Climate Change, Media & Culture

Critical Issues in Global Environmental Communication

Juliet Pinto, Robert E. Gutsche Jr., Paola Prado, Juliet Pinto, Robert E. Gutsche Jr., Paola Prado

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781787699694
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Étude des média

The acceleration of massive global climate change creates a nexus for the examination of power, political rhetoric, science communication, and sustainable development. This book provides an international view of twenty first century environmental communication, from journalism to artistic expression, to critically explore mediated expressions of climate change.
Seeking to understand how government policies, environmental news reports, corporate messages, and social influences communicate the complexities of climate change to the public, this book examines the roles that journalism, entertainment, and strategic messaging play in mediating meanings of science, health, economy, and sustainable solutions. It considers the critical importance of the study of climate change communication, which is inherently interdisciplinary, as well as globally and locally impactful.
With topics ranging from communicating resilience through environmental journalism and linguistics, the storytelling of climate change explanations in the news, the role of visual communication in capturing and addressing climate change, and the communication of the health impacts of climate change, this book will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students and scholars in environmental sciences, international relations and politics, media, journalism and mass communication.

Chapter 1

“Why is it Here, of All Places?”: Debris Cleanup, Black Space, and Narratives of Marginalized Geographies in Post-Irma Miami-Dade

Moses Shumow

Introduction

On September 9, 2017, Hurricane Irma, the largest hurricane ever to appear in the Atlantic, outside of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico, swept across South Florida, leaving a path of destruction across the entire state. Miami-Dade County, at the southern tip of the state, avoided a direct hit. However, the storm left the county and its dozens of municipalities with gigantic mounds of storm debris. As the weeks went by, the piles festered and frustration with the pace of the cleanup mounted.

Two dump sites in particular drew the attention of local media and community activists: a park ringed by a housing development in Liberty City, a black community in the heart of Miami; and historic Virginia Key, which had once been the only beach in Miami open to black citizens during Jim Crow. Gigantic piles of garbage several stories high were piled in both locations. More than a dozen similar heaps appeared throughout the City of Miami and Miami-Dade County as transfer sites where public works and sanitation departments worked to sift through all of the storm debris and garbage.

Liberty City and Virginia Key both have deep historic as well as contemporary connections with Miami’s black community. Liberty City was once a middle-class black community, developed after World War I as New Deal initiatives were harnessed to alleviate overcrowding in the traditionally segregated areas of Miami closer to downtown; like many minority communities in urban areas across the United States, the community now suffers from disinvestment and high rates of poverty and crime. Under Jim Crow, most of the beaches that began drawing throngs of tourists from northern climes to South Florida during the first half of the twentieth century were off limits to black residents of Miami, with the exception of Virginia Key. Given the prominence of these geographies in the story of Miami’s segregated past, claims of environmental racism underlying the choice of these two locations for garbage dumping were quickly mounted among black residents and activists. These groups took to social media to air their grievances, and held a press conference to draw attention of media and officials; headlines from post-storm coverage include “Location of Post-Irma Debris Piles Is Not ‘Environmental Racism’, Miami-Dade Officials Say” (Stein, 2017b) and “‘Vermin. Rats. Snakes. Possums. Racoons.’[sic.] Life next to a Hurricane Irma debris dump” (Hanks, 2017).

By focusing on the aftermath of Hurricane Irma in a heavily urbanized region still bearing the markers of a segregated and racist past, this chapter examines three public narratives during a time of storm recovery and amid scenes of destruction and recovery that will become more familiar globally as climates, environments and weather patterns continue to change. Narratives that are examined here include media coverage, official explanations from local governments for the decisions made related to debris placement and outrage from citizens on social media.

Through an analysis of each narrative, this chapter investigates how the dumping of storm debris in black spaces was reported, justified, and contested in the aftermath of one of the worst hurricanes to strike Miami-Dade County in over a decade. It is built on theories of environmental racism and the cultural meanings embedded in journalistic coverage that rely on official explanations for understanding social problems but at the same time are shaped by civic dialog and protest. This investigation also addresses growing questions of the role of news media during a time of increasing environmental crisis, as the impacts of climate change become every day harder to ignore or discount.

As climate change models predict the increasing frequency of super storms like Irma and discussions of how coastal cities are responding are growing, this investigation looks at two components of this response that have not been widely considered:

What are the institutional and citizen responses in the aftermath of these storms, and how will issues of race and historic geographic marginalization be either acknowledged or ignored as the problems associated with climate change grow ever more acute and pressing?

Theoretical Framework: Journalistic Interpretations of Environmental Crisis and Racism

An investigation into the complex interplay among the narratives emerging from local governments, media outlets and civic voices in response to charges of environmental racism related to debris dumping in Miami-Dade County’s black spaces post-Irma requires the weaving together of several strands of theoretical work. These include perspectives on understanding the cultural meanings of news, critical/cultural studies examining the intersections of race and media and environmental communication research on instances of racism and social justice.

Cultural Meanings of News

Extensive work has been done on the cultural meanings of news, and the ways in which journalism interprets and supports existing power structures (e.g., Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2008; Berkowitz, 1997, 2010; Gutsche, 2015; Van Dijk, 1995). This research tends to be built around the premise that “news is a human construction shaped by the social world from which it emerges” (Berkowitz, 1997, p. 3), and moves beyond constructions of journalism as merely an attempt by media workers to give an objective, factual interpretation of reality. Instead, researchers in this field work to unravel the power structures and inherent, often unrecognized, assumptions that go into news production (Gutsche, 2015), paying close attention to the media’s successes or failures to recognize and highlight issues of power and structural inequality.

