Summer heatwaves are here, and newspapers are reporting about tragic incidents with varying degrees of acknowledgment of climate change as the driving force behind the ever-escalating weather circumstances. Often, the picture that media and other everyday conversations paint of what humans could do about climate change is vague, distorted, or depressing -sometimes all of those things at the same time. We are melting alive but not really talking about what could and should be done. The Guardian just announced that Europe’s heatwaves are not inspiring people to take more climate actions.
Those of you who know something about my research interests might be aware of the fact that I’ve spent quite a while studying how people using language in different situations end up presenting themselves as able and willing to take action that has meaningful consequences (agentic) or mitigate and deny their agency. These presentations of agency vary from situation to situation and topic to topic and are not necessarily conscious or deliberate. You might also know about my interest in environmental storytelling, e.g. climate fiction, and in its power to shape our thinking and actions. In this post, we are taking a look at lacking climate agency in language use, in other words, how our ability to act in relation to climate change can be framed in diminishing ways; in fact, we are surrounded by (social) media depictions of how we cannot really do much. Let’s have a look.
Common Ways of Mitigating Climate Agency
In October 2023, Panu Halme, a teacher of nature protection biology and sustainable use of natural resources from the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, wrote the following text on Twitter (my translation from Finnish):
“Again I also get this feedback that the anxiety of the young is my fault. Like of course they are anxious because I scare them. WHAT SHOULD I SAY IN THE LECTURES WHEN THE SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS IN THE FIELD TELLS THAT THE RATE OF EXTINCTION HAS MULTIPLIED TO 100-1000 FOLD? SHOULD I LIE????????????” Before his explosion on X, a social media commentator had once again told Halme that he should talk about solutions and not about problems to the young people. He does talk about the solutions as well, he assures in an interview in the biggest newspaper in Finland, Helsingin Sanomat ((“Save the world” in Helsingin Sanomat by Laura Kangasluoma, 28.11.2023 Panu Halme haluaa valmistaa tulevaisuuden biologit pelastamaan maailman – Hyvinvointi | HS.fi). However, before going to the solutions he has to give the students an overall picture of the situation. In nature protection biology that picture is anxiety-provoking. “Feedback on having to concentrate on solutions is classically given by middle-aged people who don’t want to admit how horrible the situation is. They are often technologically religious and think that everything will be fixed with hydrogen economy.” Halme explains that the students themselves have never asked for less anxiety-provoking content. “Some say that during the whole comprehensive school they’ve been told that if only we remember to recycle, everything is fine. When the truth then hits you, it can be brutal, but they are still terribly thankful.”
In the article, Halme says that many students say they’ve come to study to find ways to save this planet. Saving the planet is also the goal of Halme as a researcher and educator. He talks about the importance of feeding the hope of young people by praising them and by always pointing it out if he hears them mitigating themselves. He hopes that we avoid the previous mistakes when bringing up the current small children by not giving them the impression that recycling is the solution to everything. “It is not a sustainable path to protect children from all anxiety-provoking information that does exist after all.” Halme explains that even small children can be agents in their everyday nearby nature. “I believe that the solution would be a more honest, genuine, and holistic environmental education from a very young age.”
In this example, Panu Halme is being urged to promote an imaginary, false sense of agency (the feeling that my actions can have a meaningful impact) in his students by people who think children and young people should not carry anxiety about climate change. Halme is promoting a stance where you educate young people with realistic information, but you also support their sense of agency by e.g. intervening if you hear them mitigating their chances to do something about climate change. Halme thus seems to be aware of the importance of how we talk into being -or construct- our sense of agency in relation to climate change while underlining that this has to happen within the limits of scientific understanding. There are scientific facts we cannot deny no matter how much we want to avoid the feeling of paralyzing climate anxiety.
Constructing Lacking Climate Agency
I’m suggesting a hierarchy of non-agentic climate statements, taking some inspiration from my previous work (especially my PhD research):
There is no CC to do something about.
I can’t do anything about CC. I’m not able to do anything about CC.
I can’t do anything meaningful about CC.
I can’t initiate CC action.
I can’t do enough about CC.
I can’t change my ways of acting about CC.
I don’t know what to do about CC.
I’m not really willing or motivated to do anything about CC.
