https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8760-0591
ABSTRACT
This article offers a reflection on environmental communication as a discipline of care as an opportunity to imagine and reconstruct, both theoretically and practically, the role of environmental communication in the global south, under an inclusive perspective that represents one of the greatest challenges for environmental communication today. In this essay, I recount several of the experiences I have had in the environmental sciences: First, I share a teaching project, a project of an environmental science degree at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) that involved working with rural communities, an environmental NGO. Secondly, the construction of a teaching material for an endangered indigenous language. Third, a video project involving socio-environmental research as part of the Institute for Research in Ecosystems and Sustainability of the UNAM, which was coordinated across different regions of Mexico. Fourth, I reflect on an investigation with digital native media and its audiovisual communication in social media. In conclusion, I consider how the move to emphasize care in an age of environmental crises might provide space for greater inclusion of global south praxis.
Introduction
In the global south, the expressions of the environmental crisis in different socio-cultural contexts are reflected in an increase in inequality, migration processes (from the countryside to the city, and from countries from de south to the global north), religious conflicts, interethnic conflicts, the gigantic business of mining, oil, drugs, weapons and money laundering on multiple scales (Buscaglia, Citation2015), loss of languages and cultures (Lewis et al., Citation2015), as well as the loss of biocultural heritage (Boege, Citation2008; Maffi et al., Citation2007; Maffi & Woodley, Citation2010; Toledo & Barrera-Bassols, Citation2008).
Reflecting on environmental communication as a discipline of care (Pezzullo & Cox, Citation2021), implies that we might have an opportunity to reimagine and reconstruct, in a theoretical and practical way, the role that environmental communication has in the global south. This call comes at a time when the field also is creating space for increased inclusion of the global south, particularly in rural and indigenous communities with economic poverty (Thaker, Citation2021). Taking into consideration that most of the research on environmental communication has been conducted by people from the global north (Comfort & Park, Citation2018) and most of the research on the global south has been conducted by people located in the global north, for example, the section “Internationalizing Environmental Communication Research” of the Handbook of International Trends in Environmental Communication (Takahashi et al., Citation2023) are by researchers who all are living in the global north at the time of writing, although origins of some began in the global south. The need to develop environmental communication, both from academia, from its theoretical scope, and from action with practitioners in the regions of the global south remains an enormous challenge.
What would be required to build a networked and collaborative environmental communication that goes from south to north and vice versa? How can we begin to connect local problems, successful experiences, and collective community efforts in ways that are known and shared both locally and across regions? In this sense, I would argue that the role of the media and social media platforms become key elements to share with society what is happening in remote places in the global south about which little is known.
Yet, as a scholar born and working in Mexico, I am interested in asking: how might we go about thinking of these connections in ways that, on the one hand, assuming the theoretical development of environmental communication has indeed been developed to a greater extent in the global North – many people from the South need to seek postgraduate degrees in order to develop and train in this disciplinary area – and how to develop in a theoretical way some of the particular characteristics of environmental communication in the global South? that allow us to have a more equitable global perspective on environmental communication. On the other hand, how can we recover the aspect of the practice of environmental communication, which is developed in countries of the global south, and which is little documented? Finally, surely the great challenge and dream of many of us is how we can develop this discipline in our countries and regions of Latin America, Asia and Africa.
In the following paragraphs, I will share four experiences of praxis to rethink social media from the global south. First, I share a teaching project I was responsible for in an environmental sciences degree program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which we carried out with students and teachers in the region of Chilapa, Guerrero, Mexico. Second, I reflect on building didactic material for an endangered indigenous language, Ixcateco, in Oaxaca, Mexico. Third, I consider a video project involving socio-environmental research as part of the Institute for Research in Ecosystems and Sustainability of the UNAM, which was coordinated across different regions of Mexico. Fourth, I reflect on an investigation with digital native media and its audiovisual communication in social media. In conclusion, I consider how the move to emphasize care in an age of environmental crises might provide space for greater inclusion of global south praxis.
