How Climate Change Comes to Matter: The Communal Life of Facts (Experimental Futures) - Softcover

Callison, Candis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822357879 ISBN 13: 9780822357872

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2014

Synopsis

During the past decade, skepticism about climate change has frustrated those seeking to engage broad publics and motivate them to take action on the issue. In this innovative ethnography, Candis Callison examines the initiatives of social and professional groups as they encourage diverse American publics to care about climate change. She explores the efforts of science journalists, scientists who have become expert voices for and about climate change, American evangelicals, Indigenous leaders, and advocates for corporate social responsibility.

The disparate efforts of these groups illuminate the challenge of maintaining fidelity to scientific facts while transforming them into ethical and moral calls to action. Callison investigates the different vernaculars through which we understand and articulate our worlds, as well as the nuanced and pluralistic understandings of climate change evident in different forms of advocacy. As she demonstrates, climate change offers an opportunity to look deeply at how issues and problems that begin in a scientific context come to matter to wide publics, and to rethink emerging interactions among different kinds of knowledge and experience, evolving media landscapes, and claims to authority and expertise.

About this title

About the Author

Candis Callison is Assistant Professor in the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of British Columbia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

How Climate Change Comes to Matter

The Communal Life of Facts

By Candis Callison

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5787-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction, 
One: The Inuit Gift, 
Two: Reporting on Climate Change, 
Three: Blessing the Facts, 
Four: Negotiating Risk, Expertise, and Near-Advocacy, 
Five: What Gets Measured Gets Managed, 
Epilogue: Rethinking Public Engagement and Collaboration, 
Appendix: A Decade of Climate Change, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

The Inuit Gift

On July 7, 2007, I awoke early to a brilliant Arctic sun already high above my hotel in Kotzebue, Alaska. Kotzebue is a town that guidebooks refer to as a "working Arctic town," or what I determined as code for "nothing to see here." Such a description is in stark contrast to nearby Nome, which caters to tourists, Iditarod sledding enthusiasts, and gold rush history seekers. I traveled the extra leg to Kotzebue so I could attend the Inuit Circumpolar Youth Council (ICYC) language symposium. The invitation had been extended to me by Nome-born Patricia Cochran, international chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC). ICC represents Inuit people across the Arctic parts of Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Greenland. ICC has both a youth council and an elders' council in addition to the main political organization.

It was a privilege to be invited to the ICYC symposium in Kotzebue, but after I accepted, I realized the symposium fell on the vaunted 7–7–7 date. I had originally planned to attend one of the Live Earth mega-concerts scheduled for that day. Live Earth, at that time, was one of the largest (and most expensive) efforts at generating public awareness and engagement with climate change. Many of the world's most popular musicians had signed on, and Al Gore's organization was programming the climate-related part of the program. It was meant to energize the faithful and convince others to care and do something—even switching light bulbs from incandescent to longer life compact fluorescents (CFLs) counted as a responsible response to climate change.

Each morning I was in Kotzebue, I would descend the stairs to the hotel lobby where a small group of male elders were chatting and laughing with one another in the seating area in front of registration. Tied together through networks of kinship and friendship, they came from various fly-in communities, like Point Hope, Kobuk, Barrow, and other villages in the northwest Arctic. The symposium was a reunion of sorts for everyone who attended. I was a bit of an anomaly, although they were certainly accustomed to scientists, social and otherwise, being in their midst to study them or their land.

The same group of elders had questioned me a day earlier about my identity. They were sure that I was a lawyer and had a good laugh when they found out I was a graduate student. Climate change as my topic of interest elicited a different response—the tone of the conversation shifted quickly. Several spoke very briefly and gravely of storms that had forced their whaling boats back in, changed game patterns, and continued dangerous erosion of their coastal villages. They didn't necessarily want to know what I was up to in an in-depth way, but they did want to inform me that these changes were very much an everyday concern for them.

