Page 191 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

14 JOURNALISM, CLIMATE COMMUNICATION AND MEDIA ALTERNATIVES 185

and users, and empower ordinary people to engage in public
discourse;
• mobilization-orientation; a positive orientation towards progressive
social change, and productive connections with (but not subordina-
tion to) social movements;
• engagement with communities, whether defined in terms of shared
locale, or shared interests;
• independence from state and corporate control, and from commercial
imperatives; individual or co-operative ownership;
• low degree of capitalization; often reliant on volunteer labour, grants
and donations; conventional production values and standards of
professionalism may be less important (Atton and Hamilton 2008).
Those characteristics mesh well with climate crisis journalism that would
seek to both inform and mobilize counterpublics, engage local commu-
nities and challenge entrenched power. In a study of alternative media
coverage of climate change in Vancouver, Gunster (2011) concluded that
it offered much more hopeful, optimistic and engaged visions of climate
politics than the cynical, pessimistic and largely spectatorial accounts which
dominated conventional news. While alternative media were deeply critical
of the spectacular failure of ‘politics-as-usual’ at the 2009 Copenhagen
summit, they invited the public to respond with outrage and (collective)
action rather than (individualized) despair and hopelessness. Informed by a
more sophisticated and broadly sympathetic understanding and exploration
of the multiplicity of climate activisms, alternative media (re)positioned
political action and engagement as viable, meaningful and accessible forms
of agency for those struggling to respond to climate change. Particularly
important in inspiring hope, were stories of political success—concrete
examples of civic activism, political struggle, innovative and effective public
policy, and transformative change in communities, institutions and gov-
ernments (Gunster 2012). Such portrayals can normalize political
engagement as something that ordinary people actually do, remind publics
that another world is possible, and thus:

not only feed upon the hope, nourished by historical example and con-
sciousness, that democratic pressure can compel [existing] institutions to
behave differently, but also awaken the political imagination to the utopian
prospect of inventing new institutions and even new forms of politics in
response to environmental crisis. Such an expansion of the conceptual and