Luc Pauwels (2012:1-2) introduces the visual essay, which will also be referred to here as the photo essay, as a thoughtfully planned-out combination of images, captions and larger text that has been created by an author to provide a specific, ‘inspirational’ narrative, or to create a link between text and images that will solidify a specific argument. Benjamin Coles (2014:519-520) argues that photo essays are able to tell a different story compared to single photographs, due to the photo essay’s ability to engage with the audience to produce a narrative that is completely different from an individual piece of writing or a single photograph. Pauwels (2012:3-10) states that a photo essay allows the audience to experience a “broadly contextualised type of ‘field experience’,” which makes for distinct forms of expression to produce a “scientifically informed statement” and visually present the end product of visual research. Visual and photo essays are created with the intention to tell a story that can potentially evoke an emotional response from the audience (Childs 2006:205). Photo and visual essays provide visual accounts of research that differ from traditional formatted academic writings by voicing and visualising personal reflections, ideas, experiences and observations (Pauwels 2012:2). Visual/photo essays often carefully bring together ideas and links that could easily go unnoticed when attempting to portray a specific narrative or argument without using a combination of images and texts.

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Academic visual and photo essays remain close to specific theoretical and methodological guidelines that are followed by the discipline it is employed for, while still presenting new and creative formats that portray an idea or an argument. According to Pauwels (2012:1) visual essays can be considered as one of the most visual forms of visual research, letting scholars experiment with new media technologies that provide the audience with an opportunity to experience a memorable visual experience. Photo essays are made up of different text, images and captions that can be organised in a way that allows for a specific narrative to emerge (Childs 2006:520). Photographs, according to Ricardo Marín-Viadel and Joaquín Roldán (2012:15) are always (re)presentations of human knowledge and are produced for specific purposes, and Marín and Roldán (2010:1) mention that photographs gradually reveal possible interpretations and meanings that are enforced by captions and texts, exploiting the “rhetorical and narrative potential of images”. Merilyn Childs (2006:205) states that “photo-essays makes us feel as if we can see what really happened, sometimes as it happened,” allowing the author to present their argument in a way that will very likely be understood and interpreted in the way it is intended to be understood and interpreted. Therefore, visual and photo essays can be seen as a method and approach that challenges traditional formal qualities of academic essay writing by creating a multimodal experience that visualises academic insights in experimental and experimental ways (Pauwels 2012:2).

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O’Gorman, van Dooren, Münster, Adamson, Mauch, Sörlin, Amiero, Lindström, Houston, Augusto Pádua, Rigby, Jones, Motion, Mueke, Change, Lu, Jones, Green, Matose, Twidle, Schneider-Mayerson, Wiggin and Jøregnsen (2019:428) and Holm, Adamson, Huang, Kirdan, Kitch, McCalman, Ogude, Ronan, Scott, Thompson, Travis, and Wehner (2015:978) introduce environmental humanities as an interdisciplinary field that aims to bring insight and approaches from all humanities’ fields to critically explore, engage and observe environmental factors by providing insight into human action, human perceptions and human motivations. Holm et al (2015:978) state that environmental humanists aim to identify, explore and demonstrate contributions that humanities disciplines could employ in order to create a wider awareness and understanding that effectively engages with environmental issues. Furthermore, Palsson, Szerszynski, Sörlin, Marks, Avril, Crumley, Hackmann, Holm, Ingram, Kirman, Pardo Buendía and Weehuizen (2013:4) add that environmental humanities aims to contribute humanities’ specific skills and knowledges to help achieve pro-environmental human behaviours, since humanities disciplines are concerned with human behaviours, human articulation and humans perception of the world (Holm & Brennan 2018:1). Environmental humanists argue that natural sciences are able to monitor and measure environmental and global climate change, but are unable to provide insight into the human factor that lies outside scientific calculations (Holm et al 2015:979; Palsson 2013:5; Holm et al 2018:1-2). Humanists offer insight into human imagination, human perception, relationships between humans and their surrounding environments; and are able to respond to environmental challenges, causes and impacts of environmental changes by looking at the history of human activity (Holm et al 2015:979; Palsson et al 2013:10-11).

