🌿Wild Ones #71: 2022 in Review
A recap of 2022 with some of the memorable keywords, tools, research, ideas and quotes I explored in Wild Ones
Happy New Year!🎉 and welcome back to Wild Ones, a newsletter by me, Gavin Lamb, about news, ideas, research, and tools in environmental communication: or the role of language and communication in promoting more sustainable and just human-environment relationships. 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:
2023 is here! For the New Year, I’m taking some time to reflect on the topics I explored in Wild Ones in 2022, and thought I’d share some of the keywords, tools, research, ideas, tweets, and quotes that I wrote about over the past 12 months. I hope you find something useful here in your own life and work!
On a side note, I’ve written a ‘year in review’ edition ever since I started this newsletter way back in June 2020 when I was fresh off my first postdoc and back on the academic job market during pandemic lockdown in Hawai‘i. So I thought I’d keep the tradition going! It’s also a nice chance for me to come back to some of the ideas I’ve been writing and thinking about over the past year. I’m not sure where this newsletter will be going in 2023, but as of today I have 402 subscribers! So for those of you who have stuck with me on this journey, I just want to say thank you! While I didn’t write in Wild Ones as frequently as I had hoped to in 2022, my plan for 2023 is to continue sending this newsletter/digest out into the world as often as I can.
And as always, I'd also love to hear from you too. So please tap the comment button below to let me know what you think about Wild Ones and what topics you’d like to see covered more in Wild Ones in 2023😊 🐢
Just in case of interest, you can read my Wild Ones ‘year in review’ recaps for 2020 and 2021 here:
🌱10ish Environmental Keywords, Book Reviews and Essays
Green nudge: “An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society’s most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which individuals operate. Along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both academic and policy communities, we now believe this was a mistake.”
The Digital Commons, Democracy and Twitter: “with 400,000 followers on Twitter I’m loath to walk away from it, but also increasingly disgusted by the hold it has on my life but more importantly on our world. I doubt we can cool the planet, or defend democracy, if we can’t do a better job.” – Bill McKibben
Book review of: The Truth about Nature: Environmentalism in the Era of Post-truth Politics and Platform Capitalism. By Bram Büscher. University of California Press (2020).
Book review of: Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism, by Kate Soper (2020): “Unlike the more alarmist responses to climate change, alternative hedonism dwells on the pleasures to be gained by adopting a less high-speed, consumption-oriented way of living…Its advocates believe that new forms of desire — rather than fears of ecological disaster — are more likely to encourage sustainable modes of consuming…[A] counter-consumerist ethic and politics should appeal not only to altruistic compassion and environmental concern (as in the case of Fair Trade and ethical shopping), but also to the self-regarding gratifications of living and consuming differently….”
Book review of: An Ecotopian Lexicon, Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. Minnesota University Press. (2019).
Book review of: The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. By Dorceta E. Taylor. Duke University Press (2016)
Green Grabbing: “Across the world, ‘green grabbing’ – the appropriation of land and resources for environmental ends – is an emerging process of deep and growing significance…Green grabbing builds on well-known histories of colonial and neo-colonial resource alienation in the name of the environment – whether for parks, forest reserves or to halt assumed destructive local practices. Yet it involves novel forms of valuation, commodification and markets for pieces and aspects of nature, and an extraordinary new range of actors and alliances.”
Eairth: “Perhaps we should add the letter i to our planet's name, and call it "Eairth," in order to remind ourselves that the "air" is entirely a part of the eairth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed in that fluid element.” – David Abram, cited by Julia Corbett in Communicating the Climate Crisis.
🗞️10ish Environmental Conversations, Films, Podcasts, and Creative Projects
Bathsheba Demuth on a More-Than-Human History. On the podcast For the Wild
A short trailer about Senegalese photographer Fabrice Monteiro’s newest addition to his fascinating Prophecy photograph series.
An interview with N.K. Jemisin. The Ezra Klein Show.
“In her fiction, Jemisin crafts worlds that resemble ours but get disrupted by major shocks: ecological disasters, invasions by strange, tentacled creatures and more — all of which operate as thought experiments that can help us think through how human beings could and should respond to similar calamities.”
Taking Climate Action to Extremes - Now and Ahead. A conversation with Mark Alpert (Climate Parables Project), Gaia Vince (Nomad Century), and Igor Vamos (Yes Men Environmental Prankster Project). Hosted by Andy Revkin, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability: The conversation is part of the ‘Sustain What’ series: “a global conversation identifying solutions to the complicated, shape-shifting and epic challenges of humanity’s Anthropocene moment. A prime focus is making sense of, and getting the most out of, the planet's fast-forward information environment - the one Earth System changing faster than the actual environment.”
