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Climate Change Advocacy in the Anthropocene

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Climate Change Advocacy in the Anthropocene University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2017 A World Of Our Own: Climate Change Advocacy In The Anthropocene Rowan Howard-Williams University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Climate Commons, Communication Commons, and the Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment Commons Recommended Citation Howard-Williams, Rowan, "A World Of Our Own: Climate Change Advocacy In The Anthropocene" (2017). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2860. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2860 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2860 For more information, please contact [email protected]. A World Of Our Own: Climate Change Advocacy In The Anthropocene Abstract The effects of human impacts on the environment are often not comprehensible to people and have to be given meaning through communication. Such impacts, most prominently climate change, have increased to the extent that human actions are the dominant force in planetary biophysical systems. Yet these impacts are for the most part unintentional and not subject to democratic control. A critical discourse analysis of campaign material and media content examines how three advocacy groups – 350, a climate activist organization, The Breakthrough Institute, a think-tank, and The Nature Conservancy, an established conservation organization – discursively construct climate change. The three groups acknowledge the need to more consciously or deliberatively manage environmental impacts, and yet all have very different assumptions, objectives and tactics in their advocacy. Analysis of the communication activities of the organizations and how their ideas are represented and contested in other media shows not only how they construct the particular issue of climate change but their relationship to societal power relationships. How the organizations build their case for action involves discursive acts which define or re-define the boundaries between nature and society and what (and who) is to be included or excluded from political concern. Unless directly challenged, these new formations will reproduce existing power structures and inequalities. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Communication First Advisor Marwan M. Kraidy Keywords activism, advocacy, anthropocene, climate change, critical discourse analysis, media Subject Categories Climate | Communication | Environmental Indicators and Impact Assessment | Environmental Sciences This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2860 A WORLD OF OUR OWN: CLIMATE CHANGE ADVOCACY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Rowan Howard-Williams A DISSERTATION in Communication Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2017 Supervisor of Dissertation _____________________ Dr. Marwan M. Kraidy Anthony Shadid Chair in Global Media, Politics and Culture Graduate Group Chairperson _____________________ Dr. Joseph Turow Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication Dissertation Committee: Dr. Michael X. Delli Carpini Walter H. Annenberg Dean and Professor of Communication Dr. Guobin Yang Grace Lee Boggs Professor of Communication and Sociology A WORLD OF OUR OWN: CLIMATE CHANGE ADVOCACY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE COPYRIGHT 2017 Rowan Howard-Williams This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution- NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ ACKNOWLEDGMENT This dissertation would not have been possible without the help and support of a great many people. My advisor, Marwan Kraidy, offered invaluable feedback, mentorship and wisdom in guiding me through the often tortuous process of creating a dissertation. My committee members, Michael Delli Carpini and Guobin Yang, were likewise generous with their advice. The extraordinary faculty at the Annenberg School for Communication all contributed to my development as a scholar; in particular I had the great privilege of working closely with Elihu Katz and Joseph Turow, both of whom taught me a huge amount. My fellow PhD students made the process much more bearable. I owe a great deal in particular to Tim Fallis for his friendship and support and for helping me over the line in the final stages; and to Nora Draper, Lori Young, Deepti Chittamuru, Derek Blackwell, Chris Ali, and Katherine Felsburg Wong. Finally, none of this would have happened without my family – Mum, Dad, Heather, Carol – whose visits and Skype chats kept me going, and whose love and support got me where I am. iii ABSTRACT A WORLD OF OUR OWN: CLIMATE CHANGE ADVOCACY IN THE ANTHROPOCENE Rowan Howard-Williams Dr. Marwan M. Kraidy The effects of human impacts on the environment are often not comprehensible to people and have to be given meaning through communication. Such impacts, most prominently climate change, have increased to the extent that human actions are the dominant force in planetary biophysical systems. Yet these impacts are for the most part unintentional and not subject to democratic control. A critical discourse analysis of campaign material and media content examines how three advocacy groups – 350, a climate activist organization, The Breakthrough Institute, a think-tank, and The Nature Conservancy, an established conservation organization – discursively construct climate change. The three groups acknowledge the need to more consciously or deliberatively manage environmental impacts, and yet all have very different assumptions, objectives and tactics in their advocacy. Analysis of the communication activities of the organizations and how their ideas are represented and contested in other media shows not only how they construct the particular issue of climate change but their relationship to societal power relationships. How the organizations build their case for action involves discursive acts which define or re-define the boundaries between nature and society and what (and who) is to be included or excluded from political concern. Unless directly challenged, these new formations will reproduce existing power structures and inequalities. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgment iii Abstract iiiv List of Tables viii Chapter 1 – Introduction: The dreadful burden of choice 1 Impact and control 3 Communicating the environment 6 Dissertation overview 9 Chapter 2 – Literature Review 15 Risk society, reflexive modernization, and the environment 15 Scientific knowledge in risk construction 20 Risk politics 24 The politics of the Anthropocene 28 Climate change, discourse and media 35 Media in the risk society 37 Chapter 3 – Methods and case studies 46 Critical discourse analysis 47 Research design and analytic plan 53 Overview of case studies 55 Popular mobilization: 350 and fossil fuel divestment 55 Radical modernization: The Breakthrough Institute 59 Nature’s capital: The Nature Conservancy 64 Summary and comparative benchmarks 68 Chapter 4 – Politicizing climate change: Challenging power through fossil fuel divestment 72 Introduction: Carbon divestment and the Fossil Free campaign 72 The carbon bubble and the financial risk of CO2 regulation 75 Subpolitics and divestment 78 The South African divestment campaign 82 Lines of argument in fossil fuel divestment 85 Economics 87 v Morality 93 Politics 105 Conclusion: Reflexivity and the political 117 Chapter 5 – Ecomodernism: The Breakthrough Institute’s theology for the Anthropocene 128 Introduction 128 The Death of Environmentalism 130 Reactions to The Death of Environmentalism 134 Rejection of the DoE thesis 136 The environmental movement’s ideological positioning 137 Three paradigms of environmentalism 140 Environmentalism without environmentalists 144 The Environmental Justice movement on environmentalism’s death 148 The Death of Environmentalism and the birth of climate activism 155 Break Through and the creation of a new politics 158 The conceptual roots of ecological modernization 162 Faith in modernity 167 The emerging Ecomodernist identity 174 Conclusion: Democracy in the Anthropocene 182 Chapter 6 – Gardening the Anthropocene: Conservation after the end of nature 192 Introduction 192 The origins and evolution of TNC 195 A new conservation for the Anthropocene 201 New age, new tensions, new paradigm 203 Conservation discourse and practice 211 Fragility and resilience 214 New conservation and old capitalism 218 Ecosystem services 222 Pristine nature in TNC’s public campaigns 227 Conclusion 237 Chapter 7 – Conclusion 244 Summary of case studies 247 Comparisons across cases 252 vi The nature-society binary 252 Attitudes towards dominant institutions 255 Systemic versus individual responsibility 257 The role of the public 259 Bibliography 262 vii List of Tables Table 1: List of primary sources 71 Table 2: List of primary sources for Chapter 4 75 Table 3: List of primary sources for Chapter 5 129 Table 4: List of primary sources for Chapter 6 195 viii Chapter 1 – Introduction: The dreadful burden of choice In December of 1962, John Steinbeck accepted the Nobel Prize for Literature at the City Hall in Stockholm. After ruminating in his acceptance speech on the “nature and direction of literature,” Steinbeck (1962) turned his attention to the greatest existential threat of the time, the prospect of nuclear annihilation: The door
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