🌿Wild Ones #84: Environmental Communication Digest
"Oceaning": drones and marine conservation + Hōkūleʻa: Finding the Language of the Navigator + Environmental keyword: Climate Discrimination + more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a 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
“Climate discrimination”
I have to admit, I don’t read dense legal discussions about case law too often, but when I came across an article on ‘climate discrimination’ by legal scholar Duane Rudolph, it seemed like an environmental (law) keyword worth sharing here. I’ve had a growing interest in research at the intersection of environmental communication and legal discourse over the years, and have mentioned some topics related to this theme on Wild Ones: like Maxine Burkett’s research on the legal landscape of climate migration in the Pacific, or Karen Bradshaw’s fascinating legal scholarship on ‘wildlife as property owners.’ There is also the excellent ‘Damages’ podcast which I’ve recently discovered and is self-described as “Law & Order meets the climate crisis.” I appreciate the way these writers and podcasters make legal theory and case law accessible, and so I was intrigued by Rudolph’s article as a rich and compelling legal discussion of ‘climate discrimination.’ The term, Rudolph argues, will be a legal keyword in the coming years as we enter a time that some have called the “Great Climate Migration,” an event he compares to the migration of millions of people out of the US ‘Plains states’ that took place during the Dust Bowl disaster of the 1930s.1
Rudolph writes that while researching the article he discovered there is no relevant case law that addresses employment discrimination specifically towards ‘climate migrants’ in the U.S.: that is, people who are seeking work in new states due to unliveable conditions due to climate change in their home states or countries. Notably, he uses the legal storytelling device of ‘hypothetical claimants,’ in this case, climate migrants in the U.S. who confront and contest different forms of job discrimination in other states after leaving their home states due to climate change. Rudolph writes that this novel narrative technique for making persuasive legal arguments is “meant to show the strengths and weaknesses of federal laws governing employment discrimination in an age of climate upheaval and forced adaptation.” He writes,
“This Article focuses on the coming legal plight of workers in the United States, who will likely face discrimination as they search for work outside their home states. The Article takes for granted that climate change will have forced those workers across state and international boundaries, a reality dramatically witnessed in the United States during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. During that environmental emergency (and the devastation it wrought), workers were forced across boundaries only to be violently discriminated against upon arrival in their new domiciles. Such discrimination is likely to recur, and it will threaten the livelihoods of workers across the country, especially the poor and workers from minority communities.
While it may be tempting to believe that the current array of federal employment-discrimination laws is both comprehensive and flexible enough to meet the challenges ahead, the prevailing interpretations of federal employment- discrimination laws show that applicable federal law will not be able to respond” (p. 1).
– Duane Rudolph, in Climate Discrimination, from the introduction (2023):
Some backstory: When I was an undergraduate student at the University of Hawai‘i in the 2000s, I took several courses on French language, literature and postcolonial theory from Dr. Duane Rudolph, an Assistant Professor of French at the time. He was one of those teachers I feel lucky to have had over the course of my life, someone who challenged me intellectually and encouraged me to expand my sense of what is possible for my life and career trajectory. I remember when I was considering whether to pursue graduate school, I exchanged several emails with Prof. Rudolph, asking for advice about which graduate programs to pursue (or whether going to grad school was the right decision), and his responses were impactful, as I still think about them today. I remember him telling me to follow the “tributaries of my own intellectual journey” and to embrace the pull I felt towards certain paths even if they seemed lined with miles of uncertainty, referencing poems like this one by Rainer Maria Rilke:
“Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.”
Professor Rudolph left the French Department at the University of Hawai‘i in the late 2000s to pursue a legal career instead, and the last time we corresponded over a decade ago he was completing a law degree at Harvard. Anyways, I bring all this up because I was thinking recently about him and the impact he’s had on the direction I’ve taken over the years in research and in life, so after a quick google search, I discovered he recently started a new position as an Associate Professor in the School of Law at University of San Francisco, and that one of his most recent articles was a legal exploration of “Climate Discrimination” in the United States. It struck me as an important environmental keyword to share here.
“The climate catastrophe of another age is worth recalling. The result, at least in part, of human attitudes to the environment, the Dust Bowl of the 1930s made the Great Plains in the United States uninhabitable. Heat made the United States “a vast simmering cauldron,” drought provoked widespread economic loss, and soaring temperatures alone killed at least 4,500 people in a single year. The arid landscape, devastated by drought and grasshoppers, led to a few million farmers receiving relief assistance. States like California saw large numbers of arrivals from places like Oklahoma, which hemorrhaged 18.4 percent of its population in 1930 alone. Colorado, for example, attempted to bar the entry of new arrivals into the state, as did California…Many Oklahomans, pejoratively known as "Okies" and "exodusters," lived in squalid conditions in California, referred to as "little Oklahomas.”…Although our age seems long removed from the Dust Bowl, as one writer has observed, "[a] Dust Bowl event will most likely happen again." It is noteworthy that the average temperature in the United Sates in summer 2021 exceeded the heat record set by the summer of 1936 during the Dust Bowl. (pp. 6-8).
