Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Media communications and the environment
The media and communications enable us to actively shape our understanding of
the world beyond our own immediate direct experience. They help us create meaning
and so orientate us in some way to the world we inhabit. In terms of symbolic
action, Robert Cox (2013) uses the term environmental communication in two ways:
•
As pragmatic
: educating, alerting, persuading and helping audiences and users
to deal with environmental problems.
•
As constitutive
: helping audiences and users to compose and construct repre-
sentations of sustainability, nature and environment challenges as subjects for
people's understanding.
Thus media communications may evoke certain perspectives, articulate certain values,
define certain problems and offer particular references for attention, denial and/or
action.
Images have been particularly important from both perspectives. In mid nineteenth-
century America, the landscape photography of Carleton Watkins helped define the
term 'wilderness' and establish a new resonance for the term 'environment' and
in so doing became an important factor in persuading Congress to establish the
Yosemite and Marisopa areas in California as the world's first national parks in
1864 (DeLuca and Demo, 2000). In the twentieth century the documentary films of
Pare Lorentz and the photography of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange helped
shape the emotional response to the American Dust Bowl, just as the photography
of Ansel Adams and the series of coffee-table topics produced by the Sierra Club
continued the work of the early wilderness pioneers such as John Muir (Dunaway,
2005). Of course, nature photography and wildlife filmmaking have been massively
important to the world conservation movement, more generally creating symbols
that can both mobilize and motivate action for positive change, with NGOs such
as Greenpeace, PETA and WWF particularly adept in their use of images (Blewitt,
2010b). In other contexts, some photographers such as Edward Burtynsky whose
twenty-five project photographing devastated and contaminated industrial landscapes
across the world has led to a series of images that tend to elicit a sublime but negative
response to toxicity which, rather than aestheticizing the landscape, serves to move
the viewer 'beyond paralysis or indifference to the active contemplation of the self
in relation to the object' (Peeples, 2011: 387). A sense of complicity that moves
beyond indifference leads Jennifer Peeples to suggest:
The recognition of a connection to these toxic places is the important step to
understanding the need for alternative resource and waste protocols and decision
making. In addition, the improbability of the sublime also allows for audacious
thinking as one grapples with solutions to the difficult and abstruse problems
of contamination. The toxic sublime, then, confronts two of the most damning
barriers to dealing with contamination: (1) a lack of a visual presence leading
to people not knowing the extent of the environmental damage and (2) a sense
of impotence when facing the omnipresence and destructive capacity of the
toxins.
(2011: 388)
