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Environmental Communication Call for Editor

December 14, 2022

We are seeking applicants for the position of Editor of the journal Environmental Communication. This journal, published by Taylor & Francis, is the official journal of the International Environmental Communication Association (IECA) (https://theieca.org). The journal has become the flagship publication in the field of environmental communication, currently publishing eight issues per year and receiving more than 300 submissions annually. The journal’s ISI Impact Factor for 2021 was 3.389, one of the highest in the communication field. In addition, the journal earned a Scopus CiteScore of 5.0 in 2021. For important information about the journal’s mission, aims, and scope, along with samples of published work, go to www.tandfonline.com/renc.

The Editor is responsible for promoting the mission of the journal through seeking, commissioning, and developing articles and other features of the highest quality, and ensuring these articles and features are delivered to the publisher in good order and on a timely basis. The new Editor will take full responsibility for assigning and reviewing new submissions beginning January 1, 2024. The editor’s term will be fixed at three years.

The IECA is committed to diversity and inclusion as a core value and will embody those commitments in the editor search process by encouraging a wide variety of individuals to apply.

Relationships and Support

The Editor will work with the publisher through the Taylor & Francis Portfolio Manager for the Environment journals list as well as promotional staff. The Editor will also work with the Research & Publications Committee of the IECA to maximize both quality and circulation of the journal. The Editor will serve as a member of the IECA’s Board of Directors, and will be expected to make reports on the journal’s progress as requested. The publisher will assist the Editor through production editing and promotional support as well as an annual stipend.

Primary Tasks

* Recruit and manage a team of Associate Editors that reflects the breadth of the field

* Develop a broad-based and international Editorial Board with expertise in both the social sciences and the humanities, and with broad methodological expertise

* Process and make editorial decisions on open submissions

* Commission special issues of the journal that reflect trends in the field

* Provide quality assurance in the selection and performance of reviewers

* Deliver high-quality, peer-reviewed manuscripts for publication within prescribed deadlines

* With Taylor & Francis, identify strategies to enhance the quality and reputation of the Journal, its citation levels, and readership/circulation

* Increase awareness of articles published in the Journal in all relevant communities and among colleagues

* Work with the publisher and the IECA to promote the journal at professional meetings and other venues

* Work with the IECA Research Committee to share journal updates with IECA members and others in the environmental community

Selection Criteria

A successful candidate for the position should be able to demonstrate a number of attributes, including:

* Leading researcher/scholar in the field of EC

*Deep understanding of variety of methodological perspectives (qualitative, quantitative)

* Large existing international network in the field of EC

* Capacity to support the journal’s mission

* Ability to communicate effectively and manage projects and tasks on deadline

* Demonstrated capacity to work collaboratively with faculty and staff

* Experience in reviewing and editing (books, journal issues, etc.)

Consistent with IECA’s commitments, we also expect the editor of the journal to promote diversity and inclusion within the EC field by encouraging a wide range of submissions and authors without respect to gender, race, ethnicity, or country of origin.

 Applications should include a cover letter that addresses your interests and capabilities (including any potential institutional support), along with a current CV. Applications will be reviewed beginning March 1, 2023 and will continue until the position is filled. Final editor selection will be made by Taylor & Francis in consultation with the search committee.

Send application materials electronically to:  Steve Depoe, chair of Research Committee (depoesp@ucmail.uc.edu). Search committee members include:  Kundai Chirindo, Tema Milstein, Gabi Mocatta, Silje Kristiansen, and Ed Maibach.

NCA Reflections and Shout-Outs

November 30, 2022

While I did not attend NCA this year, I heard from so many people about the amazing time, scholarship, and camaraderie in New Orleans. There was also much praise for Carlos's program planning! Here are a few reflections and shout-outs from NCA 2022 and a list of our newly elected ECD leadership team.

"Shoutout to Carlos Tarin for putting together a SPLENDID program. From the Toxic Tour organized by Phaedra Pezzullo to the very last panel on DC Coalition of Higher Education for the Environment, Resilience, and Sustainability (DCCHEERS), ECD showed out and showed up. 👏🏾" - Kundai Chirindo

"The toxic tour was collective. Grateful for you, Kundai—from your excellent intro of Dr Wright to rethinking publishing & how we do what we do" - Phaedra Pezzullo

Incoming and Continuing ECD Leadership Team

President: Carlos Tarin, University of Texas at El Paso

Vice-President & Program Planner: Danielle Endres, University of Utah

Vice-President Elect & Outreach Chair: Mariko Oyama Thomas, Skagit Valley College

Immediate Past President & Awards Chair: Kundai Chirindo, Lewis & Clark College

Secretary & Nominating Committee Chair: Urooj Raja, Loyola University Chicago

Publications Director(s): Joanne Marras Tate, University of Colorado (Boulder), and Michael Warren Cook, University of Colorado (Boulder)

Teaching Committee Chair: José Castro-Sotomayor, California State University Channel Islands

Sustainability Committee Chair: Arla Bernstein, Mercer University

Student Representative Chair: Erin Keoppen, University of Washington

Interview: Talking about A Strategic Nature with Melissa Aroncyzk and Maria I. Espinoza

November 16, 2022

A Strategic Nature: Public Relations and the Politics of American Environmentalism (2022) - Oxford University Press

*A Strategic Nature is the winner of the Outstanding Book Award from the National Communication Association, Public Relations Division*

Tell us a bit about A Strategic Nature. What are its key arguments and ideas?

The central finding of our research for this book is that the public relations industry has, for several decades, been a major actor in the strategy, planning, and execution of campaigns to influence public opinion and policymaking around environmental issues.

 We show in the book that the history of American public relations can be seen as a history of battles over how to control high-stakes environmental problems. It began in the early twentieth century, when monopoly companies in environmentally compromising industries like rail, steel and coal faced opposition from Americans worried about their size and power. Corporate public relations emerged from this concern, charged with a mission to restore the public image of these companies. Many pre-World War II public relations campaigns focused on downplaying the environmental harms caused by corporations in their communities such as air and water pollution or waste management. In the second half of the twentieth century, as Americans became more and more aware of the ecological harm caused by extractive industries, corporations became symbols of destruction and targets for political reform. Again, public relations counsel played instrumental roles in restoring a positive reputation to companies and their activities, emphasizing their contributions to society and downplaying their harmful environmental impact in public, in the courts, and in government forums. Today, many public relations firms working for fossil fuel interests actively prevent public awareness and government action on climate change. And they are using many of the same strategies they developed decades ago.

What are you hoping readers will take away from the book?

In addition to conveying that the relationship of PR to environmental and climate problems is a longstanding one, we also hope to show readers a very different way of thinking about public relations. We theorize PR at a systemic level. Public relations is not just about communicating messages to “stakeholder” publics. PR is a broad system of influence that works within democratic ideals of participation, deliberation, and consensus formation to gain legitimacy for both its clients’ interests and for cultural norms. We treat PR as a “technology of legitimacy” in the book to account for its power to create a set of political and social conditions in which certain ways of thinking become available to us, while others are foreclosed. We hope the book inspires others to conduct more critical research into promotional discourse and the influence industries and their impact on environmental communication and climate issues.

What is your favorite case study or example you analyze in the book and why?

We were very fortunate to meet one public relations executive who generously shared his company library with us. Without him, we would not have been able to write this book with as much insight into “green” PR. But he also helped us to see just how much green PR has muddied the waters when it comes to thinking about sustainability and climate response. This executive worked for major polluters and environmental rule-breakers in the most contentious industries in the world, from oil and coal to tobacco and pesticides. We see through his work how PR serves as a linchpin for intensive coordination of anti-environmental strategies across sectors and through time. We hope this account of “green” PR helps us to understand its devastating long-term political, economic and information consequences.

Book Announcement - Agrotopias by Abby L. Goode

November 2, 2022

Agrotopias: An American Literary History of Sustainability (2022) - The University of North Carolina Press

In this book, Abby L. Goode reveals the foundations of American environmentalism and the enduring partnership between racism, eugenics, and agrarian ideals in the United States. Throughout the nineteenth century, writers as diverse as Martin Delany, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Walt Whitman worried about unsustainable conditions such as population growth and plantation slavery. In response, they imagined agrotopias—sustainable societies unaffected by the nation's agricultural and population crises—elsewhere. Though seemingly progressive, these agrotopian visions depicted selective breeding and racial "improvement" as the path to environmental stability. In this fascinating study, Goode uncovers an early sustainability rhetoric interested in shaping, just as much as sustaining, the American population.

Showing how ideas about race and reproduction were central to early sustainability thinking, Goode unearths an alternative environmental archive that ranges from gothic novels to Black nationalist manifestos, from Waco, Texas, to the West Indies, from city tenements to White House kitchen gardens. Exposing the eugenic foundations of some of our most well-regarded environmental traditions, this book compels us to reexamine the benevolence of American environmental thought.

"A significant contribution to a growing field of studies on pre–twentieth century antecedents to contemporary sustainability rhetoric and practices. Agrotopias highlights the ways that U.S. agrarianism has been entangled from the beginning with nativist and eugenic assumptions about population control and racial purity."

—William Gleason, Princeton University

“Goode attends to the racial dimension of American sustainability discourse and the literature of agriculture and that has long been missing from scholarly work on the subject. An important intervention in the history of American agrarianism.”

