The Anthropocene in Global Media

Neutralizing the risk

Leslie Sklair, Leslie Sklair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000263787
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Media & Communications Industry
• Index: Business

This book offers the first systematic study of how the 'Anthropocene' is reported in mass media globally, drawing parallels between the use (or misuse) of the term and the media's attitude towards the associated issues of climate change and global warming.

Identifying the potential dangers of the Anthropocene provides a useful path into a variety of issues that are often ignored, misrepresented, or sidelined by the media. These dangers are widely discussed in the social sciences, environmental humanities, and creative arts, and this book includes chapters on how the contributions of these disciplines are reported by the media. Our results suggest that the natural science and mass media establishments, and the business and political interests which underpin them, tend to lean towards optimistic reassurance (the 'good' Anthropocene), rather than pessimistic alarmist stories, in reporting the Anthropocene. In this volume, contributors explore how dangerous this 'neutralizing' of the Anthropocene is in undermining serious global action in the face of the potential existential risks confronting humanity. The book presents results from media in more than 100 countries in all major languages across the globe. It covers the reporting of key environmental issues, such as the impact of climate change and global warming on oceans, forests, soil, biodiversity, and the biosphere. We offer explanations for differences and similarities in how the media report the Anthropocene in different regions of the world. In doing so, the book argues that, though it is still controversial, the idea of the Anthropocene helps to concentrate minds and behaviour in confronting ongoing ecological (and Coronavirus) crises.

The Anthropocene in Global Media will be of interest to students and scholars of environmental studies, media and communication studies, and the environmental humanities, and all those who are concerned about the survival of humans on planet Earth.

Part I

The Anthropocene and Media

1 Editor’s introduction

Leslie Sklair

There is an impressive amount of research on how climate change and global warming are reported in the media all over the world (Smith 2000, Boyce and Lewis 2009, Boykoff 2011, Eide and Kunelius 2012, Brevini and Lewis 2018, McNatt et al. 2019). However, there is very little research on how the Anthropocene, the name proposed for a new geological epoch defined in terms of human impacts on the Earth System, is reported in the media. The Anthropocene Media Project (AMP), on which this book is based, aims to fill that gap by documenting and analyzing how the media worldwide report the Anthropocene. Whereas select groups of academics, environmental professionals, social scientists, humanities scholars, and creative artists do engage actively with issues of the Anthropocene, it is likely that most people have either never heard of it or, if they have, they have no clear idea about it.

The difference between climate change (which most people seem to have heard of) and the Anthropocene, to put it simply in lay terms, is that, whereas climate affects and is affected by every ecosystem (implicating oceans, forests, soils, rocks, atmosphere, all interacting with the biosphere of living organisms, which regulates the system), the Anthropocene is a more holistic idea that directly implicates human behaviour. The environmental historian Julia Thomas (2014: 1588) expresses this very clearly, declaring that the Anthropocene: ‘is admittedly a contested term, but I use it instead of “climate change” or “global warming” because they misleadingly imply that the threat is limited to atmospheric increases in methane and, especially, carbon dioxide’ (expanded in Thomas 2019). Climate change seems to have become a metonym for the Anthropocene, substituting a part for the whole. This linguistic distinction matters because everyone knows that the climate (usually understood in terms of ‘the weather’) changes and, unless you study the science, the implications of this may be vague. Neither climate change nor global warming in themselves, as phrases, imply anything about human agency. If we explain the Anthropocene as the ‘Age of Humans’ (or ‘of Man’), the issue of human agency is blurred. However, the term ‘Anthropocene’ (and the adjective ‘anthropogenic’) specifically implicate human behaviour. It is important to ask questions about whose interests are served by such an apparently innocuous linguistic choice. This book aims to be a resource for those who want to compare what the media write about the Anthropocene and what scholars write about it, all over the world. This is a difficult task, as the Anthropocene as a concept, within and beyond Earth System science, is open to many interpretations (see, for example, Steffen et al. 2004, Schwägerl 2014, Hamilton et al. 2015, Angus 2016a, Davies 2016, Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017, Ellis 2018, Lewis and Maslin 2018, Zalasiewicz et al. 2019).

