Although Bill McKibben is widely recognized as one of the leading strategists of the US climate change movement, several observers identify significant limitations to his approach to climate advocacy and politics. These criticisms are based on his reliance upon "symbolic gestures," such as campaigns to promote fossil fuel divestment and stop fossil fuel infrastructure construction. In this essay we reconsider McKibben's work, drawing specifically on his speeches given in the US from 2013 to 2016 in support of the fossil fuel divestment campaign and campaigns attempting to block the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure, in order to show how McKibben's strategic orientation is grounded in a politics of gesture. His speeches provide a model for how to reconceive gestures and assemble them for political ends, and expand a sometimes narrow focus on policy mechanisms. Beyond the case of McKibben our analysis contributes the concept of strategic gestures to identify and theorize social movement interventions that have significant symbolic and material consequences.
Global media and communication processes are central to how we know about and make sense of our environment and to the ways in which environmental concerns are generated, elaborated and contested. They are also core to the way information fl ows are managed and manipulated in the interest of political, social, cultural and economic power. While mediation and communication have been central to policy-making and to public and political concern with the environment since its emergence as an issue, it is particularly the most recent decades that have seen a maturing and embedding of what has broadly become known as environmental communication.This series builds on these developments by examining the key roles of media and communication processes in relation to global as well as national/local environmental issues, crises and disasters. Characteristic of the cross-disciplinary nature of environmental communication, the series showcases a broad range of theories, methods and perspectives for the study of media and communication processes regarding the environment. Common to these is the endeavour to describe, analyse, understand and explain the centrality of media and communication processes to public and political action on the environment.More information about this series at
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