🌿Wild Ones #60: Environmental Communication Digest
(Eco)Linguistic Relativity + Two Eyed Seeing + Environmental Communication PhD Opportunities + Rumors and Wildfires + 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. 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
‘ecolinguistic relativity’
“Few ideas generate as much interest and controversy as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the proposal that the particular language we speak influences the way we think about reality. The reasons are obvious: If valid it would have widespread implications for understanding psychological and cultural life, for the conduct of research itself, and for public policy.”
– John A. Lucy (1997), Linguistic Relativity. Annual Review of Anthropology, 26(1), p. 291.
“Beyond the renaming of places, I think the most profound act of linguistic imperialism was the replacement of a language of animacy with one of objectification of nature, which renders the beloved land as lifeless object, the forest as board feet of timber…”
– Robin Wall Kimmerer, Speaking of Nature: Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world. In Orion Magazine.
An interesting thread on Twitter popped up earlier this year on the topic of ‘linguistic relativity’ from Tom Pepinsky, a political scientist at Cornell. In a nutshell, linguistic relativity is the idea that the language(s) we speak influences how we think. It suggests that our everyday experience of reality – our worldview – is influenced in either big or small ways by the language we speak. It’s an idea made famous by the linguists Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939) and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897- 1941), hence the other name for linguistic relativity: ‘the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.’
The idea of ‘linguistic relativity’ has fascinated everyone from psychologists, to sci-fi writers (remember the movie Arrival?), to the emerging (and controversial field) of ‘Whorfian economics’ (more on this last field of research below).
But just to illustrate the idea of linguistic relativity a bit more, Tom gives the famous example of Guugu Yimithirr:
As Tom goes on to explain: “That's a pretty substantial claim, but there's good evidence Guugu Yimithirr speakers are better at dead reckoning and solving maze puzzles than are speakers of related languages who do possess egocentric directions and who live otherwise similar lives.”
This evidence from Guugu Yimithirr suggests a ‘weak’ version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: the language we speak influences how we experience the world in very subtle ways. In this case, the enhanced ability of Guugu Yimithirr speakers to ‘dead reckon'.
Another example of the ‘weak’ version of linguistic relativity is how Russian speakers are slightly faster at experimental tasks involving blue color classification than English speakers. The linguistic relativity claim here is that the Russian language distinguishes different shades of blue as completely different colors, whereas English speakers just perceive different shades of the same color: blue. Pepinsky also explains this oft-cited finding nicely in his thread:
While these examples illustrate the ‘weak’ version of linguistic relativity, Tom is concerned about a ‘strong’ version of the hypothesis gaining traction in a controversial new subfield of economics he calls ‘Whorfian socioeconomics’. Rather than language just having a subtle influence on our everyday patterns of thought, the ‘strong’ version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis goes something like this:
“the language we speak determines our experience of reality, shapes our worldview and unconsciously directs our everyday behavior in profound ways.”
For example, Whorfian socioeconomists make the stunning claim that people who grow up speaking a ‘futureless language’ (Chinese) save more money than people who speak ‘futured’ languages’. On a side note, in all my linguistics courses, I have never heard of languages being classified in this way, and it seems to exist only in this subfield of economics. One of the leading Whorfian economists, Keith Chen, explains his claim about the difference between futured and futureless languages like this, comparing English (a ‘futured language’) with Mandarin Chinese (a ‘futureless language’) (See Keith’s TED talk here):
“[Chinese speakers] can say yesterday it rained, now it rained, tomorrow it rained. In some deep sense, Chinese doesn't divide up the time spectrum in the same way that English forces us to constantly do in order to speak correctly…You speak English, a futured language, and what that means is that every time you discuss the future or any kind of a future event, grammatically, you're forced to cleave that from the present and treat it as if it's something viscerally different.
Now suppose that that visceral difference makes you suddenly disassociate the future from the present every time you speak. If that's true, and it makes the future feel like something more distant and more different from the present, that's going to make it harder to save. If, on the other hand, you speak a futureless language, the present and the future, you speak about them identically. If that suddenly nudges you to feel about them identically, that's going to make it easier to save.”
So, for Whorfian economists, it seems a particular language – or more specifically how the dimension of time (tense and aspect) is expressed through a particular language – does not just influence individuals’ thoughts, but determines how whole societies behave. ‘These are BIG claims!’ Tom Pepinsky says:
“What if people with obligatory politeness distinctions [like ‘tu/vous’ in French] in pronouns are more authoritarian than the rest of us? What if people with future oriented languages save more [money] than other people? These are BIG claims! I term this literature "Whorfian socioeconomics." It's linguistic relativity for the big leagues. Not just how we think, or how we go about our lives, but how whole societies are oriented. I also think that the evidentiary base for such claims is very thin.”
