Picturing the Clima(c)tic: Greenpeace and the Representational Politics of Climate Change Communication

Images of melting glaciers dominate the pictorial language of climate change, powerful symbols of a fragile earth at risk from the impacts of climate change (Figure 1). The environmental campaign group Greenpeace has been instrumental in documenting these impacts through film and photography. Since 1997, Greenpeace has led expeditions to the Arctic and Antarctic in order to observe and record climate change effects witnessed through retreating or cracked glaciers. The discourse of visual ‘truth’ invested in the photograph functions here in a powerful way when considered in the context of historical struggles by Greenpeace, and other environmental NGOs, to communicate the reality of global warming to sceptical governments and a disinterested public since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first assessment report in 1990. Yet concurrently, photographs of melting glaciers engender a representational problem concerning the visual communication of environmental issues. The photographs of glaciers represent temporally the already seen effects of climate change; a distinct problem when considered within the context of the historical efforts by environmental NGOs to bring attention to the global problem of climate change, before its impacts could be seen. Understood within the discourse of photography, the comparative photographs of melting glaciers signify as the certainty of what is, or as Barthes would say, ‘what has been’ (Barthes, [1980] 2000, p. 85). In other words, the potential effects of climate change upon the landscape have become actual, recorded and made evident by the photograph (Doyle, 2008). The visualisation of climate change through photography thus calls attention to the problems associated with trying to communicate environmental issues that are both temporal (long term and developmental) and unseen (not always visible), through a medium that privileges the ‘here and now’ of the visual. Science as Culture Vol. 16, No. 2, 129–150, June 2007