This is the ClimateCultures monthly selection of Views from Elsewhere so far for 2020. Each month, editor Mark Goldthorpe adds new stories he’s discovered (most recent reads at the top for each month, rather than in order of original publication). This year’s stories come from Anthropocene Magazine, BBC Future, Climate Lab Book, The Conversation, The Correspondent, The Journal of Wild Culture, The LA Times, Mike Hulme, New Histories, The New Yorker, Quanta Magazine & Seasonalight.
Since 2017, we’ve covered over 200 stories from almost 100 different sources. You can browse our selections for 2019, 2018 and 2017.
March 2020
The 'gotten worse' part is easy enough to see, if and when we choose to. "Animal populations are declining so broadly and rapidly that scientists have invented the term 'defaunation.' In the last four decades, population abundances in vertebrate species have declined about a third on average. Because species don’t get onto endangered lists until they are rare, it is imperative that we wake up to the broad across-the-board declines that are happening." All this, Safina writes, "sums to something profoundly disturbing: At this point in the history of the world, humankind has made itself incompatible with the rest of life on Earth. We’re too much of a good thing. I don’t think that’s how we’d want to be remembered. Unless we see the big picture and care about our role in maintaining or destroying the miracle of living existence, we will continue to do the latter. But the big picture is exactly what can be numbing. Fortunately, none of us has to tackle the big picture." It is the smaller pictures that can help us see the 'gotten better' part, while never ignoring the dismal trend. Safina describes the many successes in reversing decline, and the hope that these provide. "No one worked on all of those successes. But someone worked on each of them, and that’s what made the difference. It would help all of us, and the cause of the world’s species, if we think more granularly; speak more specifically; focus on what can be meaningful; and stay observant of the many beauties remaining." "For thousands of years, a parasite with no name lived happily among horseshoe bats in southern China. The bats had evolved to the point that they did not notice; they went about their nightly flights unbothered. One day, the parasite—an ancestor of the coronavirus, sars-CoV-2—had an opportunity to expand its realm. Perhaps it was a pangolin, the scaly anteater, an endangered species that is a victim of incessant wildlife trafficking and sold, often secretly, in live-animal markets throughout Southeast Asia and China. Or not. The genetic pathway remains unclear. But to survive in a new species, whatever it was, the virus had to mutate dramatically. It might even have taken a segment of a different coronavirus strain that already inhabited its new host, and morphed into a hybrid—a better, stronger version of itself, a pathogenic Everyman capable of thriving in diverse species. More recently, the coronavirus found a new species: ours." Kormann charts the research work that identified the virus, beginning with the 2003 SARS outbreak. "After years of further bat surveillance, researchers eventually found the direct coronavirus antecedent to SARS, as well as hundreds of other coronaviruses circulating among some of the fourteen hundred bats species that live on six continents. Coronaviruses, and other virus families, it turns out, have been co-evolving with bats for the entire span of human civilization, and possibly much longer." When the first cases of pneumonia were declared in Wuhan, China, they were connected to a wet market "with a notorious wildlife section. Animals are stacked in cages—rabbits on top of civets on top of ferret-badgers." One of the researchers described it as "just a gravitational exchange of fecal matter and viruses." Kormann's piece sets out the differences between coronaviruses and those that cause more familiar diseases, and how this particular one goes about its task of using human hosts to replicate and spread. "It has spent thousands of years evolving to get where it is. We’re now just rushing to catch up." Cats 'self-domesticated' around 10,000 years ago but haven't actually changed that much since then, leading to a double identity as wild predator and domestic companion. "Conservationists consider the wild side of cats to be their most important trait, and think unowned ones should be managed accordingly — trapped