| Chapter 1: | Reinventing the Political |
|
|
shots and space photography, to present evidence for the considerable effects of centuries of agriculture and industry on the environment. The visibility of large-scale landscape interventions and atmospheric effects generates spectacular visual content that can be used to persuade audiences of the material reality of climate change. These vast images offer one way to solve the conundrum of how to signify sufficient immediacy to achieve personal salience without negating awareness of the suprahuman temporal and spatial scales of climate change. Enabling people to comprehend a complex global phenomenon that is plagued by uncertainty may be cause for celebration, and yet two quite distinct and opposing directions can be discerned in 21st-century attitudes toward aerial images. The first takes the optimistic view that the rhetoric of environmentalism, supported by still and moving images—especially of the whole planet—is creating a growing activist response from audiences. The second is a more pessimistic concern that still and moving image technologies, integral to the predominantly visual culture of modernity and particularly significant in the development of remote-control surveillance and weaponry, themselves contribute to the distortion of habitable space. Hughes analyzes the perspective found in the use of aerial photography, aerial cinematography, space photography, and satellite images in three U.S. climate change documentaries: An Inconvenient Truth (David & Guggenheim), Everything’s Cool (Gold & Helfand), and The 11th Hour (Conners, Petersen, & Conners). She points out that these documentaries use extreme long shots to materialize otherwise abstract concepts drawn from climate change research. Environmental documentary film producers have recognized the potential of cinematic long shots not only to persuade viewers of the urgency of the situation regarding climate change but also to present possibilities for responding individually and collectively to it.
In chapter five, Carvalho and Gupta turn readers’ attention to the explicitly political arena with their analysis of policy documents from signatories to the UNFCCC. Building upon Schweizer and Thompson’s claim that public engagement is a crucial (but not necessarily a sufficient)