Do We Care to Listen?: Commitments of Care in Environmental Communication from the Fields of India

ABSTRACT

Reimaging environmental communication as not only a “crisis discipline” but also as a “care discipline” opens up new possibilities for research and praxis. It challenges environmental communication scholars to rethink – and the funding bodies and institutions to reimagine – how an issue and discipline as central to humanity as the environment could progress. This article highlights key findings from women farmers-led environmental campaigns in India to challenge assumptions that might move us to overlook them. The article hopes to help us rethink the concept and practice of care through collaboration and ongoing relational research. Overall, this essay hopes to reimage the genesis and the future of the discipline of environmental communication as embodied in the everyday struggles and victories of women farmers at the forefront of environmental protection and social justice movements in the Global South and transnationally.

KEYWORDS:

• Farmwork
• collective care
• environmental campaigns
• gender
• SDG13: climate change

Reimaging environmental communication as not only a “crisis discipline” (Cox, 2007) but also as a “care discipline” (Pezzullo, 2017; Pezzullo & Cox, 2018) opens up new possibilities for research and praxis. It challenges environmental communication scholars to rethink – and the funding bodies and institutions to reimagine – how an issue and discipline as central to humanity as the environment could progress. This article highlights key findings from women farmers-led environmental campaigns about the concept and practice of care through collective ownership of seeds, farms, markets, and communication resources (DDS, 2023; Dutta & Thaker, 2019, 2020; Malik & Pavarala, 2020). It hopes to reimage the genesis and the future of the discipline of environmental communication as embodied in the everyday struggles and victories of women farmers at the forefront of environmental protection and social justice movements.

For example, several researchers focus on the tragedies of modern society – from man-made climate change and its scepticism to science distrust and misinformation, to name a few. It appears we are hard-wired to pay close attention to negative news (e.g. Lengauer et al., 2012). Nevertheless, scholarly excitement is probably comparatively lacking when we celebrate successes such as the environmental movements that have been fought over many decades and won (Scheidel et al., 2020). Reflecting on environmental communication from care, then, might make space for recognizing success.

Reimaging a discipline needs to start with reimaging the history of the discipline. The genesis of environmentalism as a people’s movement is often traced to the rise of the green movements in the 1960s in the Global North due to a shift from materialist to post-materialist values (Inglehart, 1981, 1995). That people care about the environment once their other material needs are satisfied has been a central thesis in some corners of development and communication research (for review, see Dunlap & York, 2008; Thaker, 2021). However, research from Global South indicates that the poor care about the environment not only for their material needs (Gadgil & Guha, 1993; Guha, 2002; Guha & Alier, 1998) but also for spiritual connectedness (Dutta, 2019). Understanding such motivations for environmental care can help us better integrate research and practice, particularly policy-making, that does not see people and nature as incompatible – constantly in competition for domination – but rather in a symbiotic relationship, indeed a subservient one where humans are one part of the nature, albeit with enviable power over other natural beings and resources.

To imagine an alternative future would require us to interrogate the past critically. So what new knowledge can we learn if we trace the genesis of the environmental communication discipline not as one rooted in the post-material 1980s values of the Western world but the colonial and postcolonial movements of farmers’ rights, women’s rights, and the right to environmental resources (e.g. Bandyopadhyay & Shiva, 1988; Sivaramakrishnan, 1999). Even after independence, these movements often had to fight with a neoliberal state still controlling access to environmental resources (food, wood, salt, forests, and so forth), parts of the local environments that local communities often had been subsisting on for several generations in sustainable ways prior to dispossession/colonization.

As environmental issues are, by nature, intersectional and intergenerational – as well as international in scope and impact – environmental communication seemingly needs to be re-theorised alongside related disciplines, such as economics, development, gender, and indigenous studies. Focusing on care warrants this integrative approach to understanding the causes and consequences of communicating about the environment – who communicates what, to whom, why, and with what environmental consequences.

Deccan Development Society: new directions in environmental communication

The need to reshape disciplinary commitments and boundaries was made visible to us in our research led by women farmers from south India (see Dutta & Thaker, 2020; Thaker & Dutta, 2016). Deccan Development Society is a sangham, a grassroots collective of over 5000 women farmers primarily from disenfranchized communities in the Zaheerabad district of Telangana state in south India (https://www.ddsindia.org). What started 40 years ago with a goal to ensure local food access has now become an international organization seeking to champion women’s leadership across issues of environmental conservation, development, gender and social justice, and food security. Their work, primarily as a collective of traditionally marginalized castes working to own land, seeds, and markets, is critical to the development indicators of women’s rights, poverty, food security, and sanitation; yet, recognizing them as notable in environmental communication might require we reassess some of our assumptions.

