- Nuclear power is thought to be “green energy”
- Not paying attention to radioactive waste material and products
- “Normal accidents” incredibly serious
- Chernobyl not problem of the past, still present problem
Political nature of risk assessment → radically different numbers
What are some strategies to make us belief that we’re safe?
- Strong statement, no debate
- Pastoral footage
Greenpeace Calendar
- Personalising and humanising → putting face to victims (high-lighting children), not simply numbers
∞ Think about whether construction of story-telling works
- Music
- Spare of use speaking: girl and liquidator
- Simple imagery → multiple audiences
- Silent film → silence
- Nuclear flower
- A lot of it is done through film-making
- Education: motivate, politicise
- What impact do films have and how do we measure social change?
- Is it profound in effects or simply reinforcing?
∞ What is the impact on of commemorative films?
Political Mimesis
- Our bodily reaction to something; reaction to one film is felt in body, not cerebral
- Physiological response → cognition
- Relations between the bodies on the screen and audience
- Starting point: what one body makes another do
e.g.
Horror → scream
Melodrama → cry
Porn → sexual arousal
∞ Engage person through body!
- Impacting because already know/care (reinforcing) or to draw you in (question, think)?
∞∞ Why should we remember industrial accidents? How should we remember? Strategies?
Strategies
- Guided on interpretation of visual by song
- So many different kinds of images in film
- Birth defects (graphic)
- Contrast of before/after
- Children’s drawings
The Internet Age
- Not possible to be a creator of content (as opposed to being receiver) a few years ago
- Now… euphoria of what is possible
- Environmental policies and problems have to keep yielding profits to meet ever-expanding consumer society
- It doesn’t work → but we still do it
Canadian View
- Periphery of developed world: exportation of natural resources
- Canada is so large… resources feel as if they are “infinite”
Industrialism
- Not capitalism, but “unbridled industrialism” – the way in which we have dealt with production – that results in little environmental accountability
- Over-estimate of progress without factoring environmental issues and cases into consideration
Tensions
- Balance between:
- Government must provide jobs, etc.
- We need to protect the environment
∴ Need paradigm shift
Developing/Industrialising Countries
- Countries entering consumer age
- 1st-World: you can’t develop – pointing finger but comes back to historical first-world activities which cause current environmental damage
- Challenge: how to have development with environmental integrity?
- Unsustainable impoverishment – environmentally damaging practises just to survive
Risk & Risk Assessment
- Risk – Probability a particular hazard will occur
- Many risks we cannot see → defer to experts
- Organisational basis of risk
- Originates from large-scale activities
- ∞ Structurally set-up in operation of organisation
- Profits first → accidents inevitable
- Changes to safety procedure to save money
“Normal Accidents”
- “Normal” because of sophistication of technology, consequences of procedure and system
- When accident happens, state/company responsible, both cannot act to respond
Community Perception of Risk
- Feel whether protected: degree of trust in experts
- How to keep people feeling safe
Social Distribution of Risk
- Socioeconomic status (SES) analysis → industrial and waste sites, not located in high SES area
- Environmental Classicism – Decision of risk influenced by inequality and power
- Not just ethnic basis → poverty
- Vulnerable periphery
- Depressed
∴ Where people are really struggling, there is a high burden of environmental risk
Stages local communities go through:
- See themselves as victims of corporate environmental crime
- Make appeals to government environmental agencies to take action
- Become disillusioned with slow pace/absence of official action – seek environment justice
- Increased community pressure – either convinces government regulars to enforce environmental standards – or nothing happens
Political Economy of Environment
- Tendency to think of capitalism at fault
- Really, “treadmill of production” at base of political economy of environment
- Industrialisation itself → problems and consequences
- Profit can drive environmentalism? Positioning
Think: Environment ↔ Economy
Now: ←
Future: →
Environmental Mobolisation
Frames – interpretations of events and what they mean
3 Parts
- Diagnostic – what is the problem
- Prognostic – offer solutions
- Motivational – call recruits to take action
- 1960s: “Impending doom” framed, can get us bummed out
- 1970s: “Carrying capacity” – idea of whether planet could sustain population growth
- 1980s: Acid rain, biosphere crisis, green house gases
- Now: Global warming
Political Economy of Environment
- Some look at: production and consumption
- We need to focus more on production
Two approaches to natural environment: dominant and alternative environmental paradigm
Dominant Paradigm
- Moral imperative of material-wealth creation
- Progress is advancement of material wealth
- Moral conviction that humans have inalienable right to dominate nature
- Harness environment to that end
- Large scale organisation of society and resource depletion
- Confidence in science and technology that there is always going to be a technological solution
- All major institutions reflect widespread acceptance of this paradigm
Alternative Environmental Paradigm
- Emphasises smaller-scale impact of resources; waste generated is reduced
- Decentralised economic and political structures
- In harmony with nature – delicate balance of eco-systems
- Little confidence in science and technology to come up with technological fix for material and energy shortages
Sustainable Development
Possible with capitalism?
Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the avility of future generations to meet their own needs
Environmental Attitudes and Concerns
Difference between attitudes and actions:
Most people say they are willing to do a great deal to help curb pollution problems and are fairly emotional about it, but in fact they actually do very little and know even less