đ±Wild Ones: Fieldnotes
New words on the wild + an interview with Rebecca Solnit + I am Greta + Breaking the Silence: Climate Communication Tool + More
Hi everyone, welcome back to Wild Ones, a bi-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:
What Iâm reading
Environment: New words on the wild, by Robert Macfarlane. In this essay published in the science journal Nature in 2013, Macfarlane explores the potential for literature, and nature writing in particular, to energize environmental movements. In short, heâs ânot so sure.â But he has some ideas on the positive influence nature writing might have on our potential to act, and act fast, on the ecological crises unfolding around us.
Hereâs an excerpt:
âFor literature possesses certain special abilities, very different to those of science. It can convey us into the minds of other people, and even â speculatively â the minds of other species. It can help us to imagine alternative futures and counter-factual pasts. It is content with partial knowledge in ways that science is not. Crucially it can, in author and environmentalist BillMcKibben's phrase, make us feel things âin the gutââ fear, loss and damage, certainly, but also hope, beauty and wonder. And these last are, I think, the most important emotions in terms of our environmental future: our behaviour is more likely to be changed by promise than by menace. We will not save what we do not love.â
What Iâm listening to
An interview with the environmental writer and activist Rebecca Solnit.
In the essay above by Robert Macfarlane, in it he describes Rebecca Solnit as âone of today's most interesting US essayists and environmental activists.â He offers an interesting quote of hers too,
âTransformation comes about as much because of pervasive changes in the depths of the collective imagination as because of visible acts, though both are necessary. And though huge causes sometimes have little effect, tiny ones occasionally have huge consequences.â
I had heard of Solnitâs writing, but after reading Macfarlaneâs essay, I instantly went to the web to learn more about her. She is a womenâs rights and environmental activist and a prolific environmental feminist writer.
I came across this fascinating interview with Solnit with Krista Tippett. Across the many topics they cover in this hour-plus-long conversation, Solnit describes her writing on the aftermath and well-spring of environmental activism following Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. Stepping back a bit, she reflects,
âPeople in this culture love certainty so much. And they seem to love certainty more than hope â which is why they often seize on these really kind of bitter, despondent narratives that are they know exactly whatâs going to happen. And that certainty just seems so tragic to me. I want people to tell more complex stories and to acknowledge that sometimes we win and that there are these openings. But an opening is just an opening. You have to go through it and make something happen. And you donât always win, but if you try, you donât always lose.â
What Iâm watching
I am Greta: A force of Nature.
Eco-Tool Iâm curious about
Breaking the Silence: Sharing Climate Emergency Feelings. This is a new experimental tool being created by Margaret Klein Salamon, a clinical psychologist, founder of The Climate Mobilization, and author of the new book Facing the Climate Emergency: A Radical Self-Help Guide to Become the Hero Humanity Needs.
About this new tool, Salamon explains: ââBreaking the Silenceâ are guided, digital conversations for individuals who are in pain about the climate emergency to share and process their feelings together.â
Iâve been exploring the literature on the psychological distress caused by the experience of environmental crises. For example, I wrote recently about the word solastalgia appearing in the news to label forms of climate-induced distress.
Anyways, Salamon is recruiting people to try out her tool tomorrow Nov 20, and Saturday, Nov 21. If this sounds helpful, why not try it out!
Quote Iâm thinking about
"Earth hasn't evolved to host storytelling animals who forever try to run from it, to deny physical reality, to live outside life's many beautifully and delicately spun cycles of participation. Relationships are the primary reality. That is the baseline that the old story cannot erode, try as it might. Abundance for our own kind is within reach, but only when we forsake the compulsion to step outside the living world. True abundance is within reach only inside this Earth."
- Martin Lee Mueller, in Being Salmon, Being Human.