Next: Telling your story: citizen journalism
Posted Jan. 12/08
- Joshua Greenberg is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication and is cross-appointed to the Department of Sociology and Anthropology. He is also a research associate with the Centre for Voluntary Sector Research and Development.
Environmental activists criticized Leonardo Dicaprio for his part in The Beach, when native vegetation was bulldozed to prepare a protected national park in Thailand for filming. Now he has appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair’s “green issue” and produced a global-warming documentary The 11th Hour.
In the 1990s, the Shell group of oil, gas and petrochemical companies came under fire by Greenpeace when it planned to dispose of Brent Spar, an oil storage tanker, in deep Atlantic waters. Now Big Oil touts its environmental and socially responsible targets and practices.
The chair of the board for the David Suzuki Foundation, Canada’s foremost science-based environmental non-governmental organization (NGO), is the president of a leading public relations agency.
The PR machine is at work, building eco-celebrities, repairing corporate reputations and enhancing the power of NGOs. But how did climate change become such a touchstone issue? Through PR, of course!
“There’s no question that PR has helped transform climate change into the most important global issue of our time,” says Joshua Greenberg, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication. “Just as a gaseous substance can become liquid, climate change has been transformed from a state of relative invisibility into something much more perceptible.” But it wasn’t always this way. “PR has also figured prominently in efforts to keep the science of climate change off the policy, media and public agendas,” he says.
It’s this investigation into the paradox of public relations that is the focus of Greenberg’s newest project, Smog and mirrors: PR and the climate change debate in Canada. Greenberg, who is working on the project with a colleague from McMaster University, departs from conventional critiques, which he argues demonize the PR industry uncritically. “In books, documentaries and Hollywood portrayals of PR we find an insidious figure looming in the shadows and controlling discourse and decision-making,” he says.
Yet PR plays a much more complicated role, particularly in the case of the environment. Greenberg argues that environmental NGOs have successfully influenced policy, media and public agendas and this has resulted in no small part from what he describes as “a commitment to professionalizing their communication practices.” This success has also generated a number of side effects in the form of new problems for NGOs.
“It’s a paradox of environmental activism that groups like Greenpeace, the Suzuki Foundation, and the Pembina Institute have generated market opportunities for the PR industry to provide rhetorical service to state and corporate actors that have been the very targets of their campaigns. Thus, in many ways environmental activism has helped to generate growth in the PR industry.”
In exploring these paradoxes Greenberg argues that we don’t have to deny that PR practitioners propagate misinformation about climate change, and we shouldn’t do so. “The record here is pretty conclusive,” he says. “But it also behooves us as researchers to acknowledge that there is a far more complex opportunity structure for action. Many different protagonists have entered into the fray of debate about climate change and this has produced divergent outcomes.”
In addition to providing a niche market for PR companies around all things green, the climate change debate has changed the relationship between the various sectors of Canadian society. Environmental activists have become corporate players, corporate PR executives now bring prominence and influence to NGOs by sitting on their boards, NGOs add former journalists to their leadership ranks, and environmental spending has found its way into corporate accounting.
“If we are truly to understand the significance of climate change, we need to explore in more detail the many different roles of PR,” Greenberg says. “But we need to do so with a view to understanding the complexities and paradoxes. It’s much more interesting that way.”