đżWild Ones #75: Environmental Communication Digest
The Persuaders: Winning hearts and minds in a divided world + The Callout Sandwich + Reclaiming Time + Messaging the Moment + The Mustang + 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, and if you find this digest useful, please share with others you think might find it useful too:)
đ What Iâm reading
âThe ascendant political culture, confrontational and sensational and dismissive, has many causes: the inflammatory incentives of social media; the cynical manipulations of billionaire-owned, divide-and-conquer news outlets; the growing confidence and voice of once-marginalized groups; the very real material crises that beg for solutions and continue to remain unsolved; the frustration with how little milder, kinder, more civil, more hopeful politics has delivered; the sense that, absent a politics of us and them, the them will continue to pillage the us. For these and other reasons, many Americans have grown alienated from an idea at the heart of democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds by persuadingâ (p. 13).
âDemocracy Dies in Darkness,â the motto adopted by the Washington Post in 2017, was adopted by the paper to signal the importance of journalismâs role in âshining a lightâ on the corruption, secrecy and anti-democratic authoritarianism that creep into government when the free press in society is weak. But in The Persuaders, Anand Giridharadas argues that there is another threat to democracy: a wide-spread belief that people already have their minds made up, and there is no use in trying to change them. In other words, when our belief in the possibility of persuading others fades away, so does a functioning democracy. For some, the âpower of persuasionâ might be associated with sleek corporate marketing strategies, or maybe cynical media manipulation techniques to boost ratings. But in The Persuaders, Anand places everyday conversational efforts to persuade others at the center of a thriving democracy.
In the U.S. it seems the dominant way of framing and talking about democracy tends to be in the language of electoral democracy, which assumes that people have already-formed and unchanging opinions, and simply cast a vote representing these opinions every couple of years. Yes, there may be some swing voters out there who donât know what they think yet, and need some nudging, but the main political communication strategy is not to persuade others, but to get people who already believe what you do to get off the couch and cast their vote.
Over the past decade or so, though, there has been a fast-growing body of research in political communication that has increasingly shifted focus from electoral democracy to an interest in âdeliberative democracy.â At its most fundamental level, write the editors of handbook on the concept, deliberative democracy âmean[s] mutual communication that involves weighing and reflecting on preferences, values, and interests regarding matters of common conÂcern.â In other words, persuasion. Political persuasion seems especially fraught in our age of âpost-truthâ platform capitalism, when social media like Facebook and Twitter place more value on an attention economy that generates âlikesâ rather than a common ground of facts. As the editors of that handbook on deliberative democracy put it:
âPost-truth politics is the antithesis of deliberative democracy. Resurgent auÂthoritarian and populist leaders in many countries have little interest in deliberationâexÂcept to suppress it. Even where deliberation is not repressed, we too often see levels of political polarization that signal inabilities to listen to the other side and reflect upon what they may have to sayâ
We hope that these sorts of trends can and will be reversed, and that the ideas and pracÂtices of deliberative democracy can play a key role in their reversal. In the meantime, however, these trends feed the cynicism of those who believe that deliberative democracy is a pipe dreamâ (p. 1-2).
But for Anand Giridharadas, deliberative democracy is definitely not a pipedream, but a bourgeoning reality in the here-and-now. After reading The Persuaders, I came away with a hopeful sense that âthe ideas and pracÂtices of deliberative democracyâ are alive and well in the U.S., even if it doesnât often seem that way. Or at least, we learn about people throughout the book who believe this to be the case and who are working hard to bring about a more sustainable, democratic and just world through everyday conversations informed by an emerging science and art of persuasion.