Environmental science by and for the poor
Many years ago, I wrote together with Victor M. Toledo an article called “Science for the poor.” In this article, we stated:
“In Mexico, in the absence of a clear scientific policy, an ‘academic science’, individualistic and endogenous, has been gradually imposed in most of the country's research centers, where the fundamental issue is no longer the generation of knowledge to solve the problems of Mexican society and the natural resources it appropriates, but to make successful those who perform it, through the compulsive generation of papers aimed at the international market of knowledge. The dissolution of a science that should be aimed at solving the problems of the country and the world, and its substitution by a dehumanized practice that only makes sense for individuals and academic elites”. (Solís & Toledo, Citation2001)
Expanding on that work, I want to consider another project that builds on the idea of environmental communication by and for the poor. In 2010–2016 I was part of a teaching project for an Environmental Sciences degree at UNAM, called “Research and intersectoral participation in the training process of Environmental Sciences. The case of the collaboration with GEA A.C. and Communities of the Chilapa Region, Guerrero, Mexico.” This project was developed during six years, in a very poor region of the mountains of Guerrero, in the region of Chilapa. It was part of an “integration” practice of the subjects of the last semester of the bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences: (1) natural resource use and ecosystem services; (2) conservation biology; (3) ecological restoration; and (4) land use planning (Lindig and Casas, Citation2013). Each of the subjects had either a professor or a group of professors specialized in each subject who taught the subjects individually. It seems to me that it was a very valuable integration exercise and that it can be analyzed and shared from different angles. In this case I will focus on environmental communication, but it would also be interesting to analyze its teaching, interdisciplinary and intersectoral communication components.
This project would not have been possible without the participation of an NGO called “GEA” or Grupo de Estudios Ambientales A.C., which was one of the first environmental NGOs in Mexico. GEA’s conception of the environment always articulated the ecological with the socio-cultural, the technical with the political (Illsley C., Citation2007). The Association had been working for a long time in the communities of the region of Chilapa, Guerrero.
Collective mapping with students, campesino and professionals of GEA
Photo: Leonor Solís
Again, the teaching objective of the project was above all to carry out projects that would be useful for the local communities. That is, to teach research work not only from the individual and personal interest of the researcher, but also as a work of public service to society, to address specific socio-environmental problems and to provide useful results that can be applied to the reality of rural communities. The second objective was to share with the students the relevance of linking and working collaboratively with different sectors within the communities, as well as with GEA as a civil organization (Casas et al. Citation2017).
Every year we began with a meeting in which a commission of students and teachers participated, with representatives of the communities where the educational program was presented and where permission to work in the communities was requested. Both GEA and the communities presented us with their own agendas and information needs and collectively decided on the locations and projects to be carried out. Throughout this period more than 20 research projects were carried out. Some very specific ones were carried out in a particular year and others, such as inventories of forest resources, the study of agroforestry systems, firewood consumption, water quality diagnostics and studies of risks associated with landslides had continuity for several years (Casas et al. Citation2017).
One part of the project that was not planned and ended up being one of the most valuable involved an intergenerational commitment among the students. What we did is that the generation that carried out the project delivered a first version of the report and a first version of the communication materials, in the year of the course, only to the teachers. Then, the report and the communication materials were handed over to the students of the following year, so that they could familiarize themselves with the local issues, and they oversaw and oversaw editing the report until the final version was produced and the communication materials finalized. So, both the technical report and the dissemination materials involved two generations, the outgoing and the incoming. This over the years promoted intergenerational engagement among the students, who became aware of the effects of whether the previous generation did a good or bad job for the successive generation. In a way it represented the passing on of responsibility for the continuity of the project to the next generation. This intergenerational engagement was an extremely interesting element from the teaching side (Casas et al. Citation2017).
As teachers, we used models of co-production of knowledge (Freire, Citation1973; Gibbons, Citation2000) that required flexible social organizations for their better development. In this way, researchers, students, civil associations and communities collaborated to recognize the capacities of everyone involved. In this way, inter-sectoral cooperation and collaboration produced empowerment and strengthens social participation in environmental decision-making. At that time, I was part of the team of teachers of natural resources and ecosystem services, but I was already very involved in environmental communication. We were committed to deliver technical reports every year to both the Civil Association and the communities.
My contribution involved designing with the students, communication materials for the communities to learn the results that the students found in their research. This model allowed students to learn from local residents about their expertise and to share their own insights in return. During this six-year period, I coordinated the elaboration of communicative materials for each one of the more than 20 specific projects. We made botanical collections that were delivered to the communities with the collected information, educational materials, manuals, maps, videos, plant and animal guides. The objective of the production of both the technical report and the communication materials was that they would be useful for the communities in their decision making and agreement building. The construction of the communication materials was a learning process, since year after year, the communities gave us feedback on how to improve them. For example, we created maps on canvases that lasted for a long time, including informative signage supporting community assessment of water quality in springs and water bodies. In this sense, the process was a collective, collaborative learning process.
Botanical collections with local knowledge in Acateyahualco
Photo: Leonor Solís
Shared authorship became a key value in this work. In the case of the field guides on plants and animals, for example, we decided that all the participants, both from the NGO and the farmers who provided us with information, would appear as authors. The truth is that, before writing this essay, I had not thought that developing specific materials designed specifically for each community, where the participation and contribution of everyone is recognized, could be considered a form of care. A form of environmental communication from care, which was collaborative, collective, and cross-sectoral.
