Page 183 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

14 JOURNALISM, CLIMATE COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA ALTERNATIVES 177

and among the public that any progress on climate change is going to be
fought over bitterly and will be decided through conflict’, which ends up
producing a real ‘blind spot’ with respect to solutions that can emerge out
of design, technology or policy innovation.
David Beers (2006), publisher of thetyee.ca, identified three different,
but complementary approaches through which solutions-focused journal-
ism can ‘catalyze concrete positive change.’
The first is ‘living the solution’, in which individuals describe their own
experiences with a particular form of behavioural, institutional or social and
political change. Exemplary of this approach was The 100-Mile Diet in
which Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon wrote about their attempt to live
on a diet consisting only of food sourced within 100 miles of their home.
The popularity of the online articles led to a best-selling book (Smith and
MacKinnon 2007) and helped spawn a global movement devoted to
dietary localization.
Second, journalists can investigate and publicize innovative, local,
small-scale experiments which are often highly successful but largely
invisible to the broader public. In these cases, the analytic focus becomes
questions of scale, reproducibility and barriers: if a specific practice, tech-
nology or policy is so effective, how can it be applied more broadly, and
what social, economic or political barriers are preventing such expansion?
Finally, Beers noted the importance of exploring solutions in other
jurisdictions, which are often neglected due to the parochial sensibilities
(and shrinking resources) of mainstream newsrooms. Learning about and
from other places can shake up public acceptance of the status quo, and
enliven political debate about the full range of choices available to citizens
and governments. How, for example, has Norway managed the develop-
ment and governance of its energy resources (and the profits from them)
compared to Canada? What might Vancouver learn from the cycling
policies and infrastructure of Portland, Copenhagen or Amsterdam? While
much of this information already exists in reports from NGOs and aca-
demic studies, the creativity and expertise of journalists as storytellers,
combined with their ethical and professional commitments as
fact-checkers, can give their reporting upon solutions a credibility and
rhetorical appeal which can get the public interested, engaged and excited.
Especially important for both Dembicki and Beers are the identification
of points of possible compromise and consensus—‘moveable parts’—which
are otherwise obscured by ongoing conflict between different stakeholders.
One of the most surprising revelations for Dembicki in his series Greening