Surveilling Climate Change from Above
The visualization of climate change in the news depends on a vertical gaze, drawing on satellite imagery, remote sensing, and aerial photography.
This god's eye perspective is ambivalent. While the "view from nowhere" and the "god trick" of science have been critiqued by social theorists and philosophers as celebrations of human power, and contemporary news images do reveal the power of surveillance, they also disrupt dominant alignments of power, knowledge, and emotion. Surveilling climate change from above it becomes easier to emphasize environmental impacts as out-of-proportion and out-of-control. The presentation will pursue these ideas through news stories by comparing the vertical gaze on environmental disturbance with the associated captions and descriptions.
Paul C. Adams´ is Director of Urban Studies, Department of Geography and the Environment at the University of Austin, Texas.
Paul C. Adams
University of Texas, USA