đżWild Ones #82: Environmental Communication Digest
Environmental keyword: 'petro-paltering' + This Radical Land: A Natural History of Radical Dissent + Ecocene Politics + Robin Wall Kimmerer on Paddling Against the Wind + More!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a 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:
đ What Iâm (re)reading
This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, by Daegan Miller, University of Chicago Press (2018).
ââThe American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,â wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. Thatâs largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America todayâŚBut if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one thatâs been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story.â
I discovered this book about 19th century radical American environmental history one day on the platform formerly known as Twitter (Iâve given up on calling it X), when I saw a tweet from the author, Deagan Miller, asking if anybody wanted a free copy of his book. He had a few extra copies, and wanted to send them out to anyone interested. I already have a mounting pile of books yet to be read. But a free book, especially on âradicalâ environmental themes, is hard for me to pass up. So a few weeks after sending Daegan a reply, he sent me a signed copy of the book in the mail! âStay Wild!â he wrote on the inside cover, a good reminder to cultivate moments of wildness in my day to day.
That was way back in January of 2021, but Iâve recently been reading a couple of books Iâll look forward to sharing more about next week that argue for the need to revisit the radical side of the work of 19th and 20th century American environmental thinkers, figures like Henry David Thoreau, for reasons Iâll get into in next weekâs edition of Wild Ones. So I wanted to go back to Millerâs fascinating book as it delves into these themes at the intersection of environmental thought and democratic action, bringing a lens to both well-known landscape-documentarians like Thoreau, as well as lesser know ones like Burnette Haskell and James McCune Smith and Andrew J. Russell.
Miller begins the book by introducing the idea of âwitness trees,â and explains how he uses this idea to organize his book. He writes that âAmericans had long been used to learning their history from trees, and they gave to them a name: witness treesâŚâ
Originally created by surveyors to mark property lines, the term slipped into pop culture, coming to mean a tree, sometimes hundreds of years old, that has born witness to all sorts of events over the course of their lifetime. ââŚa witness tree,â Miller writes, âwas a tree that had once seen something remarkable, a repository for the secrets of the past.â As he goes on to write,
âThis book is my attempt, in four essays, to listen to those witness trees, to read what is written on their leaves, to get down on paper the lessons those once-living metaphors might still hold for today.â
Writing about his favorite books of 2018, I liked how nature writer Robert Macfarlane captured the overall tone and aim of Millerâs book: âA fascinating, often hopeful journey through the landscape histories of âvibrant resistanceâ - anarchism, anti-slavery movements, social-justice activists - that have sprung up across North America over the last two centuries.â
âThe American religion of Progress has left many stories inscribed in a long series of deep scars across the landscape. But a counterhistory of patient, vital resistance has long worked those jagged outlines into something softer. Delicate blades of green things grow, as they always have and always will, crumbling concrete and shifting foundations, causing microscopic cracks to bloom into vast furrows, letting in the light by which new landscapes appearâsunshine revelations of possibility. Some of these green living things grew into witness trees that were taken to tell deeply ambivalent tales about the course of empire, an ambivalence springing from the word witness itself: a noun and a verb, both transitive and intransitive; a thing testifying to a past and prophesying a futureâŚâ
â Daegan Miller, in This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent (pp. 11-12).
đżEnvironmental Keyword
â(Petro)Palteringâ
In an April 16, 2023 edition of the climate newsletter Heated, journalist Emily Atkins writes that,
âPaltering is one of three scientifically-defined forms of deception. Introduced in 2016 by Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania researchers, it refers to the active use of true statements to create an overall false impression. Itâs also known as âlying by telling the truth.ââŚ
As these researchers put it in their 2017 article âArtful Paltering: The Risks and Rewards of Using Truthful Statements to Mislead Othersâ âUnlike lies by commission, paltering involves the use of truthful statements to mislead others. Importantly, paltering readily enables self-serving assessments of morality. By contrast, if discovered, targets harshly judge palterers who actively misled themâ
Paltering, or more specifically what we might call âpetro-palteringâ in light of Atkins great reporting on how Big Oil embraces this communication tactic, appears to be one of a set of tactics in a fossil fuel communication toolkit of climate delay, an environmental keyword I explored a few weeks ago. âDiscourses of climate delay,â as climate communication researchers have recently argued, âpervade current debates on climate action. These discourses accept the existence of climate change, but justify inaction or inadequate efforts. In contemporary discussions on what actions should be taken, by whom and how fast, proponents of climate delay would argue for minimal action or action taken by others. They focus attention on the negative social effects of climate policies and raise doubt that mitigation is possible.â
For instance, climate journalist Amy Westervelt has reported on how fossil fuel corporations use communication tactics that may appear contradictory on the surfaceâat once justifying climate inaction while simultaneously claiming to be advancing climate action â but which all serve the same goal: to ramp up fossil fuel production and entrench the world ever deeper into a fossil fueled global economy. As Emily Atkins goes on to explain:
Paltering is when you say, âI finished my math homework,â when in reality all you did was take 5 minutes to write â666â in all of the answer boxes. So you did technically finish your math homework, but you did such a bad job that youâre still going to fail. The only thing you achieved is getting your parents off your back by actively misleading them about your activities.
