Background
Popular environmental literature often acts as an important bridge between the scientific world and the world beyond. This genre of literature brings much-needed context to scientific writing, which can be too narrowly focused on one single experiment or problem. This context is also useful for “connecting the dots” and drawing conclusions among individual scientific papers; it can be argued that popular environmental literature is the study of scientific literature. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring is often referred to today as the spark that led to the USA’s modern environmental movement. While the book does have a remarkably scientific tone, Carson’s final book is a fine example of the potential effects that popular environmental literature can have: the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the ban of harmful pesticide use, an environmental movement. Topics regarding environmental issues and changes affect audiences across the globe, and understandably, popular environmental literature often addresses topics through a global lense while referring to local examples. Studying this branch of literature can present challenges because of the inherent bias of the authors and the lack of a standard methodology in studying broad environmental issues. This lab was an attempt to quantitatively assess in a replicable manner the beliefs and views of various authors.
Procedure
We read Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came Into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming by Paul Hawken (2007), focusing primarily on the first two chapters, in which Hawken introduces the environmental movement he explores in the book. To begin our analysis of Hawken’s writing, we pulled 19 quotations that could be situated either globally or locally, comparing sections relating to specific locations with broader, transnational perspectives.
An example of a quotation from a local perspective is: “Clayton Thomas-Muller speaks to a community gathering of the Cree nation about waste sites on their native land in northern Alberta, toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer space” (Hawken 2007). An example of a quotation from a global perspective is: “These timeless ways of being human are threatened by global forces that do not consider people’s deepest longings” (Hawken 2007).
Once we categorized global and local quotations, we labeled them either positive or negative. This allowed us to explore potential correlations between the situated aspect to a quotation and its overall message. We used a code to label a quotation either positive or negative, local or global. We labeled a positive quotation with a “1” and a negative quotation with a “-1.” This allowed us to easily separate our quotations into four categories: total global positive, total global negative, total local positive, and total local negative. We made these categories by simply adding up the labeled positive or negative “1’s.” We also calculated two averages: global local average and positive negative average. The global local average was a calculation of total global quotations minus total local quotations. The positive negative average was a calculation of total positive quotations minus total negative quotations. These calculations enabled us to gauge whether Blessed Unrest focuses on a local or global scale and whether these perspectives are correlated with a more positive or negative outlook.
Reference | Page # | Text Sample | Scale | Valence |
Hawken (2007) | 11 | Clayton Thomas-Muller speaks to a community gathering of the Cree nation about waste sites on their native land in northern Alberta, toxic lakes so big you can see them from outer space. | Local | -1 |
Hawken (2007) | 11 | The movement grows and spreads in every city and country, and involves virtually every tribe, culture, language, and religion, from Mongolians to Uzbeks to Tamils. | Global | 1 |
Hawken (2007) | 12 | In a world grown too complex for constrictive ideologies, even the very word movement to describe such a process may be limiting. | Global | 1 |
Fig. 1
Figure 1 shows a sample of textual evidence that we divided using scale and valence. Scale can be either Local or Global, within which valence determines whether or not the scale is a negative or positive correlation.
Global(+)Tot | Global(-)Tot | Local(+)Tot | Local(-)Tot | GlobLocAvg | PosNegAvg |
9 | 5 | 3 | 2 | 9 | 5 |
Fig. 2
Using 19 text samples, we complied our valence in relation to scale. Figure 2 is a presentation of how our text samples vary between scale and valence.
Fig. 3
In order to gain a broader perspective of global versus local and positive versus negative, we combined our data with that of five other groups, each of which replicated the procedure with a different book within popular environmental literature. Figure 3 shows an x-y plot of the six books plotted according to the sum of their global versus local and positive versus negative readings.
Discussion
Understandably, the media (television, magazines, news) often covers the negatives of environmental change: sea level-rise, unprecedentedly large wildfires, and increasingly devastating hurricanes, which is often echoed in individual and public writing. As such, it would make sense if the environmental literature we read were to also echo this global feeling of doom and despair. However, what we found as a class contradicted this tendency to expand on the negative, and instead focused on the positives of the modern environmental movement: technological innovation, grassroots campaigns, nature’s resiliency, etc. This could imply many things in terms of how environmental issues are viewed on a large scale. One such belief is that while there are awful problems occurring in ecosystems worldwide, there are also many positive shifts towards change occurring. Blessed Unrest, in particular, focused on what is going right in the environmental movement by using local evidence and persuasion to justify and corroborate the existence of a larger, more universal environmental network.
In continuing the quantitative analysis of qualitative research (i.e. popular environmental literature), the methodology used in this lab will continue to be useful, but more variables should be observed (x,y,z axis). In addition, a larger sample of popular environmental literature should be selected to really understand the beliefs of environmental authors.