đżWild Ones #67: Environmental Communication Digest
What is environmental communication? Some definitions + New book: Worlds of Gray and Green + Are ad agencies destroying the climate? + 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 youâre new, welcome! You can read more about why I started Wild Ones here. Sign up here to get these digests in your inbox:
đ±What is environmental communication?
If youâve been reading Wild Ones for some time now, youâve probably noticed I include a lot of different themes and topics under the rubric of âenvironmental communication.â My aim has been to leave open what âenvironmentâ and âcommunicationâ mean, as placeholders for exploring a range of perspectives on how human beings come to know, feel and act in relation the nonhuman world. My own impulse is to keep front of mind how a more explicit discussion of what environmental communication is can help bring clarity and insight to how people come to understand the problems and circumstances of our current moment of ecological crisis, and the kinds of collective solutions we pursue in light of these understandings.
For example, the environmental keywords section in Wild Ones has been my attempt to gather terms together that help me think about what environmental communication is in more critical and interdisciplinary ways.
The kind of environmental communication I think we need (IMHO) is one that questions pre-existing boundaries between academic disciplines â such as between the âsocialâ and ânaturalâ sciences â that no longer serve us in creating a healthier planet. It is also one that must disrupt the boundaries between knowledge production in the âivory towerâ of universities and âthe public.â Thereâs a lot more to unpack there, and in the future Wild Ones I plan to explore some exciting research in environmental communication doing just this. For now, I thought a helpful starting point for me (and I hope for others too:) would be to share a few basic definitions of environmental communication I often come back to as a way to ground (and link back to) future posts on how to envision environmental communicationâs role in promoting a more healthy and just planet:
âAt first glance, a definition of environmental communication can be confusing if we define it simply as information or âtalkâ about environmental topicsâwater pollution, forests, climate change, pesticides, grizzly bears, and more. A clearer definition takes into account the roles of language, visual images, protests, music, or even scientific reports as different forms of symbolic actionâŠ.In this book, we use the phrase environmental communication to mean the pragmatic and constitutive modes of expressionâthe naming, shaping, orienting, and negotiatingâof our ecological relationships in the world, including those with nonhuman systems, elements, and species. Defined this way, environmental communication serves two different functions: Environmental communication is pragmatic: It consists of verbal and nonverbal modes of interaction that convey an instrumental purposeâŠ.Environmental communication is constitutive: It entails verbal and nonverbal modes of interaction that shape, orient, and negotiate meaning, values, and relationshipsâŠâ
â Phaedra C. Pezzullo & Robert Cox, Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (5th Edition).
âIn the simplest terms, environmental communication is communication about environmental affairs. This includes all of the diverse forms of interpersonal, group, public, organizational, and mediated communication that make up the social debate about environmental issues and problems, and our relationship to the rest of natureâŠEnvironmental communication is also an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the role, techniques, and influence of communication in environmental affairs. Basically, it studies the activity and in doing so, it draws its theory and methods primarily from communication, environmental studies, psychology, sociology, and political science.â
â Mark Meisner, from his course description: âEnvironmental Communication: Research Into Practiceâ(course now discontinued).
ââŠwe can draw attention to environmental communication as both what we do when we communicate about the environment AND what the environment or earth is as it ââspeaksââ to us. Both need to be firmly placed if we are to know from whence, and about what, we speak. I have formulated these touchstones as a mnemonic device, so it spells EARTH, and so it takes communication not just as its subject matter, but as its primary theoretical concernâŠâ:
Earth, ââEnvironment,ââ is doubly quoted: the word and the world speak.
Action is engaged in words, environments, and their peoples.
Responsible research takes nature, or earth to be the measure of the good.
Time helps temper enthusiasms, and allows enduring insights to be built.
Heuristic explorations create insights, while generating better ways to proceed.
â Carbaugh, D. (2007). Quoting âthe Environmentâ: Touchstones on Earth. Environmental Communication, 1(1), 64â73.
âIf we were to approach our work in light of normative tenets that help to define our field as a crisis discipline, I am proposing, our task would become two-fold. It would include identification and analysis of the failures, distortions, and/or corruption in human communication about environmental concerns. But, it would also include the willingness to recommend alternatives, to enable ââpolicy decision makers, communities, businesses, educators, and citizen groupsââ to respond to signals of environmental stress in ways that are appropriate to human and biological well-being.â
â Cox, R. (2007). Natureâs âCrisis Disciplinesâ: Does Environmental Communication Have an Ethical Duty? Environmental Communication, 1(1), 5â20.
đ What Iâm reading
Land as Interlocutor: A Study of Ojibwe Learner Language in Interaction on and With Naturally Occurring âMaterialsâ. By Mel M. Engman and Mary Hermes:
âThe Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies that situate humans as part of nature do not apply only to Indigenous peoples. Relationality holds us all in entanglements with the natural, social, and material world. These entanglements are experienced (Cajete, 2000), felt (Million, 2009), and storied (Archibald, 2008) in ways that are not necessarily visible. Language use in context can help us map these relational entanglements, but only if we stretch our understanding of language beyond notions of a settled, discrete, oral code. Language is a multimodal range of sense making and relating that includes embodiment, gestures, senses, gaze, memory, and verbal production. Delinking from colonial conceptions of language (Makoni & Pennycook, 2005) changes how we might recognize ability and skill (Canagarajah, 2018) and thus reimagines how we might facilitate language development in multilingual learnersâ (p. 102).
