Making Climate Action Meaningful Communication Practices in the New Zealand Climate Movement

Making climate action meaningful Communication practices in the New Zealand climate movement Jonathan Oosterman A thesis submitted in fulfilment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Victoria University of Wellington, Te Whare Wānanga o te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui 2016 Abstract The climate crisis requires urgent action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; however, ‘business as usual’ continues to fuel further increases. Instead of the social change needed to safeguard the wellbeing of people and the planet, there has been an unpromising mix of active resistance, lukewarm concern, lack of engagement, and lack of hope. In the face of this, climate communicators seek to make climate action relevant and meaningful to people, thereby mobilising them to create a social consensus on climate action and the political will for change. A core dynamic in climate communication is the balance between, on the one hand, speaking to the facts of the climate crisis and to what makes climate action meaningful to climate communicators themselves, and on the other, speaking in a way that is meaningful to those being communicated with. If the balance is right, climate communication will empower people, thereby helping translate belief in, and concern about, the climate crisis into behavioural change and political engagement, cumulatively creating social change. If the balance is wrong, however, communication efforts risk not connecting with people, emotionally overwhelming them with the weight of the climate crisis, or overly diluting the message, leading to no effect, or to a negative effect. An important way in which this dynamic manifests is in the balance between moral and economic framing. Morality and economics are two fundamental elements of what gives a sense of meaningfulness to climate action, and therefore underlie decision-making around both climate action and climate communication. Combinations of moral and economic framing are of particular interest in the way they call for radical action while speaking to people’s desires for security and prosperity. The climate movement is at the heart of efforts towards social change and the creation of a social consensus on climate action. It is therefore to the experiences of climate movement participants that I turn to explore these issues. I take a movement-centred activist scholarship approach to research on climate communication decision-making via interviews with fourteen members of the New Zealand climate movement. Highlighting the importance of knowledge development within social movements, I seek to contribute to activist and academic understanding of effective climate communication. Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and thank all of those who participated in this research: Steve Abel Catherine Cheung Gary Cranston Jeanette Fitzsimons Gareth Hughes Nicole Masters Robina McCurdy Matt Morris Niamh O'Flynn John Peet Katherine Peet Mike Smith Dayle Takitimu Paul Young My thanks also go to my thesis supervisors: Sandra Grey – School of Social and Cultural Studies Ralph Chapman – School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences And, for much appreciated thesis feedback, many thanks to: Jeanne Guthrie Andrea Higginson Preface “Today, our Mother Earth is wounded and the future of humanity is in danger.” - World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC 2010). It was early in 2004 when I first began engaging seriously with the climate crisis. In April of that year, I helped start the Save Happy Valley campaign against a (then) proposed opencast coal mine on the West Coast of the South Island (Aotearoa New Zealand). While I was already concerned about climate change, the research that I undertook as part of this campaign helped me understand the very real threat of triggering catastrophic climate impacts, and the urgency of radical climate action and systemic change. Following my participation in the Save Happy Valley campaign, I was involved for a number of years with the permaculture-inspired Grey Lynn Community Gardens in Auckland. During this time, I began to appreciate the importance of organic gardening in responding to the climate crisis. It shaped my sense that we need practical alternatives to the status quo, and that we can create and embody these alternatives through our everyday actions. Clearly, though, we have a long way to go in creating such alternatives on a societal level. During the Save Happy Valley campaign, I travelled around the country, giving a number of public meetings, and speaking with members of the public and the media. While those who turned up to the public meetings expressed very real concern about climate change, on a broader level I developed a strong sense of the chasm that existed between where our society was, and where it needed to be to adequately respond to the climate crisis. More than ten years later, this gap still exists. It is difficult to talk about the climate crisis and all that it