The gist of Pepinsky’s thread isn’t that the linguistic relativity hypothesis is wrong. In fact, his Twitter thread points to several areas of research that show how language influences our experience of the world in all sorts of fascinating ways. And I know many other language researchers find linguistic relativity fascinating, me included.
But in his recent article, Pepinsky warns: “I'm going to confess something: I am rooting against Whorfian socioeconomics. I think it is a dangerous position to hold that language matters in this way.” It is a dangerous position because it harkens back to an old colonial idea in Western philosophy that some ‘named languages” are better for thinking, and therefore more advanced than others. As he says, “There are no objectively good or bad languages, or strong or weak languages. Nobody's thoughts are crippled by the language that they speak.”
I think this is an important point for environmental communication. Does the language(s) we speak influence our environmental worldview? Or, to put it another way, does speaking English as a first language influence my experience of nature differently than say, people who grow up speaking French or Japanese?
For environmental communicators, I want to suggest these are unhelpful questions to ask. Starting with questions about the influence of a ‘named language’ like ‘English,’ ‘French,’ or ‘Mandarin Chinese’ on our patterns of thinking and behavior is where we risk getting into trouble in my view.
Just think of the radical diversity of environmental worldviews expressed by speakers of ‘English,’ or ‘French’ or ‘Japanese.’ Speakers of these languages express and act out a wide spectrum of both anti- and pro-environmental thoughts and behaviors, even though they may be using the ‘same language.’ Not to mention that most people on the planet are multilingual; do they experience conflicting worldviews, or switch between better and worse environmental behaviors when they switch languages?
Rather than the common ‘named languages’ approach, I think a more helpful way of thinking about eco-linguistic relativity - how language influences our environmental thinking and behavior – is a ‘discourse-oriented approach.’
Sociolinguist Joe Comer made this point commenting on Pepinsky’s thread:
Luckily, the field of ecolinguistics gives us a fantastic set of tools for exploring linguistic relativity from a discourse-oriented approach! According to ecolinguist Arran Stibbe, ‘discourses’ are the “standardised ways that particular groups in society use language, images and other forms of representation.” And these standardized ways of using language inform the kinds of ‘stories-we-live-by.’
From this perspective, it’s not the particular language we speak that influences our thoughts and actions, so much as the underlying ecologically destructive or beneficial ‘stories-we-live-by’ we use any language to express. As Stibbe puts it,
“At the core of ecolinguistics is the idea that some of the stories industrial civilisation is based on are not working, because society is becoming increasingly unequal and increasingly destructive of the environment. These ‘stories’ are not the kind that are read to children at bedtime, shared around a fire, or conveyed through anecdotes in formal speeches. Instead they exist behind and between the lines of the texts that surround us - the news reports that describe the ‘bad news’ about a drop in Christmas sales, or the ‘good news’ that airline profits are up, or the advertisements promising us that we will be better people if we purchase the unnecessary goods they are promoting.”
– Ecolinguistics and economics: the power of language to build worlds, by Arran Stibbe, in the World Economics Association, 2020.
To give one last example, Robin Wall Kimmerer eloquently offers a similar ‘story-we-live-by’ approach to understanding eco-linguistic relativity in her fascinating essay: “Speaking of Nature: Finding language that affirms our kinship with the natural world.” Here, she asks about the potential for speakers of any language to resist destructive ecological stories, and how we might come to share more beneficial stories-we-live-by across our linguistic and cultural differences:
…At Standing Rock, between the ones armed with water cannons and the ones armed with prayer, exist two different languages for the world, and that is where the battle lines are being drawn. Do we treat the earth as if ki is our relative—as if the earth were animated by being—with reciprocity and reverence, or as stuff that we may treat with or without respect, as we choose? The language and worldview of the colonizer are once again in a showdown with the indigenous worldview. Knowing this, the water protectors at Standing Rock were joined by thousands of non-native allies, who also speak with the voice of resistance, who speak for the living world, for the grammar of animacy.”
🎧 What I’m listening to
The Wild with Chris Morgan: Etuaptmumk: Two Eyed Seeing. “‘Etuaptmumk’ or two-eyed seeing is a term first used by Mi’kmaw elder Dr. Albert Marshall. It is a way to understand wildlife and nature from the perspective of both western science and indigenous knowledge.
"[Etuaptmumk is] this principle of learning to see from one eye with the strength of Indigenous knowledges and ways of knowing and from the other eye with the strength of western knowledges and ways of knowing, and learning to use both of these eyes together for the benefit of all," said Dr. Andrea Reid, who leads the Centre for Indigenous Fisheries at the University of British Columbia.”
🔍 Tools & Opportunities
Discourses of Climate Delay by Céline Keller: “a comic adaptation of the ‘Discourses of Climate Delay’ study by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). I used the quotes from their supplementary materials and added some extra examples with context information gathered mostly from the fantastic Climate Disinformation Database at Desmog.”
