🌿Wild Ones #86: 2023 in Review
A recap of 2023 with some of the memorable keywords, tools, research, ideas and quotes I explored in Wild Ones last year
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-monthly (maybe more often soon!) digest/newsletter 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:
Happy Earth Month everyone! Around New Year every year since I first started writing Wild Ones way back in the summer of 2020, I review everything I write over the past year on research, ideas, podcasts and more, and compile a selection of these items into an end of year ‘In Review’ edition of the digest. Just in case you’re curious, here are my past ‘Year in Review’ editions:
I was a bit late getting to it this year, but that’s okay, better late than never! I enjoy putting these year-in-review digests together because I tend to forget about all the things I write about and share over the year. Compiling these annual reviews together and revisiting all the ideas I’ve included over the weeks and months also makes me realize I’m taking a bit of artistic liberty with what falls under the umbrella of ‘environmental communication.’ But seeing the diverse range of research, communication campaigns, art and activism people are doing under that label, or with similar but different labels, makes me feel a bit better writing about and sharing the admittedly eclectic range of eco-communication ideas I explore in this digest:)
Oh, and as it happens, there is also an upcoming online and free ‘24-hour marathon’ of knowledge sharing about environmental communication hosted by IECA on May 2-3, 2024 (see the program here). The event will have speakers coming from a wide variety academic and professional perspectives in environmental communication, so I think it will be a great chance to learn more about the eclectic range of ideas percolating in the field in recent years.
Finally, if you have any suggestions for topics (or research, tools, creative projects, books, etc…) you’d like to see covered in Wild Ones this year please leave a comment or respond to this email directly and share your thoughts. I don’t hear from readers very often, so it’s always nice to hear what you think about this little newsletter/digest, as well as other eco-ideas that might be on your mind🌱Now, onto my 2023 review of Wild Ones😊
🌱10 Environmental keywords & books I’m reading
Book!📚: This Radical Land: A Natural History of American Dissent, by Daegan Miller, University of Chicago Press (2018).
“‘The American people sees itself advance across the wilderness, draining swamps, straightening rivers, peopling the solitude, and subduing nature,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835. That’s largely how we still think of nineteenth-century America today…But if you know where to look, you can uncover a different history, one of vibrant resistance, one that’s been mostly forgotten. This Radical Land recovers that story.” – Daegan Miller
Keyword!💬: (Petro)Paltering: “Paltering 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. It’s also known as “lying by telling the truth.”…
Keyword!💬: The Orbis Spike
“The choice of either 1610 or 1964 as the beginning of the Anthropocene would probably affect the perception of human actions on the environment. The Orbis spike implies that colonialism, global trade and [fossil fuels] brought about the Anthropocene…Choosing the bomb spike tells a story of an elite-driven technological development that threatens planet-wide destruction…The event or date chosen as the inception of the Anthropocene will affect the stories people construct about the ongoing development of human societies.” - In ‘Defining the Anthropocene’ by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015).
Book!:📚 A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions, by Thom van Dooren (2022): “For the most part, humans tend to appear in one of two main guises in popular writing about extinction: either they take the form of an individual conservationist or a group of such individuals, struggling, often heroically, against the losss of species, or they are present in the form of an amorphous, threatening, “humanity” whose actions are in one way or another causing these losses. But if we look a bit closer, things are always more complex on the ground. Missing from such stories are the diverse and unequal ways in which different communities are exposed to and suffer through extinction, as well as the very particular systems of political, economic, and cultural life that are responsible for any given extinction…” (p. 16).
Book!:📚 Language and Sustainable Development, edited by Lisa J. McEntee-Atalianis and Humphrey Tonkin. Springer (2023) (open access): “Despite the legacy of the UN with respect to promoting multilingualism for social and educational development, language has been conspicuously absent in recent major global development initiatives of the UN, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”– from the chapter: “Sustainable Multilingual Education,” by Francis M. Hult (2023, p. 55)
Keyword!💬 Discourses of Climate Delay:
“Discourses of climate delay’ pervade 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.” — William F. Lamb, Giulio Mattioli , Sebastian Levi , J. Timmons Roberts , Stuart Capstick , Felix Creutzig, Jan C. Minx , Finn Müller-Hansen , Trevor Culhane and Julia K. Steinberger (2020). Discourses of Climate Delay. In Global Sustainability.
