Page 58 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

42 R. MAXWELL AND T. MILLER

wonder that media scholars, commentators and school curricula have
virtually nothing to say about media technology’s impact on the
environment.
In response, we began a research project over a decade ago that we
hoped would disabuse media and communication experts of the idea that
media, information and communication technologies are environmentally
neutral. We have drawn on this research for this chapter, primarily from our
book, Greening the Media, and a column of the same name published
monthly at http://www.PsychologyToday.com. Our aim continues to be
to spark new ways of thinking about media history, media industries and
the connections between media usage, climate change and our health. Our
specific focus here is on challenges for green citizens and their expectations
of environmental organizations engaged in some form of activism, advo-
cacy, or policy-oriented work.

THE ECOLOGICAL CRISIS AND THE TECHNOLOGICAL
CHALLENGES
Readers of the collection of essays will be familiar with the basic con-
stituents of the ecological crisis:

• global warming (climate change) caused by overproduction of carbon
dioxide (CO 2 );
• pollution, including industrial dumping, unabated and unregulated;
• rapidly diminishing biodiversity, the “sixth great extinction” and the
precipitous decline of biosphere integrity (loss of land and sea
habitats).
Climate and environmental scientists have different ways of explaining the
ecological crisis, but they agree on one point: that since the industrial
revolution people have dangerously tipped the balance between what the
Earth can give to support human activity and what the Earth can safely
re-absorb from those activities. This balancing function has been called the
“scientific prerequisites for ecological sustainability” or, more simply, our
“planetary boundaries” (Rockström et al. 2009a, b; Schauer 2003).
Researchers who developed the model of planetary boundaries have
shown that human industriousness has crossed four of the nine boundaries
1
in their model, and that the transgression of two of the boundaries that
are key to the resilience of life on the planet—climate change and biosphere