Climate change, environmental politics and meaning
Discussing the lack of public support for political and personal changes required to address climate change, Westerhoff and Robinson (2013:2) observe that climate change ‘has failed to acquire any significance or meaning for the majority of those of us living in the western world.’ Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change research, reflects on how the issue has quite different meanings for different people, commenting, ‘Science may be solving the mysteries of climate, but it is not helping us discover the meaning of climate change. The meanings [of climate change] cannot be read from the pages of the scientific assessments made by the IPCC’ (2010:41).
Environmental Humanities literature consistently draws links between the politics of sustainability and the way humans make meaning. Discussing the need for a new paradigm for addressing the sustainability gap, Fischer et al. (2007) call for ‘fundamentally enhanced collaboration among natural and social scientists and scholars of human contexts, symbols and meanings.’ Nye et al., (2013) observe that scholars working in the Environmental Humanities ‘are posing fundamentally different questions [to those asked in science and industry], questions of value and meaning’ (28). Lockwood (2012) refers to the ‘world-building’ influence of environmental texts such as Silent Spring (127). Calling for a radically new symbolic mode for relating to the environment, Kolodny (1996) describes the role of metaphor and symbol in giving coherence to the world. She argues that our salvation may lie in our ‘capacity to enter into and exit from the images by which we seek to explore and codify the meaning of experience’ (178). Eaton (2013) sees the causes of the socio-ecological issues we face as ‘entangled as much within our cultural ideologies and worldviews as within economic systems and social organization’ (109).
Eaton continues by discussing the concept of an ecological imaginary and the importance of symbolism:
Perhaps there is less need for assessing causes and calamity and more need for something upon which to base hope. Thus… I have changed orientation in a quest of an ecological imaginary… Success as an ecological society will depend, at least in part, on the generation of a powerful ecological imaginary to challenge the governing utilitarian and exploitative social imaginary. (109,110).
Describing a social imaginary as ‘like the water within which we swim,’ Eaton (2013, 15) makes strong claims for importance of symbolism in all forms of human experience:
The ‘symbolic, metaphoric and imaginative mode of being is the modus operandi of humans. A symbolic consciousness is the way humans process and navigate the world. It is not through or with symbols and images that we think and comprehend. It is within symbols. (14)
Analysing the aesthetics of symbolic action: insights from ecocriticism
How can an ‘ecological imaginary’ be communicated through public symbolic action? Ecocritic Hubert Zapf offers a number of reflections about literature that can be applied equally to the analysis of symbolic political communication. Zapf argues that literature not only lifts issues into consciousness, but also invests them with ‘special imaginative… and aesthetic energy’. It ‘articulates what remains unavailable in the established categories of cultural self-interpretation.’ Literature, he argues, acts ‘like an ecological principle or an ecological energy within the larger system of cultural discourses…’ It provides ‘a sounding board for hidden problems, deficits and imbalances of the larger culture… [It] critically balances and symbolically articulates what is marginalized, neglected, repressed or excluded by dominant power structures… Literature becomes the site of a constant creative renewal of language, perception, communication and imagination.’ (2006: 55, 56, 63) Thus in Zapf’s view, literature offers not only a new or different ‘imaginary’, but resources by which existing ‘imaginaries’ can be transformed.
There is more than just a resemblance between written texts and their images on the one hand and the public sphere and political symbols on the other: political symbols can ‘do’ within cultural discourse what literary themes and images ‘do’ in relation to their audience. ‘Social texts’ are only intelligible through a process of being ‘read’, and Zapf’s description of how people respond to literature offers insights into the function of political symbols within culture.
Continuing a long-standing process where insights from literary studies have influenced social and political thought, insights about symbolism and political impact are becoming part of more mainstream political analysis. In a 2006 paper, Politics as theatre: an alternative view of the rationalities of power, Apter analyses the relationship between the political and the aesthetic. He is concerned with how and why public displays of drama generate power, and how events are endowed with symbolic significance. Citing examples such as Tiananmen square, the Dreyfus case, the Reichstag trial, and the use of drama by figures from Mao to Mandela, Apter argues that political theatre endows even everyday political actions with meaning and affect. It can replace conventional knowledge with ‘more gripping signs, symbols, and signals.’ It provides an avenue for defining and communicating different political visions. Performance, he writes, ‘at its best, enables a politics as theatre to endow a particular space with a certain clarity, miniaturizing, focusing, concentrating and intensifying public attention, by magnifying a symbolic register’ (227).