—Timothy Sweet, West Virginia University

Book Announcement: Twisting in the Wind by Oksan Bayulgen

October 19, 2022

Twisting in the Wind: The Politics of Tepid Transitions to Renewable Energy (2022) - University of Michigan Press

30% discount code: UMF22

Why do governments insist on fossil fuels? Why do renewables face uncertain and inconsistent legal and regulatory circumstances that slow their market-share growth against fossil fuels? Oksan Bayulgen studies the political determinants of partial energy reforms that result in tepid energy transitions and shifts the geographical focus from front-runner countries of energy innovation to developing countries, which have become the largest carbon emitters in the world. Her in-depth case study of energy policies in Turkey over the past two decades demonstrates that energy transitions are neither inevitable nor linear and that they are often initiated if and only when promoting renewables is in the interests of governing elites and stall when political dividends associated with energy rents change. This book contributes to the debates on the nature and pace of energy transitions by analyzing the power dynamics and political institutions under which energy reforms are initiated and implemented over time. This timely topic will be of interest to scholars, policymakers, energy investors, and anyone interested in environmental studies.

“I applaud Professor Bayulgen for taking us outside the Western world to look at green energy transitions. To reverse global warming requires sufficient buy-in from non-Western countries. Her analysis is theoretically informed and empirically rich. It is a must-read for students of Turkish politics and for those who like to understand green energy transitions.”

—Christoph Stefes, University of Colorado Denver

“Bayulgen tackles head-on the challenges of fossil fuel persistence and clean energy ambivalence in Turkish energy policy and offers a muchneeded perspective on the partial reform path many countries are on. This comprehensive, well-researched, and eloquent book highlights the importance of agency, political power, and institutions to clean energy performance.”

—Indra Øverland, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs

Climate Change Denial & Skepticism: A Review of the Literature

October 5, 2022

As the effects of climate change on our weather, economies, and societies continue to worsen, a related phenomenon of climate denialism threatens a healthy people and planet. “Climate denial,” a catch-all term to describe activities and opinions that run counter to the existing scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change, is an obstacle to action on climate change (Collomb 2014; Farmer & Cook 2012; Schafer 2015; Walter et al. 2017; Whitmarsh 2011). As wildfires, droughts, and flooding across the U.S. becomes a new normal, why do some politicians, business leaders, and everyday Americans insist climate change does not exist?  

 We must address climate change denialism because the dangers posed by climate change are quite real. Comprehensive reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reveal that the predicted consequences of unchecked climate change are extremely likely to be dire physically, economically, and socio-culturally to humans and the planet (IPCC 2021; IPCC 2014). Action is necessary to prevent a runaway global environmental crisis, but dysfunctional information dynamics, sticky anti-climate narratives, and coordinated tactics by disinformation producers erode public support for pro-environmental policies (Cook et al. 2016; Tesler 2017).

While climate change denialism is a broad term, there’s significant nuance that many scholars have developed over time. Typically, denialism exists on a spectrum from rigid rejection to confusion and disinterest. The Yale Global Warming’s Six Americas report (2021) defines six U.S. groups ranging from belief to disbelief, with categories like “dismissive” and “doubtful” falling within a denialist spectrum. Coan, Boussalis, Cook, and Nanko (2021) classify denialism in groupings such as “it’s not real,” our focus in this paper, and “it’s not bad” or “the experts are unreliable.”

Research has shown that climate denialists are a large minority with an outsized impact. Less than 30% of the US population does not believe in climate change; which as of 2022, is roughly 90 million people (Leiserowitz et al. 2020). This minority has a powerful voice. False claims about climate change in the US has spilled over into action, instigating events ranging from violent threats like armed citizens taking to Oregon streets over wildfire conspiracies to click-bait style stunts like a U.S. senator bringing a snowball into the Capitol in a facetious attempt to demonstrate that the Earth is not warming. While climate mis- and disinformation has existed prior to social media, the rise of these platforms has enabled climate deniers to network with one another and amplify false claims, dangerous hoaxes, misleading climate studies, and create echo chambers of denialist feedback loops (see: Bloomfield & Tillery 2019; Koteyko et  al. 2013; Lewandowsky et al. 2019; Lutzke et al. 2019; Pearce et al. 2018; Samantray & Pin 2019).

Polling and research has identified common demographic characteristics of people who do not believe in climate change; the most consistent characteristic is conservative political identity (McCright 2011; Björnberg et al. 2017; Treen et al. 2020a; Treen et al. 2020b). Yet being a part of an identifiable minority of the population has not prevented this group from significantly shaping domestic climate science, policy, and communications (Leiserowitz et al. 2020). Knowing who is most likely to deny climate change does not answer all of the questions surrounding climate change denial: including the history of the movement, why it persists, and what efforts can be taken to change minds about climate change and the possibility of limiting its effects.

In this literature review we look at the history of the producers of climate denialism in the Republican party, conservative organizations, and the energy industry, and how their work has been refined by contemporary actors to spread climate dis- and misinformation online. We will also consider climate denialists’ identity through the lens of demographic variables like politics, geography, race, and religious affiliation. Finally, we explore the pervasiveness of these climate denial narratives, and where we stand on disrupting them. Understanding the nuances of climate change denialism in the US is pressing; our days to secure the political will for robust conservationist policies—and thus warding off the worst effects of climate change— are numbered.

Continue reading Catherine Weddig's literature review on the MediaWell website.

A focus on science communication at #ICA22

September 21, 2022

Given its expansive breadth, it is not surprising that many science communication scholars — including myself — are attracted to the International Communication Association (ICA) annual conference. This year’s conference, ICA 2022, was hosted in a hybrid format from May 26–30 in Paris, France, and featured more than 700 presentations by scholars from more than 80 countries. A diverse range of contributors was drawn by the conference theme of One World, One Network!?, which aimed to encourage a “reimagining [of] communication scholarship on globalization and networks”1 and a simultaneous celebration and critique of the concept of “oneness”.

For many science communication scholars, however, the highlight of ICA 2022 may have taken place before the main event: at the inaugural Science of Science Communication pre-conference2 hosted at the beautiful Sorbonne University on May 25, 2022. The hybrid event was organized by Sven Engesser, Sarah Kohler, Niels Mede, Andreas Scheu, Franzisca Weder, in cooperation with Pascal Froissart, Lisa Bolz, and the Environmental Communication Division of ICA. It brought together science communication scholars from around the world for presentations and discussions focused on the theme “Mapping the Field”. With about 100 attendees, it offered a more intimate setting than the main conference, allowing scholars to (re)connect with colleagues and engage in in-depth discussions about new research with direct relevance to their field. It facilitated fascinating conversations about topics such as cross-cultural perspectives on COVID-19 and climate change communication [Kedar & Brüggemann, 2022; Van Berkum, 2022], the rejection and skepticism of scientific evidence [Kosyk, Kirsten, Uth & Scheu, 2022; Krämer, 2022; Schug, Bilandzic & Kinnebrock, 2022], and more.

Tying together the many presentations at the preconference were three lively keynotes by Dominique Brossard, Shirley Ho, and Dietram Scheufele. Brossard [2022] argued that science communication scholars should “get out of their comfort zone” if they hope to build equitable and relevant knowledge. She urged attendees to collaborate with other disciplines, engage in meaningful participatory research, and to avoid reductionist answers to the complex questions facing our field. Ho [2022] similarly proposed that science communication scholars should pursue more interdisciplinary research. She also advocated for considering multiple stakeholder perspectives in tackling global communication issues and exploring how new, immersive and interactive technologies such as augmented reality could be used to address long-standing science communication challenges. Finally, Scheufele [2022] presented a virtual keynote outlining failures to communicate COVID-19 research. He critiqued ongoing efforts to address scientific misinformation using uncertain evidence and emphasized the importance of considering how such “prebunking” and “debunking” attempts can actually backfire within our algorithmically-driven media landscape.

Read the rest of Alice's review published in the Journal of Science Communication here.

Book Announcement - Generation Dread by Britt Wray

September 7, 2022

Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis (2022) - Knopf Canada

Climate and environment-related fears and anxieties are on the rise everywhere. As with any type of stress, eco-anxiety can lead to lead to burnout, avoidance, or a disturbance of daily functioning. 

In Generation Dread, Britt Wray seamlessly merges scientific knowledge with emotional insight to show how these intense feelings are a healthy response to the troubled state of the world. The first crucial step toward becoming an engaged steward of the planet is connecting with our climate emotions, seeing them as a sign of humanity, and learning how to live with them. We have to face and value eco-anxiety, Wray argues, before we can conquer the deeply ingrained, widespread reactions of denial and disavowal that have led humanity to this alarming period of ecological decline.

It’s not a level playing field when it comes to our vulnerability to the climate crisis, she notes, but as the situation worsens, we are all on the field—and unlocking deep stores of compassion and care is more important than ever. Weaving in insights from climate-aware therapists, critical perspectives on race and privilege in this crisis, ideas about the future of mental health innovation, and creative coping strategies, Generation Dread brilliantly illuminates how we can learn from the past, from our own emotions, and from each other to survive—and even thrive—in a changing world.

“A rare look at the internal work required to meaningfully confront the existential threats climate change poses to our institutions, our futures, and our selves. If you are ready to feel through eco-anxiety, grieve what’s lost, and imagine what comes next, read this courageous book.” —Naomi Klein, author of On Fire and This Changes Everything

“Dr. Britt Wray doesn’t ever look away from the hard emotional truths of the climate crisis. But it’s also exactly from this scary place that she is able to help us manifest something we all desperately need nowadays: strength. Generation Dread is a vital and deeply compelling read.” —Adam McKay, award-winning writer, director and producer (Vice, Succession, Don’t Look Up)

“In this intriguing and engaging work, Britt Wray explores the internal ecology of climate anxiety with insight and sensitivity. She shows finally that meaningful living is possible even in the face of that which threatens to extinguish life itself, and that addressing global climate change begins with attending to the climate within.” —Dr. Gabor Maté, author of When the Body Says No

Seeing with Wildfire: Where the Water Was

August 24, 2022

I am curious what it might mean to see with wildfire—to learn from its attributes, affects, and movements, and to create images through such lenses. In my current work, a mix of photographic production and visual and elemental analyses, I inquire into the relationships between colonialism, wildfire, and visuality. My photographic series, Where the Water Was, is a visual experiment in seeing with wildfire. Drawing on Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s “The Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation” (2014), this series considers how wildfire can shift how we come to know and think about land, and how we might learn to look differently.