The Anthropocene and Earth System science

The Anthropocene concept signifies both a measure of geological time and a system that is more than the sum of its parts, in which positive and negative feedbacks between ecosystems are of vital importance.¹ From these ideas, Earth System science, sometimes referred to as the Gaia hypothesis, emerged in the 1960s (see Lenton 2016, Lovelock 2016, and Steffen et al. 2004: Box 2.7). The idea of the Anthropocene is a consequence of these new ways of looking at planet Earth and the impacts of human actions on it.²

The consensus among environmental scientists is that the Earth System has always been changing. However, since the second half of the twentieth century, the findings of Earth System scientists strongly suggest that the rate of change, particularly for atmospheric CO₂ and other greenhouse gases implicated in the degradation of ecosystems and potentially posing existential threats to human survival, has been increasing unusually rapidly. It is argued that these changes are causing serious (possibly irreversible) damage to the viability of the Earth System as a whole, as far as humanity is concerned. This has been conceptualized as ‘The Great Acceleration’ (Steffen et al. 2015, McNeill and Engelke 2016, Lane 2019). On the evidence of over 6,000 peer-reviewed papers, this is more or less the conclusion reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established in 1988 by the UN to monitor the situation (IPCC 2018).³

Scholars have been warning for decades (in some respects, centuries) that such changes may present a credible existential threat to human life on the planet.

It is interesting to compare the tone of two multi-authored scientific papers on the Anthropocene in prestigious peer-reviewed journals a few years apart. The first (Steffen et al. 2011: 862) concludes: ‘Darwin’s insights into our origins provoked outrage, anger, and disbelief but did not threaten the material existence of society of the time. The ultimate drivers of the Anthropocene, on the other hand, if they continue unabated through this century, may well threaten the viability of contemporary civilization and perhaps even the future existence of Homo sapiens’. The second (Steffen et al. 2018: 8252) concludes: ‘Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable, interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies – and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioural changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values’. This paper does discuss some alarming concepts: ‘hothouse Earth’, ‘tipping points’, ‘planetary boundaries’ and (not quite so alarming) ‘safe operating spaces’ for the human species. The ideas of planetary boundaries and safe operating spaces, as we will see in Part II, have attracted some media attention.⁴ However, the messages contained in the conclusions to these papers seem rather different. The difference is that, in the first, the existential risk to human survival is clearly stated, whereas, in the second, the role of human agency is mobilized to create what we might (uncharitably) label an optimistic spin to the story of the Anthropocene. The following chapters document the messages mass media all around the world have been sending out in their reporting of the Anthropocene, and ask whether journalists and scientists themselves have been in any way complicit in neutralizing the perceived risks of the Anthropocene?⁵

Dilemmas of the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene was introduced as a geological concept to name and explore human impacts on the Earth System. In 2009, proponents of the distinctiveness of the Anthropocene began a process to persuade the bodies responsible for naming geological periods by establishing the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), led by Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester.⁶ This is a complicated and lengthy business, involving a mass of scientific evidence and many committees. Lewis and Maslin describe the process as ‘The Messy Mechanics of Defining Time’ (2018: 283–94). According to geologists, we have been in the Holocene epoch, a period of moderate temperatures and relative stability in the Earth System (especially as far as humans are concerned) for at least the past ten thousand years. It is not a foregone conclusion that the name Anthropocene will ever officially become part of the Geologic Time Scale.

A simplified Geological Anthropocene Timeline indicates some of the people, institutions and publications involved in the evolution of the Anthropocene from a relatively obscure geological-stratigraphic concept into a phenomenon that impacts on everything, even ‘the Anthropocene style’ (Rahm 2019), and everyone.⁷

Our book is not intended as a critique of journalists or scientists, nor does it seek to apportion ‘blame for the Anthropocene’. Rather, it starts from the premise that the Anthropocene puts journalists, scientists, and the rest of us in a series of impossible dilemmas created by the choices taken (knowingly or unknowingly, consciously or unconsciously, deliberately or casually) at, as yet, still-contentious historical junctures by different groups of people in different places at different times. The most important expression of these dilemmas is the debate that swirls around the effort to establish the Capitalocene (Age of Capital) as a more accurate and radical alternative name to the Anthropocene, a name that appears to portray all humanity as an undifferentiated totality.⁸ This ignores the fact that all communist or socialist societies have followed similar patterns of unfettered economic growth based on fossil fuels (thus the label ‘state capitalism’). While not disputing the decisive role of the capitalist system in the creation of anthropogenic ecological destruction, we need to ask if the argument is that capitalists set out from the beginning of the exploitation of fossil fuels deliberately to destroy the planet and the capitalist system for their offspring? Did Karl Marx, warming himself by the coal fire in chilly London, do the same? And today, when information about the perilous state of the planet is readily available, those of us who drive, fly, consume excessively, the lucky minorities, and the not-so-lucky billions who do not consume excessively but whose struggles to survive also impact adversely on the ecosystems that sustain them – are we all exonerated? In two previous books (Sklair 2001, 2002), I argued that the transnational capitalist class can be held responsible for ecological unsustainability because of its insatiable appetite for economic growth, and that, through the culture-ideology of consumerism, it exerts tremendous pressure on everyon...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• PART I The Anthropocene and Media
• PART II Media coverage of the AnthropoceneA global survey
• PART II From the Anthropocene to the Anthropo-scene
• Appendix 1: Countries in Regions
• Index