🎥: Muerte Es Vida: Death Is Life: Filmmaker Ali Alvarez explores the relationship between the journey of the Monarch butterfly, the deaths of individual people, and the Day of the Dead celebration: “Muerte Es Vida is a documentary about the connection between death and nature. The film’s central Mexican character, Sabino, believes the Monarch butterflies that arrive every year are the souls of departed family members coming back to visit as they arrive in time for Day of the Dead after an epic journey from Canada and the Northern United States.”
This fascinating (and terrifying) overview of climate tipping points by Alexandria Herr, Shannon Osaka, and Maddie Stone in Grist:
Conflicts of Interest, Debunking Demand, Media Manipulation & More | IPCC Report, Part One: From: Drilled podcast: A true-crime podcast about climate change, hosted and reported by award-winning investigative journalist Amy Westervelt.
River: “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.”
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.”
🎙️Q&A with Phaedra Pezzullo and Salma Monani, Series Editors of Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture. In the University of California Press Blog.
Intelligence Squared Debate: The Battle for the Countryside: Britain Should Rewild its Uplands: “Rewilding, unlike conservation, has no fixed objective: it is driven not by human management but by natural processes. There is no point at which it can be said to have arrived. Rewilding of the kind that interests me does not seek to control the natural world, to re-create a particular ecosystem or landscape, but — having brought back some of the missing species — to allow it to find its own way.” – George Monbiot in Feral: Searching for Enchantment on the Frontiers of Rewilding.
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
🔍 10ish Tools & Resources
UCLA’s Critical Media Literacy Library: Climate Change and Environmental Justice. A fantastic collection of publications, film, podcasts, blogs, and reports.
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.”
Resources for working with climate emotions. From the All We Can Save Project, and crated in collaboration with Britt Wray of the climate emotions newsletter Gen Dread: “As Susi Moser writes in All We Can Save, ‘Burnt-out people aren’t equipped to serve a burning planet … [so] the well-being of our hearts and souls must be reestablished to their rightful place as relevant, essential.’”
The Greenwashing Files by Client Earth: “Following our world-first complaint against BP’s advertising, we've investigated some of the world's biggest fossil fuel companies and uncovered the truth. Our Greenwashing Files highlight how advertising doesn’t always match up to reality.”
Journalist Field Guide: Navigating Climate Misinformation. By Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD). Check out their 3-page tip sheet (pdf): “This guide was created as a resource for journalists and editors covering topics related to climate change to help better understand and respond to misinformation. It is focused on best practices, including psychology-based communications techniques and web-based tools. It features visual examples showing some key dos and don’ts for journalists and editors to consider to avoid fanning the flames of misinformation and getting gamed by grifters.”
Story of self, us and now. From the Beautiful Trouble Toolbox: Creative tools for a more just world:“Public narrative is a practice of leadership; it’s the why of organizing — the art of translating values into action through stories.”
13 Tips for academics on how to talk to journalists: “#4: Construct a clear messaging framework and have specific examples on hand. Journalists are looking for short soundbites, oftentimes under tight deadlines and pressure from their editors.” Here is a video of a workshop from last year (June 2021) on the topic organized by the Technology and Social Change Project, at the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard University.
To Know the World: A new vision for environmental learning: “Life Improvisation is the essence of environmental learning, sparking the imagination, stimulating creativity, and helping us reinvigorate how we think about our residency on Earth.”
“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 STRIVE 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.”
(Syllabus) Imagining Race and the Environment. By Min Hyoung Song, Professor of English and Director of the Asian American Studies Program at Boston College.
📰 10ish 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): On Thursday, June 30, 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of West Virginia, restricting the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. Read more about the decision and its implications on EarthJustice. Also: The Supreme Court has curtailed EPA’s power to regulate carbon pollution – and sent a warning to other regulators. By Patrick Parenteau in The Conversation.
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.”
In Conversation With Angélique Kidjo on “the power of art in moving hearts and minds; and how her climate work has overlapped with, and informed, other issues she has made it her mission to address, such as gender equality. How can artists around the world tap into this collective potential to make a difference?” Hosted at Climate Forward London June 30–July 2, 2022, by The New York Times.
Is Wildness Over? A discussion with Paul Wapner and Victoria Kiechel (video): “Climate change, mass extinction, pandemics: Something powerful is wrecking life on the planet. This presentation will explain how current planetary ecological challenges are the result of trying to rid our lives of wildness.”