While dominant depictions of wildfire focus on flames, those of us who live in areas of wildfire impact know that flames are only one element of a burn. For example: ash rains from the sky, collects and piles onto plant leaves, and combines with soil, reconstituting grounds, waterways, and growth; and smoke particles fill lungs, darken skies, and move pollutants across geographic boundaries, transforming bodies, objects, atmospheres, and futures in the process. These impacts—across scales, species, and beings— suggest that wildfire is multi-directionally productive. Seeing with wildfire requires lenses that invite deeper engagement with these kinds of networks of relationships in and across ecological systems. 

Like others who have posted in this blog series, I am grappling with what it means to live in a place haunted by wildfire—expecting and awaiting its return. Wildfire has transformed my sightlines and my thinking; I’ve become obsessed with water. I find myself continuing to question how to create images that offer viewers the opportunity to see wildfire across scales and beyond the singularity of its flames. I make macro images that enlarge intimate encounters with fleeting forms of water in an area broadly impacted by wildfire and I pair these images with text to clarify the context. I aim for these images to contribute to more nuanced and multifaced understandings of wildfire and its associated stories. While draught and water usage are not the only conditions that contribute to the severity of wildfires today, where I live, the soil is rapidly losing moisture and “the atmosphere is thirsty,” increasing fire danger now and into the future (Desert Research Institute 2020). These days, encounters with rain, snow, and ice have become reckonings with what happened and what may be yet to come. Both hopeful and hopeless, these small moments with forms of water are reminders of some of the lessons of wildfire—including the transformative potential of destruction, the beauty to be found in what appears to be decay, and the coexistence of loss and nonhuman forms of resilience and growth. 

As wildfires become increasingly prevalent and severe, links between climate change and colonialism remain urgent. Today’s wildfire flames, smoke, ash, and debris are reminders of the consequences of colonial conceptualizations of and relationships with land, where land is understood as property, resources for extraction, conquerable wilderness areas, and/or “pristine” sites to be preserved. Wildfire seems to make colonial values visible and also exposes and creates conditions where these values fail: houses burn, resources deplete, and seemingly “pristine” sites scar. The wildfires of this moment engulf us in the consequences of colonialism. What can we learn—and learn to let go of—in the process?

Works Cited 

Desert Research Institute, “Climate Change and ‘Atmospheric Thirst’ to Increase Fire Danger and Drought in Nevada and California.” 19 November 2020, https://www.dri.edu/climate-change-and-atmospheric-thirst/

Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation.” Decolonization: Indigeneity Education Society, vol. 3. no. 2, 2014.

* I would like to thank the following people for reviewing this piece and thinking through it with me: Jared Bok, Isabelle Favre, Jenna Hanchey, Lydia Huerta, Adela C. Licona, Ignacio Montoya, Ken Peres, Ana Milena Ribero, and Fran Swan. Lastly, thank you to NCA ECD, especially Emma Frances Bloomfield, for coordinating this opportunity.

Environmental Imagery in the Musical "Hadestown"

August 10, 2022

Debuting in 2019, Hadestown is a musical retelling of the Greek myth Orpheus and Eurydice. Named after the play’s version of the Underworld—symbolized as an underground industrial factory—Hadestown is about Orpheus, a gifted musician meant to restore the world with a song, and Eurydice, a displaced young woman. Adjacent to their love story is the relationship struggle between Gods of the Underworld, Hades and Persephone. Although Persephone—Goddess of Spring—is meant to split her time between Earth and Hadestown, Hades forces her to return to the Underground early, straining their marriage and unintentionally ruining the seasons on Earth. Meanwhile, Orpheus, too focused on his song, is unaware of Eurydice leaving for Hadestown in need of food and shelter. In the end, as Orpheus journeys to Hadestown, set on restoring balance in the world and saving Eurydice, themes of climate change and the relationship of humans to the Earth are highlighted.

It has been confirmed by musical creator Anaïs Mitchell, that Hadestown is full of environmental imagery and that its core symbolism is climate change. After all, Hadestown and Hades symbolize industrialism and man, which is the source of discomfort for everyone on earth and a bane to Persephone, the connection of “Mother Nature” to humans. While these are examples of environmental symbolism in Hadestown, one of the clearest instances is the contrary perspectives of Eurydice and Orpheus.

Eurydice is introduced as a wanderer, swept away by the environment and unable to find footing. Resultantly, it is unsurprising that she is the first character in the musical to describe the climate problems directly, singing, “The weather ain’t the way it was before. Ain’t no spring or fall at all anymore. It’s either blazing hot or freezing cold." Eurydice is an explicit victim of climate change and is described by the musical director as a victim of economic injustice and an environmental refugee. Thus, Eurydice mirrors not just the individual who endures financial hardship but the specific role of women and the environment. According to Singer, ecofeminism deals in the illumination and critique of “patterned connections between systems oppressing women and those oppressing nature” (p.1).  Eurydice is directly impacted by the weather caused by the dysfunction surrounding Hadestown and in the end, she must compromise her well-being and turn to industry for stability. 

Contrarily, Orpheus is the most hopeful and environmentally connected character in the entire musical. Therefore, it is no surprise the cyclical thinking Orpheus demonstrates, as evidenced in songs like "Livin’ It Up On Top." When giving a toast to Persephone, he says she “[asks] nothing in return except that we should live, and learn to live as brothers in this life, and to trust she will provide. And if no one takes too much, there will always be enough; she will always fill our cups.” Orpheus demonstrates awareness and knowledge that the environment will provide as long as people honor it. LaDuke notes this idea in the discussion of cyclical thinking, stating, “assumed in the ‘code of ethics’ is an understanding that ‘you take only what you need, and you leave the rest’” (p. 2). Though he is not indigenous, Orpheus still expresses the idea of seeing the world as a product of itself; this plays into his hope for balance between Hades and Persephone and, consequently, man and Mother Nature.

Hadestown is a musical with layers of environmental symbolism, ranging from the New Orleans prohibition-era backdrop to the character casting and jazz music style. Yet, the songs and lyrics on their own emphasize the message of climate change and environmental impacts. This is evident through Eurydice's perspective; climate change and ecofeminism central to her character, and Orpheus, who demonstrates an understanding of the cyclical thinking of traditional ecological knowledge, adamant about the connection of humans to the earth. In the end, it is the music of Hadestown that truly connects its audience to the issue of climate change, fully illustrating the truth of how humans influence what the world is and what it can be.

Book Review tag: Jenna Hanchey reviews Undrowned by Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020)

July 27, 2022

Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2020)  - AK Press

Near the end of her book, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals, Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us, “As the oceans rise, what will we learn?” (155). She asks me, she asks you, she asks us all, even those of us who are not human. Or at least, have not been recognized as such. She speaks to us intimately, holds us while our minds churn with this question and others. She tells us how much she loves us. 

Gumbs offers paths to learning in a context where it is increasingly becoming difficult to breathe. Where Black people are choked, where wildfires fill skies with smoke, where rising oceans threaten to drown us, we must learn how to breathe in contexts that were not meant for our survival. All of our survival—but some of us more than others. Blackness is central in this work, because Black feminists have already had to learn to survive in and beyond the end of the world. Listening to them, to their resonances in marine mammals, teaches us to be free—how all of us may be free. 

Harriet Tubman, Gumbs reminds us, “could have been individually free.” But instead, she chose “to live free in an unfree space. It was the only way to bring us all with her” (40). Like Tubman, Gumbs seeks to bring us, all of us, with her in her journey to freedom.

So she connects us to our nonhuman kin, marine mammals, whose very life is staked upon survival in an oceanic context where they cannot breathe. In doing so, she reminds us that we are all connected. That “the scale of breathing is collective” (1) and “the world is round” (106) and everything returns. That “we are all entangled” (103), both within the ropes of capitalism that bind us, and, more hopefully, to and with each other. 

Undrowned is a series of 19 powerful meditations on how marine mammals can teach us to collectively survive and radically transform the colonial and capitalist systems that have put us into contexts where we cannot breathe. The chapters can be read separately or out of order, and are accompanied by a series of activities at the end of the book to enhance our marine mammal practices. Gumbs makes it clear that she is not “trying to garner sympathy for marine mammals because they are so much like us,” but rather “undoing a definition of the human, which is so tangled in separation and domination that it is consistently making our lives incompatible with the planet” (9). The result is a deeply thought-provoking, emotionally moving, and eminently readable volume that I expect to return to over and over in the years to come. 

As Gumbs exhorts, “If there was ever a time to humbly submit to the mentorship of marine mammals it is now” (7). I encourage everyone to read this book, sit with it, “take a moment to imagine how you would move if you weren’t caught up in this” (104), to “remember, there is something called freedom even if you can’t see it” (32), and to let the Black feminist imaginations of our marine mammal kin flow through you, forming you into something new. 

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About this series: Conceived as a means of amplifying the voices of environmental communication scholars, the tag review series features brief engagements with books by scholars and activists involved in environmental communication as a practice or subject of inquiry. After writing their review, authors “tag” a colleague who then writes the next review. 

