🌿Wild Ones #76: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental Keyword: "Environmental Rage" + Two Histories: How Memphis Defeated a Pipeline + The Soils of Black Folk and W.E.B. Dubois + A global conservation basic income + 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:
🌱Environmental Keyword:
“Environmental Rage”
“The story of climate change, both its history and its future, needs to be told by people who have already experienced injustice and disempowerment, people who are justifiably angry at the way the system works. And some of those stories are beginning to be told.”
– Amy Westervelt, The Case for Climate Rage (2019). In Popula
“During the last year, ‘eco-anger’ has received a first focused wave of research interest, but studies related to it are still very few (Kleres and Wettergren, 2017; du Bray et al., 2019; Stanley et al., 2021). This is another major omission in research about climate emotions, because analysis of surveys and interview studies shows that people often have feelings of climate anger.”
– Panu Pihkala, Toward a Taxonomy of Climate Emotions (2022), in Frontiers in Climate
I know that when I am angry, I am driven to act. I know that when I act, I feel better.
– Emily Atkin, from “Out of grief and into anger,” in Heated
According to a 2021 poll conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication which examined Americans’ ‘Emotional Responses to Global Warming,’ the poll found that about 70% of Americans are ‘somewhat worried’ about global warming, while nearly half, or “Four in ten or more say they feel ‘angry’ (47%)” about it.
In her 2022 Atlantic essay ‘The Utility of White Hot Rage,’ the environmental journalist Emma Marris writes that when it comes to identifying with a particular climate emotion camp, she has long seen herself in both the ‘worried’ and ‘angry’ camps. This mix of climate emotions, similar to the background noise of ‘ambient anxiety’ that activists for social justice often experience, steadily wear a person down. Marris describes how over the course of her nearly two decade career as an environmental journalist reporting on all the things that aren’t being done to stop the climate crisis, endlessly treading water in this mix climate emotions would likely be a recipe for total “burn out.” However, as she puts it in her essay: “For some people, this might manifest as fatigue, or disengagement. For me, it’s anger. On a near-daily basis, I can feel my blood sizzling in my veins.”
Over the past several years, there has been a growing discussion of the negative emotions ecological crises generate, with new terms like ‘eco-anxiety’ and ‘climate grief’ emerging in public discourse, as well as older terms finding new resonance. Examples include the activist Christopher Manes’ idea of ‘green rage’ or philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s notion of ‘solastalgia,’ which I actually wrote about here on Wild Ones a couple of years ago:
One question that has come up is how to deal with the bad vibes climate change makes us feel, from grief and sadness, to anxiety and rage. Responding to this question, a number of essays and research articles have examined the ‘internal strategies’ people need to develop to better cope with a range of negative eco-emotions in the service of helping people maintain their sanity in the seemingly endless fight for a better world. These ideas are most recently explored perhaps in Britt Wray’s 2022 book Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (on my book list for next month!). “Employing such internal strategies makes sense,” Marris acknowledges,
“…but the fact that we need them makes me furious all over again…Advice on burnout often stresses that you can’t fix it with self-care—that you have to fix your working conditions. But what if the conditions causing burnout are a global pattern of fossil-fuel-based capitalism?”
The question of climate emotions, and what to do about them, seems to me most often raised in response to how these emotions can either fuel or hinder the actions we take to fight for a more sustainable and just world. The emotional repertoire of climate feelings (at the most zoomed out level) appears fairly binary, swinging between feelings of hope and happiness on the one hand, and despair and anger on the other. But I wonder: how can (or should) ‘negative’ eco-emotions – like climate grief, fear or, as I explore here, anger – be enlisted in environmental communication strategies to foster people to take action on the environmental issues we care about?
I especially started thinking more about the role of climate emotions — and environmental rage in particular — after reading an essay last month by
in her climate justice newsletter . Hebron writes:“And I worried, worried, worried that I would become a bitter person. That anger was an ugly emotion, that rage would blind me.
Extinction Rebellion speaks about love and rage. And I thought, well the love part is easy. That’s why we do this, right? Because I love people and this planet. This world - with thunder and music and flowers that follow the sun and sea monsters and stories - it’s incredible, complex, fascinating, intoxicating. Of course I love it, I don’t see what the other option is.
But rage, that’s scary.”
I thought this was a compelling intro because I think it raises several important questions for thinking critically about the role of rage, and emotion more broadly, as a potential (de)motivator in our climate activism and communication. In particular, the essay points to how anti-climate politicians and corporations often marginalize expressions of anger in the climate movement through sexist and ageist discourse that portrays expressions of climate-emotions like grief, anxiety or anger as feminine, childish and/or irrational responses to the climate crisis. The environmental philosopher Kay Milton examines the long history of this communication tactic framing public expressions of anger at the status quo as irrational (see her quote I cite at the end of this post for instance). And the political scientist Cara New Daggett explores how climate denial rhetoric increasingly glorifies expressions of love for fossil-fuels as rational and masculine, an anti-climate identity she has coined ‘petro-masculinity.’
