“Our dilemma is like that of a plane hurtling through the fog without map or instruments.”
We march ahead, our heads held high, beating our steps to the rhythm of machines and algorithms, led by bordered notions of progress and development, leaving a trail of a phenomenon the impact of which is massively distributed in time and space across the planet. Climate change can be categorized as a ‘Hyperobject’ according to Timothy Morton alongside big words like capitalism and neoliberalism. The scale of impact is so big and vast that it is beyond human imagination.
The 21st century with its visibly glamourous cities, superfast transport has become radically interconnected, interdependent, and communicated in the formations and flow of media. We have new weapons, new satellites, and new ways of conquering space. This same world also spawns proliferating, often interpenetrating, “global crises”. From climate change to war on terror, financial meltdowns to forced migrations, pandemics to world poverty, and humanitarian disasters to the denial of human rights, these represent the dark side of our globalized planet. Their origins and outcomes are not confined behind national borders and they are best not conceived through national prisms of understanding.
Global capital acts like an invisible agent that causes havoc wherever it lays its web on. One of its most long lasting effects, climate change has become a public issue analyzed by scientists, discussed by politicians on different local, national and international levels, claimed by NGOs, supported by celebrities or contested or used a marketing tool by industrial branches and economy.
The intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) has predicted that extreme weather events such as flooding, droughts, storms and heatwaves have increased in intensity and frequency over many land areas. To understand and approximate the level of damage that is being done, it has been constructed on the basis of physics, chemistry and big data. With increasing computing power, climate modelers have generated increasingly large simulation data sets. To represent such magnitude and scale of data related to sporadic events diffused around the earth is the challenge for the new media.
For instance, By 2050, according to an estimate based on mid- range scenarios, volume of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reach 500 ppm, upto 200 million people are expected to get displaced and between 15 and 37 percent of the world’s terrestrial fauna are committed to extinction. Energy Transition, in releasing urban atmospheric carbon from the use of fossil fuels, has unbalanced the global carbon cycle. Although the nature of the problem is ‘global’ and there have been inter-governmental talks and pacts like the Paris Agreement and the Kyoto protocol around the issue, it’s the less developed countries and vulnerable communities that will endure the most immediate and severe impacts even though they are the least responsible for producing greenhouse gases. Invisible to the people not directly affected by it, this is called slow violence — violence of delayed destruction that occurs gradually and out of sight. To focus on a specific region, countries like India and Bangladesh are very susceptible to droughts and floods respectively. Arundhati Roy, an activist and writer says –
“I think of globalization like a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the rest are in darkness, wiped out. They simply can’t be seen. Once you get used to not seeing something, then slowly, it’s no longer possible to see it.”
Vandana Shiva, scholar and activist also commented —
“The ‘global’ in the dominant discourse is the political space in which a particular dominant local seeks global control, and frees itself of local, national and international constraints. The global does not represent the universal human interest, it represents a particular local and parochial interest which has been globalized through the scope of its reach. The seven post powerful countries — G7, dictate global affairs, but the interests that guide them remain narrow, local and parochial.”
We live in the age of ‘capitalocene’, a term coined by writer Jason W. Moore. Multi-national corporations with their immense corporate carbon footprint are blamed for the way of life they have generated for humans in the cities — ‘anthroposphere’ — a zone of urbanized living. The impact of this metabolism is complex and profound. It is a new reality which determines future of life on earth.
Media spaces are the primary symbolic and information battle grounds in which the epistemology of this condition is debated, even as the physical world changes. With digitalization, urbanization and modernization, individuals are existing in their own shell (filter bubble), stuck onto their handheld devices. Virtual world has caused people to live in a kind of mediated, hybrid reality. Emergence of a transnational public sphere (Fraser, 2007) supported by digital communication infrastructures is a key feature of social movements and formal political systems. In this context, nuclear disasters, oil spills, toxic chemicals leaks, tsunamis, earthquakes, super storms, floods, bushfires, extreme heat waves and famine function as fodder for spectacular “disruptive media events” and “disaster marathons” transmitted to distant audiences consuming online, broadcast and print media.