Sign up here to be included in the book review tag list.

Jenna Hanchey has tagged Bridie McGreavy for the next book review.

The Causes and Consequences of Poor Air Quality

July 13, 2022

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, I froze (and ultimately canceled) my gym membership and started running outdoors. This change has lowered my risk of contracting COVID-19, benefitted the family bank account, and introduced me to a lot of bunnies – who knew so many lived in the neighborhood?  It has also increased my awareness of outdoor air quality.  

I live in Fort Collins, along Colorado’s northern Front Range, which is a beautiful part of the state that also suffers from poor air quality.  This area often exceeds the Clean Air Act’s limits for ground-level ozone (Brasch, 2022). In addition, the area has experienced more days with high levels of fine particulate matter (PM2.5) due to the increased frequency of wildfires in Colorado and across the western United States (EPA, n.d.). Because ground-level ozone and PM2.5 are bad for human health (American Lung Association, n.d.), when I started running outdoors I added a step to my morning routine: check the local air quality to see whether it’s a good day to run. I checked the local air quality a lot in 2020; the state’s three largest wildfires – Cameron Peak, East Troublesome, and Pine Gulch – occurred that year (Colorado Division of Fire Prevention & Control, n.d.).  

As a social scientist with expertise in health communication, I’ve been studying effective ways to communicate the health risks from exposure to air pollution for several years. The at-risk groups are diverse, ranging from outdoor workers to young children to pregnant people. The million-dollar question is, how do we craft messages for each group that increase awareness and knowledge of outdoor air pollution while also building confidence that the suggested protective behaviors are effective and relatively easy to do? The pandemic-induced change in my exercise routine has increased my understanding of one key group: people who exercise outdoors. I know what it feels like to exercise when the air quality is poor and how hard it is to skip my morning run, even when I know it’s the right decision for my health. At some point, I may return to the gym. But for now, running outdoors is helping me to be a more insightful scientist.

References

American Lung Association (n.d.). Health impacts of air pollution. https://www.lung.org/research/sota/health-risks

Brasch, S. (2022, April 12). The EPA moves to declare the Front Range a ‘severe’ air quality violator. Here’s why that matters. Colorado Public Radio. https://www.cpr.org/2022/04/12/front-range-air-quality-ozone-violations-epa/

Colorado Division of Fire Prevention & Control. (n.d.). Historical wildfire information. Retrieved July 10, 2022, from https://dfpc.colorado.gov/wildfire-information-center/historical-wildfire-information

Environmental Protection Agency. (n.d.). Why wildfire smoke is a health concern. https://www.epa.gov/wildfire-smoke-course/why-wildfire-smoke-health-concern

Book review tag: Coming to (Ethical) Terms with Waste

June 15, 2022

Environmental Guilt and Shame: Signals of Individual and Collective Responsibility and the Need for Ritual Responses by Sarah Fredericks (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Garbage in Popular Culture: Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste by Mehita Iqani (SUNY Press, 2021)

Things Worth Keeping: The Value of Attachment in a Disposable World by Christine Harold (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)

I have had the immense honor of writing reviews for three recently published books on environmental topics for Environmental Communication and the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (forthcoming 2023). In this post, I summarize my reviews and note overlaps and themes I think will be relevant for environmental communication scholars.

In my review essay for Environmental Communication titled, “Coming to Terms with Waste,” I compare the arguments and environmental topics in Garbage in Popular Culture and Things Worth Keeping. Both books are animated by issues of economics, waste, disposability, and consumption. While Harold tackles the production of waste through purchasing and disposing habits, Iqani attends to cultural meanings derived from and representations of waste. I analyzed Harold and Iqani’s fantastic books along three themes: (1) relationships with objects and waste; (2) private vs public consumption; and (3) scales of time and space.

These three themes are also relevant to Fredericks’ book but they manifest in different ways. While Harold and Iqani are interested in waste and objects themselves, Fredericks studies feelings of guilt and shame as they relate to environmentally unethical rituals, such as over-consumption and producing waste. Harold is also interested in feelings, but through the attachments we have to objects we decide to keep, fix, or discard. All three books are interested in individual vs collective actions. Harold engages this theme through individual purchasing decisions vs cultural attitudes toward objects, Iqani through a discussion of “zero-waste” lifestyles, and Fredericks through her typology of different forms of environmental guilt and shame. Finally, all three books are interested in dimensions of time and space and how they affect our relationships with objects, our representations of garbage, and how we feel about our individual and collective actions and identities toward the environment.

I want to highlight a key component of Fredericks’ work. She defines guilt as action-oriented while shame is identity-oriented. We can thus feel guilty about specific actions we have taken, or failed to take, but shame if these actions implicate our identity. One of the book’s main points is that we should not ignore emotions, including negative ones. Indeed, Fredericks’ main argument is the potential power of environmental emotions to foster what she calls “ritual responses,” or environmentally ethical behavior changes. While Fredericks’ warns against purposefully inducing feelings of eco-guilt, she notes there may be instances where it is a productive and beneficial strategy. Relating this idea to the other books, Harold discusses attempts to foster object attachment through Oxfam’s story tags, which attach stories to donated objects at a charity event. These stories could induce eco-guilt if an item were discarded unlovingly or unthoughtfully after more was known about the item. Similarly, Iqani describes different works of art made with garbage as inducing feelings of guilt toward those previously discarded items and the amount of waste we produce.

Harold’s rhetorical approach, Iqani’s media studies approach, and Fredericks’ environmental ethics approach all contribute thoughtfully to pressing environmental questions of our time: How do we navigate the feelings, attachments, and implications of our consumptive and wasteful choices? What are ways we can productively intervene in harmful environmental practice while preserving dignity and attending to important identity (race, gender, and class) dynamics? To continue addressing these important questions, I encourage scholars both inside and outside of ECD to read my full reviews and, of course, the books themselves.

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About this series: Conceived as a means of amplifying the voices of environmental communication scholars, the tag review series features brief engagements with books by scholars and activists involved in environmental communication as a practice or subject of inquiry. After writing their review, authors “tag” a colleague who then writes the next review. 

Sign up here to be included in the book review tag list.

Emma Frances Bloomfield has tagged Jenna Hanchey for the next book review.

Interview: Talking about Violent Inheritance with E Cram

May 18, 2022

Violent Inheritance: Sexuality, Land, and Energy in Making the North American West (2022) - University of California Press

Tell us a bit about Violent Inheritance. What are its key arguments and ideas? 

Violent Inheritance reinterprets foundational stories of American modernity that imagine the “American West” as a region defined by vitality. At its root, vitality is a concept deeply interwoven within energy cultures, but it has a particular salience in the modern project of making of the west and in the history of sexuality more generally. In the former, vitality captures 19th century corporate campaigns to draw health seekers to “enlivening” environments, in addition to broader ideologies of extractivism that have made the region a sacrifice zone for mining, drilling, and much more. In the latter, vitality structures logics of sexuality that emerged in the 19th century with race science, both couched in desires to map human difference and energize the settler colonial project in the Americas. Together, these two usages of vitality should give us pause to rethink the environmental politics of sexuality and the sexual politics of energy. More than an individual attribute, the book argues that dominant ideologies of sexuality in the settler colonial United States operate as a resource mentality, and as such function as a form of extractivism that differentially distributes and racializes vitality and exhaustion. 

Re-engaging that relationship as a cultural and ecological inheritance develops more precise histories for this moment of catastrophe. Extractivism leaves imprints everywhere: on the land, in infrastructure, in our environmental lexicons, and especially in ongoing struggles over memory. That enduring materiality encompasses the inheritance of “land lines,” the book’s primary key term and method. Land lines name key sites of racialization and state violence wherein political and economic actions forge connections between domains of sexuality and land use in North America. Inheritance, as I conceptualize it in the book, is a way of moving and feeling through those older energy regimes and their sedimentation in time and space. We might grapple with what we inherit by thinking about our own familial histories relative to the lands we occupy; and, in the book, I juxtapose and grapple with two different kinds of inheritance. On one hand is how “inheritance” has been marshalled as a form of white settler land possession through a eugenic imaginary; on the other, “inheritance” speaks to contemporary regional struggles of Japanese Americans and Indigenous peoples to care for the land and memories of people subject to forms of state violence, but who are also constrained by things like settler appeals to property or national land “heritage.” From these case studies, we learn not just what we inherit, but what one might do with their violent inheritance. I linger then with ways we can engage archives and memory sites with care and a concern for regenerative relationships that counter stories of extractive settler colonial renewal and dominance.  

The book is an interdisciplinary project that draws from queer ecology, the environmental and energy humanities and settler colonial studies. What insights do you think the project’s interdisciplinarity has for environmental communication scholars? 

Interdisciplinarity is a place that energizes me because it encourages us to rethink what we know and how we know, and all these conversations reflect the complexity of the cases in addition to my own lived experience. For environmental communication scholars, inheritance offers a way to think temporally relative to what we name “nature” or “environment.” I was drawn toward memory or cultural practices that frame environmental histories or remediate fragments of built environments associated with violence. I also hope this book will inspire more conversations about regimes of value related to vitality and exhaustion by engaging with what Jason Moore calls “capital in nature.” But in order to fully grapple with especially right wing and eco-fascist climate politics today, we must contend with the white supremacist ideologies undergirding constructs of “nature” from the 19th century and how those are now resurging. Scholars in sexuality studies and settler colonial studies have so much to offer to make sense of terms like “critical energy theory” or “replacement theory” and “degeneracy” because those ideas are so deeply rooted in imaginations of white possession as reproductive futurity—and to justify this, they turn to narratives of the past because it is a narrative of dominance. This is what it can look like to do an anti-fascist, anti-racist, anti-extractivist form of environmental communication. 

