Participatory Media in Environmental Communication

Engaging Communities in the Periphery

Usha Sundar Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781317223412
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Sviluppo sostenibile

Participatory Media in Environmental Communication brings together stories of communities in the Pacific islands – a region that is severely affected by the impacts of climate change. Despite living on the margins of the digital revolution, these island communities have used media and communication to create awareness of and find solutions to environmental challenges. By telling their stories in their own way, ordinary people are able to communicate compelling accounts of how different, but interrelated, environmental, political, and economic issues converge and impact at a local level.

This book fills a significant gap in our understanding of how participatory media is used as a dialogic tool to raise awareness and facilitate discussion of environmental issues that are now critical. It includes a section on pedagogy and practice – the undergirding principles, the tools, the methods. The book offers a framework for Participatory Environmental Communication that weaves three widely used concepts, diversity, network and agency, into a cohesive underlying system to bring scholars, practitioners and diverse communities together in a dialogue about pressing environmental issues.

This book is a valuable resource for researchers and students in communication and media studies, environmental communication, cultural studies, and environmental sciences, as well as practitioners, policy makers and environmental activists.

Part I
Theory in practice

1 Who is telling our stories?

Reflection

It was the evening of 19 February 2016. A category 5 Tropical Cyclone named Winston headed directly for the Fiji Islands. Winds of up to 325 kilometres per hour left a trail of destruction as Winston battered coastal villages, rural towns and luxury resorts. On the Internet, photographs, videos and stories filtered in through different social media platforms, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. People told their stories in 16 characters or less, and through their microblogs a narrative emerged about humanity’s utter vulnerability against the force of Nature. Terrified families tried to find safety inside cupboards, under beds and kitchen benches as roofs and walls were blown away by the strongest cyclone recorded in the southern hemisphere. The most compelling story to emerge that night was in the form of a twitter feed from a young woman caught in the eye of the storm in a small rural town in the north of Viti Levu, Fiji’s main island. She took safety in a cupboard with her family as the walls of her house collapsed around them. Her tweets, disarming in their honesty, provided vignettes of her family’s harrowing encounter with TC Winston as it destroyed their family home. Those tweets appeared in newspapers all around the world (NZ Herald, 2016):

The house is leaking and everyone’s crying. Planning where to hide when the entire roof comes off.

This is hands down the scariest point of my life.

Everyone’s safe in the cupboard with a mattress against us, no roof, barely any house, but alive so far. Thank God.

The next day TC Winston tore across the remote Koro Island, where families experienced sheer terror as cyclonic winds whipped up tsunami-like storm surges destroying 14 villages. When it finally left the Fiji Islands, the category 5 cyclone had killed 40 people and impacted 40% of Fiji’s population, who were either homeless or scarred by its fury (OCHA, 2016).

The stories about Cyclone Winston helped to revive my own childhood memories of natural disasters in Fiji. Tropical rains, humidity, hurricanes and floods are regular occurrences of Pacific island life and people name the seasons accordingly – things happen either in cyclone season or out of cyclone season. Growing up in the river town of Nausori with our house situated on the high banks of the Rewa River, I witnessed numerous cyclones, but their strength never exceeded category three; the strongest of these, in my memory, being Hurricane Bebe in 1972. After the hurricanes came the inevitable floods. My mother, who worked as a Red Cross volunteer, would enlist the support of local businesses, family and friends for donations of food, clothes and cash during these times of disaster. She would save sheets, blankets and clothes in big woven baskets for such events and coax us to donate our almost new dresses with reassuring words that these would bring solace to children who had lost everything. With other Red Cross volunteers, she would then spend days distributing the supplies to people in the most vulnerable areas. Upon her return, we would hear stories of the sheer hopelessness of mothers who could not feed or clothe their children, and of despair on the faces of men whose only means of income were the cash crops now destroyed in floods. There were no cameras or smartphones to capture their plight, but the stories moved our hearts.

