đżWild Ones #85: Environmental Communication Digest
Walden and the Weird Thoreau + Ecowriting for the World + "Rejecting the Anthropocene" + Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy + more!
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a monthly-ish (trying to be 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:
Well, another good chunk of time has gone by since my last newsletter, Iâm really hoping to start cranking these newsletters out a bit more often, so thanks for bearing with me as I waddle through this new job transition in my life (please read here if youâre curious:) Some writing news from me: I have a new book coming out next month in the Bloomsbury Advances in Ecolinguistics series about my communication research on sea turtle tourism and conservation, so please check it out:) I hope it can be a useful resource for courses on environmental communication and ecolinguistics, and Iâll be sharing more about it in a future newsletter, so stay tuned! I also have a couple of new chapters that came out in the past few weeks, one in a wonderful new book of essays exploring ideas and resources for ecowriting in environmental education, and another in an edited volume on Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy (itâs free to download too!). I share more about them below so please read on. Okay, now on to the digestđ
đ What Iâm reading
I recently finished reading Walden by the American environmental writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), after slowly churning through the chapters over the past couple of months.1 Walden was first published in 1854, and is a series of essays drawn from Thoreauâs journals which document his over two-year experiment (July 4, 1845 â September 6, 1847) living at Walden Pond located in a forest just outside of Concord, Massachusetts. Iâve read chapters from Walden here and there over the years (like âthe bean-fieldâ and âsolitudeâ) and find myself coming back to Thoreauâs well-known essays every once in a while (like Walking and On the Duty of Civil Disobedience). But I regret never reading Walden from start to finish, and as an important influence on American environmental thinking, I felt the book nagging at me. I wanted to gain a better sense of whatever it was Henry was trying to understand, feel, and ultimately communicate about his experience at Walden Pond in the mid-1840s. I kept pushing it back, though, behind an endless stream of new books on environmental writing and communication which always felt a bit more urgent to read for some reason. Classics are âtimelessâ for a reason, I thought, so thereâs no rush. Over the past year, however, I kept coming across various commentary and critiques about the relevance (or irrelevance) of Thoreauâs writings at Walden Pond. So when my local bookstore in Oslo happened to have a copy on sale, I bought it: a 2006 edition edited and annotated by Thoreau scholar and writer Jeffrey Cramer who directs the The Walden Woods Project Library, and with an interesting forward by the literary scholar Denis Donoghue.
âTwo main motives are active in Walden,â writes Donoghue in his forward to Walden. One motive is Henry David Thoreauâs knack for paying attention to the natural world as an amateur scientist. A second motive is his knack for paying attention to his own thoughts and self-reflections. For Donoghue, what makes Thoreauâs nature writing in Walden so rich and thought-provoking is how the author weaves together these two modes of inward and outward attention. And his skilled bi-focal attention explains why Thoreau has continued to be read and to have influenced new generations of environmental writers and thinkers over the past 170 years. Donoghueâs analysis resonates with my own experience reading Thoreauâs description of nature and life in the woods at Walden Pond. Flipping back through the pages, many of the memorable passages of Thoreauâs nature writing I highlighted in Walden, I later noticed, captured his unique way of attuning to the inner and outer worlds of the forest:
forest dogs:
âSometimes I heard the foxes as they ranged over the snow crust, in moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety, or seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright and run freely in the streets; for if we take the ages into our account, may there not be a civilization going on among brutes as well as men? They seemed to me to be rudimental, burrowing men, still standing on their defence, awaiting their transformation. Sometimes one came near to my window, attracted by my light, barked a vulpine curse at me, and then retreatedâŚ
Waldenâs lingua vernacula:
âFor sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it. I seldom opened my door in a winter evening without hearing it; Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo, sounded sonorously, and the first three syllables accented somewhat like how der do; or sometimes hoo hoo onlyâŚâ
and red squirrels:
ââŚUsually the red squirrel (Sciurus Hudsonius) waked me in the dawn, coursing over the roof and up and down the sides of the house, as if sent out of the woods for this purpose.â
Before we read these passages of nature writing that Thoreau is famous for, however, he sets the stage for Walden with a thick chapter called âEconomy,â the longest chapter in the book (85 pages). Here, we glimpse what Thoreau famously described as a âdesperateâ landscape of mid-19th century Massachusetts:
âThe mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.â
I took this opening chapter, with provocative statements like the one above, to be important to Thoreau for helping his readers make sense of his reasons for living at Walden Pond. But, strangely, this first chapter is hardly mentioned by the editor, Jeffrey Cramer or Denis Donoghue in their forward and afterward to the 2006 edition I have. I wonder if this is because, as some critics of Thoreau have noted, âEconomyâ is âone of the highest barriers to entry in the Western canon: dry, sententious, condescending, more than eighty pages long.â
There seem to be two Thoreaus that the editors arenât quite sure how to reconcile: there is the ânature writer Thoreau,â the famous American naturalist whose environmental writing fills most of Walden. And then there is the âcivilly disobedient Thoreau,â who is also interesting and important, but separate from Thoreau the nature writer it seems. This latter Thoreau is the writer of essays like âCivil Disobedience,â of course, but also âSlavery in Massachusetts,â and in this case, âEconomy,â the first chapter of Walden. In these writings, Thoreau tells his readers about the economic injustices and the forms of despair and exploitation that ensue from people âlabour[ing] under a mistake,â as he put it, the mistake being the belief that one inhabits a just economic system of necessity. âEconomyâ may not be the most riveting reading, but it does lay out, albeit in a rather long and winding way, the rationale for Thoreauâs experiment in finding ways to live a life beyond what he saw as a socially unjust and ecologically destructive economic system.
