Everything,Everywhere,All at Once: Apprehending the Climate Crisis

Abstract

The major challenge for us as communication researchers is to recognize and center climate change in the choices we make as scholars and educators, and to normalize ways of talking about climate change.

Audiences at the film “Everything, Everywhere, All At Once” may not see it as a parable for our increasingly extensive experience of the climate crisis. And unlike the movie’s protagonists, who jump into a multiverse to escape the fixed timelines of their mundane existence, we have no such chance to rewire time or space. But as the essays in this 2K special issue demonstrate, “everything, everywhere, all at once” is a fairly apt description of our current climate condition. In the absence of our own multiverse, at least for now, this special issue offers radical possibilities of response for the here and now.

The fact of our changing climate, though banal, remains shocking: We live on a planet undergoing changes that pose immense threats to life as we know it. This fact must now shift our collective response from setting distant targets or debating definitions to a conscious reckoning with these changes and their constant impacts. In the words of Mike Hulme (2009), “We must now recognize climate change as an overlying, fluid and imaginative condition of human existence.” There is no “outside” to the crisis. Rather than see this as a liability, we explore here what it means to think with and within climate change. Instead of apprehending the climate crisis “out there,” the contributors to this issue show us how communicating about climate change is internal to our lives and to our roles as researchers, scholars, consumers, and citizens.

One way to think about this is to consider how all of societies’ most pressing problems are now climate-related problems. Climate change drives pressing international issues like the refugee crisis or the rise of authoritarianism, and it exacerbates local ones, such as the lack of drinking water and an increase in heat-related illnesses. It is tied to big questions of justice and equality, as evident in the disproportionate impacts of the climate crisis on women and people of color, and to smaller matters of individual behavior like what we eat, where we bank, and how we get around. The climate crisis confronts us in our daily lives: every choice we make has a real and powerful impact on our collective future, even if those impacts are indirectly felt. As communication scholars, we may come to see our role as providing an essential link between the research we do and its climate effects. Even if our research is only notionally about climate change per se, the ways in which we carry out our research, from fieldwork to conference travel to computing power, tie us to climate effects. We are all climate communicators now.

The major challenge for us as communication researchers is to recognize and center climate change in the choices we make as scholars and educators, and to normalize ways of talking about climate change. This is a challenge for multiple reasons, not the least of which is that climate change is what scientists and policy analysts have called a “wicked problem”: a social problem that is very hard to translate into policy or practice because it is notoriously difficult to define what the problem is at the outset. The legal scholar Richard Lazarus (2009) refers to climate change as a “super wicked problem” because of the particular complexity of its features. These features include (1) the fact that as the problem extends through time, it becomes harder and harder to address it; (2) the awareness that those who have the greatest power and resources to apprehend climate change are those who have not only contributed to its cause but also have the least incentive to act to redress it; and (3) the lack of a global legal infrastructure that can set the rules required to match the scale and scope of the crisis.

In addition to concerns about how to set rules or establish standards around climate action, we must also contend with the emotional valence of climate change. The sheer magnitude of the problem can provoke anxiety, fear, and denial in all of us. Our apprehensions are all too often manipulated and amplified in political and media spheres. Elaborate campaigns designed to deny the crisis and delay action may frame their message in the context of other value-laden concerns, such as COVID-19, international conflict, or ongoing culture wars. Treatment of the topic in the news can do more to spur emotion than convey information. For example, in 2019, major news outlets like The Guardian and major city councils around the world adopted “climate emergency” as the default phrase for describing the crisis. Yet, as recent studies of media effects have shown, such labels can decrease readers’ sense of hope and their trust in the news source (e.g., Feldman & Hart, 2021).

Seen through a scientific lens, the reality of global warming is beyond debate. That unequivocal reality has not prevented the phenomenon from being repeatedly subjected to a deeply politicized and contested conversation. It is a conversation permeated by corporate influence, authoritarian justifications, anti-regulatory claims, and conspiracy theories (Aronczyk, 2023; Russell, 2023). Attempts to communicate about the realities of climate change, in other words, take place in an ideological chaos that produces calls to close territorial borders to “protect” scarce resources along with TV commercials telling us that “Life Runs on Energy.” Retrenchment, fearmongering, nativism: these, too, are climate effects.

In “Everything, Everywhere,” the film’s protagonists experience the multiverse as choices that take them into different worlds. One might approach the idea of climate communication in a similar way. Attempts by climate action advocates to point fingers at those who cannot or will not believe “the truth” about the urgency of climate change neglect to recognize that “they themselves live in an alternative world, a world in which climate mutation occurs, while it does not in the world of their opponents” (Latour, 2018, p. 25). Instead of emphasizing difference, Latour suggests, we might consider how a climate imaginary shifts the focus from facts to concerns and discover what climate change means to each of us to remake a common world.

The eight essays in this issue deal with both the challenges and the possibilities of this shared climate imaginary. Our contributors were invited to reflect on lessons learned from their research on climate issues over time and offer conceptual or practical strategies of action. David Pellow’s essay describes the tactics adopted by climate activists to connect their work to issues of racial justice and police reform. LeiLani Nishime points out the ways that cultural studies, with its long-standing commitment to understanding power and inequality, offer a crucial tool to reveal and combat climate injustices. Tim Wood proposes that scholars study fossil fuel campaigns by examining the industry’s recruitment, participation, internal structure, and strategy development, rather than merely exposing their producers as front groups. Anne Pasek shares techniques to contend with the anxiety brought on by our reliance on energy-intensive digital networks. Chris Russill asks if rallying around catastrophe might give us new horizons for communication about the climate crisis. Joshua Ettinger and James Painter offer scholar – researchers promising research directions for pluralist and diverse climate conversations. Nick Couldry asks if dismantling social media will lead to the human connections needed to deal with the climate crisis. And Waqas Ejaz and Adil Najam suggest that recent coverage of the flooding in Pakistan hints at a future of climate news in which the Global South plays a more prominent role in shaping narratives. We hope these contributions can place readers along paths of radical possibility—not toward alternative universes of space or time, but grounded on the earth we all hope to continue to inhabit.