In the case of storm debris disposal in two spaces central to Miami-Dade County’s black communities, the relevance of this approach to media analysis is especially evident, as the underlying complexities of race relations in South Florida often go unrecognized and unreported in local media coverage of racial disparities (Shumow & Gutsche, 2017). The notion that the history of racial segregation, and the decades of marginalization that have taken place in local black communities (see Connolly, 2014; Dunn, 1997), might have played a role in the decisions to dump debris in Liberty City and Virginia Key is rarely mentioned as a possibility. In this sense, reporters, while perhaps not intentionally seeking to uphold racialized constructions of meaning, do so through the very omission of that history.

Here, we see the emergence of one of the key arguments in examinations of the social influence of news: the exclusion of certain elements of a story that might not fit within mainstream interpretations or understandings of a social problem as a key indicator that journalistic work involves much more layered and contextualized decision making than a “just the facts” approach might encompass and thus contributes to the ways in which readers and viewers make sense of news. The intertwining of environmental racism with climate change complicates this phenomenon even further, at the intersection of two intractable issues, around which there is little consensus; thus, traditional approaches to understanding news work are at an even greater deficit to explain complex social inequities that span borders and cultures, confound understanding of causes, effects, and solutions, and scatter any attempt at ontological meaning.

News, Race, and Power

Similar to more specific research on the social influences of news production and interpretation, critical/race scholars have addressed the (in)ability of dominant cultural actors, particularly media institutions, to recognize, much less address, racial and socio-economic inequalities built up over decades and even centuries of power structures built on systems of White supremacy (e.g., Entman & Rojecki, 2001; Hall, 1996, 2000). Prominent among these critics has been Stuart Hall (2000), who argued that media are “not only a powerful source of ideas about race. They are also one place where these ideas are articulated, worked on, transformed, and articulated” (p. 273).

Hall’s ideas about how audiences are primed to think about race through ideological constructions in media gain particular traction in the present context, as the elision and erasure of racial contexts and history form a key element of the coverage of race and debris disposal in Miami-Dade County. As Entman and Rojecki (2001) posit, overt constructions of racism based on biology and genetics have mostly fallen by the wayside in the post-Civil Rights era, and have instead been replaced by something less obvious: “… the public face of race is now cloaked in a chameleon-like form, an ever-changing camouflage that obscures its force” (p. 1). A theoretical approach to the interplay between media and race forms a key interpretative device in the analysis that follows, since most of the discussion around debris disposal failed to recognize the racial undertones of official decision making and coverage, focused instead on the much easier to observe environmental disaster brought on by an unprecedented storm.

Environmental Racism and Communication

Finally, this research draws on important work that has been done on identifying and making visible instances of environmental racism (e.g., Boer, Pastor, Sadd, & Snyder, 1997; Bullard, 1983, 1994, 2001; Pellow, 2004) and connecting those phenomena with research calling attention to the complexities and importance of understanding the role of media and communication in an era of environmental crisis (e.g., Dickinson, 2012; Hutchins & Lester, 2010; Pinto, Prado, & Tirado-Alcaraz, 2017).

The idea that poor communities of color are unfairly impacted by man-made environmental dangers has been repeatedly identified and interrogated for decades. Heinz (2005) defined environmental racism as “the placement of health-threatening structures such as landfills and factories near or in areas where the poor and ethnic minorities frequently live” (p. 47). As Bullard (2001) has argued, the elements that have made these communities so vulnerable to environmental degradation are multi-faceted and include the “impact of redlining, economic disinvestment, infrastructure decline, deteriorating housing, lead poisoning, industrial pollution, poverty, and unemployment” (p. 153).

Intersecting with research on environmental racism is the field of environmental communication focused on media practices in an age of catastrophic climate change. Research in this arena is interested particularly in “meanings, messages, and debates (surrounding environmental conflict) and how they contribute to personal and political decision making and action about environmental futures” (Lester, 2010, p. 4), with the goal of revealing “how environmental issues are being shaped and delivered for debate in the public arena” (p. 5).

As South Florida, along with low lying coastal communities around the United States and the rest of the globe, faces a future certain to include increasing environmental disasters, media will attempt to interpret the decisions and impacts of recovery efforts, which will include where and how to dispose of storm debris. A critical racial approach to environmental communication research provides a set of theoretical tools for making sense of increasingly chaotic social crises with unequal outcomes. It also helps to further refine and define conceptualizations of environmental racism, which as a phenomenon is often so embedded in local history and geographies that it can go unnoticed, and as a result, becomes harder to recognize and expose.

Before proceeding to a discussion of methods and analysis, it must be made clear that the present research is not an argument about whether environmental racism exists; that phenomenon is well documented and not up for debate within this space. The question at hand is how institutional structures (local media and municipal and county governments) do or do not recognize that reality, their role in perpetuating and maintaining racialized geographies and spaces of meaning, and what that says about social struggles emerging out of the disruptions of climate change. These considerations are important as it is already clear that the impacts of a changing planet will not be evenly distributed but will disproportionately impact poor and vulnerable communities.

Methods

This research employs a qualitative approach using critical discourse analysis – characterized as an effort at “demystifying ideologies and power through the systematic investigation of semiotic data” (Wodak, 2013) – and grounded theory (Charmaz, 2014) to both select appropriate articles, create a thematic analysis based on an interpretation of coverage using the theoretical framework outlined above, and answer the following research questions:

RQ1. How did local governments and media outlets either explain or fail to explain the reasons for choosing to place debris in historically black spaces?

RQ2. What impact did the voice of a black community activist leveling charges of environmental racism on social m...