Environmental Themes in Popular Narratives

Over the past decade, environmental themes, such as climate change and loss of biodiversity, have occupied significant space in narratives that circulate through legacy media as well as other popular channels such as online and mobile platforms, museums, films and literature. Environmental issues are de facto entangled with the politics and discourses of globalization, and such narratives are increasingly networked, connected and homogenized, multiplied and diversified. Popular narratives constitute powerful tools that shape the sociocultural context of environmental change, influence policymaking and inform public understanding to considerable degrees. Narratives portraying future scenarios and environmental transformations are used and remediated through a multitude of popular communication venues.

This special collection of articles explores various constructions of the environment and environmental change mediated through virtual sites and thematic constructions in different popular venues, providing an account of how we imagine and reproduce ideas of the environment. We take popular communication here to include the entire “grammar, syntax, and vocabulary of everyday life” (Burkart & Christensen, 2013, p. 3) expressed in literature, media, film, social movements and other performances and speech acts.

Several cross-cutting lenses are instrumental in seeking to grasp the complexities of how environmental themes travel through popular sites. A space-specific approach can help reveal the significance of space in considering environmental imaginaries. The actual and virtual sites and locales (e.g. museums, electronic media space, literature, film, music, archives, etc.) where narrative interventions materialize constitute spaces of narrativity. Narrated space (such as “the ocean” in a broad, and “the Arctic” or “the Ozone layer” in specific senses) signifies the site of environmental transformation. In the case of cinema, for example, this “territorial ontology that underlies the world of any film” (Ivakhev, 2013) emerges as a result of complex, multi-actor production choices and the viewers’ own implicit understandings and perception, while appearing as “given”.

Due to both the networked nature of planetary scales (e.g. the Great Barrier Reef and the Arctic both being local/ized sites of global significance and human and non-human flows) and transmedial flows in today’s convergent media landscapes, a scalar conception that emphasizes the notion of scalar transcendence (Christensen, 2013) helps to further think of the actual-virtual sites and (re)mediated reach of environmental narratives and framings. The contributions to this special collection explore different narrative spaces and scales in popular science writing, zombie fiction, popular music, social media, and news media.

News, media and the environment

The news media, as one powerful popular communication site, have historically constructed environmental damage mostly on the basis of sensational scenarios. It is difficult for consumers to discern the extent of so-called slow violence such as the consequences of escalating global warming in these imaged and narrated disasters (Nixon, 2011). Journalism and journalistic discourses play a crucial role in framing environmental issues not only through narratives, but in how media institutions, as stakeholders themselves, are tightly enmeshed with and weigh in globalization and commercialization processes and governance. Embedded in framing on the whole, be it of news or scholarly analysis, is a significant form of storytelling power. How that power is used can have both far-reaching and localized consequences. Frames can define the acceptable parameters of public debate and demarcate who does (or does not) have voice (Nisbet & Newman, 2015; Hansen, 2011). Communicating expert knowledge on environmental issues is no simple matter either (cf. Nisbet, 2009), with various barriers always present. Bias and tone of reporting are often problems in the tabloid, partisan and sensationalist media (cf. Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004; Revkin, 2007) that reach wide readership.

By contrast, “prestige” media or quality press might have historically had more focused human resources, such as environmental desks and journalists for specialized reporting on science and environment, but they reach a limited —though influential— audience. The audience/user segment they reach has been getting narrower in the current milieu, where social media are used more extensively for news consumption. Coverage of environmental issues in a manner that reflects the views of the scientific community presents another challenge, and trends vary nationally depending on journalistic norms of balance and objectivity. Partisanship, bias and “balanced news” (Boykoff & Boykoff, 2004), particularly in the case of the US media, lead to misrepresentation of both scientific findings and the level of consensus within the scientific community.

