Catalan Journal of Communication & Cultural Studies - Beyond Climate Change Information: Communicating the Anthropocene, Oct 2023

The power gaps nested in the political ecology of socioenvironmental conflicts often impose critical impasses on the attainment of justice. Therefore, negotiation is accepted as an alternate tool for environmental justice, especially to avoid the prolonged sufferings linked to uneven power relations between conflicting parties, unpredictable outcomes, mounting expenses and the time taken to get a decision through formal judicial trials or arbitrations. Against this backdrop, the American movie Erin Brockovich is selected to highlight the importance of negotiation as a tool to mitigate environmental conflicts. The movie presents how an ordinary woman, who has many blemishes and liabilities, transcends personal limitations to accomplish appreciable socioenvironmental justice through grassroots mobilization and negotiation. Using close study interpretive methods, the movie Erin Brockovich is analysed as a case study in environmental leadership, distributive negotiation and procedural justice.

The scientific consensus on the existence, the human origin, the seriousness of the consequences and the urgency of adopting immediate solutions to climate change is growing, as successive reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have shown. The alteration of global climate patterns experienced in recent years confirms the worst prediction models, and yet there are still voices that question these facts. This study proposes to examine the interpretative frameworks underpinning public discussion of climate denialism on the online video platform YouTube. To this end, it presents an analysis of the 50 most popular videos under the label of climate denialism in Spanish, paying attention to the key issues and figures on which the denialist ideology is articulated and the attitude of support, neutrality or rejection on the part of those responsible for the content. The results obtained show the generalized rejection of the denialist discourse among Spanish-speaking content creators, who resort to experienced sources and contrasted resources to refute these arguments, as well as the politicization of scientific knowledge in terms of debate, uncertainty, mistrust and lack of commitment to deal with the consequences.

Greta Thunberg pushed forward a new collective action frame for the climate movement with the necessary resonance to mobilize millions of people. However, the coronavirus outbreak forced Thunberg to adjust her strategy in an abrupt way, and the resonance of the activist’s frame decreased after achieving its peak in 2019. How has Thunberg’s frame evolved before, during and after the pandemic? Can we attribute the loss of resonance to a failed frame adaptation? This article studies the composition and resonance of the Swedish activist’s frame on Twitter between August 2018 and December 2022, making use of a methodological design that combines qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse 61 public interventions and 1692 tweets. The results show that, despite adapting successfully to the pandemic, the loss of the core elements of the original frame provoked a misalignment between her framing strategy and her storytelling, which reduced Thunberg’s ability to provide resonance.

The Anthropocene, marked by significant anthropogenic impacts on a global scale, demands a completely new paradigm regarding the human-Earth alliance. It would not manifest as a more inclusive, culturally diverse, and holistic approach to the world, but rather at a seemingly one-world scale. The singularity of one-world universalism is rooted in the principle of human exceptionalism – the notion that humanity is at the centre of everything – even down to claims of structural determination on geological timescales. Our epistemological conservative view is that lifeworld is limited to existing as an ecological living space and the Earth is fixed as a mere background of our world-dwelling. At the same time, the Earth is silently yet progressively moving towards a crisis of uncertainty. Against a grand narrative of western universal assumptions in defining the Anthropocene, this article initially restructures the metanarrative by characterizing a proposal: a multiple-realization beyond speculative hermeneutics capable of fostering pluriversalization of reality layers at the geological constellation. This proposed concept explores the intersection of the geo(pluriverse)logical Anthropocene by acknowledging the interdependence and multiplication of realities, while appreciating and preserving the existence of many worlds alongside our precious Earth. It highlights the distinction between the realization of the Anthropocene in two contexts: the world and the Earth.

Modern law is based in the existence of a constitutional order, guaranteeing the predictability of law. Since we are entering in new geological era, according to the contributions of Earth System Science, defined mostly by complexity and uncertainty, this hegemonic idea of order in law is challenged. This contribution explores how constitutional order was linked to the process of colonization of nature within the capitalist world system and how this process results into a planetary transformation. Discussing the Faustic expectations embedded in the some Anthropocene narratives, associated with the human manipulation of Earth System, the paper considers the profound consequences of the complexity of the intertwined ecosocial global system, and explores how supercomplexity gives way to a legal disorder which resolves itself into conflict and dialog.