Professor Hanna Morris discusses her book Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power in the A&S News article New book argues for a climate conversation in which all voices are heard. Excerpt below.
2019 was a bad year for the climate — but a good year to be a climate journalist.
Six years ago, as Hanna E. Morris points out, people finally started waking up en masse to the reality of a planet in crisis, and the need to do something about it. Before then, climate journalism focused on arguments over whether climate change was real: at last, the answer seemed settled.
And yet, Morris argues that the opportunity to engage all voices in this universal problem was wasted. Her new book, Apocalyptic Authoritarianism: Climate Crisis, Media, and Power, explores how traditional media outlets — even those deemed to be left-of-centre — have prioritized the views of a narrow group of climate “saviours,” minimizing the efforts of activists, youth and people of colour, particularly women.
Morris is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts & Science’s School of the Environment. Her book’s analysis begins close to a decade ago, “when there were a lot of anxieties in the U.S. after Trump’s first election in 2016, around national identity and fears of the future,” she says.
“It was a time when visible threats of climate change were happening in tandem with visible threats to democracy — with the rise of Trump, but also Bolsonaro in Brazil, and of course Putin in Russia and Brexit in the UK.
“An apocalyptic discourse took shape, one that fearmongered about the supposed demise of Western civilization; this led to the legitimization of a new mode of authoritarian politics, where it was perceived that the only people who could solve this so-called total crisis would be privileged figures of power, and any who questioned these traditional authorities were cast as threatening others.”
An example of this exclusion would be the negative press attitude toward New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose sponsorship of the “Green New Deal” in 2019 seemed to hold broad appeal as polls showed that a majority of Americans approved of its tenets, which included a reduction in fossil fuels and greenhouse gas emissions.