Grammars of the Anthropocene

Over the last few years, Max Boykoff’s critiques of climate change media have lit a series of far-reaching rhetorical and empirical fires. The most famous of these conflagrations has been his smouldering challenge to the ways that journalistic communities create the biased false balance when covering controversial, high-stakes topics such as climate change. From this earlier work emerged not only research that waded into the often nauseating morass that is the UK tabloid press and its representations of climate change but also explorations of climate-focused blogs, US television (TV) coverage, even deeper work on journalistic norms and writings specifically on the celebrification of climate contrarians. Most recently, these disparate yet clearly parallel lines of inquiry have morphed into a more holistic investigation of what he calls the ‘cultural politics of climate change’ (Boykoff, 2011). Designed to encapsulate his wider project of critically examining the shifting framings and discourses of climate science as well as shifting cultural and political economic norms of the media, this is exactly where this excellent and clearly written book is situated.

But the book does much more than its wonderful turn-of-phrase title suggests: It is not just about the who that is speaking for the climate but is also fundamentally about how this is being done, to what effects in terms of its meaning- and policymaking, as well as the very what that is being spoken about. In doing this, the book presents a theoretically informed and empirically substantiated description of the ways and means by which the various voices of climate change science – from those of climate scientists, contrarians and sceptics to the journalists themselves, opinion writers and bloggers – and the artefacts of climate science – from hacked emails to hockey stick graphs to the molecules of overly emitted carbon dioxide (CO₂) itself – travel in the media ecologies of the current age. Here, excessive CO₂, and indeed media itself, is brought into being as the kind of ‘vibrant matter’ that Jane Bennett (2010) convincingly wants us to be concerned about. And, while what Bennett might call the ‘vital materiality’ of CO₂ can be rather easily conceptualised in its potential to fundamentally alter the planet as we know it, Boykoff’s remit here is to suggest an equally vital – and thoroughly politically, economically and culturally mediated – materialism of a different kind in the scientific artefacts, discourses and, as specifically articulated in his book, the media representations of climate change.

Thus, one of the significant things Boykoff does is lay bare these (un)stable materialisms in the forms of newspaper articles and headlines, blog posts and TV reporting to show not just the processes of the journalistic and mediated creations of this vibrant climate change reporting, but he works hard to show the politicised power relations embedded in the vital climate change media, that then, invariably, does work on society in crucial ways. And yet more than this – and in a distinctly cultural variant of the ‘follow the thing’s social life’ approach of Ian Cook et al. and Arjun Appadurai – in the book, through multiple vertigo-inducing graphs, charts and word clouds, climate change media is pored over, followed overtime and done so in different cultural spaces through histograms of reportage done in differing national contexts and through differing types of news outlets. In this, the book is specifically concerned with what Barnett et al. (2011) in Globalising Responsibility call the ‘grammars’ of the ‘ethical problematisation’ of climate change. Who Speaks for the Climate? spells out for us the current grammars of the Anthropocene: this is not just a simple portrayal of what voices and things are involved in climate change media representations but rather analysis centres on the particular ways that climate change has been presented to us as a problem (or not), for whom, what to do about all this and how. With a clear analytical eye, Boykoff takes apart and examines the grammatical rules – or boundaries making, whether they be journalistic, scientific, technological or deeply political economic in nature – that construct and present to us these mediated debates. Indeed, how else to explain the distinctive voice that has been given to the supposedly voiceless, downtrodden and oppressed oil companies/Koch Brothers and their paid-for scientific and public relations muses (IFG, 2011)? How else to explain Donald Trumps’ pathetically ill-informed Tweet of April 2013 that reads ‘Another freezing day in Spring – what is going on with “global warming”? Good move changing the name to “climate change” – sad’. And, finally, how else to explain that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and even Fox News (Fox, 2013; News Corporation, 2013) has performed an equally dastardly ‘comb-over’ by working to be carbon neutral when most of News Corp.’s outlets have yet to meet a climate contrarian or sceptic – including The Donald – that they did not like?

But what do we do about these more captured grammars of climate change media representation? In this regard, Boykoff (2011: 78) makes a bold statement: ‘At the end of the day, exposure to more information can help us to understand the world around us and enhance decision-making on climate issues’. And, while I do not necessarily disagree, this statement should be supplemented with more recent work by the likes of Whitmarsh (2011) and others (e.g. Poortinga et al., 2011) that shows the enduring influence that people’s values and existing ideologies have in developing their understandings of climate change and in working to facilitate behavioural change. Indeed, as Whitmarsh (2011: 698) puts it in summarising her research on climate sceptics

… attitudes to climate change are relatively entrenched and … simply providing climate change information is unlikely to be successful, as new information is often interpreted by people in line with their existing attitudes and worldviews … In other words, irrespective of how much information is provided, it is remarkably difficult to change attitudes that have become entrenched.

