Climate Change and Post-Political Communication

Media, Emotion and Environmental Advocacy

Philip Hammond

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138777491
• eBook ISBN: 9781317678885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Ecology
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For many years, the objective of environmental campaigners was to push climate change on to the agenda of political leaders and to encourage media attention to the issue. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, it appeared that their efforts had been spectacularly successful. Yet just at the moment when the campaigners' goals were being achieved, it seemed that the idea of getting the issue into mainstream discussion had been mistaken all along; that the consensus-building approach produced little or no meaningful action. That is the problem of climate change as a 'post-political' issue, which is the subject of this book.

Examining how climate change is communicated in politics, news media and celebrity culture, Climate Change and Post-Political Communication explores how the issue has been taken up by elites as potentially offering a sense of purpose or mission in the absence of political visions of the future, and considers the ways in which it provides a focus for much broader anxieties about a loss of modernist political agency and meaning. Drawing on a wide range of literature and case studies, and taking a critical and contextual approach to the analysis of climate change communication, this book will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of environmental studies, communication studies, and media and film studies.

1

Political elites and the search for green meaning

This chapter focuses on the political mainstream, examining how Anglo-American politicians have engaged with environmentalism, particularly around the issue of climate change. National political leaders are of course understood to be central to attempts to address environmental problems. There is, however, an ambiguity about the relationship between political elites and the public on the issue of climate change. Environmental campaigners and activists often tend to assume that things work bottom-up: they build public support in order to get politicians to act on environmental concerns. This was the rationale for the September 2014 People’s Climate March, for example, which was designed to put pressure on world leaders gathering at a UN climate summit in New York, on the grounds that governments would not act without popular demand from below.² Academic studies also often assume that ‘governments are unlikely to [act] without public pressure’ from a ‘large, well-orchestrated and sustained climate movement’ (Roser-Renouf et al. 2014: 163). At the same time, though, climate change is also often implicitly understood as an elite concern, about which the public needs to be educated and roused to action via top-down initiatives. In The Politics of Climate Change, for instance, Anthony Giddens notes that public support for climate change policies is ‘likely to wax and wane’, and advises that governments must try to ‘foster a more widespread consciousness of the need for action’ (Giddens 2009: 230). An example of the sort of effort he has in mind might be the television advertising campaign launched in 2009 by the British government, at a cost of £6m, to raise public awareness about climate change. The campaign (discussed further below) apparently failed to strike a chord with the public: it later featured on a list, compiled by the UK Advertising Standards Authority, of the top ten most complained about adverts of all time (Westcott 2012).

It is difficult to make sense of the dual role that the public are understood to play: as both the grassroots force that demands action from reluctant leaders, and the passive and unconcerned target of elite attempts to gain support for environmental policies. The take-up of climate change as an issue in mainstream politics is best understood, it is argued here, as an elite-driven project. Examining the context of its emergence at the end of the 1980s, the chapter highlights how the issue appealed to politicians because it was perceived as having the potential to provide a new source of political meaning for the post-ideological, post-Cold War world. The issue of climate change offered leaders a fresh way to conceive of political action as taking place on a large historical scale, and a new way to think about the future in a context in which the familiar framework of Left and Right was no longer viable. As we shall see, this necessarily entailed finding a new, post-political, emotional discourse with which to speak for an imagined constituency, including children and future generations. This discourse did not need to be invented from scratch, however: it was more a case of reworking themes which had already emerged in politicians’ engagement with environmentalism in earlier contexts.

Although, as discussed in the Introduction, climate change can indeed be characterised as a post-political issue, it is nevertheless routinely discussed in ways that map it on to the old framework of Left/Right politics. Climate change is variously understood as a left-wing and progressive issue or sometimes as a conservative issue; as a divisive or a consensus issue; as party-political or bipartisan; as marginal to the mainstream or as part of it. The picture is complicated by the fact that a complex relationship between environmentalism and mainstream politics had developed over the two decades preceding the emergence of climate change as the central concern. We therefore begin by examining modern environmentalism’s emergence within the framework of Left/Right politics.