But the general orientation of the mass media continues to inhibit, dilute and probably confuse the clarity of understanding needed to tackle climate change. Whether based on professional awareness and culture of shared concern or the political economy of media ratings, readers and revenue, section of mainstream media now often dramatize and spectacularise climate change as an impending peril. Media representations are offered within a prevailing sea of content that sends very different messages blaming one country or another. The scale and hysterical tone of the arguments is unprecedented.
In such a hypermediated space, the question now more than ever comes up is how we as individuals and groups understand reality of the objective world around us, how we understand past, present and therefore work towards the future. Baudrillard’s theory of simulated reality caused by the powers of media is allied to the theory of the commodity in which according to Marx ‘relations between people appear in the fantastical guise of relations between objects’. In the contemporary world, the loss of ability to give meaning to reality is also the product of psychic protection, the desire of the individual not to put himself at risk by exposing himself to the stimulus of a reality he can no longer interpret. The individual is going through a kind of collective, social mechanism of splitting. The spectator self is morally disengaged, floating about in an ocean of violent images. The actor self is caught up in a reality whose violence is often morally overwhelming.
Films and documentaries
Within the visual media, the role of film (both fiction and documentary) in motivating viewers to raise awareness and lobby politicians about climate change, and to make behavioral changes to reduce their carbon emissions is noteworthy. Film has become an alternate tool for science communication, especially in this case where high stakes, diverse values, and politics intertwine with the science produced and communicated to the publics. Here ‘publics’ is used to emphasize an active audience that is heterogeneous, interpreting its messages in numerous different ways.
Historical climatology is the use of documentary evidence for the reconstruction of past climate. The trends of climatic variability may be beyond the threshold of human perception over the course of a lifetime, documentary as a form is used to record it in the best possible way. They are what they are because they make particular claims about specific sociohistorical world and explore the idea of truth in all its variable meanings. As a philosophical concept, truth can be defined as simply as agreement with facts. Legal scholar Richard Sherwin postulates the variations of factual truth, higher truth and symbolic truth. We assume that a certain reality exists prior to filmmaking process.
According to the way the reality is presented and the form it takes, the aesthetics and style of the director, documentary can be categorized into four prototypes: the authoritative, the observational, the dramatized and the poetic reflexive. (Bill Nichols (2001), Carl Plantinga (1997). Many documentaries combine elements from different prototypes, but in all of them narrative and emotional dimensions play a crucial role, even though for instance the authoritative prototype is mostly based on arguments and rhetoric, the observational on very loose and sequential structures and the poetic reflexive often on more abstract visual associations and patterns.
The rhetorical form has a story with some kind of argument inside. They seek to argue, prove, demonstrate and convince the audience about a particular point. (Nichols, 2001) We expect them to tell us something about reality that has a quality of truth and authenticity. But that said, we do know as spectators, and all theories about documentary genres confirm that documentaries use all kinds of communicative strategies and they appeal not only to reason, but also to feelings and the more sensual dimensions of our reality. Bordwell and Thomson (2001) define four basic attributes for rhetorical form documentary film: (1) It addresses the viewer openly, (2) Subject of the film is more a matter of an opinion than an issue of scientific truth, (3) Filmmaker appeals to our emotions, and (4) Film often persuades the viewer to make choices that have an effect on everyday life.
On this topic, there are two predominant schools of thought with regard to the human perceptibility. On the one side, the invisibilists assume climatic change to be undetectable to the lay observer and invisible to the naked eye. They argue that local understandings of climate change are the product of the dissemination of climatic information via scientific, technical or institutional networks (e.g. through mass media or workshops) rather than based on actual observations (Mormont and Dasnoy 1995). In contrast, the visibilists claim that the effects of anthropogenic climate change are visible and have already been reported by local people worldwide. For these scholars, climate change can be tracked based on personal experience (Howe and Leiserowitz 2013; Weber et al. 2013). Meanwhile, a third school of thought is emerging with the argument that local reports of climate change reflect a combination of both observation and reception of climate information. This third claim, coined constructive visibilism, assumes climate change not to be inherently visible or invisible, but made visible through its tangible features and/or external knowledge of it (Marin & Berkes 2012).
