🌿Wild Ones #58: Environmental Communication Digest
Writing and communicating 'the city' in American Conservation + The Rhetoric of Scale in Environmental Communication + Storytelling and Ecology + more!
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:
📚 What I’m reading
The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. By Dorceta E. Taylor. Duke University Press (2016):
How should we communicate ‘the city’ in a time of global ecological crisis? How has environmental writing and thinking been shaped by comparisons between urban life and the wilderness? How do we come to experience and know the cities we live in, or don’t live in, through different forms of environmental communication, such as visual technologies like film, maps, or ‘big data’? What kinds of urban ‘ecocultural identities’ and ‘metrolingual practices’ are taking shape in cities around the world?
The city I’ve lived longest in over the course of my life is Honolulu, Hawai‘i. So, a lot of my thinking about cities comes out of my experience in that city, such as its issues with transportation, energy, food security, struggles for environmental justice, its unique linguistic and cultural landscape, and the city’s history of social and political activism and inequality.
On a side note, there’s a song that comes to mind for me by the Native Hawaiian artist Israel Kamakawiwoʻole, that paints a devastating picture of how Honolulu’s sprawling urban development has spelled disaster for Hawai‘i. It’s one of my favorite songs of his. Here are the initial lyrics (read the full lyrics here. “Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i” is often translated as: "the life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.”
Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i
Ua mau, ke ea o ka aina, i ka pono, o Hawai'i
If just for a day our king and queen
Would visit all these islands and saw everything
How would they feel about the changes of our land
Could you just imagine if they were around
And saw highways on their sacred grounds
How would they feel about this modern city life
Tears would come from each others eyes
As they would stop to realize
That our people are in great great danger now
In environmental writing and thinking, juxtaposing the city and the wild (or urban/rural, society/nature) has a long and complicated history in the United States.
For example, Raymond Williams famously wrote about the contradictions the city conjures up in environmental thinking:
“‘Country’ and ‘city’ are very powerful words…On the country has gathered the idea of a natural way of life: of peace, innocence and simple virtue. On the city has gathered the idea of an achieved centre: of learning, communication, light. Powerful hostile associations have also developed: on the city as a place of noise, worldliness, and ambition; on the country as a place of backwardness, ignorance, limitation. A contrast between country and city, as fundamental ways of life, reaches back into classical times.”
This contrast is especially clear in the radical environmental movement that emerged in the 1960s and 70s in the U.S., and how they used a negative idea of the city to construct an ideal of the untouched wilderness. For example, in The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism, environmental historian Keith Makoto Woodhouse explores how members of these radical environmental movements, like Earth First!, “…considered the existence of natural places defined by human absence to be the best measure of planetary health. Potential wilderness disappeared every day as logging companies felled trees, governments built roads, and cities sprawled into suburbs, exurbs, and beyond” (highlight mine).
Anyways, I say all this as an excessively long preamble to let you know about a fascinating book I’ve just started reading by Dorceta E. Taylor, Professor of Environmental Justice at Yale School of the Environment. Her book is on “The Rise of the American Conservation Movement.” So far it’s an extremely rich history of how origins of conservation thinking in the U.S., and how ideas about nature circulated through communication networks of elite actors and agencies in American society in the 19th and 20th centuries. Here’s an excerpt I wanted to share on cities and their role early on in the American conservation movement:
“In the United States, many of the initiatives to protect nature began among urban elites. Though several factors contributed to the rise of pro-environmental behavior, the way elites perceived and related to the city was an important dimension of environmental protection. That is, what eventually emerged as the conservation movement in the early twentieth century was built on the activism that began centuries earlier in urban areas. As cities grew, urban elites were ambivalent about them. They developed what could best be described as a love-hate relationship with cities. This is not unusual: the city evokes complex emotions in people. On the one hand, it attracts vast numbers of people who want to live, work, and play in its confines, but on the other, many fear it or are repulsed by it. Some are simultaneously attracted to and repelled by it.
