Climate change is deadly, destructive, critical, and impending, but as you go through the slog of your day to day, it’s also incredibly slow and uninteresting. The climate’s decline happens bit by bit and there are just so many other things that can hold your attention for longer which are often less depressing and demand much less of us, so how do we maintain engagement with people in the climate crisis? In A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, Sarah Jaquette Ray gives a whole spiel about how we must create community as a way of fighting climate change, but how, once that community is created, do we stay engaged in the fight especially since it doesn’t seem to be much of a fight in the traditional sense? I will begin by looking at the general aesthetic created by climate activists and the news cycle to understand how to engage people better and for longer, and to compare this tactic, which centers fear, to another which centers creation.
If you’ve ever felt like the climate situation is grim, you’re not alone and it’s not your fault. The message given by scientists and activists has been grim and the reaction from the news media has been to keep talking about how doomed we are in the face of the climate crisis. Of course the motivation for both is very different; climate activists and scientists are trying to reinforce just how serious this threat is in an attempt to motivate mass change, while the news is simply trying to use fear to engage audiences to sell them ads in between broadcasts. Ray talks about this in the fourth chapter of her book. “Television, radio, newspapers, and the internet feed us bad news in part because we seek it. ‘If it bleeds, it leads,’ as the saying goes. […] Our minds intuitively seek negativity, news outlets leverage this susceptibility, and as a result, unless we are holed up in a cave, we act and live from an orientation of fear” (81). The bad news about climate change has been given to news outlets by activists, who are rightfully concerned about the state of the world and who express their observations of the negative. News and activists get caught up in a cycle where negativity gets promoted over and over again in an attempt to engage with the viewer, news cycles for the money, activists taking up the only opportunity they are given to air their concerns to a wide audience. As Ray says “Thoughtful, reasoned analyses of climate change rarely make the news” (83). What does all this negativity do to the viewer? Well, it’s the reason that Ray wrote her book. It gives them climate anxiety and an outlook that makes them feel like they cannot do anything to effect change. It may make them engaged, but it’s a meaningless and paralyzing engagement because it’s ability to stir change is short term. If the apocalypse will be slow, so will its solution.
Fear leads to short term engagement and long term burnout/alienation. So how do we remain engaged in the cause? I think that the solution is to favor the idea of creation by creating an aesthetic around climate activism that values it. In the way that there has been this kind of reinforced fear, we could have a movement that sees itself in art and creation. We could benefit from thinking of climate activism as art. The role of art in climate change is important because it shapes the way in which we continue thinking and informs how we evaluate other things in the world. If we see everything through the good-intentioned-but-wholly-fear-based lens of the news cycle we will continue to see everything as negative or dismiss things that might have the potential to do good. Ray talks about this in the form of narrative types, the declension and the progressive. “A declension narrative […] berates people for some moral failure and implores them to improve their behavior so that they may obtain the dream” (87). This is the fear based approach. “[A story] is about how the dust bowl exposed society’s weaknesses but brought people together to improve technology—a story of social progress, or as Cronon calls it, a ‘progressive narrative’” (87). The progressive narrative is the better one for framing the climate crisis and for the purposes of creating a more creative aesthetic of climate change but it does have its pitfalls. “Critics of the progressive narrative worry that it undermines that urgency of the declension narrative, effectively muffling the call to arms” (88). However, I think that this criticism is voided if you put an emphasis on creativity because of how creativity maintains an engagement with the people involved. When people are creating, they are putting a piece of themselves into the ring with the rest of the cause. When people put in to a cause, and they are supported by it, they become more likely to maintain their engagement long term. Highlighting cool and interesting things done by other climate activists makes others want to try and do equally cool and interesting things, all of which creates more dedicated individuals and spreads the ideas and brand of what the climate movement is trying to sell. Ray ends her fourth chapter with the line “let’s amplify our stories that expand our sense of abundance to manifest climate justice” (95). I think that we should take it a step further and ask of people in the climate movement to create themselves rather than just amplify because that is what it will take to maintain engagement. Art is essential, narratives are the frame through which we see everything and by creating an environment that is invested in its individuals creating it makes people view the world through their ability to create. At the same time, it is important to have, as part of the atmosphere of creation, the reality of climate change and the urgency of the action needed to effectively curb it. This is part of the incorporation and that urgency can fuel the ideas and artistic endeavors which could see themselves realized as protests or a revolution or the undermining of a system. When we think of climate activism as art, as creation, we are inspired to go to greater lengths because there is more meaning in it than just our survival. If the lengths that artists have gone to see their visions to fruition are any indicator, there is much to be done and much that will be done that we can’t even imagine yet.
Engagement is so key to the environmental movement because of the little time we have left to change our ways before the warmed planet does us in. Art is a way of keeping us actively engaged because we put ourselves into the piece. When we think of activism as art, it gives greater meaning to our actions. Our actions have to have some meaning otherwise we fall into pessimism and burnout. We need to be engaged. We need to make our activism art.
Shared by: Anonymous
Image Credit: United States Geological Survey on Unsplash.com