Make love, not war?: Radical environmental activism’s reconfigurative potential and pitfalls (original) (raw)
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Sustaining Environmental Action: The Sea Shepherds, Conflict and the Politics of Communication
Environmental groups today are operating in a political climate that for many is characterised by an increasing threat to democratic values in democratic countries. At the same time, a functioning democracy is seen as the pre-requisite for environmental protection. The problems arising out of this tension for environmental action and debate are evident for example in the debate over climate change denial and the question of political funding by corporations. Within this context, this paper will discuss current conceptualisations of the cultural and political role of environmental action. The campaigning and media communications strategies practiced by Paul Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, and of this particular form of radical environmentalism, are used as a case study to analyse the role of various forms of communicating environmental risk and conflict by various groups in putting environmental problems on the social agenda. But rather than focusing exclusively on the Sea Shepherd’s media practices, the focus in this paper will be on Paul Watson’s whole philosophy of conflict. What kind of environmental risk communication and framing of environmental issues is actually brought into being by Sea Shepherd? What kind of debates and actions actually develop out of and around the symbols produced by Sea Shepherd’s activities? What has been developing as the recognised risk or crisis within the media sphere and public debate around the Sea Shepherds is not whaling as an issue, or even the wider environmental crisis of species extinction, but a number of other political issues, such as the risk to international relations and the handling of social conflicts over environmental issues. Hence, is Sea Shepherd’s symbolic politics further polarising existing antagonisms in the conflict over whaling rather than growing environmental awareness and fostering possible action, and what would be the implications of this for the question of the current and future role of environmental action?
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Bearing witness in 40 years of Greenpeace chronicles
MY DOG-EARED yellow-covered copy of the late Robert Hunter’s Warriors of the Rainbow still has pride of place among my bookshelves. It was inspirational in many respects before I embarked on Rainbow Warrior I’s journey to the Marshall Islands in May 1985 which led to the bombing in Auckland’s Waitemata Harbour two months later and my own book Eyes of Fire about that ill-fated humanitarian voyage, so very different from most Greenpeace campaigns.One of the original Greenpeace environmental crusaders, journalist Hunter provided a powerful and insightful tale of the Canadian birth and early years of the global movement ‘from Amchitka to Moruroa’. Even before the corporate trend to mission statements, Greenpeace had one provided by the Cree Indians and popularised by Hunter.
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Environmental Politics, 2011
Activists use emotional language and images – what Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter coined ‘mindbombs’ – to convince people that some actions are wrong, morally and environmentally. For instance, for over 50 years anti-sealing activists have employed mindbombs to transform seal pups into babies and seal hunters into barbarians. Although ‘image politics’ contributed to the decline of the Canadian sealing industry in the 1980s, its effectiveness has been – and continues to be – rocky, particularly as pro-sealing voices counter with competing claims of cultural rights, traditional livelihoods and sustainable use. Drawing on Tilly and Tarrow's ‘cycles of contention’ framework, this article argues that controlling and predicting the global uptake of messaging is becoming harder as activists operate in an increasingly crowded discursive landscape, as campaigners and counter-campaigners articulate scientific and moral frames that resonate differently across changing social and cultural contexts, and in light of globalising markets, transnational networks and changing media.
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Introduction to the special issue "Climate and marine justice -debates and critical perspectives"
Geographica Helvetica, 2021
This special issue (SI) shows that environmental justice perspectives are especially useful for analysing current socio-ecological conflicts. These perspectives help to bridge epistemological and ontological gaps in inter-and transdisciplinary settings and promote normative and justice-oriented discussions on environmental struggles within and beyond the academy. Currently, the following two interrelated environmental crises and their impacts regularly make headlines: climate change and the impacts of the unsustainable use of the oceans. Still, for a large part of the global population-not only but especially in the Global North-both crises remain abstract, mainly becoming visible through news coverage of plastic waste in the oceans, storm surges and droughts, and through documentaries on sea-level rise and the destruction of ecosystems. However, the destruction of marine and coastal habitats and the effects of climate change are increasingly affecting people's daily lives. The effects of climate change, pollution, and marine resource overuse are creating serious disruption to livelihoods and leading to new socio-ecological conflicts and new claims. This SI aims to reflect and explore climate and marine narratives, environmental knowledge claims, multiple ontologies, climate change adaptation, and the spatial and temporal shaping of socio-ecological struggles for climate and marine justice in more detail. Furthermore, it takes up current strands of climate and marine justice scholarship and explores avenues for further research.
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In Political Seas: Engaging with Political Ecology in the Ocean and Coastal Environment
Coastal Management, 2019
The world’s oceans and coasts are awash in a sea of politics. The marine environment is increasingly busy, changing, and a site of degradation, marginalization, injustice, contestation and conflict over declining resources and occupied spaces at local to global scales. Themes of political ecology, such as power and politics, narratives and knowledge, scale and history, environmental justice and equity, are thus salient issues to understand in ocean and coastal governance and management. This subject review examines research on these themes of political ecology in the ocean and coastal environment and reflects on how the insights gained might be applied to governance and management. Political ecology provides important insights into: the influence of power in ocean management and governance processes; the manner in which narratives, knowledge, and scale are used to legitimize and shape policies and management efforts; the effects of historical trajectories on present circumstances, options, and practices; and the nature of inequities and environmental injustices that can occur in the marine environment. Moreover, ocean and coastal researchers, practitioners, and decision makers ought to engage with the political processes and injustices occurring in the ocean. Moving from critical insights to constructive engagements will ensure that political ecology helps to plant seeds of hope in the Anthropocene ocean.
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