📚 What I’m reading
Oceaning: Governing Marine Life with Drones. By Adam Fish. Duke University Press. (2024):
“The drone expresses an ancient longing to lengthen normative human senses outside of our bodies. With its enhanced movement, speed, vision, and force from afar, the drone allows many people to move closer or see in higher resolution the world beyond our terrestrially bound bodies. Adopted into oceanography, the drone enhances proximity to marine life with consequences for understanding relationships between technologies, humans, and animals. Oceaning investigates the conservation possibilities of drones as they fly close to whales in the Sea of Cortez to collect viruses from their breath, follow starving seals instrumented with video cameras in the Bering Sea, frighten nesting terns in California, record coral bleaching and tracks of mother green sea turtles (Chelonia mydas) looking for a shore to lay their eggs in the Great Barrier Reef, and track sharks and the poachers who chase them, porpoises, and whales through- out the world. The book offers a proposal of technological intimacy that invites us to balance the networked connectivity provided by the drone with multispecies flourishing. With this closeness comes the aspiration to manage marine populations carefully yet incompletely” (p. 6).
🎧 What I’m listening to
Goats, Bees, and Poetry: A Conversation with Nickole Brown. Edge Effects podcast. Interview by Heather Swan (February 22, 2024).
What Ecuador's Yasuní Referendum Really Means for Oil, in Yasuní and Beyond. From the Drilled podcast with Amy Westervelt.
New Hōkūleʻa documentary film explores 'the Language of the Navigator'. From Hawai‘i Public Radio.
🔍 Tools & Resources I’m exploring
The Zotero Ecolinguistics Bibliography (Currently 611 entries!)
👀What I’m watching
“Hōkūleʻa: Finding the Language of the Navigator”
“The new documentary “Hōkūleʻa: Finding the Language of the Navigator” tells the story of how Hawaiians reacquired the skills to navigate the ocean on long voyages. It focuses on a conversation between master navigator Nainoa Thompson and cultural anthropologist Wade Davis.
It also pays homage to Mau Piailug, the Micronesian wayfinder who taught his navigation skills to Thompson and others in the 1970s. The documentary was directed by Emmy-winning Native Hawaiian filmmaker Ty Sanga”
📰 News and Events
Federal Register Notice: Finding for the Gray Wolf in the Northern Rocky Mountains and the Western United States. (Feb 2, 2024): “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service released their status review on grey wolves on February 2nd, stating that wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountain range will not be listed under the Endangered Species Act.” This was an informative discussion on this new regulation at Wolf Connection podcast.
This was a helpful science communication thread from socio-ecologist Jussi T. Eronen on what’s happening in the North Atlantic:
New study on AMOC collapse has been published. The following links give good overall summary of the study and it's impacts (links in reply posts below)
New Scientist interview of the study author's summarize the impacts nicely.
Upcoming Talk: Rachel Coxcoon on: Reflecting on ideological biases in environmental communication. (March 6)
Past Talk: 'Reasons for hope in the face of the global environmental crisis', lecture by Rhett Butler: accepting the 5th Biophilia award for Mongabay’s environmental journalism (from 19 February 2024)
📚 Research
Cultivating Care through Culture and Education, by Tema Milstein, in Environmental Communication, (January 8, 2024).
“Nearly halfway through the Decisive Decade for climate and biodiversity protection, environmental communication and adjacent fields (such as environmental/sustainability studies, environmental humanities, ecolinguistics) must be core to curricula if we are to be true to higher education’s original purpose. At this crucial moment, environmental communication educators, driven by care and responsive to crisis, may be the deconstructors, throwing spanners in the works, fostering moral character, educating to survive and thrive into the future, and, hand in hand, affirming identities of care” (p. 4).