and sterilized, relocated, or even lethally removed from wild landscapes. Meanwhile, feline advocates urge us to treat all cats, including feral ones, with the compassion we usually show to our domestic companions." The suggestion then is that an “'interdisciplinary companion animal ecology' ... can help us tease out the relationships between all of these issues, and make good management decisions about this boundary-crossing creature." Sharing the phrase with others, Gearty discovered mixed reactions: it "attracted some and repelled others. Still, like a meme, those two simple words kept re-surfacing and provoking me to say them out loud. The words were a micro-version of themselves I suppose – they created a slightly different world for me to inhabit." In exploring what being a poetic activist might mean, she developed a 6-point manifesto - which she shares here - that will strike a chord with many people wondering what meaningful action might look like in their own lives. And yet, as Gearty points out, "stridency and the word activism itself can be problematic. Many people don’t really see themselves as having that resistant fiery energy inside them. 'The word activism turns me right off', said a colleague P. across the table from me recently when I mentioned my recent blogging adventures, 'but it doesn’t mean I don’t care and passionately want to do something for the next generation'. Many people don’t want to be preached to or preachy. They don’t want to join marches and yet they are deeply concerned. So they respond, often privately, in their own way." Is there a 'call' to be a poetic activist, in the way many other activisms are triggered and shared? And then "Suppose the world was filled with people who could name and find legitimacy in the private ‘activisms’ of their lives. Wouldn’t there be some merit in connecting that up in some way? Could stepping into the identity of the ‘poetic activist’ be one way to come together some way and tell that story? Trusting that if enough people did, surprising things might happen."
Carl Safina writes at Yale Environment 360 (26/2/20) that, when it comes to awareness and action on species loss, "Things have gotten better, and things have gotten worse. A United Nations panel last year released a summary of an upcoming report, roughly extrapolating — based on the proportion of species that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed as 'threatened' or 'endangered' — that a million species face extinction in this century. A million deaths, Stalin reputedly said, is just statistics. Even Mother Teresa said, 'If I look at the mass I will never act.' This emotional overwhelm, this paralyzing tsunami to the soul, has been termed 'psychic numbing.' Mother Teresa had added, though, 'If I look at the one, I will.'”
As Carolyn Kormann explains in The New Yorker (27/3/20) the coronavirus causing the Covid-19 pandemic is the latest manifestation of zoonotic viruses - those that jump from animals to humans.
Setting aside for now whether you're a member of the 'cat person' tribe or else the 'dog person' tribe or are among the nonaligned, here's an interesting snippet from Cara Giaimo at Anthropocene Magazine (11/3/20). Yes, cats inspire divided reactions in people - "some consider them pure menaces to birds and other wildlife, while to others, they’re beloved pets" - but maybe the animal's own contradictions make sense from the perspective of the species' history. Giaimo quotes recent research that suggests that "unlike other companion species, 'the cat maintains liminal status as both a domestic and a wild animal' ... While cats’ domestic traits make them an inextricable part of human society, their wild traits keep them outside of our control. And if we want to manage them, the authors argue, we have to understand both sides."
Margaret Gearty writes at her New Histories blog (23/2/20) about the phrase 'poetic activism', an idea she discovered in the work of American social constructionist Ken Gergen. "He said that if we long for change, we have to find: 'new forms of language and ways of interpreting the world'. Only then can there be new possibilities for action. He went on to say that: 'New ways of living are not secured simply by refusing or rejecting the meanings as given, for example, avoiding sexist or racist language'. In our increasingly partisan times finding poetic moves that might help us live into that space between angry rebuttal and passive acquiescence seems ever more pressing."
