PICTURING PLANETARY PERIL
VISUAL MEDIA AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
FINIS DUNAWAY
At a key moment in the surprisingly popular, Academy Award–winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Al Gore stands in front of an enormous graph. A jagged red line tracks the changing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 650,000 years. Then a jagged blue line plots the average temperature readings over the same period. Viewers immediately notice the uncanny similarity between the two lines: every rise or dip in the red seems to generate a corresponding rise or dip in the blue. “I can’t think of another movie in which the display of a graph elicited gasps of horror,” the New York Times film critic A. O. Scott observed, “but when the red lines showing the increasing rates of carbon-dioxide emissions and the corresponding rise in temperatures come on screen, the effect is jolting and chilling.” After the lines appear, Gore steps onto a mechanical cherry picker that elevates him to the current carbon dioxide level. The red line moves relentlessly upward: its exponential verticality forecasts a radically changed planet. An Inconvenient Truth elicits shock and fear at the capacity of industrial society to transform the climate. The film presents science as prophecy, a warning about the long-term, planetary dimensions of climate change.
More clearly than any other cultural text had done to date, An Inconvenient Truth explained to mass audiences how the carbon cycle invaded the news cycle. Throughout the history of popular environmental images, the media have tended to emphasize the sudden violence of oil spills and other spectacular examples of ecological devastation. Climate change—like other problems associated with the Anthropocene—is a fundamentally different kind of threat: not an immediate, highly visible catastrophe but a gradually escalating, often invisible form of environmental danger. An Inconvenient Truth and other recent images of planetary peril suggest broader questions about visual culture and the Anthropocene: How can we learn to see systemic problems that lack the obvious visibility of an oil spill or natural disaster? To what extent does the emphasis on picturing planetary change obscure the uneven and profoundly inequitable experiences of the Anthropocene? Does the repeated focus on exponential data curves encourage environmental action or provoke fatalistic views of the future?
The visual media have helped make climate change—a systemic, slow-motion disaster—seem less abstract. In a prime example, the photographer James Balog’s Extreme Ice Survey employs time-lapse photography to record the stunning retreat of glaciers around the world; his project is profiled in the award-winning documentary Chasing Ice (2012), which includes footage of the largest glacier calving ever filmed. Likewise, An Inconvenient Truth borrows from scientific projects that use repeat photography to document glacial recession. These projects pair historic photographs of glaciers with contemporary photographs taken in the same spots: the then-and-now images reveal massive melting over relatively brief periods. Such images spectacularize the unspectacular, placing climate change in historical perspective to dramatize the rapidly changing world. These pictures also reject the news media’s emphasis on sudden catastrophe to grapple with long-term, accretive crises. In An Inconvenient Truth, Gore shows images of recent weather events from heat waves to hurricanes to demonstrate how increasing temperatures have produced recurring patterns of cataclysmic harm. In another viewing context, such as news media coverage of disasters, the images might be seen as depicting freakish events of nature, unrelated to accumulating carbon emissions. Here, though, they appear as the calamitous result of the graph’s ascending red line and resemble, as Gore puts it, “a nature walk through the book of Revelations.”
As Gore’s innovative use of graphs demonstrates, data visualization provides a powerful tool to communicate evidence of anthropogenic change, yet these displays often suffer from a reductive view of history and a failure to attend to power relations. Consider the Great Acceleration graphs featured in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme’s influential Global Change and the Earth System (2004), by Will Steffen and his cowriters. All of them imagine humanity as a singular, collective entity, marching together as an upward-sloping line that represents massive changes to planetary systems. Whether depicting the exploitation of global fisheries, the frequency of great floods, or the concentration of carbon dioxide and nitrogen dioxide in the atmosphere, these graphs produce a geometric redundancy: in all cases, the data sets rise exponentially after 1950. If they were displayed on a big screen, Gore would need to ride his cherry picker to reach their peaks. Like Gore’s climate change graph, the Great Acceleration charts present a linear, almost teleological narrative of Homo sapiens as an increasingly powerful but also increasingly destructive force. Seen in this manner, the Anthropocene concept renders the species as a set of data points plotted across shared coordinates of time and space. Anthropocene graphs provide startlingly clear representations of the scale and rapidity of global ecological change. Yet they neither tell us about the causes of our current environmental predicaments nor register the unequal experiences of environmental risk.
In this way, Anthropocene imagery reproduces some of the same problems that have limited the imagination of popular environmentalism: too often, mainstream depictions of the movement have emphasized notions of universal vulnerability and universal responsibility, framing all people, no matter where they live, no matter their class or race, as equally susceptible to environmental harm and equally culpable of causing the environmental crisis. From Cold War concerns about radioactive fallout to contemporary anxieties about global warming, the visual media have repeatedly portrayed all people as inhabiting a shared geography of environmental danger. In An Inconvenient Truth and other popular environmental works, pictures of the whole Earth—especially photographs taken by NASA astronauts in outer space—signify the planetary scale of the crisis and act as emblems of universal vulnerability. Like the Great Acceleration graphs, though, this planetary perspective obscures the realities of environmental injustice and deflects attention from the power relations that determine ecological inequalities. Moreover, the popular focus on universal responsibility has moved environmentalism from the political to the personal, prescribing individual actions and green consumerism as short-term solutions to long-term environmental problems.