Video: "Broadening participation in environmental communication research: A Latin American perspective." A talk by Bruno Takahashi, at the the Center for Latinx Digital Media's Virtual Seminar Series (October 11, 2022): “Climate change disproportionally affects countries in the Global South. In this context, Dr. Bruno Takahashi discusses the extant research in environmental communication from and about Latin America. Latin American researchers have developed robust and unique contributions to the understanding of communication processes about the environment, some that can expand epistemic considerations in the Global North. Dr. Takahashi discusses strategies to overcome barriers to collaboration that could result in the consolidation of international environmental communication scholarship.”
On Bruno Latour (1947–2022) The world was his laboratory. By Ava Koffman in n+1 Magazine.
Why a United States Supreme Court Case About Pig Farming Matters So Much. By Jeff Sebo in Verfassungsblog.
Informative Twitter thread by climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe on the UN Environment Programme’s new “Emissions Gap Report 2022”:
U.S. Congress is set to pass a huge wildlife conservation bill with bipartisan support: Recovering America’s Wildlife Act would funnel millions of dollars into saving overlooked species. By Benji Jones in Vox.
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 continent’s oldest woodlands to track the hidden cost. By Sarah Hurtes and Weiyi Cai, Photographs by Andreea Campeanu. September 7, 2022 in the NYTimes.
📚 10ish Research articles & books
Corpus-Assisted Ecolinguistics, by Robert Poole. In the Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics Series. “…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.”
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.”
Communicating climate change in “Don”t Look Up’. By Julie Doyle, in the Journal of Science Communication, 21(05). (2022):
Helping Scientists to Communicate Well for All Considered: Strategic Science Communication in an Age of Environmental and Health Crises. A Special issue (2021) in Frontiers in Communication.
Film and Television Production in the Age of Climate Crisis: Towards a Greener Screen. Edited by Pietari Kääpä and Hunter Vaughan
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.
(Re)placing the rhetoric of scale: Ecoliteracy, networked writing, and MEmorial mapping, by Madison Jones, in Mediating Nature: The role of technology in mediating nature. Routledge. 2019: Jones’ chapter explores “the problem of scale in environmental communication, specifically in the use of visualization technologies to promote ecoliteracy and communicate massive environmental issues (such as sea-level rise or climate change) to public audiences.” (read more in my Jan 2021 Wild Ones here)
Doing environmental justice: Prospects for sustainable engagement—From classroom to fieldwork. By Bilal Butt, In Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space (Online First): “Often researchers will end a project in exasperation over perceptions that people have been “unfriendly” or “uncooperative” or “difficult” when in reality this frustration comes from a lack of equitable communication—communication that tends to be written and delivered in a way that maintains existing power relations. There may be the use of technical terms that are not easily translatable, and researchers may not want to do the work of finding appropriate meanings for particular social and ecological processes. This is particularly difficult when two or more languages and dialects are involved. It is also driven by the de facto process of taking academic research findings and delivering them verbatim to communities that do not have the same level of training, thus rendering their findings less useful than they could potentially be.”
Cripping Environmental Communication: A Review of Eco-Ableism, Eco-Normativity, and Climate Justice Futurities. By E Cram, Martin P. Law and Phaedra C. Pezzullo. In Environmental Communication (October 17, 2022): “Today is an age that is unsustainable, that is, unjust and ecologically unbalanced. To challenge this crisis, environmental communication scholars and practitioners have a duty to intervene (Cox, 2007). We also have an opportunity to honor “the value of a collective sense of dignity and interdependence – not as weakness, but as the strength of knowing the interdependent relationships we require to survive, to grow, and to thrive” (Pezzullo, 2023 in press). Cripping environmental communication means challenging some core normative assumptions of the field, while also embracing the profound creativity and world-making capacities of disabled lives, experiences, and kinship.”
Climate communication: How researchers navigate between scientific truth and media publics. By Donya Alinejad and José Van Dijck, in Communication and the Public. (November 17, 2022).
Global Villain, but Local Hero? A Linguistic Analysis of Climate Narratives from the Fossil Fuel Sector. By Trine Dahl in Applied Linguistics. (2022).
What is Public Engagement and How Does it Help to Address Climate Change? A Review of Climate Communication Research. By Ville Kumpu in Environmental Communication.
