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Communicating a World-in-Crisis

by Simon Cottle (Volume editor)
©2025 Textbook XIV, 394 Pages
Series: Global Crises and the Media, Volume 31

Summary

We live in a world increasingly defined by systemic, deepening and compounding crises. They threaten not only future human existence but also the planetary web-of-life. With the help of academics, creative practitioners and activists, this book explores some of the innovative ways in which different media, communicative fields, and creative practices are seeking to make a difference. From different forms of journalism and participative documentary to climate photography and ecosophical film; from radical theatre, eco-literature and eco-art to green festivals, popular music and immersive museums; and from journalism training in the climate emergency and sustainability education to communicating with ‘whole intelligence’ and ‘integrated intelligence’ beyond AI (artificial intelligence).
This panoramic approach enables us to see how diverse communicative fields are engaging with some of the most critical concerns of our times – and what can be learned, shared and developed further in the challenging years ahead.

Table Of Contents

  • Cover
  • Title
  • Copyright
  • book About the author(s)/editor(s)
  • About the book
  • This eBook can be cited
  • Contents
  • List of Figures
  • List of Tables
  • Preface
  • Chapter 1 Introduction: Communicating a World-in-Crisis
  • Section I: Mainstream Journalism and the Planetary Emergency
  • Chapter 2 Reporting a World-in-Crisis: On Silence, Silos and the Symbiocene
  • Chapter 3 Evaluating Reporting Roles in Climate Disasters
  • Chapter 4 Reporting Protests and the Planetary Emergency
  • Section II: Community Activism Harnessing Media and Hope
  • Chapter 5 From Climate Crisis to Environment(al) Hope: Community, Affect and Local Television
  • Chapter 6 First Nations Community Media and the Climate Crisis: Towards Radical Eco-Communicative Democracy
  • Chapter 7 Green Festivals and Re-figurative Politics: Communicating Resilience and Hope
  • Section III: Photography, Documentary and Film: Visualising Change
  • Chapter 8 Fantasy in Visual Spectacles of Climate Change
  • Chapter 9 Earthship Freo: A Case Study of the Potential and Limitations of Participatory Documentary Filmmaking
  • Chapter 10 The New Weird: Independent Cinema as an Ecosophical Response to Climate Change
  • Section IV: Literature, Theatre and Art: Expressing and Embodying Affect
  • Chapter 11 ‘There’s something you need to hear’: The Literature of Environmental Crisis
  • Chapter 12 From Hidden Wars to Hidden Theatre: Embodying a World-in-Crisis
  • Chapter 13 Visionary Ecoart: Stories for Regenerative Ecologies
  • Section V: Music and Museums: Immersive Experience
  • Chapter 14 Music in an Era of Planetary Discontinuity: What Music Can and Can’t Do in This Crisis
  • Chapter 15 Communicating ‘Stories That Matter’: Activist Museography and Immersive Practice in the Climate Emergency
  • Section VI: Education and Training: Pedagogies for a Sustainable World
  • Chapter 16 Communicating Sustainability: Science Literacy and Transformative Pedagogies
  • Chapter 17 ‘All Journalists Will be Environmental Journalists Tomorrow’: On Problems, Pedagogy and Prospects
  • Section VII: Communications and Intelligence for a World-in-Crisis
  • Chapter 18 Communicating Whole Intelligence to Regenerate the Living Human World
  • Chapter 19 Beyond Artificial Intelligence: Toward Integrated Intelligence for a World-in-Crisis
  • Afterword
  • Cultural Response and Creative Resilience: A Personal Reflection
  • Notes on Contributors
  • Index

Preface

Nature of Things, the arresting image on the front cover of this book, was drawn by the artist Guno Park. I am personally grateful to him for granting permission for his exquisite artwork to be reproduced here. The original drawing standing over six feet tall, is an impressive and perfectly executed drawing of the entanglement of human life, and death, with nature. It powerfully symbolises, I think, the interwoven dependence of human life with nature, of how we are ourselves inextricably part of nature and symbiotic with it – and how we forget this at our peril.

Today’s world-in-crisis generates multiple and deeply entangled crises where not only human existence but the web-of-life itself has come under assault and is becoming dangerously degraded. Think: biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, climate change, toxic and plastic waste, land, water and air pollution, soil degradation, zoonotic diseases, food and freshwater precarity, nuclear weapons and the ecological impacts of war. And yet, as we are forced to recognise the damage being caused to not only human life but the web-of-life itself, so the way to a sustainable and survivable world begins to come into clearer view, even if through a veil of tears. It is apparent that an ‘overshooting’ world addicted to incessant growth, materialist ideas of progress and human exceptionalism have – almost – run their course and that a new way of collective being must be found. A way in which practices of social justice and ecological sustainability and custodianship become foundational and collectively enacted in symbiotic relationship with all life forms and surrounding ecosystems. Ideas and practices that have long been at the heart of indigenous communities, their ways of life, cosmologies and traditional wisdom.