What stories do we tell ourselves and others about our emotional responses to the ecological crisis? And how do these stories motivate the actions we take (or don’t take) in response to the environmental issues we care about?
A popular messaging strategy among labor activist groups in the United States has been A-H-A (Anger→Hope→Action), as Anand Giridharadas writes in his new book The Persuaders. From an AHA perspective, an opening salvo of anger about an issue of shared frustration (horrible working conditions, toxic dumping in your neighborhood, cutting down trees to make room for a parking lot) is the best way to ignite awareness and rally people together around a common cause in both social and environmental justice campaigns. Once the fire of anger is lit, the challenging communication task ahead is to channel this anger from a vague and volatile state towards concrete and targeted actions that advance progress towards the more hopeful world painted by a campaign.
The global climate movement Extinction Rebellion (XR), as Hebron points out, signs off on their emails with an appeal to both ‘love and rage.’ For example, the emails I receive from Extinction Rebellion Norway end like this:
Med kjærlighet og raseri, opprørsk hilsen Extinction Rebellion Norge With love and rage, rebellious greetings Extinction Rebellion Norway
In an essay about Extinction Rebellion’s choice to frame climate activism through this emotional binary, postdoctoral researcher Louise Knops writes that “Love and rage have always set us in motion, for better and for worse. XR invites us to channel them in one direction, despite its vagueness and imperfections.” Anger is a volatile emotion that politicians have harnessed throughout history for radically different political purposes. As Knops puts it: “…love and rage already dominate geopolitics today, but in fundamentally different directions: there is love towards one’s people but hate towards others; there is longing for a derelict past (as seen in Brexit) and rage against ‘the establishment.’”
If we view “anger as a transitory rage stop on the highway to positivity and enlightenment,” writes filmmaker Sarah Lazarovic in Yes!, sharing concrete stories about the actions we need to take to get us there could be the most effective mode of transporting us from vague rage to precise action. And as Knops concludes, once we have established that expressing anger at the culprits setting the planet aflame is an appropriate and logical response, “The next step is to populate this journey with concrete stories and actions, to go beyond our fear of extinction.”
One place we might begin to ‘populate’ this rage-to-action journey with more concrete stories is to disambiguate what me mean by rage exactly, so we can distinguish more or less helpful expressions of it on the journey towards climate justice, as philosopher Myisha Cherry writes in her 2021 book, The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-racist Struggle. Cherry describes her approach as an image variation view of rage. Rather than dismiss rage as an unproductive and negative emotion as philosophers have tended to do, a better approach is to distinguish the many variations of anger from each other, so we can begin to value certain versions over others in the fight for a more democratic, sustainable and just world. One of the problems is that, while other emotions like love are talked about in rich and complex ways, such as “conditional and unconditional love, requited and unrequited love, as well as love for virtue and love for vice,” anger tends to get lumped into a single, amorphous goo of negative feeling. Something that needs to be subdued, or at best operate as transitional stage on the way to a ‘better’ emotion like love or generosity.
Cherry opens with the story of Achilles and his anger as a parable often pointed to illustrate how anger is a misdirecting emotion that can only lead those captured by it into chaos, disaster and self- and other-destruction. However, “In seeing anger in its varieties,” writes Cherry, “we can appreciate that anger, particularly anger at racial injustice, is not necessarily destructive. If it is, it is only destructive to oppressive systems and not to life as we know it” (p.12).
I was first introduced to Cherry’s work when Ana Deumert, a sociolinguistics based at the University of Cape Town, assigned Cherry’s book for her session, “Reflecting on Hope and Anger in Times of Crisis” as part of a PhD School I co-organized on the topic of ‘Communication and Environmental Justice’ last year at the University of Oslo. One question her session raised for me was this: how does ‘political anger,’ or the kind of anger one might express in response to systems that cause social and ecological harm, help or hinder our efforts to change these systems? Cherry calls for refining our focus on political anger in particular, as it is especially relevant for thinking through how anger can best serve as a resource for social and environmental justice.
