Fire as an aesthetic resource in climate change communication: exploring the visual discourse of the California wildfires on Twitter/X

Abstract

This article uses the case study of the California wildfires of 2020/2021 to examine the visual discourse on fires on social media and investigate how it was harnessed by environmental activists to shape narratives and meanings regarding climate change. The article draws on two datasets scraped from Twitter/X (350 images), i.e. the visual discourse of the California wildfires (250 images) and the visual data of environmental NGOs (100 images). Our findings show that the general visual discourse evokes the impact, risk, and devastation of wildfires. In contrast, in the second visual discourse, civil society deploys fire as an aesthetic resource to communicate danger but also makes an explicit connection between wildfires, climate change and fossil fuel reliance. Hence, our article highlights an urgent challenge in climate crisis communication: how to make an explicit causal link between wildfires and climate change through the use of visual images of fire. This challenge is exacerbated by dramatic and powerful images of fire which dominate social media, yet simultaneously undermine fire’s capacity to communicate blame and links to climate change. This tension is explored throughout the article with fire analysed as a unique site of contestation in the visual communication of climate change.