Book Review: Environmental Conflict and the Media, edited by Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins

Abstract

Environmental Conflict and the Media. Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins, eds. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 357 pp. $149.95 hbk. $39.95 pbk.Editors Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins are both professors in Australian Universities (Melbourne and Monash, respectively) and many of the case studies here of media coverage of environmental conflict are Australian. Series editor Simon Cottle spent several years as media studies professor in Australia. The series, Global Crises and the Media, represents too rare a commodity in media studies: an academic attempt at meaningful response to the greatest crises of our times. The foci here include specific media, activism, and communication of crisis, news reporting, and frames. The book's four divisions span and technologies (with strong emphasis on social media), activism and campaigns, communication crises, and contested claims.Cottle's introduction summarizes what is known about media and environmental conflict, and invokes the public arenas model as one tool among others as one that helpfully invokes the carrying capacities of different media, principles of selection, and networks of operatives. Cottle advocates attention to the interpenetration of spe- cific crises with ecology and other global dynamics, including violent conflicts. He observes that conflicts may also contain the seeds for increased cooperation and holds out hope for the study of new media and the transnational politics of connectivity. Michael Meadows and Robert Thomson, from their study of local press coverage of national parks conclude that the local press reveals the significance and effectiveness of local campaigns. Alex Lockwood, reflecting on a U.K. campaign to save publicly owned woodland from privatization, is concerned with the efficacy of the affective- feelings and emotions-in environmental campaigns. He picks up the concept of intimate public, one that is less concerned with information and more with the structures of feeling and their nurture through social media. These tag moments of sensibility and mood. Catherine Collins considers YouTube in the context of protests against clear-cutting of old growth forests in Tasmania and the Pacific Northwest. She emphasizes the importance of constructing narratives that are crafted to appeal to people other than those who already agree with the message. Images supplement information and also represent forms of information, as Daniel Palmer argues in his consideration of how photography helps citizens to re-imagine environmental data and ecologize their collective lives by unsettling what appears natural in conven- tional in-the-moment images, instead capturing, sometimes over time, assemblages of biological, technological, economic, and governmental factors.Lynn McGuarr brings together travel journalism, environmental protest, power, and the Internet. She shows that travel journalism often enjoys tacit relationships with the travel industry, but also has a shared interest both with industry and environmental activists in conservation, and may be more motivated in the future to prioritize credi- bility with the reader over maintaining good access to powerful sources.Silvio Waisbord examines the lessons of the asambleismo movement against the establishment of pulp mills on the Uruguay River in Argentina. He criticizes the fail- ure of mainstream media to provide a wider context for the understanding of the expansion of the extractive industries and their relevance to citizen demands for envi- ronmental justice. Environmental journalists have no choice, he argues, other than to take account of the editorial and professional biases of news media. …