The Misdiagnosis: Rethinking “Nature-deficit Disorder”

This study examines and critiques “nature-deficit disorder” (NDD), Richard Louv's popular theory of how and why children are alienated from nature. Specifically, I explore NDD within the context of one forest conservation education program that aligns with and operationalizes Louv's message. Underlying Louv's and forest educators' discourses are culturally specific assumptions about human-nature relationships. Both evoke a fall-recovery narrative—that children are separated from nature and must return—and promote science and naming to reconnect. I argue that, in the absence of deeper cultural examination and alternative practices, NDD is a misdiagnosis—a problematic contemporary environmental discourse that can obscure and mistreat the problem. I call on adults to rethink human-nature disconnectedness by returning to the psyche, digging deeper to the problem's cultural roots, and using nontraditional communication practices such as emotional expression and non-naming.     

Baudrillard and Our Destiny with the Natural World: Fatal Strategies for Environmental Communication

Drawing on the writings of Jean Baudrillard, the purpose of this essay is to suggest a set of communication practices that promote a different way of thinking about the earth–human relationship. Baudrillard's “fatal strategies” are developed into concepts of intersubjectivity, seduction, and sorcery, which when used in conjunction with more traditional, logical rhetorical appeals, can produce powerful appeals for environmental change. To illustrate, we explore how these strategies are used in two exemplars of environmental discourse: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Al Gore's documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.     

Anthropocentric Distance in National Geographic's Environmental Aesthetic

Tourism is the way we understand the world: tourists travel in an increasingly mediated environment in which ubiquitous promotional material and other popular artifacts employ stunning images and romantic travel narratives to describe local environments. Tourist texts “sell” local landscapes to entice visitors, employing an environmental aesthetic that urges travel. With its mission to “explore the planet,” the National Geographic Society contributes to this tourist aesthetic. This essay examines three special issues on Africa simultaneously published by the National Geographic Society: its official journal, National Geographic, and its sister magazines, National Geographic Traveler, and National Geographic Adventure. The photographic images and travel narratives in these tourist texts produce an environmental aesthetic that positions the traveler at the center of these environments. This essay first analyzes how National Geographic constructs Africa's environmental landscapes. These magazines depict Africa as a vast desert plain, a wilderness theme park, and a part of the global scenery. The second part of the analysis examines how National Geographic locates the tourist in these environments. I discuss how National Geographic positions the tourist as protagonist, expert, and hero of Africa's environment. In the conclusions, I argue this environmental aesthetic renders Africa invisible through anthropocentric distance, and I discuss the need for more critical readings of tourist discourse.     

基于系统动力学的城市洪涝韧性仿真研究 ——以南京市为例

城市是一个开放的、复杂的巨系统，洪涝灾害对该系统中的自然、基础设施、社会经济等要素产生直接或间接影响，理清洪涝灾害与城市系统的交互关系，并评估预测其应对洪涝灾害的韧性能力，有助于韧性城市的规划建设。通过分析洪涝灾害与城市系统要素间的反馈关系，构建了城市洪涝韧性仿真模型，并以南京市为例，设定了现状延续型、经济优先型、规划发展型、韧性发展型4种发展情景，模拟在4种情景下2009～2025年南京市洪涝韧性的动态变化。结果表明：（1）构建的城市洪涝韧性仿真模型能够反映洪涝灾害与城市系统要素间的交互关系，用于预测城市洪涝韧性变化；（2）城市系统中建成区绿化覆盖面积、雨水管网设计标准对城市洪涝韧性影响显著；（3）根据现有城市发展规划，南京市洪涝韧性将不断提升，且优于现状延续发展情景，但与世界典型韧性城市还有一定差距，建议南京市从城市绿化、雨水管网设计标准、经济结构、人口素质等方面提升其洪涝韧性能力。研究结果可为南京市及其它城市韧性城市发展规划制定提供理论与科学依据。     

‘Subjective resilience’: using perceptions to quantify household resilience to climate extremes and disasters