These two Thoreaus seem to present a bit of a paradox: a person seeking a radical form of social detachment from people in the âwildnessâ of the woods, and the other, a radical form of social engagement to fight for a more just society in his abolitionism and civil disobedience. Thoreau was a bit of a walking contradiction, as we find out from his friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Writing about their tension-filled friendship, environmental scholar Jedediah Britton-Purdy notes that âEmerson thought Thoreau reflexively âput every statement in a paradox,â which led to a habit Emerson disliked, of âsubstituting for the obvious word and thought its diametrical opposite.â Emerson thought Thoreau a rather heavy ironist.â Maybe it is Thoreauâs constant irony and contradiction that has made it a challenge for many commentators to read his two projectsâenvironmental and socialâas one, common project.
My motivation for coming back to Walden was sparked, in part, after reading a pair of essays about the relevance (or irrelevance) of Thoreauâs Walden for today. In one essay in the New Yorker from 2015, writer Katherine Schulz asks (or laments), âWhy, given its fabrications, inconsistencies, and myopia, do we continue to cherish âWaldenâ?â For instance, âAt one moment, Thoreau fulminates against the railroad, âthat devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the townâ; in the next, he claims that he is ârefreshed and expanded when the freight train rattles past me.ââ For Schulz, these and many other contradictions in Thoreau donât take us on a revelatory journey into natureâs wildness, as so many admirers of his claim they do, but rather drag us into âan unnavigable thicket of contradiction and caprice.â In the hands of Thoreau, nature writing runs headlong into the âproblem with basing oneâs beliefs on personal intuition and direct revelation: it justifies the substitution of anecdote and authority for evidence and reason.â While Thoreau may give us a few moments of brilliance in Walden, Schulz argues, the ethical impulses underlying Walden are are not those of a âmoral paragon,â but more reminiscent of a modern âself-aggrandizingâ and âsuspicousâ âprepperâ who is convinced society is doomed and that solace can only be found building a life of radical detachment and strict self-reliance. In lifting up Walden as a literary classic, we risk praising
âa man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of usâŚPerhaps the strangest, saddest thing about âWaldenâ is that it is a book about how to live that says next to nothing about how to live with other people.â
Henry David Thoreau âmay have been a jerk, but he still matters,â environmental law scholar Jedediah Britton-Purdy argues in his response to Schulzâs essay. This is, at least in part, because we need to recognize how âCanonical works tend to be patterns, even thickets, of contradiction. Far from teaching consistent lessons, they establish themes, from which successors prove many inconsistent things.â
In Walden, the major themes often pointed to (and that Thoreau scholar Denis Donoghue focuses on in his introduction to Walden) include a combination of ideas about self-reliance and self-sufficiency with ideas about the spiritual affordances of living closer to wild(er)ness. At the same time, âThoreau has been the standard-bearer for anti-authoritarian and anti-conformist generations who resisted American complacency in the early twentieth century and elevated âCivil Disobedienceâ against the Vietnam War in the 1960s,â writes Britton-Purdy. So to claim that Thoreau and his Walden are no longer relevant today would seem to mean to argue that all of these themes have âdied for us, that [their] contradictions are no longer generative.â But these themes are still generative for understanding and acting in our world today, and so Thoreau must be too.