Feelings of anger and rage in struggles for social justice, Cherry writes, are often viewed as an important stage in political awareness and activism, but at best a ‘transitional’ emotion on the way to ‘better,’ more productive emotions like generosity and love. The philosopher Martha Craven Nussbaum argues for embracing this view of anger, as at best, a transitional emotion in the fight for social justice, and describes this emotional transition from rage to something better like this: “a reasonable person shifts off the terrain of anger toward more productive forward-looking thoughts, asking what can actually be done to increase either personal or social welfare.” Nussbaum also begins her argument with an example from Greek mythology to make her point that ‘anger is always problematic,’ drawing on a story from Aeschylus’ Oresteia: “in order to terminate the seemingly endless cycle of blood vengeance” plaguing mafia-like family retaliation in the city, the Goddess Athena declares that justice can no longer be resolved by turning to the Furies, or goddesses of revenge that resembled dog-like beasts and who embodied ‘unbridled anger.’ Only by taming the Furies and caging their rage within a more rational legal system, could negative anger be transformed into positive justice.
Cherry has a different view. Instead of seeing anger as something that needs to transition to love and generosity before justice can be achieved, Cherry argues for embracing ‘transformational anger.’ This is a form of rage that doesn’t transition to something ‘better’, but kindles an enduring commitment to positive social change. This kind of rage is best captured by Audre Lorde in the essay “The Uses of Anger,” and is why Cherry calls this essential version of anger in the fight for social justice ‘Lordean Rage.’ There are versions of rage that are unproductive and indeed exclusionary, dangerous and destructive. For instance, there are far right-wing expressions of rage that are directed at those most vulnerable in society, and which fuels what Cherry calls ‘wipe rage,’ or the urge to exclude and erase those deemed different from one’s community. In contrast, Lordean Rage is best defined by its radical inclusivity that Cherry says is best captured in a quote paraphrased from Audrey Lorde’s essay: “I am not free while any [other] is unfree.”
With a better sense of different forms of rage, thanks to anger philosophers like Myisha Cherry, how can we reassess the role of an emotion like rage in environmental communication? For one, we might take up Cherry’s call to embrace emotional diversity in our communication strategies to fight racial injustice, or as I would also suggest, environmental injustice:
“If we embrace emotional diversity, this makes room for tactical diversity in the fight against racial [and climate] injustice. Tactical diversity is the ability to employ several actions to defeat an opponent. For example, to succeed as a mixed martial arts fighter, just knowing how to box will not do. It will be advantageous for the fighter to also know jujitsu or muay thai—other fighting styles. In this way, she can have a variety of tools in her arsenal to defeat her opponent. This can also be applied to fights against racism. Lordean rage won’t be the best tool for everyone to use in combating all occasions of racial injustice, but it is among one of the best options, as we’ll see.”
— Myisha Cherry, in The Case for Rage: Why Anger is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle.
🎧 What I’m listening to
Broken Ground Podcast: How Memphis Beat the Odds to Stop a Pipeline, from the Souther Environmental Law Center.
I’m blown away by the reporting in this podcast series! The host Leanna First-Arai does a fantastic job bringing us into the conversations, town halls and legal fights against the construction of a pipeline in Boxtown in 2021. Boxtown is mostly African-American neighborhood in Memphis that was viewed by two oil corporations — Plains All American Pipeline and Valero Energy — as “the path of least resistance” to build Byhalia Connection Pipeline through Memphis: the plan was to snake the pipeline around wealthy white neighborhoods and build it through communities like Boxtown that were seen to have the least amount of resources and power to resist construction. And then the community got organized and fought back.
A young environmental activist named Justin Pearson becomes a key figure in the story and an incredible communicator propelling the ultimately successful effort to block the pipeline. You may have heard of Rep. Justin Pearson, one of the “Tennessee Three” who was expelled (and the swiftly reinstated six days later) from the Tennessee House of Representatives after participating in a march for gun control following the police killing of Tyre Nichols. Before becoming a state representative, Pearson honed is communication and organizing skills as an environmental activist against the pipeline in Memphis, and is definitely a story worth checking out!
👀What I’m watching
Two histories: Justin J. Pearson, co-founder of Memphis Community Against Pollution [and current Tennessee State Representative], speaks at a rally against the Byhalia Pipeline in June 2021
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
The Divide and Rule Playbook: “An analysis of how the powerful few use metaphors in their storytelling to divide by race, class and other lines.”
Also, some of the tools I’ve been using recently to explore how different areas of research are connected (or not) in environmental communication:
Concensus: “GPT-4-powered, scientific summaries’
Litmaps: “Literature review software for faster research and discovery.”
Inciteful: “Build a network of academic papers and we'll analyze the network to help you discover the most relevant literature.”
📰 News and Events
Hawaiian communities restore Indigenous conservation, from mountains to sea. By Roxanne Hoorn in Mongabay (May 2, 2023).