List of films made in the recent years all over the world have been as diverse and contradictory as the topic. Some blow it up and simplify it, some deny and others have complicated wordings. For example, Franny Armstrong’s Age of the stupid, Drowned Out, An Inconvenient Truth, Before the Flood (2016), Home (2009), Chasing Ice and the big wildlife film industry — BBC, Discovery, Animal Planet, National Geographic.
All these are political in some way. BBC’s award winning series Frozen Planet, narrated by David Attenborough presents breathtaking images and the factual presentation are not aimed at a particular national body but to the world at large. This world level acts as neutral but in reality it is aimed at specific western audiences, comfortable leaning back in their living rooms in their television sets. Most transnational documentaries are an affair for the wealthy parts of the world.
But even though this is a special feature of climate documentaries that try to illustrate abstract data and scientific arguments with personal and concrete experience, the interaction between emotions, personal and everyday experience and memories are always at work.
HOME (2009)
This beautifully shot documentary made by French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand shows a series of events happening across the world over time. Images of changing landscapes become a sort of evidence set to the voiceover of a female narrator poetically reciting the calamities occurring as we watch the sublime natural landscapes being destroyed by human settlement and activities.
The unique vantage point and the patterns in nature shown by the film works on 3 levels: information, affect and agency.
Images
Among the first cinematographers traveled to oil fields of Azerbaijan, and shot a 30 second film of oil wells. Locally unbound — both categories of images –abstract condensates of global climate science, and the pictures of concrete climate events have entered collective memory. Iconic image of the blue planet is a popular motif in the media, used to symbolize global crises and to evoke the idea of one world under threat. Power generation — power plants symbolize the energy industry in western industrialized nations, sometimes pointing the finger at a single polluter. Long shots of bright lights and traffic jams in the US or Asian megacities depict the hypermodernity humans are living in. Big machines and cattle denote industrial meat production. Alternative energies like windmills and solar power plants are shown being built everywhere.
Affect
There is a well-documented gap between environmental attitudes (which are more amenable to change through information provision), and pro-environmental behaviour (Gatersleben et al., 2002 ; Kollmuss and Agyeman, 2002). In an attempt to effectively engage the public, visual and emotionally-based appeals are frequently employed within the environmental movement. Clearly, significant reductions must be made in individuals’ emissions and lower-carbon lifestyles must be promoted. The Age of Stupid is a film made with the stated intention “to turn 250 million viewers into climate activists”
However, not all emotions are helpful in this context. Campaigns which appeal to fear as a motivator are problematic because fear can trigger denial, apathy, repression, anger and counterproductive defensive behaviours (such as buying a ‘high-carbon’ sports utility vehicle to protect oneself against an unpredictable environment) in response (Moser and Dilling, 2004). There is a need for a positive vision to sustain people taking climate change mitigation action because results will not be seen quickly (Moser, 2006).
These studies suggest that fear appeals are more successful when the recommendations to eliminate the fear threat are perceived to be effective. Fear system — being oriented in the present and providing tangible material for contemplation. Even though fearful climate change representations focus people’s attention on the issue and produce a general sense of importance, this type of communication seems to be disempowering on a personal level, leading to disengagement from the issue.
The power of evidence and the power of persuasion is used for images showing climate change. Images present particular difficulties for our moral being, and cause guilt even if they wield a distancing force. Frozen registrations of remote calamities, we have learnt to manage our relationship of suffering. The photographic image at once exposes us to and, and insulates us from, actual suffering; it does not and cannot in and in of itself implicate us in the real and reciprocal relations necessary to sustain moral and compassionate existence. Since the dangers aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day to day life, however awesome they appear, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of a concrete nature about them. Yet waiting until they become visible and acute before being stirred to serious action will, by definition be too late.
Environmentalist advocacies of place assume that individuals’ existential encounters with nature and engagements with intimately known local places can be recuperated intact from the distortions of modernization. Within its redemption of cinema’s consciousness raising potency, further reminds us that films themselves do not possess agency. We are affected by film, but the affect hinges upon how we organize ourselves, our culture and our society refracted in these films.
What makes us human, all too human is the flux of impulses, fears and desires at the center of our being. What makes us human and civilized too is the endeavor to transform that flux (with the help of our powers to reason) for moral, creative and imaginative ends. The hope is always that images have the power to produce action and influence decisions and in so doing, to change reality.