Book!:📚 The Word for World Is Forest, by Ursula K. Le Guin: “The work must stand or fall on whatever elements it preserved of the yearning that underlies all specific outrage and protest, whatever tentative outreaching it made, amidst anger and despair, toward justice, or wit. or grace, or liberty.”
Keyword!💬“Environmental Rage”: “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
Book!:📚The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age. By Anand Giridharadas (2022).: “The ascendant political culture, confrontational and sensational and dismissive, has many causes: the inflammatory incentives of social media; the cynical manipulations of billionaire-owned, divide-and-conquer news outlets; the growing confidence and voice of once-marginalized groups; the very real material crises that beg for solutions and continue to remain unsolved; the frustration with how little milder, kinder, more civil, more hopeful politics has delivered; the sense that, absent a politics of us and them, the them will continue to pillage the us. For these and other reasons, many Americans have grown alienated from an idea at the heart of democratic theory: that you change things by changing minds by persuading” (p. 13).
Book!:📚 An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us. By Ed Yong: “Sensing can feel passive, as if eyes and other sense organs were intake valves through which animals absorb and receive the stimuli around them. But over time, the simple act of seeing recolors the world. Guided by evolution, eyes are living paintbrushes. Flowers, frogs, fish, feathers, and fruit all show that sight affects what is seen, and that much of what we find beautiful in nature has been shaped by the vision of our fellow animals. Beauty is not only in the eye of the beholder. It arises because of that eye.”
🗞️10 Environmental Conversations, Films, Podcasts, and Creative Projects
“In a storytelling performance, Robin Wall Kimmerer, a scientist and author of “Braiding Sweetgrass,” shares how interactions with snapping turtles gave her the insights into humans’ 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.”
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 the 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 living…”"
Podcast!🎙️On Fire: Under Water. Future Ecologies Podcast.“What happens after the smoke clears? What does recovery look like when the disasters never end? In this episode, we're visiting the sites of some of BC's biggest burns of 2017 and 2021 — making the link between the mega-fires and the floods and landslides that followed. We'll hear about how the land is (and isn't) recovering, and the factors that spell the difference.”
Podcast!🎙️Hawaii's Poet Laureate reflects on what's next for the island after the wildfires: “So much about Hawaiian land protection and water protection is about restoration of aina, restoration of the land. And that includes water restoration, letting water remember where it should go, letting water flow where it needs to go because it was already a system that protected us”
Podcast!🎙️The Wolf Connection Podcast: An interview with Michelle Lute - Wildlife For All: “Michelle Lute is the Co-Executive Director for Wildlife For All, whose mission is to reform wildlife management in the U.S. to be more democratic, compassionate and focused on protecting wild species and ecosystems.”
Film!🎥 Madre Mar, by Patagonia Films.: “The local people have worked the waters of the Sado Estuary Natural Reserve in Portugal for hundreds of years, coexisting with the dolphins, fish and shellfish, supported by the region’s rich seagrass meadows. The practice of bottom trawling, which bulldozes the ocean floor, has wiped out nearly one-third of the world's seagrass meadows. Raquel Gaspar, marine biologist, mother and cofounder of the Portuguese NGO Ocean Alive, is on a journey to protect and re-meadow Sado’s seagrass habitat. In Patagonia Films’ Madre Mar, Raquel partners with a group of local fisherwomen to restore this crucial piece of the ocean’s ecosystem–one that provides habitats for sea life and 10 percent of the carbon captured in the ocean.”
Podcast!🎙️The Cataclysm Sentence, on the RadioLab podcast:: “What’s the one sentence you would want to pass on to the next generation that would contain the most information in the fewest words?” What came back was an explosive collage of what it means to be alive right here and now, and what we want to say before we go.”
Podcast!🎙️Data Dialogues: Season 2: Indonesia’s OneMap Policy, from the Open Environmental Data Project: “This season focuses on Indonesia’s OneMap policy: a decade-long, ongoing effort to resolve land conflict with data. Host Madhuri Karak speaks to everyone from indigenous elders to multispecies ethnographers about their experiences with mapping exercises to delve into the limitations of modern cartography and indigenous struggles over being seen.”
Podcast!🎙️Broken Ground Podcast: How Memphis Beat the Odds to Stop a Pipeline, from the Souther Environmental Law Center.
