Global Trade And Mediatised Environmental Protest: The View From Here 3030277224, 9783030277222, 3030277232, 9783030277239

Table of contents :
Acknowledgements......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
1 Introduction......Page 10
The View from Here......Page 13
Following Media......Page 17
The Book’s View......Page 22
References......Page 26
2 Counting Protest......Page 30
Speaking Out......Page 33
So What’s New?......Page 39
Conclusion......Page 47
References......Page 49
3 Protest and Publics......Page 54
Mediatised Environmental Conflict......Page 56
Social Licence......Page 61
New Communities of Concern?......Page 67
Conclusion......Page 72
References......Page 74
4 The Spectacle of the Reef......Page 79
Saving the Great Barrier Reef—Then......Page 82
Saving the Great Barrier Reef—Now......Page 85
It’s not Cricket......Page 88
See It Before It’s Too Late......Page 93
Conclusion......Page 97
References......Page 99
5 Industrialising the Forests and the Fishes......Page 104
Forests......Page 107
Fish......Page 115
References......Page 123
6 The Information Trade......Page 129
Industry......Page 133
Campaigners......Page 139
Journalism......Page 144
Conclusion......Page 152
References......Page 153
7 Conclusion......Page 157
Producing Sustained Change......Page 164
References......Page 169
Index......Page 171

Citation preview

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MEDIA AND ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION

Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest The View From Here Libby Lester

Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication Series Editors Anders Hansen School of Media, Communication and Sociology University of Leicester Leicester, UK Steve Depoe McMicken College of Arts and Sciences University of Cincinnati Cincinnati, OH, USA

Drawing on both leading and emerging scholars of environmental communication, the Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication Series features books on the key roles of media and communication processes in relation to a broad range of global as well as national/local environmental issues, crises and disasters. Characteristic of the cross-disciplinary nature of environmental communication, the books showcase a broad variety of theories, methods and perspectives for the study of media and communication processes regarding the environment. Common to these is the endeavour to describe, analyse, understand and explain the centrality of media and communication processes to public and political action on the environment. Advisory Board Stuart Allan, Cardiff University, UK Alison Anderson, Plymouth University, UK Anabela Carvalho, Universidade do Minho, Portugal Robert Cox, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA Geoffrey Craig, University of Kent, UK Julie Doyle, University of Brighton, UK Shiv Ganesh, Massey University, New Zealand Libby Lester, University of Tasmania, Australia Laura Lindenfeld, University of Maine, USA Pieter Maeseele, University of Antwerp, Belgium Chris Russill, Carleton University, Canada Joe Smith, The Open University, UK More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14612

Libby Lester

Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest The View From Here

Libby Lester Media School University of Tasmania Hobart, TAS, Australia

Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication ISBN 978-3-030-27722-2 ISBN 978-3-030-27723-9  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Christina Pritchard/Alamy Stock Photo Cover design by eStudioCalamar This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book explores how environmental protest has evolved alongside profound change to communication media and to the ways in which resources, goods, people and ideas move across the globe, supporting us and our lifestyles while pressuring specific landscapes and the people, plants and animals that inhabit them. Recognising and describing change takes time, and I have been fortunate to have had sustained support across many years to research environmental communication and the conditions under which we come together to negotiate shared futures. The Australian Research Council’s Discovery Program has supported this broader research program with three grants—most recently with funding for ‘Transnational Environmental Campaigns in the Australia-Asian Region’ 2015–2018 (DP150103454). This funding, combined with the support provided by the University of Tasmania, has allowed me to return time and time again to specific conflicts and campaigns as they have emerged, subsided or reformed, and to follow them as they have flowed from my island home in the Southern Ocean or a small town in country Victoria or from the fringes of the Great Barrier Reef out into the world and back again. Identifying change across time has also meant returning to earlier research and writing, where emerging case studies were first analysed and ideas in this book began to develop. In particular, these include: Lester, Libby (2014) ‘Transnational Publics and Environmental Conflict in the Asian Century’, Media International Australia, 150: 67–78; Hutchins, Brett & Libby Lester (2015) ‘Theorizing the Enactment of Mediatized Environmental Conflict’, International Communication Gazette, 77 (4): 337–358; Lester, v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Libby (2016) ‘Containing Spectacle in the Transnational Public Sphere’, Environmental Communication, 10 (6): 791–802; Lester, Libby (2016) ‘Media and Social Licence: On Being Publicly Useful in the Tasmanian Forests Conflict’, Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research, 89 (5): 542–551; and Foxwell-Norton, Kerrie & Libby Lester (2017) ‘Saving the Great Barrier Reef from Disaster: Media Then and Now’, Media, Culture and Society, 39 (4): 568–581. Thank you to Brett Hutchins, of Monash University, and Kerrie Foxwell-Norton, of Griffith University, for their permission to draw on our joint publications, as well as for our long-term research partnerships and friendship. I am also grateful for Lyn McGaurr’s collaboration on related topics and her support over many years. Ph.D. candidates Coco Cullen-Knox and Cynthia Nixon joined me on this project to focus on specific campaigns related to fish farming and coal mining, respectively. Their insightful and innovative research has contributed to this book, as it will to scholarship and communities more broadly over coming years. Thank you also to colleagues and friends Claire Konkes and Kathleen Williams for their support, and for their commitment to the Media program at the University of Tasmania. Accessing networks of local and international environmental groups, journalists, corporations and government trade officials has been no easy task and has relied on the trust and generosity of many people across several countries, in particular, in Japan and Malaysia. For fear of omission or breaking confidentiality, I will not attempt to name them, but I hope they recognise the crucial role they have played in this research. Likewise thank you to the interviewees, who gave me their time and insights despite the political and commercial sensitivity of some of the subject matter. I acknowledge the vital support of the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, which with thanks to Professor Tetsushi Sonobe twice hosted me throughout this project as a visiting fellow. Thank you also to Masaru Nagashima, from GRIPS, and translator Noboku Tsutsui for their work supporting interviews in Japan. Leanne Wisbey, in Hobart, took on the difficult task of transcription. In Tokyo, the International House of Japan and its accommodation and library facilities were, as always, much appreciated. Following environmental conflict across time has required patience: from my family which has put up with my absences or weekends and holidays accompanying me to various protest sites, and most notably from Janine Mikosza, who has given invaluable research assistance, friendship and deep wisdom over many years.

Contents

1 Introduction 1 The View from Here 4 Following Media 8 The Book’s View 13 References 17 2 Counting Protest 21 Speaking Out 24 So What’s New? 30 Conclusion 38 References 40 3 Protest and Publics 45 Mediatised Environmental Conflict 47 Social Licence 52 New Communities of Concern? 59 Conclusion 63 References 65 4 The Spectacle of the Reef 71 Saving the Great Barrier Reef—Then 74 Saving the Great Barrier Reef—Now 77 It’s not Cricket 81 vii

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CONTENTS

See It Before It’s Too Late 85 Conclusion 89 References 91 5 Industrialising the Forests and the Fishes 97 Forests 100 Fish 108 Conclusion 116 References 116 6 The Information Trade 123 Industry 127 Campaigners 133 Journalism 138 Conclusion 146 References 147 7 Conclusion 151 Producing Sustained Change 159 References 163 Index 165

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Stanley is a tiny town with a population of 370 in the north-east region of the southern mainland Australian state of Victoria. Wealthy during the gold mining boom of the nineteenth century, the region is now largely reliant on apple and nut growing for income. In late August 2018, Stanley—like much of Australia—was experiencing drought, and facing a summer of soaring temperatures, dangerous bushfires and water restrictions. Even without the extreme form of politics over climate change that has played out in Australia over the last two decades—the country has had seven prime ministers in eleven years, with climate change and energy policies implicated in each ‘coup’ (Butler 2017)—water has always been a political issue for the driest inhabited continent. Water restrictions are not uncommon for residents of major cities, particularly in Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, which sits at the mouth of the almost 3500-kilometrelong Murray-Darling river system and is last in line for the water. Rural dwellers across Australia are often forced to buy in water to refill the tanks connected to roofs when there has been no rain. Historically, whoever has had access to underground aquifers, streams, rivers and dams, from which water can be diverted to irrigate crops or pasture, has been a major determiner of wealth in Australia. New versions of this wealth have emerged in the last two decades, driven by the buying and selling of water rights. Across the country, new irrigation schemes are leading to the conversion of properties from livestock grazing © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lester, Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9_1

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with its volatile prices to higher-yielding and more reliable crops for evernearer and rapidly expanding Asian markets. Largely in response to the near draining of parts of the Murray-Darling basin, national policies have been introduced to limit access to surface water. There are no caps on groundwater (aquifers accessed by bores), however, which is a growing commodity and, inevitably, a new source of conflict. This is what happened in Stanley. In 2013, a newcomer ‘blew in’ (Wright 2018), buying a small property and orchard in the area, which also came with substantial water rights. While the general principle underlying water rights in Australia is that the site where water is accessed and the site where it ends up will be connected hydrologically (White and Nelson 2018), in this case the new owner was granted permission by the regional planning authority to access 19 million litres of aquifer water a year via a 60-metredeep bore to sell as bottled water. The water was trucked through the small town to the regional centre of Albury, about 60 kilometres away, to a bottling plant owned by Asahi Beverages, the Australian subsidiary of Asahi Breweries, which is at the core of the giant Tokyo-based Asahi Group Holdings. Asahi Group Holding reports annual total sales across its alcohol, soft drinks and food arms of over 1700 billion yen (or US $15 billion). From its famous Phillip Stark-designed golden corporate headquarters in Shibuya, Asahi has 147 subsidiaries and 95 plants worldwide, largely in Europe, Australia and South-East Asia, with 14.5% of its total sales in its overseas businesses (Asahi 2018). The problem for the local protesters, including the shire mayor, and one they hoped the courts would agree with when they began what turned into a four-year legal battle, was not only that the from-and-to hydrological connection had been broken in Stanley, but so too had the from-andto community connection with place. Agricultural activity, sustained by access to water, was the key to sustaining the town, protesters claimed. They framed bottled water as having no ‘value’ or ‘merit’, as ‘squandering’ the area’s most valuable resources (ABC 7.30 2018). Such framing is not unique to the Stanley conflict. Further north, on the border of the states of New South Wales and Queensland, another dispute has been described as ‘dividing the local community’ (ABC 7.30 2018), while communities in the United States, Canada and Europe have also clashed with the bottled water industry, including the residents of the French spa town of Vittel—a name now more famous internationally for the bottled water that is produced there than the locality itself—who have accused Nestle of ‘selling so much

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of their water to the rest of the world that they barely have enough left for themselves’ (White and Nelson 2018). The various court cases—which the Stanley community campaigners eventually lost leaving them with an AU$90,000 bill—became fully integrated into the protest strategy. When the Supreme Court of Victoria determined not to allow the campaign’s appeal against earlier court rulings, it created space within mainstream news media for protesters to widen the framing of the debate by pushing for policy change within Australia and to reframe the debate as a social justice issue with international relevance. For example, Ed Tyrie, chairman of Stanley Rural Community Inc., called on parliament to change regulations to prevent water mining, claiming: ‘It fails us and all Victorians when a private company is lawfully allowed to take groundwater and sell it for use as bottled water at a significant wholesale price to a multinational corporation, Asahi Beverages-Schweppes, without any measurable, meaningful dividend for the environment and for our community’ (Wahlquist 2018). It was the cost ruling that prompted the intervention of an international political organisation, SumOfUs, the ‘online community’ ‘fighting for people over profits’ and ‘which exists to put bad corporations back in their place’. The US-based organisation is funded largely by individuals and donations, and its ‘connective’ online campaign activities are supported by a strong cross-media strategy that includes issuing media releases on its activities (SumOfUs 2018a). This builds the type of news media visibility witnessed in the Stanley case, initiated when signups to an online petition (each ‘signature’ is described by SumOfUs as an individual ‘action’) reached 120,000 and spread across a wide range of news outlets in 2018. The framing of the dispute in the online campaign was familiar, with tankers ‘rolling up’ to risk the livelihoods of the ‘tiny community’. For campaigners, the notion of a transnational community of concern became the key framing device. Stanley, for example, was: ‘in a David versus Goliath battle with the multinational beverages company, but communities around the world are facing the challenge of “water mining”’ (Wood 2018). Familiar points of reference were provided for distant supporters: to ‘the small town of Osceola’ in Michigan ‘fighting off a lawsuit from Swiss giant Nestlé which pays just $200 a year to pump millions of litres of water from the near town’s water reserves’ to the ‘nine-year battle in Cascade Locks, Oregon, killing off Nestlé’s plans to start pumping there’ (SumOfUs 2018b).

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While the campaign remained targeted, with the petition aimed at ‘showing Asahi executives that consumers also care a great deal about where water comes from’ (Wood 2018), campaign leader Ed Tyrie clearly laid out the relationship when he said, ‘Asahi is responsible for the problem in this case so our campaign will be a multinational approach to a multinational problem’ (O’Shea and Somerville 2018). This, he said, ‘is not just a problem for Stanley anymore, it’s a problem for the whole world’ (O’Shea and Somerville 2018).

The View from Here This is a book about ‘here’. ‘Here’ refers to a location that is defined by our presence, our awareness of place and environment. Sometimes, as per the deep roots of the word, this means being physically in the same space. ‘I live here’. ‘My home is here’. ‘I am here’. ‘I belong here’. Or to a shared moment or observation. ‘It ends here’. ‘Here it is’. Yet, in modern use, the word also connects us to elsewhere. Point to a map: ‘It is happening here’. Display an image: ‘You can see it here’. Pull up a website: ‘Look, here’. Tweet: ‘I don’t like what is being done here’. The connection between people and environment is changing. As more governments, companies and individuals scan the globe for access to primary resources such as minerals and timber, for food, power and water, and for destinations for work, holidays and homes, pressures on places and communities grow. At the same time, global environmental risks— most notably, climate change—produce new networks and unfamiliar forms of politics. We know that media and communications are integral to this change. They interact with the geographically diverse groups and individuals that now seek to influence the negotiations and decisions that affect often far away landscapes and communities. Together, they push and puncture the boundaries that contain the ‘local’ and distort the form we apply to the ‘global’. Consciousness of and empathy for other places is reconfigured by knowledge of shared risks and impact, even by a sense of belonging. ‘Communities of concern’ are evoked that transcend local places and national boundaries. And they protest. Across the world, protests are occurring that are planted in the local but are also enacted globally. From the Papua New Guineans living beside the world’s largest gold mine, who through Australian lawyers and news media claim the jobs they were promised in exchange for their land and lifestyles never eventuated (Blakkarly 2018), to the US and Canadian communities

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forming to fight pipeline expansion driven by the continued growth of oil exports (Murphy 2018), to the mass rallies that accompany global initiatives to limit climate change (Kennedy 2018), to Indian news media coverage of Australian businessman and Great Barrier Reef tourist operators lobbying Indian mining giant Adani over its plans to develop the world’s largest coal mine (#StopAdani 2017), to the online campaigns encouraging us to ‘adopt an orangutan’ to slow oil palm destruction in Borneo (WWF 2018); all manifest features that are rooted in recognisable historical patterns of dissent while presenting unfamiliar forms of mediated politics. Yet the way we have understood these conflicts has struggled to balance the tensions that what can seem, on the surface at least, contradictory. These tensions include deep emotional and/or economic connections to place; yearning for equal access to prosperity, health, safety, food, beauty; the sense of purpose and connectedness that comes with local belonging and/or global awareness. Despite a world defined largely by its connectedness and the ever-increasing movement of people, resources, goods and information from one locality to another and another (Curson 2015), censuses show that most people still live their lives and choose to die near where they were born (in the United States, e.g., see US Census Bureau 2011; Bui and Miller 2015). We might recognise the value that comes with local communities managing local places and resources (Ostrom 2009), but how can the idea of ‘local’ be preserved or justified when what we decide for our place and lives impacts or even relies on the place, lives and decisions of others? For some time, we have rightly questioned what it means ethically, individually and politically to say, ‘It is over there’—challenging the detachment that lingers despite a world connected and informed by not only communications technologies but global harms and risks that are collectively produced. By focusing on ‘here’, however, we are forced to think about who and what is present in a space—physically or consciously—and what that presence means for places and environments, including for the people and things that inhabit them. This new politics of environmental conflict is one in which ‘distant others’ are not only called upon to voice concern, but expect and demand to be heard. In order to understand how environmental futures across the world are being determined, it is crucial to know what drives this expectation of the right to participate, to influence decision-making, ‘here’. How is this shared sense of ‘here’, with its accompanying privileges and responsibilities, being evoked, and to what outcomes for local landscapes,

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people and conflicts? Is the formation of such communities now a precondition for political visibility of issues? If so, what happens to those places, risks and conflicts that go unnoticed, are ignored or are deliberately made invisible to outside audiences? How important is the gaze of these outsiders to the construction of a local environmental issue, even of a place that is deemed worthy of conservation? On what foundations are these ‘communities of concern’ built? Nostalgia? Self-interest? Anxiety? Or is it possible that these global ‘communities of concern’ are simply spectres, conjured by marketers and activists to alter our buying behaviours and pressure corporations and governments into shifting their practices? In this scenario, it becomes even more urgent to know what drives environmental protest and the flow of information underpinning it. There is nothing surprising in environmental campaigns seeking to slow the procurement, production, trade and consumption of resources and goods deemed harmful, or in governments and corporations seeking to stem the flow of information that interrupts these activities. However, contemporary transnational environmental protest is not so straightforward. On some levels at least, this is a politics increasingly determined by a strengthening alliance between global NGOs and multinational corporations, operating across re-corporatised media and communications technologies and platforms no longer invested in the local, and supported by national and international governance regimes (see, e.g., Dowie 2011; Dauvergne 2018). In seeking to empirically investigate emerging conditions of public debate and decision-making within the context of cosmopolitan environmental concern, an analysis of the politics of the ‘local’ and its interaction with the ‘global’ is important but insufficient in itself. ‘Local’ prioritises boundaries, albeit porous boundaries (Escobar 2001). It might be possible to identify local issues, local people, local resources, local governments; to observe a local community coming together to fight for its local park or its right to manage a local fishery. We might also observe translocal and transnational interactions and their impact on local outcomes. ‘Here’, however, recognises both the space where the conflict occurs and the consciousness that is shaping the conflict and its outcomes. This consciousness is one that is rooted in specific places and a global phenomenon, given the global economy that is driving the flow of resources, goods, people and information across the world. Environmental protest—as a politics of the ‘here’—is geographically located; ‘here’ is where places provide water, minerals, fossil fuels, timber products or the locations for nuclear power plants or to attract tourists, and

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where communities and individuals carry the anxieties and lived realities of damaged environments. Yet, it also transnational, with locals on the ground interacting with globally connected political and corporate actors, and local threats and concerns coalescing symbolically into discourses of global risk, cosmopolitan concern and ultimately decision-making. It invokes different forms of power, including indigenous, science and lay knowledge claims, and emotionally charged symbols. It takes place in community halls, in ancient forests, in boardrooms and across vast networks of media and communications technologies and participants. The ‘here’ in environmental politics is where we recognise that impacts differ from place to place, and that responsibility for producing, managing or correcting the harm is not spread equally. It is where we begin to ask whether Asahi executives can see Stanley from their famous golden tower. In approaching environmental protest from this perspective, the exchange of information occurring within and between localities can be highlighted, as can the interactions and exchanges occurring within the flow of communications. This is a space of places and of flows (Castells 2011). Just as values and actors change depending on supply and demand and political conditions within the trade of goods and resources that drives so much contemporary environmental conflict, there is a trade of information in which meanings and the impact of those meanings vary depending on cultural, economic and political context. The value of connections, the strengths of relationships, the historical perspective—these become discernible at the points of exchange, where claims and counterclaims clash and the power to influence or stem further flows of information is decided. This book purposely uses the term ‘protest’ rather than ‘activism’, the more popular term for many of the activities encountered here. ‘Activism’ is too static a noun (and increasingly dismissed as such) to describe the ‘doing’ that is occurring in many places. Protest as a verb is an act of dissent, of disagreement. It involves some form of doing, even if that is only a single online click in the global trade of information. For many, however, the act of protest requires far more commitment. And this is where it becomes clear that what drives this trade of information clearly matters. We know that how decisions are made about the use of resources and places and at what risk consistently test our capacity to civilly negotiate shared futures, whether over the composition of our atmosphere or the fate of a small local fishery or aquifer. That environmental campaigners and environmental journalists continue to become greater targets of violence than ever before in many parts of the world (Global Witness 2018; Reporters Without Borders 2015)

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is evidence, I suggest, of the urgency of investigating how information flows through media and communications to inform—or form—communities.

Following Media Nothing about social change is ever entirely new. Rather, the way media and publics interact has emerged in fits and starts through the course of modernity, taking on different forms and magnitude dependent on the new technologies, politics, social conditions, trade of goods, movement of people or environmental risks occurring at various times. The advent of print in the early seventeenth century, as Benedict Anderson suggested, produced an ‘imagined linkage’ by, firstly, connecting the disparate content of the stories in a newspaper through their simultaneous publication and, secondly, via the market, linking seemingly separated individuals through the shared act of engaging with the same news at the same time (Anderson 2006: 33–36). This shared, simultaneous print culture—followed and intensified by broadcast media—disrupted the workings of political power, providing both leaders and the public with new ways to engage with each other from a distance (Thompson 1995). These shifts in identity and power were the result of what is now mostly termed ‘mediatisation’, a process in which communication media, and their transformations, are not only fully embedded and implicated in social change, but constitutive of that change (Cottle 2006; Hjarvard 2008; Hepp 2013: 38). John B. Thompson noted this process in 1995 when he suggested that through the technical innovations associated with print, then via the electrical codification of information, ‘symbolic forms were produced, reproduced and circulated on a scale that was unprecedented. Patterns of communication and interaction began to change in profound and irreversible ways’ (1995: 46), with the development of communication media ‘a fundamental and constitutive part of the formation of modern societies’ (Thompson 2018: 2). This interaction between media and social change can be understood, writes Thompson, through the creation of a ‘mediated worldliness’, where ‘our sense of the world which lies beyond the sphere of our personal experience, and our sense of our place within this world, are increasingly shaped by mediated symbolic forms’ (1995: 34–45). As media increasingly infuse this sense of the world, ‘so too our sense of the groups and communities with which we share a common path through time and space, a common origin and a common fate, is altered: we feel ourselves to

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belong to groups and communities which are constituted in part through the media’ (Thompson 1995: 34–45; see also Couldry and Hepp 2016). It is clear that to understand the potential to influence the future through some form of shared negotiation and action, it is vital to identify how our social, political and corporate worlds interact with media industries, technologies and practices. Contemporary media and communications present a special challenge. These are complex networks along which information flows, and an ever-changing range of communication technologies, content, practices and audiences interact at sometimes barely visible nodes within these networks to create different cultural and political impacts across multiple places (Castells 2011; Hepp 2013: 14). As Thompson writes, it is important to ask how the use of communication media ‘involves the creation of new forms of action and interaction, new kinds of social relationships and new ways of relating to others and to oneself’ (2018: 2, italics in original). These actions and interactions—the processes of mediatisation— cannot be seen by analysing communication media on their own. Doing so, understates the complex mix of practices, technologies, ownership, relationships and other influences that are not readily visible through that lens (Flew 2017; Thompson 2018). In some cases, in fact, media practices and relationships result in an absence of media content, a form of controlled privacy or strategic invisibility (Lester and Hutchins 2012). It is tempting for global media scholars, in particular, to retreat to ‘armchair’ or ‘desktop’ fieldwork; studying content is the safest option in a field grappling with constant change, controversial subjects, big questions and phenomenon occurring in different parts of the globe (Kraidy 2018). But what is missed or overstated as a result? Furthermore, as Ulrich Beck and Manuel Castells reminded us in their work on the ‘risk society’ (e.g. Beck 2009, 2011) and the ‘network society’ (e.g. Castells 2009, 2011), major corporations, regional and national governments, international governance regimes, nongovernment organisations, community groups, industry associations and scientific institutions are all important actors in these new forms and means of engagement. Mediatisation is as much about what is happening in other social institutions as in media. All are present in the ‘here’. In trying to overcome these challenges, the approach taken in this book is to follow media and communications and to identify associated patterns, processes and practices as they have flowed in and around specific protests over the environment. Underpinned by the concept of ‘mediatised environmental conflict’, developed with Brett Hutchins (Hutchins and Lester 2015) and detailed in Chapter 3, this study uses a range of conventional

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methods drawn from diverse fields such as anthropology and marketing, as well as those analysing discourse, and combines them in ways that allows insight into changing practices across time, and changing practices and meaning across space. Recently, leading North American environmental communications scholars Robert Cox and Bob Hackett independently called for a shift from work focused on individual behaviour and public opinion—the traditional focus of US environmental communications research (Waisbord 2016: 875)—to that which follows campaigns through their lives, highlighting critical moments, successes and failures (IAMCR 2018). This study has attempted to do precisely this, building on my many years as a journalist then media researcher in which I have attempted to get behind-the-scenes of controversial political communications (e.g. Lester 2007, 2010, 2014). This aim has also meant revisiting earlier research and writings related to the Great Barrier Reef and Tasmanian conflicts in order to locate recent events within overall contexts. An obvious methodological issue emerges when investigating the deliberate cloaking of political activity. Interviews and direct observation can assist in identifying the issues and opinions that actively compete for attention but fail to appear in media, the sources that miss out on being quoted, or the facts in media releases that journalists choose not to use. It is more challenging to identify the issues and events that are deliberately rendered invisible by sources. Yet, it is vital to understand why and under what conditions invisibility becomes desirable for political and corporate actors, particularly if they are activists trained and practised at pursuing visibility in order to maximise their symbolic power. When investigated within the context of transnational conflicts that involve a range of international actors and flows of information across vast and complex media networks, the challenge is increased further still. Yet this is crucial work for determining to what extent communities of concern are legitimate and should be included in deciding environmental futures. The book tackles these challenges by taking a long-term view of conflicts, supported by direct observation, interviews and analysis of media content including news, protest websites and media releases. This was always going to be an ambitious research project methodologically and logistically, spread over a decade, several continents, four languages, and as many media platforms as each conflict required, and with political actors who were not always easy to access, including the young woman living on a platform 65 metres above ground in a giant eucalyptus forest in the deep south-west of Tasmania; the deputy chairman of a major

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Borneo timber company at a remote, formal border meeting of Indonesian and Malaysian resource ministers; the financial analyst fresh from a merchant banking role in London in an overheated tent on a farm in central Queensland sharing his skills with anti-coal activists; the corporate social responsibility and procurement department representatives of notoriously private Japanese corporations; the indigenous campaigner in a riverside café in Kuching, chain-smoking after a court ruling earlier that day that removed native land rights in favour of oil palm plantations; a State Premier at a trade event in the conference hall of the Shanghai Shangri-La; the celebrated journalist in London banned from entering Malaysia; the diplomats and trade representatives in fortressed embassies in Beijing and Tokyo; the farmers at an Austrade seminar in regional Australia learning about free trade agreements and how to access new Asian markets to sell their salmon, milk, honey or beef. Each of these individuals and groups of actors was encountered in the study not because they had been predetermined to be participants, but because the communications we were following—in our case, mediated moments of conflict and dissent—had reached them first. Roger Silverstone described the process of mediation as involving ‘the movement of meaning from one text to another, from one discourse to another, from one event to another’ (1999: 13), while Andreas Hepp writes: ‘The concept to mediation involves a more complex approach to reciprocal interrelationships saturated with power and which become concrete in the process of media communication’ (2013: 37). For each participant in our study, the meaning of the communications differed; to discern this meaning was the purpose of seeking out these interviewees. Analysis of these exchanges was aided by ethnographic methods, particularly those explicitly developed to trace movement between the local, national and the global where ‘global communication processes can be understood by ethnographies of the local that nonetheless maintain the global as a counterpoint’ (Kraidy and Murphy 2008: 345). Or as Bruno Latour suggests in relation to ‘relocalization’, ‘there is no reason to confuse a well-connected locality with the utopia of the Globe’ (2017: 136, original italics; see also Appadurai 2008; Hannerz, 2003; della Porta and Piazza 2008; Miller and Kraidy 2016; Murphy 2017; Kraidy 2018). It is also important to acknowledge the national that ‘refuses to go away from research agendas’ (Waisbord 2016: 878). Within this context, a useful definition of community is one that stresses processes of active construction by its members and the identity that is derived from this construction

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(Bailey et al. 2008). In this way, a community is ‘fluid and contingent, where the feelings of belonging to a community do not necessarily exclude affinities towards other communities or social structures’ (Bailey et al. 2008: 10; see also Foxwell-Norton 2018). One of the many temptations for a small team from an island in the Southern Ocean in following discourse ‘objects’ as they flow across complex international networks is to retreat to linearity and neatness. In attempting to decipher the types of consciousness we have witnessed across cultures, languages and national boundaries, we resisted the temptation to reduce what we were seeing into diagrammatical ‘value chains’ and ‘lines of communication’—a particular risk given we were often following our ‘objects’ along international trade supply chains (not that trade any longer flows along these ‘chains’ in direct and predictable paths). Rather, we attempted to follow and record interactions as our communications bumped up against or were consumed by power and institutions and communities at ‘switching points’ (Castells 2009), growing in magnitude and weakening, dividing and reforming, disappearing or stalling before reappearing, all of which they did often. Another consequence of our physical base is an estranged relationship with the concept of a ‘global South’. Australia, and in particular Tasmania, has a continuing economic reliance on natural resources and its touristattracting landscapes, which are part of a global economy that criss-crosses ever longer and more complex commodity chains supplying consumers spread across the world. As Peter Dauvergne and Jane Lister note in relation to timber, trade no longer flows primarily along a consistent and direct pathway from producer to consumer, but is ‘increasingly flowing through every emerging national economy—including Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, and Russia—as well as through every developing region’ (2011: 6). Tasmanian timber products, have been destined as flooring for the London Olympic basketball stadium; as formwork in Tokyo; as pulp for paper mills in China and Vietnam. A neat categorisation of the world into the Global South and Global North is difficult to meaningfully apply here given: (a) a viewpoint from the deep, resource-dependent physical south that is supplying markets and consumers to rapidly if unevenly developing nations in the north, and (b) the unequal access to wealth and privilege and unfair distribution of environmental risks and burdens occurring at every link of a supply chain. Our location in the Asia-Pacific region also means we are surrounded by different ways of knowing (see Connell 2007; FoxwellNorton 2018) and need to remain attuned to indigenous knowledges and viewpoints.

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Finally, given that the media and communications followed in this research were generally concerned with the vulnerability of ecological systems alongside the long-standing use of the term ‘media ecology’ within scholarship, it is tempting to draw parallels between the natural systems and those social patterns and processes in which media sit. Such a comparison, however, has implications. Media are a product of humans, created, controlled and deployed or not according to the will—or lack of will—of people (Maxwell and Miller 2012). Even if the level of human invention in ecological systems is such that the term ‘Anthropocene’ is warranted to describe this period in history, the rights and responsibilities we experience and exercise through our existence in natural ecosystems (see Latour 2017) are vastly different from those we should be exercising in relation to media. Media are complex, but not so complex that they are beyond our capacity to comprehend, our rights to harness, or our responsibility to insist they are organised for common good.

The Book’s View The focus of the book’s case study chapters is mediatised environmental conflicts involving Australia and its Asian trading partners—although given contemporary flows of goods, resources, people and political information noted above, regional boundaries are not absolute. The Australia–Asian region provides an excellent case study opportunity, partly because it remains under-represented in international media and communications literature, but more importantly because of the emerging geopolitical pressures the region faces. Capitalising on the rapidly expanding middle classes of Asia is seen as central to future Australian prosperity. Australia has shifted from being one of the remotest countries in the world to being positioned within 10,000 kilometres of a third of global economic output, rising to half by 2025 (Commonwealth of Australia 2012). Transport and communication costs have fallen, and free trade agreements have expanded to provide ‘businesses with better market access, opportunities for faster revenue growth and stronger employment growth’ (Commonwealth of Australia 2012). These conditions create a broad range of opportunities for Australia, particularly in supplying primary resources such as minerals and timber, destinations for work, study or holidays, and essential food, power and water. But as the Australian Government has noted, it also creates challenges and risks. Regional conflict is predicted to occur as countries strengthen

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efforts to guarantee the sources and supply routes of essential resources; pressures rise on Australia’s resources and infrastructure, potentially alongside the frequency and severity of natural disasters; and environmental degradation is likely to hinder Australia’s capacity to meet demand. Declining soil fertility, loss of species and ecosystems, biosecurity risks and stresses on water systems threaten Australia’s long-term prosperity (Hiscock 2012; Commonwealth of Australia 2012). Echoing in gentler language the warning Robert D. Kaplan famously made in The Atlantic in 1994 that the environment would become the national-security issue of the early twenty-first century ‘from which most others will ultimately emanate’, the Australian Government warned that security could be undermined as individuals and non-state actors are empowered, and the capacity ‘for groups in society to organize within countries and across national boundaries’ grows (Commonwealth of Australia 2012: 226). In this scenario, media and communications are playing a critical role, clearly acting as more than a tool of public diplomacy to promote national goals and shape perceptions of Australia to ‘individuals and groups in other countries’, as the Australian government might hope (Commonwealth of Australia 2012: 264). While Australian media are being deployed to support stronger ties with the emerging and mature economies of Asia, they are also destabilising relations by carrying political campaigns to neighbouring nations and publics. It is clear that media technologies and practices are converging with this regional politics and social change to produce campaigns alerting distant companies and consumers to the provenance of the goods and materials they are being offered and the lack of ‘social licence’ or adequate certification at the site of procurement. In following mediated communications through their complex journeys in the region, this study set itself the following tasks: to identify mediated environmental protest that arises in connection to the flow of resources, goods and people between Australia and Asia; to gauge how pressure groups, governments and industry seek to influence environmental and market-related decision-making across complex and diverse media and political systems; to investigate the role played by evolving media and communications practices and technologies in market, industry and political change; and to highlight the aids and obstacles to the transnational flow of mediated political communication. Together, these aims allow the communities of concern that are formed in and through environmental protest to come into view. While the study was only able to sample a little of what is happening in one region, I hope our many hours of interviews, analysed

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texts from news, activist, corporate and government websites, and direct observations—when placed within broader political and social contexts and current scholarly debates—will contribute to knowledge on the changing conditions of environmental protest and debate. In the next chapter, I review contemporary views of environmental activism and protest more broadly. Over half a century of research on environmental protest has consistently pointed to the role of media in bringing attention to environmental concerns and risk (see Anderson 2014; Hansen and Cox 2015; Lester and Hutchins 2013 for overviews). Earlier research in the field showed how the attention of media—at the time, journalists working within broadcast or print newsrooms, or photographers or filmmakers—needed to be won in order for messages that highlighted risks or promoted counternarratives to reach the wider voting public. In the movement-media dance (Hutchins and Lester 2006), the interaction of local concerns with a distant media was vital to prove the scale of risks and the commitment of protesters. ‘Speaking out’, as the civil rights movement showed, can shift the scale of a concern from a defined local area translocally, nationally, transnationally or globally. Such distant support is an indicator of scale, not just in how environmental harm is distributed geographically, but in the extent these issues are understood, applied and promoted (Kurtz 2003), and speaking out from the site of conflict to engage others who are physically remote remains a key strategy. Chapter 3 presents the conceptual underpinnings of the book. The conduct and potential implications of environmental conflict occurring across borders and between nations and regions have been well recognised. But extensive and detailed evidence of precisely how governments, industry, activists and the news media respond to environmental issues that are manifested transnationally is lacking. Nonetheless, this is the arena in which environmental futures are being determined, and the chapter outlines three concepts—mediatised environmental conflict, social licence to operate and the transnational public sphere—that help provide insight into emerging spaces of environmental protest. Chapter 4 is the first of three case study chapters. Focusing on the highly visible struggle that is playing out over a global nature superstar, the Great Barrier Reef, it analyses the discursive struggle over the reach and containment of spectacle in environmental politics to consider how transnationally shared environmental awareness and concern, emerging in part through spectacle, is translating into expectations of participation and demands for

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accountability. It asks if this is already impacting the ways in which environmental protest is understood and enacted locally, regionally and transnationally. It suggests that while the transnational is clearly an ambition for environmental campaigners, and there are perceptions that transnational publics are emerging, the definition of these publics and their expectations of being heard in distant conflicts are yet to be recognised as legitimate. In Chapter 5, I return to environmental conflict in Tasmania, analysing the long-running protests over forests and more recent conflict over fish farming to identify and analyse transnational elements and their impacts. Applying the concept of mediatised environmental conflict as an analytical tool, this chapter highlights evolving features within environmental protest at the sites where resources are produced and sourced, identifying how interactions between the spheres of conflict display both recognisable patterns and new dynamics in the face of global influences. Focusing further on the trade of information that follows the flow of resources, Chapter 6 turns full attention to these global influences—to the multinational procurers and buyers, to the NGOs operating transnationally and to changing journalistic practices supporting and interrupting the international flow of information. The connection between Tasmania and Sarawak, the Malaysian state in north-west Borneo, provides a launching platform for understanding the ways in which the spheres of mediatised environmental conflict operate through global networks of diplomacy and trade, NGOs and campaigns, and media. Based largely on the interviews conducted in Japan, Australian, Malaysia and the UK, the chapter identifies how the roles, activities and relationships of corporations, activists and journalists are changing and increasingly blurring. The book concludes by returning to the questions raised at the start of this chapter about the composition, impact and sustainability of the communities of concern that are invoked in and through mediatised environmental protest. Who enters ‘here’, how and to what outcomes for the places and people resourcing transnational trade? Is the creation of these communities a precondition for political visibility of issues? What happens to those places and conflicts that go unnoticed by influential distant outsiders? Or are these global ‘communities of concern’ simply spectres, conjured to scare corporations and governments into shifting their practices?

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References #StopAdani. 18 March 2017. StopAdani activists in India make huge media splash. Retrieved from https://www.stopadani.com/stopadani_activists_in_india. ABC 7.30. 2018. Bottled water has become big business, and it’s dividing regional communities. 21 March. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/7. 30/bottled-water-has-become-big-business,-and-its/9573652. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books. Anderson, Alison. 2014. Media, environment and the network society. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Appadurai, Arjun. 2008 [1990]. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. In The anthropology of globalization: A reader, 2nd ed, ed. Jonathan Xavier Inda and Renato Rosaldo. Oxford: Blackwell. Asahi. 2018. Our business. Retrieved from https://www.asahigroup-holdings. com/en/business/. Bailey, Olga G., Bart Cammaerts, and Nico Carpentier. 2008. Understanding alternative media: Issues in cultural and media studies. Maidenhead: Open University Press. Beck, Ulrich. 2009. World at risk. Cambridge: Polity. Beck, Ulrich. 2011. Cosmopolitanism as imagined communities of global risk. American Behavioral Scientist 55 (10): 1346–1361. Blakkarly, Jarni. 2018. PNG landowners battle against one of the world’s biggest gold miners. SBS News, 1 October. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/ news/png-landowners-battle-against-one-of-the-world-s-biggest-gold-miners. Bui, Quoctrung, and Claire Cain Miller. 2015. The typical American lives only 18 miles from Mom. The New York Times, 23 December. Retrieved from https:// www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/12/24/upshot/24up-family.html. Butler, Mark. 2017. How Australia bungled climate policy to create a decade of disappointment. The Guardian, 4 July. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian. com/australia-news/2017/jul/05/how-australia-bungled-climate-policy-tocreate-a-decade-of-disappointment. Castells, Manuel. 2009. Communication power. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Castells, Manuel. 2011. The rise of the network society, 2nd ed. Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell. Commonwealth of Australia. 2012. Australia in the Asian Century. Retrieved from http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/133850/20130914–0122/asiancentury. dpmc.gov.au/index.html. Connell, Raewyn. 2007. Southern theory: The global dynamics of knowledge in social science. Sydney, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Cottle, Simon. 2006. Mediatized conflict: Developments in media and conflict studies. Maidenhead, UK: Open University Press.

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Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2016. The mediated construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity. Curson, Peter. 2015. The demographics that will change our world and our politics. ABC News, 22 October. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/201510-22/curson-the-demographics-that-will-change-our-world/6875200. Dauvergne, Peter. 2018. Will big business destroy our planet? Cambridge: Polity. Dauvergne, Peter, and Jane Lister. 2011. Timber. Cambridge: Polity. della Porta, Donatella, and Gianni Piazza. 2008. Voices of the valley, voices of the straits: How protest creates communities. New York: Berghahn Books. Dowie, Mark. 2011. Conservation refugees: The hundred-year conflict between global conservation and native peoples. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Escobar, Arturo. 2001. Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography 20 (1): 139–174. Flew, Terry. 2017. The “theory” in media theory: The “media-centrism” debate. Media Theory 1 (1): 43–56. Foxwell-Norton, Kerrie. 2018. Environmental communication and critical coastal policy: Communities, culture and nature. London: Routledge. Global Witness. 2018. Deadliest year on record for land and environmental defenders, as agribusiness is shown to be the industry most linked to killings (Press release 24 July). Retrieved from https://www.globalwitness.org/ en/press-releases/deadliest-year-record-land-and-environmental-defendersagribusiness-shown-be-industry-most-linked-killings/. Hannerz, Ulf. 2003. Being there… and there… and there!: Reflections on multisite ethnography. Ethnography 4 (2): 201–216. Hansen, Anders, and Robert Cox (eds.). 2015. The Routledge handbook of environment and communication. Oxford, UK: Routledge. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of mediatization. Cambridge: Polity. Hiscock, Geoff. 2012. Earth wars: The battle for global resources. Singapore: Wiley. Hjarvard, Stig. 2008. The mediatization of society. Nordicom Review 29 (2): 102–131. Hutchins, Brett, and Libby Lester. 2006. Environmental protest and tap-dancing with the media in the information age. Media, Culture and Society 28 (3): 433–451. Hutchins, Brett, and Libby Lester. 2015. Theorizing the enactment of mediatized environmental conflict. International Communication Gazette 77 (4): 337–358. IAMCR. 2018. Reimaging sustainability: Media and communication research in a changing world. Retrieved from https://oregon2018.iamcr.org. Kaplan, Robert D. 1994. The coming anarchy. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-cominganarchy/304670/. Kennedy, Rachael. 2018. COP24: Tens of thousands of climate change protestors march in Brussels. Euronews, 3 December. Retrieved from https://www.

