Journal of Environmental Media - Seeing the (In)Justice of Sustainability: Visualizing Inequality at the Centre of Climate Change Communication, Oct 2022

There is urgent need to consider prevailing environmental problems within the larger cultural contexts to effectively progress towards climate change impact reduction. However, national agenda to mollify the climate change rarely frames the crises from the diverse perspectives and experiences that India is home to. Shifting attention from the United Nations’ focus on perpetrators of climate change to climate change victims, this qualitative content analysis uses a constructivist paradigmatic approach to examine the participatory video narratives produced by local media producers in rural India. Based on the levels of analyses for the impact, findings from twenty primary issue videos are thematically presented: individual, family and community, and spatial. The videos depict an intertwined nature of agriculture and environment, and documents agentative social action, transformative collective potential, and present a starting point to catalyse an iterative process of communication that expands our understanding of climate change impact beyond what is portrayed in globally dominant narratives.

This article addresses situated collaborative representations of sustainability within the context of disturbed industrial ecologies in western Almería’s agricultural cluster. The analysis of workers’ understanding of sustainability as a process of interspecies resurgence guides the research, which relates to the use of multimodal tools, specifically ethnographic film, as a way to collaboratively engage with local farmers to explore meaningful sustainability. Despite the centrality of workers and farmers in sustaining economic growth, social equity and environmental protection, they occupy a subordinate place in the design of the agriculture industry’s sustainability assessments. This article suggests that the exclusion of farmers’ knowledge can be reverted through the meaning production of situated alternative sustainability futures, drawing from local knowledge, peasant movements and agroecological agricultural projects. It provides a critical analysis of sustainability as a process of resurgence, through which to attain ontological, biological, economic and political diversity, and it explores the potential and challenges of the use of collaborative film.

In this article, I examine and critique how the current and predicted future impacts of climate change are often reported on through the aesthetics and discourse of war. I argue that the journalistic imperative to witness climate change is important to consider here. Indeed, news images and descriptive accounts of climate change are often privileged for their evidentiary value according to a very strict set of visual criteria shaped by an established definition of what violence and war look like. Through a multimodal analysis of news coverage of the aftermath of Hurricane María across prominent US news magazines, I examine what constitutes compelling evidence of climate change, why and to what end in terms of the types of responses featured and proposed by journalists. Ultimately, my analysis reveals how Puerto Rico is demarcated as a ‘death-world’ across publications, effectively casting Puerto Rico as a ‘purgatory island’ dependent on the help of the United States represented as a saviour.

Despite widespread acceptance amongst researchers, climate change and responses to it remain a socially and politically debated topic. Within cartography and cognate disciplines, this has often been construed as an issue of communication: maps are tools for communication and better maps will lead to greater understanding of and responses to climate change. While existing research has shown some support for the efficacy of such approaches, this article calls into question the underlying assumptions of access and equity that pervade such communicative approaches to mapmaking and data visualization. Two new case studies from the authors’ research group highlight the importance of greater consideration of equity and access for climate change communication cartography (CCCC): first, an experiment on the use of storytelling and narrative in maps of climate impacts and, second, an augmented reality tool that presented users with storm surge information for their region. These two cases lead us to an interrogation of the assumptions that undergird claims for the rhetorical power of using cartographic stories and augmented reality. It is, we argue, somewhat of a luxury to experience climate change through stories, not lived experiences or through augmented reality, as opposed to forced displacement. We conclude by reinterrogating the map communication model in light of understandings of maps as constantly made and remade by both map author and map user. By calling into question the ontogenetic security of maps, CCCC can better understand both the impacts and equities of its maps.

Abstract

This article critiques industrial-scale solar energy development in Puerto Rico as a form of green capitalism that threatens the archipelago’s self-determination. Rather than uncritically embracing supposedly benign ‘green energy’ as necessary for advancing environmental, climate and energy justice, we argue that where, how and with whom this energy transformation takes place is crucial for calling attention to and challenging the continuance of inequitable and unjust power relations. To counter Puerto Rico’s ongoing exploitation as a ‘blank slate’ for development, we visually juxtapose the harms of industrial-scale solar ‘farms’ with distributed on-site, rooftop solar projects organized by grassroots group members in south-eastern Puerto Rico’s Jobos Bay region.