The Persuaders is packed with interesting ideas and practices that environmental communicators and organizations can take on board, but here I just want highlight three key ideas that stuck with me from three of the people Anand interviewed for the book:
Growing movements across difference
âIn her memoir, [Alicia Garza] writes that too many of her political allies seem to enjoy the cozy homogeneity of their ranks, instead of viewing that as a problem of smallness: âThey believe that finding a group of people who think like you and being loud about your ideas is somehow building powerâŠAnd while I feel most comfortable around people who think like me and share my experiences, the longer I'm in the practice of building a movement, the more I realize that movement building isn't about finding your tribe it's about growing your tribe across difference to focus on a common set of goals.â (p. 70)
Donât sell pizzaburgers
"In her research, [Anat] Shenker-Osorio sees moderates not as possessing a fixed centrist identity but rather as being in a suspended state of mixed opinions. She believes the political left gets into all manner of trouble assuming the opposite. Democrats were like pizza sellers worried about growing the business who pivot to pizzaburgers to woo burger lovers and end up alienating their existing customers while gaining few new ones. A better term for moderates, then, might be âpersuadables.â âModerateâ implies a taste for the tempered version of a thing. âPersuadableâ implies malleability.â
Deep Canvasing: or âback-loadingâ facts
A good chunk of the book is devoted to exploring the communication methods behind âdeep canvassing,â an on-the-ground, face-to-face, and conversationally more engaged, persistent and longer form of traditional political canvassing (thus âdeepâ). Deep canvassing involves eight steps according to Giridharadas.
Make contact with the person and announce the political issue or policy youâre theyâre to discuss.
Establish a ânon-judgmental contextâ for the interaction. In other words, keep a poker-face and just listen to what the person has to say about the issue without emotionally reacting or negatively or positively evaluating what they say.
Exchange personal stories with one another. Ask if the person has any personal experiences of their own on the issue, and then share your own stories
During the exchange of personal stories, create opportunities for âanalogic perspective-getting.â This idea comes out of research by political scientists Joshua Kalla and David Broockman who write in their report on deep canvassing:
âDuring this exchange of narratives, canvassers asked questions that sought to prompt individuals to draw their own implications from the narratives. Canvassersâ goal was for this non-judgmental exchange of narratives to end with individuals self-generating and explicitly stating aloud implications of the narratives that ran contrary to their previously stated exclusionary attitudes. Qualitative debriefs with the canvassers indicate that such âself-persuasionâ appeared to be commonâ (p. 10).
Make the case: Reiterate why youâre canvassing, following the narrative architecture of the âcallout sandwichâ method: shared values-problem-solution (see environmental keyword below).
This is also the point where the canvasser might (non-judgmentally) get the person to think out loud about any contradictions they came up in the personâs personal narratives. And then finally:
âSeventh, and only seventh, the canvasser was to respond to the subjects concerns with talking points and facts. As [Steve] Deline had observed, this seventh step was step one for many amateurs. No, Dad, the earth really has warmed! But in deep canvassing this kind of refutation and fact-checking and responding was back-loaded, and what preceded it was a significant amount of listening and trust building. "Canvassers were trained not to address concerns until this point in the conversation so that voters would not feel threatened by this section," the report says. "Only after rapport had been established and stories shared would canvassers address concerns." To be fact-checked, in other words, had prerequisites. It helped first to feel heard, cared for, respected, seen in the fullness of one's complexity and even, yes, confusion (p. 303).
Ask them to choose, on a scale of 1 (totally reject) - 10 (completely support), how they feel about your issue now.
In particular, Anand Giridharadas points to Shenker-Osorioâs work as a major influence behind developing the theory of persuasion and social change informing the deep-canvasing approach spreading fast across organizations around the world. Interestingly, for me at least, a big influence on Shenker-Osorioâs ideas about political communication came after taking classes and working with the linguist George Lakoff at UC Berkeley. Lakoff wrote a popular article several years ago in the journal Environmental Communication on âWhy it Matters How We Frame the Environment.â Iâve written a bit about Lakoffâs arguments on the notion of environmental framing here and here. But one of his key points about framing that Shenker-Osorio takes away from from his work is the idea that ââŠone cannot avoid framing. The only question is, whose frames are being activated â and hence strengthened - in the brains of the public.â From this, Shenker-Osorio argues that a common mistake in political communication is to invoke your opponents framing of an issue by attacking it. But âwhat you fight you feed,â she says. In other words, focus on the beautiful world you are for, not the crappy one you are against. Or, as Anand Giridharadas puts it, ââŠhave the conversation you want to be having, not the conversation your opponent prefers.â
Here are some of the people and ideas mentioned in The Persuaders in case of interest!:
Loretta Ross on: Calling In the Calling Out Culture & Understanding your circles of Influence
Alicia Garzaâs new book: The purpose of power: how we come together when things fall apart.