Introduction

Humans share their joy, sorrow, knowledge and experiences with others through storytelling. Stories are the way in which we communicate our past and our present to those around us and to our future generations. Our ability to pass on collective knowledge from one generation to another has been an important element of human progress and dominance over the natural environment. Unlike any other species, humans have the capacity to record and accumulate knowledge in the form of images and words to pass on to the next generation. This ability of our species to create, record and improve upon a collective pool of knowledge has progressed us from cave drawings to the digital age that we experience today.

David Christian, in his book Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (2011: 145), observes “the transition to human history is primarily marked not by a change in the nature of humans as individuals but rather by a change in the way individuals relate to each other”. This ability to ‘learn collectively’ (Christian, 2011: 146) and share knowledge using our capacity for symbolic language has made humans both smart and adaptable. By accumulating a growing pool of knowledge passed down from one generation to the next, through cooperation and collective action, we have improved our survival skills, giving us the ability to live in one place, cultivate food crops and develop thriving civilisations.

It is people’s capacity to tell stories that provides a society with the means to remember the past, understand the present and plan for the future. “Culture lives because it is communicated” (Gumucio- Dagron, 2014: 110). Technologies may have changed over time but one thing has remained constant – our need to share stories. Communication in its many forms, from early cave drawings and oral traditions to sophisticated forms of language, written texts and digital technology, has contributed significantly to the repository of knowledge and its dissemination through processes of socialisation. Spurgeon describes storytelling as a “timeless human tool for both the reinforcement of ideas and values and the emergence of new ones” (2015: 133). Nisbet and Scheufele (2009: 1775) identify the storytelling technique as “an important mechanism” in attracting diverse audiences to improve public engagement in science communication.

Storytellers

Storytellers have intimate knowledge of their audience and the spaces they inhabit. Myths and legends include familiar places, cultural artefacts and characters inspired by the surrounding flora and fauna. Context informs content, which embeds knowledge and skills crucial to a group’s survival. The dot painting and oral traditions of the Australian Aborigines embed knowledge about water and food sources, campsites and ceremonial places (Berndt and Berndt, 1964; Lawlor, 1991). Lawlor explains the Aboriginal women’s sand drawing: “Many symbols drawn with a story are created on the spot, to fit a particular story and a particular audience. The storyteller fabricates and defines her symbols as she communicates them, which makes all symbols highly contextual” (1991: 285). Contemporary artist Ben Fong uses similar place-based environmental education to teach children on the island of Bega in Fiji about the dangers of plastic to marine life. By drawing a fish in the sand and placing plastic bags collected from the beach in the belly of the fish, he creates a visual reference point about environmental degradation and the importance of proper rubbish disposal.

Traditional societies communicate their ecological knowledge by means of cultural practices. The seed keepers of the Matigsalog tribe in Marilog, Davao City, Philippines provide an example of how women have safeguarded resilient varieties of rice and passed these down to the next generation. The women bequeath the ‘heirloom rice’ as dowries to their daughters and at the same time impart knowledge of seed bank, farming practices, and their healing powers (Cabusao, 2012). In Cordillera region of the Philippines ‘heirloom rice’ has been preserved and harvested by women to ensure their family’s future food security:

After being handed down in an unbroken link, from generation to generation, more than 300 of these native rice varieties achieved a venerated status as tribal heirlooms. Heirloom rice is a spiritual bridge to the ancestors who built considerable knowledge through trial and error and fashioned unique technologies from experiences collected over the centuries. It has become as much a part of the region’s culture and identity as the resplendent rice terraces that the people’s forebears carved out of the mountainsides.

(Santiaguel, 2010)

This enables the next generation to carry the historical and cultural memory of food production and preservation techniques and to adapt their practice in future as circumstances change. Similar practices are found in other parts of the world where women are the knowledge bearers of food preservation, biodiversity and cultivation practices (Lopez, 2012).

