Television and Climate Change - 20 May 2010
The pile of books under the lamp in the living room is growing ever higher. I suspect every one of them contains a little world I'd enjoy sinking into for an hour… but it's been a long day and I think I'll just see what's on the television.
Ironically, one of the books in my pile is Dr Bruce Fell's Television and Climate Change. Bruce is a lecturer in screen and media at Charles Sturt University. His book, written for his PhD thesis, talks about how television - the soundtrack and wallpaper of our lives - normalises a way of life that is quite simply unsustainable. He gives the example of a scene in which two Americans sit in a snug café, snow swirling outside, eating a green salad. The salad is simply a prop on the table, not meant to be an object of interest in itself. But Bruce puts the "pause" button on that scene and invites us to think about it. He invites us to think about the miles – probably by air – that those delicate green leaves have travelled to get from the place they were grown to the snug café in the snowbound city. It is because the salad isn't "noticeable" in the scene that it is all the more powerful. It just seems normal, unremarkable.
At a climate change discussion night held at Café Kai in George Street recently, Bruce said today's generation absorbs a constant drip of images like these, imbibing them from the very beginning, along with mother's milk. He said that creating different, more sustainable images in the media – for example, a character that chooses to drink tap water rather than a fizzy drink – was enormously challenging because of the commercial interests at play. However, he said that one way to tackle the issue is by direct appeals to celebrities to model healthier and more sustainable choices. For fruit-and-veg challenged children, there could be great power in seeing a much-loved television figure simply eating an apple.
Well, the book is still in my "to read" pile but at least I had the chance to listen to Bruce in person during the discussion in the café organised by Bathurst Community Climate Action Network. If you're interested in future such discussions, stay tuned, or join BCCAN and start getting the newsletter.