Film!🎥‘Dark Waters’: On the plane from Oslo to Portland (in spring 2023), I watched a film called ‘Dark Waters’ which tells the true story of environmental lawyer Robert Bilott's case against DuPont, who investigated how the chemical manufacturing giant was poisoning the community of Parkersburg, West Virginia for decades with PFOAs (PFAS) or forever chemicals. The movie is based on a 2016 NYTimes Magazine article by environmental writer Nathaniel Rich called “The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare.”1
🔍 10 Tools & Resources
Water Justice + Tech: “Our platform is a gathering place for research, stories, art, and calls to action that critically confront the ways that technology intersects with water.”
Science Writers Database: a “free, public database of journalists, writers, editors, and other communicators who cover science and related fields. The database currently contains 768 entries.” From the OpenNotebook.
ECOPOETIKON: Global ecopoetries. “Researching and showcasing poetry written with engaged ecological and social consciousness”: “Ecopoetikon 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.”
The Environmental Ideologies Map. Created through the MISTRA Environmental Communication Research Programme, Institute of Communication Studies and Journalism at the Charles University of Prague.
“The Environmental Ideologies Map is a website that creatively communicates a map of competing ideological projects regarding the environment, sustainability, and, more generally, human-nature relationships. Generated through in-depth academic research, the website offers a visualization of the map of interconnected clusters of ideologies, allowing visitors to navigate clusters of meanings over nature, sustainability, and climate change. Each ideological element of the map is explained through a pop-up window with textual and audio-visual content, produced through the contribution of scholarly voices from the field of environmental humanities and communication and media studies.”
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.”
Messaging This Moment: A handbook for progressive communicators. (PDF) Learn the principles of persuasive and mobilizing messaging with examples for how to apply them. By Anat Shenker-Osorio and the Center for Community Change. (From ASO Communications)
#NotTooLate “is a project to invite newcomers to the climate movement, as well as provide climate facts and encouragement for people who are already engaged but weary. We believe that the truths about the science, the justice-centered solutions, the growing strength of the climate movement and its achievements can help. They can assuage the sorrow and despair, and they can help people see why it’s worth doing the work the climate crisis demands of us.”
EJAtlas - Global Atlas of Environmental Justice: 4077 cases have been reported so far.
‘The callout sandwich’: “…a generous heap of callout between two thick slices of call in. Call people in with that universally appealing paean to values. Call out the people getting in the way of those values translating into better lives. But neither start nor finish there. Remind people that if they come together, things can change and other worlds are possible.” – Anand Giridharadas, in The Persuaders: Winning Hearts and Minds in a Divided Age.
📰 10 News and Events from 2023
Moulding Nature– Discursive Struggles Over the Environment. An exhibition at Färgfabriken (Stockholm, Sweden) 26 August – 26 November.: “Moulding Nature raises questions about how we perceive our environment. In video works, collages, photos and installations, artists and other participants explore how different discourses* affect the way we give meaning to nature and the role of mankind in it. Discourses that often are in conflict with each other and compete for space, sometimes even fight each other. The exhibition is part of a project on environmental communication where researchers have identified voices, positions and ideologies that can be linked to the discussion about nature and the environment.”
Wetlands Most in Danger After the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sackett v. EPA Ruling. A nice visual explainer on the state of wetland protections (or lack thereof) in the U.S. after the EPA’s May 25th 2023 ruling. From EarthJustice
New global biodiversity fund to restore nature worldwide by 2030 officially launches: “Targets include about 20% of funds to support Indigenous and local action to protect and conserve biodiversity and at least 36% of the fund’s resources to support the most vulnerable people, small island developing states, and least developed countries. Some human rights and environmental activists are calling for more contributions needed to operationalize the fund and actions to allocate funds immediately.”
Eco-Swaraj: Pluriversal Pathways out of Global Crises (Sept 4, 2023, video of talk by ).: “Are there practices, concepts and frameworks that are pathways to a sustainable and equitable future? If yes, what needs to be done to make the transition towards such a future? This presentation will look at a Pluriverse of such alternatives. A framework of radical transformation emerging in India called Eco-swaraj, or Radical Ecological Democracy, will be presented in detail. Other similar radical approaches from around the world will be described in brief, and the commonalities within this pluriverse brought out.”