Another motivation for me to return to Walden after all these years came from a book I read last year called Decolonial Ecology by the French Caribbean scholar Malcom Ferdinand. In a section called âThoreau cut in two,â Ferdinand argues that the popular uptake of Thoreau as âthe founder of American environmentalismâ has largely involved obscuring the connection between Thoreauâs environmental thinking and his anti-colonial project. Here I think itâs worth quoting Ferdinand at length on this point:
â[Thoreauâs] stay [at Walden Pond] continues to be wrongly understood as merely a Robinsonade, the strolls of a man in love with nature, a pioneer of environmental writing and environmental imagination. There is very little mention made of Thoreauâs multiple encounters with Maroons in WaldenâŚHis writing might then be a single oeuvre made up of two, well-separated parts. On the one side there would be Thoreauâs ecological writing with his studies of nature, which made him the âmost famous of Americaâs naturalists,â and on the other side his manifest political commitments in Civil Disobedience and his antislavery writings.
âThoreauâs thought would then present a schism. Either, because of his civil disobedience, he is presented primarily as a political thinker who was also interested in a naturalist hobby. Or he is presented as the founder of American environmentalism, whose political commitment against slavery is just one more reason to celebrate him, though not an indispensable one. Numerous studies in the literary field of ecocriticism maintain this fictitious separation, seeing in Walden only the experience of nature and writing about it, where his position on slavery remains circumstantial at bestâŚ
Thoreau didnât go to live in the woods of Walden just because he loved nature. His stay in Walden testifies above all to a radical rejection of the enslavement of Black people and to a profoundly anticolonial experienceâ (pp. 164-165, emphasis in original).
Thoreauâs 26-month project âto live deliberatelyâ2 at Walden wasnât about âturning his back on the rest of us,â but an experiment in alternative, âanti-colonialâ ways of inhabiting the Earth, writes Malcom Ferdinand. In contrast to other founding American environmental writers who valued a âlargely illusory wildernessâ untouched by people, âThoreau knew that Walden was not a place of untouched nature. He recognized that Maroons and the formerly enslaved sought refuge in these same woods,â writes Ferdinand (p. 170), which Thoreau writes about in his chapter in Walden entitled âFormer Inhabitants.â As Ferdinand puts it: âIt was because of the very ability of the fugitives to nurture relationships with these spaces [like Walden Woods] into a mode of inhabitation ecologically and politically opposed to the plantations of colonial slavery that a form of liberation was possible.â Thoreau wrote about Walden Woods, not as an ideal, pristine wilderness area, but as a well-lived-in place where many others had sought out alternative modes of living and liberation that were âpolitically and ecologically opposedâ to the slave economy of Concord, Massachusetts that Thoreau famously protested against. As Elise Lemire writes in her 2009 book Black Walden: Slavery and its Aftermath in Concord, Massachussets:
That chapter [in Walden], "Former Inhabitants; and Winter Visitors," makes the case that the green spaces cherished in Concord today are not solely products of nature. They are the result of a highly stratified social order in which the highest echelon was comprised of Concord's wealthiest residents, more than half of whom were slaveholders, and the bottom echelon of slaves who were shunted by their former owners onto Concord's margins and left there to make a life for themselves as best they could. To put it more concisely, the history of slavery and its aftermath reveals that at least some of our nation's cherished green spaces began as black spaces, with Walden Woods a particularly striking case in point (pp. 11-12).
Thereâs a scene in Walden where Thoreau recounts a morning in âthe winter of 46-47â when âa hundred men of Hyperborean extraction swoop down onto our pondâŚwith many car-loads of ungainly looking farming tools, sleds, ploughs, drill-barrows, turf knives, spades, saws, rakes and each man was armed with a double-pointed pike staffâŚâ (p. 318). They were there with the Tudor Ice Company to âget out the ice,â thousands of tons of it, and ship it off around the world as a luxury item for the rich. âThus it appears,â Thoreau writes, âthat the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my wellâ (p. 322).
Writing about this scene in her fascinating book Cooling the tropics: Ice, Indigeneity and Hawaiian Refreshment, Hiâilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart notes that this glimpse into the industrial American ice trade at Thoreauâs doorstep offers an exemplar of how Thoreauâs desire to live at Walden Pond was premised on his privileged participation in a settler colonial society. For Hobart, Walden emerges as âa book that theorizes sovereignty through oneâs ability to feel at home in natureâa sense of entitlement conditioned by white privilege.â Hobart explains,
âthe feelings of comfort that so affirm Thoreauâs de facto relationship to ânatureâ are triply premised on settler colonialism (the theft of Native lands in the Northeast), racial capitalism (plantation slavery in the American South), and empire (global trade with colonial India). Rights to freshness, abundance, and energy resources became baked into what it means to be Americanâ (p. 8).