âCranky Uncle is the creation of scientist and cartoonist John Cook, who uses cartoons, humor, and critical thinking to expose the misleading techniques of science denial and build public resilience against misinformation.â
Steve Deline and The New Conversation Initiative: helping teams and movements leverage the power of deep canvassing to create lasting progressive change.
How to talk someone out of bigotry: These scientists keep proving that reducing prejudice is possible. Itâs just not easy. By Brian Resnick in Vox.
Finally, hereâs an interesting video of Anand Giridharadas discussing his book The Persuaders at Politics and Prose book store in Washington D.C. (November 4th 2022).
đ±Environmental Keyword
âThe callout sandwichâ
ââŠa generous heap of callout between two thick slices of call in. Call people all people in with that universally appealing paean to values. Call out the people getting in the way of those values translating into better lives. But neither start nor finish there. Remind people that if they come together, things can change and other worlds are possible.â
â Anand Giridharadas, in The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age.
What Giridharadas calls the âcallout sandwichâ is a persuasion tool that contrasts with another message ordering strategy popular in movement organizing: AâHâA, or Anger-Hope-Action. The callout sandwich comes out of the work of Anat ShenkerâOsorio, and while effective in labor organizing, writes Giridharadas, for some reason âthe opening salvo of anger [doesnât] work as well.â Instead, the idea for designing a persuasive message following the âcallout sandwichâ model goes something like this:
1) start with shared values: âeveryone should have access to clean water and air no matter what we look like or where we come fromâ 2) sandwich a slice of the problem in the middle: âbut a powerful few get rich off of polluting our environment while trying to divide us from each other so that we'll look the other wayâ 3) propose your solution, but importantly, âsell the brownie, not the recipeâ as Shenker-Osorioâs puts it. In other words, leave wonky policy jargon to a minimum, and focus on what the vision of this better world would actually look and feel like. Hereâs one interesting example of how to paint (literally) the solution (aka solution brownie), in this video created by the journalist Naomi Klein and the Intercept.
đ§Â What Iâm listening to
âOliver Burkeman is the author of 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals â a book about why life today often feels like a battle against endless to-do lists. In this conversation, we explore with Oliver how time has been instrumentalized under capitalism, why itâs important to âwaste timeâ on activities that are not productive and cultivate the feeling of a âjoy of missing outâ as opposed to FOMO, the âfear of missing out,â and how to connect with what is truly most important to us right now and full-heartedly embrace our finite time, our mere 4000 precious weeks, on planet earth.â
đWhat Iâm watching
Also watching: Pili Ka MoÊ»o: âThe Fukumitsu Ê»Ohana (family) of HakipuÊ»u are Native Hawaiian taro farmers and keepers of this generational practice. While much of OÊ»ahu has become urbanized, HakipuÊ»u remains a kiÌpuka (oasis) of traditional knowledge where great chiefs once resided and their bones still remain. The Fukumitsus are tossed into a world of complex real estate and judicial proceedings when nearby Kualoa Ranch, a large settler-owned corporation, destroys their familial burials to make way for continued development plans.â
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
Messaging This Moment: A handbook for progressive communicators. (PDF) Learn the principles of persuasive and mobilizing messaging with examples for how to apply them. By Anat Shenker-Osorio and the Center for Community Change. (From ASO Communications).
