Climate Change Politics: Communication and Public Engagement By ...

that landscape-based discourse about climate change in U.S. national parks has the potential to create new and productive space for political action on climate change. Likewise, they use insight from place-based education and experiential learning to explain the rhetorical power of national parks in the United States. Given their compelling cultural presence in the shared (both virtual and material) experience of self-identifying as an “American,” Schweizer and Thompson suggest that climate change communication in U.S. national parks has the potential to promote public awareness and to suggest lifestyle modifications that may help mitigate climate change impacts. Their analysis of ways that national parks in the western United States currently communicate about climate change leads them to conclude that although communicators in some parks use the appeal of the material place to create a site for learning about climate change impacts and adaptations by merging visitors’ personal experiences with national identity, communicators in other parks completely miss the opportunity. Though Schweizer and Thompson’s analysis emphasizes engagement through social marketing and therefore focuses on communicative instrumentality, their study also showcases the largely unrealized communicative potential for constituting a particular national identity from individual visitor experiences. Ultimately, they suggest ways a physical, federally managed space can function as a forum for public engagement in climate change policy by contributing to a deeper understanding of ecological impacts and potential management responses.

Hughes examines the role of aerial cinematography in contemporary climate change documentaries. She marries analysis of a particular shot type, which tends toward politicizing aesthetic issues, with an understanding of how it may contribute to a strategy for communicating about climate change. Her discussion of long shots in cinematography shows how media can reframe images of human impact on the world and explores implications of this constitutive potential for engagement with climate change. She notes that contemporary documentary filmmakers use high-angle extreme long shots, including aerial