Teaching Environmental Communication Zine by Catalina de Onís

teaching environmental communication A Zine of Resources and Projects for Students, Teachers, and Community Partners

Art by Mabette Colón Pérez

IN MEMORY OF Professor Steve Schwarze a remarkable teacher, generous mentor, and brilliant scholar

Professor Schwarze taught and mentored students at the University of Montana (and beyond) for more than 20 years: https://www.umt.edu/communication-studies/people/inmemoriam.php

about this zine This collaborative project emerged from the National Communication Association’s Environmental Communication Division Teaching Committee. In fall 2023, the committee chair issued a call for publicfacing, applied environmental communication projects. The featured creations, collaborations, and conversations include lesson plans, community workshops, storytelling via StoryMaps, a podcast, a Spanish-language radio show, zines, a campus field guide, a documentary, recorded music archives, a bilingual children’s book, an annotated bibliography intended for public use, a protest and dance event, and more! By bringing these projects together in a shared space, this zine aims to provide a heterogeneous collection that exemplifies environmental communication praxis. Many thanks to this zine’s contributors for sharing their experiences and materials. On Circulating and Reproducing Content: Feel welcome to share this zine for non-profit, educational uses. For other purposes, please obtain permission from Dr. Catalina de Onís, the zine’s editor and designer. For questions about specific sections of the zine, please contact the listed contributor(s) for the project of interest. 3

Climate Histories: Archives, Seasonality, and the Tropics Drs. Jayson Maurice Porter and Lina C. Pérez-Angel (Brown University) and Dr. Alissa Ujie Diamond (University at Buffalo)

Illustration by Dr. Alissa Ujie Diamond 4

Climate histories Lesson Plan Grade Levels: a) Middle School and b) Elementary School Objectives: To promote and practice climate literacy, or the ability to read climatic change over time (history) and space (geography), through interactive plant learning activities. Climate literacy is a skill and a science; it helps foster “an understanding of your influence on climate and climate’s influence on you and society” (climate.gov). Questions: What is seasonality, how does seasonality create plant-based archives, and how can we use seasonality and plant archives to read the climate of the near and distant pasts? Lesson Argument: In much of the Mid-Atlantic United States, temperate climates with four seasons produce tree rings that can show us that climate history. Geography, or the study of the physical features of the earth and atmosphere, helps us to understand differences in seasonal patterns in temperate and tropical regions. Tree rings are archives of information that help us to read seasonal patterns in the past. In temperate regions, those patterns are caused by changes in temperature across spring, summer, autumn, and winter, but in tropical regions tree rings, if they form, show wet versus dry seasons. Like tree rings in temperate zones, tropical zones have other archives that scientists use to read climate in the past.

Access the lesson plan via the QR code or link: https://ibes.brown.edu/ education/educators 5

Increasing Community Resilience & Reducing Disaster Risk through Equitable Urban Forest Planning Professors Ted Endreny (SUNY ESF) and Lemir Teron (Howard) Partners: Davey Resource Group, City of Syracuse, Onondaga Earth Corps, and Focusing Our Resources for Community Empowerment (FORCE) Our US Forest Service project, “Increasing Community Resilience and Reducing Disaster Risk through Equitable Urban Forest Planning,” has three overarching objectives: i) develop and disseminate urban heat maps for cities across the United States; ii) develop a model for environmental justice driven urban and community forestry (UCF); and iii) design a playbook to share the best practices for objectives one and two. Our model for UCF centers on a train-the-trainer workshop series designed to advance public science to democratize urban forestry. This collaboration involves (Syracuse) residents receiving paid training to learn professional forestry tools with an outcome of residents working with forestry professionals to create neighborhood-centered tree planting prioritization strategies, coalescing with local forestry workforce development efforts.

Learn more about this and other projects at unlearnpower.org, powered by Prof. Lemir Teron. 6

A train-the-trainer session in July 2023. Residents discussed local forestry concerns, learned how to use i-Tree software tools, and reviewed broader environmental justice implications of healthy forests and ecosystems.

