Ecomedia Literacy; Integrating Ecology into Media Education 9781138303386, 9781138303393, 9780203731109

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“Antonio López’s excellent book on ecomedia literacy makes major contributions to a growing literature on the topic that is important for making education relevant for key issues and problems of the day, and is important as well that citizens become aware of the growing ecological crises and challenges to a sustainable future.” Douglas Kellner, Distinguished Research Professor of Education, UCLA, USA “Antonio López is one of the remarkable media educators who has been working for years on developing a holistic and systemic framework for understanding media—a framework that incorporates a deep understanding not only of the politics and economics of media technologies, but of the ways they ethically implicate us as citizens active within expanding circles of social responsibility. Lopez’s ‘ecomediasphere’ model presents an admirable synthesis of insights from popular education, media and cultural studies, and the rapidly growing field of ecomedia theory and practice. This is cutting-edge work on a topic that couldn’t be more important.” Adrian J. Ivakhiv, Professor of Environmental Thought & Culture, University of Vermont, USA

ECOMEDIA LITERACY

This book offers a focused and practical guide to integrating the relationship between media and the environment—ecomedia—into media education. It enables media teachers to “green” their pedagogy by providing essential tools and approaches that can be applied in the classroom. Media are essential features of our planetary ecosystem emergency, contributing to both the problem of and solution to climate chaos, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, deforestation, water contamination, and so on. Offering a clear theoretical framework and suggested curriculum guide, the book provides key resources that will enable media educators to apply ecomedia concepts to their curricula. By reconceptualizing media education, this book connects ecology, environmental communication, ecomedia studies, environmental humanities, and ecoliteracy to bridge media literacy and education for sustainability. Ecomedia Literacy is an essential read for educators and scholars in the areas of media literacy, media and communication, media and cultural studies, environmental humanities, and environmental studies. Antonio López is Associate Professor and Chair of the Media Studies and Communications Department at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.

Routledge Research in Media Literacy and Education Series Editors: Pete Bennett and Julian McDougall

Media literacy is now established by UNESCO as a human right, and the field of media literacy education is both growing and diverse. The series speaks to two recurring concerns in this field: What difference does media make to literacy and how should education respond to this? Research and practice has aimed to protect against negative media messages and deconstruct ideology through critical thinking, developing media literacy through creative production and a social participatory approach which focuses on developing active citizens to play a constructive role in media democracy. This series is dedicated to a more extensive exploration of the known t­ erritories of media literacy and education, while also seeking out ‘other’ c­artographies. As such, it encompasses a diverse, international range of contexts that share a conceptual framework at the intersection of Cultural Studies/Critical Theories, (New) Social Literacies and Critical Pedagogy. The series is especially interested in how media literacy and education relates to feminism, critical race theory, social class, post-colonial and intersectional approaches and how these perspectives, political objectives and international contexts can ‘decenter’ the field of media literacy education. The Uses of Media Literacy Pete Bennett, Julian McDougall and John Potter Ecomedia Literacy Integrating Ecology into Media Education Antonio López For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Research-in-Media-Literacy-and-Education/book-series/RRMLE

ECOMEDIA LITERACY Integrating Ecology into Media Education

Antonio López

First published 2021 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Antonio López The right of Antonio López to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-30338-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-30339-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-73110-9 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Dedicated to the youth climate movements across the planet (and their allies)

CONTENTS

List of Figures xi List of Tables xii Preface: Media Education and the Climate Emergency xiii Acknowledgmentsxxiii

Introduction: Ecomedia Literacy

PART I

1

Ecological Worldviews and the Ecomediasystem

35

  1 Ecocultural Worldviews: Decolonizing Media Education

37

  2 Environmental Ideology and Eco-Ethics

67

  3 Disturbing the Ecomediasystem: Ecomedia Objects

93

PART II

The Ecomediasphere

121

  4 The Ecomediasphere

123

  5 Ecomedia Footprint: Ecomateriality

150

  6 Ecomedia Footprint: Lifeworld

166

x Contents

  7 Ecomedia Mindprint: Political Ecology

184

  8 Ecomedia Mindprint: Ecoculture

204

PART III

Ecomedia Literacy

227

  9 Ecomedia Pedagogy

229

10 Teaching Ecomedia Literacy

252

11 Conclusion: The 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter

276

Index283

FIGURES

0.1 0.2 4.1 7.1 10.1 10.2 10.3

Iceberg model of systems thinking and fake climate news Emerging fields of ecomedia studies The ecomediasphere Ecomediasphere analysis of fake climate news Ecomediasphere analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) Ecomedia analysis of gadget technology Three ecomediasystem scenarios

17 20 125 200 257 265 271

TABLES

9.1

Critical Media Literacy Framework

238

PREFACE Media Education and the Climate Emergency

My path to becoming an ecomedia literacy educator roughly began in 2000 when I started my apprenticeship in the media literacy movement. At that time, I primarily worked as an educator with Native Americans in Northern New Mexico at the middle and high school level. I was embedded in a program that worked directly with Native American communities, which was structured in such a way that every year our department would meet with tribal elders and representatives to develop the curriculum. We would assess the needs of the communities our students came from and then design a project to help students serve their communities. The program combined science, technology, civics, and communication. Inevitably, our projects revolved around regional ecological concerns, especially the disrupted Rio Grande river ecosystem that had been overrun by invasive species introduced by Spanish colonists and then later by the Army Corps of Engineers. This gave me firsthand experience with the ecological impacts of settler colonialism and the techno-science paradigm of environmental management. Despite our program’s deployment of high-tech tools (GPS, GIS, computer software, digital video, etc.), we were still working within a spiritual and cultural context that exists in parallel to Modernity. Tasked with developing a curriculum for the video documentation crew that I facilitated, increasingly I found myself conflicted as I tried to combine conventional media literacy and media studies approaches with the worldview of the Northern Rio Grande Puebloan peoples. An elder would tell us not to film a particular mountain, ceremony, or a fire pit. Out in the cottonwood forests of the Rio Grande where most of our fieldwork occurred, we often began our days with prayer and would had to obtain permission from the ancestors (and elders) to engage in our research activities. According to their cosmology, everything is alive. There is no inert matter. Humans are part of an extended community that includes plants, animals, minerals, elements, and spirits.

