🌿Wild Ones #62: Environmental Communication Digest
Writing Nature in the Active Voice + Summer 2022 Environmental Stories + Environmental Discourses of Limits and Responsibility + 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
Writing Nature in the Active Voice, by Sophie Chao, in Environmental History Now.
“How does one write nature in the active voice without letting the script over-write/ride the alterity of other-than-human life? Should we describe, or de-scribe? How do we come to understand life through its living inscriptions on rock and water and bark? In this interspecies deciphering, how do we weave description with de-cryption?”
🎧 What I’m listening to
'Soundings' is a memoir, meditation and adventure in following grey whales' migration. An NPR interview with the author, Doreen Cunningham
- and -
Galápagos, on Radio Lab
“This hour is about the Galápagos archipelago, which inspired Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection. Nearly 200 years later, the Galápagos are undergoing rapid changes that continue to pose — and perhaps answer — critical questions about the fragility and resilience of life on Earth.”
👀 What I’m watching
🔍 Tools, Resources, Opportunities
(grant) Investigation Grants for Environmental Journalism: “This grant programme supports cross-border teams of professional journalists and/or news outlets to conduct investigations into environmental affairs related to Europe.”
(Job) Associate Professor in Environmental Humanities with historical orientation, KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. (deadline Aug 31).
(guide) How to Do a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) on Wikihow.
📰 News and Events
The 17th Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE): Many Voices, One Planet: Accounting for the past and narrating sustainable futures. James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA (deadline October 3).
(conference) SciComm 2022: A conference on effective science communication (virtual, August 17-19).
📚 Research
Greenwashing: how ads get you to think brands are greener than they are – and how to avoid falling for it. By Morteza Abolhasani, Gordon Liu, and Zahra Golrokhi, in the Conversation. “The backlash against greenwashing has led to strategies like “anti-advertising”, a tactic using marketing to explicitly encourage people to buy less”
Mobile virtual reality for environmental education, By Ana-Despina Tudor, Shailey Minocha, Melanie Collins, and Steve Tilling in Open Research Online
Future perfect: From the pandemic to the Paris climate agreement. By Stuart Kirsch in Anthropological Theory:
“this article argues that recent developments have radically altered relationships to the future. It points to a previously unrecognized connection between two of the most significant challenges facing humanity today: the experience of living through a global pandemic and international efforts to limit the harmful consequences of climate change. Responses to both phenomena invoke the grammatical structure of the future perfect tense….This article examines how the future appears in the present and the contribution of the future perfect tense to the creation of alternative futures.”
From Limits to Ecocentric Rights and Responsibility: Communication, Globalization, and the Politics of Environmental Transition. By Patrick D. Murphy and Jose Castro-Sotomayor, in Communication Theory.
💡 Ideas
Chicago's Wild Mile is reinventing the urban river": From industrial waste to floating wetlands, how Chicago’s Wild Mile is reinventing the urban river. Floating wetlands and increased accessibility are bringing a former industrial waterway back to life.” By Nate Berg in Fast Company.
Environmental stories we love, summer 2022, a summer reading list by By The Environmental Storytelling Studio at Brown. One book on the list I’m looking forward to reading: Soundings: Journeys in the Company of Whales: A Memoir, by Doreen Cunningham:
“In this striking blend of nature writing, whale science, and memoir, Doreen Cunningham interweaves two stories: tracking the extraordinary northward migration of the grey whales with a mischievous toddler in tow and living with an Iñupiaq family in Alaska seven years earlier. Throughout the journey she explores the stories of the whales and their young calves--their history, their habits, and their attempts to survive the changes humans have brought to the ocean.”
How the World’s Richest People Are Driving Global Warming, By Eric Roston, Leslie Kaufman and Hayley Warren, in Bloomberg.
How a salmon farm disaster changed Northwest aquaculture forever Thousands of salmon escaped into the Puget Sound. Then the controversy began. By Douglas Frantz and Catherine Collins in High Country News.
“Wild salmon are a barometer of the planet’s health. They can survive only in clean, cool water, and their presence in a river has traditionally signaled to anglers that the water is safe to drink. They embody the idea of a keystone species, the animal whose existence holds the rest of the ecosystem together. If they disappear, it’s a threat to more than just recreational fishing. It’s a sign that life on Earth as we know it is changing in drastic ways.”
The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari: The best-selling author is a gifted storyteller and popular speaker. But he sacrifices science for sensationalism, and his work is riddled with errors. By Darshana Narayanan in Current Affairs.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“The experimental and reflexive piece below seeks to put into practice what Plumwood calls “writing nature in the active voice.” To write nature in the active voice is, as Plumwood notes: ‘a project of re-animating the world, and remaking ourselves as well, so as to become multiply enriched but consequently constrained members of an ecological community […] Above all, it is permission to depict nature in the active voice, the domain of agency.’”
– Writing Nature in the Active Voice, by Sophie Chao, in Environmental History Now.
“… since words were introduced here things have gone poorly for the planet: it's been between words and rivers… all this garbage! All these words …” - excerpt from a poem in the poetry collection ‘Garbage’ by A.R. Ammons (1993).
Thurlow: “In more poetic terms, Ammons’ poem considers how we also waste words by producing an excess of words. In spite of all these words being produced and consumed, however, we appear no less in touch with ourselves or the with world at large. Nonetheless, as profligate and unsatisfactory as words may be, they are often all we have for making sense of things and making sense of ourselves—for making some kind of headway. It is this tension between the simultaneous insufficiency and indispensability of words which sits at the heart of my paper. What I mostly want to do is offer a series of statements about waste, which I hope will signal some of the possibilities for a sociolinguistics of waste.”
– In: Rubbish? Envisioning a sociolinguistics of waste. By Crispin Thurlow, in the Journal of Sociolinguistics (2022).
🗄️From the archive!
🌿Wild Ones #33: Environmental Communication Digest: 'The Patchy Anthropocene + effective sustainability communications + rethinking our relationship with nature + Place-based Climate Change Communication + more!
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