This analysis draws on Mark Rifkinâs 2013 essay Settler Common Sense, which begins and ends, as Hobart notes, with a discussion of Thoreauâs Walden as a book that âoffers a vision of personhood divorced from the state, characterizing his experience of âNatureâ during his time at Walden Pond as providing him with a sense of his own autonomous embodiment and a related set of ethical resources that enable him to reject the demands of contemporary political economy.â (p. 322). For Rifkin, Thoreauâs Walden exemplifies âsettler escape into the wildernessâ where âNative territory comes to be experienced as âwildernessâ available for either usufruct purposes or for direct appropriation.â Thus, Thoreauâs desire âto live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of lifeâ at Walden Pond, and his environmental writings about Walden are ultimately expressions of ideal ways of being in nature rooted in Thoreauâs âsettler common sense.â The concept of settler common sense, Rifkin explains, ââŚsuggests the ways the legal and political structures that enable non-Native access to Indigenous territories come to be lived as given, as simply the unmarked, generic conditions of possibility for occupancy, association, history, and personhoodâ (pp. 322-333).
More contradictions. Reading together Malcom Ferdinandâs and Mark Rifkinâs competing accounts of what Thoreau was actually up to at Walden leaves me with more questions than answers. Was Thoreauâs nature writing about Walden one manâs effort to communicate his âprofoundly anticolonial experienceâ in the woods, or instead, an expression of a privileged white manâs âsettler escape into the wilderness.â Or maybe both?
One of the challenges with Walden is that the book presents the reader with a constellation of scenes and ideas that seem to encourage readers to 'pick and chooseâ their preferred Thoreau. This might explain the common but âfictitious separation,â as Malcom Ferdinand puts it, between Thoreau's ecological thinking and his anti-colonial and radically democratic politics. In his book This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, Deagen Miller makes this point, when he writes that âThoreau's genius lay in seeing the invisible, countermodern connections between things,â yet at the same time, he âstruggledâ to communicate these connections in his writing. Thoreau âcould feel the connections,â Miller argues, âhe knew they were there, although his writing largely remained archipelagic; and yet connections do exist in places like the famously incongruous first chapter of Walden - a book ostensibly about living in the woodsâcalled âEconomyââŚâ (p. 33).
Henry David Thoreau was an âarchipelagic communicator.â This resonates with me as it points to a common struggle with environmental communication in general in learning how to tell stories about our immense economic, political and ecological challenges that connect the dots between these crises, rather than obscure or miss their connections, what the philosopher Nancy Fraser calls âtrans-environmentalâ stories. If anything, the very different takeaways on who Thoreau was and what motivated him to go into the woods in the 1840s suggests to me that Walden is still worth reading today precisely because of how the bookâs âgenerative contradictionsâ are still useful for navigating the many contradictions we continue to navigate in our own lives. So even if Thoreau is perhaps most famous for being a curmudgeonly recluse who some critics see as âturning his back on the rest of usâ in his search of an illusory wilderness, Thoreau was, after all, a writer. And writers seek to share and publish what they write to communicate their ideas to other people. As Britton-Purdy puts it, a âwriter who professes solitude is always involved in a displaced kind of sociability, and the writer who denounces his time is always helping people toward imagining a different one.â Thoreauâs project in the woods, then, might be read as an effort to communicate to âthe rest of usâ alternatives for inhabiting the earth differently, outside of systems of ecological and social exploitation. Or maybe Thoreau is just best understood as a âgenuine American weirdo,â suggests Britton-Purdy in his âdefense of Thoreauâ:
âHenry Thoreau was a genuine American weirdo. He did not believe in niceness, or even civility, but in justice. He believed his soul was at stake in it, even though he was not sure his true self was part of this world at all. Most of us move, like him, between engagement and detachment, between feeling the justice and wrongs of our communities as our own and becoming insensate to them. Thoreau is no model, but he is a useful and difficult conversation partner across the centuries, a difficult friend as he was a difficult citizen. He did not solve any of our problems, but he felt their extreme poles so acutely that he still casts his broken shaft of light on them today.â
â Jedediah Britton-Purdy, âIn Defense of Thoreauâ in The Atlantic.
