by Nils Lindahl Elliot

Note: the following is the introduction to an essay that can be accessed at the Centre for Media, Culture & Environmental Education (cmcee.org). The link appears at the end of this excerpt.

Abstract

During the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit of 2009, world leaders were unable to arrive at a critical consensus regarding legislation for a drastic reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases. In the wake of what one environmental activist described as the ‘infamy’ of a failed summit, it is easy to blame an unholy alliance of vested corporate interests and weak, if not corrupt, politicians. This essay makes the case that environmental activists should be equally if not more concerned with the role played by media institutions that, on the face of it, are the advocates of the changes required to prevent catastrophic climate change. The institutions in question are what are commonly described as liberal, progressive, or at least environmentally-aware media whose editors, producers and journalists have spent the last five or more years explaining the risks of anthropogenic climate change. Unfortunately, the institutions’ political economy remains rooted in the very culture of consumption that is arguably the engine of the runaway emission of greenhouse gases. Until this contradiction is addressed, such media are likely to continue to aid and abet the untrammelled emission of greenhouse gases.

Introduction

As I write this essay the consequences of the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit of December 2009 are being digested, analysed, and spun. Many environmental activists suggest that the United States was responsible for the failure to arrive at a binding accord.  For their part, the U.S. and its British ally are blaming China, Sudan, Bolivia and ‘other left-wing Latin American countries’ for trying to ‘hijack’ the summit.

In the absence of a binding accord, many environmental activists are going back to the proverbial drawing board, wondering what, if anything, can be done to reverse what they rightly regard as a political disaster. For example, George Monbiot has suggested that ‘One of the failings of the people who have tried to mobilise support for a climate treaty is that we have made the issue too complicated.’  Days after the end of the summit, Johann Hari, a columnist for the Independent newspaper, echoed this view when he spelled out the consequences of Copenhagen in explicitly didactical terms and even suggested that publics now need to

‘take collective action. For some people, that will mean joining Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth or the Campaign Against Climate Change and helping them pile on the pressure. But those who can go further – by taking non-violent direct action – should do so. Every coal train should be ringed with people refusing to let it pass. Every new runway should be blockaded. The cost of trashing the climate needs to be raised.’

In this essay I want to argue that, while clearer and more radical accounts may be helpful, they are unlikely to have the desired effect unless a more fundamental issue is addressed: the ongoing pedagogy of consumer culture, a pedagogy which continues to be produced and reproduced by some of the very media that have been the most sympathetic to environmental activists such as Monbiot. The pedagogy in question is not an explicit one, in the way that a school teacher’s might be, or indeed in the way that Johann Hari’s was when he spelled out the consequences of failing to act now on climate change. Instead, it involves what I describe as a nonformal mode of pedagogic practice, one which can be defined by way of a paradox: the nonformal mode is one in which nothing is taught or learned, but something is still taught and learned. By this I mean that nothing is deliberately taught, nothing is consciously learned, but some meaning is still conveyed that is not only received, but may be silently appropriated and made the own.

This kind of pedagogic mode can be exemplified by way of the fact that parents teach their children far more than they (the parents or the children) realise: mannerisms or ways of speaking, personal rhythms, ideologies, etc. Referring to an equivalent process on the level of societies, sociologists often describe this phenomenon by way of the concept of cultural reproduction. For their part, psychoanalysts may approach the matter from the perspective of the unconscious. While the nonformal pedagogies are certainly key to cultural reproduction, and while they may of course involve the unconscious (personal or collective), I find it more useful to focus on a pedagogic process (i.e. a dynamic of teaching and learning) which involves what the anthropologist and historian Michel de Certeau once described as unselfconscious practices.  When the matter is approached from this perspective, it becomes both very concrete—in a way that talk of ‘cultural reproduction’ frequently is not—and susceptible to at least some change within a reasonable time frame: in other words, environmental campaigners and sympathetic journalists need not put the population on the couch for ten or more years. To be sure, nobody is above or beyond the kind of pedagogic dynamic I have just alluded to: we all communicate far more than we realise when we speak and when we act, and we are all constantly appropriating more meanings than we realise. The meanings of our words and actions are never exclusively what we intend them to be, and we respond, whether we like it or not, to all manner of tacit cues. We are all forced, in this sense, to own up to what one philosopher once described as a ‘surplus’ of meaning.

Back to Copenhagen: at a time when there is a consensus, at least amongst environmental activists, as to who is most responsible for the summit’s failure, I want to focus on a set of nonformal pedagogic practices that have tended to escape critical analysis, and which involve the practices of what are often described as the liberal, progressive, or at least the more environmentally-aware media, most of whose editors, writers or producers not only accept the science regarding anthropogenic climate change, but have actively sought to educate their audiences about the environmental risks involved. Many have also suggested what kind of lifestyle changes will be required to stop so-called ‘catastrophic’ climate change.

As an example, I would point to the practices of the Guardian newspaper, which, at the beginning of the Copenhagen summit, published a joint, front-page editorial with over 50 worldwide newspapers in which it noted, amongst other things, that

‘…climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year’s inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.’

Welcome as such editorials are on one level, I want to suggest that, so long as the rest of the Guardian’s (and other similarly inclined media’s) communications continue to engage in business as usual—promoting travel, advertising fuel-thirsty vehicles, or consumer culture more generally—then their stance regarding climate change will be a profoundly contradictory one.

This much is probably rather obvious to anyone who has thought about the matter. Perhaps somewhat more controversially, I will also argue that, if it is true that, as the Guardian editorial suggests, ‘the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted’, then the media’s failure to address the aforementioned contradiction is at least partly to blame for such a response. I will suggest that, in a variety of ways and levels, media on both the right and the left of the political spectrum continue to produce representations which either encourage their audiences to engage in the very practices that must now stop, or at least, generate a kind of parallel universe in which it is possible to continue consumerly business as usual even as one grows more and more concerned about climate change.

To access the full essay, including its references, please go to the Writings page at cmcee.org.

© Copyright 2010 Nils Lindahl Elliot All Rights Reserved