Elites were among the latter group: the city both fascinated and troubled them.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
The Better Tomorrow Speaker Series (Spotify link): “Oxford economist and best-selling author Kate Raworth, in conversation with UH professor Kamanamaikalani Beamer, discuss how the cult of endless growth in traditional economics has led us astray, undermining human welfare and outstripping planetary limits. In its place, they propose a circular framework for economic thinking, one based on indigenous knowledge and a broader set of metrics for sustainability, justice, and human well-being. They look to establish a new economics for the 21st century that would allow all of us to thrive, and that would protect future generations as well.”
🔍 Tools, Resources, Opportunities
This fascinating (and terrifying) overview of climate tipping points by Alexandria Herr, Shannon Osaka, and Maddie Stone in Grist:
📚 Research
(Re)placing the rhetoric of scale: Ecoliteracy, networked writing, and MEmorial mapping, by Madison Jones, in Mediating Nature: The role of technology in mediating nature. Routledge. 2019.
Jones’ chapter explores “the problem of scale in environmental communication, specifically in the use of visualization technologies to promote ecoliteracy and communicate massive environmental issues (such as sea-level rise or climate change) to public audiences.” Here’s an excerpt from Jones’ fascinating chapter I’m thinking about:
“In many ways, the disruptions that emerging technologies present to how we map the relations between writing and environment is nothing new. When images of the Earth from space began to circulate in the late 1960s, notions of the Earth as a large-scale ecosystem arose in both scientific and public thinking. As ecosystems ecologists like Howard T. Odum began trophic mapping and modeling at the level of atmosphere and in local environments, an American environmental movement took root. Visualization technologies became increasingly important for representing the large-scale environmental concerns to the public. In Losing Earth: A Recent History, Nathaniel Rich writes that with visualizations of the ozone hole, “though it was no more visible than global warming, ordinary people could be made to see it. They could watch it gestate on videotape” (2019: 112). From communicating the trophic scales of ecosystems to modeling the ozone hole, visualization technologies played a major role in how publics placed themselves within ecologies and environments. (p. 82-83).
Kin: Thinking with Deborah Bird Rose. Edited by Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew. Read the introduction here:
Storytelling and Ecology: Empathy, Enchantment and Emergence in the Use of Oral Narratives. By Anthony Nanson, 2021.
“Linking the ongoing ecological crisis with contemporary conditions of alienation and disenchantment in modern society, this book investigates the capacity of oral storytelling to reconnect people to the natural world and enchant and renew their experience of nature, place and their own existence in the world.”
💡 Ideas
Towards An Economy That Allows Life On Earth To Thrive, a talk by Jennifer Hinton, a researcher at Stockholm University and senior research fellow at the Schumacher Institute:
“This talk gives an overview of the key problematic features and dynamics of the current economy (i.e., the for-profit economy), and offers a vision of how the economy can be transformed for sustainability. Building on existing not-for-profit business structures, Jennifer Hinton outlines how a not-for-profit market economy is a feasible pathway out of the dysfunctions of capitalism.”
Bill McKibben on the lack of U.S. reporting, and climate coverage in particular, on Africa:
This was a great thread from writer Ed Yong exploring some of the ideas in his forthcoming book I’m super looking forward to reading: An Immense World: How animal senses reveal the hidden relams around us:
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“If language is always, in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitively separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese veeing south for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our own conversations and soliloquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated. Language as a bodily phenomenon accrues to all expressive bodies, not just to the human. Our own speaking, then, does not set us outside of the animate landscape but—whether or not we are aware of it—inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths.”
– David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
“[W]e need to move beyond a singular focus on semiosis in the service of abusive power—and reconsider power communally as well, as it circulates through communities, as they re-align around values, and renovate discourses that enact a better world.”
– James Martin, 2004: 197, cited in Positive Discourse Analysis: re-thinking human ecological relationships, by Arran Stibbe. In: The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics (2017).
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 too😊 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 you’re involved in/most interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Ones:)
Love the David Abram quote!
The Ed Yong book looks fascinating! Thanks for your review.