After six years, this project unfortunately ended due to increased risk from drug trafficking in the region, which went from dangerous to seemingly impossible if we wanted to ensure the safety of our students and participants. Even the NGO had to leave the region. It is a shame because we were building something very valuable, a collective learning that was bringing results and specific actions. That tells us about the way and the care with which we can build processes of attention to local problems, research, participation, action. Where environmental communication from care becomes an element of this complex web of dreams and actions – and crisis.
An endangered language
Another important communication project I have been involved in was the idea and design of a material to support a linguistic and ethnobiological project of a language and indigenous group in danger of extinction in the region of Tehuacan – Cuicatlan, Oaxaca, Mexico. At the time, in 2015, the Ixcatecos only had nine living speakers (Rangel-Landa et al., Citation2016a). They sought me out to support a language registration project that was being carried out in collaboration with linguists, ethnobiologists, and local teachers. Our goal became to promote educational projects so that children and young people would appreciate and, if possible, learn a little of the Ixcatecan language before it went extinct. Due to the conditions of isolation and lack of technology in the community, what occurred to me again was the construction of a lottery and memory game, where both the speakers, mostly elderly people, adults, and children would participate (Rangel-Landa et al., Citation2016b).
We organized a contest of drawings and riddles with the schools of the community. We built a very simple game that was both a lottery and memory. The drawings were created by children and teenagers, which were accompanied by a small book that summarizes the most relevant elements of Ixcatecan nature and culture.
Finally, the game is complemented with audios of Ixcatec speakers saying the names of each element in their language, as well as the voices of men, women and children from the community saying the names and riddles in Spanish. The audios were delivered to the community on compact discs and are available for free consultation and download in the repository of the National Laboratory of Oral Materials (LANMO) of the ENES, UNAM Morelia campus at http://www.lanmo.unam.mx/repositorio.php.
From the beginning, the work was built under the principle of knowledge as dialogue, resulting in a material that presents the knowledge and creativity of various sectors of the Ixcatecan community, ethnobiologists and linguists. Already, we have witnessed the value of this work, not only in the education of youth but also because the elder with the greatest knowledge that we recorded has since passed away. To increase its accessibility and dissemination, in addition to the printed version, the material was made available in a digital version that can be downloaded free of charge (http://www.iies.unam.mx/comunicacion-cientifica/materiales-disponibles//).
Caring, in generating materials beyond the technical reports, implied the dedication and development of this game, which beyond being a promise of entertainment, the game material represents a ludic instrument to promote coexistence and transmission of Ixcatecan knowledge. It can be used as a support tool for the efforts to revitalize the almost extinct Ixcatecan language, local traditions and for the dissemination of the biodiversity of the territory. It can also serve as a window that allows an outside view of an important part of Mexico's biocultural heritage.
The eCommunities network video experience
One of my great passions is photography which influenced me to decide to change the direction of my life towards environmental communication. Towards environmental audiovisual communication which has developed academically quite a bit over the last decade and was considered an emerging area for environmental communication (Cox & Depoe, Citation2015).
O'Neill and Smith (Citation2014) explain that images are analogical and in that sense our understanding of images is based on our personal experience. Words, however, rely on social convention. In this sense, images function as effective forms of communication for both rural and indigenous populations in the global south with a high proportion of illiteracy or where language is an impediment to communication. At the other extreme the contemporary language of the internet and social media platforms is permeated by the relevance of images (Hadland et al., Citation2019). So, images are part of a universal language that can serve simultaneously in many contexts: both of poverty and illiteracy, as well as for the latest technologies in the context of social media.
In 2013, I developed a video project called “eCommunities in network,” which simultaneously took up the concept of “rural communities” and brought it to the scope of “internet communities” and this more global visualization. The network concept proposed a weaving between indigenous and rural communities and their socio-environmental problems as well as the research that was carried out from IIES and that could then be disseminated through social media, particularly YouTube (https://youtube.com/playlist?list = PLRteT01IZQvri8OuQgXhZXZioVLRwLopi&si = B1Sbar8yA4kgg85l). I made a series of 10 documentaries where I presented students, researchers and local people showing some socio-environmental problem. With the hope that this project would grow and go beyond the borders of my institute, my university, my country.