I’m not really willing or motivated to do anything meaningful about CC.
I’m not really willing or motivated to do enough about CC.
I don’t know why I’m not willing or motivated to do something about CC.
There is nothing to do about CC.
I used to do all the wrong things about CC.
I don’t see how what I have done abut CC has anything to do with the future.
Other people don’t think I’m acting correctly.
I’m not sure if others would think I’m acting correctly.
Saying that one cannot do anything at all about climate change is very different from saying that other people have a negative opinion on one’s climate actions. What one can also observe is a difference in levels of reflectivity. Some of the sentences above are mere statements -this is how things are, period. Some express a level of reflectivity: the speaker is taking an observing or a meta-position in relation to their own actions or even reflecting on other’s perspectives on their action.
This categorization here is not prescriptive. I actually think we need expressions and experiences of non-agency. That is an important antidote in avoiding hubris, a medicine to stay humble. We cannot “solve” the climate crisis. There are things no human alone and not even all humans together can do. There are undeniable, external limits to our action, something that the modern culture, so drunk on the feeling that a human can do whatever they set their minds to, is having a difficult time processing. In all of the alternative agencies that I have formulated, there is an element of lacking agency -none of them sing the song of all-powerful, limitless human action. Lacking discursive agency can feed meaningful reflection and actions. I don’t know what to do – so maybe I study more? I don’t understand why I still keep doing these things -so maybe I will try to understand my actions better?
Lack of Climate Agency in the News
Let us look at a piece of news that illustrates many of the common ways of displaying and feeding non-agency that can be encountered in the media on a daily basis. The news is called “French grape-pickers wilt as ‘heat dome’ temperatures top 40C” and it circulated several websites in August 2023. (Decotte, J. August 22, 2023. Phys.org. French grape-pickers wilt as ‘heat dome’ temperatures top 40C (phys.org)
“Grape-pickers were out in French vineyards Tuesday bringing in this year’s harvest in “torrid” conditions as temperatures shot past 40C in some areas of the country during a “heat dome” weather pattern that has brought misery to millions1.
In Saint-Quentin-de-Baron in the Bordeaux region of southwest France, local winemakers have adapted the picking routines2 to take into account some of the hottest temperatures on record for this time of year.
Sebastien Jacquey, director of the Chateau de Sours, told AFP that shifts had been reduced to six hours a day, instead of eight, and that teams were starting at 7 am to avoid the suffocating heat and humidity of the wind-free afternoons2.
Teams armed with secateurs and boxes were reminded of safety routines2 as they headed out Tuesday to the neat rows of vines, which are owned by Chinese billionaire Jack Ma.
“Remember to take a break at the end of a line, keep yourself hydrated, protect yourself with hats and sun cream, but also let someone know if you don’t feel well,”2 Jacquey said.
Despite the guidelines and drinking regularly, Aurore Bernard, a 35-year-old picker doing her first harvest with her mother, said she had fallen ill on Monday.3
“I felt my heart start to beat rapidly, I felt dizzy, heard noises and felt very, very cold,” she told AFP.
Fellow worker Anthony Chappel, 42, said the key was using the shade of the vines to work in.
“The more suffocating it is, the more you get hot and the more dangerous it is,” he said as he headed out with the forecast for a peak of 34C in the afternoon.
“I don’t think there’ll be any wind today. It’ll be torrid.”
‘Intense’ heat wave
French authorities have placed roughly half of the 96 departments on the mainland on the second-highest heat warning level3, with four areas around the southern Rhone valley placed in the maximum red category.
Temperatures are expected to peak there at 40-42C on Tuesday (104-107F).
The country as a whole experienced its hottest day ever recorded3 after August 15 on Monday when the national average was clocked at 26.63C, according to the national weather service Meteo France.
It has called the current heat wave “intense and long-lasting” and “particularly late in the season”3, with a period of stable high pressure creating a “heat dome” over the country with little wind.
In the sweltering southeastern city of Lyon, 26-year-old PR worker Emma Solet told AFP it was 29C in her apartment at 6:30 am and she had bought herself an air-conditioner for the first time.
“It’s not good for the planet, I know, and it actually didn’t work,” she explained. “I took it back to the shop. The heat is in the walls.”4
The heat wave is also affecting the normally cool Alps where mountaineers preparing to tackle Mont Blanc have been urged by local authorities to delay scaling the summit of western Europe’s highest mountain.