StoryMap Link: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/3678bc6932c74332b0d57adf3434aa55

Storying on the Coquille River Dr. Ashley Cordes (Univ. of Oregon) Citizen of Kō-Kwel/Coquille Nation This StoryMap, which features original multimedia art, community stories, and critical cartography, presents a daa-nii-ya (welcome) to the Coquille River, where stories, peoples, animals, and non-humans have flowed for millennia. In the digital adaptation of the river that follows, you will find history and knowledge that the river has supported and produced, as well as the challenges the river now faces. Currently, the Coquille River is the site of the decline (nearing the critical point of extinction) of the Coquille River fall Chinook salmon. In 2010, there were 30,000 known spawners; in 2018, there were 275 adult spawners, and 879 spawners were seen in 2020. Since the Coquille/KōKwel Indian Tribe gained co-management of the Coquille River Basin in 2022, numbers are improving, but to continue combatting this decline, new understandings of the Coquille River and the fall Chinook salmon need to be nurtured to encourage care and restoration of the whole river basin. As you follow the creative flow of the river, you will find the anticolonial multimedia art, text, and further learning resources related to and inspired by the river. Once you reach the end of the river, there will be an interactive map detailing points of interest regarding the imminent extinction of the fall Chinook salmon and the Coquille Indian Tribe’s efforts to prevent this loss, based on our relationships with salmon as kin.

RELATED ARTICLE Cordes, A., & Huff, M. (2023). Decolonial feminist storying on the Coquille River: A digital humanities approach to human and non-human communication and prevention of the Fall Chinook Salmon extinction Feminist Formations, 73-96. DOI: 10.1353/ff.2023.a902067 9

organizing for solar justice PhD candidate Nicolas Hernandez, Professor Danielle Endres, and Professor Adrienne Cachelin (University of Utah) and Vice President Sirena Montalvo (Comité Caborrojeño Pro Salud y Ambiente, Puerto Rico) Since 2022, Nicolas Hernandez and Professor Danielle Endres have led a collaboration between Univ. of Utah students in an Environmental Justice course and El Comité Caborrojeño Pro Salud y Ambiente (El Comité hereafter). El Comité is a nonprofit organization in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, that is dedicated to preserving important habitats, fostering coexistence with the environment in the region, and promoting ecological education and human health. This partnership is part of Hernandez’s and Endres’s broader research project on energy democracy and environmental justice in Puerto Rico.

As part of their commitment to engaged research, each cohort collaborated with El Comité’s Vice President Sirena Montalvo to create a deliverable that coincides with El Comité’s mission and needs. The first cohort created a map of environmental injustice in the archipelago. The second cohort developed an annotated bibliography on solar justice, which they designed as a primer on existing literature on solar justice and other relevant research areas that can inform researchers, community and organizational members, and other social actors, as they influence policy change in Puerto Rico. The third cohort created an interactive presentation hosted on Prezi (https://prezi.com/view/OLUki49GUOA7RyOVOXTe/).

Stickers accompanied this third effort with a QR code linking to the presentation, which defined energy democracy and identified projects in Puerto Rico. These deliverables were designed to be installed at El Centro Interpretativo Las Salinas, a visitors center co-managed by El Comité and the US Fish and Wildlife Service. The fall 2023 cohort created an educational workshop for middle and high school students that covers climate change and heat mitigation to complement El Comité’s educational outreach mission. 11

communicating care podcast Professor Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Univ. of Colorado Boulder) and Podcast Interviewees Communicating Care is a podcast of the Just Transition Collaborative at the University of Colorado Boulder where we talk about the ways environmental and climate justice advocacy are motivated by, express, and foster care. Publicly launched in 2022, on this podcast, we listen more deeply to people who have made headlines for making a difference to learn from their insights for successful creative climate communication and behavior change. Prof. Phaedra C. Pezzullo is the host. The podcast interviews on plastics with advocates from Kenya, Vietnam, Mexico, and the United States became the inspiration for Prof. Pezzullo’s book Beyond Straw Men: Plastic Pollution and Networked Cultures of Care (2023).

Listen to the podcast: https://communicatingcare.buzzsprout.com/

Art by Niko P. Striphas, age 12

Photograph by James Wakibia 12

amplifying “el sonido de la ciencia” on spanish-language Radio In summer 2023, “El Sonido de la Ciencia” (“The Sound of Science”) aired 12 episodes on Radio Poder, a radio station in Woodburn, Oregon. This Spanish-language reporting project brought together station director Arturo Sarmiento, BBC Studios journalist Melanie Brown, and University of Oregon students Maya Ríos, Bryanda Quevedo, and Kelsey Balcazar and their Latinx Studies mentor Dr. Catalina de Onís.

