Mass Media

Modern Environmentalism and Mass Media Coverage

Many of the founding events of modern environmentalism were irrevocably shaped by mass media. Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring is a common touchstone for histories of environmentalism, but its initial serialization in a popular magazine (The New Yorker) and use in a CBS television exposé of the pesticide industry is crucial to a proper appraisal of its influence. Though it is hardly the first [Page 1110]example of popular nature writing influencing attitudes and opinions regarding environmental advocacy, Silent Spring signaled the significance of mass media as a site for advancing environmental social change. Less than a decade later, subsequent events were not merely affected by media coverage but often designed as “media events” aiming to refigure human perceptions of nature and provoke action against the ill effects of industrialism. For example, Earth Day celebrations are public protest events designed to produce an agenda-setting effect, whereby prominent media coverage moves issues onto the public and political agenda. Prominent North American news coverage of the first Earth Day in 1970 was followed by increased public support for environmental protection, improved opinion polling on such issues, broad national environmental protection policies, and new political priorities, all of which underscored the importance of mass media as a tool for environmental change, while ensuring future conflict with antienvironmental institutions on its public terrain.

Greenpeace was probably the first environmental organization to explicitly design publicity strategies on the basis of mass media theory. Whereas the 1970 Earth Day was announced with a full-page newspaper advertisement, Greenpeace created dramatic coverage through direct confrontation with powerful industries. Finding inspiration in 1960s media guru Marshall McLuhan, images of environmental confrontation were released as a series of “mind bombs,” or visual imagery triggering emotional response and support for issues usually obfuscated in abstruse regulatory language. These provocative conflicts were staged less to stop whalers, loggers, or nuclear testing than to create compelling images for mass media dissemination. As Kevin Deluca's important 1999 study made evident, these moments of radical confrontation were not romantically quixotic or irrational attacks on an impervious industrial system, but effectively measured tactics for conducting “image politics” in an increasingly televised or screened world.

More radical groups such as Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front (ELF) adopted new media as organization tools, finding in internet technology a medium well suited to their highly decentralized and antihierarchical style. Their direct action politics generally take the form of “monkey wrenching,” a practice characterized across a wide continuum of frames ranging from harmless prank to ecoterrorism. Monkey wrenching is small-scale, low budget, nonviolent industrial and economic sabotage, including such activities as putting sand in gas tanks, billboard graffiti, tree spiking, and sport utility vehicle vandalism. Similar to the early radicalism of Greenpeace, the goal is mainstream media attention and public perception of natural destruction, not a belief that damage to property will suffice to halt industrial-scale exploitation. Edward Abbey's 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, provided inspiration for the practice and gave expression to desires for new forms of environmental resistance, which proponents often conceive as an individualist or anarchist form of civil disobedience.

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