Officials in the Haute-Savoie region, which includes the French side of Mont Blanc, said there were higher-than-usual risks of rockfalls on the regular routes up the mountain, as well as new crevices opening up on its glaciers.
Swiss weather authorities said Monday that a new record had been set for the altitude of the so-called zero-degree line in the Alps—the height at which the temperature dips below zero degrees Celsius.
It was clocked overnight from Sunday to Monday at 5,298 meters, “which constitutes a record since monitoring began in 1954”, MeteoSwiss said.
‘Not such a bad thing’
For the wine harvest in France, the heat wave could bring some cheer to vintners, if not their workers.
The Bordeaux region has been badly hit by mildew this year and the burst of heat at the end of ripening process could be positive.
“It stops rot and dries out any illnesses, so it’s not such a bad thing,” said Stephane Gabard, head of the Bordeaux et Bordeaux Superieur winemakers’ group.5
The timing of grape harvesting varies around the country depending on the type of grapes, local weather conditions and the flavours and alcohol content desired by the wine maker, with southern vineyards usually kicking off the season in August.
The start of the picking season, which generally ends in October, has been advancing year-on-year due to climate change.”6
This short piece of news illustrates the following common characteristics in media language that promotes climate non-agency:
1. A weather pattern is positioned as the agent brining “misery to millions”. Humans are the victims of this villain. Contextualization about the weather pattern relating to climate change is lacking in the beginning, as it is only mentioned at the very end of the article. Because this contextualization only comes at the very end, for the majority of its length, this piece of news merely positions the people it depicts and its reader as confronting merely a heat dome phenomenon, not a global circumstance that will impact them for the rest of their lives.
2. The only action available for humans is adaptation: Just start your workday earlier and drink plenty of water! This framing also allows the positioning of the employers as considerate and caring -they take precautiouns to prevent their employees from falling ill.
3. Every news piece needs to have a dramatic arch. Here the drama is at a personal level -people are getting ill- and at the level of national heat records being broken.
4. The level of individual, responsible carbon-actions is sneaked in, as if only individual consumption choices are a meaningful way of taking climate action. The story depicts a young woman who bought an air-conditioner, yet aware of the problematic nature of her action (“It’s not good for the planet, I know, and it actually didn’t work”). She is aware of how the decision to purchase an AC only adds to her carbon footprint, but she does it anyway. The decision could be implicitly justified if only the machine would even work, but it doesn’t: The heat, the invisible enemy that people fight against, is too stuck in the stone walls of her house.
5. The heatwave is presented, as is typical in the news media, as a on one hand – on the other hand -phenomenon, something with a positive and with a negative side. This waters down the actual, undeniably catastrophic aspect of climate change but achieves the click media’s main aim: creating polarization. A piece of news is supposed to talk to all audiences -those who take climate change seriously and to those who don’t- and create disagreement in order to motivate the reader to share it forward on social media. The piece ends with a comforting (or provocative) statement from Stephane Gabard, head of the Bordeaux et Bordeaux Superieur winemaker’s group. The heatwave is not that bad a thing, since it “stops rot and dries out any illnesses” in the vineyards.
6. As a difference from the overflow of utterly decontextualized news stories at many a mainstream clickbait news site, where individual catastrophes are dropping from thin air, unconnected to each other, presented as a chance for human fight and adaptation, this piece does end with a framing where the picking season advances every year due to climate change. Yet, the article mainly presents human agency as that of a smart fighter in local, disconnected catastrophes. This war-narrative is known from popular representations of many things, including Covid pandemic and even cancer (see the work of Hanna Meretoja).
The Case of Skeptical Discourse
In May 2023 I tempted fate and went to see what Finnish people are writing on the country’s biggest discussion board, Suomi24. Anonymous user had written the following text in February 2021, here translated into English by me. The headline is “The worry grows, but will it help?”
“No it doesn’t help anything at all. China and India and many other countries will in any case increase the use of the fossils also in the future. They don’t have many other options.
What a human being is worried about is, in principle, their own choice. Nowadays the situation is however different. This propaganda, that one must be worried and that it is moral virtue to be worried has been touted so enormously that it has an anxiety-provoking effect also on those that realize how utterly insane this worry is.