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euronews.com/2018/12/03/cop24-tens-of-thousands-of-climate-changeprotesters-march-in-brussels. Kraidy, Marwan M. 2018. Global media studies: A critical agenda. Journal of Communication 68 (2): 337–346. Kraidy, Marwan M., and Patrick D. Murphy. 2008. Shifting Geertz: Toward a theory of translocalism in global communication studies. Communication Theory 18: 335–355. Kurtz, Hilda E. 2003. Scale frames and counter-scale frames: Constructing the problem of environmental injustice. Political Geography 22 (8): 887–916. Latour, Bruno. 2017. Facing Gaia: Eight lectures on the new climatic regime. Cambridge: Polity. Lester, Libby. 2007. Giving ground: Media and environmental conflict in Tasmania. Hobart: Quintus. Lester, Libby. 2010. Media and environment: Conflict, politics and the news. Cambridge: Polity. Lester, Libby. 2014. Transnational publics and environmental conflict in the Asian Century. Media International Australia 150 (1): 167–178. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. 2012. The power of the unseen: Environmental conflict, the media and invisibility. Media, Culture and Society 34 (7): 832–846. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. 2013. Environmental conflict and the media. New York: Peter Lang. Maxwell, Richard, and Toby Miller. 2012. Greening the media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, Toby, and Marwan M. Kraidy. 2016. Global media studies. Cambridge: Polity. Murphy, Patrick D. 2017. The media commons: Globalization and environmental discourses. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Murphy, Jessica. 2018. Trans Mountain: The billion-dollar oil pipeline Canadians own and can’t build. BBC News, 26 November. Retrieved from https://www. bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45972346. O’Shea, Bronwen, and Erin Somerville. 2018. Rural Victorian community fights David vs Goliath battle against bottled water company. ABC News, 16 August. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-16/ australian-community-takes-stand-against-bottle-water-brand/10127588. Ostrom, Elinor. 2009. A general framework for analyzing sustainability of socialecological systems. Science 325 (5939): 419–422. Reporters Without Borders. 2015. Hostile climate for environmental journalists. Retrieved from https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/rapport_environnement_ en.pdf. Silverstone, Roger. 1999. Why study the media? Thousand Oaks: Sage. SumOfUs. 2018a. SumOfUs is 15,038,871 people stopping big corporations from behaving badly. Retrieved from https://www.sumofus.org.

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SumOfUs. 2018b. Asahi: Stop bottling Stanley’s water. Retrieved from https:// actions.sumofus.org/a/asahi-stop-bottling-stanley-s-water?source=campaigns. Thompson, John B. 1995. The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. 2018. Mediated interaction in the digital age. Theory, Culture & Society. First published online 6 November. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263276418808592. US Census Bureau. 2011. Mover rate reaches record low, Census Bureau reports. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/ mobility_of_the_population/cb11-193.html. Wahlquist, Calla. 2018. Victorian town ordered to pay $90,000 after losing bottled water battle with farmer. The Guardian, 30 April. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/apr/30/victoriantown-ordered-to-pay-90000-after-losing-bottled-water-battle-with-farmer. Waisbord, Silvio. 2016. Communication studies without frontiers? Translation and cosmopolitanism across academic cultures. International Journal of Communication 10: 868–886. White, Emma Kathryn, and Rebecca Louise Nelson. 2018. What happens to small towns whose water becomes big business for bottled brands? ABC News, 17 May. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-17/whathappens-to-small-towns-whose-water-becomes-big-business-fo/9770128. Wood, Richard. 2018. Tiny community battles multinational company over bottled water. Nine News, 22 August. Retrieved from https://www.msn.com/ en-au/news/australia/tiny-community-battles-multinational-company-overbottled-water/ar-BBMgCD6. Wright, Tony. 2018. The village that fought and lost a war against the new water merchants. Sydney Morning Herald, 15 February. Retrieved from https:// www.smh.com.au/environment/sustainability/the-village-that-fought-andlost-a-war-against-the-new-water-merchants-20180215-p4z0fh.html. WWF. 2018. Disappearing at an alarming rate & clinging to survival. Retrieved from https://donate.wwf.org.au/adopt/orangutan.

CHAPTER 2

Counting Protest

The UN Climate Summit in New York in September 2014 attracted most of the world’s political leaders. Subtitled ‘Catalyzing Action’, the meeting was a by-then-familiar mix of calls for solidarity, sporting metaphors, celebrities and a ubiquitous hashtag: #climate2014. The United States, said Barack Obama, was ‘stepping up to the plate’ because ‘big nations’ have a ‘special responsibility to lead’ (whitehouse.gov 2014). In an address to the climate summit delegates, actor Leonardo DiCaprio stated, ‘I pretend for a living. But you do not’ (DiCaprio 2014). Twitter feeds were dominated by individuals representing civil society and what Ulrich Beck (2006: 105) described as entrepreneurs of the global commonwealth—WWF, Greenpeace, World Food Programme, Richard Branson, Guardian Environment, Pew Environment, Andy Revkin. Civilians also addressed entrepreneurs on Twitter—#stayinformedcc tweeted to Elon Musk: ‘@elonmusk Acting on climate change is everyone’s responsibility. Here’s how you can do your part. #hope7cc #climate2014’. An URL was added to direct Musk to a ‘take action’ site on the UN’s web page. On the Sunday before the summit began, more than 300,000 people— even 35 ‘official’ counters carefully placed throughout midtown Manhattan could not be more specific—had marched through New York City in what was the largest physical mass demonstration for a decade in the city and the world’s largest environmental protest march. ‘Hundreds of thousands

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more’, according to organisers, ‘joined 2,646 events in 162 countries’ (Peoples Climate Movement 2014). A petition calling on world leaders to ‘take bold action’ had been signed by another 2,129,060 people—‘at last count’ (Peoples Climate Movement 2014). In its online slideshow and story, The New York Times stressed that this was a ‘demonstration for the planet in Manhattan’, ‘a spectacle even for a city known for doing things big’, and ‘joined, in solidarity, by demonstrations on Sunday across the globe, from Paris to Papua New Guinea’ (Foderaro 2014). It was ‘a self-consciously inclusive affair, with the organizers intent on creating a very big tent, which they hoped would hammer home the relevance of climate change and its effects’ (Foderaro 2014). The environmental movement has long relied on ‘creating a very big tent’ to push its case for change. How many participate in physical mass protest events is a relatively easy stand-in for the extent of concern. These numbers circulate as evidence of widespread public support for the cause, as an indication of the scale of concern and as newsworthy in themselves (Chenoweth and Pressman 2017), becoming sources of conflict as they are contested by political opponents (Lester 2007). In contemporary forms of protest, the numbers are more precise—‘SumOfUs is 15,038,871 people stopping big corporations from behaving badly’ (SumOfUs 2018)—and power is an explicit ambition; ‘to connect with the crowd at scale’ as the ‘new power derived from collective activism is shifting trends, influencing markets and altering power globally’ (Mainwaring 2018). ‘New Power’, we are told, is derived by ‘delivering a killer user experience, sticky feedback loops, and a compelling set of incentives’ to get people to ‘show up’ (Heimans and Timms 2018: 262). The power of crowds, of ‘connected communities’—even ones with familiar organisational and leadership hierarchies—is found in numbers, and it is these numbers that are repeated again and again as evidence of organisational influence, the scale of an issue and concern, and to make governments and corporations take notice. As in the Stanley example from the previous chapter, these numbers form the basis of press releases that in turn frame news stories that circulate across multitude media and communications channels, in turn reinforcing the magnitude and thus significance of the original action, and connect across the same social media platforms as the news reports (Karpf 2016). In some cases, the pursuit of these numbers—to grow or to build networks of size—is an end in itself, with organisational growth equated with impact (Karpf 2016). Yet, there is little need to look further than to one of the most celebrated global campaigns of the last decade—against the

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use of unsustainable palm oil in everyday grocery products from margarine to soap to cereal to chocolate—to see limits. Greenpeace, which declared victory on palm oil for its massive social media shared 2010 KitKat campaign against Nestle, in which an office worker taking a break is faced with a severed orang-utan finger, now acknowledges that tropical deforestation has not been slowed (Ruiz 2018). In fact, according to Greenpeace (Taufik 2018), Nestle, Unilever and other corporations that declared they would stop using uncertified palm oil across their range of products continue to buy palm oil from companies converting rainforests into oil palm plantations in Borneo, Papua and other equatorial regions. Consumers across the globe—even those who have joined protest actions—are implicated by continuing to purchase products that are contributing to species loss, greenhouse gas emissions and the multitude of human rights abuses associated with the land grab and conversion continuing to be perpetrated against some of the world’s poorest communities. That size alone is not enough in environmental protest was evident in the power of the visual messages emanating from the 2014 UN Climate Summit’s parallel ‘solidarity’ and ‘global’ events. These included relatively small street marches in the Congo, Nepal and New Delhi (‘Don’t Procrastinate, Demonstrate’); calls for a reduction of CO2 emissions in a rain-sodden Bangladesh; symbolic expressions about climate change-created loss from the ocean edges of PNG and Tonga—‘…we will wear our warrior crown and fight for the ground on which our ancestors first stood’ (Peoples Climate Movement 2014); and a memorable ‘salute’ to the Australian government’s efforts on climate change from Townsville, Queensland, where dozens of people knelt on a beach, heads in the sand, bottoms up (Ryall 2014). Two days after the New York march, a 26-year-old environmentalist and poet from the Marshall Islands, Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner delivered a poem to formal attendees at the Summit. Jetñil-Kijiner had been selected to represent ‘civil society’ from 544 nominations from 115 countries (more validating numbers). The Marshall Islands in the Pacific is one of the countries most affected by climate change, and her poem assuring her baby that the world would not let their island home be lost to the ‘lagoon that will devour you’ reportedly moved world leaders to tears (Visentin 2014). After completing her poem, Jetñil-Kijiner was joined on stage by her husband and baby; her family, she told the audience, had ‘travelled a long way’.

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The 2014 UN Climate Summit and associated activism exhibited many of the features that we have come to associate with contemporary environmental protest—a focus on numbers and participation, on scale and distance, on symbolic representation by celebrities and lay victims. As with the Stanley example, Jetnil-Kijiñer’s role also recognised the strong physical and/or remembered ties people have to place; to the material needs and the emotional comfort these lands and seas fulfil; to the ways in which communities resist loss of ways of life associated with place; and how this emotion can be readily shared and understood, particularly when so many are implicated in the loss. The uneasy interaction of these competing discourses—now mediated across increasingly global and complex media and communications platforms and practices—is at the core of how environmental protest has been studied and understood and the focus of this chapter.

Speaking Out Protest has been understood as an act of dissent that demands attention. It needs to be noticed. Only visibility brings recognition, and only recognition brings power. Without being visible, resistance and opposition are just that – resistance and opposition. Recognition imbues acts of dissent with value and meaning. Through a sometimes-simple-sometimes-complex play with the symbolic and political, they speak out to translate individual or local experience into one that is generalised, one to which others can relate and perhaps empathise (Alexander 2006). In this way, protest wants to be more than simply noticed. It needs us as recipients of its communications to work through what it means, what values are at its core. It requires us to make judgements on its aims, activities and outcomes. Given protest’s complex relationship with political and social mores and its location within what John Keane (2005a, b) describes as an always restless civil society, it is rarely able to control what those judgements will be. History, however, provides some hints. The ways in which protest has been enacted and responded to in the past established structuring patterns, some of which remain embedded in contemporary practices, either by structural necessity or by memory of the lessons learned through old successes and painful failures. The mid-twentieth-century US civil rights movement, for example, succeeded beyond its expectations by seeking the attention of a distant American public (Alexander 2006). It needed to move the conflict

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from the location in which those most affected resided, bypassing conservative southern interests and their local news media, afraid, uninterested or opposed to change. These media blocked the movement’s access to symbolic power—defined by John B. Thompson as the ability to ‘engage, influence, intervene and affirm’ via symbolic forms (1995: 17). Instead, the physical site of the struggle was turned into the stage where the drama of the conflict, and the pain and commitment of actors, was performed for a distant audience. The local community, and its journalists and politicians, joined activists on this stage to become part of the drama. The movement, as Jeffrey Alexander writes, became ‘a master of the translating craft’, interpreting the events, emotions and contexts for its audience. This audience comprised northern media and their readers, listeners and viewers—that is, a public that carried power and influence at a national level (2006). The main aim of the movement, therefore, was to relocate the particulars of the civil rights movement in the South to the understandings of the North, that is, to translate for the distant publics that held sway. Highly symbolic, dramaturgical framing allowed protests to be understood by an American public and its leaders far removed from the site of conflict and to shift the scale of how the conflict was understood, applied, promoted and acted upon (Tarrow and McAdam 2004; see also Kurtz 2003; Neumann 2009 for overviews of ‘scale’). But it was also a drama that worked to form a community of concern, framed by notions of shared citizenship that existed beyond, but was recognisable through, the particulars of the local. As Alexander notes, civil rights leader Martin Luther King understood and harnessed the ‘tension between the universal and particular, between the possibilities of the civil sphere and the present state of its instantiation…’ (2006: 310). A speech King delivered in Montgomery following Rosa Park’s arrest for refusing to give up her bus seat illustrates Alexander’s point: Their status inside the American civil sphere, King insists, is what allows people to use the promise of civil society as a weapon in their struggle: ‘We are determined to apply our citizenship – to the fullness of its means.’ From this lofty universalism, King moves immediately to the particularities of time and place: ‘But we are here [also] in a specific sense – because of the bus situation in Montgomery’. (Alexander 2006: 310)

In the southern states, mistrust of local news media and political representation; of finding alternative means for circulating messages including

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self-produced media and interactions with journalists who did not belong to the place where the conflict was playing out; of speaking out about local particularities in terms distant audiences could understand; of deploying symbols, images and a leadership that could carry messages over vast cultural and sometimes geographic distances to engage distant publics; of invoking universal citizenship—these were the lessons learned by protest movements in the age of influential national broadcast and print media. Among them were the fledgling environmental movements that were emerging in the 1960s in North America, Europe and other developed regions, laying down the formwork for the contemporary movement that now exists around the world (Taylor 2000: 514). Public concerns and responses varied within and between countries and shifted rapidly between issues. Air and water pollution increasingly impacted on civic life, crossing the traditional socio-economic divides of major cities such as London and New York. This was the period of soup-like smog and urban rivers thick with waste. Nuclear energy, the power of which had been so dramatically illustrated in the closing days of the Second World War, created disquiet or panic as wealthy nations competed to develop more sophisticated weaponry and electricity plants. Species loss and the maintenance of biodiversity became intertwined with nostalgia for past landscapes and lifestyles as science and economic development came to dominate political agendas (Lester 2014). Rachel Carson’s famous opening to Silent Spring— ‘There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to be in harmony with its surroundings’—illustrated well these anxieties (1962). Debates about population pressures and resource limits, based on crude estimates of birth rates in Asian and African regions and future demands for oil, gas, coal and other minerals, became contentious in themselves. The magnitude of waste management issues the world was facing was difficult to ignore. The visibility of these issues was largely contained within state bounds via a mix of localised impacts and economic interests, regional and metropolitan-focused media and a relatively direct connection between those affected and/or concerned and the legal, political and industry decision-makers who could determine actions and outcomes (Lester 2013). Few environmental protests made world news. Court cases, direct political lobbying or issues-focused news stories were more prevalent than environmental protest actions before the 1970s and were publicised in such ways that symbolic translation by movement actors was not demanded and rarely facilitated by media (Lester 2010b). Photography provided a notable

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exception to these symbolic restraints. Nature photography had increasingly appeared in books, exhibitions and magazines, promoting grand landscapes and examples of peculiar species and their habits (DeLuca et al. 2011). That these landscapes were often threatened by development proposals and other incursions from modern life simply enhanced the symbolic majesty and mystery of the subject matter and thus the tension of the viewing experience (Taylor 2000). It is now commonplace to attribute the birth of the contemporary environmental movement, with its concerns for the planet and component parts, to the publication of images of Earth taken from various space missions in the late 1960s (Cosgrove 1994: 273). Here, the symbolic leap is not hard to make—small and vulnerable, the Earth floats in a vast expanse of space, its oceans and continents insignificant and barely visible and its geopolitical boundaries irrelevant. While these representations of the globe may have suggested a shared vulnerability, the first viewers of these images could not have divorced them from other representations of the globe that were featuring at the time. Jet planes replaced ships as the preferred mode of international travel. New integrated systems, such as shipping containers, streamlined and revolutionised international trade and manufacturing. New models for the production and sale of media emerged, with nature documentaries from Disney and the BBC among the most high-profile of products for sale on the international media market. Celebrities capitalised on faster travel and changing logics of media to become the heralds of rapidly globalising desires. Global governance mechanisms grew, with the United Nations Environmental Programme as an example in operation by 1972. Conflicts were communicated with new speed and intensity to publics. Where the local stopped and the global began, or vice versa, became less recognisable as the world struggled to make sense of and reconcile new and sometimes disturbing knowledge with its growing capacities and unprecedented ambitions. Environmental politics began to escape local and national bounds through this period. The details and images that filled national news bulletins and newspapers asked audiences to not only care, but also express that concern—even about distant issues. Developing shared senses of outrage and responsibility, movements formed with a principal ambition to voice and make visible their opposition. Southern Australia’s Franklin Dam conflict is worth briefly revisiting for its specific features as one of the world’s first global environmental protests (Hay 1991–1992; Lohrey 2002; Lester 2007, 2010a, b). The campaign’s leader who would later become leader

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of the Australian Greens political party, Bob Brown, had learned particularly well Martin Luther King’s lessons about symbolism and drama, and their capacity to carry beyond barriers that separated the local from the influential ‘distant north’. Brown’s brilliance with the symbolic is exemplified in two early decisions: one, in choosing an image of the Franklin River in the island state of Tasmania that would carry the campaign on posters, cards and in advertisements nationally and internationally and two, in applying the term ‘wilderness’ in all public and media statements and thus harnessing the new values of desirability, mystery and scarcity that were becoming associated with the term (Lester 2007; McGaurr et al. 2014). Several years into the campaign, Tasmania’s south-west ‘wilderness’ area was listed by UNESCO’s World Heritage Commission for its outstanding natural and cultural values, which included what was at the time the earliest record of human occupation so far south in the world. Science became a key feature of the politics; the cave where the deposits were located had been strategically ‘discovered’ in an attempt to stop the dam. The campaign leaders’ understanding of the dramatic became clear during the direct action period over the Australian summer of 1982–1983 in the lead-up to the March federal election. Thousands of mainland Australians took annual leave to join the blockade headquartered in a small fishing village on the island’s remote west coast (Hay 1991–1992). In this case, Tasmania’s state government failed to see that it had become largely irrelevant in the ‘battle to save the Franklin’. The new federal government introduced legislation that challenged the Tasmanian state government’s right to build the dam, and the focus of the subsequent High Court case was on the state’s right to contravene Australia’s international obligations under its external affairs power and in relation to UNESCO’s world heritage convention, to which the nation was an early signatory. The lengthy court case in the months following the election displayed many of the features that would later become central to global environmental politics (Lohrey 2002; Lester 2007). On the role of the spectacular, for example, a revealing exchange occurred between the High Court’s Chief Justice and the counsel for The Wilderness Society, as reported by The Age: [Counsel for the Wilderness Society] Mr Black was refused leave to present the seven judges with photographs which he said might explain the beauty of the region at stake better than words could. The Chief Justice, Sir Harry

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Gibbs, said all the photographs might only ‘inflame our minds with irrelevances’ but said the beauty of the region was not doubted. ‘We can assume it’s beautiful,’ Sir Harry said. (Mills 1983)

Sir Harry’s assumption of beauty and his concern that he and his six colleagues on the bench would not have their minds inflamed by ‘irrelevancies’ is an insight into what had been a central part of the conflict—the juxtaposition of the region’s aesthetic value against its economic value and the struggle to contain one interpretation while circulating the other. Less than a year earlier, the Tasmanian premier had described the river as a ‘brown ditch, leech-ridden, unattractive to most people’ (Andrews 1982). This was a clear and prescient articulation of the struggle of the symbolic in environmental conflict. The High Court case was also prescient in regard to international obligations and local versus global rights to intervene and determine the futures of ‘distant others’. When the High Court released its decision on Commonwealth v Tasmania in 1 July 1983, one judgement stood out for its eloquent appraisal of these concerns. According to Justice Lionel Murphy, the encouragement of people to think internationally, ‘to regard the culture of their own country as part of world culture, to conceive a physical, spiritual and intellectual world heritage’, was important in the ‘endeavour to avoid the destruction of humanity’ (Commonwealth v Tasmania 1983). Murphy wrote: … Australia’s domestic affairs are becoming more and more involved with those of humanity generally in its various political entities and groups. Increasingly, use of the external affairs power will not be exceptional or extraordinary but a regular way in which Australia will harmonise its internal order with the world order. The Constitution in its references to external affairs and to matters arising under treaties or affecting consuls or representatives of other countries recognises that while most Australians are residents of States as well as of the Commonwealth, they are also part of humanity. Under the Constitution Parliament has the authority to take Australia into the ‘one world’, sharing its responsibilities as well as its cultural and natural heritage. (Commonwealth v Tasmania 1983)

Murphy also noted the following in relation to transnational governance and power:

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Although external affairs are mostly concerned with our relationships with other nation States, they are not exclusively so concerned. There may be circumstances where Australia’s relationship with persons or groups who are not nation States, is part of external affairs. The existence of powerful transnational corporations, international trade unions and other groups who can affect Australia, means that Australia’s external affairs, as a matter of practicality, are not confined to relations with other nation States. (Commonwealth v Tasmania 1983)

The High Court found 4–3 in support of the federal government invoking its power to intervene in Tasmania’s affairs and stop the dam. In doing so, it laid out the features that would be central to many subsequent environmental protests and made bringing the global into the ‘here’ an even more important ambition.

So What’s New? If these global and transnational features were already evident in 1983, what is different about environmental protest now, almost four decades on? Some obvious points are: (a) greater awareness of an expanded menu of risk, (b) the Internet, and (c) expansion of corporate, activist and governmental transnational and global networks. Climate change, nuclear disasters, global population growth and depletion of resources are even more direct reminders of shared impact, encouraging an international response, while localised conflicts such as that over the Franklin Dam that might have deprived ‘humanity’ of a symbolic touchstone to wilderness continue to speak out. The Internet allows people to be more fully and quickly informed of environmental issues, concerns and conflicts—near and distant—and makes it easier to mobilise protest participants who are spread geographically. The capacity and willingness of transnational governance and political networks have also been in a process of dynamic change, providing new if constantly shifting targets for environmental protest and actions. Studies of protest events and movements have for some time been attempting to identify what’s new within the context of emerging media and communications technologies and practices. Sociologist Sidney Tarrow asked if the only difference was scale (2006). If international mobilisation and adaptation of the forms and framing of protest were already familiar, was it only that there was more transnational activism, involving a wider

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spectrum of people and covering a greater range of concerns? While such scaling up might have indeed occurred, Tarrow argued that what was actually new was the way protest connected to emerging waves of globalisation and to the changing structures of international politics (Tarrow 2006: 4–5). High-profile protests held to draw attention to international governance and finance, such as the G8 (or more recently G7), G20, World Trade Organisation, World Bank and World Monetary Fund, have indeed been a key feature of transnational protest through the late 1990s and 2000s. Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khasnabish suggest that a focus on dominant political and economic institutions and processes reflects a tacit acceptance by movement actors of the values underpinning these institutions, values that are challenged and rejected by more radical movements (2013a: 6). A ‘renewed materiality of power’, they argue, has been revealed in the period following the global financial crisis, leaving ‘an urgent need to better understand what the movements and spaces can contribute and what they cannot with respect to social struggles in an age of austerity and radical right-wing mobilisation’ (2013b: 386). More recently, the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, which swept across the Middle East from 2009, and large-scale protests coinciding with the annual COP climate change negotiations have been a focus of research. Transnational NGOs have developed alongside growing international governance and finance structures, in part to monitor the activities of these globalising institutions (Tarrow 2011: 242) and in part to capitalise on closer ties between NGOs, industries, corporations and mainstream political actors and the corporatised structures of many campaign organisations (Brockington 2009; Klein 2014; Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014). The reduced costs of participating in transnational networks associated with new technologies helped in the development of global protest campaigns (della Porta and Tarrow 2005: 12), while the speed of action, with rapid response as a form of tactical resistance enhanced by the Internet and alternative media, has increased capacity to form transnational campaigns (Lievrouw 2011: 56; Cottle 2011). A focus on identity and connectivity has provided useful insights into the mass outbreaks of activity, mediated and face-to-face, that have characterised events such as Occupy Wall Street and more recent manifestations of anti-globalisation protest (Bennett and Segerberg 2012). The relationship between institutionalised NGOs and these ‘looser’ and ‘freer’ protest movements or ‘crowds’ is a moveable object of analysis. They are sometimes overlapping in terms of activities, often operating in ideological and

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logistical opposition. Lance Bennett and colleagues have argued that the advantage of a crowd—‘large scale mediated networks of public action in which bureaucratic organization are marginalized’ (Bennett et al. 2014)— over a social movement is found in its flexibility, regenerative capacity and blurring of the lines between bystanders and participants (when claiming to represent ‘the 99%’, for example). These qualities are organisationally useful in an age of complex global problems and the ‘incapacity or unwillingness of governments to address them in creative ways’ (Agarwal et al. 2014: 668). High-profile NGOs have been observed coming together to form a ‘networking backbone’ for digital media networks wanting to engage publics with contested political issues, with the NGOs putting ‘the public face on the individual citizen’ and engaged in relatively few organisational branding efforts (Bennett and Segerberg 2012: 751). Recent reviews of protest suggest a general trend away from these globally linked protests at high-profile international summits or against systemic issues of global injustice, towards political, local- and communitylevel protest ‘that mobilise for more tightly defined aims, specific to local context’ (Youngs 2017). Activists continue to reach out to each other across borders but their mobilisations, according to Richard Youngs, are ‘increasingly local or nationally specific, rather than an integral part of global agendas for systemic, order-related change’ (2017). A common criticism made against the new wave of protestors is that they fail to define their aims clearly and invariably descend into a visceral and unconstructive anti-politics. However, some of today’s most typical protests do exactly the opposite, focusing at least initially on very specific and tightly defined issues of relevance to a particular community – the closure of a school or hospital, the corrosive effect of local patronage networks, or very tangible environmental degradation. (Youngs 2017)

The growing strategic use of courts—‘green lawfare’—is a case in point (Konkes 2018). Taking legal action against a proposed development on the basis of its fit with local or national environmental policies or challenging the process used by authorities in its approval shifts the site of protest into a space of tighter, more formalised communications. As litigants, environmentalists have the opportunity to frame the debate when they initiate legal action, and they are guaranteed public engagement with their claims from development proponents. Legal action usually carries with it two traditional features of successful environmental protest—potential risk and loss

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on the part of protesters in opposing a development, and actually delaying development. Both interrupt framing of protesters as not having ‘skin in the game’ when it comes to local issues, even though this new wave of legal challenges is often funded by large NGOs based away from the site of conflict. The traditional framing protesters seek to interrupt is best evidenced by a bumper sticker that appeared in Townsville, Queensland, during legal challenges to Indian company Adani’s development proposal for what would be the world’s largest coal mine: ‘Don’t take my coal job and I won’t take your soy latte’. One danger of public environmental litigation as a protest strategy is the potential loss of emotion and ‘the human element’ of the issue when it enters the formal realm of court proceedings and reporting. Days can be spent on chemical changes in soil samples or in challenging the numbers of small lizards living in an affected area, confusing and boring members of the public once interested. Another danger is losing, with the resulting loss of credibility (and associated costs) meaning campaigners need to work hard to reframe debate. Social media’s entry on to the protest landscape—Twitter stepped into a frontline role in 2009—has fuelled debates about whether social media’s role is principally as an enabling and organising tool; how deeply it has infused and altered the logics of protest; and if it produces long-lasting and real political change (see, e.g., Gladwell 2010; Morozov 2011). The motif of an ‘ecology’ of protest and media has become familiar in explanations of the impact of the presence of new digital communications, including social media, in complex political and social contexts. That protest is more likely to be represented and understood through the social media/big data prism is of concern, given the poor archiving and search functions of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook or continuing assumptions about the breadth of social media use (boyd and Crawford 2012: 666). We also need to keep asking the question: what exactly is new? The transfer of visuals by social media, for example, has been observed to replicate earlier protest paradigms, where activists and journalists turned protest into spectacle in order to attract attention. For Thomas Poell, this means that ‘while we might be seeing a shift in media power, this does not necessarily imply that protests are portrayed different than in mainstream reporting’ (Poell 2014: 726–727). Manuel Castells, influential theorist of the network society, claims the ‘fundamental’ change in the realm of communication has been the rise of what he calls mass self-communication—deployment of the Internet and wireless networks as platforms of digital communications that are based on

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‘horizontal networks of interactive communication that, by and large, are difficult to control by governments or corporations’ (2012: 6). He reminds us that a common feature to all processes of symbolic construction is that ‘they are largely dependent on the message and frames created, formatted and diffused in multimedia communication networks’ and continues: By engaging in the production of mass media messages, and by developing autonomous networks of horizontal communication, citizens of the Information Age become able to invent new programs for their lives with the materials of their suffering, fears, dreams and hopes. They build their projects by sharing their experience. (Castells 2012: 9)

Twitter, Facebook, Weibo, Whatsapp and Instagram play an important role in the decisions people make about whether or not to participate in action, providing information about the contentious issues and planned events and helping coordinate actions and engagement at a reduced cost. For the Occupy movement, Twitter acted as a switching mechanism (Castells 2009), helping coordinate and organisation-building and illustrating ‘a monumental shift in the ability of everyday citizens in repressive societies to document and express their desires for social change’ (Tufekci and Wilson 2012: 377). There is little doubt that the massive increase in social media use has accelerated the speed of activist communications, particularly in relation to the transfer of images and visual materials. These communications are now reaching large audiences on their own, without the support of broadcast and other news media (Poell 2014). But Castells’ and others’ celebration of social media-enabled networks in creating horizontal communications and leaderless movements and thus changing politics has been tempered by more and more exposure of the hierarchies sitting away from the public gaze (Gerbaudo 2012; Fuchs 2014); warnings that protest needs to remain anchored in political and institutional structures, rather than valourised for amorphousness (Markham 2014); and increasing caution in relation to the ‘datafication’ of political engagement or the numerical measurement of political ‘actions’ (Couldry and Hepp 2016: 188). For example, the targeting of consumers with their own special numbers is, on the surface, aimed at influencing environmental behaviours: ‘6 Ways to Avoid Palm Oil’; the ‘28-day palm oil challenge’. However, these mediated lists also function to de-radicalise political rhetoric and dampen the imperative of acting collectively, inferring that responsibility for environmental outcomes lies directly with the

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individual, while also providing more clicks for the inevitable organisational analytics that aim to increase numbers and thus prove ‘connective’ power (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014; Karpf 2016). This prioritisation of numbers in environmental politics reflects the broader Big Data phenomenon in some important ways, and the warnings applied to putting too much faith in numbers and their patterns are relevant here also (boyd and Crawford 2012; Mah 2017). Such caution may seem self-evident but is worth repeating. Numbers provide little insight into the depth of engagement beyond the view, the click or the share and give away almost nothing about what compels individuals to take action or the organisational practices now being driven by the analytics to which the numbers are continually subjected (Karpf 2016). Every connection is not equivalent to every other connection; frequency of contact does not mean a relationship is strong; and scepticism, context and historical perspective are required more than ever (boyd and Crawford 2012: 671; Hutchins 2016: 495). Being connected in any context does not mean ‘sharing’, nor does sharing mean caring (van Dijck 2013; Couldry and Hepp 2016: 198; Waisbord 2016: 860). That the data of those participating in these forms of quantified environmental protest is being fed into what has been described as the emerging ‘nonprofit industrial complex’ (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014: 117–118) must also be of concern in a politics that has long been the focus of security and legal containment measures and, increasingly in many parts of the world, of violence (Andrejevic 2013; Lester 2017; Uldam 2018). In embracing corporate-controlled social media, protest organisers have little control over the architecture of the spaces through which they communicate (Poell 2014: 723; see also Segerberg and Bennett 2011). Significantly, they can lose control over the increasing amounts of data they produce through their fundraising efforts or campaigns encouraging social media-enabled ‘actions’. Julie Uldam describes this as ‘the double-edged sword of visibility’, where social media, in becoming key platforms for activists’ calls for action and communication with the wider public, have enabled corporations and public authorities to collect information about protest activities. As a result, social media are platforms for surveillance, ‘tracking, for example, (potential) customers’ engagement with Facebook brand pages and discussion groups’ (Uldam 2018: 44). In an age of ‘predictive policing’ (Andrejevic 2017), in which data is paramount, the capacity of governments and private corporations to predict and contain collective behaviour through the identification of patterns of online use is increased.

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This, for Mark Andrejevic, can manifest as changing patterns in a community (e.g. more broken windows) leading to increased presence of police across the community, becoming an exercise in pre-emptive power. The capacity to monitor individuals who lead, organisationally and/or symbolically, campaigns is also strengthened. In environmental politics, where other forms of monitoring and containment, including violence, have never been far from the surface, this must be of concern. Brand-focused activism has expanded in consort with social media platforms in recent years (see Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014 for overview). With consumers firmly in their sights, either directly or via the chains of corporations that produce, transport and sell consumer goods, various campaigns have entered and remained in the public consciousness through the sheer volume of social media activity and associated news media reporting they have generated. There are notable examples of campaigns that have succeeded in generating, through consumer activity, changes to individual purchasing behaviour and thus altered the procurement and manufacturing practices of companies whose names are attached to targeted products. Focusing on palm oil and Indonesian deforestation, Canadian researcher Peter Dauvergne identifies four trends behind the rise of these mass brandfocused campaigns. These are social media emerging as a political and social power, increased Internet-based ‘shaming’ activity on the part of NGOs, the shift towards ‘sustainability’ in the branding and activities of corporations and the influence of eco-consumerism (2017: 136). Nevertheless, despite the fact that almost every major brand now has a policy of sourcing only palm oil that has been certified as sustainable, Dauvergne also points to the failure of campaigns to produce meaningful outcomes in terms of slowing deforestation. Limits of certification schemes, ongoing demand for or confusion about certification and/or illegal products and weak law enforcement contribute to the continuing large-scale conversion of native forests in equatorial regions of the world for oil palms. Dauvergne concludes that brand-focused activism has ‘innate limits and weaknesses in its capacity to improve on-the-ground management’ (2017: 149): … relying on social media tends to produce chaotic campaigns—diffuse, messy, with differing agendas at play and differing influences across languages and jurisdictions. Activist groups tend to surface across the Internet as campaigns gain traction, frequently jumbling messages and causing confusion. At the same time, scammers may pose as campaigners, public relations firms

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may pose as activists to discredit campaigns, and hackers may cause havoc just for fun. Legitimate campaigners also frequently cause confusion by posting outdated information. It is common, for instance, for one activist group to continue to demand reforms long after others have declared ‘victory’. (Dauvergne 2017: 14)

Pressures on these campaigns are generated by the NGOs themselves through their own proliferation and competition for resources and visibility. While increasingly, coalitions of environmental organisations come together for specific campaigns (Tranter et al. 2017), tensions surface over strategies, including in agreeing on key messaging or how to engage with formal politics in terms of supporting individual candidates or political parties and their environmental policy platforms (Lester and Hutchins 2012a). When combined with the proliferation of media and communications platforms and practices, the multitude of NGO voices can lead to even more mess and noise for brand campaigns focused on attracting mass actions as evidence of shifting public opinion and buying behaviour. If the campaigns encounter the claims and counter-claims circulating around science, further diffusion and confusion of messages can occur, as scientific knowledge and political imperatives collide. The way in which indigenous knowledge claims circulate in these campaigns in many ways resembles the way scientific claims are deployed. While both indigenous and scientific actors might warrant central roles, it is their knowledge or symbolic identities as keepers of a deep, special knowledge that are commonly adopted and deployed by key claims-makers within the spheres of industry, formal politics, news media and activism, rather than them appearing as key political actors themselves. This reflects the uneasy relationship between environmental NGOs and scientific organisations and indigenous activism that exists in many parts of the world. A study of Australian environmental leaders, for example, identified only a handful of indigenous leaders willing to be identified as part of the environmental movement, given its long-standing commitment to notions of uninhabited ‘wilderness’ (McGaurr et al. 2016). And as Patrick D. Murphy identified in his Amazon-focused study of environmental discourses, while the experiences of indigenous communities vary greatly, it has been the case since the 1970s that for indigenous place-based activists to make their concerns visible to the outside world, they ‘have had to invest, ironically, in Western ideas about what authentic Amazonian Indians are supposed to look like, act like, and even say’ (2017: 152).

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Social media-enabled activism is subject to many of the same pressures that have historically accompanied environmental protest. These include, most pointedly, the political and legal constraints that are threatened or enacted to protect government and corporate activities from protest—both physical protests that form the basis of media events or Internet-based campaigns targeted squarely at brands, manufacturers and retailers. The spectacular continues to be strategically deployed by activists and, in turn, restricted by claims that challenge the integrity, motivations or commitment of protesters. Celebrity and other spectacular interventions rarely escape these counter-claims given the speed and scale with which messages now circulate. The range of media platforms and associated activities available to activists are also in the main readily available to governments and corporations, often more so in terms of financial resources to access space and produce content, if less so in terms of flexibility and creativity of approach. The interaction between social media and news media, rather than social media alone, is seemingly resilient in terms of building capacity to influence decision-makers. Even if news now manifests in different forms across broadcast, print and digital, concerns about corporate control of information platforms re-emerged after only the briefest of hiatuses. These require serious consideration of how environmental discourses manifest across corporate or government-owned media predisposed towards pro-market and neoliberal positions (Murphy 2017).

Conclusion So what is new about protest? Horizontal networks that focus—sometimes—on a broad range of social and environmental issues? New transnational and global actors, some embedded in the new globalising institutions, some in social movements, some in loose coalitions of protest groups and some in all? Emerging forms of activist communications that bypass news media platforms and outlets, liberating activists from traditional and conservative reporting paradigms? The potential of new media to grow rapid-response tactics to upset and draw attention to power flows and constraints? Fewer resources required to run a campaign? Or increasing corporatisation of activist and media networks, alongside the transnational activism of corporate networks? While growing in number, international comparative studies can take us only so far in understanding the processes this book is seeking to untangle. Their starting point is often high visibility, while I would suggest that

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strategic invisibility—in a coordinated dance with visibility—will increasingly be a feature of environmental campaigns (see Lester and Hutchins 2012a, b). They also have a tendency to focus on networks created through like-mindedness, rather than the disparate and often oppositional actors now commonly witnessed coming ‘together’ in contemporary political and environmental communication networks. Moreover, they are generally centred on North America or Europe and remain contained within national boundaries and the single language and media systems that exist within these borders (Hepp 2013: 139; Couldry and Hepp 2016: 188). As subsequent chapters will show, small groups of internationally networked activists with cross-language skills and transnational industry, markets and supply chain knowledge—sometimes strategically deploying a high-profile NGO or implicating and entangling a major corporation in a campaign—can have far-reaching political, environmental and indeed social consequences. Environmental protest is changing, re-scaling and crossing a range of issues, platforms and participants in ways it has not done before. How the meanings and understandings of these protests are carried, managed and translated across local and national boundaries relies on the political and social practices we have come to associate with environmental protest and the bridges and opportunities under construction now. With its vast range of diverse actors, issues and targets—sometimes working together, sometimes in opposition, but rarely standing still—attempting to untangle the contradictions in contemporary protest is difficult. Who is erecting the ‘very big tent’ and why? Who is in it? And once inside, whose voices are heard and to what effect? What happens to those communities and issues who remain outside? In the next chapter, I outline the concept of mediatised environmental conflict as a means for identifying key actors, spheres of action and moments where power switches within environmental politics, and consider how those ‘affected’ are identified alongside emergent communities of concern. I ask how transnationally shared environmental awareness and concern might translate into expectations of participation and how, and if the legitimacy of these possible transnational publics and their opinions might be acknowledged by often distant decision-makers. A focus on environmental protest helps reveal the emerging dynamics of public debate, opinion and decision-making more broadly within the context of what might be ‘new’ in the politics of dissent and contention, where the capacity or willingness of transnational protest to be noticed and its meanings negotiated across borders remains opaque. This is a politics reliant on gaining attention, on making us notice its displays of opposition

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and on asking us to engage in debates about its meanings, its roles and its outcomes. Yet, it is also one in which these visible acts are monitored, countered and contained. That this now occurs in new forums that cross old boundaries is evident. Protest has a central role to play in levering dissenting and often marginalised voices into evolving transnational social and political spaces. How and for how long it achieves such leverage remain dependent on its capacity to be interpreted and understood in and across a rapidly increasing range of cultural and geopolitical contexts and scales.