This is what oil and gas companies do in their advertisements. Technically, they tell the truthâtheyâre investing in greener, cleaner technology. But the investments are small, the technology is unproven, and their companies are overall failing to reduce their emissions. The selective truth they choose is designed to create a false impression, so everyone gets off their back about climate change.â
Hereâs nifty video explanation of petro-paltering!:
đ§Â What Iâm listening to
âItâs perhaps more important than ever in these especially tumultuous, lonely, and oppressive times that we continue to believe that another world is possible. Simply reimagining the way we raise our children, the homes that we dwell in, the property we horde or share, and the form of the families we choose â can have profound and long-term impacts on the quality of our lives and on the world weâre living in more broadly. By challenging these seemingly ordinary structures of everyday life we can spark and re-spark our collective and individual desire to live in a more just and equitable world. This is the premise of new book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, written by Kristen Ghodsee. In this conversation, we take a journey around the world and through time, exploring some of the most fascinating, inspiring, and sometimes quirky, experiments in alternative ways of livingâŚâ
Also listening to: Mihnea Tanasescu on the Need for 'Ecocene Politics' on the podcast Frontiers in Commoning.
âThe best term for this era of geological history is not the Anthropocene, says Mihnea TÄnÄsescu, a research professor at the University of Mons in Belgium, but the Ecocene. "The increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political lifeâ requires us to shed our anthropocentric notions, and recognize our deep, entangled relationships with nature and other living beings. In this interview, TÄnÄsescu talks about his book 'Ecocene Politics' and explains what it means to unlearn the modern mindset and cultivate a relational ethics of reciprocity, cooperation, and care for living beings. We must learn to renovate our legacy forms of political economy and culture, and develop the infrastructures and practices to support mutualism.â
đ What Iâm watching
Robin Wall Kimmerer on Paddling Against the Wind: âIn a storytelling performance, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist and author of âBraiding Sweetgrass,â shares how interactions with snapping turtles gave her the insights into humansâ relationship with nature and what we can do about climate change. This reading, accompanied by live music and animation, was part of the New York Times Climate Forward event.â
Read the talk here: The Turtle Mothers Have Come Ashore to Ask About an Unpaid Debt. By Robin Wall Kimmerer in the NYTimes
âThe Earth asks that we give our considerable gifts, in return for all weâve been given and in return for all we have taken. We are called to a movement made of equal parts outrage and love. We humans carry gifts of our own. We are scientists and storytellers, we are change makers, we are Earth shapers riding on the back of the turtle. We are each called upon to resist the forces of destruction, to give our gifts, to first imagine and then enact a world whole and healed. When the turtles come among us, asking for help, we must remember that at the beginning of the world they were our life raft, and now, so much closer to the end, we must be theirs.â
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
Water Justice + Tech: âOur platform is a gathering place for research, stories, art, and calls to action that critically confront the ways that technology intersects with water.â
Science Writers Database: a âfree, public database of journalists, writers, editors, and other communicators who cover science and related fields. The database currently contains 768 entries.â From the OpenNotebook.
ECOPOETIKON: Global ecopoetries. âResearching and showcasing poetry written with engaged ecological and social consciousness.â
âEcopoetikon aims to offer equal voice and representation to established ecopoets from around the world. Based in the Creative School at the University of Gloucestershire in the UK, Ecopoetikon is a developing research project that showcases a diverse international network of ecopoets through an online mapping project. We make available inspirational and thought-provoking work from ecopoets demonstrating commitment and creative innovation in their practice. Our accessible online interface aims to engage a wider audience with ecopoetry and to offer free teaching resources when you sign up to our online community.â
đ Research
Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care
by Phaedra C. Pezzullo. University of California Press (2023):
âAddressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond âhot takeâ or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social changeâŚAttuned to plastic attachments, Beyond Straw Men illustrates how everyday people resist unsustainable patterns of the plastics-industrial complex through imperfect but impactful networked cultures of care.â
Food on the Margins: A Creative Film Collaboration to Amplify the Voices of Those Living with Food Insecurity. By C. Pettinger, C., & J. Ellwood, J. (2023). Sociological Research Online, (Open Access).