How should we measure a household’s resilience to climate extremes, climate change or other evolving threats? As resilience gathers momentum on the international stage, interest in this question continues to grow. So far, efforts to measure resilience have largely focused on the use of ‘objective’ frameworks and methods of indicator selection. These typically depend on a range of observable socio-economic variables, such as levels of income, the extent of a household’s social capital or its access to social safety nets. Yet while objective methods have their uses, they suffer from well-documented weaknesses. This paper advocates for the use of an alternative but complementary method: the measurement of ‘subjective’ resilience at the household level. The concept of subjective resilience stems from the premise that people have an understanding of the factors that contribute to their ability to anticipate, buffer and adapt to disturbance and change. Subjective household resilience therefore relates to an individual’s cognitive and affective self-evaluation of their household’s capabilities and capacities in responding to risk. We discuss the advantages and limitations of measuring subjective household resilience and highlight its relationships with other concepts such as perceived adaptive capacity, subjective well-being and psychological resilience. We then put forward different options for the design and delivery of survey questions on subjective household resilience. While the approach we describe is focused at the household level, we show how it has the potential to be aggregated to inform sub-national or national resilience metrics and indicators. Lastly, we highlight how subjective methods of resilience assessment could be used to improve policy and decision-making. Above all, we argue that, alongside traditional objective measures and indicators, efforts to measure resilience should take into account subjective aspects of household resilience in order to ensure a more holistic understanding of resilience to climate extremes and disasters.     

From Frames to Resonance Machines: The Neuropolitics of Environmental Communication

George Lakoff 's work in cognitive linguistics has prompted a surge in social scientists’ interest in the cognitive and neuropsychological dimensions of political discourse. Bringing cognitive neuroscience into the study of social movements and of environmental communication, however, is not as straightforward as Lakoff 's followers suggest. Examining and comparing Lakoff's “neuropolitics” with those of political theorist William E. Connolly, this article argues that Connolly's writings on evangelical-capitalist and eco-egalitarian “resonance machines” provide a broader model for thinking about the relations between body, brain, and culture. Environmentalists, it concludes, should pluralize their “frames” and pay greater attention to the micropolitical and affective effects of their language and practices on the communities within which they act, communicate, and dwell.     

New rig on the block: spatial policy discourse and the new suburban geography of energy production on Colorado's Front Range

ABSTRACT

Drawing from the Critical Discourse Analysis and Cultural Sociology of Space frameworks, this empirical analysis explores the discursive struggle between stakeholders of divergent viewpoints as they respond to the newfound spatial proximity of oil and gas extraction to homes and schools in suburban residential areas on Colorado's northern Front Range. Through an analysis of media, policy-making, and neighborhood meeting discourse, this study examines the social construction of space through policy narratives and regional debates about the American West's relationship to extractive industries. Results reveal that the discursive struggle over suburban drilling hinges upon the question of whether industrial activities belong in residential areas and is carried out through competing policy narratives that invoke differing (spatial versus aspatial) policy solutions. The deliberative quality of these policy narratives is constrained by existing spatial policy practices and further constrains democratic engagement.     

A people‐centred perspective on climate change,environmental stress,and livelihood resilience in Bangladesh

The Ganges–Brahmaputra delta enables Bangladesh to sustain a dense population, but it also exposes people to natural hazards. This article presents findings from the Gibika project, which researches livelihood resilience in seven study sites across Bangladesh. This study aims to understand how people in the study sites build resilience against environmental stresses, such as cyclones, floods, riverbank erosion, and drought, and in what ways their strategies sometimes fail. The article applies a new methodology for studying people’s decision making in risk-prone environments: the personal Livelihood History interviews (N = 28). The findings show how environmental stress, shocks, and disturbances affect people’s livelihood resilience and why adaptation measures can be unsuccessful. Floods, riverbank erosion, and droughts cause damage to agricultural lands, crops, houses, and properties. People manage to adapt by modifying their agricultural practices, switching to alternative livelihoods, or using migration as an adaptive strategy. In the coastal study sites, cyclones are a severe hazard. The study reveals that when a cyclone approaches, people sometimes choose not to evacuate: they put their lives at risk to protect their livelihoods and properties. Future policy and adaptation planning must use lessons learned from people currently facing environmental stress and shocks.     

Bordering Ecosystems: The Rhetorical Function of Characterization in Gray Wolf Management

Decisions about iconic species such as the wolf provide a key index of human–nature relations. The gray wolf's reintroduction in the USA has been controversial, particularly at the interface of state versus federal management. This essay analyzes discourse surrounding this controversy, focusing on how wolves are characterized as ecological and social actors in official correspondence and management plans. I interpret this textual evidence by drawing from social theory regarding sovereignty, discipline, and population, including studies on bordering practices imposed on humans. As with humans, bordering practices in the case of the wolf may illuminate how political forces impose physical and discursive limits upon mobile bodies motivated to move across political borders by powerful exigencies of need. The essay seeks to amplify understanding about how regimes of power enact difference from “others” whose presence strongly influences the health of ecosystems and economies.     