For more on Thoreau and all his âcontradictionsâ I recommend this conversation from a few years ago on the always interesting âEdge Effectsâ podcast entitled Thoreau, Now More than Ever: A conversation with Laura Dassow Walls and Daegan Miller. And if you feel inclined, Iâm curious to hear what inspires (or irks) you about Thoreau in the comments:)
đ Tools & Resources Iâm exploring
For the Love of Nature: Ecowriting the World. Edited by Jeff Share (2024).
New book!đđż:For the Love of Nature: Ecowriting the World. Happy to see this out now, and learning so much from all the incredible authors that our editor Jeff Share brought together for this. I have a chapter, âEcowriting: A Fieldguideâ exploring a range of environmental writers who have inspired my own ecowriting practice. If youâre an educator looking to examine connections between nature writing and environmental justice with your students, please check this book outđ
đ§Â What Iâm listening to
âAward-winning author and The New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan came to surfing early while growing up between Hawaii and Southern California. He helped bring surf writing, as a genre, to the literary fore in 1992 with the publication of his two-part essay âPlaying Docâs Gamesâ in The New Yorker, which chronicled both his and âDocâ Rennekerâs pursuits at Ocean Beach, San Francisco. His 2015 memoir, Barbarian Days, which documented his surfing life, won the Pulitzer Prize. Beyond the surf, Finnegan has devoted much of his career to conflict reporting in regions ranging from Mexico to parts of Asia. In this episode, Finnegan talks with show host Jamie Brisick about the modern marriage of surfing and intellectualism, the importance of asking questions, writing, curiosity, outing himself as a surfer in the context of his career, Baliâs dystopian reality, the dissemination of surf culture, and how his experience as a teacher in South Africa during apartheid shaped him as a writer.â
Also listening to:
Planet Critical: The Origins of Hell On Earth with Carl Safina
New Books in Environmental Studies: Empirical Ecocriticism with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson.
Wyoming Wolf Incident: âThis is the second instalment of our podcasts regarding the Wyoming Wolf Incident by speaking with Carter Niemeyer.â
And if youâre looking for some new music to decompress to:) All Songs Considered: Relax: Songs to calm the nerves
đWhat Iâm watching
Also watching:
Covering Climate Now: Press Briefing: How to Pre-bunk Climate Disinformation
BLUE MIND - A Short Documentary: âBlue Mind is a passion project that explores the fascinating world of Rada, an aspiring marine scientist and freediver dedicated to the preservation and health of our oceans.â
And looking forward to seeing this when it is available: Burning Injustice: "Burning Injustice" is a powerful short documentary that follows the inspiring journey of Latino activists, John Mataka and Bianca Lopez, as they lead a fight against one of the last trash incinerators in California.â
đ° News and Events
Are We in the âAnthropocene,â the Human Age? Nope, Scientists Say: A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanityâs changes to the planet. By Raymond Zhong in the NYTimes
đŁEvent: Lessons in Climate Storytelling. Yale Center for Environmental Communication. (April 19, 2024 - 12:00pm ET) âJoin us for a conversation on storytelling and its role in climate activism, moderated by Sara Peach, the editor in chief of Yale Climate Connections. We will explore how climate organizations are currently using storytelling in their work, the impacts of these stories, and lessons learned from other movementsâ
The Progress and Shortcomings of the SECâs Climate Risk Disclosure Rule. By Jessye Waxman in Sierra Club.
A Wyoming Man Allegedly Tortured a Wolf. He Barely Broke State Law.
Our columnist breaks down the laws that allow for animal cruelty. By Wes Siler in Outside Magazine.
New technologies to map environmental crime in the Amazon Basin (commentary). By Robert Muggah and Peter Smith in Mongabay, (April 12, 2024).
Chevron owns this city's news site. Many stories aren't told. By
Miranda Green and David Folkenflik in All Things Considered NPR (March 28, 2024).
đ Research
New book!đđż Ecological Communication and Ecoliteracy: Discourses of Awareness and Action for the Lifescape. Edited by Maria Bortoluzzi and Elisabetta Zurru. (2024). (Itâs free to download! I also have a chapter in it on media communication on human-seal conflicts in Hawaiâi and NorwayđŚ).