Apter argues that democracy, ‘for all its claims to the contrary, is a far cry from the reasoned expression of competing claims within a framework of Enlightenment ideals. It is rather a series of theatrical occasions that make appeals to the voter by dramatizing and exaggerating fears and prejudices dressed up as policy preferences’ (240). Without dispensing with a focus on political analysis centred on coalitions, interests, and institutions, Apter calls for a framework that shows how meaning is reinforced or redefined and action is instigated through a process of endowing political phenomena with symbolism:
Political drama is not only relevant to real politics. It is a method of understanding politics in its full range, and on a par with historical, institutional, structural, behavioral, or rational choice modes of analysis…. The analysis of discourse theory generally, and political theatre more specifically, becomes a critical addition to the body of prevailing political theory used for the normal study of politics. (251, 247)
Narrative
Several writers explore the correspondence between analysing symbolic action and analysing narrative. Writing about the role of narrative in public moral argument, Walter Fisher (1984) describes the role of ‘symbolic actions—words and/or deeds—that have sequence and meaning for those who live, create, or interpret them.’ He argues that the narrative perspective has relevance to real as well as fictional worlds, and that a narrative context provides the ‘ground for determining meaning, validity, reason, rationality, and truth… The meaning and significance of life in all of its social dimensions require the recognition of its narrative structure’ (3).
U.S. writer William Kittredge reflects that ‘narrative helps readers internalize values, make them their own, emotionally, as necessary to life rather than simply interesting or distracting, as platforms from which to act… Narrative can help create new ‘mythologies’. It can become ‘a set of implicit instructions from a society to its members, telling them what is valuable and how to conduct themselves if they are to preserve the things they value.’ (From an interview with Slovic, quoted in Iovino, 2010: 40-41). Iovino comments on the ‘ethically preventive, and orientative’ qualities of narrative: ‘It not only shows and teaches as the ancient mythos did, but, evoking ethical awareness about the values it shows, it orients our cultural evolution’ (41). She observes that a political use of literature and of ‘narrative imagination’ can be the premise for a moral agency (42-3). Rose and Robin (2004) look to narrative as a method through which the reason of connectivity may be able to ‘find its most powerful voice. This method offers the profound possibility of telling stories that communicate, invoke, and invigorate connections’ (n.p.)
Enlarging understandings of political communication
Plumwood’s (2009) calls for cultural renewal through ‘renarrativisation’ and ‘new origin stories’ involve much more than ‘selling a political message’ or advertising. Discussing Plumwood’s work, Rose (2013) argues for the need to ‘do more than represent. Somehow, one needs to vivify, to leap across imaginative realms, to connect, to empathise, to be addressed and to be brought into gratitude’ (106). Rose quotes Peter Boyle who observes that poetry is ‘capable not merely of mirroring our perceptions of the world—as everyday language does – but of delivering new perceptions, new realities.’ Significantly for the art of political symbolism, Boyle argues that poetry and music ‘do not tell us about things – they place us inside them’ (14-15). Greaves (2013) looks to the environmental arts as ‘the creative experience and articulation of our ways of being in the more-than-human world, which involves the expansion, criticism and the occasional shattering of worldviews’ (153).
_________________________
The analysis of symbolic political communication can draw much from ecocriticism’s sense of why the aesthetic is significant and the analytical framework and vocabulary it uses. Ecocriticism offers a map of what takes place in significant interaction between people and texts, including pointers to what to ‘look for’ or analyse, for example: ‘special imaginative/ aesthetic energy’ (Zapf); communication that ‘vivifies’ and enables imaginative leaps (Rose); symbolic communication as a cultural sounding board (Zapf); and aesthetic forms of communication which we do not just ponder at a distance but feel ourselves to be immersed in (Boyle).
Ecocrticial reflection on how people read meanings from texts offers insight into what is needed for communication to be effective (Rose) and a vocabulary and framework for describing and analysing the task of symbolic communication: cultural renarrativisation (Plumwood); the development of new ‘mythologies’ which offer ‘platforms from which to act’ (Kittredge) and lifting issues into consciousness and investing them with ‘imaginative energy’ (Zapf) in a way that is politically consequential.
The ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene
A richer view of ‘the human’
Making sense of the challenges of climate politics requires a rich sense of the human dimensions to the dilemmas that humans have brought about, as well as insight into human capacities to address these issues. Scientific talk of the Anthropocene can sometimes obscure the place of humans in human systems: hence the title of a recent paper by Palsson et al. (2013): Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research. Palsson et al. remark on how little widely-used concepts such as ‘the great acceleration,’ ‘thresholds,’ and ‘tipping points’ tell us about ‘the process, the driving forces, and the social consequences of the changes they imply’ (7). They argue that there is a need for concepts and narratives from the humanities and social sciences to address this situation, explaining: ‘to characterise the Anthropocene by means of quantitative data is one thing; to describe and understand how it perceives human interaction, culture, institutions, and societies – indeed, the meaning of being human – is truly another and a major challenge for the scholarly, literary, artistic, practitioner, and policy communities’ (10).