Environmentalism in the age of Left and Right

Accounts of modern environmentalism’s emergence usually date it to the decade between the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and the US government’s ban on DDT (the pesticide which was the target of her book) in 1972, but with a marked quickening toward the end of that period. Friends of the Earth was founded in 1969, the first Earth Day was held in 1970, Greenpeace was established in 1971, and 1972 saw the first United Nations environmental conference (held in Stockholm) as well as the publication of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth report and of The Ecologist magazine’s A Blueprint for Survival. The rise of the modern environmental movement is often associated with other radical protest campaigns of the era, particularly the Vietnam anti-war movement (Haq and Paul 2012: 7), yet its concerns apparently became part of the mainstream very quickly – indeed, instantaneously. The Earth Day Network (n.d.) claims with some justification that the mass mobilisation for Earth Day 1970 marked ‘what many consider the birth of the modern environmental movement’, but according to Tarla Rai Peterson (2004: 19), ‘By 1970…[the environmental movement] had become mainstream’. As evidence of this mainstreaming, Peterson points to the fact that President Richard Nixon addressed the issue of the environment in his 1970 State of the Union speech. It would appear, then, that environmentalism was born as a radical grassroots protest movement that was simultaneously part of mainstream politics.

One way to approach this puzzle would be through Andrew Dobson’s (2007: 2–3) argument that there is a sharp division between ‘environmentalism’ and ‘ecologism’: the former is a ‘managerial approach’ which proposes no fundamental social or economic change, whereas the latter ‘presupposes radical changes in our relationship with the non-human natural world, and in our mode of social and political life’. While environmentalism can be incorporated into other political outlooks such as socialism or conservatism, he argues, ecologism cannot because it is a distinct political outlook in its own right, and one which presents a radical challenge both to the status quo and to other political perspectives. While environmentalism is potentially compatible with modern liberal conceptions of politics and assumptions about the desirability of economic growth and progress, ecologism critiques Enlightenment ideas of human progress as hubristic and anthropocentric, and rejects all forms of industrial society (Dobson 2007: 6). From this it would follow that the movement that emerged in the early 1970s contained radical ecologist elements, while what was adopted into the mainstream was a version of environmentalism compatible with governing political and economic assumptions. However, while Dobson makes useful analytical distinctions between different political traditions, one would have to be cautious in mapping such a static typology on to historical reality, since too neat a model does not account for the messy interaction of different political perspectives at a particular historical juncture. The modern environmental movement at the turn of the 1970s both influenced, and was shaped by, the prevailing political conditions of the time.

Environmentalism’s apparently simultaneous emergence in both radical protest and mainstream politics suggests that, right from the outset, it raised the question noted above regarding the relationship between elites and publics. Nixon’s decision to discuss the environment in his 1970 State of the Union address is often understood as a response to ‘increased public interest’ in the issue (Peterson 2004: 19). In particular, the first Earth Day in 1970 is seen as having put ‘pressure on the government to respond’ (Vickery 2004: 119). According to one account, ‘After the Earth Day demonstrations, Richard Nixon, pragmatic as always, moved not to flee or thwart but to seize upon that environmental consensus’ (Wicker quoted in Vickery 2004: 119). According to another, ‘After Earth Day, US President Richard Nixon…in his first State of the Union address, acknowledged a growing public awareness of environmental issues’ (Haq and Paul 2012: 78). There is something curious about the chronology of such accounts, though. Earth Day was held on 22 April 1970, but Nixon’s State of the Union address was delivered exactly three months earlier, on 22 January. How could the order of events have become confused and misremembered in this way?