âFilm-making has a rich history in humanities research, and successful documentary films use compelling stories to influence positive individual and environmental changes (Brandt et al., 2016). The power of moving images to raise consciousness among viewers, leading to changes in thinking and/or behaviour, has political potency (Whiteman, 2004) and can have far-reaching social impact (Karlin and Johnson, 2011). Story telling is known to be a powerful way of making sense of life â âputting life into wordsâ (Baldwin, 2005). Digital storytelling strengthens solidarity and can help to create a greater role in community change and to understand cultures differently by way of filmed stories (Gubrium and Harper, 2016). Food stories, in particular, have an essential role in revealing the important place of narratives in generating new knowledge.â
âNo research on a dead planetâ: preserving the socio-ecological conditions for academia. By Aaron Thierry, Laura Horn, Pauline von Hellermann, and Charlie J. Gardner. In Frontiers in Education (October 2023).
ââŚwhy arenât many more of us engaging directly with the effort to push for transformative change within our institutions and across broader society? Academics are a particularly important group of which to ask this question, given that our skills in critical analysis of information (and often our specialist knowledge) could be expected to give us particular appreciation of the extent of the emergency and effective pathways for addressing the crisisâŚif those with privileged knowledge about the crisis carry on as usual it adds an insincerity to our warnings and communicates a lack of grounds for genuine concernâŚhow then can we expect others to actâ
đĄ Ideas
The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore. By Simen SĂŚtre and Kjetil Ăstli, Patagonia (2023):
âIn a prizewinning five-year investigation, journalists Simen SĂŚtre and Kjetil Ăstli took an in-depth look at Norwayâs role in the global salmon industry and, for the first time, produced a comprehensive evaluation of the detrimental effects of sea farming. The book covers the stirrings of rebellion, too. Recent victories, such as the banning of net-pen fish farms in the waters of Washington State and in southern Argentina, are an indication that we are awakening to the environmental price of engineered fish.â
What Would An Animal Revolution Look Like, by Taylin Nelson, Edge Effects Magazine Sept 28.
âIn Animal Revolution, [Ron] Broglio urges us to think about how revolutionsâwith their movements, their visible resistanceâmight look when their participants are not human. As the animals of the COVID-19 lockdown have made clear to humans around the world, resistance takes many forms, and in languages we may not be familiar with.â
Nine Women Who Are Rewriting the Environment, By Addie Hopes in Edge Effects Magazine.
âMy aim in CITIZENS is to open up a new way of understanding ourselves and the intensely challenging time in which we live. I want to equip us to see and step into the possibility in this moment, not just the threat. I truly believe we can find a way for all of us to thrive - and seeing one another as the Citizens we are is the starting point.â
Climate Education Suffers From Partisan Culture Wars: But teachers in many states are stepping up to the challenge and providing students with knowledge and tools for resilience. By Eduardo Garcia in the Revelator.
đď¸Â From the Archive
âThe fact of inscribing our time under the sign of the PhonoceneâŚis not to forget that when the earth rumbles and squeaks, it is because it also sings. It also means not forgetting that these songs are disappearing, but that they will disappear even more if we do not pay attention to themâŚâ
âThe Phonoceneâ is âthe era which connects us to the power of sound.â â Vinciane Despret, in âLiving as a Birdâ (Habiter en Oiseau) (2022/2019).
đŹ Quotes Iâm thinking about
âI love the phrase [more-than-human], but I find myself using it less and less because I still want something that doesnât have human in it to talk about what Iâm talking about. The beauty of the phrase is that it points towards the nonhuman without negating the human. It reminds us that our perception of the nonhuman is always rooted in the human, but that the human is not necessarily at the center of everything. So it is a really good phrase for that. But I guess I do yearn for something as a way of talking about agential life; life that is up to something, that is bubbling up all around and doing stuff, and that we can meet and have conversations with. Iâm just always looking for that. Well, I guess what Iâm doing more now is looking to have those conversations. I think thatâs really the thing that has to follow.â
â James Bridle, in an interview with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast.
âThen the coal company came with the world's largest shovel, And they tortured the timber, and stripped all the land. Well, they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, And they wrote it all down as the progress of man.â â John Prine, "Paradise," cited in This Radical Land, by Daegen Miller
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:)