Page 211 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

CHAPTER 18

Conclusion: One Month in the Life

of the Planet—Carbon Capitalism
and the Struggle for the Commons

Graham Murdock

A series of publications and events in March 2017, when this volume was
being prepared for production, provided comprehensive new evidence that
the climate crisis was accelerating, underlined the growing strength of the
struggles around it, and gave formal status to an alternative framework for
thinking about a viable future built around a reassertion of the idea of the
commons. All of these strands have long histories and deep roots but
looking more closely at this one month in the life of the planet points up
the central argument advanced by the chapters collected here; that
understanding the operation of carbon capitalism and constructing alter-
natives to it must take the organisation of communication systems, as both
arrays of material infrastructures and machines and contested cultural
spaces, centrally into account.

G. Murdock (&)
Department of Social Sciences, Loughborough University,
Loughborough, UK
e-mail: g.murdock@lboro.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2017 207
B. Brevini and G. Murdock (eds.), Carbon Capitalism and Communication,
Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-57876-7_18