Stock photos are generic, ready-made visual conceptualizations of everyday myths. They have low credibility among audiences, yet they are proliferating in visual communication, including journalistic media. A close reading of one of the dominant visual tropes related to sustainability, a white woman’s hands cupping a young, green plant, suggests that these pre-formatted images contain tacit layers of meaning that are uncritically anthropocentric and accepting of inequalities.

Nonfiction storytellers often aim to capture the truth about inequality, sustainability and other current issues. Joining photojournalist Jason Henry and writer Erik Maza on a visit to Guatemala’s largest landfill, award-winning filmmaker Boaz Dvir attempts to bottle the raw reality of local residents, including dozens of children, ‘rampaging through […] smoke-spewing toxic garbage’. But lacking the ability to record the experience’s olfactory, tactile, and other aspects, he comes to terms with his medium’s shortcomings. He reflects on the nature of reality in a world where the truth is literally and figuratively being eroded on a daily basis. Will he remain hopeful?

In this article we describe the conceptual interactions between climate change adaptation and equity by analysing flooding adaptation strategies commonly used in the United States. We articulate the importance of an equity lens to support a more nuanced understanding of adaptation and inform adaptation strategy design that prioritizes equity as an outcome, rather than an externality. We include an illustration of what adaptation ‘looks’ like when applying an equity lens. We underscore the importance of such a lens for creating effective and just climate adaptation.

Although development is often portrayed through a progressionist lens, the intensification of human activities at a global scale is having significant negative impacts on environments, climate change and human lives around the world. Facing the brunt of these consequences are the most vulnerable communities, which include historically marginalized groups, racial minorities and refugees. This is particularly true in the Global South, where the ideas of modernity and development have been widely adopted under the promises of social and economic ‘progress’. This article challenges these existing narratives and calls on scholars and media practitioners to consider different perspectives in their work.

Responding to a dearth of significant climate policies and the growing risks to coastal communities around the world, Miami artist Xavier Cortada created a socially engaged art project aimed at generating awareness and action around sea level rise – Underwater Homeowners Association (UHOA). The initiative utilizes local elevation data to inform the creation of yard signs and painted street intersections, consequently bringing attention to the area’s vulnerability to rising seas and convening neighbours for monthly meetings. Beyond science communication, UHOA provides a creative approach to developing interdisciplinary partnerships, engaging communities and mobilizing agents of change.

This article examines how documentary film can be employed as visual evidence to create a thick description of environmental injustice among low-social-economic status communities in China. In particular, this article exemplifies the approach with a case study of a 2022 research project on transitional injustice during China’s phase out coal strategy in the case study of Liupanshui, the largest coal mine in southern China since the 1950s. Drawing upon the author’s environmental documentaries that explored the local struggles and sufferings of environmental injustice in China, the article explores how we can examine environmental injustice via a multidisciplinary approach that combines public policy, environmental studies and documentary filmmaking.

Ûiiti (‘the treatment’) is an Android phone app created by artist duo Greenman Muleh Mbillo, in Kenya, and Dani Ploeger, in the Netherlands. The work is a high-tech iteration of the nzevu, a ritual instrument of the Kenyan Akamba tribe. It transforms a smartphone from a networking technology with complex modes of interaction into a technology of transcendence with a minimal user interface. Through a constellation of symbolic imagery and the performance of repetitive sonic patterns, the work aims to evoke a heightened experience of the user’s immediate lifeworld.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is renowned/notorious for campaigns in the name of animal rights that use women’s bodies in sexualized ways, perhaps most notably Pamela Anderson’s. Feminists have both criticized and supported these tropes, while the liberal and conservative bourgeois media alike have generally denounced them. I sketch those debates and offer an additional concern – that the organization’s reformist, consumerist politics invests in plutocratic activism.