Individual solutions to collective problems: the paradoxical treatment of environmental issues on Mexican and French YouTubers' videos

The impact of human activity on our planet is undeniable. However, this matter of fact is not fully understandable without analyzing the narratives through which people make sense of it. In this study, we aim to describe the narratives present in environmental discourses of Mexican and French YouTubers' videos. This corpus is intended to show how environmental issues are framed in the ever-growing discursive arena of entertainment and “influencing” streaming video. We set out to perform a cross-country comparison, with the purpose of contributing to the discussion of whether environmental discourse is country-specific or shared by various nations and, possibly, even global. Our study contributes to the understanding of the social construction of the environment via these discourses. Our main result points to a paradoxical treatment of environmental issues: the YouTubers of our sample represent them as collectively induced problems, but seem to mainly believe that individual-based solutions would resolve them. More broadly, our study suggests a tendency to the individualization and, therefore, the depoliticization of environmental issues as well as a globalization of the environmental discourses in YouTubers' videos.

1. Making Sense of Earth’s Politics

This chapter introduces the politics of the Earth, which has featured a large and ever-growing range of concerns, such as pollution, wilderness preservation, population growth, depletion of natural resources, climate change, biodiversity loss, and destabilization of the Earth system. It explains how the issues of Earth’s politics are interlaced with a range of questions about human livelihood, social justice, public attitudes, and proper relation to one other and other entities on the planet. It also discusses the consequences of discourses for politics and policies. The chapter clarifies how environmental issues like ecological limits, nature preservation, climate change, biodiversity, rainforest protection, environmental justice, and pollution are interconnected in all kinds of ways. It develops an environmental discourse analysis approach and shows how this approach will be applied in subsequent chapters, beginning with the positioning of environmental discourses in relation to the long dominant of discourse of industrialism.

12. Encountering the Anthropocene

This chapter examines environmental discourses in light of recognition of humanity’s entry into the Anthropocene, an emerging geological epoch that dramatizes what is at stake in the politics of the Earth. The Anthropocene is the successor to the unusually benign and stable Holocene of the previous 12,000 years, during which human civilization evolved. The human institutions, practices, ideas, and discourses that still dominate the politics of the Earth all took shape under perceived Holocene conditions. The most important quality demanded of the configuration of environmental discourses is now a capacity to generate critical reflection on the trajectory of human societies in the context of an unstable Earth system. This will require meaningful deliberative and democratic engagement across discourses.

The Politics of the Earth

This book provides an accessible introduction to environmental politics through a powerful, discourse-centred approach which analyzes how environmental affairs are constructed and interpreted through language. It recounts developments beginning with the arrival of environmental crisis in the late 1960s, which yielded dire warnings about global shortages and ecological collapse. It moves through subsequent decades to the Paris Agreement on climate change, the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and the anti-environmental backlash of denial and “Gray Radicalism”. The book develops an innovative approach to understanding contemporary environmental discourses, covering ecological limits and planetary boundaries, pragmatic problem-solving, sustainability, ecological modernization, and green radicalism, as well as radical anti-environmentalism. It analyzes key developments in environmental affairs alongside many examples that illustrate how discourses shape past and current debates on the environment. It concludes by examining the radical implications of the Anthropocene concept.

A Qualitative Study on How Perceptions of Environmental Changes are Linked to Migration in Morocco, Senegal, and DR Congo

Environmental migration is a growing concern of academics and policymakers, who foresee a rise in the number of such migrants. However, most prevailing academic and policy discourses ignore the variety of perceptions of environmental changes among people living in highly affected areas across the world. We examine the perceptions of environmental changes and how these are seen to be relevant to migration in Senegal, DR Congo, and Morocco. In total, we conducted 410 interviews with people living in two regions in each of these countries. Results indicate differences in the perception of environmental changes across regions, gender, education, and livelihoods. The economic activities of individuals determine exposure and sensitivity to environmental changes, while educational levels increase familiarity with prevailing environmental discourses and policies. Despite country-specific and regional differences across research sites, few people perceived environmental factors as directly related to their own or family members’ migration projects.

Urban Environmental Politics meets Urban Theory

Two claims are common in environmental discourses: that cities are key sites of intervention for a shift towards greater sustainability and that grassroots sustainability initiatives embody particularly promising drivers of such a shift. Drawing on Lefebvre, this chapter challenges ›episteme of the urban‹ that confine cities to ›sites‹ and argues that the planetary ›processes‹ that underpin given sites require more attention in light of socio-ecological crises. The chapter also challenges the common ›doxa‹ that ›truly‹ transformative interventions operate at a distance from dominant political institutions, such as law, and introduces ›heterodox right-claims‹ as an alternative political strategy - also for grassroots politics.

Panarchy 3: River of the Sea

The article reflects critically on Panarchy 3: River of the Sea, a learning-disabled-led ecological performance project that evolved in connection with the River Clyde from 2018 to 2019. River of the Sea was a collaboration between The Panarchy Projects at the University of Glasgow and the Friday Club at the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. The Friday Club is a learning-disabled theatre group with fifteen members that meets once a week to socialize and develop performance skills, and The Panarchy Projects are an ongoing series of neurodivergent-led, ecological, and theatre-based research projects. The article introduces the exploratory praxis of the River of the Sea project, which combines theatre practice as research method with participatory action research methods within an expanded ecological field. It then analyses the findings, insights, and accounts of experience which were generated through this praxis and shared in two very different performance events. The article ends by discussing these findings, suggesting that learning-disabled-led ecological performance practices, such as those explored in the River of the Sea project, can support aesthetic experimentation, and nurture solidarity. The article hopes to contribute to the development of what Alison Kafer has called a “cripped environmentalism” (131), and to the building of a bridge between learning disability and environmental discourses.

The rhetoric of ecology in the post-apocalyptic cinematic landscape

Contemporary post-apocalyptic films portray a world ravaged by ecological catastrophes, and humanity on the brink of extinction. Such films echo the urgent environmental discourses of the Anthropocene, while offering instances of a post-anthropocentric perspective and the new subject-formations it engenders. The article argues that the central rhetorical device that generates an ecocritical perspective in such films is the post-apocalyptic landscape. Cinematic space shapes the meaning of all films, and this is even more emphatic when setting is transformed into landscape (Lefebvre 2006). What is more, in the post-apocalyptic films, the landscape becomes the main site of the films’ “rhetorical enviromentality” (McMurry 2017). The article examines the post-apocalyptic landscape in I Am Legend (2007) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and how it articulates the entangled relation between humans and the collapsing world that surrounds them. Using Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) post-human theory, I contend that these cinematic landscapes hint at an “eco-philosophy of multiple belongings” (Braidotti 2013, 49) and enact “a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world” (Braidotti 2013, 2019). Ultimately, I conclude that the affective appeal of these landscapes implicates the viewer in post-anthropocentric perspectives, thus prompting new modes of environmental consciousness.