Although emphatic on the pivotal role of character, Aristotle seems to have been in two minds when it comes to the persuasive force of the visual and the visual arts. On one hand, he intimates that the representation of reality is intrinsically fascinating and emotionally energizing for humans:

Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies … the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, “Ah, that is he.” For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation as such, but to the execution, the coloring, or some such other cause. (Poetics IV, 3–5)

On the other hand, he subordinates visual representation in the hierarchy of the arts: cultural evolution had given rise to more complex and powerful modes of expression. The human instinct for imitation had been combined with those for harmony and rhythm and eventually “gave birth to Poetry” (Poetics IV, 6). Aristotle is clear that this is a more complete art form, especially when it provides the foundation for drama. Within the world of drama itself, he concedes that “Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own” before continuing, “But, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry. For the power of Tragedy, we may be sure, is felt even apart from representation and actors. Besides, the production of spectacular effects depends more on the art of the stage machinist than on that of the poet” (Poetics VI, 19).

It would seem that for Aristotle, then, the visual can generate superficial pleasures but not a deep and transformative experience.

Scientists agree that anthropogenic climate change is real and that it is a very serious threat on multiple levels for the entire planet (IPCC 2014). Economic, social, political, and biological systems are all said to be in trouble. Moreover, the window of opportunity for dealing with the problem is limited. At the same time, the public around the globe is mostly apathetic. Even in countries like Norway, where high levels of environmental concern and political involvement are the norm, climate change often seems more like “background noise” than a problem demanding radical collective action (Norgaard 2011). Contrary to what one might think, a similar situation pertains in the United States. Here, despite an effective right-wing campaign to discredit climate science (Oreskes and Conway 2010), surveys today show that a majority of people believe that climate change is happening and needs to be addressed, including, now, a majority of Republicans (Maibach et al. 2013). Yet many of these same surveys indicate that most Americans are unwilling to make meaningful sacrifices to deal with the problem. There appears to be insufficient support for social mobilization of the kind that will make a real difference (for a dissenting view, see Krosnick and MacInnis 2013). True enough, political and bureaucratic elites can mandate the kinds of policies advocated by climate science, with its long-term, evidence-based views. Yet there will be problems with compliance and implementation when public buy-in is weak. In democratic contexts, electoral sanctions can follow if cultural horizons for responding to climate change are not aligned with public policies (Lorenzoni and Pidgeon 2006).

What exactly is the problem? It is not simply that there is a substantial corps of climate change deniers confusing the public with nefarious tactics, nor is it that the carbon industries have easily bought off political leaders. The issue is more subtle.

We have seen that films and artworks are a significant path along which climate change activists attempt to arrive at public visibility. These are deliberately articulated attempts to stoke the fires of the social drama and to inject passion into what activists fear is perceived as a dull issue. Yet perhaps the most important and direct route of transition from back-ground noise to the center of the social attention space is through the circuits of “news” production and consumption. A capacity to be news- worthy is of the utmost importance along many dimensions. Simply being selected out for news coverage marks climate change as a significant issue worthy of priority relative to the panoply of problems every society faces. Whether critical or benign, talk about climate change in a “news” forum gives an implicit ranking to this ecological problem, making it visible as a public issue. It is also significant to note that the news reaches a numerically large and socially dispersed audience. Films and artworks appeal to limited social constituencies. As we have seen, even within those constituencies, only a small proportion of people will find the time or energy (or in some cases have the basic social competence?) to thoughtfully engage with such creative products. By contrast, exposure to whatever is in the news is somewhat nonelective and is robotically embedded in daily routines – reading the paper on the train, listening to the radio on the drive to work, checking out CNN, the BBC, or Democracy Now! online during the lunch break, and so forth. In addition, the field of “news” tends to reach over social barriers. To a substantial extent, the same “important” or “newsworthy” events are carried in highbrow and lowbrow formats, on radio, television, print, and the Internet. A final plus to getting into the news is that coverage is cost free.

Can climate change make us happy? The question might seem glib, but we ask it in earnest. Happiness, for Aristotle, was the goal of all deliberation. Without showing that he cared first and foremost about the happiness of his audience, a speaker was sunk. Deliberation over climate change is no different. And climate science cannot tell us how to be happy.