Listen to episodes on the program’s bilingual website. Full link: https://radiocienciayjusticia.com/

Melanie Brown, Kelsey Balcazar, Maya Ríos, Catalina de Onís, Bryanda Quevedo, and Arturo Sarmiento at the Radio Poder station, July 2023.

For critical reflections on this collaboration, Dr. Onís wrote an Environmental Communication journal article titled “Translating Spanish-Language Radio Programming as a Transborder Environmental Communication Praxis of Care.” 13

Raspando coco: a film about the culinary and medicinal traditions of AfroEcuadorians

Directed and produced by Dr. Pilar Egüez Guevara (Ecuador) 31 mins. in Spanish with English and Japanese subtitles

www.raspandococo.com www.comidasquecuran.org 14

Film sinopsis/synopsis Una antropóloga quiteña viaja a la costa norte del Ecuador, provincia de Esmeraldas, para recoger las historias contadas por abuelas y abuelos afro-ecuatorianos sobre los usos tradicionales del coco en la cocina y medicina local. El documental nos sumerge en las calles, fincas y cocinas de los esmeraldeños y esmeraldeñas, y a su lucha por preservar sus tradiciones de cara a recomendaciones médicas obsoletas y el encarecimiento de sus alimentos locales. El documental presenta remedios caseros y recetas tradicionales casi olvidadas preparadas por abuelas esmeraldeñas, como el chocolate con leche de coco. (subtítulos en español disponibles) An Ecuadorian anthropologist from Quito travels to the northernmost coastal province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, to gather stories told by AfroEcuadorian elders about the traditional uses of coconut in their local cuisine and medicine. The film immerses us in the streets, farms, and kitchens of Afro-Ecuadorians in Esmeraldas and their struggle to preserve their traditions in the face of obsolete medical advice and the rising cost of their traditional foods. The film shows nearly forgotten traditional recipes and home remedies made by grandmothers from Esmeraldas, such as hot chocolate made with freshly squeezed coconut milk. (English subtitles available)

RELATED ARTICLE: Consider teaching Dr. Jayson Maurice Porter’s essay, available in English and Spanish, when screening and discussing this film.

Spanish-language translation: https://comestible.info/este-ensayo-puede-conteneraceite-de-coco/

The DWELL Lab The Digital Writing Environments, Location, and Localization (DWELL) Lab at the University of Rhode Island works at the intersection of digital rhetoric, science communication, and public advocacy. Directed by Dr. Madison Jones, DWELL approaches environmental communication through an interdisciplinary lens: How can art and design improve environmental communication? How can augmented reality change users’ relationships to places, environments, and histories? To better understand these questions, DWELL uses location-based technologies like augmented reality, GIS, and other visual media to localize information and communicate social and environmental problems more dynamically.

For example, DWELL’s North Woods Project combines augmented reality, visual media, and digital mapping to highlight the URI’s 300-acre North Woods. As a relatively undisturbed parcel of forest and wetland, the North Woods are an important part of the campus community. The North Woods Project aims to celebrate the North Woods as a place where students and faculty work, learn, and play, as well as document its social and ecological history. DWELL is working on other projects utilizing augmented reality, such as the Manissean Walking Tour on Block Island and a project highlighting green infrastructure in Providence’s Roger Williams Park. To learn more about these and other ongoing projects, visit uri.edu/dwell.

Scan this QR code with a smart device to view a 3D model of a trailhead sign for the North Woods (requires the free Adobe Aero app), including a map of the Blue Trail, or follow this direct link on a mobile device to access the experience: https://adobeaero.app.link/SfILka4ZUyb