A good example of this is the framing of the issue of climate change as one of a scientific split of opinion over the decades when scientific studies have suggested otherwise. A recent survey¹ conducted in the UK, for instance, indicate that only 16% of those asked hold the opinion that “almost all” climate scientists “believe that climate change is mainly the result of human activities.” The figure is 45% when the same question is posed as “a majority of” climate scientists believe that climate change is human induced. Yet, as a recent scholarly study demonstrates, the view that Anthropogenic global warming exists is shared by 90–100% of all publishing climate scientists: results consistent with earlier studies by leading scholars such as Cook et al. (2016). While the formation of public opinion is not solely linked with mediated narratives, figures from similar public opinion surveys on climate change in the US can be similarly worrying and indicative of other dynamics.

Construction and circulation of narratives are intrinsically linked with polarization of politics, which has intensified on both sides of the Atlantic during our current decade, and the polarization of the media environment. Environmental communication, especially within the US context, has been increasingly entangled with a “post-truth” politics —or alternative facts— where we witness frequent and flagrant abuses of facts and widely mediated truth claims with policy consequences. The involvement of scientific expertise in global policymaking is often truncated by politicized national advisory systems and lobbying as well as oversight of the scope and scale of environmental degradation. Such discrepant sense-making by different people and groups motivates closer analysis of environmental narratives (Hulme, 2009; Oreskes & Conway, 2010) and news media certainly are not the only popular sites to be considered here.

From literary narratives to film and music

Different forms of communication each have their own history of engaging with environmental themes. In literature, while there is a long and multifarious tradition of nature writing, the beginnings of environmental literature in a modern, Western sense is often attributed to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, published in 1962. Still today, Carson’s narrative captures at least three central characteristics in and of environmental literature. First, the silent spring Carson describes in the fictitious first chapter of her book both draws on and exemplifies the tradition of pastoral nature writing. The tradition of lyrical descriptions of the natural world continues to be an important theme in environmental literature. Second, with the exception of the first chapter, Silent Spring is non-fiction and science oriented, foreshadowing many later environmental non-fiction books (and films) that aim to draw public attention to various environmental concerns, such as This Changes Everything (Klein, 2014) and Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes & Conway, 2010), both acclaimed accounts of climate change science and its societal and political impacts and implications. Third, Silent Spring in a powerful way introduced the notion of imperceptible but real environmental risk to a broad Western audience, especially regarding how invisible pollutants and toxins can make their way into natural environments and further into human homes and bodies.

In recent decades, environmental risk in its associations with climate change has grown into an increasingly prominent theme in environmental literature, resulting in a specific literary genre – so-called climate change fiction, or cli-fi for short. However, while Silent Spring arguably succeeded in its attempt to make invisible but potentially toxic substances imaginable and thereby eventually restricted, much contemporary environmental literature – just like film and electronic media – struggle with the representational challenges of global environmental change. For example, many climate change novels are set far in the future, in a dystopian or post-apocalyptic setting, reflecting the prevalence of apocalypse as a major theme in environmental literature (Johns-Putra, 2016; Garrard, 2001). Meanwhile, cinema is similarly torn between spectacular and escapist tropes of industrial and nature spaces (to the extent to which they can be separated), and a tendency toward apocalyptic visions in films that use climate change as their main narrative strand is discernable.

Drama, spectacle and apocalypse are thus prominent features in popular environmental narratives. In film and television, a similar distinction to that between nature writing and environmental literature can be seen between traditional nature films and alarmist environmental documentaries. However, as environmental concerns are becoming increasingly global and encompassing, this distinction is disappearing as nature films unaccompanied by an environmental message are becoming rare. Simultaneously, the difficulties and challenges of representing the complexities of anthropogenic environmental change, including slow violence and delayed effects as detailed by Rob Nixon (2011), are increasingly noticeable and problematic. Connected to this is the question of which kinds of narratives lead to action or behavioural change. While dystopian narratives tend to get considerable space in popular narratives about climatic change, dystopian images do not necessarily induce a will to act in the viewer see e.g. (Lidström & Åberg, 2016).

