🌿Wild Ones #59: Environmental Communication Digest
'Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism' + The Environmental Storytelling Studio + A is for Bee + more!
Hi everyone! Welcome back to Wild Ones, a weekly digest by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tips in ecolinguistics and environmental communication. I’m happy to be back posting again after taking a bit of break, but thanks so much for your continued interest in my little digest! I’m looking forward to sharing all things at the communication-environment nexus I come across as a researcher and educator in the field:) 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
Bram Büscher (2020). The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism.
I’ve been reading bits and pieces of Bram Büscher’s 2020 book, The Truth about Nature, over the past couple of months, as there are a lot of ideas and arguments he takes up that have taken me some time to get a handle on. But I can say, at this point, that it raises some important – and unsettling – questions about how social media is used to promote environmental campaigns and goals. One of the contributions (and challenging aspects) of the book is that it builds on arguments about the rise of ‘surveillance capitalism’ and its role in shaping new online media. Here Büscher builds on work by scholars examining how ‘platform capitalism’ shapes knowledge, politics and communication in society, like Shoshanna Zuboff (here’s an interesting documentary on Zuboff’s work).
Büscher describes how many popular approaches to communication campaigns about environmental problems adopt “the idea….that once people understand ‘the facts,’ they are better educated and will do things that ‘make a difference’ for the environment.” As environmental crises continue to worsen, popular approaches to communicating environmental challenges have tended to either embrace a ‘doom and gloom’ framing on the one hand, or an optimistic ‘hope’ frame on the other, says Büscher.
Both approaches have their benefits and drawbacks he says. As for drawbacks, doom and gloom approaches may overwhelm people into apathetic inaction on the one hand, or conversely, approaches that seek to motivate through hope may lead people into overly optimistic inaction.
More and more, writes Büscher, the urgency of environmental breakdown is motivating environmental organizations and actors to take a ‘back to the facts’ approach to environmental communication. As he puts it: “while both styles remain popular it might be better, many seem to think, to concentrate on facts and truths. After all, conservation is supposed to be based on facts and truths about nature, which are revealed through science. And as science continues to show that many environmental indicators are generally getting worse, it makes sharing these facts and truths even more important.”
To illustrate the growing popularity of ‘back to the facts’ approaches promoted by environmental organizations and individuals, Büscher gives many examples throughout the book, including:
Extinction Rebellion’s #1 demand: “Tell the truth. Governments must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.”
The “Share the Facts” campaign by Conservation International. As the website says: “Wildlife trafficking is a global problem. One of the best ways to counteract the illicit trade and profit is through education. Share these facts about wildlife trafficking and help make a difference.”
This piece by environmental journalist Cynthia Barnett in the LA Times: Op-Ed: We may live in a post-truth era, but nature does not. Barnett writes, “Regardless of alternative facts, fake news or scientific censorship, nature tells the truth.”
The book explores many other examples of how environmental campaigns are enlisting the help of social media to spread ‘the truth about nature’ (such as through #hashtag campaigns). What is nature’s truth? In a nutshell, the truth about nature is that “nature is not doing well but can be saved through appropriate (evidence-based) action.” However, while raising awareness about the urgency of the environmental crisis through relentless truth-telling and effective science communication is crucial, says Büscher, there is a more fundamental issue at stake:
“the problem remains: If environmental action is supposed to be based on facts and truths about nature, how to communicate and share these in a post-truth context?”
A key question the book asks is: how can environmental advocates effectively communicate and spread awareness about the reality of our global ecological crisis in all its urgent and complex truth, but do so successfully in an increasingly ‘post-truth’ media ecosystem based on what scholars like Shoshanna Zuboff and Nick Srnicek have called ‘platform capitalism’:
“The platform business model is predicated upon a voracious appetite for data that can only be sated by disregard for privacy (and often workers' rights), and constant outward expansion. As they become ever more central to the global economy…it's incumbent on us to understand how [platforms] function.”
– Nick Srnicek, in “The challenges of platform capitalism: Understanding the logic of a new business model” (2017, open acccess).
Below are some memorable excerpts from the introduction (and a short animated video I found helpful for explaining some of its key ideas):
“…the rise of post-truth politics and the specific mode of power this represents demands that we rethink the dominant engagement with truth. Post-truth, contrary to popular conceptualizations, is not some new word for age-old traditions of lying or bullshitting. It is also not, following the Oxford dictionary definition, emotions trumping facts in politics and public debate. Instead, a key intervention of this book is that post-truth is a recent phenomenon and should be understood as an expression of contemporary forms of power. This power, following Nick Srnicek and Shoshana Zuboff, is unprecedented and derives from a new logic of capitalist accumulation that they respectively refer to as “platform capitalism” and surveillance capitalism. Confronting this logic and the power behind it is critically important for any effective environmental politics. Not doing so will risk even the most astute environmental politics getting stuck in a debilitating vicious circle.”
What is this ‘vicious circle’ that Büscher refers to? Here is how he describes it:
“Sharing truths about nature through online new media to counter post-truth has the unintended effect of reinforcing the structural dynamics responsible for environmental crisis.”
– Bram Büscher, in The Truth about Nature, from the Introduction (pdf).