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Enviromental humanities looks at the ways that humans have significantly altered several biochemical and element cycles that contribute to climate change as a whole (Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen & McNeill 2011:843). Environmental humanities have adopted several concepts such as the Great Acceleration, the New Human Condition and the Anthropocene to try to explain the environmental affects human activity has had on the environment. According to Holm et al (2015:890) the Great Acceleration describes the rise of human technologies and power, as well as consumption in the last seventy years that have operated as a key contributor of climate change. The Great Acceleration is a global phenomenon that has taken different rates in different parts of the world. Steffen et al (2011:848-850) define the Great Acceleration as being established after World War II, resulting in rapid change of the human population, and an increase in petroleum, motor vehicles, international travel and migration to cities, with natural landscapes being converted into places for humans to inhabit. The Capitalocene, as discussed by Donna Haraway (2015) describes the exploitation of the Earth’s resources for capital gain, and this can be seen throughout the history of humanity and the ways that humankind have been concerned with improving only their own lives and not thinking about the repercussions of their actions. The Great Acceleration leads to the concept of the New Human Condition, which sees humankind as the major contributor in planetary change, which has further led to the destruction of nature (Holm & Brennen 2018:1). Both of these concepts fall under the Anthropocene, which has been used to discuss the era characterised by an increase in global human impact (Palsson et al 2013:4). According to Donna Haraway (2015:159) the Anthropocene refers to the negative impact that humanity has on Earth and other inhabitants of Earth for as long as humans have seen themselves as the superior species. Global human impact has been made possible through technological and cultural human activities (Palsson et al 2013:7). The Anthropocene acknowledges the long-term degradation that humankind has placed upon the planet (Holm & Brennen 2018:1). Joni Adamson, Stephanie LeMenager and Catriona Sandilands (2018:96) argue that many humans do not have an internal or affective relationship with most animals or with other species.

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The Anthropocene has been spoken about for years, but only by the late 1990s have scientists began to publicly link environmental change to human advances (Steffen et al 2013:652-655).

According to O’Gorman et al (2019:446-447) environmental humanities often uses anticolonial, antiracist and feminist discourses to allow for cultural and historical differences. This means that environmental humanities may engage with and present marginalised perspectives and communities as a way to discuss and look at specific case-studies in the real-world that are often neglected by the natural sciences. Environmental humanities challenge the modernist notion that privileges certain knowledges over others, allowing those in humanities fields to actively participate in environmental discussions (O’Gorman et al 2013:449). Humans use “language, narrative, imagination and cognitive models to understand, cope and take action,” and humanities disciplines give insight into how humans think and act (Holm et al 2015:891). By incorporating environmental humanities into conversations surrounding environmental climate change, humanities scholars are able to collaborate across the humanities faculties, establishing different perspectives and allowing for a multitude of humanities skills to be employed. Humanities scholars can help facilitate communication between institutions, individuals, societies, citizens and politicians (Holm et al 2015:986). By incorporating humanities scholars into environmental discussions, collaboration amongst natural sciences and human sciences can take place; allowing researchers to create data and action-plans that could potentially benefit Earth and all of her inhabitants.

 

Rob Nixon (2011:2-3) introduces the term “slow violence” as a gradual violence that appears often invisible to humanity and is typically not perceived as violence at all. Slow violence, on the one hand, is a “delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space,” and climate change and environmental issues are understood as slow violence. Nixon (2011:2-3) states that environmental issues slowly unfold, but the outcomes of climate change remain invisible. Violence, on the other hand, is conceived as an immediate action or event that is highly visible and is often covered by news-media to the general public. Disappearing ecosystems and dwindling biodiversity form part of the environmental slow violence concern.