NRDC Climate Storytelling Fellowship: “The Fellowship will grant $20,000 each to three writers whose feature screenplay or pilot script reflects the climate crisis in a compelling, realistic and thoughtful way. Writers are encouraged to submit work that depicts solutions or a more just and equitable future, helping expand our climate narrative beyond disaster and apocalypse.”
📰 News and Events
In West Virginia v. EPA, the Supreme Court Will Decide Whether We Act on Climate Change. By Wes Siler, in Outside Magazine (June 28, 2022): “The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling on West Virginia v. EPA this week, potentially deciding the future of the [U.S.] federal government’s ability to limit the effects of climate change—or even to address the looming climate disaster at all. Here’s what you need to know.”
2022 Hollywood Climate Summit (Jun 23, 8:00AM - Jun 26, 8:00PM PST, video recording). “An annual call to action of the entertainment & media community to address the climate emergency…This year's theme is Climate Storytelling With more people than ever concerned about the climate crisis but not knowing what to do, moving society to act is in the hands of creatives and culture shapers. That’s why this year’s programming focuses on harnessing the power of stories, messaging, and media to influence cultural shifts, behavioral change, and climate action.”
📚 Research
How Do Climate Change Skeptics Engage with Opposing Views Online? Evidence from a Major Climate Change Skeptic Forum on Reddit. By Lisa Oswald and Jonathan Bright in Environmental Communication (2022): “Does exposure to opposing views contribute to breaking down science skepticism? In this study, we contribute to the debate by examining reactions to opposing views within a major climate change skeptic online community on “Reddit.” Findings: “light engagement with opposition reinforced the community we study, rather than undermining it.”
“Conservation science still rests on how animals can benefit humans”, by Heather Alberro, Bron Taylor, and Helen Kopnina in The Conversation: “To effectively address our extinction crisis, we argue that we need more than merely technical advances or policies that remain mired in anthropocentric assumptions. Rather, we need fundamental changes in how we view and value nature and other species.”
Like wildfire: creating rumor content in the face of disaster. By Rebecca Ewert in Environmental Sociology:
“Rumors spread during disasters as community members seek information and attempt to make sense of unexpected, anxiety-producing events. While considerable sociological research has examined the transmission and spread of rumors, less attention has been given to the creation of rumor narrative content itself. Drawing on interviews with wildfire survivors in one rural Northern California county, this study shows that…[i]n a contested post-disaster landscape, rumors are used to frame new information to maintain coherence with existing cultural beliefs while reinforcing prevailing ideas about safety, deservingness, and class.”
💡 Ideas
Stanford’s New School of Sustainability Is a Gift to Fossil Fuel Companies “The university seems set to replicate the mistakes of past climate research: soliciting oil and gas funding, while paying lip service to environmental justice.” By Celina Scott-Buechler and Ada Statler in The Nation.
On What We Bury (pdf), by Rebecca Altman. In Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 21.1 (Winter 2014).
How Animals See Themselves. By Ed Yong in the NYTimes.
“The Umwelt concept is one of the most profound and beautiful in biology. It tells us that the all-encompassing nature of our subjective experience is an illusion, and that we sense just a small fraction of what there is to sense. It hints at flickers of the magnificent in the mundane, and the extraordinary in the ordinary. And it is almost antidramatic: It reveals that frogs, snakes, ticks and other animals can be doing extraordinary things even when they seem to be doing nothing at all.”
When Climate Anxiety Leans Right: Eco Fascism, Buffalo and Roe (Video): “In a webinar held on June 10, 2022 and sponsored by Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, listen to Betsy Hartmann, Sarah Jaquette Ray, Jade Sasser and Rebecca Weston speak about the racist history of eco-fascism in the environmental movement, the gender politics of reproductive freedom and its relationship to climate change, the psychology of petro-masculinity and authoritarianism and ways to build an anti-fascist, pro-social climate justice movement.”
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
“Today, language wielded in climate discourse is riddled with jargon, clichés, and hot keywords. The words feel tired and worse, alienating, in the way they describe the state of our world: carbon footprint, mitigation, adaptation, slow onset events, fossil fuel, mainstreaming, and sustainable development. When technical expertise is privileged as the penultimate solution to climate-related issues, we tend to lose sight of the personal loss and grief accompanying the changes taking place in our very homes. Worse, we also lose the buoyancy of hope we will need as many confront deadly tides of despair and accelerated dispossession…
….We do not need to lean on jargon. On the contrary, the very institutions that produce jargon need stories to get their messages across.”
– Storytelling and climate science, by Padmapani L. Perez and Carissa Pobre, in The Agam Agenda.
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