🌿Wild Ones #74: Environmental Communication Digest
'Reclaiming Sustainability'? + Dark Waters + Pollution is Colonialism + Environmental Keyword: Neighborly Relations + 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:
Happy April everyone!😊 Happy to be back writing here after a bit of a prolonged spring break! It seems spring is becoming the time of year where I reset and re-energize a bit (or an excuse for not being as consistent writing on here as I hoped:).
But the past couple of months have also been a bit hectic for me filled with conferences, teaching, writing and the seemingly endless academic job search now that my postdoc will be finishing up at end of this year. Hopefully I’ll have some good news to share on that front in the coming months though.
Conference-wise, I attended the American Association of Applied Linguistics (AAAL) conference in Portland, Oregon (March 17–21). The last time I attended AAAL was several years ago in Chicago in 2018. It’s a big conference, at least in the field of linguistics, (a couple thousand people), and to be honest, a bit overwhelming for me. I realize I’m becoming more and more ambivalent about attending massive conferences these days. Not least because traveling around the world several times a year to attend conferences makes less and less ecological sense, not to mention it being too costly for most scholars, especially scholars in the Global South. But I also wonder about the benefit of attending big conferences for graduate students and early-career scholars like me in particular. (Dr. Jenny Thatcher has an interesting take on this in her blog post on ‘The Super-Mega Conference Format’). I was also surprised to see so few presentations on environmental issues, one exception being Shondel Nero’s presentation on her recent co-authored book, The Power of Narrative: Climate Skepticism and the Deconstruction of Science.
On the other hand, AAAL is one of the few conferences where I get to catch up with all my old colleagues from the University of Hawai‘i where I did my graduate studies in Applied Linguistics, and it was great seeing everyone again, even though it was a little bit of an anxiety-inducing meet-up format (for me at least): karaoke.
The presentation I gave at AAAL explored some initial (or ‘half-baked’) ideas I’m developing for a paper I’m writing now on the concept of sustainability in applied linguistics, and whether the term ‘sustainability’ has been so over-used and abused that we should find new terms. Or if the term is still worth taking up for language and communication researchers, and that instead of abandoning it, we should ‘reclaim’ it and fill it with new meaning. My inspiration to examine this debate about sustainability in language and communication research came after attending an interesting symposium last year organized by the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities, with a keynote by the anthropologist Tim Ingold.
While I’m not a huge fan of disciplinary labels, when people ask what I do, I tend to call myself an ‘applied linguist’ or a linguist who applies their academic training to address “real-world problems.” I took this admittedly very broad way of framing my research from an article I read back in graduate school that argued to expand applied linguistics beyond a sole focus on one real-world problem (how to teach and learn languages), and to embrace a more expansive notion of its purpose as ‘the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue.’ And the ecological crisis is clearly one of our ‘real-world’ problems.
But my question - and the question raised at the environmental humanities symposium last year here in Oslo – is whether the term ‘sustainability’ is still useful in doing this work, or if it has become completely vacuous and useless, more as a communication tool for obfuscating responsibility and misdirecting attention from the environmental crisis. There are good arguments for ditching (or at least questioning whether to use) the term sustainability altogether. This comes in light of corporations, and the increasing corporatization of democratic governments, who have strategically captured sustainability and similar terms (say, ‘eco’ or ‘regenerative’) to reinforce a very non-sustainable status-quo. But there are also good arguments being made for ‘reclaiming’ sustainability, and investing it with new meaning, new ideas, and new stories. It's those arguments I’m looking forward to thinking through and stitching together.
After all, at its core, the notion of ‘sustainability’ for me raises at least two basic questions: What ways of inhabiting the world should we work to sustain? And whose ways of inhabiting the world are being sustained at the expense of others? These questions help me think outside of communication frameworks that still tend to treat struggles for social justice and environmental care as separate issues for researchers and activists. Instead, I like how the activist Angela Davis put it recently, in calling for an approach that doesn’t separate struggles for environmental repair from anti-racist anti-sexist struggles, but that
“…recognizes the importance of new frames, new trajectories, and new ways of imagining futures where chemical and ideological toxicities – including insecticides such as chlordecone, along with racism and misogyny – are prevented from polluting our worlds to come.”
