Nature Gone Wild?
Climate change is a global process that has been gradually identified through scientific investigation. However, it is through catastrophic images that it is most often visualised. Dorothea Born asks what are the consequences of representing global warming in this way.
National Geographic magazine, March 1999 with a cover story El Nino ‘Nature’s Vicious Cycle’.
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‘How is global warming affecting the UK?’ Under this heading, Friends of the Earth UK put different images on their website, displaying climate change impacts. Scrolling down, we see Saddleworth Moor burning, flooded streets in York, burnt fields and a toppled seawall. While the pictures are specific to the UK, the images’ overall theme is widely used in visual representations of climate change, especially when the intention is to show the effects of global warming. Type ‘climate change’ into a Google picture search and images of fires, droughts, flooding and storms will pop up. Some may show stretches of forest going up in flames or parched soil and seared crops, others display flooded cities or the aftermath of devastating storms. And most media articles, NGO websites, information videos or campaign leaflets will include similar pictures of some kind of catastrophic event when talking about climate change. Among other common visual themes, such as the iconic polar bear adrift on an ice shelf or the famous hockey stick graph (of mean global temperature), images showing natural catastrophes have become canonical for its visualisation. They are part of an iconography that has been built up to represent this issue ever since it became a ‘hot topic’. Such images display specific conceptions of Nature and the natural world. They show it as uncontrollable, dangerous or even malicious; a Nature opposed to humans and ready to ‘strike back’ for the cruelties inflicted on it by humanity. But what are the implications of relying on such imagery in communicating climate change? These images of ‘Nature gone wild’ do specific work by creating emotional reactions, leading to a particular understanding of the climate and putting forward specific conceptions of Nature. But what emotions do they evoke? Do these images accurately reflect the situation and what are the consequences of the way we think about Nature? Images that trigger strong emotional responses in viewers may produce unintended consequences in communicating climate change. Perceiving images is much more immediate than reading texts. Images of natural disasters may arouse emotions of shock, fear, dismay or even despair. Therefore, catastrophic images are very effective in attracting attention and alerting viewers. These images may raise awareness of climate change and foster an understanding of its importance and urgency. But catastrophic images primarily work by evoking negative emotions. These also often leave viewers feeling helpless and overwhelmed, which in a further emotional response may lead to personal detachment. So while they are effective in creating awareness, catastrophic images can also have a demotivating effect and not necessarily foster individual engagement to counter climate change. A second difficulty with pictures is that they do not promote a conceptual understanding of climate change that does justice to the issue’s complexities, which result from the large spatial and temporal scales inherent to the issue. While weather events happen at a specific place