Rather, what some researchers are suggesting is that information should be tailored to different publics (Poortinga et al., 2011; Whitmarsh, 2011), should focus on engaging with already existing social networks (Corner and Randall, 2011; Hobson and Neimier, 2011), should focus on ‘constructive and motivating messages that highlight the benefits of low-carbon lifestyles’ (Whitmarsh, 2011: 699), but also work to, within those social networks and with individuals, engage the much deeper values in relation to the environment as a whole. Thus, on this latter point, Corner and Randall (2011) not only show the weaknesses of social marketing to promote environmentally friendly behaviour change but – by drawing on the research of Tom Crompton (2010) – suggest that those campaigns that can tap into what are called the ‘self-transcendent’ values of care, responsibility, justice, fairness and respect might not only effect the most and longest lasting behavioural change in individuals but might work to shift the values of the likes of climate sceptics. Still others, such as Douglas Holt (2012), have offered a critique of these ‘values-changing’ strategies to instead put forward a much more broad ‘cultural transformation’ approach that addresses the historicised cultural, political, economic and ideological ‘lock-in’ of unsustainable behaviours. Either way, a broad front is needed in shifting the grammars of the Anthropocene and further information will be but one crucial component.

In addition to more knowledge, information and reporting on climate change, Boykoff makes a more diffuse call for better reporting by journalists as well as better communication by scientists. This calls to mind a series of important questions in the context of the current media climate. First, as the public continues to turn away from newspapers and traditional media outlets, will having better climate change reporting really matter? And yet if it does, what does better reporting mean in a media ecology defined by the ‘fast’ and more ‘shallow’ media of blogs, Facebook and Twitter? Second, what is better communication by scientists? Does a blog count if no one reads it? What does this do to the credibility, authority and voice of science and scientists as they begin to swim more emphatically in the deep end of popular culture? Finally, is this a kind of unfair imposition of responsibility of a series of actors perhaps much less culpable in the political economies and impacts of climate change? Are we asking too much of scientists in a cultural political system defined by vast inequalities of wealth and power where two fabulously rich individuals (i.e. the Koch brothers) have spent, over the last few years alone, US$60 million on funding climate denialist campaigns (IFG, 2013; Pineschi, 2012)?

And, what do we do about the increasingly violent dismissals and denialism of climate science, climate science reporters and even climate scientists themselves? Situated within Moser’s (2007) work on climate representations and affective emotions, I am interested in the growing geographies of hate – and in particular hate mail sent to climate scientists, journalists and others (including Boykoff) – that have perforated these debates and seem to be ever-increasing. Indeed, this rise in hate mail can be similarly plotted against the rise in atmospheric carbon as it also has its peaks and troughs mostly related to mentions of climate change in the United States by the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh; thus, the ‘Beck/Limbaugh effect’ portents a rising tide of hate mail per verbal emission from these two. It is hard for me at least to not see this as a form of intimidation that has its roots in denialist/sceptics’ funding machines that has quickly morphed into what we might think of as ‘climate McCarthyism’. But this is a McCarthyism that is coming not just from the Bards of the powerful – and their astroturfing, sock puppets that George Monbiot (2010, 2013) has appearing in the fevered ‘rantosphere’ of Internet comments – but also the so-called general public and so questions need to be asked about the sociological and geographical profiles of these climate-based hate merchants, again in these new media ecologies. For this reason, the growing work on visceral geographies (e.g. Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010) has a key place in research on the grammars of climate change media.

And so to a final set of questions that arise out of the book: How and in what ways will Boykoff’s (2011: 169) ‘fifth estate’ of the new media ecologies of social media and new media technologies such as Youtube affect/effect climate change communication, debate and representation? Boykoff and others are currently in the throes of this research and so beginning to throw these queries open; I am concerned however with asking much bigger questions in the context of climate change and new/social media. For example, is Twitter’s 140 characters a form of ‘news’ and ‘knowledge’ and if so, how and in what ways? What does it mean that Al Gore has 2.58 million Twitter followers and James Inhofe – one of the US Senate’s key climate change deniers – has a mere 13,000? Or that some of the top climate change bloggers and dedicated environmental organisations like Climate Progress have close to 250,000 followers, while some of the top denialist/uncertainty-ists bloggers have less than one-eighth that number? And even more generally, what are the media ecologies of sustainability much more broadly and are they working to create what Swyngedouw (2010) might call a post-political, popularist consensus? Or, are there times and places they have created the more ‘properly’ political, democratic deliberation he seems to be calling for in climate change politics and beyond? How has and can social media and alternative media ecologies be used to be ‘properly’ political, emphatically progressive and creatively democratic?

Who Speaks for the Climate? is a particularly vibrant and important analysis of the vibrant and important social life of climate science – and by proxy that of the excessive CO₂ emissions that underpin global economies – that tells us not just about the state of and how to make sense of media reporting on climate change, but the very state of the liberal democracy that invariably depends on a functioning and critical media in a climate-changed world. This book, and Boykoff’s wider work, has, in my estimation at least, fundamentally challenged but also fundamentally changed how critical scholars look at and understand what I have called here the grammars of the Anthropocene in the media representations of climate change and the cultural economies they co-produce. These are changes and challenges that we would be wise to heed and, indeed, build on in efforts to shift the material political economic grammars that underpin contemporary societies towards those that provide the fertile ground for the germination of more fulsome, expansive and just forms of sustainability.