How a surfing sea otter revealed the dark side of human nature. By Patricia MacCormack in the Conversation
Why was there no water to fight the fire in Maui? By Naomi Klein and Kapuaʻala Sproat, in the Guardian. Aug 17, 2023: “Hawaii is indeed in an emergency, but it needs emergency proclamations that operationalize aloha ʻāina, not ones that push it aside by opportunistically suspending inalienable water laws and dismissing diligent public servants.…Right now, the eyes of the world are on Maui, but many don’t know where to look. Yes, look to the wreckage, the grieving families, the traumatized children, the incinerated artifacts, and donate what you can to community-led groups on the ground. But look below and beyond that too. To the aquifers and streams, and the plantation-era diversion ditches and reservoirs. Because that’s where the water is, and whoever controls the water controls the future of Maui.”
Holly Jean Buck | After "Net Zero:" What New Frames for Climate Action? “2023 Redekop Lecture in Environment and Society, part of the inaugural CEGU conference, Environmental Emergencies, Emergent Environments: Critical Perspectives from the Social Sciences and Humanities, held April 20–21, 2023 at The University of Chicago.”
"Synching Justice" by Dr. Max Liboiron. The public keynote for the “Ecologies of Justice: Wasteland, Wastewater, and Human Disposability” symposium at Arizona State University.
Covering Climate Now Event: The Ever-Shifting Climate Misinformation Landscape (July 13, 2023). Moderated by Amy Westervelt, award-winning investigative climate journalist and founder of the independent podcast network and production company Critical Frequency.
Sounds Like Sustainability: An interview with Sigrid Kannengießer on sustainability, digital media, AI and surveillance capitalism (recorded webinar from February 20, 2023): The IECA webinar series Sounds like Sustainability “aims to provide practitioners, scholars and other interested folks the chance to learn about and discuss key topics in the practice of environmental and sustainability communication.
📚 10 Research articles & books
Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care, by Phaedra C. Pezzullo. University of California Press (2023):
“Addressing plastics can feel overwhelming. Guilt, shame, anger, hurt, fear, dismissiveness, and despair abound. Beyond Straw Men moves beyond “hot take” or straw man fallacies by illustrating how affective counterpublics mobilized around plastics reveal broader stories about environmental justice and social change…Attuned 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.”
“No research on a dead planet”: 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).
Negotiating climate change in public discourse: insights from critical discourse studies. By Guofeng Wang and Changpeng Huan, in a special issue in Critical Discourse Studies (April, 2023) (Open Access): “This Special Issue collects five articles that are located in the present global context, and draw on methods from across critical discourse studies (CDS) to examine the interaction between material realities of climate change and discursive communication between different Parties and non-Party stakeholders in multimodal ways and on multiple platforms. To this end, it draws on discourses such as the UN speeches, UN documents, EU green deal policy, official documents submitted by African countries to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and news reports in China and Australia.”
Rendered Obsolete: Energy Culture and the Afterlife of US Whaling. By Jamie L. Jones (2023). The University of North Carolina Press. Here’s a twitter (X) thread from the author providing an interesting overview of the book.
Environmental communication for expert audiences - experimenting three approaches. By Johanna Jämsä, Vilma Sandström, Jani Holopainen, Sirkku Juhola, Tuomo Kalliokoski, Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki. In Applied Environmental Education & Communication (July 2023): “We studied three novel approaches in environmental science communication for experts: gamification, virtual reality, and art-based scenario workshops and analyze participants’ perceptions through qualitative interviews and a survey. Four dimensions emerged from the interviews: enjoyment, usability, sociability, and learning that were found to be important for scientific communication.”
Reflections on Environmental Communication and the Challenges of a New Research Agenda. By Alison Anderson in Environmental Communication.
