Image from ABC
By Situation Theatre 28/8/2020
By focusing on solutions, adopting a light-hearted engaging tone, and weaving individualism into a broader social fabric, Craig Reucassel succeeds where many have failed before him.
In 2010, the London-based climate denialist Christopher Monckton, who described the Copenhagen climate conference as “a sort of Nuremburg Rally”, toured Australia and scored 43 ABC interviews or reports. The same year, former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies James Hansen, often described as the “grandfather of climate science”, also toured Australia. He was covered five times by the national broadcaster.
In 2020, the ABC has aired a three-part documentary called Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge, dedicated entirely to solutions to the climate crisis as a “case for saving the planet”.
It’s a welcome departure from the pitfalls of previous climate coverage, whether it be the lopsided reporting of deniers, or the false balance of shows like the 2012 documentary I Can Change Your Mind About Climate, the 2016 Brian Cox/Malcolm Roberts Q&A, or even the Q&A debate between Liberal Senator Jim Molan and climate scientist Michael Mann earlier this year.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the man responsible for the perfect pisstake of Monckton back in 2011, in which the former staffer of the UK Conservative Party under Thatcher was cast as Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest and greatest comic creation and asked to do some of his old stuff like “is niiiice”, is also now responsible for some the clearest climate communication this country has ever seen.
Like Damon Gameau in his optimistic film 2040 from last year, Craig Reucassel and the Planet A team leave behind fruitless fossil-fuelled battles with fringe voices and embark on a wide-ranging survey of measures to confront the climate crisis. Almost from the outset, protest is framed as one promising path. The “ageing Chaser boy”, as Sky News’s Chris Kenny vengefully branded him only seven years after the satirists depicted him mounting a Labradoodle, interviews school strikers amongst a crowd of 80,000 who packed out the Domain in September last year, and tears up as he contemplates the future for younger generations.
Image from ABC
There’s the usual range of consumer-based solutions offered as five households are challenged to reduce their emissions from energy use, transport, and diet. These are paired with a broad array of more collective offerings, including communal pressure for renewable energy and electric vehicle investment, community windfarms, public campaigns to expose fossil fuel greenwashing, and pressuring pollies to end fossil fuel subsidies.
On a recent episode of the ChangeMakers Podcast, Reucassel spoke about not wanting to make yet another depressing climate documentary with a token nod to inadequate or vague solutions in the closing minutes (Planet of the Humans anyone?), and it’s so much the better for it.
Another area Fight for Planet A excels is tone, where it benefits enormously from the decaying Chaser child’s warmth, creativity, and humanity. When he meets radical left-wing stooges, such as the extremist 13-year old girl Izzy, who has the temerity to want to survive her 30th birthday, he’s personable, engaging, and non-judgemental, and seems to effortlessly foster connections. When he’s interviewing residents suffering from coal dust pollution or farmers enduring a brutal drought, he’s empathetic and humane. When he’s executing spectacular stunts of melting ice or deforested umbrellas, he’s making people really feel something about environmental destruction. And when he’s chasing Scott Morrison down the beach with a cloud of black balloons at his back or delivering 20 million trees to Chevron’s Perth head office, he’s courageous and irreverent.
Not only is the focus on solutions empowering and the tone just right, the Fight for Planet A is also more politically and strategically coherent than most climate communication.
I have genuinely liked #FightforplanetA. It's tackled stuff I wondered whether they'd have the capacity or will to tackle, like corporate emissions, mining and this episode, the emissions impact of read meat.
— Ketan Joshi (@KetanJ0) August 25, 2020
Honestly, this wouldn't be possible in 2012. Or even 2017.
There’s a common and accurate left critique of climate messaging which argues that a focus on individual consumption displaces responsibility from the 100 companies who are responsible for more than 70% of global emissions since 1988.
I’m an environmental sociologist and I cannot stress ENOUGH that the majority of environmental harm on our planet is caused by CORPORATIONS & the WEALTHY & focusing on changing individual actions over holding capitalists accountable will not slow climate catastrophe at all
— yools (@yoolia_) August 23, 2020
The critique is even more powerful when you discover BP hired public relations agency Ogilvy and Mather to first promote and popularise the term “carbon footprint” in the early 2000s to displace climate responsibility from the oil giant to individuals.
A substantial portion of Fight For Planet A is dedicated to reducing the carbon footprint of five Australian households, opening up this reasonable line of attack from the left. But it’s one that perhaps misunderstands Reucassel’s theory of change as well as the overall approach of the documentary.
Again, on the ChangeMakers, the rotting Chaser baby explained how the social effects of his 2017 documentary War on Waste influenced his approach to Planet A. That experience taught him that engaging individuals in a series of personal actions to reduce waste cascaded into councils being bombarded by communal demands for change, which then escalated to state and federal levels. Research on the impacts of the War on Waste by the Institute for Sustainable Futures bears this out, reporting that it “sparked major social and environmental change across Australia, triggering more than 450 initiatives by schools, hospitals, businesses, governments and community groups to slash their waste footprint”. The report traced Woolworths’ decision to remove plastic straws from its stores in Australia and New Zealand, the Western Australian government’s banning of single-use plastic bags, and waste reduction in 280 different organisations back to the documentary.
This interplay between individuals, their communities, businesses, as well as governments is a consistent theme of the Fight for Planet A. Scenes switch smoothly between segments at these different levels of analysis, and episodes are peppered with lines like “Individuals alone can’t solve the problem”, “We need to keep up the pressure on government and industry, and ask them why they’re not doing more to reduce emissions and protecting our planet for future generations. And we need to see what else we can be doing in our own lives too”, and “The federal government isn’t doing enough to combat climate change, so it’s up to the rest of us to do something about it. And we have the power to do that, especially when we work with our community, in our councils, businesses and schools.”
This is so much more than individuals as mere consumers. This documentary represents the early stages of rediscovering a pre-neoliberal model of individuals as citizens, as coming together in collective struggle.
Fight For Planet A: Our Climate Challenge shows progress in how we communicate the climate crisis in this country. It’s a reflection of years of hard work from climate activists and communicators who are passionately committed to this communal fight for a liveable future.
Given the acceleration of the climate crisis in recent years, now it’s up to all of us to help accelerate this shift from impotent individualism to powerful collective struggle.
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