Review of 'Ice on Fire'

2017

In spite of overwhelming agreement between scientists and scientific agencies around the world that anthropogenic climate change is currently occurring, many American citizens and politicians alike continue to doubt its validity. In this article, we examine 21st-century media reporting and 20th-century cinematic examples that provide possible reasons for why this is the case, especially foregrounding Western cultural perceptions and connotations of the Arctic region, which have constructed an intellectual framework that resists scientific findings of anthropogenic forcing of climate change. Keywords Arctic region, climate change, Cold War, environmental humanities, politics

Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, 2016

The evidence that global warming stems from human origins is overwhelming. It is often said that the only scientific statements to find greater professional assent are Newton’s laws of motion. Scientists have outlined the complex physical processes that create our anthropogenically adjusted climate. They routinely warn of the dire consequences of failing to act before it’s too late. Some have announced the Anthropocene, a new age in which our species has effects akin to geological agents. This gives rise to the prospect that humans are ushering in the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. Unlike all previous mass extinctions, this one—should it happen—will be on us. The scientific consensus is that the time to act is now. As Philip Smith and Nicolas Howe note, ‘‘the window of opportunity for dealing with the problem is limited’’ (p. 1). Enter one of the great paradoxes of our time: this moment of pressing existential threat is met with wholesale public apathy. The standard story is inclined ...

Cli-Fi: A Companion, 2018

2012

2019

We used qualitative in-depth interviews to evaluate the effects of a mass media climate change program on audiences' efficacy beliefs, outcome expectations, emotional responses, and motivations and intentions to address climate change. We conducted in-depth interviews with 73 participants from five US cities and three political parties who had watched episodes of the documentary television series, Season Two of Years of Living Dangerously. Eligible participants completed an in-depth interview within 24 h of viewing a select episode. Data were transcribed and then coded and analyzed using QSR NVivo 10. Weak efficacy beliefs limited intentions to enact concrete behavioral change. Outcome expectations, national-level actions, imagery, and emotional responses to stories played an important role in these processes. Explicit information about expected outcomes of various actions, and specifically successes, should be provided in order to boost efficacy and incentivize behavior.

Good Energy and the Buck Lab for Climate & Environment at Colby College, 2024

Most research that has examined climate change in film has focused on anomalous climate-focused films such as The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up, but fictional narratives have their greatest impact in the aggregate, through repetition of common settings, themes, and actions. Is the film industry as a whole helping us face and respond to the climate crisis—or avoid it? To answer this question, I worked with five current and former students to apply a communication studies methodology to the 250 most popular films of the last decade (2013 to 2022), identifying the presence of climate change in a film’s story world; climate awareness; scenes with climate mentions; common climate impacts; and climate-positive and climate-negative behaviors in each film. The result is “Climate Change On-screen,” a groundbreaking systematic analysis of climate change in popular films, published by the Buck Lab for Climate & Energy at Colby College and Good Energy.

Art/Research International: A Transdisciplinary Journal

The purpose of this study was to explore which principles or characteristics of visual forms of climate communication have the potential to increase their perceived effectiveness in terms of triggering climate concern and engagement. This article details the results of a case study based on an art exhibition and a shortened documentary with the topic earth/soil. Two focus group discussions were conducted in Brighton (UK) with a total of 20 participants who had seen both the documentary and the artwork. The transcripts of these focus groups were thematically analyzed to establish categories, themes, and subthemes from the data. Results show that art as well as documentaries have the potential to be an effective medium to convey climate change to audiences. Art may speak to the audience on a different (i.e. emotional rather than cognitive) level than documentaries, and therefore could be a helpful way to introduce the subject to an audience that may not yet be overly familiar with cli...

Journal of Historical Geography, 2009

This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically 'at risk'. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation.

Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic, 2022

Chapter Three: “At Memory’s Edge: Collaborative Perspectives on Climate Trauma in Arctic Cinema,” trains our eyes upon Indigenous perspectives that have typically been marginalized within narratives of climate transformation. Broadening contemporary work on Arctic film and aesthetics, it addresses questions of memory and making art and film about a warming Arctic without sentimentalizing or spectacularizing suffering. It draws on the writings of Indigenous literary theorist Gerald Vizenor who uses the term “aesthetics of survivance” to articulate the central place of creative story-telling in visual form in indigenous knowledge to address climate trauma. The films discussed push the viewer to imagine a different way of seeing, feeling, knowing, and surviving in the face of the crisis connected to the Arctic’s fast-changing landscapes. These filmmakers, Ashlee Cunsolo Willox in collaboration with the communities of Nunatsiavut, Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, and Kimi Takesue, call forth new forms of representation.