What is your favorite case study or example you analyze in the book and why? 

It’s hard to choose one, but I would say the most life-giving discussion is Chapter 5, particularly my interview with the organizers of Queer Nature and their photographic work. Queer Nature is an organization formed by Pinar and So Sinopoulous-Lloyd who I met in Colorado but who are now based in Washington State. Queer Nature follows in the footsteps of queer and trans intentional communities and environmental organizing for Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color, and their individual and overlapping ancestral knowledges, transness, and disability are central to how they cultivate environmental practices. This is my favorite because it allowed an opportunity to think with them about the environmental dimensions of queer and trans care, intimacy and eroticism as a form of regenerative praxis, and the complexities of “belonging.” These are vital conversations for queer and trans folks, who might otherwise feel alienated by some streams of environmentalism. 

There will be a book launch for Violent Inheritance on May 31, 2022 at 3pm (Central). Register here to attend:

https://uiowa.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJErd-2gpjooH9L9bAbbqUg7rAYkTRlwKj5L

Public Response to Megafire

April 20, 2022

While wildfires are a persistent and even productive natural event, recent fire seasons have led to the term “megafires,” denoting fires that easily spread and destroy thousands of acres while costing millions of dollars in damage (O’Connor, 2021). Megafires appear to defy understanding: the size is so large and the loss of human property so big it can feel incomprehensible. Humans naturally want to understand how and why these disasters occur, so determining the blame for the cause of the fire is a typical first step in public conversation.

Kenneth Burke argued that there are three primary ways that people respond to disorder: scapegoating, mortification, and transcendence. Scapegoating puts the blame on a particular person or group and calls for them to sacrifice (literally and figuratively) to restore the order. Mortification puts the blame on oneself and takes responsibility for restoring the order. Transcendence shifts the blame onto structural issues or transforms the disorder into something unworthy of sacrifice.

In the case of megafires, public responses often center on locating blameworthy parties or ignition points to explain their occurrence. Scapegoating individuals or groups locates responsibility on single entities and thereby narrows the scope of conversation around the fire and potential paths to respond to the escalating yet routine risks of fire to our environment and communities. 

On September 5, 2020, the El Dorado Fire destroyed four homes, forced the evacuation of over 3,000 individuals, and burned 22,000 acres of the San Bernardino National Forest in California (Cal Fire, 2020). The fire ignited during a season of extreme drought and heat, which exceeded records for the most acres ever burned at once: four million. In addition to the amount of damage caused, the El Dorado Fire also garnered attention for its primary cause, a “gender reveal” party,  where family and friends gather to learn the sex of an expected baby. The image of exploding smoke bombs set perilously close to a tall, dry grassy area circulated alongside coverage of the El Dorado Fire, leading to widespread online condemnation of the unnamed couple for their “selfish” choice to throw the party.

Public comments on New York Times articles about the fire mostly participated in scapegoating and called for punishment for the unnamed couple. For example, one commenter wrote, “The “El Dorado Fire?” The “Sawmill Fire?” Why aren’t these known by the people who started them? Lets call them the “Smith Gender Reveal Fire” or “Jones Gender Reveal Fire” so that the irresponsible people that start these fires, live on in infamy.” Fewer comments engaged in transcendence, which saw the El Dorado Fire not as an isolated fire, but as a systemic issue of fire management and climate change:  “I don’t see climate change mentioned once on this page despite it being the obvious root cause of these terrible fires.”

The recent Marshall Fire in Boulder, Colorado, which destroyed 1,000 homes in January 2022, led to an impassioned public discussion about who to blame for the fire. Initially, media outlets reported the fire was caused by downed power lines, but after none were found, attention turned toward a religious group in the county called the Twelve Tribes, as rumors spread that the group had been burning trash on their property when the fire started (Jojola, 2022). This discussion demonstrated group scapegoating, as the Twelve Tribes were labeled as outsiders in the Boulder community and often described as a cult with extreme religious views. Ultimately, the Twelve Tribes were cleared of wrongdoing. The true cause of the fire was likely an ember blown out of an underground coal mine--demonstrating the compounding nature of our environmental choices that can lead to disasters (Aguilar, 2022). 

There are many particular dynamics involved in any natural/human-made hazard and care should be taken to analyze them based on specific circumstances and rhetorical situations. However, we largely propose that crisis discourse should move away from scapegoating and a focus on blame in favor of viewing these events as parts of larger systems of crisis management, emergency response, and climate change.

References

Aguilar, J. (2022, January 31). Cause of Marshall Fire could trace back to still-smoldering origins of Boulder County’s mining history. The Denver Post. https://www.denverpost.com/2022/01/31/cause-of-marshall-fire-coal-mine-boulder-county/

Cal Fire, “Welcome to Stats & Events,” October 18, 2020, https://www.fire.ca.gov/stats-events/; 2020 at 2:43 Staff Reports, “4 Homes, More Than 22,500 Acres Burned in El Dorado Fire,” NBC Los Angeles, September 19, 2020, https://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/el-dorado-fire-destroys-4-homes-chars-over-22000-acres-in-yucaipa/2431115/.

Jojola, J. (2022, January 4). Religious group’s land tied to Marshall Fire investigation, sheriff says. 9News. https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/next/religious-groups-land-marshall-fire-twelve-tribes/73-a7e1d5c4-5f0c-412d-a6ec-5f8874408c32 

O’Connor, M. R. (2021, November 8). What it’s like to fight a megafire. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/15/what-is-it-like-to-fight-a-megafire

Book Review tag: Jordan Christiansen reviews Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio's Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo‘olelo, Aloha ‘Āina, and Ea (2021) 

March 23, 2022

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio’s (Kanaka Maoli) Remembering Our Intimacies is a model of decolonial praxis, where the author strategically and unapologetically incorporates ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i while analyzing Nūpepa that cast an ‘upena of intimacies in the face of settler colonialism. Osorio advises readers early on that “this book does not include a glossary. The terms I will be using have many meanings and to reduce them to a single English gloss would be counterproductive to the ultimate function of this book” (p. xv). Such decolonial praxis by Osorio poignantly demonstrates how the revitalization of language “must be at the center of “the Hawaiian sovereignty movement” (p. 26). Remembering Our Intimacies engages in a refusal of translation, as the act of translation is an act of interpretation and often translation supports settler colonialism through discursive acts of containment and domestication. For these reasons, scholars interested in unsettling settler colonialism and coloniality through avenues of rhetoric, language, and scholarly method will find this book powerful and instructive for their own work. I will do my best to honor this decolonial ethic by also refusing to translate ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i present in this book review. I also note that my utilization of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i is reflective of, as well as limited by, my own personal understanding of these terms from my engagement with Remembering Our Intimacies. 

Remembering Our Intimacies makes a number of arguments, but a core argument is that there are a number of intimacies and relationships that articulate distinct ways of relating to each other and to the land. These intimacies are learned from the Kanaka Maoli mo‘olelo. In the face of the settler colonial project on Native Hawai‘i, this book takes seriously the many forms of intimacy between humans and other humans, and between humans and the land, explicitly challenging how settler coloniality has worked to eliminate (and still does) certain forms of intimacy. The various intimacies Osorio discusses through the mo‘olelo shows how these stories work to construct “'new’ visions” that teach how to be accountable and bound to each other and accountable and bound to the land. Importantly for environmental scholars, Osorio routinely points out that the mo‘olelo teaches a greater understanding of the environment and the Kanaka Maoli relationship to it. Osorio argues, “Aloha ‘āina is central to any mo‘olelo of Hawai‘i because our specific connection and relationship to land informs all Kanaka Maoli ontology and epistemology” (p. 9). By engaging in a rigorous paraphrase of an constantly transforming archive of Indigenous knowledge that is the Kanaka Maoli mo‘olelo, Remembering Our Intimacies reveals the relationship between Indigenous bodies, relationships and intimacy, the land, and settler colonialism, and how a revitalization of Indigenous languages and culture can craft new visions that unsettles settler colonialism today. For Osorio, “To read these texts is to (re)member the ‘upena of intimacies within the narrative of the text and to (re)member how these texts make ‘upena of their own that we as readers are also bound into and within” (pp. 47-48). 

While Osorio presents this book from the intersections of Indigenous feminisms and Queer theory, translation theory and history, settler colonialism, and decoloniality, Remembering Our Intimacies is a worthwhile book for any environmental scholar that seeks to investigate the co-constitutive relationship between language and the land. While reading this book, environmental communication scholars will note how (re)membering Indigenous stories, languages, and knowledges unsettles settler colonialism and logics of environmental domination and Western heteronormativity. In the book Osorio highlights how Indigenous stories and languages are land-specific and are often constituted by and from the environment. This becomes clearest in the chapter, “‘Āina, the Aho of Our ‘Upena.” Throughout the chapter Osorio demonstrates that the environments in the Kanaka Maoli mo‘olelo are entities full of power and force that influence, guide, entertain, and teach. For Osorio the Kanaka Maoli mo‘olelo is enriched “by providing specific details about each place the characters occupy,” and the land is both evidence and actor (p. 92). Meaning that the stories from the Kanaka Maoli mo‘olelo in Remembering Our Intimacies are fundamental for orientating people to the land and the land builds the people, their culture, and their language. 