Even as it places climate change within an extensive temporal vision, An Inconvenient Truth follows this familiar pattern. “I don’t know about you,” the popular food writer Michael Pollan commented, “but for me the most upsetting moment in An Inconvenient Truth came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to…change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing.” According to Pollan, the “immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem” and the “puniness” of Gore’s proposed solutions—using energy-efficient light bulbs, carrying reusable bags to the grocery store, and, if you can afford to, buying hybrid vehicles—“was enough to sink your heart.” While Scott praised its terrifying graphs, Pollan faulted the film for its failure to fashion a compelling, inspiring vision of the future.
Confronting the crises of the Anthropocene will require more than fantasies of personal empowerment. While popular environmental images have often promulgated green consumerism and personal responsibility, some activists and image makers have sought to move beyond this individualist frame by imagining collective responses to global warming and other environmental crises-in-the-making. Climate activist groups such as 350.org join Al Gore and other Anthropocene theorists in relying on data visualization. Like An Inconvenient Truth, 350.org videos use red lines to depict the exponential data curves of rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and, as indicated by the group’s name, to warn of the extreme dangers signaled by exceeding the 350 parts per million threshold. Yet 350.org and similar climate activist groups reject the limited m
odel of citizenship embraced by the mainstream media. In the words of 350.org’s operations director, Jeremy Osborn, they emphasize that “it’s not light bulbs, not Priuses” but “large systemic change” that is truly necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Climate activists harness visual and social media to galvanize public concern and to question the structure of dominant energy systems, especially the power of the fossil fuel industry. These groups are also working with indigenous peoples and environmental justice activists throughout the world to bring attention to the vast inequities of climate change and to question the universalizing message of wholeEarth imagery. Rather than naturalizing the red lines of apocalyptic despair, rather than succumbing to a fatalistic outlook on the future, these activists are challenging the short-term, profit-making interests of corporations and trying to envision long-term, sustainable ways to live in the Anthropocene.
With recognition of the ubiquitous impact of human-induced environmental change comes the question “Now what do we do?” Some want to run and hide. Some want to continue to ignore what is happening. Some want to celebrate because humans are finally in charge of the planet. Some believe that the natural world will take care of itself once humans have done themselves in. Some want to sit back and let technology provide the solutions. Some do not know what to do. And some are looking for sound solutions that will ensure a better future for Earth and humankind. The answer is neither simple nor straightforward, given the multitude and complexity of the variables at play. Fortunately, scientific and humanistic understandings of the Anthropocene are steadily advancing, providing knowledge essential for devising global efforts to slow the rate of change of biophysical transformations, mitigate their severity, and forge socially just and sustainable adaptations. Maintaining a livable planet with more people occupying a finite space subjected to accelerating environmental stresses will require extraordinary collaborations among citizens, governments, social and religious institutions, the marketplace, and the private sector. The link between the global environmental exigency and the international crisis of inequality is a fundamental aspect of the Anthropocene. As human activities in all societies become ever more enmeshed with landscapes, waterscapes, and the totality of life on Earth, we must learn to better manage our environments and ourselves. Surviving the challenges of the Age of Humans—exacerbated by expanding populations, overuse of resources, and environmental degradation—demands not only increasing knowledge of the natural world but also slowing the rate of species extinction. Much needs to be done, to be done with urgency, and to be done with a spirit of cooperation and sensitivity to our shared future on this Earth.
DRAGONS IN THE GREENHOUSE
THE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE AND THE DANGER OF UNCERTAINTY
RICHARD B. ALLEY
Disturbing headlines during 2014 warned of unstoppable sea-level rise from collapsing ice in West Antarctica. That ink had barely dried before a distinguished panel of retired high-ranking military officers noted that “the projected impacts of climate change…will serve as catalysts for instability and conflict.” As a climate scientist reading those headlines, I was reminded of “Here be dragons,” written in Latin on the Hunt-Lenox Globe from circa 1510.
Climate science may at first seem like an odd path to unknown but dangerous beasts. Despite occasional public statements to the contrary, the basics of climate and energy are not especially controversial—we gain much good from burning fossil fuel, but the carbon dioxide (CO2) thus released turns up Earth’s thermostat, and the impacts from each degree of warming will cost more than those of the previous degree, so an economically efficient response would start now to take measured action to reduce the rise of carbon dioxide and to adapt to the damages that are still expected to occur.