February 2020
Studying more than 500 accounts from around the world, in more than 100 languages, she and her colleague Karen Park have amassed examples of how people in all cultures pay attention to particular birds in order to gain particular information about the world around them. "Ecologists are increasingly documenting the ways that birds are able to predict environmental conditions such as tornados – by avoiding severe storms on their migration paths, possibly through infrasound perception ... Knowledge of these ecological indicators by professionals and local people are examples of sophisticated ecoliteracy – the ability to read landscapes, waterscapes and skyscapes to know what has occurred and thus what may yet occur." While, as the article points out, ecoliteracy traditions around the world have helped us know the world, and until quite recently provided "a taken-for-granted baseline education many around the world experienced as an integral part of ... informal childhood learning", such skills are today on the wane, though far from lost. "It is detrimental if we lose specific bits of ecological knowledge, but it is even worse if we stop paying attention to the natural world altogether ... We are, after all, constantly trying to learn from the past and to anticipate the future." "At this point, as they note in their introduction, we know how bad it is out there. They are interested in the 'struggle to understand,' at the level of both politics and emotions, how we might meaningfully respond to life in the Anthropocene." To that end, Schneider-Mayerson and Bellamy invited contributors to choose a word or phrase - "what linguists call loanwords, or 'terms that are adopted into one language from another without translation' - "that might help us understand this struggle anew." Hsu suggests that the value of loanwords is as "a reminder of the histories and cultures embedded in everyday thought". This maybe offers special benefit in times when we face such uncertainty, complexity and the sheer scale of change that the very familiarity of language might be part of the mental or imaginative block. "It’s easy to feel weighed down by the discourse, but maybe we’ve simply been using the wrong words. Perhaps, at a time of such stark extremes, there’s something meaningful about language that describes transition, a state of in-betweenness." A window is a device we look through; it separates us from the other side while at the same time connecting us with it. "A window therefore offers up the imaginative possibility of being in a different place to where one currently is." While climate change is increasingly framed as a state of exceptional threat and the 'window of opportunity' is thus a time-limited call to act with all our combined forces to defeat or to limit it before time runs out (a view that Hulme rejects) the Anthropocene is "an invitation to see the world, and our actions in the world, differently. The window is much more about framing a view than it is about defining a time. It is about changing our ‘minds-eye’." Hulme suggests that this second type of 'window of opportunity' "is all about the appropriateness of the action – what is imaginable, virtuous, appropriate and feasible" rather than simply its timing. "Rather than thinking temporally we need to think imaginatively, windows not delineated by time but by an imagination. The window in this reading opens up a different world into which we can step. I suggest that we should think about the Anthropocene not as a temporally circumscribed opportunity—act now before it is too late. Rather, it is an invitation to see the world, and our actions in the world, differently. The window is much more about framing a view than it is about defining a time. It is about changing our ‘minds-eye’." "My daughter asks about the climate school strikes. Do you want to go? I ask her. No, she says, I don’t want to miss algebra. I laugh. Anyway, she says, what is climate change? I catch my breath." Addressing the real, bodily emotion of climate change alongside and within the story of her path to here and now, she brings into sharp relief the everyday denial and diversion at play in the normal world. At the heart of the matter is the significance of story, the power of writing a new story. "I have spent years arranging my life around my shame, around avoiding my grief, around closing my ears to the ever-loudening call of the story yet to be told. But the more I ignore it the louder it gets, the more it needles and nags and finds ways to cause me pain. And if I want to answer it, to understand and to tell the story, I cannot leave any part of me behind, because the story of climate change is the story of all of us. I — we — have to pick over the bones of our fear and see what is on the other side." Monbiot identifies both narratives as examples of the 'restoration story', with the common structure of their opposing political narratives answering the question: 'How do we restore order to the land? "It goes as follows: the land has been thrown into disorder by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the ‘hero’ of the story — who might be one person or a group of people or even an institution — will take on, against the odds, the powerful and nefarious forces, overthrow them and restore order to the land. It's the Lord of the Rings story, it's a Narnia story, you've seen it a thousand times, and it turns out that both of those stories use that structure." In a talk and essay that cover a lot of ground - the nature of the commons and of participatory culture, the poetry of John Clare - Monbiot centres on the power of engagement and narrative. "So we need a new story, a new restoration story, a story that tells us how we got here, where we now stand, what the future holds, and what it's going to be like when we get there. A story that lights a path to a better world, a story based on fact because there's no point in basing it on fairytales, as I believe the neoliberals have done. This sounds like a tall order, but I believe such a story is waiting to be told, and it goes something like this:" ... With this in mind (and maybe with trouble ahead for the ClimateCultures newsletter, Re:Culture? A different kind of prefix, though...), Battson proposes that, in pace of 're' we instead adopt new words beginning with ‘for’, "the "Old English prefix usually meaning 'away, opposite, completely,' ... so I suggest we for-quire FOR as in forward, a well-used term from forth – out and away from a starting point. for-wire, for-weave, for-wild, for-store… and not least, to foreducate…" Seasonalight also features Ginny Battson's Neologisms page -- 'new words for rapidly changing times': from Avumbra to Witanslay, and Caelosemiotics to Xenotrauma.
