Glaciers and climate change: narratives of ruined futures

Jackson, Molly

doi:10.1002/wcc.351

Cited by 51 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Stories used to communicate climate change knowledge and politics have a prominent role in shaping opinions and preferences related to climate change. We claim that the narrative perspective helps to identify different actors, realized as narrative characters (hero, victim, villain) and to explain the presence/absence of typical components in a ‘story.’ Jackson has analyzed different forms of artistic expressions which depict melting glaciers, concluding that these narratives tend to reduce possible future development to only one possible outcome, which is the disappearance of glacial ice caps as a result of climate change. Choosing a single plot line when imagining the future can thus lead to a singular narrative, which disregards conflicting causes and outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives in climate change discourse

Fløttum

Gjerstad

2016

WIREs Climate Change

104

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‘Stories’ used to communicate climate change knowledge shape opinions and preferences, and analyzing such narratives can help explain how they are constructed and how they influence us on personal and societal scales. The narrative perspective makes it possible to identify the presence or absence of typical components in a ‘story,’ such as initial situation, complication, reaction(s), resolution, and final situation, and to identify different actors or narrative characters (heroes, villains, victims). This article reviews the notions of narratives and frames, describes narrative analysis generally and more specifically how a text linguistic perspective can benefit from and contribute to the Narrative Policy Framework in narrative analysis. It illustrates how different approaches can be applied as analytical tools to explore the effects of conflicting narratives (frames) on public opinion of and attitudes towards climate change. Applied to various text genres, the analysis identifies different components of the ‘stories,’ at overarching levels of the text as a whole and at microlevels such as sentences. This may have rhetorical implications, as controversial points of view can be hidden from critical assessment through the condensation of narrative components into short expressions. When exposed to conflicting ‘stories,’ people get a diverse picture of climate change, a diversity which may, however, also lead to confusion about how to react. Concerning the narrative characters, recent research indicates that a clear hero role has a large persuasive impact. More experiments testing how people interpret various narratives should be undertaken in an interdisciplinary perspective, combining social science, and linguistic approaches. WIREs Clim Change 2017, 8:e429. doi: 10.1002/wcc.429 This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives in climate change discourse

Fløttum

Gjerstad

2016

WIREs Climate Change

104

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“…They erode powerfully, entrain sediments and elements that when released from storage as ice melts become remobilized. For example, current observed glacier retreat concurs with looming visions of disastrous climate change (Jackson, 2015). As we have briefly reviewed here, glacier changes have motivated a diversity of research endeavors that, in turn, demonstrate the unique complexity of these glaciated mountain landscapes.…”

Section: Final Remarks: Integration and Innovation In The Study Of mentioning

confidence: 68%

The significance of mountain glaciers as sentinels of climate and environmental change

Mark

Fernández

2017

Geography Compass

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Mountain glaciers are transient hydrologic reservoirs persisting at the habitable extremes of Earth that both document and respond to climate change. They withhold water in solid phase from other reservoirs and ultimately impact sea levels. Moreover, they are valued resources with economic and cultural significance for human societies living below them. They also preserve histories of past climates. Yet, when climate change forces glaciers to lose mass, the water and suspended matter flow downstream with various impacts. Profoundly, current glacier and environmental changes are now accelerating and being propelled by human activity. Diverse consequences of these changes are emerging, and many are negative for society. Nevertheless, these changes coincide with a time in human history during which science is able to observe changes with unprecedented detail. Geography has a key role to play in analyzing the patterns and impacts of mountain glacier changes over multiple spatial and temporal scales and involving an integrated approach that draws on different disciplines and innovative technology to account for interactions between multiple spheres of the Earth System.

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“…As rhetoric, photographs have been used to call for the melioration of social and ecological vulnerability to the effects of rising temperatures and shifting weather patterns. Shrinking glaciers, flooded settlements and stranded polar bears have become dominant visual tropes, along with the aforementioned ‘whole Earth’ images of 1970s space programmes (Doyle ; O'Neill and Nicholson‐Cole ; Manzo ; Doyle ; Nerlich and Jaspal ; Jackson ). However, most commentators agree that such visual rhetoric has constructed the problem in unhelpful ways, with little apparent effectiveness in promoting widespread affective engagement.…”

Section: Photography Climate and Montagementioning

confidence: 99%

“…An imperial gaze directed towards the ruins of other, lost or disappearing cultures also informed colonial ‘salvage’ missions (Stoler , 198), and the ‘pleasure of ruins’ (Macaulay ) is still deeply felt in a contemporary aesthetics of melancholy and a nostalgia for particular forms of metropolitan and colonial modernity (Dillon ; see also Hell and Schönle ). Imaginations of environmental catastrophe have given new purchase to the interplay of destruction, redemption, social levelling and persistence, and to a dialectic of nature and ruined or ruinous culture (Miles ; Jackson ).…”

Section: Photomontage and Climate Changementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Reproduced with kind permission for particular forms of metropolitan and colonial modernity (Dillon 2014; see also Hell and Schönle 2010). Imaginations of environmental catastrophe have given new purchase to the interplay of destruction, redemption, social levelling and persistence, and to a dialectic of nature and ruined or ruinous culture (Miles 2014;Jackson 2015).…”

Section: Ruined Citiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Picturing the future‐conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change

Mahony

2016

Geography and Environment

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A growing body of work has explored the effects of visual imagery on shifting forms of environmental consciousness and politics. Circulating images of, for example, the 'whole Earth' have been ascribed agency in the emergence of new forms of planetary awareness and political globalism. This essay identifies a new form of global environmental image, in the shape of photographic montage depictions of future places transformed by the effects of climate change. Montage enables artists and designers to import the spatial formations of distant places into more familiar locations, in the process producing novel renderings of the interconnections of global environmental change. The future-conditional -'if x, then y' -has become a key register of scientific and artistic engagement with climate change, and practices of visual montage have offered means of reconciling the transformations of space and time in the imagination of putative futures. The essay situates such images within a longer lineage of depictions of the tropical and the ruined, and focuses on contemporary montage depictions of climate-change-induced migration. It argues that many of these 'global montages' problematically reinforce extant notions of geographical otherness. Yet montage, as a technique, also renders visible the choices, cuts, juxtapositions and arguments which lie behind any representation, thus offering the seed of a more reflexive mode of future-conditional image-making.

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Glaciers and climate change: narratives of ruined futures

Cited by 51 publications

References 60 publications

Narratives in climate change discourse

Narratives in climate change discourse

The significance of mountain glaciers as sentinels of climate and environmental change

Picturing the future‐conditional: montage and the global geographies of climate change

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