How do we feel, African Ornithology? A sentiment analysis search for symptoms of eco-anxiety

Abstract

Ostrich is co-published by NISC (Pty) Ltd and Informa UK Limited (trading as Taylor & Francis Group) This year the Cape Gannet Morus capensis has been chosen as South Africa’s Bird of the Year. A beautiful coastal bird, I have seen these foraging in large flocks which give the impression they are common and doing well, and so it has been concerning to learn that the species is Endangered, with ongoing population declines on its island colonies. The population is under pressure for food resources, as well as from natural predators, as we learn in Strydom et al. (2022). Koopman (2022) quotes this text as a description from over 100 years ago: ‘The Malagash, as it is called by the Colonists, or Common Gannet of South Africa, frequents, in countless thousands, the whole of our coastline....’. It is certainly countable in 2022 and becoming more so with passing time with fewer and fewer to count. This is a depressing situation, and yet another unfolding ecological tragedy. Learning about Cape Gannet made me sad, but it is not the only thing. Unfortunately, it appears we live in ‘interesting times’ as per the alleged Chinese curse. The past two years have been torrid, and I suspect few have not been affected by inconvenience at least, or the loss of loved ones at worst, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns. As I write, the situation in Europe is very unsettled with the invasion of Ukraine by Russia. All this is set against the backdrop of climate change, with a mounting portfolio of associated disasters. Over the last decade we’ve also seen political polarisation, and a backlash against everything deemed to be too ‘left’, into which conservation initiatives are frequently lumped (Scholes 2013). In Africa, we are seeing the loss of natural environments to a combination of urban and agricultural expansion, ‘big development’, alien vegetation encroachment, human population pressure, climate change impacts resulting in floods, fires and droughts (Lees et al. 2022). We’ve seen the terms ‘eco-anxiety’ and ‘ecological grief’ coined to describe how people with a connection to nature now feel when faced with the loss of something very close to them, something with which there is a real emotional bond (Cunsolo and Ellis 2018). Grief is a powerful emotion: a rip in the fabric of our reality, but unlike grief felt with the passing of a loved one, ecological grief never ends: each tragedy is replaced by the next (Read 2022). The past two years has seen a lot of media attention on mental health. United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres warned that psychological suffering will outlast the coronavirus crisis, stating on 13 May 2020: ‘Even when the pandemic is brought under control, grief, anxiety and depression will continue to affect people and communities’. But how did we feel before and how do we feel now? Can we detect a changing pattern of sentiment in the titles and abstracts of some scientific journals? Although those should by their definition be dry and un-emotional, themes in conservation biology may not be, especially if they touch on topics related to extinction risk and environmental degradation. I attempt to answer these self-imposed questions through text mining and sentiment analysis. Text mining is the process of distilling insights from text. Sentiment analysis represents the set of tools to extract an author’s feelings towards a subject; an attempt at extracting an author’s emotional intent from text. It attempts to unlock the emotions from text in a quantitative manner. This article presents a sentiment analysis on the titles and abstract contents from a selection of journals which publish on African ornithology, as well as a set of comparison journals. Naturally, this article will focus on Ostrich: Journal of African Ornithology, but includes other ornithological journals, notably Bird Conservation International and Ibis, which also publish many articles related to ornithology from Africa, and often with themes related to conservation (Lee 2020). Likewise, African Zoology, although ornithological articles there are a minority. For comparison, I also examine the Journal of Avian Biology, which publishes on more dry-themed biological topics, Conservation Biology, and some control journals: Methods in Ecology and Evolution, and Afrika Matematika (expecting these last two to be neutral), and South African Journal of Psychology (expecting this to have more heavily weighted sentiment scores). The methods are in the Appendix 1. Perspective