Environmental issues in the Anthropocene: ecolinguistic perspectives across media and genres. By Douglas Mark Ponton and Małgorzata Sokół (eds). Special issue in Text and Talk (2022). Some of the articles in the issue include:
The Anthropocene: genesis of a term and popularization in the press
Narratives of industrial damage and natural recovery: an ecolinguistic perspective
“This special issue takes up the discussion of environmental issues against the background of the Anthropocene – the Age of Humankind, “a proposed geological epoch aimed at indicating the transformative impact of human beings on the planet’s ecosystem”…our aims are twofold: 1) to contribute to the exploration of the term from linguistic and discursive perspectives; and 2) to address environmental issues across the diversity of media and genres in the context of the effects of human practices and their potential.”
💡 10-ish Ideas
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?”
Just a little too slow: Why journalists struggle to cover climate change. By Bill McKibben in NiemanLab (Jan 6, 2022): “…we still need to come to grips with the essential problem: the biggest news story of all time doesn’t quite fit our working definition of news, and hence is going remarkably undercovered. The comet, even now, is crashing into us, but we’re not quite able to see it.”
Instead of relying on old narratives, it’s time to build power for new ones: Ruth Taylor, in Common Cause: “Organisations 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.”
A Broken Twitter Means Broken Disaster Response. The loss of this crucial rapid-response platform could be crippling as climate change makes disasters worse. By Molly Taft in Gizmodo (November 19, 2022).
How a 50-year-old PR strategy influenced the Supreme Court’s EPA decision. “E. Bruce Harrison developed the "Three Es" [Environment, Energy, and Economy] in the 1970s. Now the framing is everywhere.” By Kate Yoder in Grist.
Our Cyborg Progeny: a review of ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’ by James Lovelock (2020). By Meehan Crist in the London Review of Books: “Lovelock’s new book Novacene continues to develop the Gaia hypothesis in rather strange directions. Or as Crist puts it, “this book is a bit nuts.” But Crist doesn’t just critique Lovelock’s book. Instead, she places the particular climate story Lovelock tells within a rich history of earth science and the “sometimes vitriolic culture war…waged along the continuum between hope and despair.”
‘This is what reconciliation work can look like.’ An interview with Bonnie McGill by B. Toastie in High Country News: “If people want to support Indigenous sovereignty and those kinds of efforts, looking at place names is a place to start. They’re these windows into a deeper history than most of us know.”
All Tomorrow’s Fables: How Do We Write About This Vanishing World? Daegan Miller on The World As We Knew It and New Kinds of Nature Writing. By Daegan Miller in LitHub.
Hope Matters: Why Changing the Way We Think Is Critical to Solving the Environmental Crisis. By Elin Kelsey: Kelsey “describes effective campaigns to support ocean conservation, species resilience, and rewilding, demonstrating how digital conservation is helping scientists target specific problems with impressive results.”
Unraveling, by Terry Tempest Williams in Emergence Magazine: “We can reweave the world anew, not from the places of fear and doubt, but from the intimate spaces of belonging we must retrieve for ourselves. We are Earth unraveling and reforming creation. We are meant to engage not isolate. These are difficult days. What causes us to recoil, strike, and retreat is also what allows us to reach out from the anxiety of unknowing and dare to trust what is to come—a reassembling of our humanity. There is something deeper than hope. Between the hours of darkness and dawn, the voices of our ancestors are amplified in the dreamtime—warning us of our awakening wisdom—a blessing to behold and a burden to enact.”
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.”
The Way We Talk About Climate Change Is Wrong: The language of “sacrifice” reveals we’re stuck in a colonial mindset. By Priya Satia, in Foreign Policy: “…the language of sacrifice for the future is uncomfortably close to the mindset that landed us at this precipice. It was precisely by training their eyes on the future, with the help of the concept of time discounting and theories of how to overcome it that germinated in the era of European colonialism, that previous generations became profligate with the Earth’s resources—which should give us pause in reprising the language of sacrifice today…It is time, in short, to stop sacrificing our humanity. Consuming less is no sacrifice in this perspective, but a profoundly self-loving act. Human civilization as we know it should expire. History has been a nightmare from which we all must awake.”
Cascade Learning for Environmental Justice. By Prerna Srigyan in EnviroSociety: “A persistent challenge of late industrialism is to understand environmental injustice as a multi-scalar and complex problem. To respond to this challenge, [The EcoEd program]’s evolving list of literacy goals include recognizing complex causation, cross-scalar relations, organization and analysis of information, collaborative tactics, and creative strategies to communicate research findings, developing what anthropologist Angela Jenks calls “justice-oriented civic capabilities” supporting students in their transitions as social agents.”