On the other hand, we have labeled as bad guys those people who are reasonable enough to realize the worry is insane. To be worried is not a matter of reason. It is precisely a matter of emotion, that makes a person ill when it prolongs.
For a person who is worried, their mental and physical ability to perform is reduced. It can even completely crash down so that the person just remains in bed in the morning, unable to do anything.
Being continuously worried can cause or worsen coronary illnesses and many other ailments. I presented the case to my wife who is a specialized nurse. She replied with quite a list of illnesses that worrying has a facilitating or worsening impact upon.
People putting the seeds of worry everywhere have neglected the medical side of the things. That is exactly the reason I keep talking about it. I really know a lot about these things. People blaming others and causing them to worry are guilty of a lot bad things.
Mental health problems have increased a lot especially for children and youngsters. That is a completely new phenomenon and it is difficult to treat it. Feeding worry has been imagined to protect them more than anyone else. In reality, it is exactly the young people that have been incapacitated with this.
Now there has been record hot weather, and it will still continue in the future. Feeding worry does not help at all in this situation.
They are local weather phenomena that are slightly impacted by the warming of the climate that has completely natural causes. Russia has a strong high pressure area that directs warm moist air here from the Black sea. Canada has a similar phenomenon going on. Very warm air has flown there from the south, and the sunshine is warming it up still more. The natural rise of the mid temperature can have some small part in this.
In any case we do have to adapt to these changes to which we indeed are completely innocent, no matter what nonsense the Helsinki media is talking. People over there have been going into overdrive for 6-7 years already. Those journalists know nothing about the climate. Even the meteorologists have tried to put some breaks on them. When the knowledge level of those journalists is zero, they mostly let into the studio “experts” from different fields that are at their own level. The only exception to the rule are the meteorologists. After all, the weather forecast is something appropriate.”
The two things obvious in the example above are the confusion of weather and climate, and the framing of worry about climate change as primarily a health concern. The author acknowledges a small “natural” change in the global temperatures, but does not go into details about what this means or where it stems from. The main focus is on local weather phenomena and, accordingly, the true experts on the topic are meteorologists -they have even had to try and control the overheated Helsinki media.
Different constructions of divisions are apparent in this piece. There are the normal local variations in the weather and the larger scale climate change, that the author however never properly defines or mentions. It becomes clear that there is something that the Helsinki media and some unnamed other groups of people are overly concerned about, putting the health of the whole nation into danger as they keep sowing the seeds of worry. The cause of this worry is never truly mentioned, it merely hangs in the background.
Another prominent division is that between emotion and reason; the position of the author is, as is incredibly common in climate denialist accounts, framed as that of reason. The big unnamed monster, climate change, does not become defined through its scientific status but instead, it becomes connected with the realm of emotion and not just any emotion but worry. The original text does not mention climate anxiety, or fear, only worry; a minor inconvenience that carries easy associations towards a state where there is no real reason to have emotions related to a real threat. We worry about getting a few extra pounds over the summer or that we won’t be able to sleep well in the night before an important job interview. Worry is not an emotion that indicates the presence of a life altering threat. Thus, it becomes increasingly clear how unfounded is the state of the affairs that the mysterious others – an anonymous group of which we only know that some of the participants are journalists from the capital region – are propagating.
The author is referring to special and superior knowledge from where he is articulating his views -again a typical feature of climate skeptical discourse- but is not very convincing in delivering to the reader the foundations of this knowledge. His wife is a specialized nurse and was, upon hearing the word, immediately able to list all sorts of illnesses that excessive worry can cause. Even if the wife’s expertise has nothing to do with climate change, in this chain of reasoning it comes to serve as a piece of level-headed rationality that indeed, we should not worry excessively about climate change, again serving to underline the bigger point -that climate change is not an issue.