The theme of understanding human dynamics in environmental systems is integral to the Environmental Humanities. Sörlin (2012) argues that ‘we cannot dream of sustainability unless we start to pay more attention to the human agents of the planetary pressure that environmental experts are masters at measuring but that they seem unable to prevent’ (788). Fischer et al. (2007) call for a focus on the humanities in order to conceptualize our role within this world, complementing knowledge from the sciences. Forêt et al. (2014) highlight how dealing with environmental challenges also amounts to dealing with issues such as values, emotions, subjectivity, and failure. Environmental challenges are ‘inextricably connected to the hopes, fears, and creativity of human actors’ with our various ‘beliefs, biases, and traditions’ (67). They argue that the Environmental Humanities can provide new ideas to environmental research by recasting environmental problems as cultural issues. Asking how we can ‘productively rethink ‘the human’ in more than human terms’, Rose el al. (2012: 3) reflect that the Environmental Humanities concern with questions of meaning, value, responsibility and purpose, offers ‘a “thicker” notion of humanity, one that rejects reductionist accounts of self-contained, rational, decision making subjects’(2). They argue that what we traditionally call ‘environmental issues’ are ‘inescapably entangled with human ways of being in the world’ (1) and that recognition of the Anthropocene requires a radical rethink of our sense of ourselves.
Climate denial and the gap between awareness and action
One challenge where a ‘richer view of the human’ is needed is understanding climate change denial and the gap between what we know about climate change and how we respond. Slovic’s (2005) reflections on the gap between awareness and action are relevant here. He contrasts the positions he took in a book he wrote in 1992 and in a 1998 presentation: earlier, he had argued for the promotion of environmental awareness and the exploration of the psychological phenomenon of consciousness as a central purpose of environmental writing. Six years later, his approach was different: he contended that ‘we are sufficiently aware. We, as members of an industrialised, information-oriented society are already saturated with environmental consciousness… The processes we deplore – the usual litany of planetary degradations – have continued virtually unchecked, despite our accrual of awareness’ (vii).
If we are ‘saturated’ in environmental consciousness but still do not respond in an proportionate way, we need to look beyond models that are unduly optimistic about human rationality. Indeed, a number of writers warn of the human capacity for illusion: McKenna (2012) reflects on ‘massive infrastructures of deception and illusion’ evident in the financial meltdown of 2008 and the BP Gulf oil disaster of 2010 (141). Palsson et al. (2013) comment, ‘Political initiatives around sustainability often amount to little more than simulacral politics, providing the illusion of a transition to sustainability while sanctioning the continued profligate use of natural resources… The mental and civic infrastructures of societies, transforming the contemporary syndromes of anxiety, drift, and self-delusion into a more positive task of building a culture of sustainability, and a new ethics of care’ (8,11).
Affect and politics
Research into climate communication ‘when the facts are not enough’ needs to be grounded in insights into why the facts may not be enough and what factors other than rationality may be influencing the public, as well as what might spark and energise change in public attitudes. Resources from the ‘affective turn’ in the humanities and social sciences have much to offer here. A number of Environmental Humanities scholars explore the limits to traditional views of rationality and the role of affect in social and political life. Anderson (1996) discusses a range of environmental problems where ‘rational considerations break down’ and where ‘emotionality is the block which prevents… solving the problem’ (8). He argues that people are creatures of emotion rather than creatures of reason, and that reason is largely ‘an aid to planning how to reach goals set by instincts and emotions’ (12). Major (2012) writes that ecocriticism needs to be affective in its approach in order to be effective. Estok (2013 and 2009) discusses the dynamics of ‘ecophobia’.
Affect, although notionally personal, is seen as playing a powerful role in the public sphere, and as integral to effective environmental communication. Drawing on the writing on affect by cultural theorists Ann Cvetkovich and Lauren Berlant, Lockwood (2012) discusses how Silent Spring established a template for how environmental writers could address ecological crises through eliciting emotional responses. For Lockwood, the impact of Silent Spring only makes sense within the ‘cultural politics of affect.’ Lockwood’s discussion focuses on the use of the author’s own feelings and emotions about their subject and how in turn ‘they are drawn together into a public sphere to “create new and counter-cultural forms”’(131). His analysis highlights how Carson was aware that, ‘if political change is to be effected, then the “everyday, purchasing, voting, song-bird-appreciating citizen can not only be brought in to believe but might be moved to action… Carson’s skill is in marshalling the affects of the everyday’ (129). It is interesting that the work of one author he discusses, Bill McKibben, can be seen as having a central focus not on a political program but on affective human experience: sadness when confronting ‘the end of nature.’