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Commonwealth v Tasmania. 1983. Retrieved from http://www.austlii.edu.au/ au/cases/cth/HCA/1983/21.html. Cosgrove, Denis. 1994. Contested global visions: One world, whole earth and the Apollo Space photographs. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 84 (2): 270–294. Cottle, Simon. 2011. Media and the Arab uprisings of 2011: Research notes. Journalism 12 (5): 647–659. Couldry, Nick, and Andreas Hepp. 2016. The mediated construction of reality. Cambridge: Polity. Dauvergne, Peter. 2017. Is the power of brand-focused activism rising? The case of tropical deforestation. The Journal of Environment & Development 26 (2): 135–155. Dauvergne, Peter, and Genevieve LeBaron. 2014. Protest Inc.: The corporatization of activism. Cambridge: Polity. della Porta, Donatella, and Sidney Tarrow (eds.). 2005. Transnational protest and global activism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. DeLuca, Kevin M., Ye Sun, and Jennifer Peeples. 2011. Wild public screens and image events from Seattle to China: Using social media to broadcast activism. In Transnational protests and the media, ed. Simon Cottle and Libby Lester. New York: Peter Lang. DiCaprio, Leonardo. 2014. Leonardo DiCaprio at the UN: ‘Climate change is not hysteria—It’s a fact’. The Guardian, 23 September. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/sep/23/ leonarodo-dicaprio-un-climate-change-speech-new-york. Foderaro, Lisa M. 2014. Taking a call for climate change to the streets. New York Times, 21 September. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2014/ 09/22/nyregion/new-york-city-climate-change-march.html. Fuchs, Christian. 2014. Manuel Castells, networks of outrage and hope; social movements in the Internet age. Media, Culture and Society 36 (1): 122–127. Gerbaudo, Paulo. 2012. Tweets and the streets: Social media and contemporary activism. London: Pluto. Gladwell, Malcolm. 2010. Small change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted. New Yorker, 4 October. Retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/ reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell. Hay, Peter R. 1991–1992. Destabilising Tasmanian politics: The key role of the greens. Bulletin of the Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies 3 (2): 60–70. Heimans, Jeremy, and Henry Timms. 2018. New power: How power works in our hyperconnected world—And how to make it work for you. Sydney: Pan Macmillan. Hepp, Andreas. 2013. Cultures of mediatization. Cambridge: Polity. Hutchins, Brett. 2016. Tales of the digital sublime: Tracing the relationship between big data and professional sport. Convergence 22 (5): 494–509.

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Juris, Jeffrey S., and Alex Khasnabish. 2013a. Ethnography and activism within networked spaces of transnational encounter. In Insurgent encounters: Transnational activism, ethnography, and the political, ed. Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Juris, Jeffrey S., and Alex Khasnabish. 2013b. The possibilities, limits, and relevance of engaged ethnography. In Insurgent encounters: Transnational activism, ethnography, and the political, ed. Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabish. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Karpf, David. 2016. Analytic activism: Digital listening and the new political strategy. New York: Oxford University Press. Keane, John. 2005a. Eleven theses on markets and civil society. Journal of Civil Society 1 (1): 25–34. Keane, John. 2005b. Cosmocracy and global civil society. In Global civil society: Contested futures, ed. David Chandler and Gideon Baker. London: Routledge. Klein, Naomi. 2014. This changes everything. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Konkes, Claire. 2018. Green lawfare: Environmental public interest litigation and mediatized environmental conflict. Environmental Communication 12 (2): 191–203. Kurtz, Hilda E. 2003. Scale frames and counter-scale frames: Constructing the problem of environmental injustice. Political Geography 22 (8): 887–916. Lester, Libby. 2007. Giving ground: Media and environmental conflict in Tasmania. Hobart: Quintus. Lester, Libby. 2010a. Media and environment: Conflict, politics and the news. Cambridge: Polity. Lester, Libby. 2010b. Big tree, small news: Media access, symbolic power and strategic intervention. Journalism 11 (5): 589–606. Lester, Libby. 2013. On flak, balance and activism: The ups and downs of environmental journalism. In Journalism research and investigation in a digital world, ed. Stephen Tanner and Nick Richardson. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Lester, Libby. 2014. Transnational publics and environmental conflict in the Asian Century. Media International Australia 150 (1): 167–178. Lester, Libby. 2017. Rights activism, journalism and ‘The New War’. In The Routledge companion to media and human rights, ed. Silvio Waisbord and Howard Tumber. London: Routledge. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. 2012a. The power of the unseen: Environmental conflict, the media and invisibility. Media, Culture and Society 34 (7): 832–846. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. 2012b. Soft journalism, politics and environmental reporting: An Australian story. Journalism 13 (5): 654–667. Lievrouw, Leah L. 2011. Alternative and activist new media. Cambridge: Polity. Lohrey, Amanda. 2002. Groundswell: The rise of the greens. Quarterly Essay 8: 1–86.

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Mah, Alice. 2017. Environmental justice in the age of big data: Challenging toxic blind spots of voice, speed, and expertise. Environmental Sociology 3 (2): 122–133. Mainwaring, Simon. 2018. New power! Book review: How to connect with the crowd to build a better world. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ simonmainwaring/2018/04/24/new-power-book-review-how-to-connectwith-the-crowd-to-build-a-better-world/#7e0fd0f516d0. Markham, Tim. 2014. Social media, protest cultures and political subjectivities of the Arab spring. Media, Culture and Society 36 (1): 89–104. McGaurr, Lyn, Bruce Tranter, and Libby Lester. 2014. Wilderness and the media politics of place branding. Environmental Communication 9 (3): 269–287. McGaurr, Lyn, Bruce Tranter, and Libby Lester. 2016. Environmental leaders and indigenous engagement in Australia: A cosmopolitan endeavour? Conservation and Society 14 (3): 254–266. Mills, Stephen. 1983. Franklin loss worse than destroying pyramids: QC. The Age, 11 June. Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The net delusion: How not to liberate the world. London, UK: Penguin. Murphy, Patrick D. 2017. The media commons: Globalization and environmental discourses. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Neumann, Roderick P. 2009. Political ecology: Theorizing scale. Progress in Human Geography 33 (3): 398–406. Peoples Climate Movement. 2014. Retrieved from http://peoplesclimate.org. Poell, Thomas. 2014. Social media and the transformation of activist communication: Exploring the social media ecology of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests. Information, Communication & Society 17 (6): 716–731. Ruiz, Diana. 2018. Time’s running out: The deforestation problem that consumer companies created. Greenpeace.org, 21 March. Retrieved from https:// www.greenpeace.org/usa/times-running-deforestation-problem-consumercompanies-created/. Ryall, Jenni. 2014. An Australian climate change protest with a difference gives a bums-up salute. Mashable Australia. Retrieved from https://mashable.com/ 2014/09/23/townsville-climate-change-heads-in-sand/. Segerberg, Alexandra, and W. Lance Bennett. 2011. Social media and the organization of collective action: Using Twitter to explore the ecologies of two climate change protests. The Communication Review 14 (3): 197–215. SumOfUs. 2018. SumOfUs is 15,038,871 people stopping big corporations from behaving badly. Retrieved from https://www.sumofus.org. Tarrow, Sidney G. 2006. The new transnational activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tarrow, Sidney G. 2011. Power in movement: Social movements and contentious politics, 3rd ed. New York: Cambridge.

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Tarrow, Sidney, and Doug McAdam. 2004. Scale shift in transnational contention. In Transnational protest and global activism, ed. Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Taufik, Kiki. 2018. Forest destroying products and producers, time’s up. Greenpeace.org, 19 September. Retrieved from https://www.greenpeace.org/ international/story/18478/forest-destroying-products-and-producers-timesup/. Taylor, Dorceta E. 2000. The rise of the environmental justice paradigm: Injustice framing and the social construction of environmental discourses. American Behavioral Scientist 43 (4): 508–580. Thompson, John B. 1995. The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge: Polity. Tranter, Bruce, Libby Lester, and Lyn McGaurr. 2017. Leadership and the construction of environmental concerns. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Tufekci, Zeynep, and Christopher Wilson. 2012. Social media and the decision to participate in political protest: Observations from Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication 62 (2): 363–379. Uldam, Julie. 2018. Social media visibility: Challenges to activism. Media, Culture and Society 40 (1): 41–58. van Dijck, José. 2013. The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Visentin, Lisa. 2014. Poet brings world leaders to tears at UN Climate Summit. Sydney Morning Herald, 25 September. Retrieved from https://www.smh. com.au/environment/climate-change/poet-brings-world-leaders-to-tears-atun-climate-summit-20140925-10lq5x.html. Waisbord, Silvio. 2016. Communication studies without frontiers? Translation and cosmopolitanism across academic cultures. International Journal of Communication 10: 868–886. Whitehouse.gov. 2014. Remarks by the President at U.N. climate change summit 23 September (Media Release: Office of the Press Secretary). Retrieved from https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/23/ remarks-president-un-climate-change-summit. Youngs, Richard. 2017. What are the meanings behind the worldwide rise in protest? Open Democracy. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/ protest/multiple-meanings-global-protest.

CHAPTER 3

Protest and Publics

How is protest over the use of places and resources shaped and knowledge of harms and risks shared? Who are the participants in these protests and how are they informed? How are their opinions heard? Can agreement— or at least compromise—be legitimately formed when the scale of an issue includes both the local and the global and the spaces in-between, and those who believe themselves affected are the 370 residents of the tiny town of Stanley or those living next to the Porgera gold mine or, potentially, everyone? Whose responsibility is it to ensure negotiations are just and diverse views are fairly represented? How are issues communicated and framed when they form and travel across vast translocal and transnational spaces? In this chapter, I present three concepts that together lay the groundwork for approaching these questions. The first is ‘mediatised environmental conflict’, a concept developed with Brett Hutchins (Hutchins and Lester 2015) and usefully adapted by others in subsequent studies (see, e.g., Foxwell-Norton and Konkes 2018; Konkes 2018). Our attempt to theorise contemporary environmental conflict argues that the political significance of the environment, and the pivotal role of media in contests over the definition and understanding of environmental risks and impacts, requires special conceptual recognition.

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Mediatised environmental conflict, we suggest, is a category of conflict that has reached a new order of scale and intensity. Conflicts grow alongside widespread concerns over the state of ecosystems, species, wilderness, forests, food productions systems, resource extraction and the atmosphere, all of which affect—if unequally—the lives of billions of humans and the complex ecosystems within which people reside. The effects of climate change, combined with climate change denial particularly in the United States and Australia (McKnight 2010), has played a decisive role in shifting the environment and environmental conflict to the centre of political and news agendas around the world, drawing in a range of media, industry, political and sub-political groups and organisations (Beck 2009; Giddens 2009; Urry 2011). These battles played out on the ‘public screens’ of mass, mobile and social media (DeLuca et al. 2011, 2012), concentrating individual and collective attention on the experience of environmental degradation and loss. The specific features of local, regional, national and international contexts contribute to how we respond to this experience and to the ‘organised irresponsibility’ of industrial activity and advanced capitalism, especially in terms of deciding who should bear responsibility for the loss (Beck 1999). Questions of legitimacy of and access for competing knowledge claims are also confronted, and this chapter therefore turns to consider attempts to identify ‘the affected’ in mediatised environmental conflict. How ideas of community, local and place are constructed in relation to the pressures of globalisation, mediatisation and cosmopolitanisation are at the core of these questions. Our notions of community, local and place are comprehensively shaped by these meta-processes: How we continue to work in the continual construction and reconstruction of a ‘community’ by its members (Bailey et al. 2008; Foxwell-Norton 2018); of our relationship to the ‘local’ through emotional labour that invokes a sense of citizenship and politics of care (Phillips et al. 2012); and of place as an outcome of this politics of care (Kirkpatrick et al. 2018). The second concept considered—social licence to operate—draws on an approach developed by the mining industry and other resource-dependent industries to harness the complexities inherent in these ideas. While this may seem paradoxical, it is these industries that have a great deal at stake in gaining local community acceptance for their place-based activities. The notion of a social licence—with the accompanying quip ‘where can I get one?’—is useful. It is revealing to consider the concept in its initial form, with its utilitarian methods for identifying those ‘affected’, that is those

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individuals or communities with whom industry should negotiate. Application of the term ‘social licence’ has since shifted: firstly, spreading from the mining industry to be increasingly deployed by a broad range of other land, water and resource-dependent industries including forestry, dairy and aquaculture and secondly, adopted with subsequent shifts to its meanings and social usefulness by the full range of political actors within conflicts over environments and natural resource use. In short, the concept of social licence in itself has been subjected to the processes inherent in mediatised environmental conflict. The questions posed in this chapter go to the heart of some of the key debates of the twentieth century, about how we come together to negotiate shared spaces and futures. These debates resonate with a new freshness today. Jurgen Habermas’s vision of an ideal form of political communication, where individuals could be brought together through a variety of means but on equal terms to move beyond opinion and form rational, common decisions based on an objective truth and free from distortion (1991), is far from dead. However, perhaps more relevant is Hannah Arendt’s reminder to be wary of desiring or acting in total unison and to celebrate plurality of opinions and the diverse nature of symbolic communications. Being united, for Arendt, was less about thinking alike than sharing the same public space and common institutions and therefore having the means and being committed to achieving compromise (Canovan 2006: 281). Thus, the third concept to be considered is that of a ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ public sphere. It is approached from the context of recent theorising about the cultural patterns, social worlds and spaces for political decision-making that are emerging alongside and within the meta-processes of mediatisation, globalisation and cosmopolitanisation.

Mediatised Environmental Conflict Mediatised environmental conflict is prominent within a media-saturated world, where the communication of environmental risks, threats and disasters is ever-present. Based on extensive fieldwork of environmental campaigns related to Tasmania, Brett Hutchins and I suggest that such conflict is constituted by the interactions occurring between four key spheres of action: (i) activist strategies and campaigns, (ii) journalism practices and news reporting, (iii) formal politics and decision-making processes, and (iv) industry activities and trade (Hutchins and Lester 2015). These spheres each have their own extensive networks of media, political and economic

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power, influenced by institutional affordances and limitations, professional norms and practices, commercial opportunities and the uneven command of symbolic resources, all of which are in turn impacted by the dynamics of a convergent media environment. We argue that the key to understanding mediatised environmental conflict is those moments and spaces where two or more spheres of action interlock, conceptualised as ‘switching points’ (Arsenault and Castells 2008; Castells 2009) that are created by cross-cutting media practices, political viewpoints, strategic objectives and modes of ‘mediated visibility’ (Thompson 2005). Simon Cottle’s concept of ‘mediatised conflict’ (2006a) addresses a defining feature of a ‘global, media age’ (2013)—the witnessing of conflict via media images, representations, news formats and communications technologies (see also Cottle 2006b, 2008, 2011). Related to ideas of ‘media events’ (Dayan and Katz 1992; Couldry et al. 2010) and ‘disaster events’ (Liebes 1998; Katz and Liebes 2007; Pantti et al. 2012), Cottle’s notion of conflict articulates with processes of social and cultural change experienced anywhere from a local to planetary scale. Reports and images of war, protests, social movements, public crises, terrorism events and environmental disasters are the sites where dispersed publics form collective sentiments about conflicts and catastrophes in a globalised world. They also form focal points where political deliberations and decisions determine responses to the conflict. Political events and news reports of conflict connect with repeated and recognisable actions that are expressed physically (e.g. demonstrations, marches, police and military interventions), politically (e.g. the formation of political parties, petitions, voting at elections, government policies, industry lobbying) and through media (e.g. appeals for aid, mobilisation of online support, news reports, public relations campaigns, political advertising and production of independent media). Media forms and practices are much more than the means through which news about conflicts are relayed to audiences. They are also resources used by journalists, victims, bystanders, activists, concerned citizens, government agencies and commercial actors to convey information, interpretations and opinions to a range of personal and public networks (including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, websites, etc.). As with the Stanley water example, the content that circulates through these networks enters into the flow of news and political discourses surrounding a conflict, embedding media practices and technologies as agents that help to structure conflicts and their conduct. Media, according to this notion, are always doing things within conflicts:

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‘Mediatization’ is used here in a powered sense to deliberately capture something of the more complex, active and performative ways that the media are used in conflicts today. The media … are capable of enacting and performing conflicts as well as reporting and representing them; that is to say, they are actively ‘doing something’ over and above disseminating ideas, images and information. (Cottle 2006a: 9)

The concept of mediatisation, as noted in Chapter 1, suggests that social, cultural and institutional settings are increasingly subject to far-reaching media processes and logics over time (Strömbäck 2008; Hepp 2013; Thompson 1995). Mediatisation processes can be seen in the transformations evident in any number of contexts, including politics, religion and sport, as well as in the institutional and corporate power exercised by the media and digital technology industries in their own right (Couldry 2012; Cushion and Thomas 2013; Hepp 2013; Hjarvard 2013; Keane 2013; Lundby 2009; Couldry and Hepp 2016). These developments are characteristic of the disruptions caused by the relentless dis-embedding and re-embedding of social relations in late modernity (Giddens 1990), as demonstrated by sustained meta-processes such as institutionalised individualisation, globalisation and transnational connectivity, commercialisation and the emergence of a consumer society and, most recently, mediatisation (Bauman 2000; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Hepp 2013; Krotz 2009; Thompson 1995). Likewise, mediatised conflict is a process that occurs through repeated and socially situated interaction between individuals and groups whose perceptions and actions are structured by and expressed through media. In this way, mediatised environmental conflict signifies the spaces, sites and times where alternative visions of modernity are fought over. It is difficult to conceive of environmental conflict occurring completely outside of or beyond the reach of media and media networks. The politicisation of these conflicts is partly an effect of the media system, the ‘logic’ of which infuses the conduct of present-day politics and political issues (Castells 2004; Strömbäck 2008). This logic produces a functionally interdependent relationship between the four spheres of action—‘they intersect and depend on each other’ (Keane 2013: 177). Although the form and types of interaction between activists, journalists, political actors and industry depend on the issue and context in question, the practices and decisions taken in each sphere are conditioned by an historically sensitised awareness

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of the strategies, likely responses, and levels of influence existing within and across all four spheres. This conditioning is evident in, for example, news reports of a coordinated protest campaign and online petition against a government policy that expands industry activity; public criticism of activists by ministers and sitting parliamentary members for ‘harming’ the economy and ‘threatening’ jobs; news coverage of legal action taken against protesters by a corporation for disrupting their operations; the sustained questioning of a minister for the environment by journalists during a press conference following the release of a new policy; or the broadcast of an investigative expose of environmental devastation by a high-profile television news media outlet, prompting immediate comment from environmental NGOs, political parties and industry spokespeople in online and offline forums. Competing and contradictory scientific and economic rationality claims run throughout all of these examples and contribute to differing outcomes depending on who is speaking, how they are framed and what the claims are directed towards (Lester and Hutchins 2012; Waisbord 2013; Waisbord and Peruzzotti 2009). A focus on the events and negotiations that occur at the meeting point between the different spheres of action helps reveal these interactions. Adapting an idea developed by Amelia Arsenault and Manuel Castells (2008; Castells 2009), these are conceptualised as switching points—the spaces and sites where interlocking networks of media, political and economic power meet and where environmental conflict is enacted. While the concept of the switching point was initially applied to the exercise of power within the global ‘meta-network of finance and media’ (Castells 2009: 426), as exemplified by News Corporation and the ‘archetypal media mogul’ Rupert Murdoch (Arsenault and Castells 2008: 489), it has since been used to think about the power and counter-power wielded by governments, social movements and citizens, including during the Arab uprisings and the Occupy movement (Castells 2012). In the case of mediatised environmental conflict, we suggest that switching points are instantiated by the production and circulation of contending messages, representations, debates and strategies. These phenomena are simultaneously physical (e.g. forests, protest sites, newsrooms, political offices, parliaments, press conferences) and mediated (e.g. news, online forums, social networking, mobile communications, broadcast media) in character. Switching points are also impacted by the timing of political and media cycles, including journalistic routines, protest planning, election campaigns, environmental policy

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reviews and industry announcements, as well as environmental and disaster events that focus public and activist attention on pressing environmental problems. The concepts of visibility and its opposite, invisibility, are core to understanding the workings of switching points and thus mediatised environmental conflict, including the protests that alert distant others to concerns and risks. In John B. Thompson’s continuing analyses of the changing conditions of visibility and publicness, visibility carries symbolic power or an ability to control and/or affect political affairs (see, especially 1995, 2000, 2005, 2011, 2018). While publicness can exist in physical spaces such as town halls and city streets, its contemporary form is deeply interwoven with the practices, formats and structures of media. Thompson observes that achieving ‘visibility through the media is to gain a kind of presence or recognition in the public space’. The opposite of this, Thompson suggests, is the debilitating condition of invisibility, condemning ‘one to obscurity – and, in the worst cases, can lead to a kind of death by neglect’ (2005: 49). The conditions under which visibility is sought and delivered have changed with the advent of the internet and other digital technologies. The boundaries between private and public are increasing ‘sites of struggle for information and symbolic content that threatens to escape the control of particular individuals’ (Thompson 2011: 68). While political leaders have, since the advent of print, always struggled to control their visibility, it is now more difficult than ever (Thompson 2018: 25). Public space is newly fragile, a permanently unstable arena of many-to-many communications in which leaks, revelation and disclosures are always capable of disrupting the most well-laid plans (2018). The emergence of networked digital communications technology and associated practices since the 1990s has helped change the conditions for visibility in environmental protest. Used effectively, they allow activists to enter into news and information flows and overcome the journalistic practices that have limited the reporting of or negatively framed their activities. Meanwhile, industry, politicians and NGOs invest heavily in public relations, image management and the surveillance of their audiences and their opponents. Yet, questions of control and strategy in contemporary environmental politics cannot be fully understood without paying serious attention to the idea of invisibility or the planned and coordinated avoidance of media communication, attention and representation in order to achieve political, social and/or environmental ends. Conditions that allow political actors and activists to stay out of the media spotlight, conceal their activities or

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to slow and block the distribution of information are changing to such an extent that the ability to strategically avoid appearing in the media is arguably a key resource. The operation and conduct of environmental conflict can only be understood once the complex interactions between key spheres are traced and analysed. As noted in Chapter 1, it is no small task to study the conduct and potential implications of environmental conflict under any conditions. It is particularly challenging when they are deliberately kept invisible and/or occurring across borders and between nations and regions. This is vital work, however, if we are to fully understand if and how communities of concern are now being instantiated in and through environmental conflict and the protests that make these conflicts visible.

Social Licence Social licence, also known as social licence to operate (SLO), emerged as a term in the 1990s and was rapidly adopted by the mining industry in the face of numerous environmental disasters that included tailing dam spills and contamination of waterways. Locals, including indigenous communities in Canada and Australia, demanded a say in the use of their lands and a share in the profits (Moffat et al. 2016). When these were not provided, highly visible direct action campaigns and legal actions were implemented, with consequential losses of access, reputation and profit for companies. As summarised by Kieren Moffat and colleagues in relation to the Australian mining industry: ‘Not only had community expectations about the performance of the extractives sector increased over time, so too had the direct involvement of citizens in decision-making about industry development’ (Moffat et al. 2016: 477). A social licence became defined as an ‘unwritten social contract that exists between companies and communities’ (Moffat et al. 2016: 480). As such, it quickly gained a foothold in the industry as an explanatory concept (i.e. what is a social licence?), for strategically communicating with broader stakeholders (i.e. we have a social licence), and as a method for working with communities (i.e. who is affected by our activities?). The term in this form was popular through the 1990s as the mining industry’s reach spread to sites across the globe where access had previously been difficult or denied. While it might be expected that there would be significant challenges for Australian mining executives negotiating with a remote Mongolian community, for example, the cultural and language

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differences were often overcome relatively easily, on paper at least, by applying arbitrary geographic divisions. As described by one mining executive, this was achieved by drawing a radius of 20 kilometres from the mine site and considering all those within the circle affected and all those outside uninvolved (Personal Communication 2016). Along with attempts to identify a neatly bounded public and to define those affected, numerous attempts have been made to model diagrammatically the process of negotiating rights, responsibilities and a share of the profits. Here, the journey from approval withheld to approval agreed and indeed welcomed is one in which blockages to ‘legitimacy’, ‘credibility’ and ‘trust’ need to be overcome (Boutilier and Thomson 2011; Edwards et al. 2018). Only then can the path to obtaining a social licence be passed. As one Canadian mining CEO explained in 2003: Success on the bottom line, financial return to shareholders, is only reinforced through success beyond the bottom line, to communities and the environment … Our corporate responsibility policy … will provide EnCanans with an overarching framework to ensure the validity of our social licence to operate. (quoted in Gunster and Neubauer 2018: 12)

Shane Gunster and Robert Neubauer compare this 2003 statement to one made by the same CEO in 2017, by which time the messy reality of dealing with the public had hit home: [Social licence] marked the beginning of the end of timely, cost-aware regulatory processes. As the social-licence snowball gained momentum, it accumulated anti-fossil fuel zealots, multi-national environmental groups, aboriginal bands claiming control over huge tracts of ‘traditional lands,’ and scores of others opposing projects for whatever reason. (quoted in Gunster and Neubauer 2018: 12)

In considering how communities are defined and participate in environmental decision-making, it is useful to analyse what went wrong for the mining industry and other resource-dependent industries over the fourteen years separating these remarks. How did these industries lose control of a concept that promised so much in terms of reputation, access and profits? There is, of course, more at stake than corporate profits. The concept of social licence hints at a way in which communities can have some control over the management of their local lands and resources, which as economist Elinor Ostrom suggested can lead to better social, economic

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and environmental outcomes (2009). As with all concepts related to fairness or justice, social licence is embedded within an ‘inescapably discursive’ process’ (Sen 2009: 337), and the ways in which these have worked on the concept of social licence reveal broader processes underpinning mediatised environmental conflict and decision-making. As Moffat et al. suggest, there is ‘potential to think about SLO as a way of building consensus among diverse perspectives, particularly in terms of building trust and fairness in stakeholder relations’. However: There is a very real danger that social licence to operate will come to mean everything and nothing, with academics, community engagement practitioners, companies, politicians, NGOs and community groups all using the term to speak to an impossibly diverse set of concepts or as justification for whatever (community oriented or interested) action is taken in resource development contexts… there is a risk that various interest groups (industry, government or communities) might choose to seize upon the term to meet their own political objectives and goals… (Moffat et al. 2016: 485)

A growing body of research provides insight into the interaction between processes of mediatisation and the ways in which communities of concern might emerge to be legitimised or de-legitimised. Recent studies in Canada and Australia suggest that news media have been heavily implicated in the shift in meaning and thus value attached to the concept (see, e.g., Leith et al. 2014; Lester 2016; Cullen-Knox et al. 2019; Gunster and Neubauer 2018). In Canada, social licence was largely reported as a business issue until 2010, after which it began to appear in relation to the Canadian oil and gas industry’s development of oil sands and pipelines. These news stories moved the concept from framing social licence as the responsibility of corporations to also emphasising the role of state and civil society (Gunster and Neubauer 2018: 16). As opposition to pipelines intensified in British Columbia, the vocabulary of social licence was increasingly appropriated by others, including regional politicians and environmental groups, to highlight the failure of industry and government to secure the consent of local communities and First Nations. Unsurprisingly for the researchers, the use of the term to oppose rather than support development rather ‘significantly cooled the enthusiasm of many industry proponents for the idea’ (Gunster and Neubauer 2018: 16). At the same time, the term was adopted by hardline conservatives to promote their democratic credentials and by environmental groups and First Nations, claiming the absence of social licence as

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justification for ongoing protests against pipelines and other projects. This then caused further conservative backlash, primarily led by media commentators and op-eds from right-wing think tanks (Gunster and Neubauer 2018: 18–29). In Australia, the term also entered mainstream media as a businessoriented concept (Boutilier 2014). In 1997, Sydney Morning Herald economics writer Ross Gittins coined the term ‘suasian’ to describe how to bring a community on board a development proposal (Gittins 1997). It did not catch on. The following year another column in the Herald suggested that ‘all organisations operate under an implicit social licence’ that limits ‘the actions of organisations that pollute the environment, put employees’ health at risk, produce dangerous products, or test their new products on animals, etc.’ (Saul 1998: 46). For an opinion writer in the Australian Financial Review two months later, the fact that ‘Shell has now embraced the philosophies of corporate citizenship and its underpinning tenet – that companies have to earn their “social licence to operate” – has raised the stakes for all corporations’ (Lagan 1998a). In these columns, social licence is framed by what it is—for example ‘built on public confidence’ that adds to ‘the collective good’ (see Lagan 1998b)—and by what it is not—a legal licence, for example. Finally, hinting at the meaning diffusion that was to come, it is framed by what it should and could be: Surely, it is not asking too much of our leading executives that they see that their social licence may also properly be restricted to limit actions which throw people out of work, damage the traditional fabric of rural communities, or place employees under intolerable levels of workplace stress. (Saul 1998)

In Tasmania, ‘social licence’ was first used in news media in relation to mining, but was quickly weighed down by the baggage of historic antagonisms. Under the heading, ‘Mine boss’ green blast’, a mining executive was reported as claiming: … no matter how hard the industry tries to do the right thing, it would never be enough for the greens. ‘They are like two-year-old kids … all they can say is, “no”.’ The answer, he said, was for mining companies to earn their ‘social licence’ so communities supported them. ‘If we don’t have a social licence we won’t be in business,’ Mr Lassonde said. ‘Establishing you are accountable for your actions is key to obtaining the respect from your stakeholders.’ However, there was no quick route to obtaining a social licence. ‘A social

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licence, like reputation, is first and foremost built on trust. It can take years to build, and moments to lose.’ (Charles 2003)

When, after a five-year absence from the mainstream press, the term reemerged in 2008, it was no longer in the control of industry. Forest and climate science, for example, were evoked to warn that global pressure could force ‘an end to logging in old-growth and regrowth forests as the world comes to grip with global warming and carbon trading’ and that ‘there is a distinct possibility that the logging of regrowth forests will lose its current social licence’ (Neales 2008). Subsequently, the term became attractive to environmental campaigners, protesting a major pulp mill development that was seeking international financing: A giant banner spelling out opposition to the Gunns pulp mill was mounted on the controversial Tamar Valley site yesterday as part of a message to potential investors… ‘A picture tells a thousand words and we want to make sure potential investors know that investing in this pulp mill is buying into decades’ worth of conflict over wood resources and water resources,’ Wilderness Society spokesman Vica Bayley said. ‘We want them to know the local community won’t stop protecting their valley because this is a high-risk and environmentally destructive proposal with no social licence.’ (McKay 2009)

When the term began to appear regularly in Tasmanian newspapers from 2010, it was without explication or definition. On the one hand, journalists used the term—generally quoting sources—as though its meaning was self-evident and it was a fully fleshed out and well-understood concept. On the other, they usually enclosed ‘social licence’ in quotation marks—recognition in journalistic practice that the concept was neither widely accepted nor commonly used in public discourse. News stories took on an increasingly duelling and declarative tone, with protagonists making unequivocal statements about the existence or otherwise of a social licence. ‘There is no social licence to build a pulp mill, as currently proposed, in the Tamar Valley’ (Johnston 2010) and ‘… Gunns had failed to earn “a social licence” to build the mill, meaning there was still widespread opposition, especially in the Tamar Valley’ (Mounster 2010). In early 2011, the CEO of the company proposing the mill, Gunns Ltd., attempted to explain the concept to the public, writing: ‘Underpinning Gunns’ move to a new plantation-based value-adding business is what we have called gaining our social licence-to-operate’ (Neales 2011a). However, by then, the concept itself was under attack. High-profile Tasmanian author

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Richard Flanagan added to his previous media commentary on the forests conflict by writing in a local newspaper: ‘Ironically, Gunns now desperately needs the support of conservationists for the much-vaunted social licence to get a funding partner that will help finance the mill’ (Flanagan 2011). For the newspaper itself: ‘Gunns has a new-look board and a new chief executive officer. It has approached environmental groups in a bid to win a “social licence”, a dreadful term that sounds more like an exercise in corporate spin than community consultation’ (The Mercury 2011). And in another newspaper: ‘Meanwhile, he has tried to build a “social licence” for the pulp mill – a loose concept perhaps best defined in this case as too few community opponents to hurt the financing’ (Baker 2011). Echoing results of the Canadian study, the conservative right sought to undermine the democratic turn as it was being applied in corporate decision-making, as this quote from a hard-line powerbroker: ‘You cannot trade off thousands of jobs in the sustainable native forest industry against a few hundred jobs in the pulp mill because of an outrageous attempt by a big company to get a social licence for its mill,’ Senator Abetz said. (Neales 2011b)

Through 2012, proof of the existence or otherwise of a ‘social licence’ was demanded within the context of communications carried by formal trade missions to Asia—with Opposition politicians ‘inviting’ the Premier to ‘prove there was bipartisan support in the Tasmanian Parliament for the forestry industry and a social licence for the pulp mill’ (Arndt 2012). Potential buyers of Gunns’ assets demanded the same, according to news reports: ‘Richard Chandler Corporation wants to find out if Gunns has a social licence and broad community support for its pulp mill before it invests $150 million in the timber firm’ (Clark 2012). Attempts to pin down the concept continued. Existence was proven by a ‘reasonable level of community support (or “social licence” to use the corporate jargon)’ (The Mercury 2012) or because ‘80 per cent of voters ticked Labor and Liberal boxes at the most recent state election’ (Sunday Tasmanian 2012). Yet, ‘social licence’ could also be inherently undemocratic: ‘…many such self-appointed arbiters actually have few members but threaten democratically elected governments with so-called “social licences” to promote their own agendas’ (The Examiner 2012). And it would become meaningless if the pulp mill site was sold to a FinnishChinese consortium: ‘If it is a Chinese company then opponents will be

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whistling into the wind with any argument of a social licence’ (Gilmour 2012). By 2013, ten years after its first use in Tasmanian news media, environmentalists were no longer excluded as stakeholders in public debate on social licence, but were considered—like corporations—to be in need of a social licence themselves: ‘Tasmanian Liberal Senator Richard Colbeck said the [environmental] group did not have the “social licence” to make their claims against the project’ (Mather 2013). Early on, the concept of ‘social licence’ acted as a powerful symbol in itself, holding the promise of a cessation to decades of often bitter conflict and a much-needed environmental, economic and publicly agreed path forward. It could do this in part through its implicit suggestion of empowering all stakeholders, not only those who had enjoyed power previously via their capacity to influence government policy either through direct engagement (i.e. industry) or through protest and campaigns designed to attract media attention. It promised the community a voice. As it developed, however, social licence became little more than a strategic objective, yet to be ‘gained’ or ‘earned’, that would bring with it the very concrete reward of formal ecological sustainability certification by a recognised international agency that would, in turn, comfort potential investors that their reputations would not be risked by investing in an industry operating unsustainably in a community known for environmental fractiousness. In the Tasmanian case, what was at stake was not so much the principles of fair and just community debate so much as securing community acceptance and thus international finance for major resource development. Both the Australian and Canadian cases show that the discursive enslavement of the concept (Sen 2009: 337) ensured it was subject to existing and emerging conditions of public debate: of the symbolic pulls within media flows; of strategic acts to achieve visibility or to contain oppositional communications; and of repackaging and deployment at switching points where the spheres within mediatised environmental conflict met and engaged. In the Australian case, it is also clear that the concept was subject to the new conditions of public debate in which environmental concerns manifest globally; where transnational corporations, NGOs and governance regimes continue to emerge; and media practices and technologies redefine the idea of ‘local’. These new conditions undermine the myth of the bounded community; that a ‘local community’ or ‘the affected’ can be defined by and contained within its location marked by a 20-kilometre radius, let alone prevent those physically distant from engaging with the ‘here’.

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New Communities of Concern? So who is affected? Who should be heard? Who is responsible and how? These are important questions for identifying concerns, addressing risks and acting politically and collectively (Jamieson 2010). The approach widely adopted by a range of industries to identify those affected by their activities and to win community and stakeholder support has failed to adequately define a public, suggesting a need to now fully face the challenge presented by the messy, noisy reality of the ‘public’. In doing so, not only the practices and interactions taking place within the transnational and translocal networks of environmental politics are confronted, but the political and cultural patterns and social worlds emerging and deepening as a result. It is worth briefly revisiting Ulrich Beck’s notions of risk society and subpolitics, as the forms of political action that Beck observed emerging in the 1990s to interact responsively with new media technologies and practices are proving robust. ‘In the world risk society’, Beck wrote, ‘politics is made in various realms of subpolitics, whether it is in the firm, the laboratory, at the gas station, or in the supermarkets’. Here, ‘new types of conflict emerge, and new coalitions become thinkable’ (1997). In Beck’s thinking (especially 1999, 2006, 2009, 2011), the political site of the world risk society is not the street but media. It is here, in the interplay of media politics and symbolic power, that media’s pivotal part in growing ecological awareness, sense of threat and possible action becomes clear. As Beck wrote in an oft-repeated passage: Herein lies a crucial limitation of direct politics. Human beings are like children wandering around in a ‘forest of symbols’ (Baudelaire). In other words, we have to rely on the symbolic politics of the media. This holds especially because of the abstractness and omnipresence of destruction which keep the world risk society going. Tangible, simplifying symbols, in which cultural nerve fibres are touched and alarmed, here take on central political importance. These symbols have to be produced or forged in the open fire of conflict provocation, before the strained and terrified public of television viewers. The key question is: Who discovers (or invents), and how, symbols that disclose the structural character of the problems while at the same time fostering the ability to act? (Beck 2009: 98)

A ‘globalisation of emotions’ and empathy occurs when ‘global everyday existence becomes an integral part of media worlds’ and people ‘experience themselves as parts of a fragmented, endangered civilization and

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civil society characterised by the simultaneity of events and of knowledge of this simultaneity all over the world’ (2006: 42). The epistemologies of ‘global threats’ and contemporary ‘interdependency crises’ depend on their articulation and advancement by contending ‘relations of definition’. The ‘world risk society’, Beck writes, ‘is not a function of the globality of problems (as diagnosed by science) but of “transnational discourse coalitions” (Hajer) that place the global threat to the environment on the public agenda’ (2009: 86). This, for Beck, is how national boundaries and political agendas are exploded, and global publics are born (2006: 6, 35–36). In considering how these ‘global publics’ might be recognised within political and environmental decision-making—that is in determining shared environmental futures—recent theorising that seeks to critically expand and adapt the concept of ‘public sphere/s’ becomes highly relevant, as suggested in Chapter 1. This work asks how opportunity can be provided for all those affected to participate in public debate and a space can be made for a diverse range of views to be put and importantly heard. Its premise is that decision-makers are held accountable through processes of publicity and the pressures of public opinion (Fraser et al. 2014; Volkmer 2014). Yet, it also questions how responsibility can be allocated and appropriate responses determined and demanded when the arenas for politics, law, communications and risks themselves now cross state boundaries, when the relationship between citizens, corporations and decision-makers is further complicated by transnational networks of economics and trade, governance and law, and media and communications. As Nancy Fraser noted in her 2007 essay, ‘Transnationalizing the Public Sphere’, republished in 2009 and again with critical commentary in 2014, while talk of a transnational public sphere is now ‘commonplace’ in media and communications studies, we are yet to determine how public opinion can be considered legitimate or efficacious under current conditions, when: (a) the ‘who’ of communication is a ‘dispersed collection of interlocutors’; (b) the ‘what’ of communication now stretches across a ‘transnational community of risk’; (c) the ‘where’ is ‘decentralized cyberspace’; (d) the ‘how’ encompasses a ‘vast translinguistic nexus of disjoint and overlapping visual cultures’; and (e) the addressee, once theorised as a sovereign state, is ‘now an amorphous mix of public and private transnational powers that is neither easily identifiable nor rendered accountable?’ (Fraser et al. 2014: 26). For Fraser, much public sphere theory relies on presuppositions that correlate the ‘public’ with citizens of a nation state (2014: 21), where public opinion is conveyed through a national communications infrastructure

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(2014: 23) with a single unifying language (2014: 24) and shared history and culture (2014: 25) and with the activities of the nation state as the principal focus of public sphere discussions (2014: 23). What happens to the formation of public opinion, she asks on this final point, when ‘the ground rules governing trade, production, and finance are set transnationally, by agencies more accountable to global capital than to any public’ (2014: 23). She continues: Moreover, if these agencies are invalidating national labour and environmental laws in the name of free trade, if they are prohibiting domestic social spending in the name of structural adjustment, if they are institutionalizing neoliberal governance rules that would once and for all remove major matters of public concern from any possibility of political regulation, if in sum they are systematically reversing the democratic project, using markets to tame politics instead of politics to tame markets, then how can citizen public opinion have any impact? (Fraser et al. 2014: 23)

Fraser’s solution to ensuring continuing relevance of the public sphere is to, firstly, divorce the idea of citizenship from the notion of affectedness, given that no longer does ‘one’s conditions of living … depend wholly on the internal constitution of the political community of which one is a citizen’ (2014: 30). … the all-affected principle holds that what turns a collection of people into fellow members of a public is not shared citizenship, but their co-imbrication in a common set of structures and/or institutions that affect their lives. For any given problems, accordingly, the relevant public should match the reach of those life-conditioning structures whose effects are at issue… Where such structures transgress the borders of states, the corresponding public sphere must be transnational. Failing that, the opinion that they generate cannot be considered legitimate. (Fraser et al. 2014: 30)

Secondly, to address the dilemma that public opinion can only be considered efficacious if it is ‘mobilized as a political force to hold public power accountable, ensuring that the latter’s exerciser reflects the considered will of civil society’ (Fraser et al. 2014: 31), Fraser urges simply for the creation of ‘new transnational public powers and to make them accountable to new transnational public spheres’ (2014: 33). She provides little detail on how this might happen, but insists:

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We must ask: if the modern territorial state no longer possesses the administrative ability to steer ‘its’ economy, ensure the integrity of ‘its’ national environment, and provide for the security and well-being of ‘its’ citizens, then how should we understand the capacity component of efficacy today? By what means can the requisite administrative capacity be constituted and where precisely can it be lodged? If not to the sovereign territorial state, then to what and whom should public opinion on transnational problems be addressed? (Fraser et al. 2014: 32)

While Fraser’s essay provides important clues to how we can approach many aspects of the conditions under which environmental concerns are expressed, debated and potentially resolved within contemporary globalised and mediatised conditions, it does not explicitly address questions of scale. A ‘transnational problem’ can present as contained within a specific physical locality. Yet, political efforts to ensure environmental issues begin and end ‘locally’ or, alternatively, are recognised internationally or globally cannot easily be matched to either ‘transnational public powers’ or transnational processes of publicity and public opinion formation. Clearly, local and national sites for communication and decision-making on environmental problems, even when potentially conceived as ‘transnational’, remain significant. And one needs only to witness the display of flags and other forms of nation branding that occurs at major international events, including the COPs or UNESCO, to see the way ‘international’ is still practised in global politics (Lester and Cottle 2009). Functioning public spheres—where issues that matter are debated by those affected to influence decision-makers with the power to determine right-scale outcomes—seems more difficult to achieve than ever. While the movement of humans through migration and tourism has created more multicultural communities and familiarity with oncedistant places than ever, and the trades of goods and information have produced more awareness of the environmental and social conditions being created by our own behaviours, the pressures to contain these movements and trades are growing rapidly. Discourses of protectionism of domestic markets, jobs and spaces leave little room for the ideal speech situation that Nick Couldry imagines, one where local and national public spheres ‘within what are still largely national media infrastructures, cultures that are still relatively homogenous linguistically, and historical traditions of political engagement’ are transnationalised so that contributions are no longer made exclusively

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by national citizens (2014: 42). Political and corporate pressures coalesce or contradict each other to promote or challenge the idea of transnational communities, created by shared ambition for the ‘good life’ (Murphy 2017). If we conceive of contemporary publics as interrelated and overlapping communities of concern that are always forming and splintering, and the realm in which they can be effective in influencing decision-making as equally instrumental in its composition, then we are forced to let go of some of the key tenets of an ideal public sphere. Andreas Hepp’s understanding of ‘deterritorialized communitization’ helps in its recognition of the sense of belonging as a precondition for the political and cultural ‘thickenings’ that occur translocally (2013: 116). Hepp suggests these communities, like nations, are imagined and rely on ‘communication networks and communicative figurations beyond exclusively territorial references’ (2013: 121). Our task is to identify these shared public spaces, common institutions and means for achieving compromise in the context of rapidly changing media and communications forms and practices. For all our talk of ‘flows’, we can only identify discourses as they exist in specific localities in specific moments of time and analyse how their meanings and values change as they move between these localities and/or coalesce within what Patrick Murphy has termed the ‘media commons’ (2017). We are aided by the ethnographically inspired turn to the ‘translocal’, in which communication is perceived as the key factor in the formation of communities that span physical localities and social spaces (Kraidy and Murphy 2003: 303–305; Hepp 2013: 105). A challenge is to determine whether the ‘sense of belonging’ and the claim to rights and responsibilities that is presupposed in the definition of community formation can be discerned within these discourses as they shift from locality to locality to locality within the broader setting of a global politics and capacity for action still organised largely along the lines of local boundaries and nation states.