On July 7, they were deep in conversation in their Iñupiaq dialect. We exchanged waves, and I headed out the front door beside them to be greeted by the gloriously bright sun and gently lapping waves of the Chukchi Sea. The dirt ring road about six feet from shore lay in front of the hotel and provided an easy footpath to the restaurant next door—one of only two or three places to eat out in a town of about 3,000 people. As I slid into a chair at the restaurant, I wondered if anyone in Kotzebue was aware or excited about the fact that somewhere in the world really famous musicians were rocking out about climate change to save the Arctic and, if one believed the most alarming projections, countries and land masses as we currently know them.

CNN was on in the restaurant, which doubled as a bar. It had updates from concerts under way in Tokyo and London. CNN's anchors were quite excited about the scientists' band broadcasting later on from Antarctica—excited, that is, in the canned performative way viewers have come to expect from on-air banter. I had to agree with their canned excitement, though. The "broadcasting from all seven continents" was a real novelty even if the seventh came by way of grainy satellite video from a socked-in Antarctic winter research station. That was it for a human polar presence, though—from the only continent devoid of indigenous human communities.

I glanced around the gritty restaurant with faded leather chairs and paneled walls. It occurred to me pretty quickly that I was the only one paying attention to the screens mounted on the ceiling above the bar. The wizened old fishermen in the booth behind me were talking about the relative merits of various winches and rigs. The elder Inuit couple and their grandchild in the booth beside them talked quietly. I couldn't make out what they were talking about, but they gave me a gentle nod to say hello, recognizing me from the symposium. Other breakfast-seekers straggled in over the next forty-five minutes, but the TV was mere background noise. Game day or election night this was not.

The Arctic was not center stage for Live Earth, despite the daily challenges of living in a vast expanse dotted with fly-in communities that have worked out a dependent relationship with ice and cold. The irrelevance of such an event to those actually experiencing the direct effects of climate change seemed palpable from this vantage point. Learning about compact fluorescent light bulbs just doesn't cut it as a solution when nearby, the ancient whaling village of Kivalina is in danger of being swept into the sea or, to put it less dramatically and more specifically, losing more and more of its small barrier island to permafrost melt and coastal erosion.

It has been argued that awareness-raising schemes like the massive undertaking of Live Earth are always removed, regardless of where one sits. Certainly, there were many critics and skeptics who wondered what the "real" net effect would be in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and the expense of broadcasting musicians like Sting, Madonna, and the Black-Eyed Peas live from large and fashionable metropolises like Tokyo, London, or Rio (Schagen 2007). Yet for those who long for a continued momentum of public interest and support for climate change action and the energizing of a new generation, there could be nothing better than a Live Aid for the Earth. After so many decades in which climate change remained on what Gallup called "the public's 'back burner,'" it finally seemed that such a massive event might be a way to raise the profile of climate change the way Live Aid or Farm Aid or other celebrity-laden events had done for other issues.

Between this gulf of the local and global, the direct present experience and the conceptual future, lies the difficulty of communicating the amorphous nature of climate change as an issue of concern. How to talk about it, where it's located, what the causal factors might be, when it may begin or how it already has, and any guesses at potential solutions appear, at first glance, to be audience-dependent. Locating what climate change means or when/how it is meaningful is a much more fraught process than what advocates or journalists might consider in their efforts to make an issue or a news story relevant to "audiences." The rules, grammars, and associations related to climate change's form of life are in motion. Locating oneself or an event in relation to climate change brings to bear history, collective identities, institutional regimes, and epistemological difference. For example, the fact that Live Earth tries to connect climate change not to where it's happening or the people located there but to musicians and science and policy experts invests it with certain kinds of knowledge and politics.

