1: Clark, T 2015, ‘Chapter One: The Anthropocene – Questions of Definition’, in Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, Bloomsbury Publishing, p.1-28.

This reading by scholar Timothy Clark is essentially a foundation and framework for how Anthropocene could be processed and defined. The term “Anthropocene” is said to become widely adopted outside of its initial sense of strictly geological to have widespread contexts culturally, ethically, aesthetically, philosophically and politically surrounding environmental issues. The term, pointing out by Clark, attracts incoherent points of view. The viewpoint of Cohen suggests the popular of the term which was set for an era, the “Anthropocene era” in 2011 when the issue of global warming received overwhelming reception at a level never seen before. Morton suggests to the term to be “daunting, indeed horrifying” that opens an era for new realisation while scholars such as Menely, Ronda and Zizek links Anthropocene to expanding of capitalism globally. Clark stresses that the term is now used both academically and novelly which could be useful in recognising a new planetary context.

Clark mentions the three levels of complexities regarding human effects on Earth, which is a study initially set up by Allenby and Sarenwitz in showing that there consists an action-consequence relationship between human actions and planet Earth, which brings “very often heated controversy over definitions, causes, rights, and responsibilities, and, for some, even whether it exists at all”. Here, Clark identifies the scramble that Anthropocene brings to how human makes sense of the world, such as putting in “the lines between culture and nature, fact and value, and between the human and the geological or meteorological”.

Clark also suggests that politically, the reason that responsible figures and bodies often struggle for an adequate strategies against global warming is because the issue is impossible to confront directly and any effort to tackle it would be unsustain. For ecocritics, “the issue is one that refuses to stay put” and brings up more and more issues. The scale of Anthropocene, hence, lays “a true sense of scope of the challenges an environmental criticism must take up”. Clark says that humanity has to consider its impact as a whole towards the planet, and the totality school of thought is the solution to the issue as well as starting “new reflexivity as a species”. The shift towards this mentality could be aid via politics, culture and art “without erasing important culture and political differences”. Clark states that ecocritics have the role to reshaping imagination, questions whether or not the environmental problems come from a crisis of imagination and asks: “How far does a change in knowledge and imagination entail a change in environmentally destructive modes of life?”

2: Hammond, P 2017, ‘Introduction: ‘Post-political’ climate change‘ in Climate Change and Post-Political Communication: Media, Emotion, and Environmental Advocacy, Routledge, pp. 1-17.

In this reading, scholar Philip Hammond first acknowledges post-politics to be “attempts to understand what has happened to political life in Western societies since the end of the Cold War”. Citing Zizek, it is suggested that the traditional ideology of left and right politics is no longer efficient compared to need for negotiation of interests and taking people’s concrete needs and demands into account. Hammond brings in many arguments from different scholars that either post-politics are inevitable or that “nothing fundamental has really changed”. Hammond acknowledges the yet incoherent nature of post-politics, saying that it is “understood differently by different theorists.” The scholar then emphasises that “politics most certainly does not carry on as before, and that it will be a challenge to reinvent it”. This point could be seen as a solid foundation for putting post-politics climate change into the context, as the goal of negotiating and recognising needs and demands being more essential.

Hammond points out that the basis of Western elites’s interest into the agenda of climate issues is due to economic competition. However, there is a bigger argument that environmentalism is a “camouflaged religion”. Hammond draws in studies that refer environmentalists to “opium of the people”, such as bringing ecology and catastrophe in “to unite social classes”. The scholar then suggests that climate change presents “an existential challenge to capitalist order”, hence environmentalists find themselves among capitalist. However, there is still a sense that climate change is depoliticised and attracts analysis on how its framing is related to the issue.

Hammond then discusses the role of media, culture and emotion. Regarding the media, Hammond, citing arguments made by Carvalho, acknowledges the important role of news media in “processes of political (dis)engagement in relation to climate change”. It is said that the media is fundamental in “presenting climate change as the concern of elite decision-makers”, while ordinary citizens play the spectating role. Hammond goes on to discuss about the emotional aspect of post-politics climate change, most notably “the continuous invocation of fear and danger”. The use of fear turns in to a “culture of fear”, involving “millennial fears” and “apocalyptic rhetoric”. Fear is “problematic for various reasons” such as inaccuracy, but is argued to be “a useful mobiliser for environmental action”. Citing more studies, Hammond suggests that emotion is integral in how climate change is portrayed on media when being compared to information and rational argument.

3: Nurmis, J 2016, ‘Visual climate change art 2005–2015: discourse and practice’, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, vol. 7, no. 4, p.501-516.

This reading by scholar Joanna Nurmis discusses how the issue of climate change is portrayed via media practice as an art. The scholar starts by addressing that generally, the presentation of climate change on media is uninspiring despite the fact that the media world is image-saturated and images play a vital role in journalism in order to attract readers. It is the fact that the media seeks “images that bleed” makes climate change “defies visual representation”. It is acknowledged that in recent times, this “uninspiring” nature has started to shift, “expanded from an almost exclusively activist genre to being a type of artwork that mobilises knowledge and emotions relating to climate change without being explicitly instrumental”.

Nurmis then looks inside the emergence of climate change as being a topic of art. Initially, climate change art was not at an appealing level that could attract people to know about the issue, and then “to be engaged”. Climate change art is stuck in a “double blind” between art connoisseur and journalists or activists, which limits public engagement. Nurmis makes a point that climate is culture, and that “an honest response to climate change requires a culture transformation”. More importantly, the author emphasises that climate change art has a role, just as journalists, scientists and activists all play a role in engagement. Art can “educate the senses”, being a hub for imagination and a potential outcome. Another important point being claimed is art has the power to communicate things about climate change at a more efficient level compared to other forms of media. An example is that art can provoke emotions, while science is prohibited from doing so.

Nurmis also brings in three categories that climate change art can provide for public engagement: representations, installations and interventions, bringing in many artwork examples to discuss. Representations essentially consist of two-dimensional pictorial art or photography as well as other medium. These works “tell the story of climate change from near-depictions of actual impacts to imaginative visions of climate change futures”. They have the role draw attention to the topic, most notably the “future that climate change is generating”. Installations refer to works that can be interacted with three-dimensional objects. The key is that these works could be physically engaged. Interventions refer to works where artists place “within the landscape” with the hope to make the climate challenges portrayed “tangible”. All three categories have the same purpose of public engaging, but the difference lays in their effectiveness.