Remembering Our Intimacies shows us how to be intimate with the land, and how the land can guide our relationships with not only ecologies, but also with others. And fundamentally, it shows readers that Indigenous languages and culture constitute boundless ways to engage in intimate connections between ourselves and the world, and that our intimacies with the environment should not be defined and determined by Western standards and settler coloniality.

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About this series: Conceived as a means of amplifying the voices of environmental communication scholars, the tag review series features brief engagements with books by scholars and activists involved in environmental communication as a practice or subject of inquiry. After writing their review, authors “tag” a colleague who then writes the next review. 

Sign up here to be included in the book review tag list.

Jordan Christiansen has tagged Kaitlyn Haynal for the next book review.

Book Announcement: Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy by Andrea Feldpausch-Parker, Danielle Endres, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Stephanie Gomez (Eds)

March 9, 2022

We are pleased to announce the publication of the Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy, co-edited by Andrea Feldpausch-Parker, Danielle Endres, Tarla Rai Peterson, and Stephanie Gomez. 

The Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy is an interdisciplinary and international collection of state-of-the-art research on energy democracy as a movement and a set of principles for energy transition. The collection is comprised of six parts:

1. Scalar Dimensions of Power and Governance in Energy Democracy

2. Discourses of Energy Democracy

3. Grassroots and Critical Modes of Action

4. Democratic and Participatory Principles

5. Energy Resource Tensions

6. Energy Democracies in Practice

Chapters in the book focus on key theorizations, concepts, case studies, and practices of energy democracy. The book features interdisciplinary energy studies scholars coming from disciplines including: Communication, Political Science, Public Policy, Urban Studies, Psychology, Geography, Writing & Rhetoric, Sociology, Risk, Sustainability Studies, Anthropology, Public Affairs, Engineering, Natural Resources, and more! 

Reviews of the book include: 

“A jaw dropping, rich, and wondrously comprehensive treatment of the topic of energy democracy. A refreshing reminder than energy decisions, policies, and pathways have as much to do with politics and systems of political deliberation as they do hardware, infrastructure, or tariffs. For acts of energy consumption, investment or self-generation can be political statements alongside transactions in the marketplace or preferences for some technical criterion. This book offers a refreshing, urgent reminder of what is at stake—it is at once a sober diagnosis, a creative piece of scholarship, and a call for action.” —Benjamin K. Sovacool, Professor of Energy Policy, University of Sussex

“This Handbook considers ‘energy democracy’ as both a social movement and a terminological ‘composition’ or way into important conversations about how technological innovation, new economic and political structures, and adaptive communication practices are all required to transform our broken relationship with the planet. Incredibly timely given recent events from Texas to India to around the globe!”—Stephen P. Depoe, Professor and Head, Department of Communication, University of Cincinnati

“Smart, comprehensive, and internationally authored, Routledge Handbook of Energy Democracy is an essential reference for scholars and climate activists alike in understanding the sociotechnical complexities of the energy transition now occurring and the urgent choices the climate crisis is demanding of us.”—Robert Cox, Professor Emeritus, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill　

“A groundbreaking and highly recommended intervention that challenges taken-for-granted assumptions that energy transition necessarily delivers more sustainable futures. Contributors interrogate up-and-downstream aspects of energy assemblages, exploring new technologies and articulating participatory alternatives in the context of resource constraints and climate crisis. This collection is a must for exploring just transition.” —Majia H. Nadesan, Professor of Communication, Arizona State University

“The intersection of energy, environmental, and security concerns creates urgent problems requiring collaborative solutions. This exciting volume provides a rich and ambitious overview of democratic concepts and practices that can empower scholars and activists in transforming the disastrous trends currently created by technocratic, neo-colonial, and corporate-capitalist control of energy systems.” —Bryan C. Taylor, Professor of Communication, University of Colorado Boulder

If you are interested, ask your library to order a copy of the book! A discount on purchasing the book from Routledge is available with the code: FLY21. 

Book Review tag: Tyler S. Rife reviews Allison L. Rowland’s Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood (2020)

February 23, 2022

Early in Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood, Allison L. Rowland invokes the “Great Chain of Being,” a medieval logic of hierarchy which organizes the value of existents relative to their proximity to God. This supposedly natural order places God at the top of the hierarchy, followed by, in increasingly degraded valuation, man, woman, child, ape, fish, tree, plant, metal, and finally, rock. While proceeding centuries would witness the subsumption of reigning logics of the divine by formations of empire and economy, warped echoes of such hierarchical valuation persistently haunt conditions of social orders to determine what lives and matter matter toward the ends of a ruling order. To articulate the nature of these dominative relationships, Rowland aptly builds upon theories of biopolitics and necropolitics through a distinctly rhetorical lens by asking, in part, “How do we come to know the hierarchy? Why do we readily accept some elements of the hierarchy more than others? How do we personally invest in the hierarchy?” Rowland’s response to these questions across the book is incisive, compelling, and remarkably generative for scholars of environmental communication invested in the rhetorical complexity of a deep intersectionality – one which locates its environmentalist advocacies within a broader matrix of hierarchical domination by governmental and imperial forces. 

What I find most inspiring in Zoetropes is, at once, the level of abstraction at which a rhetorical theory of zoetropes operates – one could argue that a trope which parses populations and determines the differential livability of subjects inscribes at the level of the ontological – alongside the peculiar and grounded nature of the three case studies that animate the theory. For example, in my favorite chapter, “Vital Biocitizens at the Gym,” Rowland analyzes how the vitality practices of privileged populations (membership activity at elite gymnasiums, capacities for strict dietary regimen, compulsive self-care rituals) and the tropes which render such practices nearly compulsory cooperate to reinforce a classed and racialized social hierarchy in Boulder, Colorado. Elsewhere, we are invited to examine how the colonial underpinnings of the American Gut Project and the upward rhetorical transvaluation of fetal existents toward humanhood at the National Memorial for the Unborn become naturalized through zoetropes. Together, these case studies reanimate the mortal implications of everyday zoerhetorics: more than a discursive alignment between hierarchy and existent, an existent’s relative position within that hierarchy serves as the very basis for their social intelligibility while structuring the material conditions of their livability. 

In attuning to zoetropes, critical scholars of rhetoric and environmental communication are called to glean the everyday rhetorical practices which mutate, reinforce, and challenge those hierarchical logics that underpin all planetary life, an essential task in the Anthropocene.

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About this series: Conceived as a means of amplifying the voices of environmental communication scholars, the tag review series features brief engagements with books by scholars and activists involved in environmental communication as a practice or subject of inquiry. After writing their review, authors “tag” a colleague who then writes the next review. 

Sign up here to be included in the book review tag list.

Tyler S. Rife has tagged Jordan Christiansen for the next book review.

Book review tag: Madison Jones reviews Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism (2021)

January 26, 2022

Every so often, I come across a book that surprises me or introduces me to new theories and methodologies for practicing science and environmental communication or even one that makes me think about the world differently. In Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron (Métis/Michif) manages to accomplish all of these goals and more through an engaging, provocative, and compelling narrative style that brings together anticolonial scientific methodologies with Indigenous perspectives on the ethics of land and relations in scientific practice. 

The first-person accounts Liboiron shares in the introduction and three succinct chapters of this book recount their work with the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), an “anticolonial lab” which focuses on plastic pollution by studying the guts of marine animals (26). They explain that the anticolonial practices of the lab “place land relations at the centre of our knowledge production as we monitor plastic pollution in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador” (6). For example, CLEAR conducts its research without toxic chemicals (6) or those that “require hazardous waste disposal,” as the use of such chemicals “assumes access to Land as a sink” (135). They also use “judgmental sampling rather than random sampling” in order to “foreground food sovereignty when we look at plastics in food webs” (6). These practices limit and shape the kinds of research that CLEAR can do, but they also foreground the ways that colonialism often shapes scientific practices and show how researchers can learn to resist those assumptions. 

From describing CLEAR’s anticolonial practices to the creative methods deployed in the writing itself, this book is truly transdisciplinary. Liboiron focuses on plastic pollution, but the text engages with practices that will be useful to researchers across sciences and humanities disciplines. One of the most important lessons I have learned from reading this book has to do with audience(s), as the collection speaks deftly and directly to a wide range of communities and disciplinary interests (which are sometimes incommensurate relations). One way that they negotiate different relations with audience in the book is through footnotes (rather than endnotes), which offer invitations for different readers to relate to, and experience, the book. These notes help enact “an ethic of gratitude, acknowledgment, and reciprocity” by “physically [interrupting] the text to support it and show [their] relationships” (viii). Through these practices and more, Liboiron asks “How might readers relate to this text and its ideas, once we leave the shared page” (155). Readers can expect to find productive challenges to even basic assumptions about the colonial infrastructures of science (and environmental communication) that offer important pathways to better enact anticolonial relationships with Indigenous Lands and science.

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About this series: Conceived as a means of amplifying the voices of environmental communication scholars, the tag review series features brief engagements with books by scholars and activists involved in environmental communication as a practice or subject of inquiry. After writing their review, authors “tag” a colleague who then writes the next review. 

Sign up here to be included in the book review tag list.

Madison Jones has tagged Tyler S. Rife for the next book review.

“The river is within us, the sea is all about us”: Posthuman Ecology and Gaian Systems in Caitlín R. Kiernan’s “Faces in Revolving Souls” - Part 2

January 12, 2022

This post is the second part of Reanna's critique. Read the first part here.