Lockwood contrasts the significance of affect and the limited attention it has received in the field of environmental studies. Taking Berlant’s (2011) view that public spheres are ‘affect worlds’, he is interested in developing new and productive starting points for the environmental humanities which understand the social and the political as passionate and affective: his broader aim is to develop ‘a critical program that destabilises the understanding of politics as free from private feelings, to (quoting Cvetkovich) “forge methodologies for the documentation and examination of the structures of affect that constitute cultural experience and serve as the foundation for public cultures.’(126)
______________________________________________________________________________
References
Anderson, E. N. (1996). Ecologies of the Heart: Emotion, Belief and the Environment. New York:Oxford University Press.
Apter, D. (2006) Politics as theatre: an alternative view of the rationalities of power. In Alexander, J., Giesen, B., & Mast, J. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual Cambridge University Press: 218-256.
Berlant, L., (2012) Cruel Optimism Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Eaton, H., (2011) An Ecological Imaginary in Bergmann, S., and Easton, H. (Eds) Ecological Awareness: Exploring Religiion, Ethics and Aesthetics Vol 3. Munster: Lit Verlag
Eaton, H. (2013) Forces of Nature: Aesthetics and Ethics in Bergmann, S., Blindow, I., & Ott, K. (2013). Aesth/Ethics in Environmental Change: Hiking Through the Arts, Ecology, Religion and Ethics of the Environment Munster: Lit Verlag
Estok, S. C. (2009) Theorizing in a Space of Ambivalent Openness: Ecocriticism and Ecophobia. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 16.2: 203-25.
Estok, S.C., (2013) Ecocriticism in an Age of Terror Comparative Literature and Culture 15.1
Fisher, W.R. (1984) Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument, Communication Monographs, 51:1, 1-22
Fischer, J., Manning, A., Steffen, W. et al. 2007, Mind the Sustainability Gap, Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 22 (12) pp. 621-624
Forêt, P., Hall, M., Kueffer, C (2014) Developing the Environmental Humanities: A Swiss Perspective GAIA 23/1: 67–69
Greaves, T., (2013) Environmental Arts as First Philosophy: This too a NeoPresocratic Manifesto Environmental Humanities 3, pp. 149-155
Hulme, M (2010) Why We Disagree About Climate Change in 2009–2010 Carbon Yearbook Haymarket Media Group:41-43
Hutchings, R. (2014) Understanding of and Vision for the Environmental Humanities Environmental Humanities, 4, pp. 213-220
Iovino S., (2010) Ecocriticism and a Non-Anthropocentric Humanism Reflections on Local Natures and Global Responsibilities in L. Volkmann, N. Grimm, I. Detmers, K. Thomson (eds.), Local Natures, Global Responsibilities, Rodopi, Amsterdam: 29-53
Killingsworth, M.J., and Palmer, J.S. (2012) Ecospeak: Rhetoric and environmental politics in America. SIU Press
Kolodny (1996) Unearthing Herstory in Glotfelty, C. and Fromm, H. (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 170-181.
Lockwood, A. (2012) The Affective Legacy of Silent Spring Environmental Humanities 1 pp 123-140
Love, G. A. (1996) Revaluing Nature in Glotfelty, C. and Fromm, H. (eds) The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 225–39.
Major, W (2012) The Function of Ecocriticism; or, Ecocriticism, What Is It Good For? Journal of Ecocriticism 4(2) pp1-7
McKenna, B. (2012) Greening Anthropology in Fassbinder, S.D., Nocella, A.J., and Kahn, R. Greening the Academy: Ecopedagogy Through the Liberal Arts Rotterdam: Sense
Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in denial: Climate change, emotions, and everyday life. MIT Press.
Nye, D. E., Rugg, L., Flemming, J., & Emmett, R. (2013). The Emergence of the Environmental Humanities. Stockholm: Mistra.
Palsson, G., Szerszynski B., Sörlin, S., (2013) Reconceptualizing the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene: Integrating the social sciences and humanities in global environmental change research Environmental Science and Policy 28: 3–13
Plumwood, V. (2009) Nature in the active voice. Australian Humanities Review 46 Available at http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-May-2009/plumwood.html.
Rose, D.B., et al. “Thinking through the environment, unsettling the humanities.” Environmental Humanities 1.1 (2012): 1-5.
Rose, D.B. (2013) Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: attentive interactions in the sentient world Environmental Humanities 3, pp. 93-109
Rose, D.B. and Robin, L. (2004) The Ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation Australian Humanities Review 1
Slovic, S (2005) Introduction in Rosendale, Steven, ed. The Greening Of Literary Scholarship: Literature, Theory, and The Environment. University of Iowa Press.
Sörlin, S. (2012) Environmental humanities: why should biologists interested in the environment take the humanities seriously?. BioScience 62.9: 788-789.
Zapf, Hubert. (2006) The state of ecocriticism and the function of literature as cultural ecology in Gersdorf, C, and Mayer, S. Eds Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism volume 3.
Symbolic Politics 