Conclusion Within the context of mediatised environmental conflict, current dominant paradigms—practical and theoretical—for determining how a ‘public’ should be fairly identified and engaged in processes of environmental decision-making remain inadequate. Industry attempts to conceive and adopt an acceptable process for working with the public failed when the concept of ‘social licence’ discursively escaped to be repurposed within

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the various spheres of mediatised environmental conflict. Theoretically, scholars still grapple with the conundrum of ideal-versus-real, conceptual neatness-versus-the complexity and contradictions that are easy to gloss over as ‘messy’ but very hard to empirically describe. The mismatch continues between the communities that form through sharing cultural activities, social ambitions, the knowledge of risk or the things we lose, and the way these communities are recognised, let alone legitimised. Nevertheless, in thinking about the ways in which the ‘affected public’ has been conceived to date and the ideal situation for conducting debate about environmental futures, Simon Cottle’s warning against developing unnecessary dualisms is apt. The ‘politics of representation’ and the ‘politics of connectivity’ are now both at play in protest strategy (Cottle 2013). How different environmental discourses are accessed, embodied, represented and made spectacular by contending agencies and actors is not an either/or question, ‘a question of public sphere or public screens’ (Cottle 2013: 31). In imagining what should be and in the struggle to bring it about, the transnational becomes instantiated within and through mediatised environmental protests. This occurs within the context of fast-changing media and communications, where rationality and deliberation cannot easily be separated from affect and fragmentation. Strategic action and the symbolic sit side by side in contemporary environmental protest, which plays on the spectacular as much as it relies on the credibility of its participating voices. Traditional news frames of civility versus uncivility, of rationality versus emotion and of the legitimacy versus the marginal further problematise mediated environmental politics and publicity. In considering who is in environmental protest’s ‘very big tent’ and what they are doing there, we need to be attuned to how shared environmental awareness and concern might translate transnationally into expectations of participation and belonging, how and if the legitimacy of transnational publics and their opinions might be acknowledged by often distant decision-makers and how the expectation of the emergence of these publics might already be impacting on environmental politics.

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Saul, Peter. 1998. Operating under implicit social licence. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 May. Sen, Amartya. 2009. The idea of justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Strömbäck, Jesper. 2008. Four phases of mediatization: An analysis of the mediatization of politics. The International Journal of Press/Politics 13 (3): 228–246. Sunday Tasmanian. 2012. The big ask. 22 April. The Examiner. 2012. Social licence needed to be anti-everything. 21 June. The Mercury. 2011. No peace in our time. 11 March. The Mercury. 2012. No rescue in sight. 10 March. Thompson, John B. 1995. The media and modernity: A social theory of the media. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. 2000. Political scandal: Power and visibility in the media age. Cambridge: Polity. Thompson, John B. 2005. The new visibility. Theory, Culture & Society 22 (6): 31–51. Thompson, John B. 2011. Shifting boundaries of public and private life. Theory, Culture & Society 28 (4): 49–70. Thompson, John B. 2018. Mediated interaction in the digital age. Theory, Culture & Society. First published online 6 November. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263276418808592. Urry, John. 2011. Climate change & society. Cambridge: Polity. Volkmer, Ingrid. 2014. The global public sphere: Public communication in the age of reflective interdependence. Cambridge: Polity. Waisbord, Silvio. 2013. Contesting extractivism: Media and environmental citizenship in Latin America. In Environmental conflict and the media, ed. Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins. New York: Peter Lang. Waisbord, Silvio, and Enrique Peruzzotti. 2009. The environmental story that wasn’t: Advocacy, journalism and the Asambleismo Movement in Argentina. Media, Culture and Society 31 (5): 691–709.

CHAPTER 4

The Spectacle of the Reef

In one of its first editorials of 2019, The Australian newspaper outlined what it considered a legitimate community for deciding environmental matters. It also made it clear what and who these communities needed to be concerned about. Indeed, rural and regional communities, it wrote under the heading ‘Green Activists Threaten Growth’, ‘have a lot to be concerned about’, given legal actions by environmental groups and ‘green expectations of inner-city voters’. These were harming ‘regional Australia, including indigenous communities’, which depended on the ‘jobs and infrastructure generated by projects such as the one in the Galilee Basin’ (The Australian 2019). The 247,000-hectare Galilee Basin, in the central area of the northern Australian state of Queensland, contains one of the richest thermal coal deposits in the world. The fact that the nine mines proposed for the basin, including Indian company Adani’s Carmichael mine, would be owned and operated by multinational corporations was not a cause of concern to The Australian. Rather, it was the ‘multinational agendas’ of environmental campaigners that were the real worry. The ‘tactics that have delayed and diminished Adani’s plans to open a new minerals province’ were described as a ‘textbook case’ and ‘the leading edge of a much bigger agenda’. The newspaper continued:

© The Author(s) 2019 L. Lester, Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9_4

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According to documents made public by the minerals industry, funding for the campaign against Adani included support from several big US environmental foundations. Local organisations such as WWF have successfully used the Adani campaign and its perceived threat to the Great Barrier Reef to raise campaign funds around the world. Despite repeated losses in the courts, green groups have successfully delayed development of the Carmichael coalmine, which may now proceed in a much reduced form. In a new twist, the Australian Greens are seeking to have any development in the Galilee Basin blocked by federal legislation on climate grounds. This is despite court rulings that stopping development of Australian coal assets would likely lead to greater greenhouse gas emissions globally as more polluting coal deposits were developed elsewhere. (The Australian 2019)

In four short paragraphs, this editorial encapsulates the themes that echo within public debate over environmental protest. Who holds legitimate concerns? Who is heard and how? Who is affected? If not here, then where? What are the rights of outsiders to intervene? How are concerns shared or contained? The previous chapter outlined three concepts for thinking about these questions—mediatised environmental conflict, social licence to operate and transnational public sphere. Talk of the last has been described by Nancy Fraser et al. (2014) as a ‘commonplace’ in media and communications studies. This chapter considers the veracity of another commonplace in media and communications studies, and in particular one that is frequently applied to the study of environmental concerns and debate. The symbolic and the spectacular play an important role in the formation of public opinion, even if there is still disagreement on the extent of that role and the legitimacy and efficacy of the public opinion and thus accountability that is formed as a result. It is a commonplace that spectacular images, actions and people have long played a significant role in environmental political communications more broadly: in the carriage of environmental information; in the representation and interpretation of environmental meanings and risk; and in the engagement of individuals and publics in environmental debate and protest action (Anderson 2013; Brockington 2009; DeLuca 1999; Lester 2010; Cox 2012; Hansen and Machin 2016). It is also apparent that the potency of such symbols and spectacle makes them a site of contestation and political conflict (Hansen 2010, 2011; Lester and Cottle 2009). Environmental protest has long sought to generate and widely disseminate spectacular images and powerful symbols, whether of impact of environmental degradation or resistance to developments and human-produced risk. The smouldering stump represents

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deforestation, a celebrity stands for the masses, images of the globe speak to cosmopolitan empathy. Meanwhile, those industries, governments or individuals proposing change and development have attempted to contain spectacle that highlights potential risk, raises concern and allocates blame. National and state bounds have been important in the capacity and strategies of political actors in this regard as they negotiate media, political and legal systems to attribute or avoid the attribution of responsibility, reassure customers of the sustainability and security of supply or of commitment of local communities to preventing environmental degradation, or use electoral or economic cycles to force policy and decision-making. To understand how these symbols and spectacles engage publics in such a way that they can impact decision-making, allocate responsibility, grow resources and ultimately contribute to determining environmental futures, it is important to consider how this is happening across local, national and regional boundaries. It is clear that these communicative and political flows and networks now operate transnationally, promoting awareness of local and global risks. Spectacular visuals can play an important role in the development of global environmental awareness and contribute to a sense of ecological citizenship and associated rights and responsibilities (Szerszynski and Urry 2006). Cosmopolitan sensibilities reach out to others via ‘unshackling minds from the harnesses of tradition and provincialism’ (Waisbord 2016). In relation to what she calls a ‘shared social imaginary’, Nancy Fraser prompts: ‘Consider, finally, the spectacular rise of visual culture, or, better, of the enhanced salience of the visual within culture and the relative decline of print and literature’ (Fraser et al. 2014: 25). This chapter, then, analyses the struggle over the reach and containment of spectacle in environmental protest to consider how transnationally shared environmental awareness and concern, emerging in part through spectacle, is translating into expectations of participation and demands for accountability, and how this is already impacting the ways in which environmental protest is being understood and enacted locally, regionally and transnationally. It focuses on the highly visible struggle that is playing out over one of the world’s most spectacular places, the Great Barrier Reef. The world’s largest coral reef system, the Reef, was listed by the World Heritage Committee in 1981 for its range of outstanding values, including being ‘probably the richest area in terms of faunal diversity in the world’ (UNESCO, n.d.). Its scientific credentials are indeed exceptional with a list of marine creatures that includes 600 types of soft and hard corals, more than 100 species of jellyfish, 3000 varieties of molluscs, 500 species

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of worms, 1625 types of fish, 133 varieties of sharks and rays and more than 30 species of whales and dolphins. The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park covers 344,400 square kilometres and contains 3000 coral reefs, 600 continental islands, 300 coral cays and 150 inshore mangrove islands. The Reef is part of Australia’s national identity, and a site of historical and contemporary indigenous cultural heritage, retaining special significance to those whose traditional lands it borders. From an economic perspective, the Reef brings $5.7 billion to the Australian economy annually with employment of almost 69,000 fulltime equivalent workers (Deloitte Access Economics 2013). Stretching for 2500 kilometre along the Queensland coast, it supports many regional towns and communities, with businesses in tourism and fishing reliant on its continued status as Australia’s premier holiday destination. However, major coral bleaching events connected to rising sea temperatures associated with climate change, plus run-off from coastal strip development and agriculture that includes cattle grazing and sugar cane farming, are creating significant concern, alongside denting Australia’s reputation as capable and/or willing to protect its landscapes and biodiversity. The Great Barrier Reef has been described by its management authority as an ‘Icon under Pressure’ (Lloyd 2014) and has narrowly avoided being listed by UNESCO as World Heritage ‘in danger’.

Saving the Great Barrier Reef---Then The ‘Save the Reef’ campaign in the 1960s and 1970s provides a useful example of early environmental protest, and an opportunity to consider how the spectre of the transnational has evolved in more recent campaigning, alongside media and communications more broadly (Foxwell-Norton and Lester 2017). In 1967, North Queensland resident and artist John Büsst instigated a campaign after reading a public notice in his small community newspaper that a local farmer had applied to mine limestone on Ellison Reef, offshore and about midway between the Queensland communities of Innisfail and Mission Beach. The limestone from the coral was to be used as fertiliser by local sugar cane farmers. The fact that John Büsst was alerted to the threat to mine the Great Barrier Reef by a notice in his local newspaper is a reminder of the critical role long played by media in communicating environmental concerns, as well as more generally in knowledge about the Reef (McCalman 2013). Despite the relatively high visitor numbers to the region, few people have direct experience of the

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Reef, particularly the outer Reef, from where our imaginings and visual representations largely emanate. At the time of this early campaign, communication in regional Australia was mostly by an often inefficient mail system or expensive timed telephone calls. Television was barely a decade old in Australia and most homes would not have a colour television until the late 1970s (Foxwell-Norton and Lester 2017: 570). Internationally, the first environmental policies designed to address the consequences of large-scale industrial production and developments were beginning to appear. International policy and programmes gained significant momentum with ‘World Heritage’ established at the 1972 Paris UNESCO Conference, delivering a mechanism for the protection of natural and cultural places of outstanding global value. Australia was one of the first nations to ratify the World Heritage Convention (Australian Government, n.d.), and Australia’s first World Heritage properties were inscribed, including the Great Barrier Reef, at a 1981 meeting of the World Heritage Committee in Sydney. The Tasmanian World Heritage Wilderness followed the year after, sparking the High Court case described in Chapter 2. The 1960s campaign to save the Reef was initially organised and staffed by a small group of friends and colleagues, and included the establishment of a local branch of the Wildlife Preservation Society and running seminars ‘in the south’ on wildlife conservation (Wright 1977: 4–5). Through personal contacts, the group was also actively meeting people from overseas— ‘biologists and naturalists and conservationists … to tell us sad exemplary tales of what had happened overseas’ (Wright 1977: 5). Australian mainstream media were critical to its success. Celebrated Australian poet and campaign leader Judith Wright understood the importance of relationships with individual journalists and news outlets, as well as mainstream media’s importance overall, as this excerpt to her book, The Coral Battleground, shows: …I wish to acknowledge the role of the press, both in reporting and in producing special articles and surveys, throughout the whole campaign from its inception in the Ellison Reef case. I make particular acknowledgement to The Australian, whose full and faithful coverage was a most important fact in the amount of public interest and information on the whole question. (Wright 1977: xxiii)

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Alternative media in the form of Wildlife Magazine and newsletters and community media such as local radio and newspapers were also crucial, as were interpersonal and organisational communications between the chief protagonists, although the speed was somewhat reduced by the postal services and telephony available at the time (Foxwell-Norton and Lester 2017: 573). John Büsst alone, for example, dispatched 4000 letters during the campaign (Queensland Heritage Register, n.d.). An analysis from the time summarised the task for campaigners: It is quite clear that sound and detailed knowledge of the problems and surrounding circumstances was a first essential requirement. This information then needs to be disseminated to the community by means of publications, public meetings, addresses to private organizations, and all the forms of mass media that can be utilized. Even after all of these actions have been taken, results cannot be achieved overnight, and both patience and perseverance are required. (Connell 1971: 254)

Media coverage of the 1969 Santa Barbara oil blowout aided the campaign by raising ‘what if’ concerns in Australia, reinforcing the Los Angeles Times’ claim that following the spill, ‘the region became ground zero for some of the most significant conservation efforts of the 20th century’ (Mai-Duc 2015). In September 1969, The Courier-Mail published a map of the Reef region leased for oil drilling (in Wright 1977: 71), naming the companies with leases—details which had been until then shrouded in secrecy. Federal politicians who had been at odds with the conservative Queensland state government supported a parliamentary inquiry, which would eventually lead to the establishment of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act, defining and establishing Commonwealth rather than state jurisdiction over management of the Reef. The publication of this material also led to the revelation that the Queensland Premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, had pecuniary interests in one of the mining companies. While science remained on the margins of the debate, mainstream media and individual sympathetic journalists were pivotal in bringing scientific knowledge and awareness to the centre of public debate, contesting political elites’ opinions (Foxwell-Norton and Lester 2017: 574). The campaign used media to garner international support for a boycott of Ampol, which was providing financial backing to a Japanese company proposing to drill at Repulse Bay. The Gold Coast branch of the ‘Save the Reef’ Committee funded coverage, placing a full-page advertisement in the national Rupert

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Murdoch-owned newspaper, The Australian. This boycott would eventually win support from Australian trade unions (Wright 1977: 80–81; Bowen and Bowen 2002: 262). In 1968, a petition of 13,000 signatures was presented to Federal Parliament, collected at various public gatherings including fairs and airports. It is also worth noting that the campaign was aided by the existing social relations of the main protagonists, not the least of which was John Büsst’s old university friend, Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt. This gave the campaign direct access to the Australian Parliament and to a host of powerful networks in Australia and internationally. Throughout insider accounts of the campaign that emerged at the time, the role of media is acknowledged as important to the campaign’s success but is of secondary interest to the machinations of the protest movement and strategies, relationships, conflict, power struggles and policy outcomes. Media are presented to some extent as ‘outside’, with campaigners ‘feeding’ coverage to journalists (Foxwell-Norton and Lester 2017: 575). Nevertheless, ‘Save the Reef’ had a clear focus on media, and this publicity was vital to pressure governments, unions, lawyers, scientists and the broader public to act.

Saving the Great Barrier Reef---Now More recent campaigns to protect the Reef have played out within the context of Australia’s ‘extreme’ climate change politics, being ‘open for business’ and ‘cutting green tape’. Plans to further entrench Australia’s status as the world’s largest coal exporter are based on the proposal for nine mines in the massive Galilee Basin deposit, 400 kilometres inland from the Reef, in central Queensland. The Carmichael mine, owned by one of India’s largest corporations, the Adani Group, will—if financed and granted final approvals—produce 60 million tonnes of coal a year (Adani Group 2014). MacMines Austasia, owned by the Chinese Meijin energy group, a major producer of coal and supplier of coal products to the United States, Korea and Japan, has approval to produce 70 million tonnes of coal a year with an expected mine life of 40 years. Coal from both mines, along with others awaiting approval, will be transported to massively expanded shipping facilities at Abbot Point, on the central Queensland coast, where ships will transport coal through the Reef. It will join the AU$57 billion of coal currently exported each year from Australia, most of which goes to Japan.

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Alongside the mining and export activity itself, the link between Reef damage and burning coal is now well established. The Reef has long coped with cyclones and floods, but recent extreme weather events have caused unusual levels of damage. According to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), flood waters running into the shallow reef lagoon can form reduced-salinity plumes laden with nutrients, sediments and agricultural chemicals such as fertilisers and pesticides, which stress and kill some of the Reef’s animals and plants, while encouraging productivity in others. Both ways, the Reef’s ecosystem is disrupted. Tropical cyclones can cause extensive damage to individual corals and to the structure of the Reef. According to the GBRMPA, between 1995 and 2009, approximately 34% of all coral mortality was caused by storm damage. Cyclones such as the Category 5 Yasi that hit in 2011 can have impacts that affect large areas for decades, if not centuries (GBRMPA, n.d.-a). In 2016, the Reef experienced the worst coral bleaching on record, in which an estimated 29% of shallow-water coral (to 10 metres in depth) was lost across the park. According to GBRMPA, this equated to a loss of one in every four shallow-water corals. In this case, the cause was not a tropical cyclone but heat stress resulting from high sea temperatures. The Marine Park Authority predicts that as the climate changes, coral bleaching will become more frequent and severe. Temperature increases of only onedegree celsius for four weeks can trigger bleaching events; if for double that time, corals die (GBRMPA, n.d.-a). In the 2016 event, bleaching also extended to deeper corals, although to what extent remains unclear given they are more difficult to survey. Nevertheless, it is the shallow-water corals that are most diverse and productive, and crucial to the tourism industry (GBRMPA, n.d.-b). Both the spectacular nature of the Reef and the stresses it is under frame media texts that attribute responsibility across various institutional, political and geographic arenas. In an explicit example from the UK edition of The Guardian, high-profile Australian scientist and environmental campaigner, Tim Flannery, sets the tone and provides steps for concerned ‘others’ to take: If the Carmichael coal mine is a global story, and the Great Barrier Reef a global asset, then the issue should not be left to Australia alone to decide. The citizens of the world deserve a say on whether their children should have the opportunity to see the wonder that is the reef. Opportunities to do this abound. Petitioning national governments to put climate change on the

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agenda of the G20 summit, to be held in Australia in November this year, is one. Pushing governments to play a constructive role at the 2015 climate negotiations in Paris is another, as is letting the Australian government know directly that everybody has a stake in the reef, and that it needs to act to secure its future. (Flannery 2014)

Internationally, Greenpeace attempted to ‘bring home’ the dangers to the Reef when it warned that ‘any dumping of dredge spoil on the World Heritage-listed reef will be an “international embarrassment” and akin to “dumping rubbish in the Grand Canyon”’ (Petersen 2014). It further invoked the spectacular when it produced an advertisement that accused the Australian government of killing Nemo—in a blender (Greenpeace Australia Pacific 2014). Such appeals manifest across a range of local, national and international forums. Legal and governance structures are key spheres for drawing attention to the spectacular while publicly attributing responsibility, particularly given the well-established relationship between these institutional arenas and journalistic reporting practices (Konkes 2017). By early 2015, court cases against Adani and its Carmichael mine were underway in Australia, including one brought by the Conservation Action Trust, an Indian environmental group, reported to be the first such challenge in Australia mounted by overseas activists and making explicit Indian communities’ stake in the debate: Debi Goenka, an executive trustee of the CAT, said: ‘The coal from Carmichael, when burnt in India, threatens the health and livelihoods of poor, rural people in India. These people can’t afford the electricity that will be generated – all they’ll get will be damage to their health and the air, water, land and natural resource base on which their survival depends.’ (Milman 2014a)

In November 2014, during an official visit to Australia, US President Barack Obama told an audience at the University of Queensland that his daughters and, in turn, their children had a right to see the Reef in fifty years time. Australia’s mismanagement meant they too were among the affected, he inferred. Both the Queensland and Federal governments responded angrily. Claiming there ‘was an issue’ with the President’s speech, Australia’s foreign minister at the time Julie Bishop said: ‘We are demonstrating world’s-best practice in working with the World Heritage Committee to ensure that the Great Barrier Reef is preserved for generations to come… I think President

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Obama might have overlooked that aspect of our commitment’ (Shanahan 2014). Such struggles to contain the spectacular and the attribution of responsibility and rights also occurred in relation to brand campaigns and their appeals to consumers to alter their buying habits. In April 2014, a campaign jointly established by WWF-Australia and the Australian Marine Conservation Society (fightforourreef.org.au), won the support of iconic US-founded ice cream company Ben and Jerry’s, owned by global retail giant Unilever. Responding to plans to dredge the Reef to improve passage for coal export ships, the company encouraged customers to ‘Scoop Ice Cream, Not the Reef’. According to Ben and Jerry’s, ‘We’ll be travelling across our fair land, scooping out free ice cream and raising awareness of how the Reef is at serious risk from intensive dredging, mega ports and shipping highways, and encouraging Australians to join us’ (Ben and Jerry’s, n.d.; see also Unilever, n.d.). In response, the Queensland government suggested Australians boycott Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and referred the company to the Australia Competition and Consumer Commission, with the Environment Minister saying the company had ‘damaged the reputation of the Reef and jeopardised jobs and tourism dollars’ by signing up ‘to the campaign of lies and deceit that’s been propagated by WWF’ (AAP 2014a). The discursive battle over the Reef has also occurred around UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee, and specifically its annual meetings since 2014 where it has considered the health of the Reef and whether it should be placed on the ‘in danger’ list. Prior to the Bonn meeting of June 2015, it was reported that Australia’s department of foreign affairs had established a dedicated task force to ensure that the Reef was not listed as ‘in danger’ by the UN (Milman 2014b). Officials and ministers were dispatched around the world to lobby key countries over the issue, and international journalists and key decision-makers were invited to Australia to visit the Reef themselves. Australian ministers also raised the issue with member countries of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee on an opportunistic basis (Milman 2014b). The threat of the listing has had significant impact on Australian domestic politics, with then Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership destabilised by his government’s decision to give AU$444 million to a little-known foundation supported by major mining and other corporations, in order to be seen to be fulfilling its commitment to UNESCO to protect the Reef (Fox 2018).

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It’s not Cricket A distinctive feature of the later Reef campaign as opposed to that of the 1960s has been the presence of celebrities and the ways in which their comments are mediated as both representatives of a transnational community of concern, while also hinting at access to elite knowledge and expertise. For example, when actor Leonardo DiCaprio attended an Oceans Conference in Washington, DC, his comments on the Reef were reported widely via news services, tweeted and shared on Facebook, including in The Australian newspaper: ‘Since my very first dive in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia 20-years-ago to the dive I got to do in the very same location just two years ago, I’ve witnessed environmental devastation first-hand,’ said DiCaprio, who pledged his own foundation would pump another $7 million over the next two years into projects to help the oceans. ‘What once had looked like an endless underwater utopia is now riddled with bleached coral reefs and massive dead zones.’ (AAP 2014b)

The ‘Fight for the/our Reef’ campaign responded by naming DiCaprio a ‘Reef Champion’ on their ‘Celebrity Wall’, leaving governments and the Reef tourism industry incumbent to defend the health of the Reef (FoxwellNorton and Lester 2017: 577). While the role of celebrities in environmental politics has been extensively critiqued in recent years (see, e.g., Lester 2006; Brockington 2009, 2013; Boykoff and Goodman 2009; Anderson 2013), there is nothing static or entirely predictable about the interaction between these individuals empowered by global flows of capital and consumption and the behaviours, landscapes and policies they seek to influence. This is particularly so as media provides seemingly ever-expanding opportunity to debate celebrity’s motivations and hypocrisies—around air travel, for example—and within the intimacy of the mediated relationship between celebrity and public (Turner 2004). Even in the DiCaprio case, in which the actor’s comments were largely greeted with enthusiasm, his suggestion that the lack of policy enforcement in relation to the Reef was akin to the ‘Wild West’ provided the Australian government with an international platform to advertise its new protection plans and policies (Miranda 2015). Throughout 2015–2016, protest activity heightened, displaying many of the features common to contemporary environmental protest, including targeted activity during election campaigns (Bruns and Burgess 2011)

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and coordinated street marches and rallies organised by an alliance of local, national and international protest groups, lockdowns and other targeted activities at branches of banks reported to be considering financing the mine, image generation and circulation using nationally recognised musicians (#coralnotcoal and across an expanding list of twitter hashtags), online petitions circulating across social media platforms, a range of legal challenges brought by environmental NGOs, and mainstream media coverage challenging Adani’s credibility (ABC Four Corners 2017). Events of March 2017 deepened the politics of representation and connectivity evident in the conflict. Reflecting a ‘tactic’ that was popular in the original 1960s’ ‘Save the Reef’ campaign, 90 prominent Australians signed an open letter to Gautam Adani, chair of the Adani Group. The letter, a response to the Queensland Premier’s visit to India to convince Adani executives to proceed with the mine, included prominent business executives, Reef tourist operators, well-known novelists, Green politicians, and—with star billing—Ian and Greg Chappell, brothers who had both captained the Australian Cricket Team in the 1970s. Greg Chappell had also briefly and controversially coached the Indian national team in the mid-2000s—recalled as a dark time for Indian cricket—making his inclusion on the list of ‘prominent Australians’ a risky tactical decision. According to Ian Chappell, he agreed to become involved because ‘cricket has a bit to do with the feeling between India and Australia’: … ‘you realise as a former Australian captain that there are times when you have a louder voice than a lot of other people [and] there are times to use that louder voice. If it has helped in that regard, to get some publicity in India and give people in India another view on it – and not the view that everyone in Australia is falling head over heels in love with this project – and if it’s got that message across, it makes that worthwhile,’ Chappell told Guardian Australia. (Robertson 2017)

And in laying out his credentials, he can be seen attempting to negotiate the tricky line for celebrity intervention: Over the last 20 years, I’ve been made aware of climate change thanks to my wife Barbara-Ann. An intelligent woman with a scientific mind and a strong social conscience, Barbara-Ann has been strident about the need to change the way we live. Armed with this information and my own observations of the increased frequency and ferocity of major weather events, I’ve come to the same conclusion. Consequently, when Geoff Cousins, the president of

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the Australian Conservation Foundation [ACF] approached me about the Adani coal mine project in Queensland I was keen to know more… I decided to put my name to the letter requesting the Adani company give serious consideration to furthering their investment in renewable energy rather than a coal mine. The world needs to change its ways and do it quickly if we want the legacy to our grandchildren to be an acceptable one -– renewable energy is an important part of that future. A decision in favour of renewable energy by the Adanis would further strengthen the already strong ties between India and Australia. (Chappell 2017)

Here, Chappell is deploying a common celebrity discourse trait in Australian climate politics—that of the layman, initially reluctant but gradually convinced by those close to him and his own observations that his political intervention is warranted. While Chappell represents the campaign as a means to strengthen ‘already strong ties’, the threat of public protest and subsequent reputational damage is being made explicit by campaign leaders. Businessman Geoff Cousins, who organised the letter and financed a delegation to India to deliver it personally to Adani, suggested repeatedly that it would be a ‘shame if the mine damaged India’s image in Australia’ and ‘The Adani family, one can see from all their published material, is very proud of their reputation’. He also invoked media images from previous spectacular environmental campaigns in Australia. ‘Go back and get the videotapes of the Franklin Dam protests, Mr Adani. Have a look at them, and multiply them by two in your head and think about if you really want to go ahead with this’ (Bennett 2017). In India and via its diaspora, however, it was less the Chappells’ involvement and the threats to Adani’s reputation that circulated within media, as much as Australia’s internal conflict over the letter. Using Australian political vernacular, conservative MP George Christensen had described the signatories as: ‘Styling themselves as “prominent Australians”, these elitist wankers include investment bankers, CEOs of major corporations such as Telstra, pretentious literati, professional activists and has-been celebrities’ (Bhattacharjee 2017). A typical response was this: Australia’s legendary cricketing brothers Ian and Greg Chappell are facing severe criticism from political quarters and media for sermonising Indian mining tycoon Gautam Adani to abandon plans to open a mega coal mine in Australia’s north… While the delegation led by Cousins has failed, as expected, to solicit the desired response from Gautam Adani-led conglomerate, the letter co-signed by cricketing brothers’ duo has generated a bitter debate Down

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Under. The anti-coal mine campaign has wide support undoubtedly but a large number of politicians and commentators from across the spectrum have trashed the move as, basically, ill-advised. (Bhattacharjee 2017)

Meanwhile, Adani hired brand consultant Suhel Seth and a ‘team of professionals’ in what was described in media reports as an ‘image makeover’, with commentators pointing out that Adani’s silence was being interpreted as guilt (Pillay and Jai 2018). What soon followed were the allegations and counter-allegations about ‘fake’ social media activity that have become a familiar part of the international political landscape—seemingly based on the presumption that social media was once free of deliberate misinformation. In this example, Buzzfeed reports on Malcolm Turnbull’s meeting about the mine with Gautam Adani, in which Indian Prime Minister Modi was also present, and the tweets that accompanied the visit: But when the replies to the tweet started rolling in, it was clear that several were pushing a very specific talking point… The accounts posting the replies, which are all based in India, used three hashtags (#Queensland, #Adani and #Carmichael) and suggested the mine would be great for Queensland jobs. Of those Indian tweeters, all were followed by two accounts pushing similar messages. It’s not the first time this has happened. Earlier this month, proAdani tweeters pushed out a message about the company’s history of debt repayments, some with a link to a 2016 Economic Times interview with Adani. …a quick look at their Twitter bios shows they are followed by other pro-Adani accounts. Unlike other Twitter “bots”, all of them have thousands of followers and have tweeted hundreds of thousands of times.’ (Di Stefano 2017)

Some of the tweets from what could be called the ‘fake public’ connected to a YouTube video featuring Adani brand manager Suhel Seth on a panel that also included Ian Chappell, Geoffrey Cousins and mayor of Townsville Jenny Hill (Fauladi Indian 2017). Seth’s comments are insightful of the new politics of transnational environmental concern. He begins by invoking the concept of social licence and what is required to win that licence— resonating with discussions in the previous chapter—suggesting that ‘the realm of getting a social licence does not belong to Ian Chappell and Geoff Cousins alone’. He then comments on Chappell’s relevancy and motives for becoming involved:

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Ian Chappell, who I have the highest regard for, who I’ve seen as a child… I completely agree that you want to leave a cleaner planet for your grandchildren, and that you signed this petition because your wife is involved in climate change. Very noble. But they are realities mired in hypocrisy. (Fauladi Indian 2017)

He lists the hypocrisies as (1) Australia consumes the largest amount of coal in the world, (2) Cousins seems to have more sway than environmental agencies who gave permission for the mine to go ahead, and (3) $44 billion will flow into the ‘Australian net’ through commonwealth taxes and state royalties, before continuing on to undermine the campaign in which Chappell has, by inference, become naively entwined: I am not for a moment suggesting that the GBR is less important than $44 billion, but I don’t believe that one individual and the Stop Adani alliance are the only arbiters of good conscience. You should be aware, Ian, or maybe not, but you should be aware by people who drafted you to sign this letter that there was a Wikileaks document that appeared and is now in the public domain which suggests that there was fighting among NGOs which were actually almost bribing some members of the Indigenous community, almost one million dollars meant to be paid or was paid. This is not me, this is Wikileaks. (Fauladi Indian 2017)

On the one hand, this is familiar politics: carefully crafted public relations, celebrity interlocutors, media events and targeted attacks. On the other hand, however, this is a complicated transnational politics: one where Wikileaks, Twitter, television and countless other media sites and platforms rub up against each other and formal legal and political decision-making forums and processes to influence outcomes, and one where interactions with various forms of mediated spectacle underpinned by contorted notions of social licence and publics—even fake ones—become central stories in themselves.

See It Before It’s Too Late Following the dramatic 2016 coral bleaching event, US-based outdoor activity magazine, Outside, controversially published an obituary that began: ‘The Great Barrier Reef of Australia passed away in … after a long illness. It was 25 million years old…’ (Jacobsen 2016). The story, which cited respected Reef scientist Charlie Veron as saying ‘I am 71 years old now,

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and I think I may outlive the reef’, was widely shared and equally widely criticised, typified by this story published in the DNA news in India: The current debate is nothing but sensationalization of an issue. Such articles can have an adverse effect. If we declare the reef is dead, policy makers will be glad to having nothing [to] bother about and will open it up for cement mining. Rather than giving them such opportunity by relegating the GBR to the graveyard, we should use this event to build political consensus for strategic surgical interventions to help reefs. (Bhula 2016)

Another typical response was this from a Seattle-based eco-travel writer, in which the commercial imperative underpinning the commentary is writ large: Russell Brainard, chief of the Coral Reef Ecosystem Program at NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, has been one of the most outspoken critics of the article. In his Facebook response to Outside’s post, he said that ‘this sort of over-the-top story makes the situation much worse by conveying loss of hope rather than a need for global society to take actions to reverse these discouraging downward trends.’…. Zegrahm’s new Best of the Great Barrier Reef tour, led by marine biologist and expedition leader Brad Climpson, offers adventurers an unparalleled opportunity to explore the region’s underwater life… The 15-day expedition is the perfect way to see for yourself that the stories proclaiming the Great Barrier Reef dead were basically fake news. But perhaps more importantly, it will show you why this massive marine sanctuary is so vital to preserve for future generations of travelers. (Love 2018)

Tourism’s role in the ‘coral battleground’ has always been seeped in contradiction, with Judith Wright highlighting the ‘loving it to death’ conundrum that was already evident in the 1970s (1977: 186). Tourists taking corals and shells despite knowing it was illegal, fishing out whole reefs, and littering—these were the human activities from which the Reef most suffered when it had just won national park status in 1974. Risks from tourists’ behaviour continue, with the list of associated harmful activities growing. With 2.7 million annual visitors to the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park alone, and 14 million to the Great Barrier Reef overall, there are many opportunities to cause harm (GBRMP, n.d.-c). Some sunscreens used while snorkelling are now widely recognised as toxic to coral, for example (LMAC 2018), and numerous websites provide advice on which sunscreen

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to choose so as not to contribute to the unfolding disaster caused by coral bleaching (see, e.g., Snorkel Ken, n.d.). The dilemma at the heart of tourism to natural, threatened environments—and particularly those places sensitive to increased visitor numbers—flows largely unchallenged across vast industry, media and government networks. The long-standing nexus between the travel industry, government support and media appears to have transferred to digital relatively unscathed. Activists continue to tread discursive tightropes over tourism, unclear in public debates not known for nuance whether tourism is good or bad for environmental futures. Local communities most affected by the changes and damage brought by increased tourism are also caught on the tightrope, given (a) the economic benefits that tourism brings, (b) the visibility that comes with being ‘noticed’, and (c) the fact that the membership of the ‘community’ changes with this visibility, ensuring more competing voices and interests become part of community and environmental decision-making processes. For Mike Goodman and colleagues, the meaning relationship between what they term ‘spectacular nature’ and ‘commodified spectacle’ is crucial: The diverse environments that ‘environmentalisms’ want to look after, in other words, are often spectacular: they are strikingly and profoundly dramatic at the same time, quotidian and ordinary in the everyday complexity of the spectacles of nature. The relationship between these two realms or meanings is critical, with the latter (spectacular nature) providing the former (commodified spectacle) with the resources it commodifies and spectacleises and, conversely, the former (commodified spectacle) often polluting, and often attempting to extend the possibilities, engagements and affective resonances of the latter. (Goodman et al. 2016: 678–679)

With an interest in the contorted meanings and representations that circulate in and around tourism in relation to environmental harm and conflict, including climate change, Lyn McGaurr’s extensive research (McGaurr 2010, 2012, 2014, 2015, 2016) suggests that ‘last-chance tourism’, even when framed as a campaign to promote environmental awareness, cannot alleviate this contradiction (McGaurr and Lester 2018). A 2015 survey of Reef visitors found that nearly 70% were motivated to see the Reef before it was too late, with most developing their perceptions of the Reef from media (Piggott-McKellar and McNamara 2017). While high levels of concern about coral bleaching and climate change were identified, there was

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little indication that tourists were concerned by their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions through their own air travel (Piggott-McKellar and McNamara 2017). ‘Last-chance travel lists’ provide important insights, given their transnational communicative potential, including via the celebritisation of lists and the ‘spectacle-isation’ of nature (Goodman et al. 2016). For McGaurr, these lists have become lucrative story scaffolding in the fierce competition for advertising revenue and thus social media ‘shares’ because they are perfectly structured for digital transmission on mobile devices and are popular with audiences (see McGaurr and Lester 2018). This also means viewers will stay with the site longer while they move from page to page as the list counts down. Online travel lists are now ‘cognitively and digitally networked into the hierarchies that populate 21st century media, ceaselessly distributing and redistributing salience’ (McGaurr 2015: 166). Their ability to circulate so far and so fast makes them ‘the transnational celebrities of 21st century travel media’: When an online travel list labels destinations ‘places to see before it’s too late’, it creates a transnational environmental spectacle, because it constructs the devastation of many of the world’s ‘natural wonders’ as immanent and dramatic. It is in their capacity as transnational environmental spectacles that last-chance travel lists have the potential to contribute to meaning-making about climate change and challenge the public relations advantages that traditional travel media afford pro-development governments. (McGaurr and Lester 2018)

In an analysis of these lists published before the 2016 coral bleaching event (McGaurr and Lester 2018), the Great Barrier Reef appeared in nine of 12 lists, ranking number one of ten in one list and second of 25 in another. Eight entries referred to climate change as a threat. In one case, the dual threats of climate change and tourism were highlighted, but tourism was not identified as contributing to climate change, while in another, tourism was presented as the major threat to the Reef and there was no reference to climate change. Four entries, however, referred to damage to the Reef that would occur if new coal mines went ahead. In three cases, a port development proposed to service the mines was identified as a source of damage. Only in one entry were the mines’ contributions to climate change via coal production acknowledged, and here that damage was identified as a risk to tourism as well as the Reef (McGaurr and Lester 2018). Of the

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images accompanying the lists, only one could be interpreted as possibly illustrating climate change impacts, and this was a photograph of a turtle swimming above colourless coral with a subheading ‘Much grief for the Great Barrier Reef – Australia’ (Destination Seeker, circa 2014–2015). Last-chance travel lists are deeply ambivalent about climate change and environmental conflict. The conflict over the Adani coal mine might be highly visible, yet the connection between Australian coal, carbon emissions and degradation of the Great Barrier Reef is rarely made explicit. And while climate change is ‘a powerful linguistic presence’ in these lists, there is almost no evidence that this also creates opportunities for travel journalists to raise the material and moral dilemma of greenhouse gas emissions from long-haul flights—‘an action that would challenge the foundations of the global visitor economy’ (McGaurr and Lester 2018).