There are many ways that taking their efforts seriously defies pregiven labels. In normative terms, for example, these women farmers might be classified as “illiterate,” as many did not complete primary school. Despite their lack of formal education in reading and writing, however, they share nuanced/sophisticated intergenerational knowledge about seeds, crops, and the impact of changing weather patterns on pests and yields. One can understand the threat experts may perceive when forced to reckon with knowledge outside the neatly curated spaces of labs and experiments – but crops do not grow in a vacuum, markets are not always free, life does not flourish in straight lines but in complicated evolutionary tapestries.

The Deccan Development Society also is deeply invested in the empowerment of women and gender justice. The women farmers taught us the difference between “male” and “female” crops, the former primarily to be sold in the market and the money pocketed by men, while the latter referring to food crops, primarily to feed the family. The women farmers at DDS have been running one of the oldest community radio stations in India, broadcasting on key issues of gender justice and advocating for policy change. By using other media, such as documentaries, DDS strives for a society “where every woman’s voice is heard and valued” (DDS, “Overview”).

The Deccan Development Society also may not be seen as consultants conducting strategic communication campaigns for behavior change or researchers invited to be part of government advisory groups, such as the “Nudge Unit” in the UK government. Some, therefore, might find their “significance” or “success” to be harder to recognize. They, however, do plan and implement systematic communication campaigns using their community-run radio stations, annual seed festivals, and regular interactions with members in various villages (Thaker & Dutta, 2018). They also have recently engaged with urban consumers who can visit the farms and learn about healthy food practices (Dundoo, 2020). These meaningful outreach programs reimagine knowledge transfer from rural to urban learning centers, contrary to a general belief that only urban centers are the home to knowledge and innovation. In their praxis, then, we can begin to perhaps appreciate different ways of assessing “success.”

Since they are locally-based, these women farmers may not be initially featured as international or development “experts,” but they have successfully cultivated a network of farmers across Asia and Africa. They also address global issues beyond their backyards, perhaps most visible through the “Millet Network of India,” which is a network of over 5000 women farmers across India. Our sense of their leadership globally exceeds our own perspectives. In 2019, for example, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) awarded the Deccan Development Society with the Equator Prize for “an outstanding example of a local, nature-based solution to climate change and sustainable development.” And, yet, most environmental communication scholars have never heard of them.

Likewise, they may not have heard about the theoretical contributions to the impact of structural determinants of health, but their praxis is deeply relevant. We argue, for example, that they have lived and experienced the belief that an individual’s health is connected to that of everyone in the community (Dutta & Thaker, 2019). We, therefore, consider their everyday caregiving and receiving as too often overlooked.

Conclusions

Environmental communication, as a discipline of care, can open up participation opportunities for marginalized communities and voices, not just as targets of scholarly attention but as fellow theorists and practitioners of environmental communication. This requires a reimagination of “research” and “fieldwork,” not as when scholars parachute to their villages and farms, but when such farmers visit universities and help us learn the ground realities. We have provided our sustained, collaborative research with the Deccan Development Society as one way to think through these possibilities (Dutta & Thaker, 2020).

Environment communication need not only be a source of “crisis” but also a source of collective identity and activism (Lewicka, 2011; Tipa, 2009). Embedding the ideals of justice, equality, and equal participation should be a source of theoretical enquiry and praxis for scholars in environmental communication (Raphael, 2019). We once again, therefore, take this opportunity to call for increased engagement with the environmentalism of the poor and Global South (Thaker, 2021).

When asked what kind of projects we should envision to work towards, a women farmer immediately asked, “Will you care to listen?” This skepticism is borne out of decades of researchers, policy experts, and government officials parading and then parachuting back to their airconditioned offices without bringing about any structural or transformational change in ideas, politics, or policies. To care is to listen, engage, and enact the policies the most vulnerable of our communities advocate for. When we do so, the circle of care is understood as ongoing and sustained. With this approach to collaboration and ongoing relational research, I believe the field of environmental communication can become a discipline of care advocacy.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).