Iconic media environmental images of Oceania: challenging corporate news for solutions

Abstract

The fate of 2700 islanders from the Carteret Islands off the north-eastern coast of Bougainville has become an icon for the future of many communities on low-lying small states globally and especially in the Pacific—the so-called ‘climate change refugees’ or ‘environmental migrants’. They are a controversial casualty of the failure of developed nations to deal decisively with the global warming crisis. Iconic images of islanders leaving their ancestral homeland and relocating also resonates with earlier environmental parallels in the Pacific such as the evacuation of Rongelapese and other Marshall Islanders in the wake of US nuclear testing in the 1950s and the forced shift of Banaban Islanders to Rabi in the Fiji Islands from 1945 because of phosphate mining. Despite an inspired and colourful campaign by Pacific Island delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009, global geopolitics stifled the outcome to the disadvantage of Oceania. This article examines how the emergence of internet-based and innovative news services have challenged corporate media in the public right to know and explores strategies to communicate over climate change in both mainstream and alternative public spheres. It also challenges the news media to lift its environmental reporting efforts.