evokes, and I believe that learning to have these conversations is an important element of responding to the crisis. This thesis is an expression of my desire to contribute to these conversations, paying respect to those who are working on this edge, and building on what is being discussed in both the climate movement and in the academic world. “[C]hange – on an almost unimaginable scale – is coming whether we want it or not.” - Rob Hopkins (2008) Contents PART ONE: Groundwork 1. Introduction 1 2. Research approach 5 PART TWO: Making climate action meaningful 3. Making climate action meaningful 25 4. Risks and challenges 45 5. Emotions and empowerment 53 PART THREE: Moral and economic framing 6. Moral and cultural framing 65 7. Economic framing 75 8. Moral economic critique 91 9. Moral economic solutions 103 PART FOUR: Conclusion 10. Conclusion 119 References 125 PART ONE Groundwork 1. Introduction Climate change is already causing widespread suffering, and currently projected greenhouse gas emissions signal the risk of far greater suffering in the coming decades. In order to safeguard the wellbeing of people and the planet, therefore, significant social change is essential. While the basic direction that needs to be taken is clear enough, powerful vested interests oppose this, and ‘business as usual’ continues to fuel further increases in greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore up to civil society to take action. As Hoffman & Jennings (2012:59) state, the “generation of a social consensus is an important follow-up to the generation of a scientific consensus” on climate change. In the words of the climate protest slogan: “To change everything, we need everyone”. Instead of a social consensus, however, we have “climate silence” (Rowson & Corner 2015:4). Talking about climate change goes against cultural norms of conversation: “people literally don’t like to think or talk about the subject” (Immerwahr 1999:13; cf. Rowson 2013:8). While a significant portion of the public expresses concern about the climate crisis (see, e.g., Motu 2015), serious engagement has largely been lacking. As Rowson & Corner (2015:6) put it: “We are changing the climate, but it’s not yet changing us.” The climate crisis may also engender feelings of hopelessness. Many people have no confidence that humanity will successfully respond to it, and “activism is currently constrained by public beliefs that political activism is ineffective” (Roser-Renouf et al. 2014:2). While the consumption habits of ‘the 1%’ and the global middle class have acted as a major cause of the climate crisis, it is clear that the habit of political non-engagement is equally important (cf. Ockwell, Whitmarsh & O’Neill 2009:318; Cross et al. 2015:18-19). Interlinked with the climate crisis, we face a crisis of political and cultural disempowerment. This, then, is what the climate movement confronts: an increasingly urgent problem, combined with an unpromising mix of active resistance, lukewarm concern, lack of engagement, and lack of hope. In the face of this, climate movement participants seek to bring about a “social consensus” on climate action by engaging with people and communicating their understanding, or ‘framing’, of the issue, and undertaking actions that draw attention to this framing. If successful in their framing efforts, they influence the public’s own ways of framing the issue, with the resulting change in framing manifesting in new ways of thinking, feeling, and acting (cf. 1 Benford 1997:410). However, there is a large gap between movement framing and public framing, and this gap is difficult to bridge. Rowson & Corner (2015:28) state: [T]here is no shortage of bright ideas for climate policies that would keep us within a safe carbon budget… The bigger challenge is how do ‘we’ (i.e., anyone who wants to stay within that carbon budget) go about persuading people [so] that policies like these happen. This thesis explores how New Zealand climate movement participants respond to this challenge, and the framing and communication practices they adopt in their attempts to bridge the gap between themselves and the public. This is the first extended piece of academic research on New Zealand climate movement communication which draws on perspectives from across the movement. I focus on the climate movement, and thereby consider ideas in action, in the belief that while ideas (about both the climate crisis and necessary responses) are important, ultimately, “it comes down to movements, and struggle” (Cox 2015; cf. Brulle 2010:84; Caniglia, Brulle & Szasz 2015:236-7). In developing our efforts to respond to the climate crisis, the experiences of those involved in the climate movement are fundamentally important. This thesis is therefore grounded in the importance of recognising movement-based knowledge development. I assume that climate movement participants are active creators of knowledge, and address myself to “the voices, ideas, perspectives and theories produced by those engaged with social struggles” (Choudry & Kapoor 2010:2).

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