Felice Wyndham writes for The Conversation (26/2/20) about the value of ecoliteracy - in particular, how "people around the world and throughout history have used birds to think about and predict the future ... In many cases, the 'reading' of birds is related to a sophisticated understanding of ecological relationships..."
That climate change is too huge a problem for any of us to really grasp has become a truism, and the feeling that it leaves us paralysed and unable to agree on how to act is itself a major impact. As Hua Hsu points out in The New Yorker (21/2/20), maybe "our inability to imagine another path forward reflects a limited vocabulary". He is reviewing An Ecotopian Lexicon by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy - a collection of essays he describes as "part dream, part provocation".
A feature of Views from Elsewhere, where I reflect on my current reading, viewing or listening, is that this sometimes means catching up on a growing reading pile. So this post at mikehulme (5/12/19) is from last year and I wish I'd read it then, but the timing feels just as right now. In a typically clear and thoughtful piece (to be published in Connectedness – an Incomplete Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene later this year), Mike Hulme contrasts much of the current thinking on climate emergency with how he sees the larger concept of the Anthropocene as "a description of a new condition of being human, an invitation to think differently about ourselves, the material world in which we are embedded" and the future. His metaphor for looking at both the Anthropocene-as-opportunity and at climate-change-as-emergency is the 'window of opportunity'. 
Sarah Lewis writes at Medium (9/2/20) about the climate change writers' retreat she organised with others: writing about climate change and about writing, but also about fear, and friendship, and hope. "Climate change, then, is a blessing. What more reason can there be than to bear witness to the real-life end of times, to tell the story of how we live now and what we did? ... Except, of course, it isn’t a blessing. It’s a nightmare. A bone fide horror show." We want, of course, to find the hero who will put the world to rights, to be the hero of our own story.
The Journal of Wild Culture (9/2/20) has published the full text of the March 2018 talk that campaigner and writer George Monbiot gave at Falmouth University (also available to watch in full): How to Really Take Back Control. Answering his own question 'Why Don't I Despair?', Monbiot gives a typically clear and forthright guide to the story of neoliberalism: how it developed, how it gets its power, and how the equally powerful story of conventional Keynesian economics can't provide the convincing response to it or to the ecological and climate crisis that it too helps to fuel. 
In her latest post at Seasonalight (5/2/20), Ginny Battson writes on "new words for new times", and our tendency to dwell on the past rather than contemplate the future. "This is reflected in the words we use ... With so many things re-quiring a very new approach (at least in living memory), I am beginning to dislike the prefix RE. re-wire, re-weave, re-wild, re-store – ‘re’ as in to go back. Latin re- again, go back, Latin possibly from PIE [Proto-Indo-European] ~ wret."