Conclusion This case study of the Reef shows that the transnational is clearly an ambition for environmental campaigners, and the perception that transnational publics are emerging is already impacting environmental politics. This is evident in the discursive struggle over spectacle that is taking place transnationally. Campaigners are regularly ‘speaking’ to the distant, attempting to invoke a transnationalised public. They are doing this when they identify the means for local or international engagement and action for media audiences; when they illustrate the potential reputational and market risks of investment and doing business in Australia to international corporations; when they provide evidence to distant consumers that local communities at the site of procurement have not agreed to a ‘social licence’ or support the resource extraction; or when they lobby international decision-making organisations, such as the World Heritage Committee, via spectacular media campaigns. It is evident when they draw comparisons with distant spectacular places, such as the Grand Canyon, but also point out the rights of others to the Reef as global citizens. They explicitly allocate responsibility to ‘global citizens’ to act to remind Australian governments and global institutions such as UNESCO of their accountability in relation to the Reef. The spectacular frames this chain of responsibility as it travels out from Australia and back again. While the outcomes are rarely certain, the aims of applying pressure to Australian governments and UNESCO are clear and largely dependent on public opinion

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and voter choice in Australia, and the capacity to influence member country representatives at UNESCO. Activity in Australia’s courts provides further evidence of emerging transnational publics. Australian environmental groups regularly initiate legal action to challenge the basis on which a government has provided development approvals. But the case brought by the Indian environmental group, the Conservation Action Trust, was the first of its type in an Australian court, and clearly identified Australian coal as a source of pollution and harm to distant others, in this case, in India. That Australia is also a major supplier of coal to China, where air pollution has entered crisis levels, and to Japan, where there is growing citizen concern about air pollution transported from China, suggests that such actions might become more common in future (Hook et al. 2017). Adani’s response that it is acting responsibly by encouraging economic growth that will improve the lives of millions is also likely to be echoed as more corporations are forced to defend their international investments and procurement activities, and seek to share responsibility. The level of transnationalism of individuals and corporations involved in the conflict over the Reef is mixed. Barack Obama’s invocation of his and his descendants’ stake in the Great Barrier Reef moved climate change mitigation from being the responsibility of ‘others’ and ‘all’ (Olausson 2009; Robertson 2010) to the Australian government and its electors, a move vehemently fought by government ministers in a range of national and international forums in the days that followed. Ben and Jerry’s, and parent company Unilever, faced intense opposition for their involvement in the Fight for the Reef campaign, with legal and reputational issues raised by Queensland government ministers in an attempt to contain the clear transnational capabilities of the corporate giant. Nevertheless, travel journalists—who could be expected to be deeply entrenched in both the transnational and the consequences of environmental degradation—resist implicating their audiences in the harm that is occurring. The case of the Great Barrier Reef suggests that a transnationalised public sphere now appears as a spectre in the imaginary of industry and governments. They expect distant publics to emerge and are taking legislative and communicative measures to restrict any potency that might be achieved. Adani’s Suhel Seth is a clear example of these measures. Yet, resilient in the face of new complex and multidirectional mediated flows of meanings, images and messages are the old restraints to free flows of information that have always existed when it comes to environmental protest. Meanwhile,

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the spectacular is crossing language and cultural divides with increasing speed, conjuring a spectre of a transnational public sphere where ‘distant others’ are considered to have rights and responsibilities. That this is both a real ambition and a real threat will become clearer in the next chapter, which picks up on the long-running conflict associated with the trade of forest products from Tasmania and more recent protests over marine farming.

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Love, Bret. 2018. Is the Great Barrier Reef dead? Why now is the best time to visit. Zegrahm Expeditions, 29 October. Retrieved from https://www.zegrahm. com/blog/great-barrier-reef-dead-why-now-best-time-visit. Mai-Duc, Christine. 2015. The 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill that changed oil and gas exploration forever. Los Angeles Times, 20 May. Retrieved from https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-santa-barbara-oil-spill1969-20150520-htmlstory.html. McCalman, Iain. 2013. The Reef: A passionate history from cook to climate change. Melbourne: Viking/Penguin Books. McGaurr, Lyn. 2010. Travel journalism: Exploring production, impact and culture. Journalism Studies 11 (1): 5–67. McGaurr, Lyn. 2012. The devil may care: Travel journalism, cosmopolitan concern, politics and the brand. Journalism Practice 6 (1): 42–58. McGaurr, Lyn. 2014. Your threat or mine? Travel journalists and environmental problems. In Travel journalism: Exploring production, impact and culture, ed. Folker Hanusch and Elfriede Fürsich. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. McGaurr, Lyn. 2015. Environmental communication and travel journalism. Abingdon: Routledge. McGaurr, Lyn. 2016. The photography of debate and desire: Images, environment and the public sphere. Ethical Space 13 (2–3): 16–33. McGaurr, Lyn, and Libby Lester. 2018. See it before it’s too late? Last-chance travel lists and climate change. In Climate change and the media, ed. Benedetta Brevini and Justin Lewis. New York: Peter Lang. Milman, Oliver. 2014a. Carmichael mine: Indian conservation group joins legal battle with Adani. The Guardian, 9 October. Retrieved from http:// www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/oct/09/carmichael-mine-indianconservation-group-joins-legal-battle-with-adani. Milman, Oliver. 2014b. Great Barrier Reef: Australia sends diplomats out to defend its actions. The Guardian, 12 December. Retrieved from http://www. theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/11/great-barrier-reef-australiasends-diplomats-defend-actions-un-in-danger-list. Miranda, Charles. 2015. Environment Minister Greg Hunt has a battle to convince Leonardo DiCaprio on reef plan. news.com.au, 2 July. Retrieved from https:// www.news.com.au/technology/environment/conservation/environmentminister-greg-hunt-has-a-battle-to-convince-leonardo-dicaprio-on-reef-plan/ news-story/7aadeb4cff865b43f27edee5cdfd3b11. Olausson, Ulrika. 2009. Global warming-global responsibility: Media frames of collection action and scientific certainty. Public Understanding of Science 18: 421–436. Petersen, Freya. 2014. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority approves plans to dump Abbot Point spoil. ABC News, 2 February. Retrieved from https:// www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-31/abbot-point-spoil-dredging-approved/ 5227774.

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CHAPTER 5

Industrialising the Forests and the Fishes

There isn’t much left of the protest camp in the Florentine Valley—or Camp Flozza as it was inevitably known as being in the Australian bush. Old nylon ropes and timber dangle from the limbs of the 60-metre-high gum trees that tower over the site. Bits of corrugated iron and charred wooden beams are piled here and there. Even at its peak, around 2008 or so, it looked a mess. Now, it is not so much a mess as simply a remnant of a mess. For more than a decade, this site—a little over an hour’s drive west of Tasmania’s capital city, Hobart, but already deep into the tall eucalypt forests and mountains that cover much of the island—was an actor in a bitter and sometimes violent environmental battle. Surrounded by the Tasmanian World Heritage Wilderness Area, the area was excluded when listed by UNESCO to allow continued access for the forest industry, monopolised at the time by Gunns Ltd, a company with close ties to the state (see Beresford 2015 for overview). The main product from these trees—some of the biggest in the world—was woodchips, sold for export to Japan’s pulp and paper mills, even at its peak price for less than AU$200 a tonne (see, e.g., IndustryEdge 2013). Some higher value trees were sold as sawlogs, principally to Japan for timber flooring and concrete formwork. The preferred method of harvesting in Tasmania is clear-felling, a process pretty much summed up by its name, although neither part of the term fully captures the extent of the clearing and felling, which involves

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bulldozing remnants of vegetation from across a harvested area or ‘coupe’ into massive piles and then burning those piles using a chemical incendiary. Every autumn, the smoke from these fires filled Tasmanian skies, sparking warnings to residents of Hobart and other towns to stay indoors to avoid breathing difficulties. When in operation, the camp had multiple functions. It was a physical blockade on the access road to a coupe earmarked for logging. At various points in its history, there could be a 20-metre-high tripod erected over the road on which a protester would perch, car bodies flat to the ground in which a protester would lie locked on by a chain cemented into a hole under the car, or an intricate hanging net of ropes and logs that supported a platform high in an adjacent tree, and if interfered with would bring down the platform and its resident activist. At one point, inspired by a visitor fresh from the UK road protests, it was rumoured that a tunnel had been built under the access road, preventing heavy machinery from passing in case an activist was hiding in the tunnel. The camp was also a base, providing living quarters for campaigners and acting as a staging post for various actions across the region, although the camp’s own status as a communications hub was restricted by being out of mobile phone range. Camp Florentine activists were involved in the infamous ‘sledgehammer attack’ in a nearby coupe, where activist footage of a violent attack on a car body in which two protesters were locked was uploaded to the web, creating significant national and international news and social media interest (Lester 2012; Hutchins and Lester 2013; Collins 2013) and acting as a ‘switching point’ when the Tasmanian Premier was forced to respond. The camp itself was the site of various attacks against protesters, including several incidents of arson. If the industry, government and police viewed Camp Florentine as an impediment and a source of frustration, they nevertheless became adept at taking advantage of the protest hub. On one of my regular visits to the camp, I found it manned only by two young protesters—an American and an Italian. At any sign of activity, they had clear instructions to call organisers, who were away on the city fringe supporting the local Aboriginal community in a high-profile protest to protect an archaeological site from road works. Forest company workers did appear at Camp Florentine, wandering up and down the dirt road, turning over rocks with the toes of their boots, until the activists took note and asked them why they were there. ‘Might be moving in on Monday’, they said. This was reported to organisers, and protesters were diverted from the Aboriginal protest.

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No loggers or machinery arrived at the camp on the Monday. Instead, police moved in at the city fringe action and arrested the Aboriginal protesters. Most of all, however, Camp Florentine served—materially and symbolically—as evidence of community conflict at the site of resource procurement, to use the term popular in corporate social responsibility literature. The interaction of protesters with political, industry and news media actors generated vast quantities of media and communications, both in the form of activist, industry and government-produced content that was circulated and shared via a rapidly expanding array of platforms and formats, and in the production of news media content that was increasingly accessible and sharable across new digital platforms. Yet, during the decades of mediated conflict over forests, Camp Florentine was only a backdrop for the real campaign, one that was at times located far away and hidden even from the protesters living in the camp. Their role was to maximise activity at ‘switching points’—conceptualised in Chapter 2 as the sites where contending messages, representations, debates and strategies clash (Hutchins and Lester 2015)—by ensuring the right pairs of distant eyes were alerted or averted at the right time. Mediatised environmental conflict over the Tasmanian forest industry and connected protest activity is revealing of the ways global pressures and influences play out in a local context. How information is contained or made to flow internationally has been at the core of the conflict and the main ambition of protests, as overseas markets for Tasmanian forest products grow or wane according to the decisions of distant corporations weighing up perceptions of reputational risk against ease and cost of supply. As this and the next chapter reveal, the spectre of an emergent transnational community of concern that spanned locals living near the site of procurement to potential consumers in Tokyo was enough to significantly shift the outcome of the conflict. The conflict is also revealing of the dynamics within more recent incarnations of environmental protest over industry growth in Tasmania. As overseas markets shied away from Tasmanian forests products in favour of products from localities with less visible or less risk-filled conflict, aquaculture and tourism have emerged to become the new foci of protest activity. A cottage industry for poorer regional and remote areas of Tasmania from the 1980s, Atlantic salmon farming industrialised significantly through the 2010s as national and international demand grew and numerous free trade agreements between Australia and its Asian neighbours were negotiated

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and came into play. With government support, the industry implemented plans to double its size by 2030. By 2016, what was considered a shining light for Tasmania’s ‘clean green’ reputation had been subjected to a Senate inquiry and exposé by the national broadcaster’s flagship investigative journalism programme. By 2018, farmed Tasmanian Atlantic salmon was suffering significant brand damage (see, e.g., Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide, n.d.). As outlined below, the responses of key actors—industry, government, news media and protesters—provide insight into the features of mediatised environmental conflict that resist resolution and that seemingly condemn places like Tasmania and those that invest in them financially or emotionally to repeat again and again the narratives of protest.

Forests Woodchipping emerged as a source of conflict in Australia, and particularly Tasmania, from the 1970s, when Japan’s demand for pulp and paper outstripped its capacity to maintain supply from its own forests. This led to the emergence of what has been described as ‘factory forestry’, with the amount of woodchips being produced in Australia increasing from none to one million tonnes in the five years to 1974–1975 and significantly shifting power relations between the two countries (Davis 1995: 19). By 2008, the annual export of woodchips from Tasmania alone was 2.5 million tonnes, with 75% of the total destined for Japan. The estimated value to Tasmania of woodchip exports was AU$362 million, compared to AU$314 million for the largely domestic markets for sawn and veneer timber. Three of five woodchip mills were owned by one company, Gunns Ltd. As Natasha Davis noted during this period of factory forestry, the pulp and paper industry was a powerful force in shaping, first, the forests of Japan in the postwar period and then Australia’s forests through the woodchip trade. This trade exemplified the long-running tension in Australia ‘between developing resources for imperial purposes, and concentrating on national development’ (Davis 1995: 4). By early 2010, the biggest downturn in demand in the history of the Tasmanian forestry industry was underway, with an estimated 1000 people losing their jobs that year. While initially the slowdown was blamed on the global financial crisis plus other plantation-based exporters coming online in countries such as Chile, South Africa and Vietnam, it soon became clear that international discomfit over the procurement of woodchips sourced

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from native forests was a contributing cause. Australian NGO The Wilderness Society had campaigned for a decade in Japan, attempting to convince Japanese companies that Tasmanian forestry practices were unsustainable. It had also continued direct action protest in the forests, a long-running tactic but by then accompanied by websites aimed squarely at the Japanese market. There had been little evidence of impact until 2010, when the forest industry began to publicly acknowledge that ‘certification’ and ‘social licence’ were essential for securing long-term international markets for its products. It was particularly interested in achieving internationally recognised Forest Stewardship Certification (FSC). International scrutiny of industry activities has featured in Australian environmental politics since the blockade of the Franklin Dam, as noted in Chapter 3. In the Tasmanian forestry conflict, the accidental torching and death of Australia’s largest tree and the world’s largest flowering plant, known as El Grande, during forests operations in 2007 attracted unwanted publicity for Forestry Tasmania in the UK from the BBC, The Observer and The Guardian that then featured in local news coverage and political debate (Lester 2010). Meanwhile, international travel journalists sponsored by the Tasmanian state government escaped their minders and wrote reports about proposals for a new industrial pulp mill development in the Tamar Valley in the state’s north (McGaurr 2013), further complicating the governmentmedia-tourism nexus described in the previous chapter in relation to the Great Barrier Reef. The potential damage to the reputation of Tasmania’s forestry industry caused by these types of activities locates international and transnational media flows as important sites of struggle. The struggle escalated when Gunns—by then Tasmania’s largest company and landowner—was too slow in making the shift towards internationally accepted product certification standards. In 2010, it had replaced its hard-line Tasmanian chief executive and board members and announced that it was withdrawing from all native forest logging and woodchip exports in order to win a social licence for its highly controversial AU$2 billion-plus pulp mill proposal in northern Tasmania (Stedman 2010). Environmental groups remained largely resistant to Gunns’ overtures—unsurprising given the historic close and often secretive relationship of Gunns with government, the company’s takeover of the forestry industry on the island and ‘public relations’ strategies that included the frequent deployment of flak against journalists and lawsuits against opponents. The most famous case— known as the ‘Gunns 20’—ran from December 2004 to January 2010.

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Legal action was taken against 20 environmentalists accused of conspiring in a ‘malicious campaign against Gunns’ (Swales 2010: 39; Beresford 2015: 207–213) and was strategically launched by Gunns on the eve of announcing its plans to build the pulp mill. Widely condemned nationally and internationally, the case was viewed as an attempt to curtail the right to dissent in civil society, inevitably damaging the reputation of Gunns and the Tasmanian timber industry. As Quentin Beresford notes in his analysis of the rise and fall of Gunns: ‘Its aim of silencing opponents was always grossly unrealistic. Yet, at the same time, it may have acted to deter some from speaking out’, with the case hanging heavily over many community activists (2015: 212–213). Despite the company’s dramatic change of face, it still failed to find a financial backer and suffered a steep decline in share value until it was eventually placed in receivership in September 2012. According to Beresford: Gunns simply underestimated the determination of the people of this region and their supporters throughout the state. Having spent years in the forest wars, Gunns executives had come to conflate all opposition to their plans as the work of ‘greenies’. This proved to be one of the company’s fatal mistakes. Their plans unravelled in the face of people power. (2015: 395–396)

Meanwhile, a new company had emerged to take a leading role in the Tasmanian forestry industry and accompanying environmental conflict. Like Gunns, Ta Ann Tasmania enjoyed strong support from the federal and Tasmanian government and main opposition party, which included AU$10.4 million in establishment grants for eucalypt veneer mills and a 20-year guaranteed resource supply (Forestry Tasmania 2012). Via a relatively complex supply chain, Ta Ann Tasmania—an offshoot of Malaysian company Ta Ann Holdings, one of the six major and controversial forest companies based in Sarawak (Straumann 2014)—supplied wood from Tasmanian regrowth and plantation eucalypt forests as veneer to Japanese manufacturers and retailers of flooring. This market comprised approximately two-thirds of Ta Ann Tasmania’s business, which it claimed contributed a total of AU$45 million annually to the struggling Tasmanian economy (Ta Ann Tasmania Pty Ltd. 2012). By 2011, Ta Ann Tasmania was at the centre of environmental protest. Two issues were at stake. The first was that Ta Ann’s wood supply was being sourced from forests earmarked for protection under the terms of a ‘peace’ agreement being negotiated, yet a moratorium designed to protect

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forests while the agreement was finalised contained a controversial clause that allowed logging to continue (Tasmanian Government 2011). The second issue related to certification and definitions surrounding forests and wood supply. Ta Ann Tasmania was certified by the industry-agreed Australian Forests Standard, which sits under the controversial international Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC) umbrella. Environmental groups consider this ‘certification-lite’, in comparison with their preferred Forest Stewardship Certification (Gale and Haward 2011). Industry-accepted definitions of ‘regrowth’ were also contested: defined as including a ‘majority of trees less than 110 years old’, they ‘may contain scattered individuals or stands of ecologically mature trees’ (Forestry Tasmania, n.d.). In Tasmania, this can mean the logging of trees almost 80 metres high and hundreds of years old. As Ta Ann Tasmania’s mills cannot process these large trees, these were the collateral damage of the process of clear-felling some ‘regrowth’ forests for suitable wood. Protest activity throughout this period included spectacular raids on loading equipment at commercial wharves and on logging machinery in the forests (see, e.g., ABC News 2012). Also notable was the production of a report ‘Behind the Veneer: Forest Destruction and Ta Ann Tasmania’s Lies’, by the Huon Valley Environment Centre, a direct action protest group. The report, based in part on information obtained via Right To Information laws, claimed that Ta Ann was ‘misleading’ its Japanese corporate customers by describing its ‘eco-plywood’ products as environmentally friendly when they were not sourced from plantations as claimed. As such, Ta Ann Tasmania was a ‘major driver of forest destruction in Tasmania’ (Huon Valley Environment Centre 2011). The report was released in early October 2011 to a small group of supporters in a hired conference room in central Hobart. Despite alerts inviting media to the launch, no Tasmanian media organisations or journalists covered the event (Interview with author 2012). The report, however, was promoted by environmental groups in Japan— in particular, the Japan Tropical Forest Action Network (JATAN), local Japanese branches of the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and Friends of the Earth (FOE), all of which had been monitoring the situation in Tasmania for much of the previous decade and with increasing focus since Ta Ann had begun its Tasmanian operations. Together, these groups organised for the report’s co-author, Jenny Weber, to visit Japan in November 2011 to speak at a conference and to meet with contacts in the Japanese companies buying and selling Ta Ann Tasmania products, including

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Panasonic, Daiwa House, Sekisui House and Edai. Weber was accompanied on this trip by a former leader of the Tasmanian Greens, Peg Putt, who since leaving parliament had become a campaigner with the NGO, Markets for Change. The group of environmentalists met with corporate social responsibility officers in Tokyo and Osaka, using Weber’s report—translated by JATAN’s bilingual director—as evidence to back their concerns. According to Weber, the company representatives asked only ‘simple questions’, such as: ‘Is it really not plantations?’ (Interview with author 2012). Weber and Putt’s visit and the report also prompted limited news coverage from the major Japanese news agency, Kyodo News, published under a heading translated as ‘Eco-certification is dubious’ (Shizuoka News 2011) and later in the influential CSR publication Nikkei Ecology (2012). In February 2012, Ta Ann Tasmania announced that it was sacking 40 workers from its timber veneer mills in Tasmania, blaming ‘persistent market attacks’ for halving sales of its Tasmanian timber products to Japan. These ‘attacks’ were described by Australian industry lobbyists and politicians as ‘terrorism’, ‘sabotage’, ‘economic vandalism’ and ‘blackmail’. Heated debate over the legitimacy of so-called market attacks by environmental groups ignited across online, print and broadcast media forums, while news reports continued to appear about the contentious issue of appropriate certification for forestry exports. Pressure mounted in negotiations on industry restructuring, and public diplomacy missions were launched by the Tasmanian government to Japan and Malaysia. A key component of the planning and coordination of the campaign was centred on a small platform in an 80-metre-high eucalypt tree in Tasmania’s remote southern forests, where activist Miranda Gibson lived for more than a year. Alongside providing an unrelenting cyber-action campaign, a daily blog and regular media releases, she provided a symbol of commitment and resistance that travelled transnationally across various media and political platforms and channels (see observertree.org). With access to the Internet provided by the construction on a nearby mountain of a new telecommunications tower and thus solving the problems that Camp Florentine had experienced, she was able to provide the technological and human resources needed to run a successful environmental campaign, supported by a network of Australian, Japanese and international environmental organisations (Hutchins and Lester 2013). Over the course of the conflict, it has been possible to highlight key moments in which media, political and industry power oscillating between the local, national and transnational became triggers for intense conflict.

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Sometimes it was a state-based journalist who uncovered details of destructive forestry industry practices or an international news outlet such as The New York Times or La Figaro publishing an exposé by a celebrity author of environmental degradation in the island state that then rebounds back into state and national political debates (Flanagan 2007). At other times, the heavy focus of news media on a major environmental policy announcement or an election generated diverse responses, including renewed activist campaign activities and coordinated efforts by political parties and logging companies to dominate the news agenda of commercial and public service media. An oft-recalled switching point, which became an exemplar for invoking a spectre of the transnational community of concern, occurred when footage of the ‘sledgehammer attack’—mentioned above—was uploaded to MySpace and then YouTube. The video became one of the most watched videos on YouTube about the Tasmanian forests, displaying the violence in unedited form for journalists and Internet users, locally, nationally and internationally (Lester 2012; Collins 2013). For a fortnight after being posted, the video received detailed attention from print and broadcast news outlets and was shared by members and supporters of various environmental groups beyond Tasmania. The shocking nature of the footage and viral distribution of the video obligated both government and industry representatives to answer difficult questions posed in news media. ‘Why spend millions of taxpayers’ dollars portraying our little island as a haven of tranquility when YouTube and TV news programmes around the world are filled with horrific images of sledgehammers viciously attacking greenies’ cars in the deep forests?’ a Mercury opinion piece asked (Neales 2008). A driving motivation in how journalism and news media respond to environmental conflict is to deny environmental actors—politicians, industry representatives and activists—the capacity to turn switching points ‘on’ and ‘off’ at will and without scrutiny. Within environmental politics, activists and journalists share an ambition to make publicly visible the policies and practices of industry and government, even when faced by organised efforts to keep these matters private. There are various methods used by industry and politicians to protect confidentiality, including legal threats and strategic lawsuits (Ogle 2010), claims to ‘commercial-in-confidence’ and ‘cabinet confidentiality’, refusal to reply to journalist inquiries and the repeated offering of ‘no comment’, deliberately misleading or partial answers and invocation of the Chatham House rule (Lester and Hutchins 2012b). For journalists, a determination to reveal private dealings in order to hold

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industry and political decision-makers accountable asserts their ongoing relevance as functionaries of the Fourth Estate in representative democracies (Schultz 1998). Our data collection activities in 2010 coincided with a highly unusual period in the history of environmental protest in Tasmania. As discussed in detail elsewhere (Lester and Hutchins 2012a, b; Hutchins and Lester 2015), the quantity of media activity and communication related to the forestry dispute fell significantly, producing an unprecedented media ‘invisibility’ for activist groups. This was evident across news media, activist, government and industry websites and social media platforms, as well as in fewer media releases being generated by the conflict’s key actors. After three decades, protest activity virtually ceased. A critical development was occurring—‘secret peace talks’ between key environmental and industry groups. The stated aims of the historic talks were to put the forestry industry on a sustainable footing and end community and political conflict over the forests (Lester and Hutchins 2012a). Prompted by the downturn in the woodchip export market, these talks were backed by national and state governments and workers’ unions, with all parties agreeing to keep the existence of the talks private until so-called common ground was reached. It took approximately six months for news media to lift the veil of secrecy around the talks. There are a range of interrelated reasons for journalists being so slow to reveal the highly significant talks and the Tasmanian Forests Agreement that they produced. Contributing elements included scepticism, with some journalists feeling that the talks were not ‘fair dinkum’ when their existence was articulated by sources (cited in Lester and Hutchins 2012b), understandable given the history of deep animosity between the groups involved in the talks. Another contributing factor was issue fatigue, with decades of conflict having left many journalists of the view that the unending forestry conflict ‘sucks the lifeblood out of Tasmanian public life’ (cited in Lester and Hutchins 2012b). There is also a long tradition of ‘flak’ (Herman and Chomsky 1988) in the coverage of environmental issues in Tasmania, which made some journalists wary of reporting the forestry story. Commonplace tactics used by influential industry and political figures in Tasmania have included direct criticism communicated to news editors and producers, lengthy formal complaints to media outlets and occasional instances of legal action. It was also hard for journalists to find credible sources willing to offer on-the-record comments about the talks.

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The eventual appearance of news stories reporting the existence of the talks saw a return to more routine media activity on news, activist and government websites, as well as on Facebook and Twitter. Moreover, spreading awareness of the talks and the Agreement sparked public concern about a lack of transparency in decisions made about the future of the forests. As one letter to The Mercury newspaper noted, ‘… the people of Tasmania should be delighted at the opportunity for some input into what will greatly affect all Tasmanians’ (Biggs 2010). Through 2013–2015, spokespeople for newly elected federal and state governments cited the secrecy surrounding the talks and a lack of community consultation as justification for ‘tearing up’ the Agreement, and the new Australian conservative government took the extraordinary step of applying to UNESCO to delist more than 70,000 hectares of forests newly added to the World Heritage Area. Protesters responded by calling for donations through political online crowdfunding organisation GetUp! to pay for billboard space on the road between the Doha airport and the Qatar National Convention Centre, where the 2014 UNESCO World Heritage Convention was held. The resulting billboards displayed a photograph of a massive eucalypt tree with the words: ‘The people of Australia thank the World Heritage Committee for listing Tasmania’s beautiful forests in 2013’ (GetUp! n.d.). The committee took eight minutes to deny the government’s request to delist the forests (Beresford 2015: 375). Quentin Beresford concludes his analysis of the rise and fall of Gunns by reflecting on the ultimately successful campaign against the pulp mill, which he says holds important lessons about the future of activist politics not only in Tasmania: There is a template in what the people of the Tamar Valley achieved. The combination of diverse, well-organised community-based groups, linked to established and battle-hardened environmental organisations, drawing on support from some high-profile personalities, utilising both old and new campaign strategies and held together by people coordinating the whole effort, proved a potent model for challenging power. In this way, the campaign against the pulp mill overcame one of the structural limitations of activist politics: fragmentation of groups accompanied by fragmentation of action. The capacity for this model to challenge corporations in cases where they are seen not to be upholding their social and/or environmental obligations is only likely to gather strength. (Beresford 2015: 396)

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At the time of writing, the Tasmanian forest wars are relatively quiet. However, the ideological position and political networks that led politicians to continue to support an industry despite evidence of highly damaging environmental, social and corporate practices (Gunns’ long-serving CEO was eventually charged with and pleaded guilty to insider-trading) have far from disappeared from public life in Tasmania. Nor have the Tasmanian environmental movement or communities facing developments withdrawn into complacency or exhaustion after decades of conflict. Rather, the relative peace in the forests is determined far from Tasmania, at the complex actuation of switching points where industry activities are increasingly monitored by activists, journalists and other corporate actors at the transnational level. In Tasmania, this is still playing out in the courts over continued attempts by the state government to introduce laws to ban protest activity at worksites (Baker 2019)—that is, to contain potentially powerful shows of dissent that will travel beyond the island’s borders to form communities of concern. The basis of the ‘communities’ that materialise in and through these switching points—derived through a combination of sophisticated political strategies and changing media and corporate practices in the face of expanding resource extraction by industry and cross-border trade activity—will be further examined in the next chapter. First, however, I explore how a recent environmental conflict with transnational influences has been shaped by these historical conflicts.

Fish As is often the way, a newspaper cartoon best sums up the state of environmental conflict in Tasmania in 2017. Under a simple drawing of an Atlantic salmon, the following is inscribed: Old Tasmanian proverb: Give someone a fish and they’ll eat for a day, teach them to farm fish and eventually the tension between growth and the environment will become a problem but we’re sure everyone’s learned their lesson from the forest wars and it will all be resolved sensibly [uproarious laughter]. (Kudelka 2017)

The repetition of features, the patterns of activity, the familiar frames, these in themselves have become a part of the Tasmanian story. How is it, a letter to Hobart’s Mercury newspaper asks, ‘that Tasmania seems to encourage perfectly nice industries to grow into monsters?’ (Graham 2019). In

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response to the news that the Tasmanian salmon industry association has hired a new chief executive from Imperial Tobacco (now Imperial Group), which news stories named only as a ‘London-listed multinational company’ (Paynter 2019), another letter writer asks: ‘Are things really that bad?… If Tasmanian Salmon and Big Tobacco have become that similar in their public relations ethos, no wonder our faith in corporate culture is collapsing’ (Lehman 2019). The narratives of conflict endure in media reporting, appearing seamlessly alongside the language of peace and reconciliation adopted in corporate social responsibility discourses. Of the new industry appointment, The Mercury newspaper reported: ‘When asked how he plans to combat those opposed to salmon farm expansion or salmon farming altogether, he said it was about transparency, openness, accountability and honesty’ (Paynter 2019). Nevertheless, some shifts are evident between the forestry and Atlantic salmon conflicts: in the visible alliances between key actors; in the explicit representation of local–global tensions; and in science’s role in mediated debate. Marine farming in Tasmania—of abalone, mussels, oysters, seahorses, trout and Atlantic salmon—became increasingly visible through the 1990s as it expanded to meet growing international markets and increasing limited capacity of wild fisheries, which now provide only about half of the 20kgs of fish consumed on average per year by every human (Cullen-Knox et al. 2019). As had already occurred in other cold-water regions of Norway and Canada, salmon farming as a traditionally inshore activity relied on access to estuaries and other waterways and thus the support of adjacent local communities. Tassal, the largest of three companies to emerge in Tasmania, is now publicly listed and the largest aquaculture business in Australia. Huon Aquaculture and Petuna, its smaller competitors, are mainly locally owned. Together, they are worth approximately AU$700 million to the Tasmanian economy and employ 2000 people, largely in regional and remote areas of the already remote island state. Salmon farming’s emergence in these areas was applauded as a partial response to an otherwise pessimistic outlook for local residents. For example, in the two main municipalities for the industry’s development, only 36% of adults in the Huon Valley and 51% in Kingborough had completed 12 years of education. In the town of Dover, 80 kilometres south of Hobart and Australia’s most southern town apart from a few shack communities, only 23.4% had completed Year 12 schooling and 39% worked in agriculture, forestry or fisheries industries. This significantly higher reliance on primary industries than for those towns within commuting distance to Hobart impacted the extent to which

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the growth of salmon farming was accepted by various communities (Leith et al. 2014). The development and implementation of coastal policy in Australia are notoriously difficult, given the different uses and values Australians attach to the coast (Foxwell-Norton 2018; Leith et al. 2014). As noted in relation to the Great Barrier Reef in the previous chapter, Australia is a nation of coast dwellers, and about 80% of the population lives within 50 kilometres of the coast. The ways in which Australian identity, lifestyles and livelihoods are associated with beaches, estuaries and oceans are magnified in Tasmania, where remoteness and poorer economic measures are compensated for by traditional affordable access to coastal areas and the accompanying benefits, including shack ownership. One in every 17 Tasmanians owns a registered boat (ABC News 2014), and forming protest fleets is a feature of social debate over Tasmanian fisheries and waterways. This occurred in 2013 and 2015 over proposals to introduce super trawlers to Australian waters (SBS News 2013) and again over various proposals to expand marine farming (see, e.g., Fromberg 2017). By far the largest of these expansions was announced in 2014, when government and industry made public its intentions to double salmon production by 2030. Despite reassurances that plans for the upscaling were supported by ‘the science’, tensions that had been simmering in the Tasmanian community became visible across social and news media. As Kerrie Foxwell-Norton has noted of mediatised environmental conflict in relation to coastal policy, affected communities ‘may not know the coast in science and technology, but they do know where they live’ (2018: 2). Moreover, the plans to expand the industry in light of free trade agreements being finalised with China, Japan and trading partners in South-East Asia including Malaysia also prompted previously private tensions within the industry to escape. Two critical moments in 2016 made these tensions within the community and salmon industry erupt—a formal Senate inquiry forced by the Greens party and an investigation by Four Corners, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship investigative journalism programme (ABC Four Corners 2016). While the factors leading up to this are complex, much of the debate prompted by these moments focused on industry activities in Macquarie Harbour, on the sparsely populated West Coast of Tasmania, in which all three companies farmed and one-third of which lies within the Tasmanian World Heritage Wilderness Area. In 2011, 9000 tonnes of salmon was produced in the harbour, but approval was given to more than

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double the allowable quota (Galea et al. 2018). Tassal, by far the largest producer out of Macquarie Harbour, would be the prime beneficiary of the expansion. In an extraordinary move, Huon Aquaculture took the federal and state governments to court, arguing that deteriorating oxygen levels proved that the harbour could not sustain the proposed upscaling, that the federal government had been remiss in approving increased quotas and that the state government was failing to protect the environment of the harbour, including the World Heritage Area (Whiting 2017). A significant difference between this and the earlier mediatised environmental conflict over forestry is evident here. Even in the face of market collapse, the Tasmanian forestry industry largely presented a united face to the world and was supported unflinchingly at a state level by both major political parties and the arms of government with responsibility for promoting, building and regulating industry activities. Political loyalty did not need to be split publicly among bickering industry actors. Mainstream news media, as noted in the previous section, was able to maintain its legacy portrayal of protesters disrupting the legitimate activities of industry/government that were supporting local Tasmanian communities. That the conflict over salmon would not follow the same script became evident with Huon’s court actions. National media coverage used the familiar framing of a David and Goliath battle, with Tassal as a ‘corporate juggernaut’ and Huon as a humble, environmentally conscious company and ‘one of Tasmania’s greatest home-grown success stories’ (Cullen-Knox et al. 2019). It also focused on the unusual action of a company taking a government to court to argue for tougher environmental regulation, while acknowledging that rival company Tassal had the most to lose if Huon won (Konkes 2017). Huon eventually lost the Federal Court case and was ordered to pay costs, in part, according to the court, because it had agreed with the original decision to expand (Shine 2018). Huon was presented as having won the ‘moral victory’ by focusing attention on the long-term sustainability of Macquarie Harbour (Thompson 2018). Following mass fish deaths in 2017, the Environment Protection Authority had already returned stocking levels to near their 2011 level, at least for another two years. Not only was conflict between industry actors purposely made visible, but so too were alliances between industry actors and environmental NGOs, which in turn publicly presented themselves as rivals in the conflict. In the conflict over forestry, criticisms and rivalry within industry or between environmental groups were mediated only when they escaped the control of leaders. In the conflict over salmon, they were deliberately

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exposed by key actors. Not surprisingly, Huon Aquaculture’s court actions were publicly supported by Environment Tasmania, which describes itself as ‘the state’s peak environment group’ (Kelly 2017), although its status as an umbrella organisation shifts dependent on need and circumstances (Tranter et al. 2017). For example, in a 2017 statement, supporting an investment by Huon in land-based fish farming, the group criticised Tassal for remaining ‘stubbornly committed to a decades old operating model, the result will be ongoing conflict which harms Brand Tasmania’: ‘Australian Ethical Investment’s recent decision to offload its Tassal shares is a clear sign that even if Tassal won’t abandon damaging plans for Macquarie Harbour and Okehampton Bay for moral and environmental reasons, there are clear business reasons to transition to a more sustainable operating model,’ Ms Kelly said. (Kelly 2017)

Nevertheless, despite these ‘moral and environmental reasons’, Environment Tasmania’s key argument was based on the fact that it was simply ‘smart business sense’, with Huon’s investment securing its ‘stake in the future of salmon farming globally’ (Kelly 2017). According to Environment Tasmania’s Strategy Director, Laura Kelly: Huon has read the global market signals correctly. With warming waters and mounting evidence of the damage caused by intensive inshore operations, the industry is zeroing in on a move to land, where it can control the growing environment. (Kelly 2017)

Environment Tasmania’s attacks on Tassal extended to the company’s partnership with WWF, repeating concerns raised in Four Corners ‘about the money exchanged between both Tassal and the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) and Tassal and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)’ (Kelly 2016). As part of the deal, this allowed ‘Tassal to feature the logo of both organisations on their products, to communicate to consumers that Tassal’s salmon is, apparently, sustainably farmed’ (Kelly 2016; see also WWF, n.d.; Tassal, n.d.-a). These actions represent a notable shift in how environmental groups operate in Tasmania: adopting industry partners as allies, along with industry discourses of market and growth, and publicly letting go of the myth of a united movement. These events also highlight the local–global tensions that are clearly visible in this latest incarnation of mediatised environmental conflict: in

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the logos on the side of Huon’s trucks claiming to carry ‘The World’s Most-Loved Salmon’, to the script of an all-media campaign featuring the CEO of Tassal: I grew up in Tassie. My journey’s led me away and back again to this place and home I love. All the things we hold near and dear: people, environment, science. What I love most about our company is what Tassal brings our local communities. We love the fish. But it is really about the people. (Tassal, n.d.-b)

This campaign actively does not sell Tassal products into the national and international markets—a separate advertising company does that. Rather, it is promoting the company itself to local audiences in order to win back the social licence it so clearly lost. Seafood governance increasingly takes place internationally (Gale and Haward 2011; Ponte 2012; Vince and Haward 2017) and, as noted in Chapter 3 in relation to social licence and the forests conflict, the imperative of environmental certification and the regimes that provide or withhold certification are now visible in media discourse as sites of contestation in themselves. Formal certification, if bestowed by a trusted governing body, can reduce conflict locally. However, if the certifying body is challenged over its methods or legitimacy, it can further undermine the credibility of an industry and its social licence (Gale 2018). Moreover, evidence of social disharmony at the site of procurement over production practices can—as the forest debate so clearly showed—slow if not fully block certification. In such cases, certification processes can trigger environmental protest, not only ensuring certifying bodies are aware of conflict over corporate practices but are aware of the increased reputational risk to their credibility as an assessor of environmental standards and expectations. Given how much is now at stake in terms of access to international markets and harmony and lifestyles for local communities, serious consideration needs to be given to the role and framing of international certification bodies as arbiter within mediatised environmental conflict. In relation to the Tasmanian salmon industry, for example, Tassal achieved formal certification from the industry-preferred certification body, Aquaculture Stewardship Council, but then was listed as unsustainable by a counter ‘certification’ site, Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide (n.d.), which was backed by environmental groups. This creates further ambiguity and uncertainty for the

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public, already struggling to understand the increased complexity of relationships between and within industry and environmental NGOs (CullenKnox et al. 2019). In the face of such ambiguity and confusion, scientific knowledge has been repeatedly invoked in this latter conflict, with certain features magnified or slightly shifting from the earlier forestry conflict. This is evident in the widespread presence of scientific data across mediated debate on the issue. Nevertheless, few scientists themselves actually appear in media, and an acute awareness of the politicisation of scientific knowledge is apparent, with the ‘buying in’ of scientific knowledge repeatedly queried. The ABC Four Corners programme, ‘Big Fish’, that aired in October 2016, for example, addressed inconsistencies in the interpretation of environmental data, but the only scientific data that was discussed on the programme related a select incident of low dissolved oxygen in Macquarie Harbour, giving little context of environmental process (Cullen-Knox et al. 2019). Further, as Coco Cullen-Knox et al. point out, this was presented by a scientist from the University of Melbourne, rather than drawing on significant local expertise (2019). The presentation of scientific knowledge largely disconnected from its producers and proponents was carried into the news media coverage that followed both the Senate inquiry and the Four Corners programme. One-quarter of news articles following the inquiry and 55% following the Four Corners programme mentioned science in a general capacity, such as the role of science in informing the management of the Tasmanian salmon industry or excerpts from scientific reports. It was, for example, the ‘first casualty’, ‘ignored’ and used ‘selectively’ (Kempton 2016). However, only 7% and 3% of articles respectively featured scientists themselves (Cullen-Knox et al. 2019). This disconnection has ramifications for how scientific knowledge and expertise are carried in environmental conflict. Trust is vital at the nexus of government, industry and community—the space where social licence is granted (Edwards et al. 2018). Actors entering mediated environmental conflict do so with no certainty to how they will be received, let alone trusted. Yet to not appear is a riskier strategy. Whether scientists themselves are present or not, their data will be used by the key actors—media, industry, government, and campaigners—and will become a source of contention in itself. When the data is not accompanied into the public domain by its scientific creators and proponents, it is prone to politicisation—rendering futile any decision on the part of scientists to deliberately stay out of public debate so as not to politicise their work (Lester and Foxwell-Norton,

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in press). While many scientists do not have the necessary communication skills or knowledge to join controversial debates (Besley and Tanner 2011) or have been burned by previous experience (Dunwoody 2015), there is also evidence that others see themselves as remote from the public sphere, a messy space of negotiation and contest that has a clearly troubled relationship with fact (Simis et al. 2016; Dudo and Besley 2016; Besley and Nisbet 2013). Our direct observation showed that when politicisation of science is entrenched within a conflict, scientists’ involvement, along with that of their data, is rarely presented as that of a key actor who is able to actuate switching points within mediatised environmental conflict. For example, in one protest meeting, the fact that the community of King Island had used crowdfunding to raise money to hire its own ‘independent’ scientists (Cullen-Knox et al., under review) became the focus of debate. A concern was raised by the organiser and leader of the meeting that this assessment could indicate that the location was in fact environmentally suitable. In response, another opposition group leader suggested that regardless of what the outcome of the assessment was they would oppose it because ‘that doesn’t mean the community has given a licence to do it and that it is acceptable’. For The Mercury newspaper, this is an example of the intractability of environmental conflict in Tasmania: There are those who, regardless of the science presented, will never, ever accept the practice. Likewise, opponents are too easily dismissed as agitators or extremists. In our experience many are not. They are people with valid concerns. Their views need to be listened to. Too many issues in Tasmania are divided into streams of black and white. Forestry is a key example. You are with us or you are against us. But so much of the community operates in the grey space in between. (The Mercury 2017)

Or as one of our interviewees expressed it: I have talked to some of [those opposed to a new salmon farm], ‘We just don’t want a marine farm there. Visually we don’t want one there.’ Well, that is fine, that is a reason for not having one, it’s a valid argument. Government were doing the same on the other side of the coin, everyone just kept using the science, but really, I do not think… we actually never got to speak about the real science. (quoted in Cullen-Knox et al. 2019)

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Peat Leith and colleagues (2014: 293) suggest that ‘in complex environmental contexts, such as the estuaries where salmon aquaculture takes place… appropriate involvement of scientists… can link stakeholders, build trust, foster deeper and better informed debate and, perhaps, even effectively distribute responsibility’. However, they also point to the ‘vicious cycle’ of mistrust and a lack of understanding that leaves space for inflammatory media debate. Protest emerges from and is embedded within this vicious cycle. How the transnational influences this cycle will be explored more fully in the next chapter.