COLLABORATORS Dr. Madison Jones (Univ. of Rhode Island, Depts. of Public and Professional Writing and Natural Resources Science) Ally Overbay (Univ. of Rhode Island, Master of Environmental Science and Management ’24) Amelia Moore (Univ. of Rhode Island, Marine Affairs) Maryann Gobern Mathews (Manissean Tribal Council) Lorén Spears (Executive Director, Tomaquag Museum) John Craig Freeman (Emerson College, Dept. of Visual & Media Arts) AnnaFaith Jorgensen (Univ. of Rhode Island, MESM ’24) Kendall Moore (Univ. of Rhode Island, Journalism) Ally Cuomo (Univ. of Rhode Island, MESM ’24) Sarah O’Sullivan (Univ. of Rhode Island, MESM ’22) Gabrielle Pezich (Univ. of Rhode Island, MESM ’22) Joseph Ahart (Univ. of Rhode Island, MESM ’24) Travess Smalley (Univ. of Rhode Island, Art) Michelle Peach (Univ. of Rhode Island, Natural Resources Science) Brett Still (Univ. of Rhode Island, Natural Resources Science) Jason Parent (Univ. of Rhode Island, Natural Resources Science) Leah Heilig (Univ. of Rhode Island, Dept. of Public and Professional Writing) Ryan Kopp (Providence Stormwater Innovation Center) Rebecca Reeves (Providence Stormwater Innovation Center) José R. Menéndez López (Northeastern, Dept. of Art + Design) 17

“What a F***ing Waste!” Stories from the Dumpster Recently zines have had a re-emergence in the social sciences. They have been used to respond collaboratively to disasters, challenge neoliberalisation, share punk skills, and agitate for environmental justice. But their ability to encourage collaboration and work across researcher-participant boundaries is still largely unrecognised. This is why we made our zine, “‘What a f***ing waste!’: Stories from the Dumpster.” This creation uses collage and collaborative zinemaking to tell our stories of dumpster diving in Naarm/Melbourne. This was part of a larger research project, led by Willow Ross at the University of Melbourne, to understand embodied experiences of dumpster diving. The zine reflects on quotations and themes from the project's interviews and participant observation, generating a practice-led, collaborative early analysis. Using photos, artworks, poems, and foraged dumpster materials, we created a tangible product— a DIY zine—that could be easily shared with wider communities.

Today, the zine can be found in a number of social centres, environmental groups, and homes across our city. “What a f***ing waste!” has travelled to London, Gimuy/Cairns in Queensland, and Boorloo/Perth in Western Australia and hopefully encouraged new people to dive for the first time. With pages like “The Gross,” “The Critters,” and “The Highs,” we invite you to dive in with us.

Check out the zine: https://issuu.com/binchickenink/docs/whatafknwaste Collaborators (surnames omitted for safety reasons): Alys, Elk, Gali, Hari, Jordan, Lauren, Bec, Lil, Richard, Rhys, Emori, Patches, Sab, Somer, Oli, and Willow. 19

Campus Field Guide Joanne Marras Tate, PhD, Robert Buehler, MFA, and Mathew Sharples, PhD (Univ. of Colorado Boulder) “Campus Field Guide: Species Relationships at The University of Colorado Boulder” catalogs and researches some of the species and their relationships at the University of Colorado Boulder. The field guide’s creators highlight the local flora and fauna at and around the university campus and the complex relationships shared between species, including humans, which outline the many ways our worlds intertwine. The Nature, Environment, Science, and Technology (NEST) Studio for the Arts network sponsored this project. Collaborators worked with CU Boulder Facilities Management, The CU Boulder Natural History Museum, community members, and La Raza X Publishing.

The project intends to further engagements with connecting campus with local and non-local biodiversity and different cultural understandings that shape our communities (human and more-than-human). Hopefully, students will use this field guide to engage with the campus as part of their learning about different biological systems, sustainability, individual species, and their cultural values. This project seeks to become a living document, where students and faculty continue to add species and relationships to create and share natural-cultural history knowledge about the campus.

Joanne Marras Tate (left) and Robert Martin Buehler (right) read and discuss field guides.

Review the complete Campus Field Guide on CU Boulder’s Museum of Natural History website. Full link: https://www.colorado.edu/cumuseum/sites/default/files/attached -files/nest-fieldguide2020.pdf 21

Beyond the Borders: An Artistic Archive of Sundarbans Movement Dr. Elja Roy and PhD student Sneha Goswami (Univ. of Memphis) This project offers an online, free-access, YouTube-based digital library of musical performances from the Indian forests of West Bengal and Bangladesh for the world's largest mangrove forest, Sundarbans.

