Communicating the Future. W. Lance Bennett
thinking about how transformative ideas spread that I cannot thank them all here. So, I want to express my appreciation for all of the excellent work in communication, political science, and my home field of political communication that has informed my thinking. However, there are a few people whose contributions call for special mention. Alexandra Segerberg at Uppsala University always asks the best questions and spots the arguments that need fixing. Henrik Bang at Canberra challenged me to remember the importance of “everyday makers” like Greta Thunberg. Julie Uldam at Copenhagen Business School gave me some great feedback on the manuscript, and I share her hopes that more citizens and organizations working for change can overcome their “narcissism of small differences.” And thanks to my good friend Brian Loader, who has spent many hours over scotch and conversation helping steer this project toward a balance of hope and realism within a useful analytical framework. Also, I appreciate being invited into the community of social movement scholars some years ago by Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow. Insights from many members of that network have found their way into this book.
The plan of the book began to emerge during time spent with colleagues at various universities and research centers in Europe. I am grateful to Barbara Pfetsch, who nominated me for a Humboldt Research Award, and to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for granting me recurring visits to Free University, Berlin, between 2015 and 2017, where I developed early sketches of the project. Spending the fall of 2018 and winter 2019 as a research fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society (The German Internet Institute) in Berlin helped my thinking about how disinformation of the kind surrounding our environment debates is produced and how it travels over media networks. I am grateful to Barbara Pfetsch and her teams at Weizenbaum for the many lively discussions, with particular thanks to Curd Knüpfer, Ulrike Klinger, and Annette Heft, among others. My time in Berlin was also enriched by discussions with Peter Lohauss on green economics (and rock and roll), Maria Haberer on democracy and progressive activism, and Terry Martin for his wit and wisdom in commenting on early drafts and much else.
Serious writing on the book began in the spring of 2019 during a research fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam. Thanks to Henrike Knappe and Patrizia Nanz for making this possible. Achim Mass and the team who ran the fellowship program at IASS made my stay incredibly rich. I am particularly grateful for the weekly seminars featuring fellows from all over the world presenting research on an incredible range of environmental problems, including their social and economic aspects. I was humbled by the wisdom and generosity of both the fellows and IASS researchers. Ortwin Renn was particularly helpful for my thinking about bridging questions of science and society. I also want to thank Frank Fischer for his refreshing perspectives on public policy processes, and Frank and Dorota Stasiak for their collaboration in organizing a workshop on climate science disinformation. The IASS staff made it all go smoothly. And special thanks to Danniel Gobbi who participated in the workshop, and shared original material on the connection between Charles Koch political operations in the US and the movements that helped elect Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.
The opportunity to help organize and join a Social Science Research Council working group during 2018 to 2020 on the history of media technology and disinformation taught me a lot about The Disinformation Age, which is the title of the book produced by that group. In particular, I have enjoyed my conversations with Steven Livingston, who helped me clarify the rise of neoliberal economics and associated democratic disruptions discussed in Chapter 3.
To Mary Savigar, my wonderful editor at Polity, I can only say that without you, this book might not exist at all, and surely not in its current form. Mary helped me develop the project, sort out the many ways to write it, and offered the perfect guidance in finding the right tone and approach. Ellen MacDonald-Kramer kept me on track through the process. Thanks also for the excellent suggestions from the two anonymous reviewers.
Finally, I thank my life partner and intellectual companion Sabine Lang for the careful reading and helpful ideas on the final draft of the manuscript. Her insights are informed by knowing what I am trying to write, sometimes even better than I do. Sabine has the rare ability to find, and suggest how to fix, all the places that make an argument stronger.
As I write these words, the world is in the grip of a coronavirus pandemic (named Covid-19 for Coronavirus disease of 2019). It has been challenging to think about the future when the human toll is so immediate, and the economic crisis looms so large. It is ironic that as economies around the world shut down, demand for oil collapsed and industrial pollution eased; many environmental health indicators improved. This book is an expression of hope that we can find ways to organize our economic and political lives in better balance with the life support capacities of the planet. The world seems both far away and terrifyingly close from our small retreat on a peninsula less than two hours from the complexities of Seattle. It is inspiring to be surrounded by islands, trees, mountains, and water. It seems a good omen that a pair of eagles flew by as I wrote these last words.
Longbranch, Washington, May 2020
Introduction: The Future is Now
Thinking about the environment and the future of life on the planet is challenging. The daily news is filled with stories about serious threats on so many fronts. At the same time, there is hope in the uprisings of millions of people, all over the world, who demand political action. A surprising leader of millions of young people who protested around the globe was a sixteen-year-old Swedish girl named Greta Thunberg, who left school to hold a one-person strike for climate change outside the Parliament building in Stockholm in 2018. Her eloquence and ability to focus attention on children concerned about their futures soon won her invitations to speak at the United Nations. She is the girl who took a 32-hour train ride from Sweden to the Alps to address The World Economic Forum, and scolded the world elite for flying in on their private jets. Her courage and eloquence won her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2019. In a speech before the British Parliament, she said this:
My name is Greta Thunberg. I am 16 years old. I come from Sweden. And I speak on behalf of future generations…
I was fortunate to be born in a time and place where everyone told us to dream big … People like me had everything we could ever wish for and yet now we may have nothing…
Now we probably don’t even have a future any more. Because that future was sold so that a small number of people could make unimaginable amounts of money. It was stolen from us every time you said that the sky was the limit, and that you only live once.1
Students around the world began walking out of school and taking to the streets in a movement they named “Fridays for Future.” Anna Taylor, aged seventeen, helped found the UK student climate network and was soon making eloquent statements of her own to the national press: “Those in power are not only betraying us and taking away our future, but are responsible for the climate crisis that’s unfolding in horrendous ways around the world.” Pointing out that climate change affects those least responsible for the causes, and least able to do anything about it, she also noted that, “It is our duty to not only act for those in the UK and our futures, but for everyone. That’s what climate justice means.”2
For those who believe the overwhelming scientific evidence, an ecological crisis threatens the current human civilization built on fossil fuels, overconsumption of resources, negligent handling of wastes, and a built-for-obsolescence consumer culture. Many animal species beyond humans are threatened as well. We hear most often about global warming, but there are many other earth system breakdowns caused by the runaway industrialization of nature. Frightening cocktails of toxics are found routinely in air, water, soil, and food. Interactions among different environmental hazards multiply present dangers and bring new ones. Precious water supplies are increasingly contaminated by agricultural chemicals, landfill leakage, industrial and human wastes, hydraulic fracking for natural gas and oil, and dozens of other sources. Supplies of clean water in some regions are further compromised by glacial melting due to global heating. The liquidation of vast ice sheets at the poles and Greenland is causing rising sea levels that threaten massive population