Paper Short Abstract:

My paper draws from understanding that contemporary environmental emergency is rooted in the disconnection of two dimensions in environmental communication – our/cultural ways of thinking about an environment and how environment itself is meaningful and semiotically active (Low 2008: 48). Addressing crisis and resignation, and developing new methods for environmental communication, management, and conflict resolution, requires overcoming this disconnection. This also means we need to change how we tell the story of crisis and stories within crisis. I explore the potential of local environment-related folk narratives, or place-lore, in environmental conflict and crisis communication. While storytelling and narrative approaches have gained popularity in environmental studies and environmental humanities, discussions often scratch the surface, focusing on the discursive level and highlighting conflicting environmental representations. Instead, we must shift from a discursive to an ontological perspective and ask: Whose stories are heard? Who has a say, and why? How can stories help us break free from symbolic and cultural isolation? In environmental emergency communication, personal and subjective vernacular narratives are often sensationalized for clickbait in affect-driven media. More commonly, they are dismissed as resistance to change or NIMBYism. However, ignoring these narratives perpetuates structural slow violence and closed, hermetic environmental communication. Recognizing that local, small-scale narratives are part of environmental-related practices and embody diverse semiotic meanings—ecological and cultural—reflecting specific environments and human-nonhuman interactions (see also Kohn 2013; Whitehouse 2015), we can ask how they might help break through closed communication and disconnection (see also Päll 2024). Using cases from Estonia as examples, I show attempts to use place-lore to radically reshape environmental conflict communication by offering: 1) a way to cope with conflict or crisis by emphasizing place-identity and grounding anxiety; 2) a means to mediate, explain, and make accessible non-human umwelts through storytelling; and 3) a way to unlock creative, sustainable approaches to coping with crisis. References Kohn, E. (2013). How forests think: Toward an anthropology beyond the human. University of California Press. Low, D. (2008). Dissent and environmental communication: A semiotic approach. Semiotica, 2008(172). https://doi.org/10.1515/SEMI.2008.089 Päll, L., & Pungas-Kohv, P. (n.d.). How Can Storytelling Help Restore Mires? Applying Place-lore Fieldwork Methodology in Ecological Restoration. Environmental Communication, 0(0), 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2024.2420789 Whitehouse, A. (2015). Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene: The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World. Environmental Humanities, 6(1), 53–71. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615898

Paper Abstract:

Addressing crisis and resignation, and developing new methods for environmental communication, management, and conflict resolution, requires overcoming the disconnection of two dimensions in environmental communication – our/cultural ways of thinking about an environment and how environment itself is meaningful and semiotically active (Low 2008: 48). This also means we need to change how we tell the story of crisis and stories within crisis.

I explore the potential of local environment-related folk narratives, or place-lore, in environmental conflict and crisis communication. While storytelling and narrative approaches have gained popularity in environmental studies and environmental humanities, discussions focus on discursive level, discussing conflicting representations. Instead, we must shift from a discursive to an ontological perspective and ask: Whose stories are heard? Who has a say, and why? How can stories help us break free from symbolic and cultural isolation?

Recognizing that local, small-scale narratives are part of environmental-related practices and embody diverse semiotic meanings—ecological and cultural—reflecting specific environments and human-nonhuman interactions (see also Kohn 2013; Whitehouse 2015), we can ask how they might help break through closed communication and disconnection (see also Päll 2024).

Using cases from Estonia as examples, I show attempts to use place-lore to radically reshape environmental conflict communication by offering: 1) a way to cope with conflict or crisis by emphasizing place-identity and grounding anxiety; 2) a means to mediate, explain, and make accessible non-human umwelts through storytelling; and 3) a way to unlock creative, sustainable approaches to coping with crisis.