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
Teaching (or learning) story craft? Storyboard is here to help A sampling of possibilities on how to use Storyboard in your journalism and writing classes. Nieman Storyboard.
What is linguistic ethnography? An overview of linguistic ethnography from The Linguistic Ethnography Forum:
âAs Copland and Creese explain, it is the combination of linguistics and ethnography that âlinks the micro to the macro, the small to the large, the varied to the routine, the individual to the social, the creative to the constraining, and the hisÂtorical to the present and to the future.ââ
Reasons to avoid false balance and fake debates: âOne of the most insidious, albeit often inadvertent forms of climate misinformation is false-balance media coverage, where contrarian voices are given equal coverage with climate scientists.â
đ° News & Events
âConference Abstract Submission Deadline: The 17th Conference on Communication and Environment (COCE) June 5-9, 2023. James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia, USA. Conference Theme: Many Voices, One Planet: Accounting for the past and narrating sustainable futures
U.S. Congress is set to pass a huge wildlife conservation bill with bipartisan support: Recovering Americaâs Wildlife Act would funnel millions of dollars into saving overlooked species. By Benji Jones in Vox.
Zimbabwe moves 2,500 wild animals due to drought from climate change. ABC News, Australia": âAbout 400 elephants, 2,000 impalas, 70 giraffes, 50 buffaloes, 50 wildebeest, 50 zebras, 50 elands, 10 lions and a pack of 10 wild dogs are among the animals being movedâŠâ
Europe Is Sacrificing Its Ancient Forests for Energy Governments bet billions on burning timber for green power: The Times went deep into one of the continentâs oldest woodlands to track the hidden cost. By Sarah Hurtes and Weiyi Cai, Photographs by Andreea Campeanu. September 7, 2022 in the NYTimes.
Does This Fisherman Have the Right to Be in a Billionaireâs Backyard?: A fight along Coloradoâs waterways pits an alliance of white-water rafters and amateur anglers against some of the nationâs wealthiest landowners, bruising the image of a sportsmanâs paradise. By Ben Ryder Howe, in the NYTimes.
âThe animals know where the private land is. In hunting season youâll see hundreds of hunters on one side and all the elk on the other. People donât understand how much need there is for refuge.â
đ Research
New Bookđ: Worlds of Gray and Green: Mineral Extraction as Ecological Practice. By by SebastiĂĄn Ureta, Patricio Flores, University of California Press.
âIn Worlds of Gray and Green, authors SebastiĂĄn Ureta and Patricio Flores challenge us to rethink extraction as ecological practice. Adopting an environmental humanities analytic lens, Ureta and Flores offer a rich ethnographic exploration of the waste produced by Chile's El Teniente, the world's largest underground mine. Deposited in a massive dam, the wasteâknown as tailingsâengages with human and non-human entities in multiple ways through a process the authors call geosymbiosis.â
đĄ Ideas
DESIGN EARTH is a research practice, founded by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy in 2010. Their work engages the medium of the speculative architectural project to make public the climate crisis.
Instead of relying on old narratives, itâs time to build power for new ones: Ruth Taylor, in Common Cause: âOrganisations that want to tackle the climate crisis have a duty to ensure that the deeper narratives that their work reinforces, and the values that underpin them, are in service to the world they want to see.â
TED Talkđ€:Are ad agencies, PR firms and lobbyists destroying the climate?:
An unnoticed industry worth two trillion dollars a year is influencing almost every carbon emission. Sustainability solution seeker Solitaire Townsend calls this sector the "X industry" (where "X" stands for influence), and it includes professional services like advertising and PR firms, management consultancies, corporate law firms, lobbyists and more. In this eye-opening talk, she exposes the industry's massive but largely invisible influence on the environment -- and proposes ways they can use their creativity, inventiveness and knowledge to fix climate change instead of contributing to it.
đŹÂ Quote Iâm thinking about
âClimate-related disasters are expanding the military footprint in other ways as well. After Hurricane Katrina, for instance, President George W. Bush and other American politicians frequently compared the disaster to a nuclear attack. Through this framing, the event came to be absorbed into a much older nuclear discourse that has long been used to increase military expenditure, even as funding for public welfare was declining. In effect climate-related disasters have themselves become a contributing factor in the steep increase in military spending that is under way around the world. To look these facts in the face is to recognize that it is a grave error to imagine that the world is not preparing for the disrupted planet of the future. Itâs just that itâs not preparing by taking mitigatory measures or by reducing emissions: instead, it is preparing for a new geopolitical struggle for dominance.â
â Amitav Ghosh. The Nutmeg's Curse (p. 129). University of Chicago Press.
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 toođ 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 youâre involved in/most interest you, or anything youâd like to see more of in Wild Ones:)