Visit the musical archive online. Full link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist? list=PLlnAZrl2uMFrotmBimHWpXBNp0Gc7jr7A Watch Dr. Roy’s “Musical Mangrove” documentary. Full link: https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=ui4Uits_3KY&list=PLlnAZrl2uMFrotmBimHWpXBNp0Gc7jr7A&index=1 22

lesson plans: water and environmental justice in las américas Dr. Jayson Maurice Porter (Brown University)

The lesson plan, “Arsenic in North America,” is part of a “Teaching Water and Environmental Justice in the Américas” series. Grade levels: Middle school and up

Visit the Univ. of Michigan webpage to access water and environmental justice lesson plans. Full link: https://ii.umich.edu/lacs/outreach/edu-resources.html 23

Environmental Justice StoryMaps in Colorad0 Warren Cook, Anthony Albidrez, Sam Collier, Danielle Miyoko Furuichi, and Professor Phaedra C. Pezzullo (Univ. of Colorado Boulder) In Spring 2022, Prof. Phaedra C. Pezzullo taught a graduate course in Environmental Justice Foundations. Students could opt in to partnering with the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE) to create ArcGIS StoryMaps for the state’s new EnviroScreen tool, which quantitatively highlights the communities most disproportionally impacted by environmental harms in the state. Our contention is that public storytelling would improve interest and engagement with the state’s data and provide an opportunity to increase community empowerment and trust by opening with why people love living in these communities, despite the challenges, as we argue in an Environmental Justice journal article: “Amplifying DesireCentered Research Beyond Deficits and Fatigue: A Case Study of Environmental Justice ArcGIS StoryMaps in Colorado.” CDPHE published these StoryMaps: https://cdphe.colorado.gov/colorad o-enviroscreen-storymaps. The San Luis Valley StoryMap was featured in the Colorado Resiliency Office’s 2022 Annual Progress Report as a Community Spotlight Anthony Albidrez for Supporting Strategies that “develop & deploy community engagement and civic capacity tools,” “strengthen local resilience planning,” and “integrate equity” (p. 12). 24

campus Murals

Artists at CU Boulder transformed the windows of this campus building with animal and plant prints.

article from CU Boulder Today about Environmental Murals

The Anthropozine Joy Reeves, Masters of Environmental Management Candidate (Duke University) The Anthropozine is an illustrated storytelling journey about what it means to be a planetary citizen in the “age of humans.” Taking the form of a short mini-comic, this piece discusses environmental ethics and the history of our planet, through the lens of a young ruby-haired person. In a vibrant, existential stream of consciousness, the protagonist contemplates questions of being human in the climate crisis: What does it mean to be both a part of nature and a force of nature? How can we re-imagine climate advocacy and ground it in collective rather than individual ethics? How is the past a key to the future?

Read the zine. Full link: https://www.flipsnack.com/ environmentalcomics/theant hropozine.html The Anthropozine takes the unconventional form of a comic to be accessible to all audiences and all ages. The comic provides links and resources to take action in the climate space. Its panels were drawn and inked by hand, with color added digitally. Understanding that comic media deviate from the “fine art” category, The Anthropozine seeks to be a radical exploration of humanity in a humble, human medium. 26

making Latine/x environmental, climate, and energy justice zines Dr. Catalina de Onís, Beatriz Cabrera, Maia Alexandra Thomas, and Maya Ríos (Univ. of Oregon) “Construyendo Otros Mundos: Environmental, Climate, and Energy Justice Zines” is an article published by The Latinx Project at New York University. In this reflexive piece, student coauthors and their professor describe their experiences in a 300-level research course titled “Environmental, Climate, and Energy Justice in Latinx Communities.” The article includes several zines by the student coauthors and some of their colleagues.