Lynn White Jr. writes that “all forms of life modify their contexts” (“Historical Roots” 3). This statement is most obviously confirmed by examining Sylvia’s presence within various contexts: she affects her mother which modifies her home environment to be abusive and hostile, and she affects other parahumans which modifies this environment to be defensive and apprehensive towards her. However, the ultimate cause of these shifts cannot be understood solely by analysing Sylvia’s relationship to others. Ultimately, it is the animal matter influencing her body’s inner workings that underlies her interactions and, consequently, “modif[es her] context”. Kiernan uses this to impart a complex, adaptive system that draws on other systems. Sylvia’s relationship with her parahuman self exhibits a Gaian form of systems theory to define the true cause of these environmental shifts as systems interplaying with other systems.

The Gaian system that plays out within Sylvia emphasizes a posthuman materialism that exhibits a “host- symbiont” relationship, rather than a transhuman materialism that exists within other parahumans as they acquire posthuman material matter for the extension of ‘human’ life and desires. Kiernan reveals that Sylvia’s body and its parahuman attachments are co-evolving agents. Sylvia’s signing of the document solidifies this notion, as she literally submits herself to the “procedures of her own free will” (Kiernan). In other words, Sylvia does not surrender to her own individual ‘free will’ but to the procedures that constitute this will; she submits to the systems of collective agency and submits her systems to the collective agents that will bind to her. Thus there is a sense of autopoietic materialism that supports the “self-making and self-maintaining properties” of both Sylvia and her tentacular appendages as “living systems” that are “well within the materialist view” (Margulis 865). The autopoietic material exchanges that take place between Sylvia’s body systems and the tentacular systems involve interdependent “gas-trading, gene-exchanging, and grow[th]” that constitute semi-open systems (Clarke 87).

The parahuman transformation is both Gaian and autopoetic as it depends on the materials’ effective incorporation of themselves into each other while still “maintain[ing] their own complex membranes” (77). Sylvia’s body does not become the tentacle, nor does the tentacle become a human; they bind to each other while still maintaining their own systems. Thus this relationship effectively constitutes a host-symbiont Gaian theory that “confirms a state of non differentiation between organisms and their environment” (Clarke 75), meaning the symbiont and host’s “procedures of...free will” are entirely collaborative.

Caitlin Kiernan’s “Faces in Revolving Souls” advocates for a reformed social system that reconciles with marginalized groups and creates spaces for inclusive posthuman interactions. She then guides her readers through a potential iteration of this, but draws attention to the possible flaws that could engender further marginalization, using Sylvia to demonstrate that system isolation endangers livelihoods of already-vulnerable beings. This action is detrimental to the very existence of planetary beings, as Gaia emphasizes the interconnectedness and coevolution of all systems. Gaian theory suggests a valuable solution that addresses the leading cause of this isolation: the judgmental gaze. As an alternative to this gaze that ‘others’ and marginalizes, we must consider the notion of “extraterrestrial perspective”: a gaze that can be exhibited when observing a Gaian system from the outside. 

It emphasizes each planetary being “not as a physical object but as a living system of cosmological duration… in persistent if not eternal operation” (Clarke 185). Thus each planetary body, when observed, is “not just captured in a cosmic pose but also grasped at a particular moment in its cosmic evolution” (185). Should the extraterrestrial perspective be embraced within a Gaian social system, every being would observe the inherent value of each other as worlds within the same cosmos despite their differences. Moving beyond exclusionary hierarchies and basic cybernetic values is a legitimate posthuman action that can trigger the necessary shifts towards the rewriting of our anthropocentric codes.

Works Cited

Clarke, Bruce. “A Paradigm Shift.” Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 23-46.

---. “Margulis and Autopoiesis.” Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 157-182.

---. “Neocybernetics of Gaia.” Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 83-100.

---. “The Planetary Imaginary.” Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 183-212.

---. “Thinkers of Gaia.” Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene, University of Minnesota Press, 2020, pp. 47-82.

Cudworth, Erica and Stephen Hobden. “Complexity, Ecologism, and Posthuman Politics.” Review of International Studies, vol. 39, no. 3, 2013, pp. 643–664.

Kiernan, Caitlin R. “Faces in Revolving Souls.” Lightspeed, vol. 6, Nov. 2010.

Latour, Bruno. “Third Lecture: Gaia, a (finally secular) figure for nature.” Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, translated by Catherine Porter, Polity Press, 2017, pp. 75-110.

Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. Bantam Books, 1988. Margulis, Lynn. “Kingdom Animalia: The Zoological Malaise from a Microbial Perspective.” American Zoology, vol. 30, 1990, pp. 861-875.

 White Jr., Lynn. “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” 1967. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Herold Fromm, University of Georgia Press, 1996, pp. 3-14.

 Wolfe, Cary. What Is Posthumanism? University of Minnesota Press, 2009. ProQuest.

Land, Knowledge, Ethics, and Incommensurability: A Response to the Public Land and Power Series

December 29, 2021

The posts in the Public Land and Power Series take up diverse topics, as the authors engage with constructions of wilderness; grasslands; locality; fire management; National and urban parks; The Outdoors; and binaries between nature/culture, economy/environment, and inclusion/exclusion. Collectively, these analyses draw attention to the myriad, complex, and “fraught intersections”[1] between language, knowledge, and power and especially how dominant approaches to decision making, natural resource management, and framing “environmental” concerns are racialized and colonial in specific ways.  

For example, Michelle Presley and Sarah Derrick open the series with a critical reflection on The Wilderness Act (1964), a piece of legislation that has been described as a “landmark conservation law [that] now protects more than 111 million acres of the U.S. wilderness.”[2] Yet, as they argue, this policy defines Wilderness in ways that reinforce the very logics of separation, domination, and exclusion that perpetuate unjust ways of relating with each other and with wilderness, in the broadest sense. In a similar vein, Joshua Smith picks up the touchstone of locality to show how, in the context of arguments about Bears Ears National Monument, “the local” “define[s] who has the authority to speak about the land.”[3] In this case, locality was deployed in a failed attempt to marginalize the voices of Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition (BEITC). These critical analyses of the social-material constructions of race and colonialism challenge touchstones within dominant environmentalist discourses, widening the recognized field of meanings that articulate with commonplaces like wilderness, outdoors, locality, “the environment,” and so forth in ways that extend, challenge, and enrich the field of Environmental Communication’s engagement with these concepts.  

Further, these analyses demonstrate how critical attention to complex intersections of language, knowledge and power can reveal tactics for disruption, especially for what knowledge is and means. The authors call for diverse, multiple, and Indigenous-led approaches to knowledge that push against knowledge as object—a thing to be measured, collected, and extracted—to instead orient towards knowledge as relation. In this shift, Land helps shape and organize these relations, an ecological formation that co-constructs knowledges, bodies, spaces, and times.[4] For example, Taylor Johnson argues for centering Indigenous knowledge in decision making about federal land management policies and highlights multiple examples from which federal officials and collaborators could learn, such as the development of policies for the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument as well as the BEITC’s role in the Bears Ears National Monument, referenced above.

As Chelsea Graham’s analysis shows, opening to multiple and relational forms of knowledge provides a way of sensing the power of an entity like steam in Awé Púawishe, the “land of steam,” that now gathers millions of visitors to the place also called Yellowstone National Park.[5] The vital capacities of Land in the formation of knowledge extends even further to include the unique ecological entities that (re)define Grasslands (Bryce Tellmann); the paradoxical role of industry in “greening” parks in Pittsburgh (Kaitlyn Haynal); the influence of intertidal beaches and sand dollars in Siesta Key (Michelle Presley); the potential power of wildfire in shaping capacities to respond to climate change (Jared Macary); and the subversive motive of Seneca Lake in forming antifracking appeals (Mollie Murphy). These orientations all bring to mind Max Liboiron’s characterization (and capitalization) of Land as “the unique entity that is the combined living spirit of plants, animals, air, water, humans, histories, and events recognized by many Indigenous communities.”[6] For them, knowledge names a relation with Land and with myriad life forces.

This approach to Land and knowledge also shows how “methodologies—whether scientific, writerly, readerly, or otherwise—are always already part of Land relations and thus are a key site to enact good relations (sometimes called ethics).”[7] An interest in ethics-focused methodologies has long shaped Environmental Communication praxis and is also an area of growth for this field, especially for becoming involved in the kind of anticolonial “third-spaces” that Jordan Christiansen and Joshua Smith describe.[8] The shape of these good relations and third spaces depends on the unique ecologies within which one is enmeshed, which constrains possible generalizations about what knowledge as relation means as praxis.

So instead of generalizing about praxis, I conclude with a brief note about the Land relations in which I’m situated, living on an island in the Penobscot River in the homelands of the Penobscot Nation and Wabanaki Tribal Nations in a region also called Maine (a formation of Land that includes Water) and what we are learning about knowledge, relations, and ethics. Here in partnership with diverse collaborators and mentors, we have turned to concepts shaped within these homelands to guide our collective efforts.[9] Drawing from those whose work has similarly been shaped by rivers and tides, we practice methodologies of listening[10]: intimate, embodied, and relational approaches to language and knowledge that have helped us learn how to sense and disrupt dominant, racialized, and colonial forms of power here. Listening also helps us attend to the inherent incommensurabilities that arise in justice-focused coalitional efforts, a focus that is evident across the Series’ posts and one that invites more direct attention still. In our experience, commitments to staying with incommensurability and/as ethics can be amplified by asking questions, “learning to learn,”[11] and making knowledge together through time.

[1] Bryce Tellmann, “U.S. National Grasslands: Compromised Landscapes or Landscapes of Compromise?” Public Land and Power Series, Environmental Communication Digest (blog). 3, November, 2021, https://sites.google.com/view/ecdnca/blog#h.vf40txq5ha2s.