The role of hope and conservation attitudes in current conservation actions and future conservation intentions. By Helen R. Ough Dealy, Rebecca M. Jarvis, Tim Young, Kushaal Maharaj & Michael Petterson. In Discover Sustainability. (2024)
Making Peace with Nature: Ecological Encounters along the Korean DMZ. By Eleana J. Kim (2022). I shared this book before here on Wild Ones and found it to be a fascinating window into the human relations other species and ecosystems that spring from what Kim calls “infrastructures of division.” It just won an award for new books in Korean Studies so thought I’d share it again here, read the introduction here (pdf):
Dario Nardini, an interview on his new book, Surfers Paradise (2024, Ledizioni Publishing). The book seems to be only in Italian for now, but this was an interesting interview about Nardini’s anthropological research on surf culture along the Gold Coast, Australia (although I’m not entirely convinced by his statement that: “The act of surfing is not naturally exciting. It has become so, in a long process of historical and social construction of the ocean as a place of leisure, contemplation, imagination and detachment, of the watermen as adventurers, and of surfers as embodiment of a contemporary version of the Romantic hero.” )
Dario Nardini: Billabong’s “Only a surfer knows the feeling” sounds both to surfers and not-surfers like an initiatic mantra. Surfing is something so exciting that you cannot even describe it, if you won’t try it. However, in my book I try to show how surfing is an intrinsically literary activity, that is inspired by cultural (literal, mediatic, and so on) representations that actually orient surfers’ experience. “Only a surfer knows the feeling” certainly means that only a surfer may have experienced what other people can only imagine, but also that it is possible to imagine it (if not, surfing would not be so charming to the non-surfing audience, and even to my own “body formed with feet on the ground” in the Apennine Mountains). And the outcome of this act of imagination, to some extent, conditions the experience. Representations (of the ocean, of the watermen, of surfing) precede the experience of surfing, and orient it…”
Econarrative: Ethics, ecology and the search for new narratives to live by. By Arran Stibbe, Bloomsbury (2024).
“Econarratives are all around us, describing and shaping human interactions with other species and the physical environment. This book provides a foundational theory of econarrative, drawing from narratology, human ecology, critical discourse analysis, and ecolinguistics, and offering insights from a rich variety of texts…Raising awareness of the powerful role that language plays in structuring our lives and society, the book reveals narratological and linguistic features that convey activation, emotion, empathy, identity, placefulness, enchantment, compassion and other key factors that shape interactions with the natural world. If we want real, fundamental change, then we must search for new econarratives to live by.”
💡 Ideas
Gutbucket: At the end of the world, rituals offer a lifeline. By Emily Raboteau in Orion:
“I was joining my colleague, Dr. Maria Tzortziou, a distinguished professor of environmental sciences who studies the effects of climate change upon vulnerable ecosystems and communities, including the basin where the Yukon River joins the Bering Sea. This is one of the fastest warming parts of the planet, or as Maria put it, “a ground zero.” Ours was an interdisciplinary effort. While she prepared to conduct measurements with her NASA-funded research team that would capture changes in the coastline from as far as space, we’d work together gathering testimony from elders in the Native community whose tribal council office would serve as our base, having collaborated with Maria’s team for several years. To truly understand the impacts of environmental change in the coastal Arctic, Maria explained, scientific questions need to derive from the people who live there. For instance: why are the salmon dying?”
These Whales Still Use Their Vocal Cords. But How?: Unusual experiments on organs recovered from three carcasses suggest how baleen whales call out at sea. By Kate Golembiewski in the NYTimes. February 21, 2024.
How first contact with whale civilisation could unfold. If we can learn to speak their language, what should we say? By Ross Andersen in The Atlantic. February 24, 2024.
“To engage the whales in a more extensive dialogue will be a challenge of a different order. Its difficulty has long been understood: Even when Jonah was in the whale’s belly, he did not address his captor directly. He beseeched the Lord to speak on his behalf. Project CETI is beseeching AI.”
Together, a children’s book by Mona Damluji, Assistant Professor of Film & Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and illustrated by the fantastic activist artist Innosanto Nagara. (2021)
Great Apes Know Just How Much to Annoy One Another: Playful teasing might have evolved to help our ape ancestors gather crucial intel on their family’s and friends’ thoughts. By Katherine J. Wu in the Atlantic. February 13, 2024.
🗃️ From the Archive
💬 Quotes I’m thinking about
“Considering the scale of the planetary suffering we are experiencing . . . it would be unethical to offer only theoretical tools: this is rather a time for solidarity, collective mourning, and regeneration. We need to pause to meditate on the multiple losses of both human and non-human lives, as well as deploy intellectual tools for further understanding and criticism. But over and above all else, an affirmative relational ethics is needed, driven by environmental principles, which combine more inclusive ways of caring, across a transversal, multi-species spectrum that encompasses the entire planet and its majority of non-human inhabitants.”
– Rosi Braidotti, 2020, 28; cited in Oceaning, by Adam Fish, 2024, p. 4.
“Because I care so much about nature and storytelling both, I would urge upon environmental historians the task of telling not just stories about nature, but stories about stories about nature. I do so because narratives remain our chief moral compass in the world. Because we use them to motivate and explain our actions, the stories we tell change the way we act in the world. They are not just passive accounts: in a very literal sense, the frontier stories helped cause the Dust Bowl, just as the New Deal stories helped cause the government response to that disaster. We find in such stories our histories and prophecies both, which means they remain our best path to an engaged moral life.”
– William Cronon, in A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, (1992, p. 1375).
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:)
For more on the Dust Bowl, I recommend reading environmental historian William Cronon’s excellent 1992 piece “A place for stories” (pdf).
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