This claim, which Büscher spends the core of the book explaining and providing evidence for, is a fairly concerning diagnosis not just of the limited power of online media to effect positive environmental change in the world. More so, it suggests using online media to advance one’s environmental cause – when it is based in platform capitalism – can actually make things worse. The solution? I’ll have to save that for future Wild Ones’ digests as I digest(🤪) the book a bit more, but in the meantime, here is a helpful animated video that explains the book’s main thesis and suggests a possible way forward for environmental communicators in a ‘post-truth’ age:
🎥What I’m watching
Hot Times: Climate Change in Every Workplace (Pultizer Center). “Labor and climate experts in some of the most affected countries discuss how and why climate coverage rarely focuses on work issues. They examine the issues and how best to report on the risks. Featuring Nikhil Dey, Andreas Flouris, Flora Pereira, Phaedra C. Pezzullo, and Christine Spolar.”
Also watching: Intersections: Digging deeper into the term ‘Intersectional Environmentalism’ “A discussion on race, gender, history, and nature. This documentary “digs into the term ‘intersectional environmentalism’ - an inclusive version of environmentalism that advocates for both the protection of people and the planet. Through a thoughtful conversation between Leah Thomas - a young activist, and Betty Reid Soskin - the oldest Park Ranger in the US, the two women discuss topics that range from race, gender, history, and nature” (free to watch on waterbear.com).
🎧 What I’m listening to
“The IPCC mitigation report dropped [the week of April 9th] and it is a *doozy*. We'll be digging into it throughout the month of April to help you make sense of it all.” (read more here)
🔍 Opportunities, Tools & Resources
“The Environmental Storytelling Studio is a writing course for scholars, postdocs, faculty, and graduate students in the environmental sciences, social sciences, and humanities who want to marry scholarship with literary storytelling to engage a broad audience for their work.”
Behavior Change for Agriculture: A new interactive resource from Rare's Center for Behavior and the Environment: “A behavior-centered design approach to motivating farmers’ actions for climate and livelihoods.’
The SRIVE project: “The STRIVE project brings together experts in translation, intercultural communication, and crisis management, to investigate cultural and linguistic gaps in the Italian COVID-19 vaccination campaign.”
Flipping the Script on the Climate Narrative. A UN action campaign by Futerra. Also: Futerra’s ‘Rules of the Game’.
(Syllabus) Imagining Race and the Environment. By Min Hyoung Song, Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Boston College.
📰 News and Events
Call for Stories, The Bushfire Stories Project: The Bushfire Stories project aims to provide a platform for people to tell their stories and to be heard. At this project’s heart is the development of an online archive for community stories about Australian bushfires that can be accessed by anyone.
(Video) On Forest - A Symposium curated by Formafantasma Session 1: Contextualizing (the first of five sessions that explores “the complex relationship between the natural environment and design.” (June 6-8, 2022)
Tanzania’s Maasai appeal to west to stop eviction for conservation plans: Thousands of Indigenous people sign letter to UK, US and EU protesting at appropriation of land for tourist safaris and hunting. By Katie McQue in The Guardian.
An interesting Twitter 🧵 on this event and the social and ecological consequences of ‘fortress conservation’ by Asad Rehman (director of Warn on Want and co-founder of the COP26 coalition).
🤔⬇️
📚 Research
Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics (by Robert Poole) introduces and integrates key research concepts, principles and techniques in ecolinguistics and corpus-assisted discourse study, answering foundational questions for researchers new to the discipline and asserting the urgent need to expand its scope.
Global Villain, but Local Hero? A Linguistic Analysis of Climate Narratives from the Fossil Fuel Sector. By Trine Dahl in Applied Linguistics. (2022).
The Handbook of International Trends in Environmental Communication. Edited by Bruno Takahashi, Julia Metag, Jagadish Thaker, Suzannah Evans Comfort
2022 edition of Language & Ecology: “Language & Ecology publishes articles on the role of language in the life-sustaining relationships of humans, other species and the physical environment. It also publishes creative works (prose, poems or artwork) which promote ecological awareness, and analyses of these works.”
Tracking Memes in the Wild: Visual Rhetoric and Image Circulation in Environmental Communication. By Madison Jones, Aaron Beveridge, Julian R. Garrison, Abbey Greene, and Hannah MacDonald. In Frontiers in Communication (June, 2022).
💡 Ideas
How can journalism get better at covering climate change? Being a bummer might help. “A new study of social media about a climate change conference found journalists’ negative tweets gained far more traction with users than positive ones.” By Joshua Benton in Nieman Lab. (March 21, 2022).
Seed Money: Monsanto’s Past and Our Food Future (2021). Bart Elmore, Associate Professor at Ohio State University (USA) discussing his new book at the Greenhouse environmental humanities book talk series (March 28, 2021).
Finnegan, Dog Known for His Exemplary Nose, Dies at 14. By dog cognition scientist Alexandra Horowitz in the NYTimes. (Feb 21, 2022).
And this new children’s book looks fun!🐝: A is for Bee, An Alphabet Book in Translation, by Ellen Heck
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“For the last several years, especially after Donald Trump’s election as US president and the UK Brexit referendum in 2016, we have been living in what some have called the post-truth era. Truth, it seems, has been dealt its death blow. We now live in a world where commitment to any shared understanding of “reality” or “facts” seems unrealistic. My reality competes with your reality, and “alternative facts” compete with “actual” facts. As long as one’s reality or facts get traction or generate commercial success, they may seem legitimate in global information markets. This plainly poses fundamental challenges to environmentalism in the twenty-first century.”
“A simple observation: environmentalism is much older than social media. Trite though this observation may be, it is crucial in understanding how the latter came to influence the conservation world. Thus, while many see social media as a game changer, even the holy grail for conservation, many others are skeptical…”
– Bram Büscher (2020). The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism.
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:)
Hello Gavin, I am so glad you're back on writing these newsletters. I always look forward to receiving Wild Ones in my mailbox :) I am learning so much thanks to your content, keep it up!
Julie