Others have made the same point, but they have tended to conceive of happiness in restrictive ways: ethical, psychological, economic. We conceive of happiness in more inclusive sociological terms. It is about more than feelings of security or the promise of prosperity. In the Aristotelian tradition, happiness (eudemonia) is not simply pleasure or contentment but “is something like flourishing human living, a kind of living that is active, inclusive of all that has intrinsic value, and complete” (Nussbaum 2012, 342). In American civil discourse, something like this view of flourishing has echoes in talk of “community” or even “freedom” in the way that they capture the societal actualization of latent possibility. From the perspective of cultural sociology, happiness is, above all, socially integrative. As Durkheim (1965) argued in the Elementary Forms, it arises in the form of solidarity from a complex mixture of shared memories, shared emotions, shared ends, shared activity, and shared symbolic systems.

It also arises from shared beliefs, which, in Aristotle's view (and Durkheim's), are closely linked to shared emotions, including fear. Consensus matters.

In 2006, a London-based liberal think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, issued a paper arguing that the case for climate change needed to be made more effectively (Ereaut and Segnit 2006). Written by two public relations and marketing specialists, Warm Words suggested that the battle for public attention was being lost thanks to mixed messages, contradictory scraps of information, and contending expert opinions in the mass media. Climate change discourse in the United Kingdom was “confusing, contradictory and chaotic” (7). Every argument was met with a counterargument, apocalyptic scenarios were confronted by cheery visions of an emergent British wine industry, and the overall story the public got was that “nobody really knows.” It suggested a new strategy was needed by climate change advocacy groups. This would treat “climate-friendly activity as a brand that can be sold” (28). There would be less reference to a top-down “message” from experts and authority sources with the implication of “rational argument.” Rather, it urged that “we need to work in a more shrewd and contemporary way, using subtle techniques of engagement” (28). These would include getting the issue onto the “emotional radar” and constructing a myth of “ordinary heroism” in which everyday folk could take on a huge task (8).

It was perhaps imprudent to publish a document, which amounted to an own-goal by activists (we review other clangers in Chapter 6). Critics pounced on it as evidence that the climate change camp is characterized by patronizing and sneaky spin doctors who wish to replace an ongoing rational debate with insidious and patronizing propaganda. The pain of the self-inflicted wound was redoubled by the fact that there was no need to publish. Although far more respectful of science and of the need for debate than Warm Words, by the time of the cultural strategy document's appearance, Al Gore's efforts to get climate change taken seriously had already made use of myth, emotion, and those “subtle techniques of engagement.”

It is generally agreed that the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth featuring Al Gore and directed by Davis Guggenheim (2006) was a pivotal moment in the history of global warming discourse.

For a philosopher who wrote brilliantly on the general concept of place (Casey 1997; Curry 1996), Aristotle had amazingly little to say about the fact that every story must happen “somewhere.” The Greek tragedies and comedies that he studied were located in kingdoms, cities, islands, deserts, temples, and so forth. These settings might be expected to influence mood or audience interpretations due to their aesthetic properties or the background myths of place with which they are associated. Exploiting these is a common principle of contemporary staging in theatre, film, and opera. Regrettably Aristotle remains silent. His interest in the relationship of plot and character reigns supreme in the Poetics. As in our chapter on climate change art, we ask here whether his focused attention on these variables is analytically or pragmatically sufficient. Might not some attention to the settings of action pay some dividends? Might place have implications for the social drama of climate change with much the same force as character? We begin our chapter by mapping and justifying this theoretical possibility. We end it with some empirical investigations of the ways that settings are imbricated with plot and character in the telling of particular climate change dramas.

In their darker hours, environmentalists often say that apathetic members of affluent societies will only take climate change seriously when it starts to “hit home” – when they and their families and friends start to suffer from unmistakable, localized changes: wells running dry, neighborhoods lost to the sea, crops failing year after year. As long as she sees it as somebody else's problem, the argument goes, the average member of the middle class will find other issues to worry about. In more optimistic moments, the same environmentalists tell a different version of this story. Individuals, they say, will band together to fight climate change when they feel they are fighting for home, when concrete, meaningful place – not abstract, global space – becomes the focus of their shared concern.