Audrey Stuart, Liza Tugangui, Blake Slattengren
Background
With the massive amounts of environmental literature being published that analyze the condition of the world today, there is a lot said about global conditions and local, more situated conditions. Many of the ideas portrayed in this literature situated environmental issues in the terms of the common expression, “Think globally, act locally”. In simple terms, this expression means that the best way to approach solving environmental issues is to think in a global perspective, or to educate yourself in the big picture of what is happening around the world, but to take action in local, feasible ways. There are a lot of different opinions about this way of viewing environmentalism, as well as many theories about what this exactly looks like, or even the benefits of this lifestyle. In this lab, we wanted to be able to study the differences in the way
environmental journalists and authors talk about this subject, and be able to compare different pieces of literature. This will allow us to see a broader picture of the global versus local conversation. To do this, we had to strategize a way of turning literature into statistical data. We then sat down with the book and started analyzing pieces of the text that best represented the author’s argument.
Procedure
We chose to study Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, a nonfiction book and thought experiment about if humans suddenly disappeared from the earth. We skimmed the book and found and recorded about a passage per chapter for analysis. We then decided if the passage was locally or globally focused and if it had a positive or negative valence.
After this, we added up the totals for our 20 different samples and could compare our results to the results from other teams. This gives us a better view of the overarching themes of popular environmental literature and allows us to understand trends in what people are interested in reading.
Results
This book focused mainly on global implications. The largest category was global messages with negative valence, which accounted for 10 of our examples. Our next highest group was only half that size, with 5 pieces of text being locally focused and negative. This predominance of negative excerpts paints an overall depressing picture of the fate of the Earth, even if humans were removed. The negative local category included specific examples of species or natural areas desiccated by humans, and an argument that the damage done is impossible to repair. The next group was the 4 quotes that had positive global implications. These included optimistic statements about the power of nature to repair itself, and even possible benefits humanity has on the world. This category included some of the most interesting quotes because it is very rare to read literature describing species that have adapted and benefitted from our presence. Even if humans disappeared, our effect of rearranging species on Earth would remain and would benefit certain species. The last, and smallest group, was a single text that was locally focused and positive. This was about a patch of land that had remained relatively untouched by humans, and Weisman commended its significance and beauty. This book is a thought experiment, so it makes sense that Weisman does not spend lots of time establishing the value of nature since it may be already assumed.
Example of Data Collected:
Results of class data:
Our data, in comparison to class data, shows a similar trend of being globally focused with negative valence. This demonstrates that in popular environmental literature, people are generally more interested in issues on a global level and that have dystopic elements. This is certainly true for The World Without Us. Our book was the most extremely global and negative of the sample studied by our class. This shows the author’s strong arguments and generally dismal outlook on whether our effect on the planet could feasibly be reversed.
Overall, the books we studied focused second most on local and utopian elements. However, this was the least represented category in our book. This shows that despite Weisman’s negativity, authors tended to stay positive on a local level in order to make a difference.
The last two categories, global positive and local negative, show that authors did not prefer to talk about global issues positively and local issues negatively.
Discussion
In order to simplify this procedure, the options for coding particular quotes were limited. For example, there were phrases that seemed to have both local and global implications. There was no way to signify whether a piece of text was extremely global, or just global enough to be classified as such. All texts placed in a category are assumed to have fairly similar implications (global vs. local or positive vs. negative), which may undermine our understanding of the huge variation even between texts placed in the same category.
In a general sense, we saw a general trend of negative, globally situated texts contrasted with positive, locally situated texts. This mirrors the research Jim Proctor did with Evan Barry in that a general trend of environmental journalism is globally dystopic. Although this data is very general, in that the rhetoric used in these texts can be taken subjectively, ultimately the trends are too overwhelming to ignore.
The conclusions drawn from this lab can catalyze further research into the implications that the different styles of rhetoric in these texts can have on the readers, or even the general public, thus raising more questions. Does this dystopic way of viewing the world encourage more environmentally-conscious actions? Is it beneficial to contrast localized views with globalized views so drastically? Are these journalists providing enough reassurance that humans can take significant action against these issues? To answer these questions would necessitate more research and analysis into these texts, but with this lab, we have drawn some insight into the messages that current environmental journalists are depicting.