Reclaiming Aloha. An interview with Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osario on the For The Wild podcast: “In the same way that Aloha asks us to recognize each other, it also asks us to recognize our relationship to the ʻĀina, to the land, to that which feeds us, that which is around us.”
💬 10 Quotes
“The experimental and reflexive piece below seeks to put into practice what [Val] 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.
Jonathan Watts: “Can an idea go viral like a disease?”
Bruno Latour: “Covid has given us a model of contamination. It has shown how quickly something can become global just by going from one mouth to another. That’s an incredible demonstration of network theory. I’ve been trying to persuade sociologists of this for 40 years. I’m sorry to have been so right. It shows that we must not think of the personal and the collective as two distinct levels. The big climate questions can make individuals feel small and impotent. But the virus gives us a lesson. If you spread from one mouth to another, you can viralise the world very fast. That knowledge can re-empower us.”
– Bruno Latour, in interview with Jonathan Watts, in the Guardian, June 2020.
“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.
“If language is always, in its depths, physically and sensorially resonant, then it can never be definitively separated from the evident expressiveness of birdsong, or the evocative howl of a wolf late at night. The chorus of frogs gurgling in unison at the edge of a pond, the snarl of a wildcat as it springs upon its prey, or the distant honking of Canadian geese veeing south for the winter, all reverberate with affective, gestural significance, the same significance that vibrates through our own conversations and soliloquies, moving us at times to tears, or to anger, or to intellectual insights we could never have anticipated. Language as a bodily phenomenon accrues to all expressive bodies, not just to the human. Our own speaking, then, does not set us outside of the animate landscape but—whether or not we are aware of it—inscribes us more fully in its chattering, whispering, soundful depths.”
– David Abram, Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World
“[W]e need to move beyond a singular focus on semiosis in the service of abusive power—and reconsider power communally as well, as it circulates through communities, as they re-align around values, and renovate discourses that enact a better world.”
– James Martin, 2004: 197, cited in Positive Discourse Analysis: re-thinking human ecological relationships, by Arran Stibbe. In: The Routledge Handbook of Ecolinguistics (2017).
“What we do now as a global civilization will create one future out of a vast array of possible futures, an array which ranges from utmost disaster to lasting peace and prosperity. The sheer breadth of this range is all by itself extremely confusing, to the point of inducing a kind of mental and emotional gridlock. Anything could happen! So what should we do? Maybe nothing! Maybe we can’t do anything! But we can do things, if we can figure out what they are. Various good futures are achievable, even starting from our current moment of high danger. So some really comprehensive analysis, destranding, and remapping is now part of our necessary work. Inevitably new concepts and new words will emerge— lots of them.”
– Kim Stanley Robinson, in the Forward to An Ecotopian Lexicon. Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy. Minnesota University Press. (2019).
“Climate communication needs to keep in place both climate mitigation and adaptation, making the historical and structural inequalities of capitalism and colonialism the interconnected stories of both [Sultana, 2022]. [Pheadra] Pezzullo states that, “Imagination is a performative survival technique” [2016, p. 804]. If climate justice is to become central to climate action, then popular communication on climate change needs to present such stories as central to the reimagination of a socially just world that responds equitably to the climate crisis, providing a “liveable and sustainable future for all” [IPCC, 2022, p. 35].”
– Julie Doyle, in Communicating climate change in “Don”t Look Up.’
“A humanistic environmental communication, fundamentally driven by a desire to provide solace in a time of difficulty, a hope to foster understanding and create meaning in a disrupted, disruptive environment, a wish to restore and sustain human welfare in the midst of rapid change, and a longing to support human emancipation and evolution in the Anthropocene toward our highest selves, such a discipline and practice is not just a crisis discipline, but a restorative one.”
– Susanne C. Moser, Whither the heart(-to-heart)? Prospects for a humanistic turn in environmental communication as the world changes darkly. In The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication.
“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. … Did you ever stop to think that you can’t leave for your job in the morning without being dependent on most of the world? … This is the way our universe is structured, this is its interrelated quality. We aren’t going to have peace on Earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality.”
– from Martin Luther King’s 1967 Christmas Sermon in Atlanta, Georgia.
“The ʻāina (the land) can be restored, we can feed ourselves. There is really – and this is hard to say sometimes because we do live in a scary dark world – there is really so much to look forward to, so much within our control. We just have to have, like we said, a little trust in each other, a little faith, and commit to doing it together.” – Dr. Jamaica Heolomeleikalani Osorio, interviewed on the For the Wild podcast, July 27, 2022.
🐦10ish Tweets from me😊
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