[2] U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “Wilderness.” 30, March, 2021, https://www.fws.gov/refuges/about/public-lands-waters/wilderness/#:~:text=Protecting%20Our%20Wildest%20Places,million%20acres%20of%20U.S.%20wilderness.

[3] Joshua Smith, “Mike Lee, ‘the Local,’ and Colonial Limitations on the Land’s Subject.” Public Land and Power Series, Environmental Communication Digest (blog). 13, October, 2021, https://sites.google.com/view/ecdnca/blog#h.vf40txq5ha2s

[4] Max Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021), 42-46. Drawing from Indigenous scholars who also write about Land, Liboiron emphasizes Land as verb and defines colonialism as the assumed access to Land as Resource through which forms of pollution become colonialism, 62-63.

[5] Graham cites Alysa Landry, “Native History: Yellowstone National Park Created on Sacred Land.” Indian Country Today, September 13, 2018, https://indiancountrytoday.com/archive/native-history-yellowstone- national-park-created-on-sacred-land; Hunter Old Elk, “‘Land of Steam’: Yellowstone National Park and Plains Indians,” Buffalo Bill Center of the West, August 2, 2016, http://centerofthewest.org/2016/08/02/land-steam-yellowstone-national-park-plains-indians.

[6] Liboiron, Pollution is Colonialism, 7.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Christiansen and Smith reference Kevin Bruyneel’s Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of U.S.–Indigenous Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007). See also la paperson, A Third University is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

[9] For more on these relations, see Bridie McGreavy, Darren Ranco, John Daigle, Suzanne Greenlaw, Nolan Alvater, Tyler Quiring, Natalie Michelle, Jan Paul, Maliyan Binette, Brawley Benson, Anthony Sutton, and David Hart, “Science in Indigenous Homelands: Addressing Power and Justice in Sustainability Science From/With/In the Penobscot River,” Sustainability Science 16, (2021): 937-947. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-021-00904-3

[10] Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 29. King offers the metaphor of the shoal as a methodology for listening and for staying with the indeterminacy and potential creativity of coalitional work.

[11] Rauna Kuokkanen, Reshaping the University: Responsibility, Indigenous Epistemes, and the Logic of the Gift (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007), 97.

A Surprising and Important Reason to Protect Public Lands: The (Sustainable) Economic Benefits

October 20, 2021

Environmental advocates are often leery of constructions of nature as an economic resource for human use. After all, economic constructions of nature can feel eerily similar to industry rhetorics of extraction, and arguments for environmental protection based in claims to economic benefit cannot serve environmental welfare in a more holistic sense (Brulle, 2000). Yet a long-term sustainable economy that benefits local communities cannot exist without a healthy environment. Environmental advocates can communicate protection of public lands as crucial for the formation and/or maintenance of a truly healthy economy without depicting economic benefit as the only grounds for valuing the natural world.

What might such advocacy look like? An anti-fracking campaign in Upstate New York offers clues. The “We Are Seneca Lake” (WASL) group formed in 2014 with the goal of putting a stop to Crestwood Equity Partners’ plans to turn salt caverns beneath Seneca Lake into storage containers for gases to be used for hydraulic fracturing. Economic appeals were central to WASL’s rhetoric. Though they voiced concerns including climate change and recreational use, activists emphasized the fact that the Seneca Lake region supports thriving local businesses including wineries, breweries, agriculture, distilleries, and bakeries, all of which attract tourists and ultimately contribute 4.8 billion dollars to New York’s economy each year. In 2017, Crestwood abandoned the project. One year later, former Governor Andrew Cuomo rejected Crestwood’s pitch to store liquefied petroleum (LPG) in the caverns and effectively ended the company’s gas storage prospects in New York State (Murray, 2017).

To view WASL’s economic appeals as a desperate attempt to get the government to care about environmental welfare by monetizing its value is to miss a critical truth embedded in their campaign strategy: a healthy local economy that is sustainable in the long term cannot exist without a healthy environment to support it. WASL’s economic vision offered audiences a vision of what a truly sustainable economy looks like while showcasing such an economy as dialectically opposed to fossil fuel extraction. When we consider economy/environment rhetoric, we should ask what kind of economy we are talking about. A communication perspective can help us to rethink how we approach, digest, and utilize economic appeals to environmental welfare. To imagine an economy that promotes the welfare of all living things, we must be able to communicate it.

References

Brulle, R. J. (2000). Agency, democracy, and nature: The U.S. environmental movement from a 

critical theory perspective. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Murphy, Mollie K. (2020). “We are Seneca Lake”: Defining the substances of sustainable and extractive economics through anti-fracking activism. Frontiers in Communication section Science and Environmental Communication, 5 (27), 1-12.

Murray, J. (2017). “Crestwood drops Seneca Lake natural gas storage project,” Star Gazette, 

accessed May 10, 2019 from https://www.stargazette.com/story/news/2017/

05/10/crestwood-drops-seneca-lake-natural-gas-storage-plans/316228001/

United States Department of Agriculture, “About the Forest,” Retrieved Sept 24, 2021 from 

https://www.fs.usda.gov/wps/portal/fsinternet/cs/main/!ut/p/z0/04_Sj9CPykssy0xPLMnMz0vMAfIjo8zijQwgwNHCwN_DI8zPwBcqYKBfkO2oCADIwpjI/?position=BROWSEBYSUBJECT&pname=Finger%20Lakes%20National%20Forest-%20About%20the%20Forest&navtype=BROWSEBYSUBJECT&ss=110923&pnavid=null&navid=170000000000000&ttype=main&cid=FSE_003840 

Book review tag: Joshua Trey Barnett reviews Catalina M. de Onís’s Energy Islands (2021)

October 6, 2021

With Energy Islands, the first in the University of California Press’s new Environmental Communication, Power, and Culture series, Professor Catalina M. de Onís has woven a text from strands which are at once richly historical, deeply personal, incisively critical, methodologically rigorous, and profoundly generative. Scholars and students of environmental communication will not want to miss this new book.

 Within the pages of Energy Islands, readers will confront histories of energy colonialism in Puerto Rico. They will listen closely as de Onís narrates their own familial, intellectual, and political ties to this place. They will learn about the strategies that governments and corporations deploy to exploit Puerto Ricans and the more-than-human beings and ways of being with whom they dwell. They will meet some of the inspiring activists who are transforming relations on the ground. And they will grapple with suggestions for guiding energy relations in more just directions in the decades to come—namely, that efforts to reimagine and remake energy relations must be informed by the goals of decarbonizing, decentralizing, democratizing, and decolonizing.

Although Energy Islands is brimming with useful concepts, my favorite is “archipelagos of power,” which de Onís defines early in the project as a “network of entities/islands at various levels and hierarchical and horizontal nodes across and within structures and institutions that enable and constrain agency for diverse actors” (13). Thinking power archipelogically entails attending to both “nodes” and “structures,” to particular agents (human and more-than-human alike) and to the conditions under which—and into which—they act, rhetorically and otherwise. Readers will find numerous examples of archipelogical thought and action throughout Energy Islands as de Onís moves betwixt and between geographical, ideological, political, and cultural scenes. The collective force of these movements is felt in the way de Onís traces energy, racial, and colonial injustices to particular configurations of power while also lighting up paths for resistance and resilience.

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About this series: Conceived as a means of amplifying the voices of environmental communication scholars, the tag review series features brief engagements with books by scholars and activists involved in environmental communication as a practice or subject of inquiry. After writing their review, authors “tag” a colleague who then writes the next review. 

Sign up here to be included in the book review tag list.

Joshua Trey Barnett has tagged Cassandra Troy for the next book review.

Interview: Talking about Communicating in the Anthropocene: Intimate Relations with Alexa Dare and Vail Fletcher

August 25, 2021

Communicating in the Anthropocene (2021) - Lexington

What motivated you two to organize this collection? What did you hope to accomplish? 

We wanted this book to speak to the urgency of this moment. We solicited contributions from scholars, activists, and artists because we wanted to highlight the ways in which environmental destruction is not a “disciplinary” issue but is deeply intersectional and entangled. We use the idea of “intimate relations” as a provocation for thinking about these intersections and entanglements as sites of critique and of possibility for speaking, acting, and relating differently in the Anthropocene. The amazing contributors show us carefully, critically, poetically, heartbreakingly how we humans are entangled with the more-than-human world in profound ways. 

What lessons or insights do you hope scholars of environmental communication will glean from Communicating in the Anthropocene?

Carol J. Adams, in her foreword, highlights how the chapters in the book tell stories that “undiscipline” and “disrupt.”  We love that framing and hope that people who read the book – scholars, activists, students, artists, and more – glean insights and ideas from these stories that open up a pathway for being in relation with the world and for communicating in nonanthropocentric ways. The effects of human (masculine) violence are on full display in 2021. We hope our volume and the creative ways that the contributors center “intimacy” in their work is, frankly, a source of optimism for readers. In this book readers will see both grief and hope; both heartbreak and resistance. 

How do you hope environmental communication scholars will make use of this collection? 

This is a collection that has something for everyone and while we think that reading the collection as a whole is a wonderful way to see how disparate issues (from nonhuman mourning to aquaculture practices to psylocibin and wellness) are knowable in and through relationships, this is very much a book that readers can enjoy in small bites. In addition to full-length chapters, we also included twelve shorter contributions that represent Arts-Based Knowing. These chapters are powerful invitations to world-making: art functions to plant us in the ground that birthed us.  

The book can be ordered at 30% off the list price using the code LEX30AUTH21 at rowman.com. This interview originally appeared in the Winter 2021 ECDigest and was conducted by Joshua Trey Barnett.