The role of language in shaping perceptions and understanding goes beyond literary texts and is recognized in studies of how organizations communicate both their own identities and claims of legitimacy related to narratives of change (Gabriel, 2004). Here there is also a tension between dystopian environmental narratives of irreversible change and those of restorative processes, such as the coercive measures to implement environmental legislation, routines and practices to reduce harmful substances, as in the example of the ozone layer. As Grevsmühl (this issue) notes, the notion of an ozone hole is one example of a “metaphorical, visual and imaginary construction”. It originates back to astronomical studies and was only later formulated as a metaphor signifying an environmental threat.

Some environmental narratives thus take dystopian forms, while other narratives of transformation are signified by progressive change and an environmental innovation agenda. The intersection of these narratives recognizes that change is not only about the speed of transformation, but also entails assumptions and narratives about the directionality of change and user perspectives (Stirling, 2011; Larsen & Höjer, 2007). Analysis of metaphors and narratives can help to sharpen divergent disciplinary understandings of societal transitions at different time scales. A historical perspective on metaphors complements the use of metaphors as filters of reality or how they are interpreted in a more literal sense to capture how “metaphorical landscapes shift over time”, as argued in Grevsmühl’s (this issue) article about the ozone hole.

On the whole, stories, imagery, and tools such as metaphors and metonyms communicate visions and scenarios that engage with users, readers and audiences in complex ways. Narratives and other processes that make sense of environmental transformation are tightly linked. How stories are told, content is covered and framed, and cases are made play significantly into how information reaches the public and potentially influences opinion formation and policymaking (Nisbet, et al., 2003). What is foregrounded in politics and policy circles, in return, influences news agendas and other mediated narratives. As we note elsewhere (Christensen, Nilsson, & Wormbs, 2013), the heightened significance of mediated information makes the narration of environmental change increasingly relevant across the disciplines of humanities and social sciences as well as environmental sciences.

In the opening interview essay “Slow Violence in the Anthropocene” by Christensen, the interviewee Rob Nixon suggests that it is difficult to discern the extent of slow violence such as the consequences of escalating global warming in the mediated image and narrative disasters that the public encounters on a day to day basis. One purpose of this interview essay is to foreground the analytical framework that Nixon sees as crucial in order to reveal the unrecognized forms of violence in globally marginalized places and their populations. The essay addresses, from an historical perspective, the key paradigms which have governed the way we have understood and narrated environmental change in popular and academic discourses as well as some of the key conceptual tropes we have utilized in this special collection. The conversation, as presented in the text, points to the linkages between certain fields of research such as environmental humanities and media and communication studies.

In the following article entitled “Sea-Level Rise in Public Science Writing: History, Science and Reductionism”, Susanna Lidström provides a two-level critique of how sea-level rise has been framed in literary works. One line of critique concerns the fact that this phenomenon is often framed as a feature of natural variation rather than one of anthropogenic change. In such framings, geological dynamics are underscored while “the social” is absent or on the sidelines. Lidström’s second account of critique has to do with the decontextualized nature of these narratives and how they seek to amplify fast-paced change rather than emphasizing the significance of slow or incremental change. The author considers stories such as those of flash-floods to be examples of climate reductionism and suggests that such narrativity depoliticizes sea-level rise and hinders public understanding rather than informs it.

As Ulrika Olausson observes, climate reporting declined in Sweden in 2016. Instead the attention shifted toward the perils of meat consumption for the climate. “Stop Blaming the Cows!”: How Livestock Production is Legitimized in Everyday Discourse on Facebook” is a detailed and engaging scrutiny of how social media representations polarize livestock production by positing them as environmentally good or bad. The author discusses the links between the dominant national ideologies and the legitimization of livestock production as well as the role of social media in providing counter narratives in our current post-politicization milieu where environmental issues are publicly debated in a multitude of popular communication venues. Taking the internet as a “discursive bridge”, Olausson shows us how air travel and livestock-dairy production are widely singled out and shared as negative factors contributing to climate impacts and how the latter is reproduced in legitimizing representations.