Conclusion These examples present different formations of nonetheless the same elements long found within environmental protest. There are historical resonances of community, environments and land use; increasing global demands and pressure; complex communicative and supply chains; new, responsive media frames strategically deployed by various protagonists; and old and new campaign practices. Notions of rights and responsibilities are invoked by a range of actors, as are expectations around how community opinion is informed and gauged. This is a picture of complex interactions between media, activist strategies and campaigns, formal politics and decision-making processes, and industry activities and trade, which often leave the potential arbiters of science and communities sidelined. The Tasmanian case makes it clear that environmental protest over land use and resource procurement cannot be understood in isolation from the international contexts driving resource demand and trade and influencing the ways in which protest is enabled or contained. The next chapter shifts focus to these international factors, including to the forests of Sarawak now connected to Tasmania by these international flows of trade and protest, and provides further detail of the pressures flowing across markets and their supply chains and the global networks of media and activism intersecting with them.

References ABC Four Corners. 2016. Big Fish. 31 October. Retrieved from https://www.abc. net.au/4corners/big-fish/7972064. ABC News. 2012. Anti-logging Protesters Charged. 12 January. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-12/protesters-charged/3769864.

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ABC News. 2014. Tasmania boasts highest level of boat ownership in Australia. 12 January. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-0112/tasmania-boasts-highest-level-of-boat-ownership-in-australia/5196108. Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide. n.d. Retrieved from https://www. sustainableseafood.org.au/fish.php/1/6/atlantic-salmon. Baker, Emily. 2019. Taxpayers $350K bill for failed laws. The Mercury, 19 January. Beresford, Quentin. 2015. The rise and fall of Gunns Ltd. Sydney, NSW: NewSouth Books. Besley, John C., and Andrea H. Tanner. 2011. What science communication scholars think about training scientists to communicate. Science Communication 33 (2): 239–263. Besley, John C., and Matthew Nisbet. 2013. How scientists view the public, the media and the political process. Public Understanding of Science 22 (6): 644–659. Biggs, J. 2010. People should know about forest talks (Letter to the Editor), The Mercury, 26 August. Collins, Catherine. 2013. Clear cuts on clearcutting: YouTube, activist videos and narrative strategies. In Environmental conflict and the media, ed. Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins. New York: Peter Lang. Cullen-Knox, Coco, Aysha Fleming, Libby Lester, and Emily Ogier. Under review. Negotiating the environmental risks of salmon aquaculture in Tasmania. Cullen-Knox, Coco, Libby Lester, Aysha Fleming, and Emily Ogier. 2019. Publicised scrutiny and mediatised environmental conflict: The case of Tasmanian salmon aquaculture. Marine Policy 100: 307–315. Davis, Natasha. 1995. Paperpower: The Japanese paper industry and the environment in Australia and Japan. Japanese Studies 15 (1): 1–25. Dudo, Anthony, and John C. Besley. 2016. Scientists’ prioritization of communication objectives for public engagement. PLoS ONE 11 (2): e0148867. https:// doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148867. Dunwoody, Sharon. 2015. Environmental scientists and public communication. In The Routledge handbook of environment and communication, ed. Anders Hansen and Robert Cox. Abingdon: Routledge. Edwards, Peter, Aysha Fleming, Justine Lacey, Libby Lester, Libby Pinkard, Katharina Ruckstuhl, Carel Bezuidenhout, Tim Payn, Karen Bayne, and Tracy Williams. 2018. Trust, engagement, information and social licence— Insights from New Zealand. Environmental Research Letters. https://doi.org/ 10.1088/1748-9326/aaf33c. Flanagan, Richard. 2007. Out of control: The tragedy of Tasmania’s forests. The Monthly, May. Retrieved from http://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2007/ may/1348543148/richard-flanagan/out-control.

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Forestry Tasmania. 2012. Forest management in Tasmania: The truth. Retrieved from www.forestrytas.com.au/uploads/File/pdf/pdf2012/fm_the_ truth_2012_web.pdf. Forestry Tasmania. n.d. Old growth, regrowth, high conservation value—What do they all mean? Retrieved from www.forestrytas.com.au/international-desk/oldgrowth-regrowth-high-conservation-valuewhat-do-they-all-mean. Foxwell-Norton, Kerrie. 2018. Environmental communication and critical coastal policy: Communities, culture and nature. London: Routledge. Fromberg, Annah. 2017. Anti-fish farm flotilla protests Tassal expansion at Okehampton Bay. ABC News, 17 September. Retrieved from https://www. abc.net.au/news/2017-09-17/okehampton-bay-fish-farm-protest-takes-tothe-water/8954512. Gale, Fred. 2018. NGOs and private governance/certification challenges. In Handbook of research on NGOs, ed. Aynsley Kellow and Hannah Murphy-Gregory. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Gale, Fred, and Marcus Haward. 2011. Global commodity governance: State responses to sustainable forest and fisheries certification. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Galea, Siobhan, Emily Street, and James Dunlevie. 2018. Macquarie Harbour salmon: 1.35 million deaths prompt call to “empty” waterway of farms. ABC News, 29 May. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-29/ salmon-deaths-in-macquarie-harbour-top-one-million-epa-says/9810720. GetUp! n.d. Let’s cover Doha with billboards of Tassie forests. Retrieved from https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/save-our-forests/doha-billboards/ lets-cover-doha-with-billboards-of-tassie-forests. Graham, Alistair. 2019. Salmon front-man (Letter to the Editor). The Mercury, 17 January. Herman, Edward S., and Noam Chomsky. 1988. Manufacturing consent: The political economy of mass media. New York: Pantheon. Huon Valley Environment Centre. 2011. Behind the veneer: Forest destruction and Ta Ann Tasmania’s lies. Retrieved from http://mps.tas.greens.org.au/2012/ 02/behind-the-veneer-report-by-huonvalley-environment-centre. Hutchins, Brett, and Libby Lester. 2013. Introduction: Tree-sitting in the network society. In Environmental conflict and the media, ed. Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins. New York: Peter Lang. Hutchins, Brett, and Libby Lester. 2015. Theorizing the enactment of mediatized environmental conflict. International Communication Gazette 77 (4): 337–358. IndustryEdge. 2013. Australian hardwood chip export volume & price forecasts and stumpage and harvest cost review. Report prepared for Macquarie Forestry Services Pty Ltd. Retrieved from https://www.macquarie.com.au/dafiles/ Internet/mgl/au/advisers/campaign/static-file/independent-expert-report. pdf.

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Kelly, Laura. 2016. Big Fish: Four Corners investigates the business of salmon farming. Environment Tasmania, 5 November. Retrieved from https://www.et. org.au/big_fish_four_corners_investigates_the_business_of_salmon_farming. Kelly, Laura. 2017. Environment Tasmania praises Huon leadership—Calls for government structural adjustment package to assist industry old guard. Environment Tasmania, 7 April. Retrieved from https://www.et.org.au/environment_ tasmania_praises_huon_leadership. Kempton, Helen. 2016. Relevant science first casualty in Four Corners Big Fish doco, says Tassal boss Mark Ryan. The Mercury, 1 November. Retrieved from https://www.themercury.com.au/news/tasmania/relevant-science-firstcasualty-in-four-corners-big-fish-doco-says-tassal-boss-mark-ryan/news-story/ 7c5798ef8b60bff22f7583bc1aee9f4d. Konkes, Claire. 2017. Bender’s choice: Tasmanian salmon, from farm to court. The Monthly, October. Retrieved from https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/ 2017/october/1506780000/claire-konkes/bender-s-choice. Kudelka, Jon. 2017. [Cartoon] Sunday Tasmanian, 3 September. Lehman, Greg. 2019. Public confidence (Letter to the Editor). The Mercury, 17 January. Leith, Peat, Emily Ogier, and Marcus Howard. 2014. Science and social license: Defining environmental sustainability of Atlantic Salmon aquaculture in SouthEastern Tasmania, Australia. Social Epistemology 28 (3–4): 277–296. Lester, Libby. 2010. Big tree, small news: Media access, symbolic power and strategic intervention. Journalism 11 (5): 589–606. Lester, Libby. 2012. No Images from the forest Frontline: Invisibility in the internet age. Island 127: 36–41. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. 2012a. The power of the unseen: Environmental conflict, the media and invisibility. Media, Culture and Society 34 (7): 832–846. Lester, Libby, and Brett Hutchins. 2012b. Soft journalism, politics and environmental reporting: An Australian story. Journalism 13 (5): 654–667. Lester, Libby, and Kerrie Foxwell-Norton. In press. Citizens and science: Media, communication and conservation. In Making a difference: Linking science and policy, ed. W. Sutherland et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGaurr, Lyn. 2013. Not so soft? Travel journalism, environmental protest, power and the internet. In Environmental conflict and the media, ed. Libby Lester and Brett Hutchins. New York: Peter Lang. Neales, Sue. 2008. Bartlett’s Forestry Balancing Act. The Mercury, 1 November. Nikkei Ecology. 2012. Australian certified wood products accused of environment destruction: eNGOs develop boycott campaign against Japanese customer companies—SMKC, Eidai, Panasonic, Daiwa and Sekisui, May: 45–47. Ogle, Greg. 2010. Anti-SLAPP law reform in Australia. Review of European Community & International Environmental Law 19 (1): 35–44.

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Paynter, Jack. 2019. Salmon industry appoints new boss in united front for the future. The Mercury, 11 January. Retrieved from https://www.themercury. com.au/business/salmon-industry-appoints-new-boss-in-united-front-for-thefuture/news-story/2b82179695cd6293d031442a5c9ad701. Ponte, Stefano. 2012. The Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) and the making of a market for sustainable fish. Journal of Agrarian Change 12 (2–3): 300–315. SBS News. 2013. Factbox: The debate about super-trawler “Margiris”. 26 August. Retrieved from https://www.sbs.com.au/news/factbox-the-debatearound-super-trawler-margiris. Schultz, Julianne. 1998. Reviving the fourth estate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shine, Rhiannon. 2018. Huon Aquaculture loses legal battle against Tasmanian rivals over Macquarie Harbour. ABC News, 6 July. Retrieved from https:// www.abc.net.au/news/2018-07-06/huon-aquaculture-loses-court-battleover-macquarie-harbour/9949520. Shizuoka News. 2011. Eco-certification is Dubious. 21 November. Simis, Molly J., Haley Madden, Michael A. Cacciatore, and Sara K. Yeo. 2016. The lure of rationality: Why does the deficit model persist in science communication? Public understanding of science 25 (4): 400–414. Stedman, M. 2010. Gunns in dramatic shake-up: Gay gets pulp mill role. The Mercury, 24 April. Straumann, Lukas. 2014. Money logging: On the trail of the Asian timber mafia. Basel: Schwabe AG. Swales, Penelope. 2010. Activism: ‘Gunns 20’ reaches final settlement. Alternative Law Journal 35 (1): 39. Ta Ann Tasmania Pty Ltd. 2012. Media release: Green market campaign costs jobs. Retrieved from www.taanntas.com.au/userfiles/Documents/20120213% 20job%20losses%20due%20to%20green%20campaign.pdf. Tasmanian Government. 2011. Tasmanian forests intergovernmental agreement. Retrieved from www.environment.gov.au/land/forests/pubs/tasmanianforests-intergovernmental-agreement.pdf. Tassal. n.d.-a. Sustainability. Retrieved from http://www.tassal.com.au/ sustainability/#environment. Tassal. n.d.-b. Tassie’s Tassal—Mark [video]. Retrieved from http://tassalgroup. com.au/mark/. The Mercury. 2017. Test case for fish farmers. 18 February. Thompson, Brad. 2018. Huon claims moral victory despite court loss in fish farming fight. Australian Financial Review, 9 July. Retrieved from https:// www.afr.com/business/huon-claims-moral-victory-despite-court-loss-in-fishfarming-fight-20180709-h12fi4. Tranter, Bruce, Libby Lester, and Lyn McGaurr. 2017. Leadership and the construction of environmental concerns. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Vince, Joanna, and Marcus Haward. 2017. Hybrid governance of aquaculture: Opportunities and challenges. Journal of Environmental Management 201: 138–144. Whiting, Natalie. 2017. Huon Aquaculture claims salmon farms damaged World Heritage area in Macquarie Harbour. ABC News, 15 March. Retrieved from https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-14/we-damagedworld-heritage-area-claims-salmon-company/8353926. WWF. n.d. Tassal. Retrieved from https://www.wwf.org.au/about-us/partners/ tassal#gs.p3pU3azX.

CHAPTER 6

The Information Trade

As Japan prepares for the 2020 Olympic Games and the international scrutiny that accompanies a global mega-event, Tokyo-based NGOs Fairwood Partners and Friends of the Earth Japan (FOEJ) hire a seminar room in an office block in Tokyo’s Minato business district. They also hire two simultaneous translators, usually employed by the Japanese government to accompany ministers and trade officials on overseas missions. The NGOs have invited Japanese companies that trade in and use imported timber to a seminar on due diligence and the risk of illegality in Japan’s timber supply chain. Imported timber is used widely in Japan for everything from most home flooring to concrete formwork in construction, including for the New National Stadium near Shinjuku. Speakers at the seminar include international environmental and human rights activists from the European and US-based groups, Global Witness and the Environmental Investigation Agency. Both groups deploy undercover techniques and satellite imagery among other methods to expose the illegal timber trade and associated abuses to the rights of local communities and traditional landowners. Previous seminars have featured Australian NGO Markets for Change, which emerged during the Tasmanian forests conflict, surveying Japanese corporations about their procurement practices and sharing information and strategies with these United States and European organisations. Surprisingly—in both Fairwood Partners and FOEJs’ experience as campaigners and mine as an observer of environmental politics—more than © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lester, Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9_6

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120 company officers attend the seminar, forcing a last-minute change to a larger room. Among the companies represented are Japan’s giant general trading companies, with reach across the globe’s resource, financing and construction sectors. These companies provide the historic template for the global trade of today, dominated as it is by distant resource procurement and development, and complex supply and financing chains. Several of the country’s leading journalists who cover environmental issues also attend. They are here, as corporate and media attendees reveal later during interviews, for a simple reason: the NGOs know more about the global timber trade, due diligence and potential corporate risk than they do. As PowerPoint slide after PowerPoint slide suggests, the risk of buying and trading timber from the back hills of Sarawak or the virgin forests of Papua New Guinea remains high. Weak certification schemes or nebulous notions of ‘social licence’ do not protect these corporate giants from the reputational risk that can accompany buying timber illegally harvested from regions struggling with poverty, illegal land grabs and political corruption. For all the statements of concern for human rights and environmental sustainability that appear on their corporate social responsibility websites, corporations are either acutely aware of or wilfully uninterested in the unknowability of their supply chains. In many cases, corporations acknowledge it is only two links back in their increasingly complex supply chains before ‘knowing’ is broken, and the companies become vulnerable to misinformation provided by local suppliers or officials or their own reluctance to investigate. Under these conditions, even when they are on the ground physically in the region where the timber is logged and the oil palms planted, it can be difficult for company representatives to find their way through the fog of foreign cultural practices, language and political and corporate processes to know if the agreeable indigenous leader to whom they have been introduced by a local supplier is really a leader, or the timber stockpile they are inspecting comes from the right side of an ill-defined boundary. So they are here at the seminar, seated in snug rows at long desks, taking notes in English and Japanese, measuring the potential risks that the speakers are formally outlining and implicitly threatening, dot point by translated dot point. The previous chapter identified evolving features within environmental protest at the sites where resources are produced and sourced, identifying how interactions between the spheres of mediatised environmental conflict display both recognisable patterns and new dynamics in the face of

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global influences. Focusing further on the trade of information that follows the flow of resources, this chapter turns full attention to these global influences—to the multinational procurers and buyers, to the NGOs operating transnationally and to changing journalistic practices supporting and interrupting the international flow of information. The interconnection between Tasmania and Sarawak, the Malaysian state in northwest Borneo, provides a case study for understanding the ways in which the spheres of mediatised environmental conflict operate through global networks of diplomacy and trade, NGOs and campaigns, and media. Sarawak is known for an export forest industry that has generated massive wealth for its owners, while operating under regimes of questionable governance and opaque laws. Now fully entwined with the palm oil industry via the process in which vast tracts of land are converted from native forests to oil palms, Sarawak’s timber industry remains one of the world’s most controversial, with unsustainable logging practices and lack of environmental certification, unjust alienation of traditional owners and local communities from their lands and the close ties of major companies to politicians and their families (Straumann 2014). Six companies hold tenure over 3.7 million hectares of forests or 30% of Sarawak’s total land area. This includes Ta Ann, whose subsidiary operates in Tasmania—among many other places—with continuing state government support. Illegal logging operations are also rife. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that approximately 50% of all wood products from Sarawak could be illegally harvested (UNODC 2013: 95). Associated incidents of violence include the killing of activist Bill Kayong, who in June 2016 was shot dead at traffic lights on his way to work in Sarawak’s second city of Miri (Then 2018). Local journalists have been cowed by government complicity in the land grabs, a mainstream media largely owned and controlled by the forest companies and a social world turned upside down by land conversions in which they and their families are intimately involved. Meanwhile, palm oil production has doubled worldwide in the last decade, ensuring the demand for cleared Sarawak land continues (Amnesty International 2016). Within this context, activists carry out transnational investigations to uncover information supported by international NGOs providing resources and global networks, while journalists deploy skills developed within mainstream newsrooms and both old and new media technologies and platforms to effectively campaign on environmental issues, dissolving already porous boundaries around ‘professional journalism’. A global politics of the environment is being formed and shaped at these switching points, with

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transnational interactions around specific places ensuring ‘here’ becomes a critical reality. These interactions are occurring in the space of obscured commercial activity; of shifting NGO-industry allegiances and journalism practices; of corporate social responsibility, brand protection and risk assessment; of environmental crimes and untraceable chains of responsibility; of the transnational sharing of information; and of the increasing use of violence to contain these flows. These are the spaces of contemporary environmental protest. A note on methods: this chapter draws largely on 40 interviews and direct observation in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the UK, conducted between 2014 and 2018. Given the commercial and community sensitivities at the heart of this study, including within the media industries and business cultures of Japan and Malaysia (see, e.g., Freeman 2000; Straumann 2014), interviewees were offered anonymity in order to encourage them to speak as freely as possible and have been de-identified in the chapter. These interviewees are identified in this chapter by a number and category. While it is unrealistic to expect full openness in the face of such sensitivities even with the condition of full anonymity, interviews provided important insight into how information is sourced and circulated to impact decision-making processes. Overall, interviewees included 16 activists based in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the United States, Europe and the UK but operating in a transnational capacity either with international organisations or in networked local and national organisations. Interviews were also conducted with corporate executives of five large Japanese companies with multiple business operations including construction and retail, and all involved in importing products into Japan. The majority of these interviewees were employed as managers of corporate social sustainability departments. Most meetings were with two executives from each corporation and were assisted by a professional translator. I also interviewed two corporate social responsibility (CSR) consultants in Tokyo with expertise in international governance and certification. Seven Australian government trade officials based in Hobart, Tokyo and Kuching were interviewed and six journalists who had covered environmental issues related to resource procurement and trade with Japan in Tokyo, Kuching and London. Only Clare Rewcastle Brown, whose work as an investigative journalist and campaigner has been internationally recognised since the Malaysian general election of 2018 (Ellis-Petersen 2019; Griffiths 2019), has been identified with her permission. Other interviewees included tour operators, local government officials and oil palm industry consultants.

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The interviews were supplemented by direct observation in Tokyo and Sarawak, including of trade mission, oil palm and durian plantations, the New National Stadium site in Tokyo, and activist-organised events, including the one described above.

Industry Deforestation in tropical regions, driven largely in recent years by a demand for the high-quality, competitively priced timber and for the consequently cleared land ideal for oil palms with its fast returns and high per-hectare yields, has been a focus of international NGO activity since the late 1990s. In parallel with social media-based campaigns targeting brands, government-industry-NGO activities have led to the introduction or strengthening of laws in notably Europe, the United States and Australia in relation to the import of illegal timbers. These include the 2008 Legal Timber Protection amendments to the US Lacey Act, the European Union’s Timber Regulation in 2010 and Australia’s Illegal Logging Prohibition Act in 2012. Yet, as with the social media campaigns that generate consumer backlash against brands, the new laws are not proving effective in slowing overall rates of tropical deforestation. This has been in part blamed on the growing markets for timber and palm oil beyond the regulated west, most notably in China and India; the discursive shift from ‘sustainability’ to ‘illegality’ that accompanied the laws’ introduction, taking the focus off sustainable harvesting and consumption practices (Leopold et al. 2016); and the difficulty in monitoring and policing global trade. As Dauvergne and Lister suggest: For legal timber and imports and exports, an increasingly globalized timber economy creates obscure chains of custody. For illegal production and trade, the task of monitoring, governing and ensuring accountability is even tougher. Investigating the illegal activities within just one chain in not unlike a lone-wolf detective chasing thousands of suspects across hundreds of jurisdictions. False leads, dead ends and incomplete evidence are unavoidable. And questioning all, or even most, of the suspects is virtually impossible, in part because the list of suspects is ever-changing in a corporate shell game of obfuscation. (Dauvergne and Lister 2011: 23)

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Major corporations might represent themselves as sustainability champions to a global consumer society, yet their green credentials are often based on meeting a low bar, which makes them vulnerable to media-based markets campaigns and political and corporate scandals. At the same time, certification schemes spawn counter certification schemes, that are in turn promoted using a range of media practices and platforms, further muddying the message for consumers and for how governments and corporations should respond. So when, within this context, the Australian trade officials based in Japan suggest that for Japanese trading companies ‘brand is everything’ (Interview with author, Trade Officials, 4, 5), they are not only referencing an historical business culture that can extend back centuries and is evident in the corporate messaging these corporations present to the world, but a real fear of exposure and subsequent brand loss. These companies tread a tightrope between operating in 90 countries in industries from finance to energy to metals to machinery and chemicals (as Mitsubishi Corporation does, for example) and knowing enough of these operations to protect its brand and meet its corporate principle: ‘Strive to enrich society, both materially and spiritually, while contributing towards the preservation of the global environment’ (mitsubishi.com, n.d.). Mitsubishi Australia nervously trod this discursive tightrope when it moved its investment in Tasmania from export woodchips to dairy, which in turn became fraught with conflict as major international companies took over the local industry. How and what can such Japanese investors and buyers operating in distant locales really know about local effect and conflict at the site of resource procurement in Tasmania or Borneo? Corporate interviewees in Japan expressed a common sentiment: ‘Our approach is to sincerely address concerns. The company policy is to immediately improve if [it] find fault’ (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 2). This, according to an interviewee from the construction arm and timber importer of another of Japan’s largest general trading companies, was the main reason they agreed to meet with NGOs when it was suggested they were purchasing illegal timber from Sarawak. They met and reviewed documents, which the corporation then sought to verify through its own on-the-ground visit. However, it is recognised that these visits in themselves are no guarantee: … we don’t cut the logs ourselves; cut, port or ship. Standing trees are difficult to judge for us. We need to bring specialists to establish findings. So we are reliant on suppliers and the government sector. It is difficult.

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One of the suppliers introduced us to indigenous people from Sarawak. They comment, saying they are satisfied with this supplier’s performance. But then Global Witness provides a different opinion from indigenous people about the same supplier. So, yes, NGOs provide information that we didn’t have before. (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 3)

The ‘noise’ within public debate—in this case, from competing claims being strategically deployed by the Sarawak government and the timber industry and those sourced by NGO Global Witness—is regularly invoked by corporate interviewees as the source of their vulnerability. In seeking to cut through the ‘noise’, they describe an assessment process that includes media monitoring, plus meetings with suppliers and NGOs. NGOs are described as ‘experts’, with on-the-ground experience of local suppliers’ procurement practices and local communities’ acceptance or otherwise of these practices and with international networks that stretch further and deeper than those of even these giant trading companies. ‘We don’t collect the information every day, but they collected those kinds of information every day so they know better than us’ (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 4). As one company corporate social responsibility executive noted of the reasons, their retail company—one of Asia’s largest—meets regularly with NGOs: One is to understand them because sometimes if we misunderstand them they … criticise us, so we have to understand what is their ideas, what is their thinking… The second one is these are experts. [They] know a lot of international activities, they have international relationships, that is something we don’t have and they have expertise… We act together, we discuss problems, the NGOs start to understand what is our problem and we start to listen to their problems… They say something, it’s not just a claim. They now bring a proposal when they criticise us or when they ask us to change. (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 4)

Nevertheless, even if accepting evidence that activities are creating environmental harm or even potentially illegal, some corporations claim they have no choice but to continue. Corporations argue, for example, that there is no substitute for Sarawak timbers given their strength and suitability for use as construction formwork, even rejecting requests from the Japanese government to avoid potential controversy by only sourcing timber domestically for construction related to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 5; see also Bruno Manser Fund 2019). They also claim that Japanese companies are an easy target for activists,

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in part because of the visibility and potential for scandal that accompanies the Olympic Games, but also because of specific cultural business practices. ‘It is our national character,’ one interviewee said. ‘Japan apologises. Always apologises. It is easy to attack us’ (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 3). A common comment from interviewees was that if campaigners were genuine about wanting to protect forests rather than producing superficial, short-term media victories, they would be focused on Chinese and Indian markets, who have overtaken Japan as the biggest buyers of Malaysian timber (Interview with author, CSR Consultant, 2). Even better, the companies suggest, they should focus directly on changing government regulations in relation to international certification. Given brand-focused activism’s reliance on the threat of shifting mass consumer behaviour, it is interesting to note the perceptions of Japanese corporations, including major retailers, about their customers’ attitudes to social media-carried pleas to sustainability. All interviewees in Japan, including those from industry, activism and news media, noted that Japanese consumers are largely impervious to sustainability campaigns, although they suggested there had been a shift in some environmental and eco-labelling campaigns following the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. This natural disaster killed almost 16,000 people and destroyed nuclear reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, leading to the long-term evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people and lasting impacts across the energy, agricultural and fishing sectors, among others. Interviewees agreed that Japanese consumers will largely make purchasing decisions on the basis of price, health and aesthetics (e.g. maintaining their age-old commitment to the use of timber in their homes), and thus, consumer activism is not a widely used trigger to prompt corporate change. As summarised by one industry corporate social responsibility executive: When we have workshops or meetings about how we can advance for example sustainable production and consumption, all these people say, ‘oh but you know in Japan consumers don’t have, you know, enough sense of responsibility’. They just seek for cheap things, cheap commodities. Only prices mean everything, it seems like. People are quite ignorant, so government has to give some information that can [inform a] smarter consumer. It’s a typical way; compared with those in Europe, we have quite quiet moderate kind of consumer activities. (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 4)

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The Ta Ann Tasmania case, as outlined in the previous chapter, is a case in point, where Tasmanian activists were startled by the scale of their impact in terms of Japanese companies withdrawing contracts when their cyberaction brand-focused campaign had attracted so few individual actions (see also Lester 2014). Rather, it was the evidence provided directly to Japanese corporate executives in face-to-face meetings that the timber they were procuring and marketing as plantation was, in fact, sourced from native forests. As the companies themselves suggest, it is international reputation and the threat of scandal that is at stake, and thus, the capacity to continue operating across the vast global networks Japan relies on for food and resources. As one interviewee explains: …it’s not from the domestic pressure but the pressure from outside. Whilst Japanese companies go outside Japan, always we face that kind of reputation compliance risks which we are aware of inside the market… [There] was a huge complaint and we were forced to deal with. We have to once again review what was done and what was wrong, and we established a procurement system and the management monitoring policy, that kind of thing. And we changed procurement vendors but in order to address that kind of critical things, we had to learn a lot from many people. That time we listened to many stakeholders’ voices including NGOs and then they came to address us. So the expectations rightly [was that] it was a very, very important thing… Once you are outside [Japan] you need to listen to other voices. And if you can build in that kind of mechanism inside your system then you might be able to find a better way to address responsible procurement… No-one wants to be accused of any bad conduct. (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 5)

What and how corporations ‘know’ within the context of local politics, global markets and diverse media practices remains the principle challenge. ‘There is no such thing as a community without local conflict,’ one manager said. ‘We need to weigh up and understand the conflict’ (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 1). And consumer and political expectations are always changing: Palm oil is a good example. It was initially very popular, and we began working in the area, buying plantations. But then it became clear that the business was contrary to our CSR principles so we moved out of the business. It was costly and potentially damaged our brand. It is not something we would want to do too often. That’s why we work with some NGOs. (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 1)

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Language remains a crucial factor in the trade of information. One CSR consultant working with a trading company’s forestry arm described the significance of language to his daily information sourcing routine: I personally use Google a lot and because most of the information comes to us is Japan domestic and everything is in Japanese so I search on the English site for [company name], ‘tropical rainforest’, ‘harvesting’ …. So if say WWF has whatever campaign, it takes sometimes one month to get to us, you know, for them to be translated into Japanese and Japanese people start to hear about that news in Japanese. And if it’s really a big one, I’m sure that they co-ordinate that it goes up maybe simultaneously… So my advantage is that I can search in English. It doesn’t necessarily mean that everything will be translated into Japanese and the Japanese papers pick up the topic. But that’s one criteria for us that if it becomes Japanese language news that is really concerning. (Interview with author, CSR Consultant, 1)

The spectre of negative news media coverage of corporate activities is present with all industry interviewees, and they acknowledge that the new legal and certification regimes do not provide the comfort they had hoped for, given the proliferation of competing schemes with varying degrees of requirement. Companies who meet requirements of even the tougher schemes are often accused of not going far enough. As a CSR consultant noted, reflecting comments from the companies themselves: ‘They believe they are doing the right thing, so it is quite difficult to them to understand the situation I think’ (Interview with author, CSR Consultant, 2). One forest company executive explained of the Japanese context: … it is often said that say in the US that if anything happens… if you pay the fine and then people will forget so of course it’s not good but you can [continue] business. But in Japan there is this sort of social sanction and then even if it’s not legally wrong, if someone starts to shout that, ‘I can’t believe your company did that’, whatever, then if it goes to a certain level, it’s very difficult for that business to come back… There are many cases in the past 10, 15 years… It’s not about illegal, it’s really emotional and that’s very difficult. (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 5)

In all cases, corporate interviewees acknowledged their vulnerabilities to environmental protest within international trade, including that their capacity to know about procurement practices and local conflict at the site of procurement was limited. In fact, none suggested they were able to

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go further than two steps before becoming insecure about their knowledge about their suppliers’ practices and surrounding political contexts. The recognition of this as a vulnerability means that despite ‘bad memories’ (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 5), corporate doors have opened to international NGOs with their extensive networks and ‘fingers on the pulse’ of consumer and public/political acceptability.

Campaigners When Ulrich Beck described NGOs as the ‘entrepreneurs of the global commonwealth’ (2006: 105), he was suggesting that NGOs had not only developed the ways in which global issues are categorised and understood, but had placed these issues on the political agenda, internationally and nationally. However, according to Beck, given that these ‘self-declared creators of publics and interveners in foreign jurisdictions and forms of life’ traded in values and information, their power was vulnerable to misinformation and dependent on the ‘more or less voluntary cooperation of states and economic enterprises for the active aversion of harm’ (2006: 106). Beck captures some of the conditions in which NGOs operate in contemporary transnational politics. Accurate information is a source of their advocatory power. How this works in practice in relation to transnational flows of politics rarely sits in the deliberative ideals of international relations. Environmental and human rights information is often laden with images and symbols that resonate differently according to culture-specific meanings and histories (Lester and Cottle 2009). The local distorts global communicative flows, especially when it provides symbolic representations of the costs of losing forests to logging or land to oil palms (Murphy 2017), but also through definitions of legality and broader norms for governance under which resource industries and media systems operate (Flew and Waisbord 2015). Local conflict over the environment and land control can be conflated or dismissed dependent on access to knowledge about local media practices, political activism or geographic detail (Hutchins and Lester 2015). And as noted above, the role of language in this information flow is not well studied, but access to expert translation must be a key element in the way political knowledge is transferred transnationally (Waisbord 2016). While the well-resourced status of many NGOs operating internationally is now recognised, their continuing reliance on local activists for highly specialised knowledge, on-the-ground networks and historic context is less

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acknowledged. Here, the relationship of NGOs operating on a global stage to those activists with their feet firmly planted on the contested land is mirrored in some ways in the supply chains that link local loggers in Borneo or Tasmania to the giant trading and retail corporations headquartered in Tokyo. Furthermore, within the broader category of ‘activism’, it should not be presumed that messages flow evenly or without contestation between actors. Activists working in this realm of environmental politics can produce competing discourses as they seek influence with key stakeholders, while also working to coordinate activities and events to achieve high visibility (Tranter et al. 2017). Japanese-based campaigners agree with their corporate targets that mass consumer campaigns rarely have impact in Japan. As one activist working for an international NGO in Japan put it: ‘Awareness of environmental issue[s] for Japanese people is very low’ (Interview with author, Activist, 8). Nevertheless, this also has the flow-on effect, reinforced by the international focus on legal-illegal wood, of making it difficult to promote greater sustainable practices. According to a local Japanese forest campaigner: ‘Legality is important. Unfortunately, sustainability is not so important for them. It’s price and volume and legality’ (Interview with author, Activist, 14). Under these conditions, activists say the most effective form of environmental protest is to remain focused on specific products and companies, supported by a small highly targeted online campaign, rather than mass rallies or consumer campaigns. As one campaigner for another international NGO stationed in Tokyo suggested: Here I can say the vast majority of companies that we’ve dealt with have no idea how to deal with activism. So if you can get a critical mass of people online or their customers or whoever to speak out about what they’re doing they usually don’t know how to deal with it and will fold really quickly. … We always reach out to the companies before we do a public push to give them the opportunity to do something before we potentially endanger their brand. And often they’ll talk to us and it will be very productive and we won’t do anything at all, it just happens. But sometimes they’ll be like, no piss off, and then, okay, no worries. (Interview with author, Activist, 16)

The focus of international campaign organisations on social media-enabled collectivism, reflected in much of the protest literature emerging in recent years, is not easily applied in Japan where, as noted above, mass consumer campaigns and physical protests are rare, even post-Fukushima. Likewise,

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Japanese celebrities will rarely speak out on any specific environmental issue, cutting off a major avenue for social media activity. As one Tokyo-based campaigner for an international NGO puts it: ‘World peace, no problem. Poverty, poor issue, fine. Hunger, fine, no problem. Environmental, very difficult.’ (Interview with author, Activist, 8). Internationally, financial expertise has become one of the most highly valued resources for environmental protest over the last decade (Interview with author, Activists, 11, 12; see also Beresford 2015), with the clearing of traditional obstacles blocking the movement of experts between industry and NGOs. This has been a particularly powerful weapon in Japan: … the world runs on money. And a lot of the time the best way to effect change is to talk to these businesses on an economic front… At the end of the day, the shareholders hold a vast amount of power so there’s a lot to be said about talking to companies on an economic level and in some countries, Japan specifically, it makes far more sense to talk on economic levels than on social responsibility levels because there’s more interest in maximising economic performance than there is on maximising social responsibility. Norway and Scandinavian countries, you can easily talk more about social responsibility and even in the UK sometimes, Europe in general, but economics works much better here so we’re moving more into economic area now. We have an investment specialist advising us now who wrote our report… You have a lot of people moving across from high power jobs in oil and gas into the environmental movement. (Interview with author, Activist, 16)

The Tasmanian case again illustrates how this expertise sits within networks of international and local activists producing and circulating documents detailing activities along supply chains that are highly targeted at specific groups of buyers. The tiny Huon Valley Environment Centre worked with an equally tiny Japanese NGO to translate a report into Japanese in order to circulate the evidence that hardwood timber being marketed in Japan as plantation sourced was in fact coming from native forests. The Tokyo arm of the international Rainforest Action Network provided detailed corporate knowledge required to untangle the complex purchasing and financing deals underpinning the trade, which was then used to achieve meetings with Japanese importers and retailers and led to the cancellation of contracts. From this emerged an Australian organisation, Markets for Change, led by a former Greens parliamentarian, that used these relationships with the Japanese corporations—in partnership with international NGOs such

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as Global Witness—to produce and deliver detailed reports on Japanese corporation’s involvement in Borneo deforestation. Its report ‘Forest to Floor’, released in 2016, is an example of the type of information-activism that increasingly follows the transnational trade of natural resources. Published in English and Japanese, this report focuses on the Sarawak-Japan timber trade, and specifically, the 55% of plywood produced from Sarawak tropical forests that is imported into Japan (Markets for Change/JATAN 2016: 1). It uses powerful images of indigenous owners and simple diagrams to trace, firstly, the production process from forest harvesting to shipment to Japan and secondly, the companies involved in each step of the supply chain, from the Malaysian timber corporations, to major Japanese trading companies of Sarawak timber, to Japanese major flooring manufacturers, to distributors and wholesalers and to housing companies. Overall, 67 companies are identified and surveyed about their knowledge of their wood supply and issues associated with Sarawak. A total of 23 responded. The report introduces results with the following: Transparency is a vital component of proper ethical purchasing, but for the purposes of this report we have been unable to assess the procurement requirements and actions of companies who did not respond. They have not supplied any information that they have made efforts to address the serious human rights and environmental issues associated with Sarawak products in their supply chain. The companies who did not respond are listed on the table. (Markets for Change/JATAN 2016: 21)

Within these international partnerships and networks, groups are at times competing for support and visibility and at other times cooperating and pooling the information they have sourced to maximise impact. Two high-profile NGOs in these networks are the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Global Witness. Focusing on investigating tropical deforestation with offices in the United States and the UK, EIA is funded by public donations and works under the slogan ‘Protecting the environment with intelligence’. It includes among its methods ‘undercover investigations’ and ‘rigorous research’ (Environmental Investigation Agency, n.d.). Similarly, Global Witness, an NGO based in London and Washington founded in 1993, has the motto: ‘We find the facts, we uncover the story, we change the system.’ A 2017 report outlined what it described as the ‘murky’ 14,000-kilometre-long supply chains between the rainforests of Papua New Guinea to finishing factories in China to retail outlets in the

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United States (Global Witness 2017: 5), where hardwood flooring in the United States is a $2 billion market, with tropical species accounting for approximately 5–10% of its total (Global Witness 2017: 26). Since 2013, Global Witness has produced three reports on the role of Japan’s construction industry in driving rainforest destruction in Sarawak, using among other techniques satellite photography to identify illegal logging. A 2016 report, released prior to the Tokyo G7 summit, identified seven timber importers in Japan who dominate the plywood trade from Sarawak. It claimed that all seven importers do business with Sarawak logging companies that have been found to be illegal logging and involved in legal disputes with indigenous communities who claim their human rights have been violated (Global Witness 2016: 3). Four of the seven companies, according to the report, admitted that they did not fully know where the timber they imported was sourced in Sarawak nor had they inspected their suppliers logging operations. In interview, activists working within these groups are clear on their goals: … they know who we are, they know what our game is, they know what our objectives are and we just stick to that plan. So we’re very transparent… They know if they don’t do something, we’re going to do an expose, but they can expect that. So we can have that dialogue with them and say look, like this is how it is, this is how it’s going to be, you know these are our goals, these are our objectives, this is what we want. (Interview with author, Activist, 9)

Media and communications remain central to environmental protest, providing NGOs with a means to threaten to expose poor corporate practices, and the opportunity for mass mobilisation of consumers in countries such as Japan. However, where this news appears or is followed up remains uneven, with news media barriers in Malaysia, where press freedom is lacking, and in Japan, through the tightly controlled press club system that denies access to publications and their journalists if they are seen to go rogue, which in turn impacts on the ways in which local NGOs attempt to influence press coverage. As an international campaigner working in Japan notes: It’s interesting being the outsiders in this context. The Japanese groups wouldn’t publish anything like that, and I think that’s one of the interesting questions – how do we fit in? – cause we can kind of be part of it and maybe can push the companies to more dialogue and working with the Japanese and then sort of making progress. (Interview with author, Activist, 9)

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Corporations present themselves as reluctant partners in this form of transnational political activity, suggesting they are forced to pursue change down their supply chains on behalf of the NGOs or face public shaming through media. ‘We are constantly talking to our Sarawak supplier,’ said one executive in interview. ‘We are aggressively asking them to report, to change their mindset. Gradually we start to change their mind. But the NGOs are not yet satisfied’ (Interview with author, Corporate Executive, 3). While two companies are reported to have reduced the quantity of timber imported from Sarawak as a result of a similar Global Witness campaign in 2014, Japanese companies continue to buy—if nervously (Global Witness 2016: 3).