There was indeed pressure on Nixon, but it came not so much from environmental campaigners as from anti-Vietnam War protestors. As Micheal Vickery (2004: 120) argues, the issue of environmental protection appealed to the president as ‘an expedient means of reaching out to young, middle-class voters, thereby ­helping to counteract the unpopularity of the Vietnam War with that segment of the electorate’. The Earth Day organisers understood the situation in a similar way. Describing the occasion as ‘channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement’, the Earth Day Network (n.d.) says the aim was to ‘force environmental protection onto the national political agenda’. Similarly, Earth Day’s founder, Senator Gaylord Nelson, describes the initiative as an attempt to ‘infuse the student anti-war energy into the environmental cause, [so that] we could generate a demonstration that would force this issue onto the political agenda’ (Nelson n.d.). For a president seen as a warmonger by large swathes of American youth, the issue did not require much forcing: it must have appeared as a godsend. Indeed, it no doubt looked that way well before the actual Earth Day protests. In November 1969 the New York Times was already reporting that ‘Rising concern about the environmental crisis is sweeping the nation’s campuses with an intensity that may be on its way to eclipsing student discontent over the war in Vietnam’ (quoted in Nelson n.d.).

Nixon’s attention to environmentalism, then, may be explained at least in part as ideological in much the way that, as discussed in the Introduction, Baudrillard (1974) understood at the time: an attempt to deflect from a highly divisive issue by promoting a potentially more unifying cause. Indeed, this is exactly the way that Nixon presented the issue in 1970, as ‘a cause beyond party and beyond factions’; the ‘common cause of all the people of this country’, but particularly of ‘young Americans’ who would ‘reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later’ (Nixon 1970). For at least some (non-ecologist) radicals at the time, the ideological gambit was clumsily obvious. As one US civil rights activist reportedly said after Nixon’s speech: ‘It is a sick society that can beat and murder black people on the streets, butcher thousands in Vietnam, spend millions on arms to destroy mankind, and then come to the conclusion that pollution is America’s number one problem’ (quoted in Pepper 1986: 90). Yet, as we shall see, the basic theme developed by Nixon was to be of enduring importance beyond the immediate context of diverting attention from an unpopular war: in more recent years too, a key part of environmentalism’s appeal for political leaders has been that it can supply a missing sense of purpose and mission. For Nixon, there had been ‘too little vision’ in the recent past, and the challenge was to ‘inspire young Americans with a sense of excitement’. As he put it in his peroration: ‘The greatest privilege an individual can have is to serve in a cause bigger than himself. We have such a cause’ (Nixon 1970).

In terms of what he actually said about the environment, Nixon’s 1970 address might easily be taken at first glance as an example of the sort of watered-down, compromise environmentalism that Dobson (2007) identifies as not really presenting any fundamental challenge to the established order. Alongside other, conventionally conservative, themes such as the Cold War (including the on-going war in Vietnam), and planned cuts to federal government spending but increased spending on law and order, Nixon devoted about a quarter of the speech to environmental problems. He emphasised that ‘The answer is not to abandon growth’ but rather to ‘develop a national growth policy’, since ‘Continued vigorous economic growth provides us with the means to enrich life itself and to enhance our planet as a place hospitable to man’. That last pointedly anthropocentric remark is anathema to an ecological outlook, as is his characterisation of America as an ‘unfinished land’ which required ‘perfecting’ (Nixon 1970). Far from suggesting any deep green convictions, the tenor of such statements suggests a pragmatic, opportunistic use of the environmental cause. Yet this was not simply rhetoric: later that year Nixon went on to establish the Environmental Protection Agency to enforce regulation, having already set up the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality in 1969 (Lewis 1985). A closer look at the speech suggests that there was more going on.

Given that a promise of rising wealth has historically been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Epigraph
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Political elites and the search for green meaning
• 2 Cycles, arenas and norms
• 3 Green consumption, lifestyle journalism and media advocacy
• 4 Climate change and celebrity culture
• 5 Celebrity solutions and the radical alternative
• Conclusion
• Index