I am beginning this book with my journeys to the Arctic because this is where climate change is a lived and felt reality. Beginning where climate change is already happening reveals the ways in which climate change has been shaped by scientific vernaculars and media discourse and the ways in which its form of life requires many different levels of negotiation by those who are implicated in the predictions and experiences associated with it. This chapter seeks to locate climate change in diverse Inuit discourse, contexts, and histories, and to locate Inuit claims and experiences in media and science-laden contexts where action, logics, and representations compete for dominance and prominence. Understood as an emergent form of life, particularly in the Arctic, climate change presents the need for excavation and reassessment of what a recognition of climate change portends for those who have endured a century of immense cultural, political, and environmental changes. My stark awakening to this began a day earlier, before I went looking for global climate change concerts.

Climate Change as "a Three-Month Conversation"

When I first flew into Kotzebue, I wasn't sure what to expect. Most of the travelers at that time of day seemed to be local people. Though Kotzebue is small, there were two or three taxis waiting for disembarking passengers. I surmised that either locals often needed transport or much more traffic than I was aware of passed through here on the way to the nearby Red Dog mine (90 kilometers away), the offices for the Iñupiat-owned Nana Regional Corporation, or any of the villages that formed a hub around "Kotz."

My taxi driver wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing in town, and if I had ever been this far north. The thing about small towns is that once you land, there is a sense of obligation to identify and locate oneself among the pantheon of previous and future visitors. The ride to the hotel was probably about three to five minutes, yet it seemed to last much longer, providing me with my first glimpses of the Chukchi Sea.

The woman at the hotel desk was considerably more professional and urbane than the taxi driver. She checked me in without any small talk and gave me directions to the school gymnasium where the symposium was taking place. It was about a ten-minute walk and my first opportunity to wander through town. The streets were mostly empty and lined with weather-worn wooden houses and buildings. The Quaker church, a bright red barnlike structure, jumped out at me, as did the array of large satellite dishes, which I later figured out were next to the building that housed the radio station. Further from town, one could make out reddish-orange cranes at the shipping terminal on the edge of the water—the familiar outline of a working seaport.

I wandered down the gravel road that was a main street through town and found the school with little trouble. I entered what seemed to be the front door and followed the sounds of voices down the hall and past a large trophy case. There was no signage denoting the symposium, and hardly any hall lights were on.

When I entered the brightly lit gym, I had the distinct sensation of joining a community meeting of eighty to one hundred Inuit people. They mingled, drank coffee, and gossiped. The only people I vaguely knew were Patricia Cochran, whom I had met briefly at Arctic Science Summit Week some months earlier at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Megan Alvanna-Stimpfle, chair of ICYC, whom I had spoken with on the phone to secure her agreement for my attending the symposium. Needless to say, I was a bit of a curiosity. There were two other non-Inuit social science researchers there, I discovered later, but they were well known to all the participants, having either lived in Kotzebue or worked with the youth for some years.

I was greeted warmly. Most of the elders and leaders made a point of finding out who I was. Some thought I must be Inuit, which I'm not. I explained to many that I was an enrolled member of what was, for them, a "southern" Canadian tribe (the Tahltan Nation located near the Yukon/British Columbia border), but I was studying at MIT in Boston, and my research looked at the communication of climate change to Americans. My MIT status garnered more interest than my indigeneity, especially because I wasn't part of the sociopolitical or kinship fabric of any Arctic or sub-Arctic indigenous group. The responses to my research topic were varied, but one of my first conversations was transformative in a way I didn't anticipate.

A prominent locally elected official, upon hearing my personal and research introduction, said, "Climate change ... we don't really talk much about that. It's more something they talk about on CNN. It's out there. It's not what we talk about." I was shocked by her comment, but intrigued as well. I wondered if I had misunderstood either her comment or climate change in the Arctic because environmental change related to massive warming trends all over the Arctic were being heavily discussed in Alaska at that time. The headline on the regional paper for the Kotzebue area announced the recent hearings by the Alaska Climate Impact Assessment Commission, which had two individuals from Kotzebue on it—another elected representative and an elder. Kotzebue is also a hub for ten nearby villages accessible mostly by boat, one of which is Kivalina.