🌱Environmental Keyword
‘neighborliness’
“I define neighborliness as a type of relationality that revolves around mutual moral responsibility. Neighborliness is a familiar form of engagement in local communities around the world…The focus on neighborly relations reconfigures climate change in terms of legally and morally charged engagements between those who emit greenhouse gases in one part of the world and those who face the detrimental consequences of global warming thousands of miles away.”
In Noah Walker-Crawford (2022). Climate change in the courtroom: An anthropology of neighborly relations. Anthropological Theory. Online First (Open Access).
👀What I’m Watching (📚and reading)
On the plane from Oslo to Portland, I watched a film called ‘Dark Waters’ which tells the true story of environmental lawyer Robert Bilott's case against DuPont, who investigated how the chemical manufacturing giant was poisoning the community of Parkersburg, West Virginia for decades with PFOAs (PFAS) or forever chemicals. The movie is based on a 2016 NYTimes Magazine article by environmental writer Nathaniel Rich called “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.”1
Mark Ruffalo is great playing Bilott, and it brought to mind the disaster going on in Hawai‘i right now with the NAVY’s forever chemical (PFAS) leaks into O‘ahu’s water systems,2 contaminating the water supply of both local residents and military families stationed there.
The movie Dark Waters hit a bit more powerfully since I also happened to be reading Max Liboiron’s 2021 book Pollution Is Colonialism. Liboiron is the founder and director of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR) and an Associate professor of Geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland:
“In Pollution Is Colonialism Max Liboiron presents a framework for understanding scientific research methods as practices that can align with or against colonialism. They point out that even when researchers are working toward benevolent goals, environmental science and activism are often premised on a colonial worldview and access to land. Focusing on plastic pollution, the book models an anticolonial scientific practice aligned with Indigenous, particularly Métis, concepts of land, ethics, and relations.”
In the book, Liboiron examines ‘the threshold theory of environmental pollution,’ which was also central to DuPont’s justification for dumping PFAS in the community streams and rivers, using the following question as a tool to resist regulation: how much pollution can the environment absorb before it crosses the threshold of toxicity and ‘scientifically detectable harm occurs’ (p. 5).
In 1960, writes Liboiron, a British ornithologist named G.R. Bennett wrote an research report entitled “Rubber bands in a puffin’s stomach.” Liboiron notes that this was one of the first articles published on what would soon be discovered as a world-wide phenomenon of birds ingesting plastics that somehow seemed to be turning up everywhere on earth. Behind the rationale for this mass-manufacturing and global spread of plastic waste is an industry that made ‘disposability’ – and the notion that plastics could simply be sent off to an invisible place called ‘away’ – central to pro-plastic environmental rhetoric.
This ‘away’ was not just a far-off place, but also embedded in the modern concept of pollution itself, where pollution occurred when at a certain moment the environment (whether a body of water, or the air) “could not purify itself and that moment could be measured, predicted and properly called pollution” (p. 4). The ‘term of art’ plastic and chemical industries used to justify dumping their toxic waste into communities for decades was ‘assimilative capacity.’ As Liboiron writes, “Assimilation theory transforms bodies of water and other environments into a Resource for waste disposal”:
“A core scientific achievement in the permission-to-pollute system was the articulation of assimilative capacity – the theory that environments can handle a specific amount of contaminant before harm occurs…The threshold theory of pollution differentiates between contamination, as the mere presence of a pollutant, and pollution, as the manifestation of (scientifically!) demonstrable harm by pollutants when metabolism is overwhelmed. Assimilative capacity is based on land relations that strip away the complexities of Land - including relations to fish, spirits, humans, water, and other entities – in favour of elements relevant to settler and colonial goals for using the water as a sink, a site of storage for waste.”
