🌿Wild Ones #72: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental Fiction: Hollow Kingdom + Resisting Symbolic Violence + Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice + Finding comfort and conviviality with urban trees + 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. The post is a bit lengthy for email, so please go to the website for the full post:) 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
Hollow Kingdom, by Kira Jane Buxton (2019).
For 2023, I decided to put together a reading list with the wildly ambitious and unlikely goal of reading a new book every week. Much of my reading last year was mainly spent pouring over academic journal articles and single chapters from edited volumes and books. I only read a few books in their entirety from beginning to end. So this year I decided to change it up a bit. I made a google sheet of all the books I want to read this year, one for each week of 2023. But looking over the list, I realized there was almost no fiction – a genre which I’ve struggled to engage with much, unfortunately, ever since I started grad school over a decade ago. So I went looking for recommendations and saw this tweet by Professor Paige West, someone whose research and writing I draw a lot inspiration from (here is a Wild Ones I wrote in 2021 about her work on ‘rhetorics of environmental dispossession’):
I just finished the book and it was…strange, funny, and at times, surprisingly touching for a zombie apocalypse novel. It’s set in Seattle, and narrated by a crow (named “ST”) whose companion human becomes a zombie. Together with Dennis the dog, the two are forced to flee their comfy home. In trying to understand the gravity of the situation, and what to do about it, ST seeks out Onida, an all-knowing Octopus at the Seattle aquarium:
“I do know Aura. But there is not just Aura in the world. Your crow kind absorbs through Aura. My kind—those beneath the breathing line, those of scale and shell—we listen to Echo—the ocean’s breath, the song of whales, the hum of a mollusk, the swish and sway of kelp. It is connected to Aura as all things are connected. I listen closely to the messages of water, air and The Other World, and beyond that which we can see.” Onida slithered closer, still on the rock, a colossal, peristaltic mass of muscle.”
Through listening to Aura, as well as the wild’s other global communication networks, Echo (the vast underwater network of marine life) and Web (the mycelial soil network of fungus, plants and trees), ST and Dennis learn that they must embark on a mission, with the help of their wild friends, to save the domesticated animals (‘domestics’) of the world and any humans who might still be out there too.
In the emerging genre of climate and environmental apocalypse novels, Hollow Kingdom is one of my favorites. I also enjoyed the first-person vignettes from the perspective of polar bears, armadillos, cats, elephants and many others sprinkled throughout the book. Kira Jane Buxton’s approach to environmental writing, a usually human-centered apocalyptic tale told through a nonhuman perspective, strikes me as a fascinating way to imagine less anthropocentric environmental futures. So I’m looking forward to reading the sequel at some point.
And if you have any recommendations for new ‘eco-fiction’ I’d love to hear any suggestions you might have in the comments:
Also on my reading list: There were some interesting essay recommendations in response to climate writer Mary Heglar’s recent question about people’s “favorite climate essays.” Here are a few that I look forward to checking out:
Faster Than We Thought: What Stories Will Survive Climate Change? Omar El Akkad on Our Obligation to Preserve Memories, in LitHub
The Habits of Highly Cynical People, by Rebecca Solnit, in Harper Magazine.
The Case for Climate Rage, by Amy Westervelt, in Popula.
🎧 What I’m listening to
Unearthing the Deep Roots of Regenerative Farming: A Conversation with Liz Carlisle. In the Edge Effects Podcast
Liberation Ecotherapy. Interview with Phoenix Smith. From Upstream.
The Protectors: What is it about Mauna Kea that makes it so sacred to Hawaiians? So precious that people have pledged their lives, their liberty, to blocking further development on its summit? From Honolulu Civil Beat’s podcast, “Off Shore.”
👀What I’m watching
Crispin Thurlow, a sociolinguist at University of Bern, recently shared his TEDx talk, “Embracing a life of mediocrity.” Thurlow is also an affiliated professor in my department at the University of Oslo, and I’ve had the pleasure to chat with him about his work on the sociolinguistics of tourism, elite discourse and, more recently, his engagement with the field of ‘discard studies’ exploring the language of garbage and waste.
Thurlow’s talk is a nice reflection on the “relentless language of superiority and comparison” that surrounds us, and how we might live life otherwise. In particular, he discusses some of his linguistic research on ‘elite’ discourse and how it creates “symbolic violence” in our lives, a term he draws from the work of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Symbolic violence is about, as Thurlow puts it, “How we allow words to manipulate us even when it’s against our own best interest.” In pushing back against this linguistic manipulation, his talk asks: “How can we avoid doing symbolic violence to ourselves?”
Embracing a life of mediocrity | Crispin Thurlow | TEDxBasel
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
#NotTooLate “is a project to invite newcomers to the climate movement, as well as provide climate facts and encouragement for people who are already engaged but weary. We believe that the truths about the science, the justice-centered solutions, the growing strength of the climate movement and its achievements can help. They can assuage the sorrow and despair, and they can help people see why it’s worth doing the work the climate crisis demands of us.”
Race and Nature, resources. Compiled by Dr. April Anson, Assistant Professor of Public Humanities, San Diego State University.
Doing Fieldwork in a pandemic, google doc (also a great resource for doing digital research in environmental communication and ecolinguistics!)