Kivalina makes for a striking visual image. It is thousands of years old, located on a tiny barrier island whose edges are slowly being reclaimed by the sea. Several months after my trip to the area, the village leaders filed a lawsuit against major oil companies in order to cover the cost of moving their village from its barrier island to another location. Shishmaref, further north, had also been in global news reports on climate change—what some took to calling "climate porn" (Lowe 2006). Shishmaref can represent climate change in a way that makes it "real" and horrific by showing houses and a shoreline destroyed by permafrost melt, coastal erosion, and changing weather patterns—all attributable to climate change. In fact, Cochran had told me that earlier that year, Shishmaref had asked her to pass on the message to interested media to give them a break for a bit. They were so inundated with media crews that it was beginning to become a problem for the small village. Climate change then was recognized as a serious challenge facing residents of Arctic Alaska now, not sometime in the distant future, and conversations with others revealed this quite vividly. How then to make sense of the resistance to climate change?

Hours later, I talked with Patricia Cochran about the CNN comment. She squeezed in a longer interview with me between conference sessions. We sat on a bench in front of the hotel, facing the Chukchi Sea—its waves gently lapping about three feet from us. Every so often, old friends or conference attendees driving or walking by would stop to say hello to her. We watched as a boat filled with younger men pulled out for points across the inlet. It was a beautiful view, with the sun high in the sky and the inlet seemingly going on forever in all directions.

It's not that people don't talk about climate change, or are unsavvy about the term, Cochran told me. They just don't necessarily call it that. Rather, the everyday vernacular in Kotzebue and among those from other communities throughout the Alaskan Arctic tends to focus on symptomatic changes along the lines of the elders I earlier described chatting to in the hotel lobby—whalers forced back in, more storms, more intense storms, early sea ice breakup, and coastal erosion.

Certainly, when our elders talk about climate change and global warming, those are not the words that anybody would ever hear coming from an elder's mouth or anybody else. Maybe because those are just not the words that we use. But if you were to ask elders about the changes in ice conditions, and what they have seen in their lifetime, changes in ice? Well, that would be a three-month conversation.

The absurdity of trying to sum up a lifetime of discrete observations layered on oral histories and community consensus about witnessing environmental change in one term is striking, particularly for those who have a tendency to gloss over the definition of climate change as something to be found in the pages of Science.

And yet is this "three-month conversation" the same as "climate change"? What does a rejection of climate change in the place where it is seen to be happening mean? What kind of problem is it that climate change isn't a recognizable term, and one assigned to media (CNN in this case) as "their" term, as something experts and journalists talk about and not what's happening in and around this part of Arctic Alaska?

When Fischer expands on the social life of language and knowledge offered by Wittgenstein, he argues that techno-scientific problems present as emergent forms of life, bringing to the fore a direct confrontation with "the other," with heterogeneity and historical genealogies. I wondered what genealogy lay behind this difference and differentiating between "them" on CNN and "us" and the refusal to defer to climate change. And I wondered at this occurring at a moment in which certainty seemed to have been achieved in the wider science and science policy world—where terms like scientific consensus and images of Shishmaref were regularly trotted out as evidence of some kind of closure. Wittgenstein describes certainty in language as the point at which questions no longer need to be asked and explanations come to an end. Yet here I experienced not an explicit questioning of climate change but a flat-out rejection of it as a term that described what direct experience with climatic changes feels like and how it is that such changes are understood and discussed.

Cochran expanded on the notion of a three-month conversation by weaving vernacular and worldview together.

It has a lot to do with different language. I don't mean different Native languages, but the way we use common everyday language. And then the other piece of that is the Native worldview. All things are connected, and so to take one piece of a problem and not connect it to the rest of the world and the environment around? It just logically makes no sense. How can we talk about changes in weather without talking about changes in vegetation or the air or the people or the animals, as all of those things are part of a natural mix. All things are connected in our universe.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from How Climate Change Comes to Matter by Candis Callison. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822357879
• ISBN 13: 9780822357872
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328