The questions posed by the ecological crises – notably the climate emergency - are a series of provocations. These questions drive us back not only to intimate connections between our actions and the fate of the earth and our atmosphere, but to the intimate realm of our attention and capacity to care both individually and collectively.
The climate and ecological emergencies are ‘signs of our times’ that raise political questions far beyond the conventional realm of environmental policy. Our individual and collective responses are heavily mediated by parallel struggles in the new frontier of the ‘attention economy,’ where our freedom to embrace the conviction that another world is possible is deeply compromised by political and corporate-sponsored media complexes with ever more sophisticated capacities to target, monetise and colonize our attention and capacity to care and act wisely.
The climate emergency and wider ecological crises are beginning to touch on the foundations of human meaning and meaning-making, and they are doing so at a time when the global ‘one percent’ is exerting unprecedented levels of influence on our shared imaginaries through their ownership and control of media and information technologies. During the past two decades, concentrations of global wealth have been accompanied by the rising concentration of ownership of, and control over, multinational media corporations.