“Over recent years, the “information deficit” model has come under growing criticism and new concerns have increasingly focused upon citizen involvement and moving public engagement “upstream”…Yet as Kahan (2013) points out, scientists, government officials, and NGOs have made little use of the findings generated by scholars working in the science/environmental communication area. Field experiments provide an opportunity for models to be tested in the real world, and to then apply that evidence and learn lessons. There are myriad opportunities for environmental communication scholars to work alongside communicators on specific campaigns targeting specific social and cultural groupings in order to develop their communication strategies in ways that can be observed and measured…”
Empirical Ecocriticism: Environmental Narratives for Social Change. Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Alexa Weik von Mossner, W. P. Malecki, and Frank Hakemulder. University of Minnesota Press, 2023 (read the introduction):
“Most environmentally engaged scholars, thinkers, and activists agree that to respond to the existential challenges we currently face, we need new narratives about who we are, how we’re entangled with the rest of the natural world, and how we might think, feel, and act to preserve a stable biosphere and a livable future with as much justice as possible. But what kinds of stories should we tell? To which audiences? Through what media? Are some stories more impactful than others? Are some counterproductive? And how can scholars of literature, theater, art, digital media, film, television, and other cultural forms contribute to, expedite, or shape the historic socioecological transformation that is now underway?”
How climate change is causing a communication breakdown in the animal world. By Mahasweta Saha in The Conversation: “Climate change is not just affecting individual species. A growing number of studies suggest that climate change-associated stressors which modify these chemical interactions are causing info-disruption across whole ecosystems.”
The Place of the Teacher: Environmental Communication and Transportive Pedagogy. By Erin Hawley, Gabi Mocatta & Tema Milstein. In Environmental Communication (2023): “Environmental communication pedagogy aims to build core competencies that empower students to solve wicked problems and participate in pro-environmental action. The “ethical duty” of the field (Cox, 2007) extends to educators, who, like environmental communication researchers and practitioners, seek to empower others to lead change during a time of ecological crisis…Educators in this field seek to help their students participate in environmental conversations taking place in and across ecocultures, media landscapes, and transforming public spheres, enabling them to become aware, ethical, and effective environmental communicators and change-makers” (p. 339).
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.”
💡 10 Ideas
The New Fish: The Truth about Farmed Salmon and the Consequences We Can No Longer Ignore. By Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli, Patagonia (2023):
“In a prizewinning five-year investigation, journalists Simen Sætre and Kjetil Østli took an in-depth look at Norway’s 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.”
What Would An Animal Revolution Look Like, by Taylin Nelson, Edge Effects Magazine Sept 28.
“In Animal Revolution, [Ron] Broglio urges us to think about how revolutions—with their movements, their visible resistance—might 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.”
The Animals Are Talking. What Does It Mean?: Language was long understood as a human-only affair. New research suggests that isn’t so. By Sonia Shah in the NYTimes, Sept 20, 2023.: “The quest for language’s origins has yet to deliver King Solomon’s seal, a ring that magically bestows upon its wearer the power to speak to animals, or the future imagined in a short story by Ursula K. Le Guin, in which therolinguists pore over the manuscripts of ants, the “kinetic sea writings” of penguins and the “delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen.” Perhaps it never will. But what we know so far tethers us to our animal kin regardless. No longer marooned among mindless objects, we have emerged into a remade world, abuzz with the conversations of fellow thinking beings, however inscrutable.”
Why the climate movement doesn’t talk about polar bears anymore. Global warming moved from the North Pole to your backyard — and so did its symbols. By Kate Yoder in Grist (Aug, 2023).: “When the symbol gets bigger than the region itself and people don’t realize that the polar bear is just one piece of a whole diverse web of life in the Arctic, then it can become almost a barrier,” Leanne Clare, at the time a communication manager for the World Wildlife Fund’s Arctic Program, said in 2018.”
Can a New Genre of Eco-Thrillers Inspire Climate Action?
“Fighting the apocalypse is a timeworn movie trope. But in an era of environmental catastrophe, some filmmakers are creating more down-to-earth heroes.” (Aug. 22, 2023)
Understanding time may be the key to the race against climate change. Ruth Ogden, in The Conversation (July 2023): “Metaphors for time, such as “keep moving forwards”, are not universal, which means you can’t create a global public messaging system. Time feels different depending on who you are, where you come from and what you happen to be doing. While many people are motivated to engage in environmentally friendly behaviour, we need to frame time in a more informed and nuanced way if we want more people to change.”
Heat Is Not a Metaphor: As the hottest summer on record draws to a close, how do we make sense of the images of a climate in crisis? By Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Harper’s Bazaar.
The Real Free Speech Threat: “Almost half the US states have criminalized protest in the past 5 years. They're not alone. The UK, Australia, Canada, France, Uganda, Mozambique, Brazil, Vietnam -- governments around the world are criminalizing climate protest in particular. That's the real free speech threat” — climate journalist Amy Westervelt.