“In Hawai’i, an Indigenous stewardship and conservation system known as ahupua’a is slowly being revived on a mountain-to-sea scale in partnership with U.S. government agencies…The inclusion of Indigenous Hawaiian conservation, social and spiritual values, like Aloha kekahi i kekahi, have been key to building these conservation areas and forming better working relations with the government.”
Why are killer whales attacking boats? Expert Q&A. An interview with Luke Rendell, researcher of learning, behavior and communication among marine mammals at the University of St Andrews. In The Conversation (May 2023): “Reports indicate a ‘traumatised’ victim of a boat collision initiated the behaviour. Are notions of solidarity and self-defence among killer whales outlandish?”
Climate Anxiety: The existential threat posed by climate change is deeply troubling to many young people. By Charles Schmidt in Harvard Medicine.“I believe the fundamental and best treatment for youth climate distress is a rapid and just transition from fossil fuels…I genuinely consider all that work to be in the area of mitigating climate anxiety.” – Elizabeth Pinsky
📚 Research
Climate Justice Communication: Strategies from U.S. Climate Activists. By Julia Coombs Fine, in Environmental Communication (May, 2023):
“Drawing on 67 conversational interviews and 112 online surveys with activists, the analysis discusses strategies for engaging two high-priority audiences: (1) social justice advocates who do not see the climate crisis as a justice issue and (2) climate action advocates who do not view climate justice as integral to climate solutions. The analysis also identifies a low-priority audience category of climate justice deniers, or people who—independent of their views on the climate crisis itself—are apathetic to its social justice implications.”
The Soils of Black Folk: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Theories of Environmental Racialization. By Ankit Bhardwaj in Sociological Theory. (June, 2023):
“Sociologists have canonized W.E.B. Du Bois as a theorist of race but have neglected his engagement with environmental themes. Not only was he concerned with ecology, such as the health of soils and water, but environmental themes also figured in his explanations of racism. Du Bois prefigured contemporary scholarship on environmental racism, detailing colonial capitalism’s uneven distribution of environmental benefits—such as natural resources—and harms—such as flooding and pollution. Moreover, Du Bois had novel insights on the role of environmental entities in shaping the adoption of racism, a process I term environmental racialization. He demonstrates how struggles over land led workers to pursue racism rather than solidarity. He argues that capitalist planters adopted racism to blame laborers for degraded soils. Du Bois is one of sociology’s earliest environmental theorists, uniquely illuminating how environment-society relations shape racism.”
The cene scene: Who gets to theorize global time and how do we center indigenous and black futurities? By Andrew Curley and Sara Smith in Nature and Space: Environment and Planning E.
“Climate change is an anxious pair of words. They resonate in visceral ways within a fractured political environment, speaking to planetary crisis now and in the future. Environmentalists, scholars, and social scientists have done their best to contextualize the moment, and following the lead of geologists, have debated timescales of ‘epochs’: the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, and Plantationocene—what we call the ‘cene scene.’”
💡 Ideas
We are all seeds: heirloom seed saving, multispecies justice, and resisting colonial erasures in the occupied palestinian territories. By Jessica Johnston In Environmental History Now.
“Scholars of multispecies justice are increasingly turning toward plants, animals, fungi and complex other-than-human organisms as subjects of justice in our shared worlds.[1] In addition to the invitation to expand the moral community, multispecies justice issues a serious challenge to rethink conceptions of our human selves not as distinct individuals, but rather as part of a deeply entangled web of relations among and across non-human beings and bodies.”
“For decades, the ‘war on cancer’ has neglected environmental justice and the need to rid the nation of harmful chemicals. Marusic’s dramatic account puts a human face on the struggle to right this wrong. An excellent book!” – Robert Bullard, Director, Bullard Center for Environmental & Climate Justice, Texas Southern University.
Crossings: How Road Ecology is Shaping the Future of Our Planet. “The necrobiome,” Goldfarb writes, “airbrushes our roadsides, camouflaging a crisis by devouring it.”
A global conservation basic income to safeguard biodiversity. by de Lange et. al. (2023). In Nature Sustainability, 1–8.
🗃️ From the Archive
💬 Quote I’m thinking about
“Does it matter if the opposition between emotion and rationality is a myth? It has, after all, been a very useful device for getting decisions made, for guiding public discourse away from open aggression and towards calm negotiation. But clearly, it matters to those who are disadvantaged by the myth, to those for whom non-market interests matter most, and this, I suggest, is a sizeable proportion of the population in any liberal democracy. The market systematically destroys whatever it cannot encompass. This includes, not only nature and natural things, but also health, family, friendship, spirituality, knowledge and truth. Any failure to put the things that people hold most sacred at the centre of public decision making makes democracies, at best, undemocratic.”
Kay Milton (2003). Loving Nature: Towards an Ecology of Emotion. Routledge. p. 150.
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:)
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