Framing climate change as an issue of hot-headed environmentalists or other special groups of people is another technique we know from denialist accounts. The fascinating thing about the text is that the author talks about the detrimental effect of continuous worry without making clear who it is that is continuously worried. Seeing the disparity between the first two sentences and the rest of the text makes me think it is the author himself. In fact, the first two sentences made me expect a completely different kind of a text than what it turned out to be. The author displays a faint recognition that the object of worry has something to do with fossil fuels and that China and India are among the big culprits here. A psychologizing reading could easily build a story where the author is very well aware about the basics of climate change and has first hand experienced the health effects of continuous worry, only to then shut the cause of his overwhelming emotions away from his mind by deeming it as imaginary, only existing in the agendas of those who for some reason like to make others worry. Of course, such an analysis is beyond the limits of what can be reasonably be claimed based on merely inspecting the discourse here -it is only a theory that popped into the mind of this reader.
The next question is what does this textual example and its analysis do in the a post about mitigating climate agency. The answer is: Everything. If we do not accept something as a problem in the first place, there is no possibility of being agentic about it. When I conducted my PhD studies on agency in psychotherapy, in the model we created the lowest level of discursive agency is represented by the client denying or mitigating the existence of their issue. These clients had voluntarily sought therapy, but ended up explaining that the issue they have is really not that big of a deal. That is the same case as with humans being “ill” with climate change -we do not recognize the problem and hence, we cannot be cured. However, denying the problem of climate change is not quite as simple a business as this. In fact, previous literature has separated several levels of denial: Denying that global warming is human-caused, denying its existence altogether, or denying that it is a fatal problem. Without having tick any of these survey option -type boxes, one can also take a mitigating or denying position by simply silencing out the whole issue of climate change, as the author here does, merely making vague references concerning the assumed emotionally detrimental effect of it. In fact, a case could be made that simply not talking about climate change is the most significant and wide-spread manner of denying or mitigating the issue (Norgaard, 2011; Ghosh, 2016). Such a silence is never only an individual’s choice: We live in a society where silencing climate change out is completely possible, to the point that actually talking about it has become the difficult, if not impossible action. It is an awkward, politically loaded topic. It might upset people. It might stir up political debates and divisions, and that is the last thing we want in a world that is enough crazy as it is, right?
Lacking Climate Agency: The Case of the Midway Middleground Discourse
One statement commonly heard and seen in various contexts is “But we cannot all be Greta Thunberg” This claim constructs climate change agency as something that has an idealized, ultimate form, the total dedication of life to this cause represented only by the penultimate climate activist of our times, Greta Thunberg. The argument is that this unattainable ideal is for some reason out of the reach of most people, and perhaps should stay there -what kind of a world would it be if everyone would be Greta Thunberg?
This ultimate climate agency is also depicted as something a little bit too much, an exaggeration; so strong is the ideal impacting our thinking that states “the middle way is the best”. Climate change becomes displayed as a daunting phenomenon to which special individuals dedicate their life, while going a little askew when doing it. We should be more moderate. Not take it too far. Everybody can do a little. Nobody can save the whole world alone.
Gravitation towards the sweet middle way is incredibly common in conversations around climate change. It seems difficult for humans to imagine and discuss the need for radical actions, the existence of an undeniable urgency. Rather, we push the issue away from the consciousness and find different ways of working it into a mid-range problem to which not-too-big, middle ground and midway responses are the only correct ones. If the CEOs of big companies and leaders of world economies are of the opinion that minding the environment should not come at the expense of financial growth, then individual people are often of the opinion that climate change agency should not come at the expense of their personal comfort. Climate change has acquired the status of a problem to which a reasonable stance is constructed to be one of max medium-sized worry and action, because “not everybody can be Greta Thunberg”.
Climate change is a flourishing springboard for midway midrange normalization language. The current climate change discourses are saturated with normalization about what is good and what is too much. The language of convenience dominates and the available resources of speaking into existence a stronger and more hopeful climate agency are rare.
Conclusion
In this post, I have presented some analyses on lacking climate agency from a discursive perspective. That is, how human agency -the capacity to act on a meaningful way- in relation to climate change is habitually mitigated in public conversation. Note that the discussion has been solely about language and no psychological conclusions have been draw. That means that I don’t think that a person speaking in a certain way about climate change feels a certain way about climate change. Language is a tool for constructing the shared social world on its own right, and the way we discuss and hear other’s discuss about climate change on various platforms and in different situations impacts how we see our own place, or the position of humanity, in relation to this gigantic chain of disasters. What and how we speak and write matters. Reality is not only in the language, but it is also in the language.
You must log in to post a comment.