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According to Rachel Carson (1962:[sp]) humans have the power to irreversibly and irrecoverably alter the nature of ecosystems through contamination of the environment. Andrew Whitehouse (2015:54) states that the Anthropocene places humans as the only species in history that has been powerful enough to change the planet and humankind’s involvement and destruction has led to irreversible ecological effects. Therefore, humanity has become a new kind of geological force that presents the truth about earth (Martinson 2019:137). Further, Elizabeth Kolbert (2014) mentions that humans have rearranged the earth’s ‘biota’, allowing for extinction of species, and damages to the earth that will leave behind geological traces. Humans that are alive today are not only witnessing the destruction of ecosystems, they are also causing the destruction (Kolbert 2014:[sp]). Whitehouse (2015:55,66) looks at the change in bird populations and loss of bird species in the Anthropocene, and mentions that listening to birds, or rather the silence of birds, is a process of grieving for what is lost.

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Environmental challenges unfold over many years and have the power to change the world as we know it. Slow violence needs to be presented in representational ways to attract the short-attention span of the contemporary human in order to deeply impact humankind’s memory and to future and most importantly, ignite long-lasting changes to the environment (Nixon 2011:6,8). Humans have continuously used their power to interrupt the natural life cycles of ecosystems by: transporting native flora and fauna to different continents, establishing industries that allow for billions of tons of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the air and then further allowing for carbon dioxide to be absorbed into the ocean; changing the pH levels and acidity of the water that houses vital ecosystems (Kolbert 2014:[sp]). Kolbert states that since the start of the Industrial Revolution, humans have been involved in activities such as burning fossil fuels, deforestation, and overkilling of species that have contributed to unnecessary, irreversible mass extinctions of species. Inhabitants of ecosystems have been removed from their homes, leading to the anxiety around the future of these species. Bernie Krause, referenced in Whitehouse (2015:56-59) theorises that each species has its own distinct sound, however in the Anthropocene, human sounds such as industry sounds dominate and disrupt nature’s sounds, leading to a loss of sound. For birds, sound-making is a process of place-making: birds are companion species that find their place by making relations with other birds and their environment (Whitehouse 2015:58,63).

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Carson (1962:[sp]) focuses on the chemicals that have been used as a method of controlling the lives of plants, insects and animals that seen as ‘pests’. All organisms play an important role in ecosystems, and these insecticides, pesticides and herbicides have detrimental effects on all aspects of the environment, including humanity’s quality of life (Carson 1962:[sp]). Carson mentions that we might not know of the detrimental effect that poisons have on ecology as a whole, for effects might only be visible in future generations. By poisoning one organism, the entire food chain is disrupted, potentially leading to repeated exposure to poisons that can change the chromosomes of species in future generations. It is human nature to put off actions that might only be seen in years to come, and Carson states that most of the necessary knowledge about environmental issues is readily available, but “control men” in governments, big corporations and chemical manufacturers deny the effects of climate change for further monetary and power gain. Media outlets often follow cues from politicians who often, according to Nixon (2011:9) treat environmental action as critical yet not urgent. This means that environmental issues, as a slow violence, does not fall into the immediate concern of media outlets, and will not get accurate or any airtime. Carson (2014:[sp]) states that “we are accustomed to look for the gross and immediate effect and ignore all else,” however, the slow violence of climate change cannot be ignored. The impacts of climate change, deforestation and pollution are frequently taking place gradually and out of sight (Cock 2014:113) and as a slow violence, climate change requires creative methods for catching the public attention and this can be done by presenting representational and imaginative challenges that respond to both recent, past, and radical changes in our ecology (Nixon 2011:10-12). Nixon (2011:11-16) suggests that writers, film makers and digital activists could play as mediators in helping to shed light on issues of slow violence. Attempting to render the slow violence of climate change requires a redefinition of speed: climate change has been accelerating in speed since the beginning of the Anthropocene, while the “nature-and-time-will-heal” narrative has been pushed for decades for power gains that have negative impacts on the environment (Nixon 2011:21).