PICTURING PLANETARY PERIL
VISUAL MEDIA AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS
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 model 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 whole-Earth 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.