Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In an increasingly image-saturated cultural environment, image communication
can play an important part in promoting social learning and even in motivating
significant policy, technological and life-style changes. For Stephen Shepherd, realistic
future landscape visualizations in 3D and 4D offer important advantages in rapidly
advancing people's environmental awareness by enabling people to see in a vivid
manner the possible consequences of climate change in a way that they can relate
to personally and experientially. They can see and feel what may happen to their
own backyards (Shepherd, 2012). However a spectacular visualization of climate
change may be, however much they may galvanize sentiment, or even mobilize a
more cosmopolitan perspective and local-global solidarity, still or moving images,
whether in an art gallery or on a television news broadcast, 'cannot entirely substitute
for the processes of political debate and deliberation which must also inform the
politics of climate change' (Lester and Cottle, 2009: 933). The politics of climate
change, of the environment and of sustainable development is not the same as the
associated image politics or visual rhetoric, although one does closely inform the
other (Lester, 2010).
The United Nations Decade for Education for Sustainable Development, 2005-14
(ESD) identifies the media as an important vehicle for promoting learning about the
global environment and the developing world. The draft implementation guidance
for the ESD Decade states:
Journalists and media organizations have an important role to play in reporting
on issues and in helping raise public awareness of the various dimensions and
requirements of sustainable development. Their involvement can contribute to
reinforcing access to information, communication and knowledge, as well as
access to the know-how and capacities necessary for effective use of ICTs in the
framework of development programmes. This can include, for instance, the
production of radio and television programmes with local content and on themes
such as gender equality and universal basic education.
(UNESCO, 2005: 25)
Contemporary debate about sustainability and the environment is dominated by
corporations, governments, NGOs, universities and other organizations which often
have, or hire, sophisticated Public Relations outfits which often represent particular
interests, values and perspectives in sometimes open and in sometimes covert ways.
The use of PR companies and techniques has increased phenomenally since the 1990s,
with the big corporations often able to outspend other groups by wide margins.
In the period preceding the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009,
the powerful oil and gas industry in the United States increased its PR budgets by
50 per cent (Lester, 2010). As news organizations cut their expenditure on investigative
reporting, many journalists become increasingly reliant on detailed and ready-to-use
media releases, which has arguably compromised journalistic values, the public sphere
and the public interest (Lewis
et al
., 2008; Reich, 2010). Richard Heede (2013), a
researcher at the Climate Accountability Institute at Colorado, has shown that just
ninety major companies or state-owned entities, such as Chevron, BP, Gazprom,
Exxon Mobil and Saudi Aramoco, have been responsible for nearly two-thirds of
the world's historical global greenhouse gas emissions, and a number of the biggest
emitters have been active funders of climate disinformation campaigns. In such a