January 2020
"We have a new reconstruction of global temperature going back to the year 1AD thanks to the work of the PAGES2k team. This reconstruction includes data from a wide variety of proxy records such as tree rings, cave deposits, corals, etc. The warming over the past 50 years is stark compared to the variations that have occurred naturally over the last 2000 years. It is not normal." Showing the data both in the conventional scientific graph and the warming stripes sequence (you'll need to click through to the story to see it) make the point very elegantly. "The data show that the modern period is very different to what occurred in the past. The often quoted Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are real phenomena, but small compared to the recent changes. ... The invention of the efficient steam engine in 1790 by James Watt kick-started the industrial revolution and our reliance on burning fossil fuels for energy. This has brought many benefits to humankind, but we are now experiencing the side effects of that development." As Rosen explains, Molnar's original intention was to make realisable the often abstract concept of climate change, in a way that might provoke feelings. She succeeded -- provoking deep feelings in herself in the process. "After Molnar had created more paintings of vanishing ice, it hit her: this is what it feels like to try to hold the enormous losses brought about by climate change" - even though, "at first glance, it’s not clear what Molnar’s works are about. She paints with translucent, often iridescent pigments that morph from yellow to green, teal to indigo, purple back to red. The shapes are vibrant and beautiful — culled from scientific studies and satellite images — and they cover the canvas in a colorful confetti of ruin." Rosen's article draws on the reflections of others in exploring climate grief and the risks of not recognising the emotional costs of climate change alongside the physical, social and environmental ones, including psychotherapist Rosemary Randall. Grief can be seen as "an ongoing set of tasks — like making space for uncomfortable feelings and adjusting to a new reality — that can be embraced or ignored. The goal, after all, isn’t to 'fix' grief. It’s to learn to live with loss." Oliver goes beyond the common sense of this appeal to point out the ways in which science shows we do not really ever act 'only' as individuals. From the way "most of our 37 trillion human cells have such a short lifespan that we are essentially made anew every few months, directed by a genetic code that is a shared heritage not just of humanity but all life on Earth" to the way all the external stimuli we receive -- from other people and the more-than-human world -- reshape the neural networks of our brains and our identity as selves; and how our sense of connectedness with nature reinforces our attitudes and wellbeing. He concludes that "to solve the major environmental problems the world now faces, we actually need to do both – to change the world and ourselves. In fact, it is even more nuanced than that – because changing ourselves is a prerequisite for changing the world. Realising the true nature of our human connectedness actually engenders more ethical and environmentally responsible behaviours." And the vocabulary for nature is being whittled down, he explains, citing research that "discovered that words from the 1990s which were entirely used to refer to the natural world, have now taken on meaning from the world of computers and the internet. Cloud, stream and tweet are such examples. In a comparable dataset from the 2010s ... cloud has fallen to 77%, stream is down to 36% and tweet is down to 1% of its old usage in everyday conversation." Of course, language is dynamic, and "children will not stop playing computer games and they will not stop having an interest in new technology – and nor should they. But the adults in this conversation must explore ways to combine modern technology with a love of nature." As Hall discusses "while the ice-albedo feedback loop is simple in theory, a number of complexities play into it, including ice thickness, the different types of ice, the presence of snow and clouds, and the physical interactions that govern those complexities. Slowly, scientists have begun to incorporate these intricacies into their simulations. Yet despite these recent improvements, our understanding of these and other feedback loops is still far too crude. That much can be seen in the variety of outcomes that various models predict. Some forecast that summer sea ice will continue to exist until sometime in the 22nd century. Others predict it will be lost within the next 10 years. Whenever it happens, the transformation will affect the entire planet." But personal encounters with the shifting ice bring home the strangeness of a habitat with profound implications for changes close to home and around the world. "Around 4 a.m. the day after the ice cracked beneath my feet, the thin veneer of ice started to explode with deafening booms that woke up the ship. Before I left for the trip, I spoke with a number of Arctic researchers who told me to listen to the ice. I thought that meant I had to kneel down on the ice and put my ear against the floe — that the ice would whisper to me. But the ice does not whisper. It screams. Whenever the pressure builds up, you can hear a large hissing sound — almost like the screeching from an exploding soda bottle. It sizzles. It pops. It groans. And it does so loudly. A polar bear standing in the distance likely would have heard something akin to thunder." Whenever he is asked "What gives you hope?” in the context of climate change, Ortiz knows that what people really want to know is “Where can I find hope?” He suggests that rather than looking for hope 'out there', "real, good, useful hope has nothing to do with positive news. Instead, it is profoundly linked with action: both ours and that of others alongside us." He quotes Rebecca Solnit's book Hope in the Dark, where she writes of hope that "'It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency.'” As his article explores, there are key distinctions between hope and optimism, though we tend to use the words interchangeably. Charting this year by year over the coming decade, Holthaus starts with 2020 as "the year we acknowledge that the most urgent thing we can do in an emergency is to passionately tell others that it exists"; by mid-decade "through art, music, memes, and methods-yet-to-be-invented, we will laugh and love and interpret what it means to be a part of a thriving global civilisation in the middle of the most transcendent decade in human history" and "expand our practice of regenerative agriculture." And by 2030 "perhaps the most radical change of all this decade will be our newfound ability to tell a story – a positive story – about the future and mean it."
