In the time of the Anthropocene we are increasingly gaining awareness of the human impact on Earth and of the contradictory role of science. This awareness makes us simultaneously reflect on the environmentally devastating effects of technological progress, and on the way that science sets out the paths within which we can think of alternative environmental and technological futures. Within ECREA we have to take on responsibility for engaging in the environmental crisis, and to insist on the role of the human and social sciences, in particular media and communication research, when taking on this challenge.
There is a necessary and urgent call for politicians, CEOs, planners, educators and indeed individuals to listen to the scientists. This means taking seriously the devastating messages conveyed by the measurements of emissions and their effects, and the future scenarios including the question of an irreversible turning point, which have left scientists deeply worried. This call has been present, even prominent, for everyone who has been interested in environmental matters during the last 50 years at least. But, as Greta Thunberg and the recent surge in popular climate activism show us, this call is still debated and resisted. The fact that the international community seemingly has begun to listen, and perhaps even respond, to this call is one of the most interesting perspectives in environmental politics for a long time.
The scientific documentation of the crisis and the awareness that ‘something must be done’ do not, however, show any clear paths forward. Nor does this solve fundamental issues of responsibility and ethics in a field that is clearly socially and politically very complex. Public debate has been less focused on the equally pressing need for more research and knowledge that goes beyond the technical (and natural) scientific descriptions and predictions of the environmental catastrophe. Climate change is caused and maintained by humans’ interactions with technology and with nature. It is conditioned by the cultural and political understandings of our capitalist economic system, of our relation to and understanding of resources, and of the patterns of consumption and production we participate in. While these cultural and political systems are largely taken as natural and given, the way we understand our interactions with nature is deeply ethical. By gaining awareness of how these processes rest on a predominantly utilitarian environmental ethics, we are urged to think of the environmental crisis in new ways that go beyond this particular capitalistic, utilitarian, individualistic and consumerist horizon of meaning that we are part of.
As media and communication scholars, the central role played by media in this process seems obvious. This calls for critical analyses of how the media and different mediating processes shape and maintain, but also challenge the current environmental discourse and the complex role played by science. For ECREA to develop as an environmentally responsible organisation is of course to think of new formats for sharing research with less environmental impact and more economic fairness. But it is also necessary for ECREA to insist on the importance of foregrounding a humanistic and social science perspective on how media and communication play a pivotal role in the environmental crisis. And that understanding and researching this role is important to any meaningful, ethical and democratic engagement with this issue.
Mette Marie Roslyng, Aalborg University, Copenhagen (Chair of the Science and Environment Section)