Framing the flood: a media analysis of themes of resilience in the 2011 Brisbane flood

In the wake of the flood that affected Brisbane, Australia, in January 2011, public attention turned to the causes of the event and lessons for minimizing the impacts of future floods. The news media was an important vehicle for understanding and internalizing the 2011 Brisbane flood. Examining how the flood was framed in the media is, therefore, useful to understand broad public perception of floods. We undertook a systematic newspaper analysis during a one-year period to explore media framings of the flood, focused on learning as an aspect of resilience in relation to two themes: (1) perceived links between the flood and climate change and (2) perceived roles of government in managing the flood. We show that media coverage of the flood reinforces aspects of resilience by acknowledging community spirit, self-reliance and the importance of sharing experiences for learning; articulating the risk of extreme events in a changing climate; and highlighting regional management trade-offs. Much of the discourse is likely to inhibit resilience, however, by casting the flood in terms of blame and political opportunity and paying inadequate attention to longer-term aspects of regional resilience. The limited learning observed to date may highlight a need for other mechanisms and actors to lead learning processes. As policy related to the 2011 Brisbane flood, and extreme events more generally, is influenced by the public discourse, it is important to understand the nuances of communication around these events and the media’s role in reinforcing or changing perceptions.     

“You Can't Run Your SUV on Cute. Let's Go!”: Internet Memes as Delegitimizing Discourse

In an effort to explore the role of new media technologies in environmental protest rhetoric, this paper examines Greenpeace's Let's Go! Arctic campaign, which opposed Shell's Arctic oil-drilling plans. The campaign produced a body of Internet memes designed to look like Shell's own corporate advertising. Moreover, the viral campaign used various rhetorical techniques that challenged Shell's goals and identity. Greenpeace-generated and user-generated memes cleverly use irony, corporate voice and humor to delegitimize Shell's Arctic efforts. The memes offered messages that mocked corporate practices and corporate messaging while also providing direct protest messages and accessible humor that invited identification against Shell. Thus, the memes collectively encouraged identification with Greenpeace's antidrilling, pro-environment discourse.     

Using sustainability science to analyse social–ecological restoration in NE Japan after the great earthquake and tsunami of 2011

In the wake of the catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that devastated part of northeastern Japan in March 2011, proposals for reconstruction and rehabilitation are still subjects of debate. The claim by many climate scientists that large-scale extreme events can be expected in the future, with similar catastrophic effects in coastal areas, suggests the need for long-term planning that aims at building resilience, the ability for socio-ecological systems to withstand and recover quickly from natural disasters, and continue to develop. We hypothesize that ecosystems and socio-economic resilience will provide affected communities with flexible barriers against future disasters and greater protection in the long run than will hard/engineering solutions such as high seawalls aimed at ensuring only physical security. Building social/ecological resilience in the Tohoku region will increase general security and is anticipated also to contribute to an enhanced quality of life now and for generations to come. This paper argues that building resilience in the affected area requires a transformation to sustainable agriculture, forestry and fisheries and we describe how the links between satoyama and satoumi, traditional rural territorial and coastal landscapes in Japan, can contribute to this revitalization and to strengthening the relationship between local residents and the landscape in the affected communities. Decision makers at local, regional and national levels need to take a holistic approach based on sustainability science to understand the inter-relationships between these landscapes and ecosystems to develop a robust rebuilding plan for the affected communities. Moreover, this paper suggests that building resilient communities in Japan that demonstrate the strategic benefits of satoyama and satoumi linkages can be a model for building resilient rural and urban communities throughout the world.     

Whale Wars and the Axiomatization of Image Events on the Public Screen

The essay interrogates Animal Planet's television show Whale Wars, and the use of footage from that show in a commercial for one of the network's other shows, How Stuff Works, to examine the way these texts interact within the public screen. I argue that the (re)presentation of whale kill footage further instantiates an image event as a commodity and rhetorically reconciles the image event into a capitalist ideology counter to the social movement message constructed on Whale Wars—and by proxy allows the image event to play out only via a profit-motive tied to the death of the whale.     

A Complicated Reef: The Relationship Between a Representation and the Represented Phenomenon

In this study, I describe the relationship between the Florida Aquarium's representation of a coral reef and the live reef that served as the model for the representation. I specifically illustrate how naming practices complicate the aquarium's stated purpose of environmental education. I conclude by suggesting ways the aquarium and other pro-environmental facilities can better manage environmental representation.     

Influence of community-based natural resource management strategies in the resilience of social-ecological systems

Different social-ecological systems around the world are managed under community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) strategies. This paper analyses how CBNRM strategies influence the resilience of social-ecological systems to the disturbances they face, drawing upon the experience of three Latin American cases (two in Mexico and one in Colombia). The cases differ in their CBNRM approach and in the time these governance systems have been in place. By using a mixed-method approach, we review the socio-ecological history and describe each CBNRM characteristics. We then assess their resilience to socioeconomic and environmental disturbances through a set of indicators. We found that CBNRM strategies influence positively and negatively resilience and that internal decisions might address important threats. On the positive side, the social-ecological systems with longer tradition of CBNRM and more local buy-in of commonly agreed objectives appear to be more resilient to environmental challenges. But, internal governance factors such as power imbalances, poor income distribution, and gender inequities linked to CBNRM undermine resilience and foster out migration. Finally, communities appear to have limited capacities to cope with external disturbances such as global drivers of change or national policies that negatively affect their social-ecological resilience.