Communicating a World-in-Crisis is not preoccupied with the prospects of mass death or societal collapse, but with the communicative possibilities of helping to ensure life’s continuity in the web-of-life and into the future. This demands however that we must all wake up to the all too real existential threats generated by today’s world-in-crisis and how they continue to converge and deepen, taking us to a planetary cliff edge preceded by ‘endless emergency’ and potential-possible-probable extinction. The contributors to this volume expertly and insightfully explore different mediums and creative practices within and across today’s communication ecology, broadly conceived, seeking out to what extent and how each can make a positive contribution to wider understanding of not only our current planetary predicament but also the cultural flourishing of new ideas and regenerative practices that variously embody imagined futures and the politics of active hope. Guno Park’s beautifully crafted drawing of nature’s entanglement in human life, and death, helps remind us all, communicatively and powerfully, of the necessity to recognise and live symbiotically in the web-of-life as the positive antidote to today’s otherwise terminating world-in-crisis.

Simon Cottle

·1·

Introduction: Communicating a World-in-Crisis

Simon Cottle

Today we are waking up to a world-in-crisis and its unfolding in real time. A world in which crises caused by the inexorable and ecologically destructive advance of human society and its predominant economic system, are finally reaching their planetary nadir – or endgame. The world it seems, notwithstanding its gross inequalities, multipolar politics and pluriverse of cultural identities and outlooks, is universally ensnared by human history’s most globally rapacious, economically extractive, and ecologically devastating system of production and consumption yet devised and set loose by the human species. A system underpinned by a normative worldview wedded to ideas of incessant growth, material progress and human exceptionalism.

Climate change straddles the Earth as the most precipitous threat to humanity, but it is sadly mistaken to think that this is the only existential catastrophe now bearing down on life on planet earth. Climate change is a symptom or expression of a deeper underlying malaise that manifests simultaneously across a range of interconnected crises. Pandemics, biodiversity loss, the sixth mass extinction, energy, water and food insecurity, soil degradation, toxic pollution, weapons of mass annihilation and AI (Artificial Intelligence), amongst others, all now pose further threats to existence. Entangled within and precipitating many of them are global financial crashes and deepening inequality, increasing political polarisation and instability, failing supply chains, world population growth and mass population movements and, inevitably, increased humanitarian disasters. The latter, moreover, are no longer spatially confined ‘over there’ in the global South but take root ‘at home’ in the global North and temporally threaten to become permanent emergencies everywhere. It is imperative that we recognise the increasingly entangled and compounding nature of global crises today and address these holistically as endemic to a world-in-crisis (Cottle, 2023).

Communicating a World-in-Crisis deliberately sets out to explore how today’s accelerating and deepening global crises are communicated in and through diverse media and forms of communication, broadly conceived. We live in a world suffused with and enacted through communication: from digitised broadcasting, newspapers and magazines to photography, film and computer games; from street posters, street protests and spectacular advertising to social media and sporting events; from the cultural practices of writing, art and theatre to the classrooms of education and training; and from music’s cacophony of sounds and the pedagogic displays of museums to our own communicative embodiment in gesture, speech, and social performativity. In all these and other ways, we live out most of our lives communicatively. Indeed, anything capable of sending, responding and adapting to ‘information’ or being ascribed with meaning and read semiotically ‘communicates’ – and that’s everything!

This book deliberately, if unusually, throws its communicative net widely. It does so to better explore how today’s world-in-crisis is variously being communicated in and across different communicative fields, media and practices. How global crises become communicated proves critical to how we come to know, understand and situate them within the world as well as how we could or should respond – whether cognitively, emotionally, intellectually, morally or politically (Cottle, 2009a, b, 2014, 2022). With the help of academic and activist voices, and here these distinctions need not be so distinct, the chapters not only question the evident silences and failings of different media and communicative practices to fully engage in the systemic complexity and existential gravity of today’s crisis-generating world, but also, importantly, they seek to recognise, broaden and/or deepen the characteristic modes of different media and communicative practice to better align them with processes of future imagining and pathways of transition and societal change.

Today’s communication systems and fields of creative practice constitute a complex of institutional and cultural formations, forms and flows that variously interconnect and/or inform each other and communicate today’s deepening global crises. An encompassing communications ecology that is expansive both in space and time, is situated in the vortices of culture and power, and which variously helps to suture social relations within everyday as well as public life. All are, of course, also materially implicated in those extractive processes that deplete our planet’s resources and impact natural environments, as well as, sometimes, shining a powerful light on the forces and effects of environmental destruction. And so too, sometimes, can their depictions of ecology capture our sense of awe and wonderment at the natural world and even encourage us to recognise our relational interdependence in the web-of-life.

