Environmental catastrophe between reality and representation

The transition from the information society to the communication society, placed by scholars in the mid-nineties, also marks the beginning of an interesting period because of its radical changes in the individual and collective consciousness, which are often linked to one of the basic people’s needs: security. This is a primordial need which is definitely going to affect both the representations that are built around this theme, and those behaviours and attitudes that characterize everyday life. Within this interpretative framework, the environmental problem becomes an interesting focus for the scholar of the social and communicative processes, as well as for the historian of science. A cultural process of great complexity hence begins to take shape. It involves a contradictory coexistence between processing systems of a “rational” and conscious kind, such as research and science, and large flows of meaning production and far more ambiguous sign communication, which are increasingly relevant in the construction of collective identities. There is a coincidence which is not only chronological – since the nineties - between the appearance of the global fear for the environmental mutation and the general shift of an economic, cultural and social order, which Manuel Castells describes as the advent of the informational development model of the network societies, based on a new articulation of communication, between the fluid world of the media and identity processes of a various and new kind. The fear of an environmental change, in order to be interpreted and discussed, calls into question a mediological, sociological and psychological view, as well as the scientific, economic and political one. The traditional fears arising from disasters of a natural order (such as earthquakes or eruptions), or of a mixed order (a natural one, but resulting from degenerative changes in the environment caused by humans, such as floods and fires), seem more frequently to invade a sensitivity that is fueling itself through the ubiquitous connectivity of the media, generating complex reactions on the imaginative level, on mythologies, and symbolic constructions, as well as, of course, on the level of social behaviours, political practices, and theorizations themselves. These dynamics generate along the changes in the terrain of collective participation: ecologist and environmental protests, which originated in the United States in the early Seventies and later spread throughout Europe, mirror the transmigration of the conflicts, from the level of material production to the one of symbolic production. The enquiry "Environmental catastrophe between reality and representation" aims to examine four basic dimensions: 1. The representation of environmental disaster in the collective imagination, with special focus on the arts, literature and cinema; 2. The representation of environmental disaster in the traditional media, with particular attention to television as a reservoir of memory and identity; 3. The evolutionary dynamics of the social movements, with particular attention to the transition from commitment and participation based on ideologies (e. g. political participation), to the symbolic dimensions, often anchored to the growing attention for the quality of life. The action of the collective movements takes place in a limbo wherein values and expectations are created, where change has its origin, where the future is being designed and becomes present; 4. Those communication strategies which are more coherent with the contemporary imagination, to promote a widespread awareness of our being all players in the sustainable development process. An enquiry path, then, which is preliminary to the elaboration of appropriate communication strategies suited to create an environment culture and to give life to an information typology which spares no efforts in handling the environment with the best tools, daily renewing the interest in these themes and, above all, concretely affecting our lifestyles.