Journalism Journalists covering the environment have long faced accusations of ‘campaigning’ or being ‘anti-development’ from both within and outside newsrooms. Since the inception of the specialisation in newsrooms in the late 1960s, journalists reporting and researching the environment and associated human rights abuses have faced a high level of scrutiny and negative feedback or ‘flak’ on their stories (Neuzil 2008). Journalists claim this ‘flak’ has had an insidious impact on their capacity to research and investigate environmental issues (Lester 2013). There has always been a fine line between what is perceived as investigation and what is perceived as campaigning and how the two activities are framed in terms of their civic contributions (Olesen 2008). That the line is now blurred in the world of human rights, environmental politics and international trade is evident most clearly in a 2013 speech to the State Assembly by Abdul Taib Mahmud, who as Chief Minister of Sarawak from 1981 until 2014 was regularly accused of corruption in relation to the forest industries and land grabs. According to local news reports: KUCHING (May 29): Facing numerous land grab and corruption allegations both locally and internationally, Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud today hit out at these ‘external forces’ for spreading malicious allegations… He said he was accountable to the august House and the people of Sarawak who have repeatedly given him the mandate to lead since 1981, but not accountable to foreign NGOs or foreign reporters or broadcasters, including Sarawak Report, Bruno Manser Fund and Radio Free Sarawak.

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‘To respond or react to what they wrote about me would be to acknowledge that they have a right to interfere in or participate in the affairs of this country.’ (The Edge Malaysia 2013)

While many forms of investigative journalism, not just environmental journalism, have their roots in campaign-style reporting (Neuzil 2008), environmental journalists face perceptions from colleagues and editors that they are ‘anti-development’ or campaigning for action on the environment in general. The dilemma this creates for journalists’ professional selfrepresentation is evident in these comments from an Australian environment editor for major metropolitan newspapers: There has been an expectation that this was a campaigning round. We often ask ourselves: Are we simply reporting on all aspects of environmental issues and taking a neutral position or are we pushing for better outcomes for the environment. I’m not sure that’s been resolved … But our job, like all journalism, is to report and expose the truth in areas of public interest and I guess we still take the point of view that we report strongly on areas where there are environmental problems that need to be addressed; where expert opinion and scientific evidence tells us there are problems that need addressing. (quoted in Lester 2013: 228)

Newsrooms increasingly rely on user-generated content to cover protests, although the bridge between the two is further strengthened when protesters understand newsroom practices and are able to ensure their product meets newsroom demands. In a study of Iran’s Arab Spring protests, Hanska-Ahy and Shapour found that protesters had taken on board BBC editorial requirements to become ‘savvier content creators’, and as the BBC became more reliant on this content and its journalists worked more closely with the content creators, the practices of those creating the content changed again (Hanska-Ahy and Shapour 2013: 30). While all newsrooms would have preferred to have had their own crews on the ground, this was no longer always an option (Hanska-Ahy and Shapour 2013: 30). The experience of London-based journalist Clare Rewcastle Brown provides an example of the new conditions under which journalism is produced within a broader framework of environmental conflict. An interview with Rewcastle Brown took place in London in 2017. At that time, it had been five years since she had been refused entry to Sarawak, where she had been born while it was a British colony pre-1963, and three years since the Malaysian government had issued an arrest warrant against her and

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requested Interpol to distribute a ‘red notice’, usually associated with acts of international crime and terrorism. While the introduction of the ‘world’s first anti-fake news legislation’ during the Malaysian general election campaign of 2018 was not a hopeful sign (The Strait Times 2018), within a year of our interview, Prime Minister Najib had not only lost the federal election in the face of the 1MDB scandal involving the disappearance of almost a billion dollars from a Malaysian state fund but been arrested and charged, and Rewcastle Brown had made a widely reported return to Malaysia (Latiff 2018). Rewcastle Brown has since published a book on the scandal (2018). Since a 2005 visit to Sarawak where she had witnessed the deforestation and impacts on local communities, Rewcastle Brown had focused her investigative journalism expertise—developed through a long career in mainstream UK broadcasting—at revealing the then largely undocumented corruption driving the Sarawak forest industry and its ties to government, in particular then Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud (see also Straumann 2014): When I first went back to Borneo, I had to make a speech and then journalists started coming up to me and I ended up going out into the jungle areas and discovering the terrible plight of the people whose lives had been destroyed by all this. And they were all pleading, and I spent the first few months sort of saying, ‘well why isn’t anyone covering this story, it’s amazing, it’s outrageous, you know, this chief minister has made billions. Everybody knows it, everyone’s saying it, someone needs to get on and do the story.’ It couldn’t possibly be me because I’m in London you know, that was my view. And then bit by bit I realised no-one was going to do it. There was a total sort of mafia-like control of this area. And I started lying in bed at night thinking, ‘Oh God, can I just ignore this or should I try and just do whatever it is I can do, it’s probably better than nothing?’ (Interview with author, Rewcastle Brown)

In response to some of the toughest restrictions on news media anywhere in the globe (Reporters Without Borders 2018), Rewcastle Brown established two London-based platforms for circulating information about Sarawak to both Sarawak communities and more widely. Radio Free Sarawak was transmitted on shortwave and digitally via podcast. As Sarawakian activists who were involved in the station explain of local communication conditions at the time:

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So you’ve got a few key activists who are working in different areas. There is very little communication between communities, and actually that’s born out culturally. You know, traditionally there would have been effectively sovereign entities so this idea of collaborating between different communities is not, it’s not in the culture. And then there’s serious problems with communication with transit from one community to another. So the fact that there were various communities affected, nobody knew that this was going on. (Interview with author, Activist, 1)

A second initiative, one which proved easier to continue and resource from London, was the Sarawak Report, a website featuring news and information about Malaysian politics that Rewcastle Brown describes as a blog. In interview and her subsequent book (2018), she describes that prior to establishing the independent platforms, she had attempted to produce and sell content as a freelancer to mainstream UK news outlets. Threats of legal action and a ‘general sense’ of ‘do we care that much about Malaysia?’ had restricted her capacity to have content published, and she found instead that establishing her own website proved a better model for circulating information. Another key factor for Rewcastle Brown has been the capacity to respond to claims of bias and that she was ‘campaigning’—both to her detractors within Malaysia and to those adhering to traditional notions of journalistic objectivity more broadly. Attempting to apply Western models for news reporting on the nexus of the Malaysian government and corporate relations was akin, according to Rewcastle Brown, to ‘trying to play cricket in Mosul’: I did use to attempt right of reply. When I had my radio station I did have a small office and we soon discovered that our phone number had been identified and a memo had been sent around government departments telling them not to pick it up if our phone rang. So how long are you going to play that game anyway? I’m sometimes accused of you know, being biased. I would say that I’m a campaigning journalist and I chose an area that I thought was particularly important. I was an investigative journalist for many, many years and put a lot of effort into investigating things that perhaps I didn’t think were totally terribly important and so this was something that I did think was terribly important. So I focussed on it. I’m this relentless one person on one small issue, which of course by burrowing in you realise how the whole world, and everything then connects or disconnects … (Interview with author, Rewcastle Brown)

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Nevertheless, Rewcastle Brown continues to rely on large news organisations to circulate bigger stories and has watched as mainstream journalists in high-profile newsrooms have gone on to win awards for these stories. She has also faced campaigns to contain the site, including via multiple lawsuits and international public relations companies. She notes that her capacity to respond has been supported by her personal situation—including a level of financial security, legal advice from her father who is trained in law and public support from her husband’s older brother, Gordon Brown, the former UK Prime Minister. In conversation, Rewcastle Brown positions herself as both an investigative journalist ‘who was never into tying myself to a tree’ and ‘a starry eyed environmentalist’: I can’t think of anything more important. If you’re going to put your energy into something, as a journalist, you know, when you know you’ve got a story and you’ve got enough facts… So in a way, being the tiny little activist has served me well. I couldn’t have got away with what I’m doing if I had an editor and legal team because they, you know, won’t get deep enough into a story… When I first started, I was going out and I filmed all the destruction and I thought frankly, you do all this work, you might get five minutes on a news program or you might even get a documentary half hour, and it will be forgotten. Much better to actually just keep the story going and if you can make your own platform, and you don’t have to get past an editor … [who says], we’ve done that, we did that similar story about Timbuktu just last month you know…. I don’t have to worry about readers in South London. I’ve got a strong following of people who self-select and then pass on. So that’s why the mainstream newspaper model, the television model, is having such a problem. And so I’ve been away in my little corner. (Interview with author, Rewcastle Brown)

In comparing Rewcastle Brown’s comments with the ways in which campaign organisations Global Witness and the EIA represent themselves, as described in the previous section, it is clear that the always porous boundaries between investigation and activism are further dissolving, although both work discursively to stay connected to journalism’s fourth estate ideals. For example, an ‘investigating’ activist describes his activities: Our focus is on getting the evidence from you know, and so that’s the undercover investigations, but more beyond undercover we put a huge emphasis on data collection and data analysis and evidence collection, so evidentially based

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investigations…. Just try to understand the issue from within the industry. So we try to enter into the industry and be able to talk to people one to one, to really get what’s happening inside the industry… A lot of our work is in the factories and the transition places, trying to understand within those nodes how illegal timbers are getting through, how it’s being processed, how it’s being handled to the consumer markets and what those consumer markets are, what kind of pressure is coming from the consumer markets to those sectors. (Interview with author, Activist, 9)

The increasing similarities to investigative journalism practices are not accidental: We’re focussed on data and data processing, data analysis and portraying the data and using the data to tell a story. Over the past year we’re getting much more into the world of data link journalism in the US, and there is some international investigative reporters and different groups that do trainings… We’re really trying to enter into that dialogue because we, in many cases, do have the capacity and we have the focus that allows us to dig very deeply into one case and bring them data and … so many journalists don’t have the time, they don’t have the [resources], they just don’t have the scope to be able to do that deep dive. (Interview with author, Activist, 9)

The differences between journalistic investigation and campaign investigation are subtle. Both are focused on impact. As one Tokyo-based activist working for an international NGO puts it, focus is ‘on what will influence the companies’ (Interview with author, Activist, 16). And as journalism shifts its focus, the space is increasingly filled with networks of international agencies working with local activists and reporters, who are then feeding content back to news sites. The blurring of the distinction between the work of activists and journalists raises a set of questions around professional practices that pertain to both roles. How, for example, should sources embedded within local conflicts be protected by international NGOs? How are locals used and protected as ‘fixers’? Here, an investigative activist addresses NGO practices in relation to local contacts, using language that could as easily be deployed by a foreign correspondent (Murrell 2014): We’re very, very concerned with keeping them out of trouble and keeping them healthy and able to continue their campaigns and their work and everything… I mean for us we always trust our local partners to understand the situation but at the same time we’re just very aware in each case to make sure that we are not in any way pressuring them … (Interview with author, Activist, 9)

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This—where the ‘local partners’ reside and work—is the less accessible front in the transnational flow of information and politics concerned with natural resources, where the movement of information and knowledge is curtailed. A variety of methods is used, but increasingly physical violence, to prevent information appearing in the boardrooms of London, or the newsrooms of New York, or a seminar room in Tokyo. More than reputation, corporate profits and social media numbers are at stake here. At this front, numbers are raw. Global Witness reports that 201 environmental and land activists or ‘defenders’ were killed in 2017, the deadliest year on record (Global Witness 2018a). This compares to the deaths of 116 activists in 2014 (Forte 2015; Global Witness 2014). Brazil remained the most dangerous country in 2017 with 57 killings, most of which related to conflict over the ownership, control and use of land. Here, rights to landscapes, the resources they contain and environmental futures are inseparable. Agribusiness—including beef, dairy, cotton, palm oil, soy and sugar cane—was the most dangerous sector, overtaking mining for the first time, with Global Witness writing that 46 activists were killed protesting against the way ‘goods we consume are produced’ (2018b: 8). There were 48 killings in the Philippines in 2017, compared to 15 in 2014, with resistance to agribusiness linked to half the deaths. Global Witness documented seven cases in 2017 in which more than four defenders were killed at the same time, suggesting massacres are becoming more common (Global Witness 2018b). Few of the killings result in arrests, as the murky world of organised crime and local gangs collide with the illegal activities and obfuscation within supply chains as described by Dauvergne and Lister above (2011: 23). Environmental journalists are also suffering increased violence. The press freedom organisation, Reporters Without Borders, lists 10 murders in 2010–2015, the majority in south-east Asia, with two in India and one in Russia (2015: 9). The four deaths in Cambodia during this period included that of Taing Try, who was shot in October 2014 after threatening to reveal illegal logging activities, and of Vorakchun Khmer journalist Hang Serei Odom, whose battered body was found in his car boot in September 2012 after the publication of his story suggesting army officers were involved in timber trafficking (Reporters Without Borders 2015: 10). In 2018, Indonesian journalist Muhammad Yusuf died in a Kalimantan jail, in southern Borneo, where he was being held on charges of defaming a local palm oil production company. He had written 23 articles, published on the Kemajuan Rakyat and Berantas News websites, on the issue in the four months before his arrest (Reporters Without Borders 2018; UNESCO

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2018). Reporters Without Borders first noted the trend in 2009, finding that 15% of the cases the group investigated involved environmental reporting (Reporters Without Borders 2009; also 2010). It argued that the gathering and dissemination of information that raised environmental concerns ‘complicated’ development plans, and as a result, environmental journalists were seen as ‘an unwanted menace and even as enemies to be physically eliminated’. The report continued: ‘In many countries – especially, but not only, those that are not democracies – journalists who specialise in the environment are on the front line of a new war. The violence to which they are subjected concerns us all. It reflects the new issues that have assumed an enormous political and geostrategic importance’ (Reporters Without Borders 2009: 1). While underestimating the number of likely deaths, these numbers do not include the many more journalists and activists who suffer violence and imprisonment (Global Witness 2018a). In October 2018, for example, 11 Iban activists were imprisoned in Sarawak, arrested while blockading oil palm plantations and a rock quarry that they claimed had destroyed the river that was their water source, the Sungai Besangin. Witnesses say masked police burned the peaceful blockade, hit women and looted the camp (Save Rivers Network 2018). The 10 men and one woman were held in jail in Mukah on a bail of RM 4000. It was only after the bail was reduced to RM500 per person by the High Court five days later that the protesters were able to leave. Companies working in the Ulu Kelawit area since 2012 include subsidiaries of Ta Ann. A ‘solidarity’ protest was held following the arrests outside the Hobart operations of Ta Ann Tasmania (Bob Brown Foundation 2018). In their 2016 book analysing rising violence against journalists, Simon Cottle, Richard Sambrook and Nick Mosdell highlight the ‘elastic conceptualisation of who and what exactly counts as a journalist and journalism’ (2016: 10). They ask ‘what happens when the definition extends from fulltime paid professionals, to part-time amateurs as well as to so-called citizen journalists and social activists, or even belligerents and, on occasion, states when all are seeking to get their particular message across and/or further their cause?’ We can add further questions. What happens when the environment and control of land are the subjects of investigation? What happens when not only nation states but transnational corporations and every link in their complex supply chains are also seeking to further their various interests? What happens when this is achieved more easily by keeping information contained rather than by circulating messages and providing

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counter-arguments? And can mediated data-driven politics, without journalism’s traditional requirement to provide space for counter-arguments, provide publics with access to the knowledge they require to negotiate a shared and just future? These are important questions with significant environmental and political consequences that we are a long way from answering.

Conclusion While corporations present themselves as ‘reluctant partners’ in new forms of political activity driven by the trade of information, they are proving anything but reluctant to hand over responsibility for knowledge about their supply chains to NGOs. The work that NGOs are doing in tracing the path of resources from site of procurement to, for example, concrete formwork in Tokyo’s New National Stadium can be painstaking, dangerous and expensive. While fear of public exposure has driven corporations to alter practices, we need to ask whether this will continue to influence their behaviour given the growing awareness of the complexity of compliance, certification, social licence, due diligence, legality and sustainability and a high level of acceptance that the confused and competing discourses around these issues are an excuse. Despite the introduction or toughening of legislation to prevent the import of illegal timbers in several major markets, deforestation in tropical regions is still occurring. One possible reason is the laws themselves. In shifting the focus onto illegality, NGOs have shifted the discourse away from sustainability and weakened at least temporarily their protest power. Likewise, in the global economy in which timber resides, the legislation will undoubtedly have unexpected impacts for forests and communities in unintended places (Leopold et al. 2016). In Tasmania, for example, the restriction on the import of timber from places like Sarawak—where legality is virtually impossible to prove—could see a revival in the Tasmanian forest wars as the timber industry rebuilds to fill domestic shortfalls. The impact of the increasingly strong ties between NGOs and the corporations heavily implicated in the unsustainable, let alone legal, trade of timber is significant. This has been extensively critiqued in the context of brand campaigns, in which consumers are driven to buy more eco-friendly or fair-trade products, with ‘more’ being the word as they strive ‘to live within the market with less hypocrisy and more sustainability’ (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014: 16; see also Dauvergne 2017). What has been described

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in this chapter are new levels of access for NGOs to corporations and subsequent negotiations between NGOs and corporations about the form and extent of proposed campaigns. This has implications in terms of transparency: What becomes public? What remains private? Who is responsible for sourcing and sharing information in this partnership model? As the practices and representation of international campaigning and investigative reporting become conflated, there is also evidence that in targeting the newsrooms and web pages of global media and politics and the board rooms and seminars of global trade, those on the ground at the sites of resource procurement are becoming more vulnerable. Already marginalised politically, economically and professionally, local journalists and campaigners are exposed to further harm as violence is used to contain information and prevent it from reaching these distant and powerful audiences. In this scenario, who is ultimately responsible for ensuring global attention turns to those communities most in need of being ‘noticed’?

References Amnesty International. 2016. The great palm oil scandal: Labour abuses behind big brand names. London, UK: Amnesty International Ltd. Retrieved from https:// www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/ASA2151842016ENGLISH.PDF. Beck, Ulrich. 2006. The cosmopolitan vision. Cambridge: Polity. Beresford, Quentin. 2015. The rise and fall of Gunns Ltd. Sydney, NSW: NewSouth Books. Bob Brown Foundation. 2018. Media alert: Bob Brown to lead protest outside Ta Ann in Hobart today. Retrieved from https://www.bobbrown.org.au/mr_ 011118. Bruno Manser Fund. 2019. NGO statement of concern on Tokyo 2020 Olympics revised timber sourcing code. 30 January. Retrieved from https://bmf.ch/ en/news/ngo-statement-of-concern-on-tokyo-2020-olympics-revised-timbersourcing-code. Cottle, Simon, Richard Sambrook, and Nick Mosdell. 2016. Reporting dangerously: Journalist killings, intimidation and security. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Dauvergne, Peter. 2017. Is the power of brand-focused activism rising? The case of tropical deforestation. The Journal of Environment & Development 26 (2): 135–155. Dauvergne, Peter, and Genevieve LeBaron. 2014. Protest Inc.: The corporatization of activism. Cambridge: Polity. Dauvergne, Peter, and Jane Lister. 2011. Timber. Cambridge: Polity. Ellis-Petersen. 2019. Picassos, a glass piano and missing billions: Scandal of 1MDB reaches court. The Guardian, 11 February. Retrieved from https://www.

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theguardian.com/world/2019/feb/11/1mdb-scandal-court-najib-razakmalaysia-picassos-glass-piano-missing-billions. Environmental Investigation Agency. n.d. About us. Retrieved from https://eiainternational.org/about-eia/. Flew, Terry, and Silvio Waisbord. 2015. The ongoing significance of national media systems in the context of media globalization. Media, Culture and Society 37 (4): 620–636. Forte, Jay. 2015. Brazil ranks highest in killing of land and environmental activists. The Rio Times, 21 April. Retrieved from http://riotimesonline.com/brazilnews/rio-politics/brazil-ranks-highest-in-killing-of-land-and-environmentalactivists/#sthash.UJL6A4s8.dpuf. Freeman, Laurie Anne. 2000. Closing the shop: Information cartels and Japan’s mass media. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Global Witness. 2014. Deadly environment: The dramatic rise in killings of environmental and land defenders. Retrieved from https://www.globalwitness.org/ en/campaigns/environmental-activists/deadly-environment/. Global Witness. 2016. Wilful ignorance: How Japan’s voluntary approach is failing to stop the trade in illegal timber. Retrieved from https://www.globalwitness. org/en/reports/wilful-ignorance/. Global Witness. 2017. Stained trade: How U.S. imports of exotic flooring from China risk driving the theft of indigenous land and deforestation in Papua New Guinea. Retrieved from https://www.globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/ forests/stained-trade/. Global Witness. 2018a. Deadliest year on record for land and environmental defenders, as agribusiness is shown to be the industry most linked to killings (Press release 24 July). Retrieved from https://www.globalwitness.org/ en/press-releases/deadliest-year-record-land-and-environmental-defendersagribusiness-shown-be-industry-most-linked-killings/. Global Witness. 2018b. At what cost? Irresponsible business and the murder of land and environmental defenders in 2017. Retrieved from https://www. globalwitness.org/en/campaigns/environmental-activists/defenders-annualreport/. Griffiths, James. 2019. From Hollywood to Saudi Arabia, Leonardo DiCaprio to Paris Hilton: The scandal that enveloped the world. CNN, 9 February. Retrieved from https://edition.cnn.com/2019/02/08/asia/malaysia-1mdb-trial-najibintl/index.html. Hanska-Ahy, Maximillian T., and Roxanna Shapour. 2013. “Who’s reporting the protests?”: Converging practices of citizen journalists and two BBC World Service newsrooms, from Iran’s election protests to the Arab uprisings. Journalism Studies 14 (1): 29–45. Hutchins, Brett, and Libby Lester. 2015. Theorizing the enactment of mediatized environmental conflict. International Communication Gazette 77 (4): 337–358.

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Latiff, Rozanna. 2018. Briton exiled for reporting on 1MDB returns to Malaysia. Reuters, 19 May. Retrieved from https://www.reuters.com/article/usmalaysia-politics-journalist/briton-exiled-for-reporting-on-1mdb-returns-tomalaysia-idUSKCN1IK06C. Leopold, Sina, Metodi Sotirov, Theresa Frei, and Georg Winkel. 2016. Protecting “First world” markets and “Third world” nature: The politics of illegal logging in Australia, the European Union and the United States. Global Environmental Change 39: 294–304. Lester, Libby. 2013. On flak, balance and activism: The ups and downs of environmental journalism. In Journalism research and investigation in a digital world, ed. Stephen Tanner and Nick Richardson. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. Lester, Libby. 2014. Transnational publics and environmental conflict in the Asian Century. Media International Australia 150 (1): 167–178. Lester, Libby, and Simon Cottle. 2009. Visualising climate change: TV news and ecological citizenship. International Journal of Communication 3: 920–936. Markets for Change/JATAN (Japanese Tropical Forest Action Network). 2016. Forest to floor: How Japan’s housing construction is driving forest destruction and the dispossession of indigenous people in Sarawak. Retrieved from https:// www.docdroid.net/YdPMSu9/forests-to-floor-english-web.pdf. mitsubishi.com. n.d. Three principles. Retrieved from https://www.mitsubishi. com/e/history/principle.html. Murphy, Patrick D. 2017. The media commons: Globalization and environmental discourses. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Murrell, Colleen. 2014. Foreign correspondents and international newsgathering: The role of fixers. New York: Routledge. Neuzil, Mark. 2008. The environment and the press: From adventure writing to advocacy. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Olesen, Thomas. 2008. ACTIVIST JOURNALISM? The Danish Cheminova debates, 1997 and 2006. Journalism Practice 2 (2): 245–263. Reporters Without Borders. 2009. The dangers for journalists who expose environmental issues. Retrieved from https://www.iucn.org/downloads/danger_ environmental_journalists.pdf. Reporters Without Borders. 2010. High-risk subjects: Deforestation and pollution. Retrieved from https://rsf.org/en/reports/deforestation-and-pollution-highrisk-subjects. Reporters Without Borders. 2015. Hostile climate for environmental journalists. Retrieved from https://rsf.org/sites/default/files/rapport_environnement_ en.pdf. Reporters Without Borders. 2018. Indonesia urged to investigate reporter’s death in detention. Retrieved from https://rsf.org/en/news/indonesia-urgedinvestigate-reporters-death-detention.

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Rewcastle Brown, Clare. 2018. The Sarawak Report: The inside story of the 1MDB exposé. Southern California: Lost World Press. Save Rivers Network. 2018. Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/ SaveSarawakRivers/. Straumann, Lukas. 2014. Money logging: On the trail of the Asian timber mafia. Basel: Schwabe AG. The Edge Malaysia. 2013. Taib hits out at foreign NGOs in Dewan. 29 May. Retrieved from https://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/taib-hits-foreignngos-dewan-124504411.html. The Strait Times. 2018. Malaysia’s anti-fake news legislation becomes law, is now enforceable. 11 April. Retrieved from https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/seasia/malaysias-anti-fake-news-legislation-becomes-law-is-now-enforceable. Then, Stephen. 2018. Man sentenced to death for murder of activist and politician Bill Kayong. The Star, 10 August. Tranter, Bruce, Libby Lester, and Lyn McGaurr. 2017. Leadership and the construction of environmental concerns. London: Palgrave Macmillan. UNESCO. 2018. Director-general urges transparent investigation into death of online reporter Muhammad Yusuf in Indonesia. Retrieved from https:// en.unesco.org/news/director-general-urges-transparent-investigation-deathonline-reporter-muhammad-yusuf-indonesia. UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). 2013. Transnational organized crime in East Asia and the Pacific: A threat assessment. Retrieved from www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/TOCTA_EAP_ web.pdf. Waisbord, Silvio. 2016. Communication studies without frontiers? Translation and cosmopolitanism across academic cultures. International Journal of Communication 10: 868–886.

CHAPTER 7

Conclusion

This book has sought to understand environmental protest as it occurs within the shifting conditions of mediatisation, and how such protest forms communities that inhabit—consciously if not physically—the places that are pressured and threatened by human activity. These protests, places and activity are simultaneously local and global, shaped as much by the translocal and transnational movement of resources, goods, people and ideas as they are by the ways each of us experiences a place, an anxiety, a loss. So too are the communities of protest, consciously formed and shaped by their members who identify as affected and/or responsible, and who claim rights to influence and interfere in outcomes. The members of these communities are here, whether they are wanted or not. Another of these communities has recently formed and will soon be on its way. Bob Brown, the hero of the Franklin Blockade of the early 1980s, has announced that a protest convoy will travel from Hobart in Tasmania, where the Franklin protests were born, to the Galilee Basin in Queensland, where Adani plans to build the world’s largest coal mine. The Stop Adani Convoy Appeal is accepting tax-deductible donations and 1837 people have already signed up (Bob Brown Foundation, n.d.) to join the convoy, despite the fact that final dates for the journey are yet to be confirmed. This protest, says Brown, will be ‘bigger than the Franklin’ (Hannam 2019). Size, numbers, scale are the tools still deployed in the rhetoric of protest. They remain equally popular with those wanting to © The Author(s) 2019 L. Lester, Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9_7

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deny the legitimacy of protest communities. Adani responded to the convoy plans by saying that ‘some 14,500 people had registered to work for the mine, most from Queensland’ (Hannam 2019). It continued by reminding potential protesters that they do not belong ‘here’ in the way Adani now does: ‘We ask activists from interstate to respect the thousands of people across regional Queensland who want the Carmichael Project to proceed because they need a job and understand the contribution that mining makes to both the state and national economy,’ a spokeswoman said. (Hannam 2019)

This community and its opponents are built on familiar ground: a protest with a seemingly traditional relationship to visibility. While underpinned by new technologies that allow the speed of signups to become a news media item in itself, the community forms to symbolically represent combined concern and united determination. The numbers reinforce the fact that a significant community has formed; if 2000 can physically join, how many more wish they could do so? But communication media complicate these calculations. Many now communicate with many, stimulated by and stimulating the interactions occurring at the switching points between campaigners, industry and corporate actors, politicians and policy-makers, and news media. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald describing the speed of signups and donations sparks further signups and donations for the Stop Adani Convoy, while these signups are dismissed as irrelevant by industry and government on the basis of the 14,500 potential workers who have registered interest—that is, those who have virtually signed up with Adani. Scientists remain on the periphery, even as their activities and data are deployed at the switching points within and between the key spheres. Adani, for example, responds: ‘After more than eight years of rigorous scientific assessment, regulatory approvals and legal reviews, the community can be confident that the project stacks up environmentally’ (Hannam 2019). On the surface, these protesters are the opposite of NIMBYs, the NotIn-My-Back Yard protesters driven by a generally limited set of concerns and demands confined to a locality in or near where they reside (della Porta and Piazza 2008). Nor are they strictly what we might refer to as NIYBYs, interfering from afar with a Not-In-Your-Back Yard specificity. Rather, they are a little of both, locating themselves in a ‘here’ that is defined as both

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specific (‘my’ and ‘your’) and universal (‘ours’). Nevertheless, if NIMBYlike protests have long been dismissed for their localism and refusal to acknowledge outside interests even as they work to fiercely defend local environments (Foxwell-Norton 2018), the closer resemblance to NIYBYism of the protests described in this book means they are disregarded for their interference from outside in local concerns. These communities of protest are, to use the term favoured in Australia, ‘blow-ins’. In spanning local, national and regional territories, they are delegitimised as distant, ill-informed and easily manipulated into misguided displays and intrusion. Moreover, their actions are still dismissed using the trope of theatre, choreographed for the cameras even if these cameras are now wielded by almost everyone rather than largely controlled by news media, and the resulting multiple-captioned images are circulated by many to many Coordinated responses that question the legitimacy and rights of these communities and their actions are ever present (Lester and Cottle 2011). News media remain complicit in this, reproducing press releases and other carefully controlled communications opportunities from industries and pro-development interests within governments to create and publish content that is available for easy sharing across numerous media platforms. The traditional framing of these protest communities as built on symbolism and emotion and therefore marginal to the real business of representative politics persists, even when such framing has clearly been undermined by the lifting of the cloak that has disguised representative politics itself. Supported by fundamental changes in the technologies and practices related to communication media (Thompson 2018), what were once scandals in formal politics in many parts of the world are now the new norm, as are once-unimaginable emotion-charged tweets from world leaders. Conflict over the legitimacy and rights of the outsiders, of the blowins, is infusing all politics, not least that which is concerned with environmental decision-making and futures. Protest communities must now exist and operate within this dominant framing. Even in the context of current debates about globalisation receding to ‘slowbalisation’, in which the movement of people, goods and resources is perceived to be increasingly confined to regions, such framing is likely to strengthen as ‘the local’ and ‘place-based’ become ever more prominent in civic and corporate policies and discourses. How these communities map onto existing decision-making forums, frameworks and regimes has never been resolved (Dryzek 2013). Their sense of a common good, of rights and responsibilities that transcend

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national borders and of collective and individual public activity resonates with notions of environmental citizenship (Dobson 2006, 2007). But there is little stability or clarity about which decision-making institutions and forums their activities target. There is nothing hidden about the ambitions of the Stop Adani Convoy, timed as it is (with some contingency) to coincide with the next Australian federal election campaign. This is a protest aimed squarely at the national level, at influencing who will be in government and the policy announcements of those vying for political power. Yet when the key actors in the environmental conflict include an Indian corporation, international networks of NGOs, potential buyers and users of coal in China, Japan and India, and billions of people who can claim to be affected by the burning of the coal that will be dug from the Galilee Basin in Queensland, a focus on politics that is contained within a single nation state can only be temporary. When UNESCO next deliberates on the fate of the Great Barrier Reef or the Tasmanian wilderness, it will be again be faced with these communities. As will the organisers of the 2020 Olympic Games, attempting to balance a mega sporting event, claims of greenwashing, unparalleled displays of commerce and consumerism, and the construction of stadiums with concrete formwork sourced perhaps illegally from the forests of Borneo (Neslen 2018; see also Miller 2016). It will also be the case when local political representation is next determined in Townsville, the city on the edge of the Reef and where the rights of outsiders to debate the Adani mine’s future has been most visible. ‘Don’t take my coal job and I won’t take your soy latte’ (Butler 2017), the popular bumper sticker says. Yet, as the Stop Adani Convoy is being announced, its rights to interfere are strengthened by the fact that Townsville is an active emergency zone after an unprecedented metre of rain falls within a week (Smee 2019). While we are still a long way from determining how these political and other forums for decision-making should hear and recognise the various protest communities that form and re-form in response to concern about environmental risks and harm, it is crucial to continue investigating the access these forums provide to protest communities. Within the context of mediatised environmental conflict, we know they are both influenced by and influencers of the interactions occurring at the switching points. Governance, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is forced to register and represent the claims and forces that the multitude expresses— ‘like impressions of footprints in the sand’ (2009: 374). The communities seeking recognition and response are often short-lived and their outlines

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blurred. But like footprints in sand, they are evidence of a real presence. A starting point for recognising that presence is acknowledging shared impact and futures. In doing this, it is important to accept the plurality of voices and differences of opinion that now circulate freely within mediatised environmental conflict. As the Tasmanian forest and fish farming cases showed, many of the conditions under which internal disagreements might be hidden from public view no longer exist. Nor, seemingly, does the will to protect old allegiances between industries or within movements. In our travels for this study, we were confronted again and again by the clashes that occur within any community. It was evident at the Beyond Coal and Gas Jamboree in central Queensland, for example, when activists from across Australia began to celebrate a government decision to move the dumping of dredge spoils to land rather than in water adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. The dredging is required to allow expanded shipping activity of coal from the Galilee Basin. An Aboriginal man at the back of the packed hall where the activists had gathered raised his hand. He began by apologising for dampening the celebrations, then said: ‘It won’t do. That land is important to us’. Old alliances break and new ones form as campaign organisations compete for visibility across media platforms and industry actors accuse each other and their government regulators of unsustainable practices. For John Dryzek (2013), a plurality of voices that transcend boundaries between natural and human systems and between nation states enables the development of ecological democracy. How internal differences are represented within and through media will be key to the future of these communities as legitimate influencers of environmental decisions. Yet, it is possible to see other connections strengthen as common risks and experiences are recognised, debated and mediated. They are evident, for example, in the new ways in which the landscapes and lifestyles associated with the Great Barrier Reef and Tasmania join in the face of climate change. These are deeper connections than those being strategically deployed by campaigners to invoke victorious environmental campaigns of times past and to remind politicians of the dangers of ignoring the lessons of history. As unprecedented rain falls on the city of Townsville, Tasmania experiences its hottest and driest January on record, and rare dry lightning strikes set the bush alight. Almost 5% of Tasmania’s land mass burns, destroying prized areas of wilderness and threatening towns over a period of two weeks. The celebrity status of Man Booker Prize-winning Tasmanian author Richard Flanagan ensures appropriate connections are made

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and widely shared in a piece of journalism. The danger to Tasmania, Flanagan points out, is no longer the state’s own Hydro Electricity Commission or Gunns Ltd., damming rivers to produce cheap electricity to attract international manufacturers or logging old-growth forests to sell to Japan for flooring and formwork. It is climate change that is uniting us in the ‘everyday’ way it now causes power grids to collapse, dying rivers to ‘vomit huge fish kills’, unprecedented floods in the north, and heat so extreme in the south ‘it pushes at the very edge of liveability’ (Flanagan 2019). The Tasmanian fires, he continues: … have attracted little national media attention because there has been as yet, thankfully, no loss of life and only a handful of homes burnt. And yet these fires signal a terrifying new reality, as disturbing and ultimately almost certainly as tragic as the coral reef bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef… What has become clear over these last four weeks across this vast, beautiful land of Australia is that a way of life is on the edge of vanishing. Australian summers, once a time of innocent pleasure, now are to be feared, to be anticipated not with joy but with dread, a time of discomfort, distress and, for some, fear that lasts not a day or a night but weeks and months. (Flanagan 2019)

The power of stories to connect and unite has been a consistent feature of protest, well recognised in the US civil rights movement and beyond (Alexander 2006). These are the basis on which communities of protest form. While the means by which these stories circulate has identifiably changed, less predictable are the channels and the audiences they reach or the multitude of responses they prompt. This is true of all mediatised environmental conflict, in which neither the interactions nor their outcomes occurring between the key spheres are ever entirely foreseeable. In places where corporate-government-media interests form a nexus that deliberately alienates those affected and seeks to prevent external interest or intervention, they are particularly difficult to trace. Nevertheless, the stories provide a foundation. On the outskirts of Kuching, for example, a woman selling trinkets at the Sarawak Cultural Village insists on writing her details on the inside back cover of the yellow pamphlet I was handed on entry, my ‘passport to a most pleasant and an unforgettable experience’. Race: ‘Bidayuh’. Village: ‘near Mt Singai’. Phone number. She would like to tell me her story again, she says. ‘Whenever’. The Bidayuh, my passport to ‘the finest living museum in South East Asia’ explains with many poignant changes of tense, account for 8.4% of Sarawak’s population and live in the steep

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limestone mountains, near the watershed. Like many Borneo natives, they live in longhouses ‘in mountain fastnesses, stacked to a steep hillside like a gigantic staircase…’ The woman tells me again: ‘Whenever’. But her story is the same story we hear everywhere in Sarawak. From the Iban activist—a large number of Iban, according to my yellow passport, still prefer longhouses, which are built ‘to last fifteen to twenty years or until the farm land in the surrounding area was exhausted’. From an Orang Ulu guide—Orang Ulu ‘build their houses to last’, which ‘makes the search for new farmlands unnecessary’. From a young Penan journalist—‘The shy nomadic people of the jungle, the Penans, live in the dense virgin jungles of Central Borneo, among some of the State’s most valuable timber resources’. She will never write this story for her newspaper, she tells me, because ‘it is always about family’. Each telling of the personal story—provided without prompts whether during research interviews or casual meetings—contains only small variations of the same story. The forest/palm oil company representative/s arrived and bargained with an aunt/grandfather/uncle/headman. The company was given access to/bought the land surrounding the longhouse. The forests were cut down, sent to Japan/China/UK, replaced with oil palm plantations. We complained/we left. The longhouse did not/will not survive without access to these lands for plants/animals/timber/water. The ways in which the telling of these stories can produce different forms of communities of protest that transcend local boundaries are evident in the case of Clare Rewcastle Brown, who was prompted to surrender normative ideas about professional journalism practice in order to ensure the stories she heard and the information she investigated were circulated more widely. It is also evident in the information-based activism that complements brand campaigns and mass protest to further upset the professional norms of journalism. Via a combination of invitation and threat, the information that is produced is revealed to corporations’ procurement and corporate social responsibility officers, who are forced to relinquish claims of ignorance about their supply chains as justification for continuing business-as-usual. Meanwhile, the flow of this information out from the site of conflict to inform buyers and consolidate communities of concern prompts further efforts at containment, including increasingly through the use of violence. In many of these stories and interactions, Borneo serves as the exotic tropical island of the colonial imagination, renowned for its White Rajas and orang-utans, and long boats manoeuvred expertly by local boatmen up remote rivers. The people of Sarawak were among the first of the globe’s

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equatorial states to experience land conversion and resource extraction of such speed and scale that it has left local communities confused, defeated and divided. Yet in hearing and responding to their stories, we also need to ask—as Patrick D. Murphy does—whether we condemn them to remain in costume, in a way not too dissimilar to how they are framed by changes of tense in a tourism brochure. How fully is the ‘media commons’ still invested in Western ideas of what authentic locals ‘are supposed to look like, act like, and even say’? (Murphy 2017: 152). This is not unrelated to the set of complex questions asked about the power of NGOs, and the alliances they form with governments and industries, resulting in alienation of people from their lands for conservation (Brockington 2009; Dowie 2011) or brand campaigns that encourage consumption (Dauvergne and LeBaron 2014). This complexity is pervasive. Tourists, including celebrities and presidents, mourn the loss of the Great Barrier Reef, while they contribute to its harm through the greenhouse gasses their travels produce and in encouraging others via Instagram posts of holiday snaps to contribute also. Consumers who respond to brand-focused campaigns and reject products with uncertified palm oil find they are still contributing to rainforest destruction when certification schemes prove unreliable in stemming the replacement of forests with oil palm plantations or corporations do not fully ‘know’ their supply chains. International activists become complicit when they accept responsibility for supplying this knowledge, while local activists ‘on the ground’ can produce and circulate evidence of conflict that undermines any comfort corporations might feel about their social licence. Meanwhile, NGO-generated brand-focused campaigns provide content for corporatised social media platforms, supported by supermarket chains and celebrities. When, in the lead up to Christmas 2018, the UK’s Iceland supermarket chain repurposed for its television advertising campaign Greenpeace-produced content highlighting the plight of orang-utans in the face of unsustainable palm oil use, it might have expected to fall foul of broadcasting political advertising laws, as it soon did. The publicity resulting from the ban ensured the content—an animated poem, ‘Rang-tan in my bedroom’, narrated by actress Emma Thompson (Iceland Foods 2018)— was viewed more than five million times on Iceland’s YouTube site alone, and for free.