Patrick Murphy in “Lessons from the Zombie Apocalypse in Global Popular Culture: An Environmental Discourse Approach to the Walking Dead” turns our attention to a common feature in various popular culture genres on a global scale: the zombie apocalypse. Through an analysis of environmental discourses embedded in zombie narratives, Murphy discusses how the allegorical figure of the zombie has been associated with resource depletion, ecological disasters and “post-event life” on the planet. Such widely circulated storytelling reveals how environmental fears seep into popular fiction and how planetary futures and possible solutions are imagined. While a figure of Western genres used as a vehicle of narrating Western fears, the zombie has global purchase and further embodies the fear of the vulnerability of the Western safe zones which can be easily breached and trespassed by viruses and ultimately man-made monsters.

In the following article, Josh Wodak turns our attention from zombies to the narrative power he sees as inherent in popular music. In “Shifting Baselines: Conveying Climate Change in Popular Music”, the author terms popular music a “generation-specific zeitgeist” and suggests that music affords otherwise unobtainable engagement with environmental themes” while its links with climate change remain understudied. Wodak makes a noteworthy a distinction between conveying versus communicating climate change. In this account, which draws upon the framework of shifting baselines, we are presented with an intriguing idea of thinking of popular music as a soundtrack to rapidly unfolding biophysical change. As the authors observes, despite the fact that there is a large volume of literature on music in various disciplines and on climate change in aesthetic and cultural scholarship, the two are rarely considered together.

Last but certainly not least, in “Revisiting the “Ozone Hole” Metaphor: From Observational Window to Global Environmental Threat”, Sebastian Vincent Grevsmühl takes us back to 1985 when the “ozone hole” made a global splash in media stories of environmental risks. As we noted earlier, this article underlines the significance and influence of the mass mediations of environmental metaphors. The ozone hole made the headlines at a time when visualizing climate change and environmental threats —unless those could be linked to natural disasters— was a challenge for journalists. Taking metaphors as “historical objects of study”, Grevsmühl traces the ozone hole back to the turn of the 20^th century and analyzes the interactions between scientific images and metaphorical framings.

All together, the articles constituting this special collection represent a cross-section of different media forms, with different contextual relations to narratives of the environment.

Final remarks

The aim of this special collection of articles has been to explore a number of prominent environmental narratives conceived and reproduced in different venues. Popular communication narratives, taken as a whole in their variety and scales of reach, do not only provide frames within which audiences can relate to environmental impacts and policies, but can also impact formulations of future scenarios and policies themselves. Environmental narratives are also continuously reconfigured as they travel across borders and regions and diverse media and sites of narrativity. This, in return, calls for interdisciplinary dialogue and “integrative thinking” (Christensen & Nilsson, in press).

As an example and a final thought to point to future research horizons, we would like to note that to date, surprisingly little exchange between ecocritical and media studies has taken place — a crossover that seems especially pertinent considering both legacy and social media attention to environmental change and concerns. One area that could profit from such crossovers is the study of affect, which is a crucial concept for thinking about narratives and narrativity vis-à-vis questions of embodiment and action. Within film and media studies, cognitive research has been used in order to understand the complexities of affect and embodiment. However, while the question of “narratives provoking action in a subject” as theme of inquiry is deeply entrenched within environmental humanities and eco-criticism, very little of cognitive research has been employed in those fields (Weik von Mossner, 2017). In view of the degree to which popular narratives can inform values and citizen or policy action, the study of affect could be considered as one of the central aspects in research agendas that aim to understand the relation between popular communication and societal change. Similarly, while there is some research on the conceptualization of future technologies in science fiction, this research has mainly focused on popular culture forms such as film and literature, but has rarely connected to fields of science and technology studies or organizational studies as areas where contemporary strategies, visions and policies for future technologies and energy alternatives are drawn up. In sum, at a time when media and popular channels of communication from social media and mobile platforms to books, web TV and music permeate our daily lives and influence our impressions of environmental change at profound cognitive and affective levels, continued scrutiny of the complex questions and challenges we face is clearly needed. The current special collection of articles is but one step in that direction.

Notes

1. http://www.comres.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/ECIU_Energy-and-Climate-Change-Survey_29092015.pdf