     

The Ecology of Empire: Wal-Mart's Rhetoric of Environmental Stewardship and the Constitutive Power of the Multitude

This essay provides a critical account of Wal-Mart's rhetoric of environmental stewardship. By situating this discourse within a new political economy of production and governance that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have termed empire, I argue that environmental communication scholars should limit the rush to deploy ideological criticism when explaining the corporation's rhetorical motives. Instead, I advocate reading Wal-Mart's rhetoric as a problem of historical conjunctures, a critical move that seeks to highlight, not only the structural interests of capital, but also the centrality of social antagonism. In the case of Wal-Mart, this means accounting for the increased significance of demand to economic production, changes in the composition of sovereignty, and the transgressive function of environmentalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.     

Citizens’ perception of the resilience of Australian cities

How well does the general public understand the concept of urban resilience? We address this question via an online survey of 500+ citizens living in three large Australian cities (Sydney, Melbourne and Perth). The majority of respondents claim not to know what urban resilience means. Of the remaining respondents, understanding ranges from poor to sophisticated. To circumvent this stated lack of understanding, we cast the concept of urban resilience into a more familiar framework consisting of risk and ability to cope with threats. This allows us to assess perceptions about what may challenge the resilience of Australian cities. Two concerns clearly emerge: (1) violence and social unrest and (2) environmental threats. Analysing a number of constructs from the social psychology literature reveals that these two concerns hold different cognitive signatures, whose understanding may facilitate discussion and communication within a public engagement process.     

Environmental Risks in Newspaper Coverage: A Framing Analysis of Investigative Reports on Environmental Problems in 10 Chinese Newspapers

Economic modernization has been China's national priority since the establishment of the People's Republic. Since the authorities retain control over the media, which is also now subject to commercial influences, it might be expected that the Chinese news media would construct a discourse of assurance, endorsing economic modernization. A framing analysis of newspaper investigative reports on environmental problems in this article, however, shows that these reports have portrayed environmental problems in a manner that opposes rather than supports the national priority for economic growth. It challenges rather than reinforces the current institutional discourse of development and criticizes rather than contributes to the present structure of the capitalist mode of production in China. In this case, the prominence of the critical reflective discourse demonstrates the critical role investigative journalism potentially plays in arousing the public's awareness of risks in order to create a society in which such risks can be minimized. Factors in the wider social context contribute to our understanding of the critical discourse of environmental problems.     

Resilience and collapse of artisanal fisheries: a system dynamics analysis of a shellfish fishery in the Gulf of California, Mexico

Analyzing different pathways by which social–ecological systems can loose resilience and enter trajectories of collapse constitutes an important aspect of our quest towards understanding resource sustainability. This paper’s goal was to better understand the effect of a particular class of disturbance—the accumulative effects of routine stressors—in the context of marine social–ecological systems. To that effect, we built a system dynamics model using empirically collected institutional and biological field data of an artisanal fishery in the Gulf of California, Mexico. Among our findings, we identified different scenarios under which even very small endogenous changes in the relationship between ecological and institutional variables can send a seemingly resilient system into a trajectory of collapse. We discuss why these types of disturbances are so difficult to prevent and be identified by the users of the resource, as well as potential strategies to address these challenges.     

Community-led reforestation: cultivating the potential of virtuous cycles to confer resilience in disaster disrupted social–ecological systems

Human relationships with trees can result in widespread citizen-led reforestation projects that catalyze social–biological-reinforcing feedback loops and set in motion virtuous cycles that restore perturbed social–ecological systems. These virtuous cycles confer resilience in such systems that counterbalance the tendency for vicious cycles to be triggered by destructive behavior and neglect. Given this argument, we ask: how do we cultivate the potential for virtuous cycles to confer resilience in social–ecological systems? To answer this question, we review feedback mechanisms and identify virtuous cycles catalyzed via ecological restoration to highlight their importance to the resilience of social–ecological systems. We then conceptualize these cycles with a causal map (also known as a causal loop diagram) illustrating an example where restoration activities and civic ecology practices contributed to feedbacks and virtuous cycles. Following from this example, we discuss approaches for recognizing and investing in virtuous cycles that accompany social–ecological systems and outline approaches for managing such cycles.