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Producing Sustained Change How, among these shifting allegiances within and between the key spheres of mediatised environmental conflict and the multiple and sometimes contradictory roles each of us is required to play, can environmental protest of the type identified in this book be more effective in terms of producing sustained change? Firstly, scientists must be lured into the fold in a way that makes science a key sphere of mediatised environmental conflict. Scientists have an important role to play in carrying their knowledge into public debate, and this means letting go of the idea that their communications will be delivered uninterrupted to receptive audiences, including those making policy or pursuing or protesting the development. As Kerrie Foxwell-Norton and I have argued elsewhere (2019; see also Foxwell-Norton 2018), a core problem facing science is that science communication understands itself and largely gathers its authority and legitimacy by defining its terrain in terms of ‘science’ rather than ‘communication’. While it is clear about the merits of bringing science to society, it is less clear on the reverse, of the importance of bringing society to science. We suggest that the politicised nature of scientific knowledge as it enters mediatised conflict means that it is rarely understood by the public in terms of the rigour of research underpinning it. Scientists need to be willing to carry it into the arena of mediatised environmental conflict and participate alongside and through other political actors, including activist groups, news media, industries and government. Even when scientists remain absent, as has largely been the case in the conflict over fish farming in Tasmania, there is no divorcing their work from these politics. Nevertheless, models of funding that let some national governments politicise research can be an important obstacle to achieving this outcome (see Hutchins and Lester 2018 for example). Secondly, it is important to identify the dangers and possibilities in the shifting alliances and interactions in the key spheres of mediatised environmental conflict. In Tasmania, the united public face within the spheres of industry, government and campaign organisations that was sustained throughout the earlier conflict over forests collapsed in the latter conflict over fish farming. It is also evident in the most recent environmental issue in Tasmania to focus protesters’ attention, one that coincidentally involves Asahi Holdings, the Japanese-based brewer implicated in the Stanley water example provided at start of the book. Hobart is notable

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for its location wedged between the harbour formed by the convoluted mouth of the Derwent River and the dramatic slopes and cliffs of a 1270metre-high mountain, known by both its Aboriginal name, kunanyi, and its post-white settlement name, Mount Wellington. Two decades after British settlement in 1803, the Cascade Brewery began operations in the mountain’s foothills. Today, after several changes of hands, Australia’s oldest stilloperating brewery and one of the country’s most recognisable buildings is ultimately controlled by Asahi Holdings, through its ownership of South African brewer SABMiller, which in turn owns the Australian-based Foster’s Group, owners of Carlton & United Breweries. The ‘responsibility’ part of ‘corporate social responsibility’ is indeed difficult to trace, monitor or apply when parent-to-subsidiary is separated by so many volatile links. A proposal to build a cable car to the summit of Mount Wellington has prompted protests in which media communications (social media, fake sites, media releases) and physical protests against the cable car were as predictable as the development that was proposed to cater for growing numbers of international tourists, particularly from China. To quote travel website Lonely Planet, Tasmania is riding ‘a tourism-fuelled economic boom’ (2019). However, there are two noteworthy shifts. The first is found in the media self-representation of the developer, the ‘Mount Wellington Cable Car’ (2018). Here, it is not environmental protesters who are framing themselves as being unable to pull the levers of power through media or direct political access. Rather, the developer frames the proposal as a campaign driven by non-elite political actors, requiring the formation of a community of support and concern—‘For the Mountain’. This is a development proposal that is not seeking to ignore or minimise community conflict, but rather to embrace and even capitalise on it. Under the ‘Community’ button on the proposal’s website, for example, you can ‘Take Action Now’ by registering your support, writing a letter to the editor, asking your employer to register as a ‘proud supporter’, signing the petition, or buying a car sticker. ‘It’s your mountain,’ according to the slogan. ‘It’s your cable car’ (Mount Wellington Cable Car 2018). Another important feature evident in this conflict is the breakdown of traditional corporate allegiances, as witnessed in the conflict over salmon farming. In its plans, the developer proposed to locate the cable car’s base station on land owned by Cascade Brewery, giving direct access to the mountain, including the iconic dolerite cliffs known as the Organ Pipes. The media release issued by Carlton & United Breweries, announcing under the heading ‘No cable car on Cascade land’ that it would not sell

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land to the venture, is telling of the new forms of environmental politics now playing out, and thus worth citing here in full: CUB will not sell or lease any Cascade land to the Mount Wellington Cableway Company (MWCC) for its proposed cable car on kunanyi / Mount Wellington. CUB’s decision follows discussions with the MWCC and extensive consultations over the past year, including with local residents and various community groups. The proposal to build a cable car on Mount Wellington is a pivotal decision that will clearly change the mountain and therefore Hobart. We are not satisfied that we, as a company, should be making such a momentous decision on behalf of Tasmanians. CUB was also not satisfied that the MWCC had been successful in winning broad support from the community for its proposed cable car. Cascade has operated from the foothills of Mount Wellington for almost two centuries. We have been privileged to share a special relationship with Mount Wellington, Hobart and the local community that have supported us. As a company we have a special responsibility and commitment to both the community and the Mountain. Cascade has been in the heart of Tasmanians since 1824 because we’ve been a great brewer who has earned the strong and loyal support of Tasmanians. We want to concentrate on doing what we do best – brewing and creating jobs and opportunities for the people of Tasmania. (Carlton & United Breweries 2018)

In this media release, the company—in reality, the same multinational ‘stealing’ local water from communities across Bass Strait in Stanley, Victoria— carefully positions itself as both an outside community patron, as in the Stanley example, but also as belonging to the community and thus carrying shared responsibilities. While social licence to operate as a corporatesponsored attempt to evade regulation or protest was shown in Chapter 3 to have largely failed in the face of processes associated with mediatised environmental conflict, we nevertheless need to recognise the ways in which big business and its own ideas of corporate ‘citizenship’ can be deployed to interact more visibly and more usefully with the politics of the ‘here’. Thirdly, for sustained impact of global environmental protest, government, industries and news media need to let go of the myth of a bounded community and tired, out-of-date rhetoric that seeks to delegitimise the rights of outsiders to be heard in environmental decision-making. There were never hard borders that contained the ‘affected’ to within a 20kilometre radius, and they are even less likely now. This is not to say that those physically located at the sites where developments are occurring, where resource is extracted or procured, do not have additional rights.

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These, in democratic countries at least, are provided through elections and other formal citizenship rights. But the framing of translocal or transnational protest communities as illegitimate on the one hand, while supporting the activities of transnational corporations driven by export and global consumer demands on the other, is nonsensical. This framing has been a repeated feature in the debate over the Adani coal mine and the future of the Great Barrier Reef, reinforcing the fact that news media continue to play a problematic role as a sphere of mediatised environmental conflict, while still failing to create ideal conditions for crucial public debates. Fourthly, despite the plurality and internal disagreements obvious within the sphere of environmental campaigns, making visible what is otherwise hidden should remain a core tenet for protest. As the Tasmanian forests case showed, shifting political activity to behind closed doors risks public trust in environmental organisations at a time when it is needed more than ever. While environmental groups can point to short-term positive outcomes from their private negotiations with industry and government, we need to ask about the long-term costs. Meanwhile, the privacy in itself becomes a source of contention between groups and for communities, struggling to place their concerns on the agendas of international NGOs and governance forums. A sense of stewardship for the environment is best created when communities are empowered to participate in deciding their futures. Even when policy and laws are agreed and enacted, community support is essential to ensure they are adopted, monitored and enforced. Whether these communities are located physically at the sites of conflict or formed within and through communication media in the face of risk and loss, their participation is vital for a continuing sense of environmental responsibility. Finally, we need to be wary of representing still emerging forms of communication media as something separate from humans. It is one thing to recognise complexity in their multitude of actors, platforms, technologies, owners and related practices, even to note resemblances to the vast natural ecological systems that require global co-operation to conserve and manage. It is another thing to relinquish responsibility, suggesting that communication media are beyond our control or stewardship. Just as we investigated old news media power in relation to environmental communications, we need to continue to investigate how power works within and through new media to allow some voices to be heard while others remain silenced, even while coping with disasters and loss to which we have all contributed.

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One last view: on the twenty-second floor of Asahi’s Phillip Starkdesigned golden corporate headquarters in Shibuya, Tokyo, is a corporate functions centre, open to those members of the public willing to buy one of Asahi’s signature beers. Arrive just before sunset, order an Asahi Dry and sit at a window. Below, you can see thousands of commuters moving in and out of Asakusa station and the tourists emptying from the grounds of Tokyo’s oldest Buddhist temple, Sensoji. The adjacent Tokyo Skytree lights up. Into the distance, trains and elevated roads crisscross the city. On a clear day, Mount Fuji—that most respected and cherished symbol of Japan—can be seen on the horizon. What will make it possible to see further?

References Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. The civil sphere. New York: Oxford University Press. Bob Brown Foundation. n.d. Stop Adani convoy sign-up. Retrieved from https:// www.bobbrown.org.au/stopadaniconvoy_signup. Brockington, Dan. 2009. Celebrity and the environment. London: Zed Books. Butler, Josh. 2017. Matt Canavan got roasted online after the Adani announcement. Huffington Post, 7 June. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost. com.au/2017/06/06/matt-canavan-got-roasted-online-after-the-adaniannouncement_a_22129702/. Carlton & United Breweries. 2018. No cable car on Cascade land (media release). 26 June. Retrieved from https://cub.com.au/no-cable-car-on-cascade-land/. Dauvergne, Peter, and Genevieve LeBaron. 2014. Protest Inc.: The corporatization of activism. Cambridge: Polity. della Porta, Donatella, and Gianni Piazza. 2008. Voices of the valley, voices of the straits: How protest creates communities. New York: Berghahn Books. Dobson, Andrew. 2006. Ecological citizenship: A defence. Environmental Politics 15 (3): 447–451. Dobson, Andrew. 2007. Environmental citizenship: Towards sustainable development. Sustainable Development 15: 2760285. Dowie, Mark. 2011. Conservation refugees: The hundred-year conflict between global conservation and native peoples. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dryzek, John S. 2013. The politics of the earth, 3rd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flanagan, Richard. 2019. Tasmania is burning. The climate disaster future has arrived while those in power laugh at us. The Guardian, 5 February. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/05/tasmaniais-burning-the-climate-disaster-future-has-arrived-while-those-in-power-laughat-us.

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Foxwell-Norton, Kerrie. 2018. Environmental communication and critical coastal policy: Communities, culture and nature. London: Routledge. Hannam, Peter. 2019. “Bigger than Franklin”: Bob Brown to lead anti-Adani road convoy. Sydney Morning Herald, 6 February. Retrieved from https://www. smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/bigger-than-franklin-bob-brownto-lead-anti-adani-road-convoy-20190206-p50w1o.html. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hutchins, Brett, and Libby Lester. 2018. Some questions for Simon Birmingham, from two researchers whose ARC grant he quashed. The Conversation, 29 October. Retrieved from https://theconversation.com/some-questions-for-simonbirmingham-from-two-researchers-whose-arc-grant-he-quashed-105838. Iceland Foods. 2018. Iceland’s banned TV Christmas advert…Say hello to Rangtan. YouTube, 8 November. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=JdpspllWI2o. Lester, Libby, and Simon Cottle. 2011. Transnational protests and the media: Toward global civil society? In Transnational protests and the media, ed. Simon Cottle and Libby Lester. New York: Peter Lang. Lester, Libby, and Kerrie Foxwell-Norton. 2019. Citizens and science: Media, communication and conservation. In Making a difference: Linking science and policy, ed. W. Sutherland et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lonely Planet. 2019. Tasmania. Retrieved from https://www.lonelyplanet.com/ australia/tasmania. Miller, Toby. 2016. Greenwashed sports and environmental activism: Formula 1 and FIFA. Environmental Communication 10 (6): 71–733. Mount Wellington Cable Car. 2018. Take action now. Retrieved from https:// mtwellingtoncablecar.com/takeaction/. Murphy, Patrick D. 2017. The media commons: Globalization and environmental discourses. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. Neslen, Arthur. 2018. Tokyo Olympics venues “built with wood from threatened rainforests”. The Guardian, 30 November. Retrieved from https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2018/nov/29/tokyo-olympics-venues-builtwith-wood-from-threatened-rainforests. Smee, Ben. 2019. I’ve got nothing valuable left: The heart-wrenching return to Townsville’s flooded homes. The Guardian, 5 February. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/feb/05/ive-gotnothing-valuable-left-the-heart-wrenching-return-to-townsvilles-floodedhomes. Thompson, John B. 2018. Mediated interaction in the digital age. Theory, Culture & Society. First published online 6 November. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 0263276418808592.

Index

A Abbot Point, 77 ABC Four Corners program, 114 Aboriginal protest, 98 Aboriginal protesters, 99 Active emergency zone, 154 Activism, 7, 134 Activist communications, 38 speed of, 34 Activist groups, 106 Activist-organised events, 127 Activists, 6 Adani coal mine, 162 Adani, Gautam, 5, 84, 151 Adani Group, 77 Adani’s Carmichael mine, 71 Adani’s credibility, 82 Address concerns, 128 Adopt an orangutan, 5 Age, the, 28 Agribusiness, 144 Alexander, Jeffrey, 25 Anti-development, 138, 139

Anti-globalisation protest, 31 Aquaculture, 47 Aquaculture Stewardship Council, 113 Aquifer water, 2 Arab Spring, 31 Asahi Beverages, 2 Asahi Breweries, 2 Asahi Group Holdings, 2 Asahi Holdings, 159 Asian markets, 2, 11 Asia-Pacific region, 12 Associated rights, 73 Atlantic salmon, 108 Atlantic salmon farming, 99 Audiences, 34 Australia, 1, 12, 46, 77, 90, 126 vs. India, 82, 83 El Grande, 101 national identity, 74 Australia-Asian region, 13 Australia Competition and Consumer Commission, 80 Australian bush, 97

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 L. Lester, Global Trade and Mediatised Environmental Protest, Palgrave Studies in Media and Environmental Communication, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27723-9

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INDEX

Australian climate politics, 83 Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), 83 Australian Cricket Team,in 1970s, 82 Australian domestic politics, 80 Australian economy, 74 Australian Forests Standard, 103 Australian Government, 14 Australian Greens, 28 Australian Marine Conservation Society, 80 Australian newspaper, the, 71 Australian NGO Markets for Change, 123 Australian Parliament, 77 Australia’s Illegal Logging Prohibition Act (2012), 127 Australia’s Sustainable Seafood Guide, 113

B BBC, 139 Beck, Ulrich, 21, 60, 133 Beijing, 11 Ben & Jerry, 80 Beyond Coal, 155 Big Data, 35 Big data, 33 Big Fish, 114 Big tent, 22, 39, 64 Biodiversity maintenance, 26 Biosecurity risks, 14 Bipartisan support, 57 Bishop, Julie, 79 Bjelke-Petersen, Joh, 76 Blackmail, 104 Blow-ins, 153 Borneo, 5, 11, 157 Borneo deforestation, 136 Borneo forests, 154 Bottled water, 2

Boundaries, 4 Bounded community, myth of, 161 Brand campaigns, 146 Brand-focused activism, 36, 130 Brand is everything, 128 Brand protection, 126 Brand Tasmania, 112 Brazil, 144 Broadcast media, 8 Brown, Bob, 28, 151 Building consensus, 54 Business issue, 54 Büsst, John, 74

C Cable car, 160 Campaign leaders, 83 Campaigns, 10 Campaign-style reporting, 139 Camp Florentine activists, 98 Camp Flozza, 97 Canada, 2, 52, 109 Carbon trading, 56 Carlton & United Breweries, 160 Carmichael mine, 77 Cascade Brewery, 160 Castells, Manuel, 12, 33 Celebrities, 24 Celebritisation of lists, 88 Celebrity interlocutors, 85 Central Queensland coast, 77 Certification schemes, 36, 128 Chappell, Greg, 82 Chappell, Ian, 82 Chatham House rule, 105 Chief Minister, Sarawak, 138 Chile, 100 China, 127, 136 coal supplier, 90 Chinese company, 57 Chinese markets, 130

INDEX

Chinese Meijin energy group, 77 Citizen journalists, 145 Citizenship, 61 sense of, 46 Civil rights movement, 15 Civil society, will of, 61 Clear-felling, 103 Climate change, 1, 46, 87, 89, 155 Coal supplier, 90 Coastal policy, 110 CO2 emissions, reduction of, 23 Collective good, the, 55 Commodified spectacle, 87 Commodity chains, 12 Common ground, 106 Commonwealth v Tasmania, 29 Communication media, 8, 162 Communications, flow of, 7 Communicative flows, 73 Communities, 3, 4, 12, 46 of concern, 4 formation, 63 legitimacy and rights of, 153 multinational stealing local water from, 161 opponents, 152 of protest, 151 science and, 116 support, 162 Community conflict, 160 at resource procurement, 99 Complex international networks, 12 Complex networks, 9 Complex supply chains, 124 Connected communities, 22 Connective power, 35 Connectivity, 31 Conservation Action Trust, 79, 90 Conservative backlash, 55 Conservative right, 57 Consumers, 23 mass mobilisation of, 137

167

society, 49 targeting of, 34 Contemporary publics, 63 Contemporary transnational environmental protest, 6 Content creators, 139 Conventional methods, 10 COP climate change, 31 Coral Battleground, the, 75 Coral bleaching, 78, 87 Coral bleaching event (2016), 85 Coral Reef Ecosystem Program, 86 Corporate activities negative news media coverage of, 132 Corporate actors, 10 Corporate change, 130 Corporate citizenship, 55 Corporate executives, 126 Corporate juggernaut, 111 Corporate power, 49 Corporate principle, 128 Corporate social responsibility (CSR), 126, 160 consultants, 126, 132 principles, 131 websites, 124 Corporate social sustainability departments, managers of, 126 Corporations, 6, 22 Cosmopolitan environmental concern, 6 Cottle, Simon, 48 Counter certification schemes, 128 Court cases, 3 Cousins, Geoff, 83 Credibility, 53 ‘Cutting green tape’, 77

D Dairy, 47

168

INDEX

Datafication, 34 David and Goliath battle, 111 Deadliest year, 144 Decentralized cyberspace, 60 Decision-making, 6 Deforestation, 127, 140 Derwent River, 160 Deterritorialized communitization, 63 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 21, 81 Digital communications, platforms of, 33 Digital media networks, 32 Disaster events, 48 Dispersed collection of interlocutors, 60 Distant American public, 24 Distant audiences, 26 Diverse views, 45 Domestic pressure, 131 Double-edged sword of visibility, 35 Double salmon production, 110 Drama, 28 Dramaturgical framing, 25 Dredge spoil, 79 Drought, 1

E Ecological citizenship, 73 Ecological democracy development of, 155 Economic vandalism, 104 El Grande, 101 Ellison Reef, 75 Emotional labour, 46 Energy policies, 1 Environment Minister, 80 Environment Protection Authority, 111 Environmental activism, 15 Environmental awareness, 39 and concern, 73

Environmental campaigners, 7 Environmental certification, lack of, 125 Environmental citizenship, 154 Environmental communications research, 10 Environmental concern, 39 Environmental conflict, 89 politics of, 5 Environmental crimes, 126 Environmental debate individuals and publics engagement in, 72 Environmental decision-making, 53, 161 Environmental degradation, 14 Environmental discourses, 37 Environmental futures, 15 Environmental harm, 15, 129 Environmental information carriage of, 72 Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), 123, 136, 142 Environmentalisms, 87 Environmental issues, 15 Environmental journalism, 139 Environmental journalists, 7 Environmental leaders, 37 Environmental meanings and risk representation and interpretation of, 72 Environmental movement, 22 Environmental NGOs, 50, 114 Environmental outcomes responsibility for, 34 Environmental politics, 7, 89 prioritisation of numbers in, 35 Environmental protest, 6, 15, 73, 151 centre of, 102 visibility in, 51 vulnerabilities to, 132 Environmental protest action

INDEX

individuals and publics engagement in, 72 Environmental reporting, 145 Environmental responsibility, 162 Environmental risks, 12 Environment Tasmania, 112 Essential resources, 14 Establishment grants, 102 Ethical purchasing, 136 Ethnographic methods, 11 Europe, 2 European Union’s Timber Regulation in (2010), 127

F Facebook, 33 Factory forestry, 100 Fairwood Partners and Friends of the Earth Japan (FOEJ), 123 Fake public, 84 Fake social media activity, 84 Federal Court case, 111 ‘Fight for the/our Reef’ campaign, 81 First Nations, 54 Fish farming, 16 Flanagan, Richard, 57, 155 Flannery, Tim, 78 Florentine Valley, 97 Flow-on effect, 134 Forest to Floor, 136 Forestry, 47 Forestry Tasmania, 101 Forests, 16 Forests Stewardship Certification (FSC), 101, 103 Four Corners, 110, 112 program, 114 Franklin Blockade, 151 Franklin Dam, 27, 101 Fraser, Nancy, 60 Free trade agreements, 11

169

Friends of the Earth (FOE), 103 Fukushima Daichi power plant, 130 Functioning public spheres, 62 Funding models, 159

G G7, 31 G20, 31 Galilee Basin, 71, 77, 151, 155 Gas Jamboree, 155 GetUp!, 107 Gibson, Miranda, 104 Global awareness, 5 Global citizens, 89 Global communicative flows, 133 Global communities of concern, 16 Global consumer society, 128 Global economy, 12, 146 Global environmental politics, 28 Global environmental protest, 161 Global environmental risks, 4 Global governance, 27 Global initiatives, 5 Globalisation, 153 of emotions, 59 Global meta-network of finance and media, 50 Global networks of media and activism, 116 Global North, 12 Global phenomenon, 6 Global politics, 63 of environment, 125 Global publics, 60 Global South, 12 Global warming, 56 Global Witness, 7, 123, 129, 136, 137, 142, 144 Globe representations, 27 Goods, flows of, 13 Governance, 154

170

INDEX

broader norms for, 133 Government support, 87 Grand Canyon, 89 dumping rubbish in, 79 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Act, 76 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA), 78 Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, the, 5, 10, 74, 101, 154, 155, 158, 162 Green Activists, 71 Green credentials, 128 Green lawfare, 32 Green politicians, 82 Greenhouse gasses, 158 emissions, 23 Greenpeace, 21, 79 Greens party, 110 Ground water, 2 ‘Gunns 20’, 101 Gunns Ltd, 56, 97, 101, 156 woodchip mills, 100 Gunns pulp mill, 56

H Habermas, Jurgen, 47 Harmful activities, 86 Hierarchies, 34 High Court, the, 30, 145 case, 28, 29 Chief Justice, 28 High-profile NGOs, 32 Historical perspective, 7 Hobart, 97, 109 Holt, Harold, 77 Human rights abuses, 23 Huon Aquaculture and Petuna, 109 Huon Valley Environment Centre, 103, 135 Hutchins, Brett, 9, 15, 45 Hydro Electricity Commission, 156

I Iban activist, 145, 157 Iceland, 158 Icon under Pressure, 74 Identity, 31 Illegal activities, 144 Illegal land grabs, 124 Illegal logging, 137 Image makeover, 84 Images of Earth, 27 India, 127 vs. Australia, 82, 83 Indian company, 71 Indian environmental group, 79 Indian markets, 130 Indigenous communities, 37, 71, 137 Indigenous knowledges, 12 Individual citizen, 32 Indonesia, 126 Indonesian deforestation, 36 Information transnational sharing of, 126 Information Age, 34 Information-based activism, 157 Information flow, 6, 90 language role in, 133 Infrastructure, 14 Innate limits and weaknesses, 36 Instagram, 34 Institutionalised NGOs, 31 Interactive communication horizontal networks of, 34 Interdependent relationship, 49 International campaign organisations, 134 International embarrassment, 79 International flows of information, 16 of trade and protest, 116 International governance and certification, 126 International NGO activity, 127

INDEX

171

International Rainforest Action Network, 135 International tourists, 160 International trade supply chains, 12 Internet, 33 Internet-based shaming activity, 36 Interviews, 16 Investigating tropical deforestation, 136 Investigative journalism, 139, 140 Investigative journalist, 142 Invisibility, 39, 51

Journalists, 138

J Japan, 11, 77, 123, 126 construction industry role, 137 corporate interviewees in, 128 Malaysian timber biggest buyers, 130 mass consumer campaigns, 134 pulp and paper, demand for, 100 timber supply chain, 123 Japanese-based campaigners, 134 Japanese celebrities, 135 Japanese companies, 123 Japanese consumers, 130 Japanese corporations, 123 perceptions of, 130 Japanese major flooring manufacturers, 136 Japanese manufacturers and retailers of flooring, 102 Japanese trading companies, 136 Japan Tropical Forest Action Network (JATAN), 103 Jetñil-Kijiner, Kathy, 23 Journalism practices, 126 professional norms of, 157 program, 100 Journalistic objectivity, 141 Journalistic practices, 16

L Land grab and conversion, 23 Language, significance of, 132 Large news organisations, 142 Large scale mediated networks of public action, 32 Largest environmental protest march, 21 ‘Last-chance travel lists’, 88 Laws, strengthening of, 127 Leaderless movements, 34 Legal action, 32 Legal containment measures, 35 Legality, definitions of, 133 Legal licence, 55 2008 Legal Timber Protection amendments, 127 Legitimacy, 53 Legitimate concerns, 72 Lester, Libby, 9, 15, 45 Lines of communication, 12 LinkedIn, 48 Local and global risks awareness of, 73 Local communities impacts on, 140 Local gangs, 144 Local issues, 6

K Kayong, Bill, 125 Key moments, 104 Key stakeholders, 134 Key strategy, 15 Killing Nemo, 79 KitKat campaign, 23 Kuching, 11, 138, 156 Kunanyi, 160 Kyodo News, 104

172

INDEX

Local news coverage, 101 Local partners, 144 Local suppliers/officials, 124 Logging, 56, 98 Lonely Planet, 160 ‘Loving it to death’, 86 Luther King, Martin, 25

M MacMines Austasia, 77 Macquarie Harbour, 111, 114 Mahmud, Abdul Taib, 140 Mainstream news media, 111 Major corporations, 128 Malaysia, 11, 126, 137 Malaysian general election campaign (2018), 140 Malaysian government, 139 Malaysian timber corporations, 136 March federal election, 28 Marine farming, 91 Marine Park Authority, 78 Marketers, 6 Markets for Change, 135 Mass consumer behaviour, 130 Mass consumer campaigns, 134 Mass self-communication, 33 McGaurr, Lyn, 87 1MDB scandal, 140 Media, 9, 87 and communications, 4, 6, 64, 72 and digital technology industries, 49 as business-oriented concept, 55 content, 9 ecology of, 33 events, 48, 85 invisibility, 106 power, 33 practices, 9 public shaming through, 138 release, 3, 161

role of, 45 visibility, 3 Media commons, 63 Mediated communications, 14 Mediated data-driven politics, 146 Mediated lists, 34 Mediated politics, 5 Mediated symbolic forms, 8 Mediated worldliness, 8 Mediatisation, 8, 9 Mediatised conflict, 48 Mediatised environmental conflict, 9, 13, 15, 45, 99, 155, 159 sphere of, 162 Mercury, the, 105, 107, 108 Migration, 62 Minerals, 13 Mining companies, 76 Mining industry, 46 Mitsubishi Corporation, 128 Mobilization, 31 Modi, Narendra, 84 Moral and environmental reasons, 112 Mount Wellington, 160 Mount Wellington Cable Car, 160 Movement-media dance, 15 Multicultural communities, 62 Multimedia communication networks, 34 Multinational corporations, 3, 6, 71 Multinational procurers and buyers, 16 Murdoch, Rupert, 77 Murphy, Justice Lionel, 29 Musk, Elon, 21 MySpace, 105

N National boundaries, 4, 12, 60 National broadcaster’s flagship, 100 National economy, 12 National-security issue, 14

INDEX

Native land rights, 11 Natural disasters, 14 Natural wonders, 88 Nature photography, 27 Nestle, 23 Networked digital communications technology, 51 Networks, 4, 9, 73 Network society, 9 New digital communications, 33 New industrial pulp mill development, 101 New media, 38 power work, 162 New National Stadium, 123 New Power, 22 New South Wales, 2 New transnational public spheres, 61 New York City, 21 News Corporation, 50 News media, 4 barriers, 137 coverage, 5 platforms and outlets, 38 role, 162 Newspaper, 8 Murdoch, Rupert, 77 Newsrooms, 139 Nikkei Ecology, 104 NIMBY, 152 NIYBY, 152 NOAA’s Pacific Islands Fisheries Science Center, 86 Non-elite political actors, 160 Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 16, 104, 129, 135, 146, 147 as ‘entrepreneurs of the global commonwealth’, 133 environmental, 50, 114 high-profile, 32 -industry allegiances, 126

173

institutionalised, 31 Tokyo-based, 123 transnational, 31 Nonprofit industrial complex, 35 Northwest Borneo, 125 Norway, 109 Nuclear energy, 26 O Obama, Barack, 21, 79, 90 Occupy movement, 31 Occupy Wall Street, 31 Oceans Conference, 81 Oil drilling, 76 Oil palm destruction (Borneo), 5 Oil palm plantations, 11, 157 2020 Olympic Games, 123, 154 Online campaign, 3 Online petition, 3, 82 Online use, 35 ‘Open for business’, 77 Open letter, 82 Oppositional communications, 58 Organised crime, 144 Organised irresponsibility, 46 Oudom, Hang Serei, 144 P Pacific, 23 Palm oil, 23, 131 Palm oil production, 125 Paper mills, 12 Papua New Guinea, 23, 124, 136 Park, Rosa, 25 Peg Putt, 104 people vs. environment, connection, 4 People, flows of, 13 Peoples Climate Movement, 22 Persistent market attacks, 104 Photography, 26 Physical blockade, 98

174

INDEX

Physical violence, 144 Plantations, 104 Political actors, 10 Political agendas, 60 Political campaigns, 14 Political communications, 10 Political corruption, 124 Political debate, 101 Political flows, 73 Political information, flows of, 13 Political loyalty, 111 Politics, 4 of care, 46 of connectivity, 64 of representation, 64 Post-Fukushima, 134 Poverty, 124 Power of crowds, 22 Predictive policing, 35 Pre-emptive power, 36 Press freedom, 137, 144 Primary resources, 13 Pro-Adani tweeters, 84 Procurement practices, 129 site of, 14 Professional journalism, 125, 157 Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), 103 Prominent Australians, 83 Protectionism, 62 Protest, 4, 7 activities, 35, 106 core tenet for, 162 ecology of, 33 forms communities, 151 reviews of, 32 strategy, 33 Protester, 98 Public debate, 6 Public members, 163 Public relations, 85

Pulp mill, 57 Q Queensland, 2, 71 Queensland Premier, 76 Quentin Beresford, 107 R Radio Free Sarawak, 140 Rainforest Action Network (RAN), 103 Rainforest destruction, 137, 158 Razak, Najib, 140 Receptive audiences, 159 Recognition, 24 Reef Champion, 81 Reef, the, 74 ecosystem, 78 as global citizens, 89 Regional Australia, 71 Regional politics, 14 Registered boat, 110 Relocalization, 11 Reluctant partners, 146 Renewed materiality of power, 31 Reporters without Borders, 7, 144, 145 Resources, 14 flows of, 13 Responsibilities, 45, 73, 162 untraceable chains of, 126 Rewcastle Brown, Clare, 126, 139–141, 157 Right To Information laws, 103 Rigorous research, 136 Risk assessment, 126 Risk society, 9 Rural communities, 55 S Sabotage, 104

INDEX

Sakeholder relations building trust and fairness in, 54 Salmon, 11 Salmon farming, 160 emergence, 109 Sarawak, 102, 116, 124, 125, 137, 139, 140, 157 logging companies, 137 timber industry, 125 Sarawak-Japan timber trade, 136 Satellite photography, 137 Save the Franklin, 28 ‘Save the Reef’ campaign, 74 ‘Save the Reef’ Committee, 76 Scale, 25 Scale of concern, 22 Science communication, 159 Science, politicisation of, 115 Scientific knowledge, 159 Scientists, 114, 116, 159 ‘Scoop Ice Cream, Not the Reef’, 80 Seafood governance, 113 Secret peace talks, 106 Senate inquiry, 100, 110, 114 Sensationalization, 86 Sense of belonging, 63 Seth, Suhel, 84, 90 Shared citizenship, 25 Shared social imaginary, 73 Shinjuku, 123 Silent Spring, 26 Slowbalisation, 153 Smart business sense, 112 Social activists, 145 Social change, 14 Social institutions, 9 Social licence, 14, 15, 46, 54, 56–58, 113, 161 absence of, 54 Social licence to operate (SLO), 52 Social media, 33–35 corporate controlled, 35

175

Social media-based campaigns, 127 Social relationships, 9 Social structures, 12 South Africa, 100 South-East Asia, 2 Spaces architecture of, 35 Speaking out, 15 Species and ecosystems, loss of, 14 Species loss, 26 Spectacle-isation of nature, 88 Spectacular nature, 87 Spectacular visuals, 73 Stakeholders, 55 Stanley, 1, 161 Stanley Rural Community Inc, 3 Stanley water, 159 State and civil society, role of, 54 Stop Adani Convoy, 152, 154 Stop Adani Convoy Appeal, 151 Strategic action, 64 Street marches and rallies, 82 Suasian, 55 SumOfUs, 3, 22 Sungai Besangin, 145 Sunscreens, 86 Super trawlers, 110 Supply chain, 12 Sustainability campaigns, 130 champions, 128 practices, 134 Switching mechanism, 34 Switching point(s), 12, 50, 98, 99, 108 Sydney Morning Herald, 152 Symbolic construction, 34 Symbolic representation, 24 Symbolism, 28

T Ta Ann, 145

176

INDEX

Ta Ann Holdings, 102 Ta Ann Tasmania, 102, 131 Taing Try, 144 Tamar Valley, 56, 101 Targeted attacks, 85 Tasmania, 10, 12, 101, 111, 125 beautiful forests, 107 ‘clean green’ reputation, 100 forest products, 91 marine farming, 109 tourism-fuelled economic boom, 160 Tasmanian economy, 102 Tasmanian fires, the, 156 Tasmanian fisheries and waterways, 110 Tasmanian forest products, 99 Tasmanian forestry industry, 99, 111 history of, 100 Tasmanian forests, 162 conflict, 123 Tasmanian Forests Agreement, 106 Tasmanian Greens, 104 Tasmanian newspapers, 56 Tasmanian Premier, 98 Tasmanian regrowth and plantation eucalypt forests, 102 Tasmanian salmon industry, 113 Tasmanian state government, 28, 101 Tasmanian timber industry, 102 Tasmanian wilderness, 154 Tasmanian World Heritage Wilderness, 75 Tasmanian World Heritage Wilderness Area, 97, 110 Tassal, 109 Television, 75 Terrorism, 104 Thompson, John B., 8 Threats of legal action, 141 Timber(s), 12, 13 illegal, 127 imported, 123

veneer mills, 104 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (March 2011), 130 Tokyo, 11, 99, 135, 163 Tokyo-based NGOs, 123 2020 Tokyo Olympics, 129 Tokyo’s New National Stadium, 146 Tourism, 62 economic benefits, 87 environmental futures, 87 Tourism dollars, 80 Tourism industry, 78 Tourism’s role, 86 Tourists’ behaviour, 86 Townsville, 154, 155 Trade officials, 126 Traditional corporate allegiances, breakdown of, 160 Traditional framing, 153 Translocal and transnational interactions, 6 Translocal and transnational movement, 151 Transnational communicative potential, 88 Transnational community of concern, 3 of risk, 60 Transnational conflicts, 10 Transnational corporations, 145 Transnational discourse coalitions, 60 Transnational/global public sphere, 47 Transnational governance and power, 29 Transnationalised public, 89 Transnationalizing the Public Sphere, 60 Transnational networks, 31 Transnational NGOs, 31 Transnational political activity, 138 Transnational problem, 62 Transnational publics, 89

INDEX

Transnational public sphere, 15 Transparency, 136, 147 Travel industry, 87 Travel journalists, 90 Tropical cyclones, 78 Trust, 53, 56 Turnbull, Malcolm, 80 Twitter, 21 U UN Climate Summit, 21 UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 125 Undercover investigations, 136 UNESCO, 62, 154 World Heritage Commission, 28 as World Heritage in danger, 74 Unilever, 23, 80 United Kingdom (UK), 101, 126 United Nations Environmental Programme, 27 United States (US), 2, 21, 46, 137 US civil rights movement, 24, 156 US Lacey Act, 127 V Value chains, 12 Vicious cycle, 116 Victoria, 1, 161 Vietnam, 100 Violence, 7, 126, 144, 145, 157 Visibility, 38, 51, 58, 134, 152, 162 Vorakchun Khmer, 144 W Water, 1

177

mining, 3 restrictions, 1 rights, 2 Weber, Jenny, 103 Weibo, 34 West Coast of Tasmania, 110 Whatsapp, 34 Wikileaks, 85 Wild West, 81 Wilderness Society, the, 28, 101 Wildlife Magazine, 76 Wildlife Preservation Society, 75 Wireless networks, 33 Woodchip mills, 100 Woodchipping, 100 Woodchips annual export of, 100 Workers’ unions, 106 World Bank and World Monetary Fund, 31 World Heritage Area, 107 World Heritage Committee, 73, 75, 107 World Heritage Convention, 75 World risk society, 60 World’s first anti-fake news legislation, 140 The World’s Most-Loved Salmon, 113 World Trade Organisation, 31 World Wildlife Fund (WWF), 21 Wright, Judith, 75

Y YouTube, 48, 105 Yusuf, Muhammad, 144