The Climate Gaze

This presentation introduces the concept of the climate gaze as a new way of examining the interconnectedness of journalism and other discourses in environmental communication. Our theorisation is indebted to John Urry, who for more than 20 years examined how another gaze – the tourist gaze – ordered a particular form of engagement with various cultural objects. The climate gaze is not a subset of the tourist gaze. Indeed, we build our case in part by acknowledging Urry’s presumption that post-modern distraction has made tourism increasingly indistinguishable from that which is not tourism. Like Urry, however, we find the study of departures helps us interrogate the normal.

We argue that there already exists a climate gaze authorised by a fractious discourse coalition of journalism, tourism, science and activism. The contribution of each coalition member is characterised by unstable amalgams of accredited and unaccredited visual discourses and banal glocalisms. Our presentation aims to illustrate this with reference to three ubiquitous objects of the climate gaze: weather; landscape and escape.