Environmental activism and advocacy - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 211

In that sense, Castells's ( 1996 /1997) analysis of the environmental
movement as a place-based, grounded countermovement that makes
full use of modern information technologies to address the consequence
of processes located in and organised through the space of flows is only
partly adequate. More than Castells imagined one decade ago, a signif-
icant part of the green movement engages with the space of flows; and
the structure, dynamics and strategies of that part of the movement
have changed through processes of globalisation and informational-
isation. The evaluation of that development differs within the envi-
ronmental movement itself but also by outside commentators: from
condemning a movement being incorporated in global corporate capi-
talism, to celebrating a strategic innovation following a new time frame
in which full use is made of the informational powers of a globalised
civil society.
If there is a central space where these informational powers of the
(globalised) environmental movement clash with the informational
(and other) powers of economic and political agents, it will be the
media. With informational politics and governance becoming more
central in environmental controversies and struggles, we can expect
the media (i) to become more and more the location of environmen-
tal controversies, (ii) to be used as a crucial resource in environmental
controversies and (iii) to be transformed through such informational
politics. The next chapter focuses on these media hypotheses.