đ° News and Events
Sounds Like Sustainability: An interview with Sigrid KannengieĂer on sustainability, digital media, AI and surveillance capitalism (recorded webinar from February 20, 2023): The IECA webinar series Sounds like Sustainability âaims to provide practitioners, scholars and other interested folks the chance to learn about and discuss key topics in the practice of environmental and sustainability communication.
đ Research
A common talking point about climate change gets it all wrong, new study says: Thereâs no solid evidence that framing the global problem as a local one prompts people to act. So what does? By Kate Yoder in Grist. (April 21, 2023).
Reflections on Environmental Communication and the Challenges of a New Research Agenda. By Alison Anderson in Environmental Communication.
âOver recent years, the âinformation deficitâ model has come under growing criticism and new concerns have increasingly focused upon citizen involvement and moving public engagement âupstreamââŠYet as Kahan (2013) points out, scientists, government officials, and NGOs have made little use of the findings generated by scholars working in the science/environmental communication area. Field experiments provide an opportunity for models to be tested in the real world, and to then apply that evidence and learn lessons. There are myriad opportunities for environmental communication scholars to work alongside communicators on specific campaigns targeting specific social and cultural groupings in order to develop their communication strategies in ways that can be observed and measuredâŠâ
âEven I am a Part of Natureâ: Unraveling the Human/Nature Binary to Enable Systems Change. By Tema Milstein, Mariko Oyama Thomas, Jeff Hoffmann & John Carr. In Environmental Communication (open access, April 19, 2023).
Islands and Cultures: How Pacific Islands Provide Paths toward Sustainability.
by Kamanamaikalani Beamer, Te Maire Tau and Peter M. Vitousek. Yale University Press.
đĄ Ideas
What Sound Can Tell Us About Our Changing World: As new technologies supercharge the field of bioacoustics, researchers can better listen to environmental changes â and use the information to guide conservation efforts. By Tara Lohan in The Revelator.
AI translation is jeopardizing Afghan asylum claims: Cost-cutting translations are introducing errors and putting refugees at risk. By Andrew Deck in Rest of World (April 19, 2023)
Octopus time: We humans are forward-facing, gravity-bound plodders. Can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalise our ideas about time? By David Borkenhagen in Aeon Magazine:
âCould we learn to move through time as an octopus moves through space? With equal access to the past, present and future â viewed wide or with sharp focus â we might better navigate the challenges of living and dying on Earth. The octopus invites us to think in a way that dissolves the boundaries between the present and the future, understanding our âendingâ less as a fixed point and more as a fluid process stretching across generations.â
How to talk to your family and friends about the new IPCC report â five tips from climate change communication research. By Josh Ettinger in The Conversation. (March 22, 2023).
#3: âFind ways to adjust your conversation based on what people are interested in. Researchers call this âtailoringâ.â
đïžÂ From the Archive
Ecocultural blindspots âare zones in which, through selective and limited focus and omission, the law treats as outside the lawâs purview the very things it ostensibly is intended to interrogate and regulate, including systemic anthropogenic ecological destruction.â
- John Carr & Tema Milstein (2018). In Keep burning coal or the manatee gets it: Rendering the carbon economy invisible through endangered species protection.
đŹÂ Quotes Iâm thinking about
ââŠearth-centered thinking portends significant changes on how we understand the role of language in communication. We move away from logocentrism in acknowledging that diverse polysemiotic resources (bodies, objects, material ecologies) participate equally in making meaning; meaning emerges in activity in situated interactions through an assemblage of social and material networks; it emerges through a responsive and collaborative distributed practice of social agents, environmental resources, and nonhuman participants working together; it is affective, embodied, and ethical, sensitive to all the agents and actants in an ecology and their claims.â
â Suresh Canagarajah, from the preface (p. xi) in TESOL and Sustainability: English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era. By Jason Goulah and John Katunich.
Iâve also been experimenting with posting quotes and other stuff on the new âNotesâ feature on Substack, giving me an opportunity to revisit old quotes from the Wild Ones archive:)
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:)