– Max Liboiron (2021). Pollution is Colonialism. Duke University Press. (pp. 39-40).
I highly recommend Max Liboiron’s fascinating and inspiring book (I especially loved their approach to idea-citation in the footnotes in the book, with the footnotes almost composing another book unto themselves!). I think their research has important implications for how we should go about investigating, understanding and communicating environmental problems and solutions, so I’m looking forward to returning to Pollution is Colonialism often, and connecting with other books I have on my reading list this year (like the powerful book Decolonial Ecology by Malcom Ferdinand I just finished and look forward to sharing more about in a future Wild Ones!)
If you’re interested exploring more on Liboiron’s and the CLEAR Lab’s research, here is a great short documentary created by the Atlantic from a couple of years ago:
🎧 What I’m listening to
Words and Actions, Episode 26: The language of Corporate Social Responsibility: Ecolinguistics, An interview with Arran Stibbe.
Against Nature | Raj Patel & Tina Ngata. “On the first episode of our new season of the Verso Podcast, host Eleanor Penny is joined by author Raj Patel and human rights advocate Tina Ngata to discuss the historical roots that tie together the exploitation of nature and people, and how those roots continue to impact our world today.”
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
Climate Solutions For Kids: An adaptation of Project Drawdown for young readers (PFF). Created by Inside the Greenhouse at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Discussion Guide: Let's Move Past the "Moral Case" for Fossil Fuels. By Amy Westervelt at Drilled.
📰 News and Events
Not Too Late: Rebecca Solnit, Yotam Marom & Renato Redentor Constantino. Hosted by Brooklyn Public Library, 14 April 2023 (video replay). “An energizing case for hope about the climate, from Rebecca Solnit (“the voice of the resistance” — The New York Times), climate activist Thelma Young Lutunatabua, and a chorus of voices calling on us to rise to the moment. Solnit will be in conversation with contributor and activist Yotam Marom.”
Online Lecture Series: Arctic Environments. Organized by the Network in Canadian History & Environment | Nouvelle initiative Canadienne en histoire de l'environnement. April 12, 2023 – May 17, 2023
India’s Indigenous people pay price of tiger conservation: Several Adivasi groups say the conservation strategies mean uprooting numerous communities from forests:
Papua New Guinean youths’ loss of tradition is bad news for hunting — but also for conservation. By Spoorthy Raman in Mongabay, 14 April 2023
"The Violence of Conservation in Africa: seeking non-violent alternatives." 25 April 2023, 13:00 CAT. REGISTER: https://loom.ly/RqDKEjU
Nature Spirituality, Environmental Movements, and Radical Politics: A Conversation with Professor Bron Taylor, hosted by Michigan State University. (Tuesday 11 April, video replay). “Bron Taylor is Professor of Religion, Nature and Environmental Ethics at The University of Florida, a Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center (at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munchen). An interdisciplinary environmental studies scholar, Taylor’s research and teaching engages the quest for environmentally sustainable and more equitable societies.”
📚 Research
Revolutionaries Needed! Environmental Communication as a Transformative Discipline. By Franzisca Weder and Tema Milstein (2021), in The Handbook of International Trends in Environmental Communication, edited by Bruno Takahashi, Julia Metag, Jagadish Thaker, and Suzannah Evans Comfort.
“This chapter argues that the theories and frameworks of environmental communication have the potential to be fundamentally transformative in scholarship, in pedagogy, and in public intervention.”
A review and provocation: On polarization and platforms. By Daniel Kreiss and Shannon C McGregor in New Media & Society (First published online April 11, 2023, open access):
“Scholars increasingly point to polarization as a central threat to democracy—and identify technology platforms as key contributors to polarization. In contrast, we argue that polarization can only be seen as a central threat to democracy if inequality is ignored…Groups struggling for equality, such as the Black Lives Matter movement, often cause polarization because they threaten the extant power and status of dominant groups. To develop a shared theoretical lens around polarization and its relationship with inequality, we take up the case of research on the role of platforms in polarization, showing how scholarship routinely lacks analysis of inequality.”
