🌿Wild Ones #65: Environmental Communication Digest
Making Coral Reef Visible + New Film: 'Rivers' + Discourses of Cycling + Underground "Mud" Communications + The Value of a Whale + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a 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
An interview with marine science writer Juli Berwald about her new book Life on the Rocks: Building a future for Coral Reefs. Interviewed by Celia Ford in The Open Notebook.
“We have this ability to kind of turn our backs on the ocean and say, “Oh, we’re up here on land, we don’t have to worry about that.” I think my biggest hope was that the reader would see the reefs as a more visible piece of our planet.” – Juli Berwald
🎥 What I’m Watching
“Throughout history, rivers have shaped our landscapes and our journeys; flowed through our cultures and dreams. RIVER takes its audience on a journey through space and time; spanning six continents, and drawing on extraordinary contemporary cinematography, including satellite filming, the film shows rivers on scales and from perspectives never seen before. Its union of image, music and sparse, poetic script will create a film that is both dream-like and powerful, honouring the wildness of rivers but also recognises their vulnerability.”
🔍 Tools, Resources and Opportunities
🎙️Q&A with Phaedra Pezzullo and Salma Monani, Series Editors of Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture. In the University of California Press Blog. Here’s their advice if you’re interested in submitting a book proposal:
Salma: Check out our series’ landing page, fill out the UC Press book proposal form, and contact either us or our new acquisitions editor, Chloe Layman.
Phaedra: We’re interested in extending the topics covered to areas such as corporate disinformation campaigns, the recent rise of ecofascism, abolition ecologies, and mutual aide food or disability justice networks. We look forward to hearing from more emerging and established scholars doing environmental research that is intersectional, reflexive, deliberate, and consequential.”
📝The De-Jargonzier: a tool to help make your writing more accessible.
💻Webinar (from 2019, but interesting!): Making Science Communication More Strategic. By Anthony Dudo and John C. Besley:
“Drs. Dudo and Besley have focused their recent research on how to improve the quality of science communication practice. As part of this work, they have developed a framework for strategic science communication that emphasizes the initial importance of setting clear behavioral goals and then working backward to identify communication objectives that have the potential of affecting desired behaviors, as well as tactics that have the potential of helping achieve communication objectives.”
📰 News and Events
📢Series of Live Talks on ‘Contested Data Territories: Resisting Data Infrastructure’. Organized by The Centre of Governance & Human Rights, University of Cambridge. (Sept 14 and 21).
“The community and environmental harms of data infrastructures, especially data centres, are not news. Turning the focus to this phenomenon, we are delighted to share this series of talks on the rise of grassroots opposition against the expansion of data infrastructure in different regions of the world.
This initiative, hosted as a bilingual series of talks incorporating simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish, will bring together environmental and digital rights activists and academic researchers from the Global South and North to consider how collective action can democratise decisions regarding the planning, construction, and deployment of technological infrastructure. ”
🐦Interesting thread on the Right to Roam campaign in the UK :
📚 Research
Discourses of Cycling, Road Users and Sustainability: An Ecolinguistic Investigation. By M. Cristina Caimotto, Springer (Open access) (2020):
“Being a linguist, I observed the discourses deployed to either promote or reject an increase in bicycle use [in Turin, Italy] from a language perspective and I frequently had a feeling that the issues being debated reached far beyond the practicalities being discussed. This book aims to transform that feeling into an analysis grounded in linguistics. Drawing from a cross-disciplinary approach, disentangling, pinning down and observing the various discourses that are drawn upon when cycling is discussed—liberty, public property, social class, norm and deviancy, safety, stigma, discrimination, hate and human rights—to name but a few.”
Environmental myth-work: the discursive greening of the Olympic Games. By Ben Glasson, in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (2022):
“Olympic greening can be seen as part of this overall reassurance strategy that strips the ecological movement of its radical political edge. “Sustainability” has gained a place on the Olympic platform but notably absent are thorough-going and critical forms of environmentalism that may threaten the interests of key Games stakeholders—especially corporate sponsors”
“As referenced in a 2020 paper about climate change in medical journal The Lancet, negative emotions like “ecological anxiety and grief” are uncomfortable, but they are also “the crucible through which humanity must pass to harness the energy and conviction that are needed for the lifesaving changes now required.” As long as organizations that benefit from the status quo promote metanarratives of virtuous green harmony, this necessary reckoning is further delayed.”
Is ecology anti-urban? Urban ideas and imaginaries across one hundred years of ecological publications. By Silvia Flaminio, Joëlle Salomon Cavin, Marco Moretti in Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. (August, 2022, open access):
“This paper investigates urban imaginaries conveyed in publications in ecology over the past century. We examine some urban ecologists’ view that urban areas have been disregarded by ecology due to negative views on cities and urbanisation…Our hypothesis is that ecology has embraced an anti-urban imaginary that is manifested in urban invisibility as well as the recurrent expression of negative ideas about cities (constituting an ‘anti-urban bias’). Our results partially confirm this hypothesis. We show that until the 1970s only a few papers were published on cities. We identify nine main themes relating to cities around which ideas about cities have been constructed (threats, pests, refuges, fragmentation, gradients, pollution, homogenisation, planetary urbanisation, and planning) and show how these ideas have been mobilised in the articles since the 1920s…”
📑Research Report: Global Green Media Network: Digital transition in screen arts. Center for Science and Policy, University of Cambridge:
The University of Cambridge’s Centre for Science and Policy hosted a Policy Workshop at Sidney Sussex College on 22 April 2022, as the closing event for the Global Green Media Network (GGMN). The international project has been looking at the technological changes, industry initiatives, and economic drivers involved in the ‘greening’ of the global film, TV, and screen arts sector. It has explored how different parts of the world’s screen arts industry are reducing their carbon emissions and setting environmental agendas within the media sector.
💡 Ideas
“Underground communications” and connecting mud to the internet: “Farmers can save water with wireless technologies, but there are challenges – like transmitting data through mud.” By Abdul Salam, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Technology, Purdue University, in the Conversation.
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“When it comes to saving the planet, one whale is worth thousands of trees.”
“A team of researchers at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently posed a simple question: what is the value of a whale? The researchers settled on an even $2 million per specimen (great whales only), summing to an impressive $1 trillion for the existing global 'stock'. They based their calculation on whales' contributions to eco-tourism revenue (ironically detrimental to whale populations themselves) and their robust capacity for carbon sequestration: over their lifetimes, on average great whales capture the equivalent of 33 tonnes of carbon dioxide more per pound than a tree. Recognising the potential for this stock, if allowed to return to its pre-whaling population, to sequester 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 per year, the IMF researchers earnestly suggested investment in whale conservation over other carbon capturing methods. They estimated the cost of such conservation at a modest $13 per person on Earth. $13- that's the value of a whale, as it turns out, to you or me.”
– Adrienne Buller, excerpt of the first paragraph of her new book: The Value of a Whale: On the Illusions of Green Capitalism. Manchester University Press (2022).
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