Uncertainties do encircle this basic consensus, however, just as they have always surrounded any growing body of knowledge. Christopher Columbus’s voyages forced mapmakers to confront what they didn’t know, too. The Hunt-Lenox Globe, perhaps the second-oldest surviving globe from after Columbus and now at the New York Public Library, has a recognizably accurate South America to go with the well-known classical world, but a few scattered islands stand in for all of North America. And on a vaguely recognizable coast of Asia are the famous words “HC SVNT DRACONES.”
Whether the mapmaker was thinking of scaly fire-breathers, Komodo monitor lizards, or something else is open to debate. But the words have reminded us over centuries that new knowledge also highlights what we don’t know—early mapmakers couldn’t guarantee freedom from dragons in largely unexplored territory. Further research usually cuts off the long tail of possibilities, finding familiar, dragon-free conditions. Occasionally, though, a long-tailed “dragon” may show up.
As the science of climate change has matured, it has shoved many of the possible dragons that we worried about a decade or two ago off the map. The National Research Council reported in 2013 that methane freed from clathrate ice in the sea floor by warming from our burning of fossil fuels is likely to amplify that warming, but slowly—giant methane belches suddenly cooking the planet are very unlikely. Changes in North Atlantic circulation will probably influence our future in unpleasant ways, too, but the flash freeze in the 2004 movie The Day after Tomorrow was science fiction, with emphasis on the fiction.
But as new research has lowered these concerns, just as new explorations half a millennium ago replaced islands and dragons with North America on maps, other tipping points in the warming Anthropocene have become more worrisome. Hurricane Sandy brought a storm surge to a piece of American coastline for a few hours in 2012, filling subways in New York and crippling the city; the West Antarctic studies point to the likelihood that changes already have been or soon could be initiated that will commit the world’s coasts to long-term sea-level rise similar to or larger than Sandy’s surge. This result may still be revised as the modeling is repeated and extended, and so far the onset of any rapid rise seems to be decades or more in the future, but the consequences still loom large to many observers. And as scientists look at the effects of changing climates on ocean acidity and dead zones, and on ecosystems including the Amazon rain forest and widespread coral reefs, many damaging tipping points remain possible.
Furthermore, despite their strength and vitality, our economies include large vulnerabilities that climate change can make worse. For example, in their report, the retired military officers traced the dashed line leading from drought in Syria to civil war there, and from heat and drought in Russia and China through crop failures to rising bread prices and then uprisings in North Africa. The report’s comment on conflict in Mali applies to all of these situations and more: “While climate change alone did not cause the conflict, it certainly added environmental stressors.”
Solid scholarship shows that in a world without dragons, in which we prepare wisely for the well-expected, smoothly rising impacts of warming, it will be economically beneficial to start now to enact efficient policies that reduce the release of fossil-fuel carbon dioxide into the air. But in a world where a threshold is occasionally crossed, unexpectedly and rapidly triggering the loss of an ice sheet or a huge ecosystem or much of the economy of a trading partner, the costs of warming are likely to be substantially higher, increasing the value of slowing the release of the fossil-fuel carbon dioxide that pushes these things toward their tipping points.
Early mariners had to successfully manage uncertainty to bring back the information for the Hunt-Lenox Globe. Fog was a reason to slow down: no prudent pilot wanted to discover an unknown and unseen reef by sailing into it at full speed. Today one occasionally hears the argument that society should not take actions to slow greenhouse gas warming until we have absolute scientific certainty that we face damaging hazards, that we should sail full speed ahead through the fog of our remaining ignorance, an idea that might have seemed strange indeed to those sailors of yore.
It may be a little self-serving for me as a researcher to point out the value of doing more research
, but knowledge really is power and money in this case. Ship captains eagerly embraced radar and sonar, GPS, and better charts as they became available, greatly reducing uncertainty and improving the ability to speed through bad weather. By better predicting what dragons do and don’t await us in a warming future, we may be able to prepare for or avoid the most dangerous ones, sailing ahead more rapidly and confidently.
Yet even with all the modern navigational technologies, sailors still carry life-preserving equipment and emergency beacons on ships built to minimize the risk of sinking if a collision does occur, and they carry insurance against disasters. Uncertainty can never be removed entirely, and the slight chance of a devastating accident is sufficient reason to take serious precautions. Science will never learn exactly where all the possible dragons are in a warming future. Analogy to the precautions taken by sailors suggests the value of actions to increase societal resilience to unexpected shocks and perhaps to work harder to slow the warming, just in case.
Exploration since Columbus has accurately filled in most of the geographical unknowns, so the Hunt-Lenox dragons are gone from our globe. We can send at least most of the climate change dragons to join them, and prepare wisely for any that remain, by designing and implementing wise policies using the knowledge we already have and new knowledge we will obtain from targeted research. The sooner we get started, the more effective we will be.
Living in the Anthropocene Page 13