One of the videos I am most fond of is about floral carpets (of wild and cultivated flowers) made by a community called “Tangancícuaro” in the province where I live in Michoacán. The construction of these carpets has many biocultural meanings that imply knowledge of nature, collective construction of the whole community, organization, coexistence and a lot of care and patience. Together with botanists from my institute, who realized that in a tapestry that is made in the city people thought that the flowers were plastic or painted, we took on the task of producing this video that describes all that is involved in its construction. The people of the community were very kind to us and just now the government of Mexico has asked me for the images to compose an international video proposal to UNESCO to make the flower carpets of Spain, Malta, Italy and Mexico intangible heritage of humanity. They just recognized the care and love I put into this video.
Wild orchids from floral carpets of Patamban Michoacán, México. Photo: Leonor Solís
These videos are motivated by my care for (sharing experiences that I find very valuable both nationally and internationally). It seems to me that video is a format that can help a lot in environmental communication or has already done so as recognized this year by the Reuters Digital News Report (2023) that documentaries are the ones that work best to communicate climate change. My dream was that they would have a wide diffusion, unfortunately it didn't turn out as I expected, the video that I mentioned before only has more than 34,000 views.
This led me to try to understand how environmental audiovisual content is disseminated on social media platforms.
Social video news as climate communication
The last academic work I did was trying to understand how social video news in digital born news outlets work in climate change communication. Social video news refers to the creation and dissemination of news content through social media platforms in video format. This form of news dissemination leverages the visual and interactive capabilities of social media platforms to deliver timely and accessible news content to a wide audience, often optimized for viewing on mobile devices. Social video news is often designed to be concise and engaging, catering to the shorter attention spans of social media users. Videos are usually brief, focusing on the most important aspects of a story. The content is primarily distributed through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok. This kind of content has become a critical resource for address climate communication for young audiences (Serrano-Puche & Solís-Rojas, Citation2019; Solís-Rojas, Citation2022).
Initially, my hope was to find clues to produce communication materials in video format that would have a diffusion through social media in a global internet that would democratize information; but I realized that thinking this was very naive on my part. On average, climate change coverage accounts for 0.62 percent of all articles published between 1997 and 2009 in the 37 newspapers under study (Schmidt et al., Citation2013). Although this has changed somewhat in recent years, with projects such as Covering Climate Change. Southern countries and our environmental issues are little in the agenda setting that is marked by Northern countries (Takahashi & Meisner, Citation2013; Rochyadi-Reetz & Teng’o, Citation2022). In the research I conducted during a year, for four media specialized in social video news, only one of their news was about a topic located in Latin America, the rest was mainly about news located in Europe, the United States, Australia and the Arctic.
As for social media platforms and their algorithms, I found that they also have no interest in making these issues visible, either from the media or from academia. This is in addition to the accelerated speed of change, in audiovisual formats on social media platforms, in the last five years, histories, reels, TikToks, etc. That they are constantly transforming audiovisual content, making it faster and more focused on entertainment.
For environmental communication, it is very important that new research takes into consideration some of the logics of social media (Van Dijck & Poell, Citation2014) such as attention economy, clickbait, soft news features and other emotional features, which are strongly influencing current contents (Davenport & Beck, Citation2001; Bazaco & Redondo, Citation2019; Lorenz-Spreen et al., Citation2019; Palau-Sampio, Citation2016). It seems to me that there is still a lot to do from environmental communication with respect to audiovisual environmental communication in social media with ephemeral formats, reels, TikToks, etc. A very broad field that requires a lot of research efforts from various approaches and disciplines.
Following the news about climate change constantly over the last few years has been devastating for me, this added to the realization that sharing environmental information from south to north through social media is not an easy task. This added to being aware of everything that is happening all over the planet, exceeding the tipping points, not achieving the negotiations that took 30 years to say yes to the issue of “Losses and Damages” in the COPs, the negotiations at the COPs, all the natural disasters, are very difficult to assimilate. It's all gotten to the point of burnout and affecting my mental health. To look at our work from the urgency and the crisis is very difficult.
Concluding reflections
Phaedra’s invitation to reflect on my environmental communication praxis as care allowed me to look at my collaborative work from another angle. In the face of the current despair, looking at environmental communication from care has helped me to find a light, and it has reawakened my hope. No matter how devastated and exhausted we are, I am sure that many of us will not stop. Looking at and reflecting on our work from the perspective of care gives it a new meaning that transcends the crisis and urgency to consider our motivations, collaborative methods, and creative responses. I do not know to what extent we can contribute, how much impact we can have, but at least we can take refuge in the fact that we did environmental communication with care and not with haste or solely with desperation. I hope and dream that we can continue to share our theories and experiences, collectively reflecting on our work, caring for our community and building strength at this important time. Because caring for our society and the planet is our individual and collective strength and driving force. Thanks to all those who are working on this, from any angle, from any country.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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