📰 News, Events, & Forthcoming Eco-Books
Hydronarratives. By Matthew S. Henry, University of Nebraska Press:
Capitalism's Natures and the Climate Crisis. February 10, 2023. Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU), University of Chicago:
📚 Research
Beyond Fortress Conservation: Postcards of Biodiversity and Justice. By Subhankar Banerjee and Finis Dunaway. In Environmental History:
“For the 2022 Venice Biennale, we worked together to create an exhibit of twenty-two postcards reflecting on the global legacies of fortress conservation. Even though our project is grounded in a critique of visual culture, we also believe that critique is not enough. The postcards document actual practices on the ground to show surprising, everyday examples of contemporary conservation. Challenging conventional myths, the photographs and accompanying texts layer history and critique with stories of sustenance and survival.”
Towards inclusive international environmental communication scholarship: The role of Latin America. By Bruno Takahashi in International Journal of Cultural Studies.
Finding comfort and conviviality with urban trees. By Elizabeth Straughan, Catherine Phillips, and Jennifer Atchison in Cultural Geographies:
Hello Tree,
I think your possum guard, and the possum guards of some of your fellow trees in Harcourt and Courtney St, is getting too tight, and your trunk seems to be suffering, am i right? I hope you get some help soon to loosen the guard, and that your fellow trees do too. (Alex).
In the City of Melbourne (CoM), Australia, trees are receiving emails. They arrive from near and far, sharing personal dilemmas, jokes, poetry, confessions, political concerns and more. The emails come to CoM’s offices through an online platform that hosts an interactive visualisation of the urban forest’s publicly managed trees (around 80,000) (Figure 1).2 Such online maps are increasingly common for municipalities looking to share information with the public about a city’s urban forest. However, CoM’s visualisation took their platform’s interactivity further by assigning each tree an email. The aim was to allow Melbourne residents to tell City staff about maintenance issues regarding specific trees. It turns out, however, that such emails are rare. Instead, people send trees all kinds of messages…
How prominent science communicators on YouTube understand the impact of their work. By Vanessa M. Hill, Will J. Grant, Melanie L. McMahon, and Isha Singhal, in Frontiers in Communication.
Communicating with the public about wildland fire preparation, response, and recovery: a review of recent literature. Anna R. Santo, Heidi Huber-Stearns, and Hollie Smith. In Applied Environmental Education & Communication
💡 Ideas
Bomb Cyclone? Or Just Windy with a Chance of Hyperbole? When the barometer drops, the volume of ‘hyped words’ rises, and many meteorologists aren’t happy about it.
Temple Grandin: Society Is Failing Visual Thinkers, and That Hurts Us All. In the NYTimes.
There’s Something About the Bike: A Conversation with Bob Giordano. In Edge Effects Magazine.
Many American spaces are designed around the automobile. Infrastructure for pedestrians, bicycles, and public transit is secondary to the car. This leads to the “five C’s,” according to Bob Giordano: car crashes, cancer, and climate change. To get a community bicycle advocate’s perspective on the benefits of bike- and pedestrian-friendly spaces in our cities, I reached out to Giordano, a longtime Missoula, Montana resident and an advocate for sustainable transportation and bikeable communities. He’s the director and founder of Free Cycles Community Bike Shop and the Missoula Institute for Sustainable Transportation (MIST). We spoke on the phone to discuss what bicycles can do for communities and why Bob Giordano has dedicated his life to a more bikeable Missoula.
Animal pain is about communication, not just feeling, by Mirjam Guesgen, in Aeon Magazine.
Cambridge Saffron: An investigation into the local histories, uses, and stories surrounding saffron in Cambridgeshire:
🗃️ From the Archive
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
“Something you might be unaware of—in the natural world, there is an Internet. In English, it would roughly translate to Aura because it is all around us…In fact, the birds are delivering information through melodic verse, releasing intricate notes much like how the trees whisper their slow secrets into the wind on the wings of leaves. A torrent of warnings, stories, adages, poems, threats, how-tos, real estate info, survival tips and non sequitur jokes are available for those who tap in. Everything talks, you just have to be willing to listen.”
– Onida the Octopus, in Hollow Kingdom, by Kira Jane Buxton.
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 too😊 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 you’re involved in/most interest you, or anything you’d like to see more of in Wild Ones.
Lastly, as you probably noticed, a lot of the research, ideas and events I share here come from the networks of academics, writers and activists I follow on Twitter. But over the past couple of months, I’ve been using Twitter less and less, and am contemplating leaving at some point, although I’m not sure yet when/if that will happen. I’d be curious to hear how other (former) Twitter users are thinking about the platform these days. In the meantime, I’ve created a Mastodon account, intrigued by the new ‘Mushroom Project’ as an alternative social network. So you can also find me there too just in case:) @gavinlamb@spore.social
Hi Gavin! Linnea here, from the emerging Scandinavian Association of Ecolinguistics (was that what we decided to call it?). Nice to read your newsletter, as always. Special thanks for the recommendation about the novel Hollow Kingdom. I'll put it on my reading list!
For my part, I've enjoyed reading the first three books of the Norwegian author Maja Lunde's Climate Quartet (and the last one just came out in Norwegian). These novels are set in several times – historical, contemporary and future – including a kind of post-apocalyptic world that puts our times in a horrible light.
I've read a couple of other post-(climate-)apocalyptic novels – I might also mention The Wall by John Lanchester, and The Road by Cormac McCarthy – and I think they all provide useful and chilling perspective on the imminent crisis.
However, my best recommendation is Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, which I'm currently reading. It's set in the 2030s and later, after a lethal heatwave, and it deals with politics and activism in addition to just describing the horrors of unsustainable development. Thereby it suggests a couple of ideas of how to actually stave off the crisis. Quite an inspiring read!
Good luck with your ambitious reading goal (I'm happy if I manage to read 20–30 books per year – in total; including Harry Potter with my nine-year-old!).
Thanks for your work with the newsletter. I learn so much from it.
Best,
Linnea