comes with constant fear, because they live in Iran where dogs are considered "untouchable", and the only truly safe place is in the dark shadows of the night.”
👀What I’m watching
A short trailer (see below) about photographer Fabrice Monteiro’s newest addition to his fascinating Prophecy photograph series:
Caption for above photo: The10th prophecy (from the photo series ‘The Prophecy’ by Fabrice Monteiro. “..and so the spirit took away the Colors and life of the reef.” About the series, Monteiro says: ‘I wanted to create a series of spirits sent by Mother Earth to warn humankind about its neglect and destruction of the environment.’ On a side note, I discovered Monteiro’s work when I came across Cajetan Iheka’s new book: African Ecomedia: Network forms, planetary politics:
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
How to talk about the ocean. From FrameWorks.
13 Tips for academics on how to talk to journalists: “#4: Construct a clear messaging framework and have specific examples on hand. Journalists are looking for short soundbites, oftentimes under tight deadlines and pressure from their editors.” Here is a video of a workshop from last year (June 2021) on the topic organized by the Technology and Social Change Project, at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University.
📰 News and Events
Workshop: Speaking about the humans. Animal perspectives on the multispecies world: This one-day interdisciplinary workshop aims to get a better understanding of other animals’ perspectives on humans and the implications of these perspectives for developing better relations.
Event: Author Meets Readers: Pollution Is Colonialism. “Dr Max Liboiron will discuss their new book Pollution is Colonialism in an online ‘Author Meets Readers’ session with Professor Michelle Murphy, Professor Deboleena Roy, and Dr Angeliki Balayannis: 27-01-22, Live on Zoom, 12.00 EST / 13.30 NST / 17.00 GMT.
Action:
📚 Research
Academic Flying and the Means of Communication. (open-access book). By Kristian BjørkdahlAdrian Santiago Franco Duharte (editors):
“Provides the first and only volume to collect and consolidate current research on academic aeromobility. Uncovers the mechanisms that have made flying seem necessary to the academic enterprise. Offers research-based proposals for how to reduce academia’s reliance on flying. Reflects on how the COVID-19 pandemic has changed or might change attitudes towards air travel.”
Demilitarizing disarmament with mine detection rats. By Darcie DeAngelo in Culture and Organization: “This paper will use observations from over 14 months of fieldwork among this partnership with mine detection rats, showing tensions between local militarized methods for disarmament and an NGO’s aspirations for global humanitarianism.”
There’s an interesting discussion in the article about the discourse of ‘cute-ification’ of mine detection rats in publicity materials and other public communications, and the ‘militarizing’ of dogs in Cambodia’s mine disarmament efforts.
Read more about Ronin, a mine detection sniffing out dangerous landmines in Cambodia.
💡 Ideas
Why Are ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ Producing Ads for Big Oil? By Amy Westervelt in The Nation: It looks like real news, but “native advertising” is greenwashing for the climate-wrecking industry.
An Environmentalist’s Lessons for an Improvisational Life. By Mitchell Thomashow in MIT Press Reader, an article adapted from Mitchell’s new book:
To Know the World: A new vision for environmental learning: “Life Improvisation is the essence of environmental learning, sparking the imagination, stimulating creativity, and helping us reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth.”
The Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative (Y2Y). Chris La Tray examines the connects and disconnects between the Indigenous Land Back movement and conservation.
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. … Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? … This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
– from Martin Luther King’s 1967 Christmas Sermon, at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia.
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