Dawn at Mineral King Valley: The Sierra Club, the Disney Company, and the Rise of Environmental Law. By Daniel P. Selmi, University of Chicago Press.
Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds. By Marisol de la Cadena. Duke University Press (Open Access).
The world wide web of carbon: Toward a relational footprinting of information and communications technology's climate impacts. By Anne Pasek, Hunter Vaughan and Nicole Starosielsk. In Big Data and Society. (Open access)
Every Day is Earth Day: Evidence on the Long-term Impact of Environmental Activism. By Daniel Hungerman and Vivek Moorthy in American Economic Association:
💡 Ideas
Sacrifice Zones: A Genealogy and Analysis of an Environmental Justice Concept. By Ryan Juskus in Environmental Humanities (2023).
“The sacrifice zone concept originated in livestock management, where it concerned techniques for balancing economic and ecological costs and benefits. Its current range of meanings in environmental thought emerged in its transference from this realm, where it was a conservation concept, to that of energy and environmental issues, where, in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, it became a critical concept for opposing the human and environmental costs of abstract collective projects like development, consumerism, and militarism.”
Latour’s Metamorphosis, by Alyssa Battistoni, in New Left Review (Jan 20, 2023).
“Made notorious by the ‘Science Wars’ of the 1990s, [Bruno Latour] reinvented himself as a climate scholar and public intellectual in the last two decades of his life. Yet amidst the expressions of appreciation and grief, many on the left shrugged. Latour’s relationship to the left had long been fraught, if not entirely unsatisfactory to either: Latour enjoyed antagonizing the left; in turn, many leftists loved to hate Latour.”
UT Austin journalism professor John Schwartz on teaching sustainability disinformation:
Black Soldiers Cycled 1,900 Miles Across the U.S. So He Did, Too.
A remarkable journey from Montana to St. Louis by 20 Black infantrymen in 1897 seemed doomed to obscurity until Erick Cedeño, a bicyclist, retraced their journey. Interview by Nina Burleigh in the NYTimes.
Don’t cancel John Muir. But don’t excuse him either. By Michelle Nijhuis in the Atlantic. In the series: Who owns America’s Wilderness.
🗃️ From the Archive
“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?”
– Sophie Chao
✏️Writing from me
I’ll be workshopping a sustainability article a bit more over the next few months, and I might make new sub-section in Wild Ones to experiment with doing it:) But I’d of course be curious to hear what your thoughts are on the term sustainability: ditch it or keep it? In the meantime, here is a Medium post I wrote a few years ago for those interested!: “What is ‘Sustainable’ Development? A quick guide to the history of a malleable concept, and what it can teach us about creating a sustainable future.”
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“What matters more to me now is: how are we traveling together? And are we using all the tools available to us to make sure we collectively flourish?…As I say to my students: take what is useful from these systems, and leave the rest behind.”
– Zoe Todd, from here to there, in Anthro{dendum}
“More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.”Ada Limón, Instructions on Not Giving Up.
“Compromise is what happens when you have obligations to incommensurabilities. Incommensurability means things do not share a common ground for judgment or comparison; that is, “projects that simply cannot speak to one another, cannot be aligned or allied.” Anticolonialism within dominant science. Diversity work in a racist institution. Humility in a tenure application. All are impossible bedfellows that are nonetheless crucial to pursue and indeed happen, yet should never be smoothed over or conflated in that pursuit.”
– Max Liboiron on Obligation. In Pollution is Colonialism (2021). Duke University Press. (p. 136).
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:)
On another note, one of Nathaniel Rich’s most wide-read reports, and one of the first in New York Times Magazine to examine the climate crisis in depth, is also bit more problematic as Naomi Klein examines here.
I’ve been following Christina Jedra, an investigative reporter for Civil Beat Honolulu, for updates on this unfolding crisis in Honolulu (and throughout the Hawaiian Islands it seems unfortunately).