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

referenced in the chapter encourage public participation in the politics of the atmosphere and of climate change, thereby advancing democratic pluralism. Fomenting dissensus and giving voice to those who are silenced by the existing hegemony (Mouffe, 2007), critical artistic practices can help foreground the political—rather than the technical—nature of responses to climate change and thus reinvigorate public engagement.

Gunster’s chapter turns attention to alternative media spaces and their specific ways of framing the politics of climate change. News media have been shown to function as the public’s main source of information on climate change (e.g., Cabecinhas, Lázaro, & Carvalho, 2008; Wilson, 1995). The media produce, reproduce, and disseminate multiple discourses on climate change in which knowledge, values, and power issues come into play, and they occupy a central position in the public space of contemporary societies, a battleground where different hegemonic projects are confronted (Mouffe, 2007). Their contribution to the social construction of politics—as well as of the political—warrant detailed analysis. Although a number of studies have focused on the coverage of climate change in mainstream media, alternative media are blatantly underresearched. Looking at two independent Canadian newspapers, Gunster’s analysis explicitly foregrounds the political dimensions of climate change. Whereas news in corporate media tends to be dominated by narratives of political failure to tackle climate change, Gunster suggests that alternative media often offer more optimistic, even if critical, images and argues that media accounts of developing successful governmental projects for the generation of renewable energy or for the reduction of greenhouse gas are likely to stimulate the perception that all governments are capable of undertaking effective action; those accounts thus promote civic pressure for that to happen. He finds a strong emphasis on political rather than technological or lifestyle-related solutions in alternative media, which often involved contrasting actual politics with the politics of the possible, that is, referring to beneficial measures that could be put in place but are being ignored by governments. Another unique characteristic of alternative media when