Ed Hawkins - creator of the famous Warming Stripes visualisations - has published at Climate Lab Book (30/1/20) a striking visual response to the question he's commonly asked: "‘What happened before 1850’? I’m glad you asked.
Julia Rosen's piece in The LA Times (11/1/20) explores the art that Daniela Molnar produced in response to a shape left by a melting glacier as it exposed land for the first time in centuries. "Little did she know, it was a shape that would expose a profound feeling of grief within her — and then help her process it."
With over 36 billion tonnes of CO2 emitted around the world every year, and any one person's share of that amounting to at most a few tonnes, as Tom Oliver writes in The Conversation (23/1/20) "It seems unlikely that our lone actions and voices can really make a difference. But our actions do matter. The global environment is withering from the accumulation of billions of small impacts. Each of our individual purchases or travel choices is a vote for how we treat other people and the natural world, and even if we don’t directly see the results, our votes do count."
Glenn Hadikin writes for The Conversation (22/1/20) that, while "there has been research into how languages and words evolve and become extinct and even how others survive ... there is a lack of academic research which looks specifically at the language of nature. And even he, studying language use for 21 years, "became more keenly aware of the relationship between noticing the natural world and being able to name bits of it when I read Robert MacFarlane’s book Landmarks." After reading about forgotten words for natural features in the landscape, Hadikin says "I have noticed a lot more ammil and smeuses since I read the book, which describes hundreds of words from across the British isles for snow, ice, animal calls and noises." (Ammil and Smeuse? Read his article to find out!)
Writing in Quanta Magazine (16/1/20), Shannon Hall describes her six-week journey visit to scientists spending a year in a German icebreaker that's been trapped within the sea ice at the top of the globe. The researchers are monitoring the Arctic in order to better quantify some of the Arctic unknowns and so better inform models of the changing climate. 
In an interesting piece for BBC Future (10/10/20) Diego Arguedas Ortiz describes how he is inspired by "a handful of marine biologists who are fighting coral bleaching" as much as by young climate activists, atmospheric scientists and climate essayists. These biologists grow tiny bits of coral in underwater nurseries "and once they’re big enough move them back to the reef, hoping to restore it. Their pace is slow, possibly too slow to keep up with bleaching due to climate change. Warming waters swipe entire reefs in a matter of weeks. The biologists need months to nurture enough corals to restore a couple of square meters. Reef restoration seems like an impossible task, but they are relentless. It must be done to give corals a chance, so they are doing it ... They were earning their own hope, one coral at a time."
"What is human civilisation if not the result of all the stories we’ve been told?" asks Eric Holthaus in The Correspondent (8/1/20). "Our story of the 2020s is yet to be written, but we can decide today whether or not it will be revolutionary. Radical imagination could help us begin to see that the power to change reality starts with changing what we consider to be possible." With an infinite number of possible paths ahead of us, he offers one scenario to halve global emissions in a decade: "a story about our journey to 2030 – a vision of what it could look and feel like if we finally, radically, collectively act to build a world we want to live in.