Storytelling – the means by which we share knowledge and emotion – is at the heart of this book and the style it adopts. The book integrates a personal point of view based on my life in Fiji where I grew up and worked as a journalist, and later, as this experience translated into my research interest in media and communication in the Pacific. This convergence of experiential knowledge gathered as a media practitioner and practice-based researcher with communities in the Pacific context provide the insights which I bring into the present discussion. Working in both mainstream and community media settings, I have come to understand how proactive use of media can disrupt power relations and become a social and political force for marginalised groups. By working outside the established norms and networks, community producers create alternative dialogic spaces for self-expression. The narrative form connects people in a meaningful way by highlighting their struggles and adversities. This capacity for self-representation leads them to reflect on the power relationships “within their specific social structures and cultural contexts”, as well as those from outside (Braden, 1999: 118).

Tradition and Fiji COP23

Storytelling is important to both the maintenance of culture and everyday interaction in Pacific island communities. As such it is an integral part of the island communication ecology. During Fiji’s Presidency of the annual United Nations climate change conference known as Conference of Parties (COP) 23 in Bonn, Germany in 2017, Fiji’s Prime Minister, Frank Bainimarama, arrived bearing three symbolic gifts from the Pacific. The gifts were the Bula spirit, the Fijian greeting which symbolises inclusiveness, friendliness and solidarity, drua, a traditional canoe, and talanoa, an indigenous form of dialogue practised in the Pacific. An important Pacific icon, the drua was placed at the entrance of the main hall to serve as a powerful symbol of unity to remind conference attendees that there is only one earth and we are all in the same boat. Talanoa became the guiding method of negotiation which Bainimarama explained in the following way:

This is a process of inclusive, participatory and transparent dialogue that builds empathy and leads to decision making for the collective good. It is not about finger pointing and laying blame but is about listening to each other, learning from each other, sharing stories, skills and experiences.

The United Nations has adopted the talanoa process in climate change discussions leading to COP24 in Poland. “Countries will follow the traditional Fijian practice of talanoa in their negotiations – a way of solving problems by sharing ideas, skills, and experience through storytelling”, The Times in UK reported under the headline, “Fijian storytelling can save world, says UN” (Webster, 2017).

This is an example of how alternative discursive spaces and indigenous ways of knowing can gain greater acceptance within conventional knowledge systems and communication practices. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) report recommends the inclusion of affected communities “in the international, regional and local climate change discourse” (Macchi, 2008: 59). It is increasingly clear now that diverse forms of knowledge – inclusive of scientific, experiential and traditional – are essential in order to understand vulnerabilities and build resilience of local communities in the face of environmental changes and to identify effective adaptation methods on the ground.

Great challenges posed by anthropogenic climate change and environmental degradation require human beings to rethink our own place on this planet and find a different way of living. A social and cultural transformation is necessary before we find an economic model that is not dependent on infinite growth, a model that does not promote a culture of insatiable consumption that depletes and degrades planet Earth’s resources. Our relationship with Earth and our place within it requires a transformational shift in our own thinking. What role can environmental communication play in bridging the culture and nature divide in this current epoch described as the Anthropocene, during which human activity and the global economic system has had significant impact on Earth’s system?

Gaps in environmental communication

Environmental communication is an emerging discipline within communication studies. The field of study has grown rapidly as governments, scientists, media, the private sector and civil society groups recognise the crucial role of effective communication about critical environmental concerns that affect both the natural environment and human society. The leading research and professional network, International Environmental Communication Association (IECA), describes the area as “a lay activity and a field of professional practice” and gives a functional definition of the field on its website:

In the simplest terms, environmental communication is communication about environmental affairs. This includes all of the diverse forms of interpersonal, group, public, organizational, and mediated communication that make up the social debate about environmental issues and problems, and our relationship t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Theory in practice
• Part II Bringing Pacific Island perspectives
• Index