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.”
A common talking point about climate change gets it all wrong, new study says: There’s no solid evidence that framing the global problem as a local one prompts people to act. So what does? By Kate Yoder in Grist. (April 21, 2023).
💬 10 quotes I thought about in 2023💡
“The fact of inscribing our time under the sign of the Phonocene…is 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 them…” – Vinciane Despret, in ‘Living as a Bird’ (Habiter en Oiseau) (2022/2019).
“…earth-centered thinking portends significant changes on how we understand the role of language in communication. We move away from logocentrism in acknowledging that diverse polysemiotic resources (bodies, objects, material ecologies) participate equally in making meaning; meaning emerges in activity in situated interactions through an assemblage of social and material networks; it emerges through a responsive and collaborative distributed practice of social agents, environmental resources, and nonhuman participants working together; it is affective, embodied, and ethical, sensitive to all the agents and actants in an ecology and their claims.” – Suresh Canagarajah, from the preface (p. xi) in TESOL and Sustainability: English Language Teaching in the Anthropocene Era. By Jason Goulah and John Katunich.
“Somebody far wiser than I said: “you know what the most effective communication technology ever devised by man is? Everyone always says it must be the internet or the printing press, but I think the answer is: the story.” We are hard-wired for story I think: we remember stories, we fill in between the lines in a way that stories leave us open to create relationships with a narrative. And I think stories are a way of weaving relationships. The other thing that I find powerful about stories, especially after years of writing only technical peer reviewed scientific articles where no story is allowed, is that stories embrace the intellect, physical sense, emotion, and spirit. It’s so holistic. We remember in these powerful ways because each part of our being has been touched. Gary Nabhan has said, as we try to heal the earth with restoration, with ecological restoration, that’s well and good but what we really need to do is re-story-ation. We need to tell ourselves a different story about our relationship to place. That’s where I think creation stories, either from antiquity or the creation stories we are in the process of writing today about our relationship to place, really matter. They can become a compass for us.” —Robin W. Kimmerer, in an interview with Edge Effects podcast on ‘The Stories and Languages of Home’
“Then 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.” – John Prine, "Paradise," cited in This Radical Land, by Daegen Miller
“The most influential messages of the twenty-first century will be sent not through words and images but through heat and cold.” – Nicole Starosielski, in Media Hot and Cold.
“How you language is beautiful. Don’t let anyone tell you your languaging is wrong. Your languaging is the story of your life.” —Jon Henner
"...it takes a lot of things to change the world: Anger and tenacity. Science and indignation, The quick initiative, the long reflection, The cold patience and the infinite perseverance, The understanding of the particular case and the understanding of the ensemble: Only the lessons of reality can teach us to transform reality.”
– Bertolt Brecht, Einverstandnis. Cited in the epilogue of Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference, by David Harvey (1996).
“We can’t restructure our society without restructuring the English language. One reflects the other. A lot of people are getting tired of the huge pool of metaphors that have to do with war and conflict [and] the proliferation of battle metaphors, such as being a warrior, righting, defeating, and so on. In response, I could say that once you become conscious of these battle metaphors, you can start “fighting” against them. That’s one option. Another is to realize that conflict is not the only human response to a situation and to begin to find other metaphors, such as resisting, outwitting, skipping, or subverting. This kind of consciousness can open the door to all sorts of new behavior.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, in an interview with Jonathan White in Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity.
“How does one write nature in the active voice without letting the script over-write/ride the alterity of other-than-human life? Should we describe, or de-scribe? How do we come to understand life through its living inscriptions on rock and water and bark? In this interspecies deciphering, how do we weave description with de-cryption?”– Sophie Chao
“Something you might be unaware of—in the natural world, there is an Internet. In English, it would roughly translate to Aura because it is all around us…In fact, the birds are delivering information through melodic verse, releasing intricate notes much like how the trees whisper their slow secrets into the wind on the wings of leaves. A torrent of warnings, stories, adages, poems, threats, how-tos, real estate info, survival tips and non sequitur jokes are available for those who tap in. Everything talks, you just have to be willing to listen.” – Onida the Octopus, in Hollow Kingdom, by Kira Jane Buxton.
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😊