Contesting Coal, Contesting Climate: Materializing the Social Drama of Climate Change in Australia and Germany

ABSTRACT

A key challenge for climate communication is to materialize the climate crisis experientially and create an embedded climate politics which targets the causes of climate change at source. Since 2009, the climate movement has sought to keep coal, the principle contributor to global heating, in the ground, confronting the entrenched power of the coal-industrial complex at the places where it is extracted. This article analyzes data from extended ethnographic research at two such sites, on the Liverpool Plains in Australia and the Lausitz (Lusatia) in Eastern Germany. In both locations, farmers, villagers, citizens’ initiatives, Indigenous groups, and climate activists engaged in a process of “strategic communing” in a shared struggle to protect their homes, fields, and forests from coal mining. I focus on the shared narratives which emerged from this process and analyze them applying Smith and Howe’s concept of climate change as “social drama.” This analysis reveals how small-scale struggles against coal mining, and the scripts or storylines employed by different actors, can make the sites of struggle morally meaningful in the drama of climate change. Such struggles, I argue, are themselves an important theater in which the global risk of climate change is staged. They foster solidarity between different actors and allow the emergence of exemplary narratives, “shared storylines” of resistance to the fossil-fuel economy and agitation for climate action.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• coal
• social drama
• climate communication
• protest
• place
• climate movement

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 A notable exception is the article by Dahlin and Fredriksson (2017) cited immediately below.

2 My colleague, anthropologist Katja Műller and I, reflected on the methodological challenges and benefits of this approach and its specific application to research on climate and energy issues in a previous scholarly publication (Műller & Morton, 2018).

3 Cf Hajer & Versteeg (2005): “Discourse” is defined here as an ensemble of ideas, concepts and categories through which meaning is given to social and physical phenomena, and which is produced and reproduced through an identifiable set of practices. […] Discourse analysis illuminates a particular discursive structure […] for interpretative environmental policy research, it is not an environmental phenomenon in itself that is important, but the way in which society makes sense of this phenomenon. [175–176]

4 LEAG is owned by the Czech company EPH, which acquired all of Vattenfall’s coal assets in 2016.

 

Additional information

Funding

The funding on which this research was based was supported by the Australian Research Council under Discovery Project Grant DP140102606. The Coal Rush and Beyond: Climate Change, Coal Reliance and Contested Futures.