Zine cover by Kyle Trefny

Class members experienced a multipart research process that involved a topic proposal, an outline, a rough draft, and a final zine. Students received professor and peer feedback on all components. During finals week, when class members presented extemporaneous speeches about their projects, everyone received a printed copy of their zine. 27

Field to Media Prof. Mark Pedelty (Univ. of Minnesota), Prof. Rebecca Dirksen (Indiana Univ.), Prof. Yan Pang (Point Park Univ.), Prof. Elja Roy (Univ. of Memphis), and Tara Hatfield-Ramirez

Field to Media is about amplifying musical communities’ responses to environmental challenges. Field researchers worked with communities in Canada, Bangladesh, China, Haiti, India, Tanzania, and the United States to create musical videos and cinematic messaging about climate change, water pollution, deforestation, and the impact of motor noise on marine life. Online visitors will find a full-length film about the project, followed by all of the musical videos, documentary shorts, and publications generated by the project in the link below. Field to Media was funded by the Humanities Without Walls’ “Humanities in a Changing Climate” at the University of Illinois with Mellon Foundation support.

https://www.ecosong.band/field-to-media 28

bilingual climate justice children’s book

¡juntes por la justicia climática! A Project by Many People ¡Juntes por la justicia climática!/ Together for Climate Justice! is a Spanish- and English-language children’s book that tells the story of five young people who teach each other about climate in/justice. A no-cost PDF and a forpurchase paperback are available on publisher Editora Educación Emergente’s website. All proceeds provided to the coauthors will be shared with labor union Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroeste. This project included student coauthors, many of whom wrote portions of this text in a public-writing seminar instructed by Dr. Catalina de Onís.

Art by Mabette Colón Pérez

Student writing workshop, Univ. of Oregon Honors College seminar, June 2023.

Learn more by scanning the QR code with a digital device.

Five coauthors joined KMUZ radio host Melanie Zermer for an interview about the project, Oct. 2023.

Access the information provided in the QR code above by visiting this website: https://catalinadeonis.wordpress.com/ 29

Climate Justice for Puerto Rico Intervention Professors Alicia Díaz, Mary Finley-Brook, Patricia Herrera, and Mariela Méndez (University of Richmond) In Spring 2023, a collaboration of five University of Richmond classes led to a transformative project exploring environmental violence in Puerto Rico. Through courses like Prof. Alicia Diaz’s “Dance for Social Change,” Prof. Mary Finley-Brook’s “Ecofeminisms” and “People and Place,” Prof. Patricia Herrera’s “Latinx on Stage,” and Prof. Mariela Méndez’s “Activisms,” students staged the Climate Justice for Puerto Rico Intervention. This event featured a theatrical procession, incorporating student presentations, the vibrant expressions of Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba music and dance led by Tata Cepeda, and a community altar. Class members in Prof. Méndez's class created this "Nuestra América Living Altar.” Students on the first step lay on blankets and covered their faces with coal ash, expressing distress. The second step contained social Photo by Peter McElhinney justice books, including Dr. Hilda Lloréns’s Making Livable Worlds: Afro-Puerto Rican Women Building Environmental Justice. Behind these texts, two students held the black and white Puerto Rican flag—a symbol of the archipelago’s independence movement and persistent calls for self-determination. On the third step, two students sat at the corners, fanning themselves with money. This action sought to highlight the environmental injustice inherent in capitalism. 30

At the heart of the intervention was a profound message addressing environmental injustices, particularly those associated with the AES Guayama facility in Puerto Rico—a coal-fired plant with ties to the University's partner, Spider Solar, LLC. The following day, a panel discussion brought together attorney Ruth Santiago, who serves on the White House Environmental Justice Advisory Council, and Prof. Yarimar Bonilla, a prominent figure in Caribbean and Latinx politics. The two guests discussed Puerto Rican documentaries, such as El poder del pueblo. The interdisciplinary approach of blending arts, academia, and activism underscored the urgency of decolonizing climate justice activism. The intervention emphasized the interconnections of local and global decisionmaking, prompting a crucial conversation about the profound impacts of the University of Richmond’s choices on humanity and the planet.

Photos by Ethan Swift

Selected Materials Video: “Climate Justice for Puerto Rico Intervention” Newspaper Article: “Being There: Climate Justice For Puerto Rico, April 5” StoryMap I: “Not Your Colony!” StoryMap II: “The Energy ‘Offset’ Bandwagon” StoryMap III: “AES Hawai'i” Student Petition to University of Richmond Administration 31

Thank you for reading this zine! Many of the projects, lesson plans, and experiences communicated in this zine relate to and can be informed by chapters in Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere, by Professors Phaedra C. Pezzullo and Robert Cox.