When we approach communication broadly and as richly differentiated fields, then, so can we better discern how each variously encompasses and deploys different communicative dimensions and appeals. These can range across, for example, the informational and imagistic, analytic and aesthetic, expositional and expressive, cognitive and cultural, factual and fictional, deliberative and dramatic, propositional and performative, phenomenologically embodied and, with the advent of immersive technologies, the practically extended and virtually experienced. How these and other dimensions of communication find prominence in and across different communication fields and in respect of today’s crisis-ridden world, and how they exert possible consequences for understanding, feeling and action is explored by many of the contributors to this volume.

This introductory chapter sets the scene for the contributions that follow. First it sets out some of the latest indices and research evidence documenting the trajectories of decline and potential collapse that now position human society and planetary biosphere in existential jeopardy. Second, we briefly review more conceptually and theoretically some of the different perspectives on world collapse and the constellation of different traditions of intellectual thought and practice that coalesce under the mantle of overarching ideas of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003), Capitalocene (Moore, 2015) and Symbiocene (Albrecht, 2019) or Ecological Civilisation (Korton, 2021; Lent, 2021). Together these prove heuristically useful for understanding the complex and systemic nature of today’s world-in-crisis. Third, the chapter provides a brief route map of the book’s structuration and an overview of the chapters that follow.

Indices of a world-in-crisis

We live in a world where systemic global crises now cascade and converge, deepening existential threats to humanity and the planet’s biosphere. Climate change is wreaking havoc around the globe, with extreme weather events including unprecedented heatwaves and megafires, storms and flooding, and melting glaciers and icecaps destroying lives and livelihoods and rendering some places in the world uninhabitable and some traditional ways of life unsustainable. The year 2023 became the world’s hottest year since records began in 1850; the ten hottest years in this 174-year history have all occurred during the last decade (2014–2023). In this same year our planet witnessed unprecedented levels of ocean warming, glacier melting, and a catalogue of devastating climate-related disasters across all the world’s continents. These have predominantly impacted societies and communities least responsible (IPCC, 2022). As this book goes to press, the years ahead only look set to continue the now annual catalogue of accelerating and deepening climate-related catastrophes.

Carbon emissions continue year on year to rise to new levels, as they have done in contra-agreement to the Paris Accords goals of 2015 and every UN COP (Conference of the Parties) thereafter. This seemingly inexorable trajectory continues the steep upward J patterns of growth and carbon emissions unleashed over centuries by industrialised and extractive societies (Steffen et al., 2015). On current trends temperature rises of 2.4°C to 2.8°C can be anticipated by 2100 or earlier, resulting in even more devastating extreme weather events, sea level rises, species extinctions, mass human migrations, and mass deaths and suffering. As ecosystems become impacted and destabilise, so biodiversity, soil quality, freshwater supplies and food production and human health are all also in decline (Borrelli et al., 2020; UNEP, 2023; FSIN, 2023). But it is not only climate change of course that bleeds into other global crises, whether famine, water scarcity, disease, mass migrations or conflicts.

Since 1970, and this still numbs me to say it, over two-thirds of all the world’s population sizes of all mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish have been lost (WWF, 2022) and an insect apocalypse, including pollinators so crucial to food production, has also taken place, in large measure caused by pesticides, toxic pollution and monocultural agriculture (Goulson, 2021; Millman, 2022). The number of species going extinct all together continues to rise year on year in today’s human-induced sixth mass extinction (Kolbert, 2014; Erlich, 2017; Cowie et al., 2022). The world death toll from Covid-19 at its height is estimated to have caused between 15 million (WHO, 2022) and 18 million (Wang et al., 2022) excess mortality deaths. And the rise of zoonotic diseases and global pandemics caused by the relentless encroachment of human society on biodiverse environments, expansion of monocultural agriculture and trade in wildlife, is set to continue in the foreseeable future (WWF, 2020; Lawler et al., 2021; Vidal, 2023).

Details

Pages
XIV, 394
Publication Year
2025
ISBN (PDF)
9781636671864
ISBN (ePUB)
9781636671871
ISBN (Hardcover)
9783034354097
ISBN (Softcover)
9781636671888
DOI
10.3726/b22368
Language
English
Publication date
2025 (January)
Keywords
World-in-crisis planetary emergency global crises communications creative practices cultural fields media arts
Published
New York, Berlin, Bruxelles, Chennai, Lausanne, Oxford, 2025. XIV, 394 pp., 5 b/w ill., 19 col. ill., 4 b/w tables.
Product Safety
Peter Lang Group AG

Biographical notes

Simon Cottle (Volume editor)

Simon Cottle is Professor Emeritus, Media and Communication, in the School of Journalism, Media and Culture (JOMEC) at Cardiff University where he was Deputy Head and Head of School. He is the author of many books and articles and is the Series Editor for the Global Crises and the Media Series. He is currently writing and lecturing on journalism and our world-in-crisis.

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