âIn this volume, communicative situations, events and their discourse practices are viewed as an integral part of the ecosystems: through them we construe ourselves as humans in relation with the more-than-human world and as part of the âlifescapesâ we belong to. We use the overarching term âcommunicationâ to address the interplay and co-deployment of a variety of modes in situated discourse practices in which linguistic features are intrinsically related and intertwined with other semiotic modes (still and moving images, graphic features, sounds, music, gestures, facial expressions, proxemics, space layout, etc.).â
Animals as legal beings: Contesting Anthropocentric legal orders. By Maneesha Deckha (2021):
âIn Animals as Legal Beings, Maneesha Deckha critically examines how Canadian law and, by extension, other legal orders around the world, participate in the social construction of the human-animal divide and the abject rendering of animals as property. Through a rigorous but cogent analysis, Deckha calls for replacing the exploitative property classification for animals with a new transformative legal status or subjectivity called âbeingness.ââ
De Gruyter has made a collection environment related publications free access for Earth Day.
Imagination, Identification, Intensification: Rhetorical Strategies for Climate Fiction on Television. By Sarah Riddick in Environmental Communication (2024).
âI rhetorically analyze Extrapolations (2023), a climate-fiction television series intended to provoke climate action from its audience. This analysis reveals three rhetorical strategies as critical to the genreâs persuasiveness: imagination, which helps audiences envision and evaluate information being presented to them; identification, which fosters feelings of connection and responsibility from audiences; and intensification, which moves audiences to act by imbuing emotion into the delivery of information. I show how these strategies can serve as a conceptual framework for developing and assessing climate fiction in popular media, and I suggest ways in which these strategies can more effectively motivate climate action.â
Greenwashing, net-zero, and the oil sands in Canada: The case of Pathways Alliance. By Melissa Aronczyk, Patrick McCurdy, and Chris Russill in Energy Research & Social Science. (2024):
âThis article examines net zero greenwashing using the case of Pathways Alliance, a coalition of six companies representing 95 % of oil sands production in Canada, one of the world's largest oil reservesâŚWe identify instances of selective disclosure and omission, misalignment of claim and action, displacement of responsibility, non-credible claims, specious comparisons, nonstandard accounting, and inadequate reporting. There is also evidence that their publicity campaign extends beyond the materials usually collected and assessed for greenwashing by researchers.â
đĄ Ideas
Rejecting the Anthropocene is a mistake: Geologists' vote is a terrible blunder. By Timothy Morton in iai News. (April 9, 2024).
âAs ecological disaster on Earth looms ever larger, the International Union of Geological Sciences has voted against recognizing the Anthropocene as an official epoch. The vote was anti-scientific and regressive, argues Timothy Morton. Now more than ever we must recognize that we have entered an age of human-induced planetary transformation.â
Talking about sustainability: Whatâs new in the âgreenâ lexicon?: âFrom âgreen loansâ to âgreen hushingâ â environmental discourse is continually expanding with new terms to guide us through a sustainability-oriented world. So, what's the latest in the green lexicon?â By Saloni Ramakrishna in DeGruyter Conversations.
Kinship: Science must become attuned to the subtle conversations that pervade all life, from the primordial to the present. By David Waltner-Toews in Aeon:
âI am the manifestation of a conversation among microbial lives, who are in conversation with everything else.â
AI is taking water from the desert: New data centers are springing up every week. Can the Earth sustain them? By Karen Hao in The Atlantic. March 1, 2024.
âThe American Southwest has become the site of a collision between two civilization-defining trends. In this desert heat, the explosive growth of generative AI is pitched against a changing climateâs treacherous extremes.â
âQuite radicalâ: the feeling of exhaustion is key to tackling climate change: âExhausted of the Earth author Ajay Singh Chaudhary says how we feel and the state of the earth are connected.â By Maya Goodfellow in The Guardian.
âEmotions can help with this because they are how people ârelate to the worldâ, he says. But aside from ecoanxiety (an overwhelming disquiet about environmental crisis) and solastalgia (the distress caused by the environmental changes where you live, causing a kind of homesickness), how we feel, a more âinchoateâ sense of exhaustion, is missing from a lot of climate texts, he says.â
đď¸Â From the Archive
đŹÂ Quote Iâm thinking about
ââŚWriting about the rise of Facebook, and by extension all the other social media platforms, [Zadie Smith] observed, âWhen a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way itâs a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.â But we arenât transcending to something higher, just less ourselves. And a flattened, reduced version of ourselves is easier to confuse with a flattened, reduced version of someone elseâ (p. 41).
â Naomi Klein, in Doppelganger: A trip into the mirror world (2023)
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As always, I am grateful to my tireless editor, my dad, for catching my typos. All remaining typos are my ownđ
In probably one of his most famous passages in the second chapter, âWhere I lived, and What I lived for,â Thoreau writes,
âI went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.â