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During this time, my media literacy colleagues were demonizing tobacco (as part of the national anti-smoking push that was occurring in the 1990s and early 2000s), yet the youths I worked with carried small pouches of tobacco for their daily prayers. Often community directives didn’t make sense to the rational, Western mentality I was educated in, but it wasn’t my place to say no or to contradict the protocols I was tasked to respect. Working with Native American students presented other challenges, including accommodating differing learning styles, diverse expressions of cognition, cultural differences, colonial-settler legacies (environmental destruction, loss of traditions, abuse, genocide, historical trauma), power dynamics, language, poverty, drugs (psychopharmaceuticals and illegal substances), suicide, and other stresses pervasive in these communities. Subsequently, in addition to ecology, many of our other projects were tasked to address substance abuse prevention and to promote healthy lifestyles. Though there were plenty of media literacy resources on commercial tobacco, alcohol, and junk food, it was difficult to find anything related to environmental issues and ecology. The more I dug for resources, the more it felt like media education was disconnected from the reality of Native Americans I was working with. In essence, though I didn’t identify it as such at the time, I was beginning a process of decolonizing not only my worldview but also media literacy education. In 2016, when mní wicóni—“water is life/water is alive”—emerged as the core ethic of the water protectors at Standing Rock Indian Reservation who were resisting the Dakota Access Pipeline in North Dakota, their protests resonated deeply. My work in Northern New Mexico had taught me the importance of respecting water and how it connects with the spiritual reality of indigenous peoples. Though mediated only through my various social media feeds, I  felt profoundly connected to their struggle. I wondered how mní wicóni could be an ethic that also drives media education. For example, Hunter Vaughan (2019) demonstrates how water waste has been integral in the history of Hollywood cinema. How is it possible in our analysis of film that we missed something as fundamental as water consumption and waste in media production? Given the ecological crisis the pipeline conflict represented, it became even more imperative to my thinking to find a way to formulate media education to reflect such ecoethics and struggles. It’s a task that has been gestating for over 20 years. Writing my first three books was a process of working through the challenge of decolonizing media literacy. Mediacology (López, 2008) addressed the difficulty of integrating media and digital literacy in Native American communities and non-Euro-American learning environments. It explored how Western knowledge traditions exclude ecological worldviews and offered insights into the root of the problem and how to address it. In it, I did a deep dive into the conflicts arising from the needs of Native American communities and the imposition of technology and mainstream education, and explored the legacy of US education policy toward Native Americans (which can be summarized by the

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19th-century phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man”). I  tried to resolve these differences through the exploration of Native American educational theory, in particular by investigating the approach of Vine Deloria Jr. and Daniel R. Wildcat (2001), who advocate for TC3 (technology, community, communication) and P3 (power-and-place-equal-personality). The Media Ecosystem (López, 2012) was written as a manifesto for college-aged students and media activists to help them conceptualize media as an ecologically embedded ecosystem. It was written at the height of Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring, so I was inspired to highlight how media practitioners (producers and users) could become green cultural citizens and advocate for Earth democracy through emerging DIY media practice. However, as some critics noted, I didn’t problematize the notion of citizenship or “Jeffersonian democracy,” which are inherently rooted in colonialism and white supremacy. In response, I am keeping this critique in mind as I continue to develop the theory of ecomedia literacy, for my intention is to remain sensitive to the historical legacy of colonialism on epistemology and how it affects our ability to imagine a collective future. My last book, Greening Media Education (López, 2014), presents extensive research (qualitative and ethnographic) on North American media literacy practices and practitioners that I performed to explore the barriers and opportunities for incorporating ecology into media education. I found that there were conflicting purposes between conventional approaches to media literacy (“educationalist”) and alternative activist media literacy (“interventionist”), which creates a barrier between those working within the status quo and those who want to change it. But more importantly, my main discovery is the extent to which media literacy is rooted in the worldview of Modernity, a way of thinking about and being in the world that is the source of our planetary ecological crisis. Despite whatever good intentions of media literacy educators, unless the paradigm that underlies environmental destruction is confronted and transformed, media literacy will not be part of the solution. This brings us to this book, Ecomedia Literacy.

A Field Guide to Ecomedia Literacy I’ve been teaching an undergraduate media and the environment class for a dozen years. When I first started, it was challenging to find works in media studies or media literacy that connected media with environmental issues. This is partially due to the Western cultural legacy based on the body–mind duality, which leads to a belief that anything related to thoughts, images, or ideas is primarily immaterial. The dearth of environmental connections is also related to the way that the media ecology tradition inspired by McLuhan and Postman has evolved. Their exploration of how medium reshapes perception has led to a convoluted understanding of media environments as purely technological and abstracted from their physical ecologies. To date, the average media scholar (based on anecdotal evidence) still does not immediately grasp the intimate connection between media

xvi  Preface

and their impacts on the environment (and if you are wondering what that is yourself, I will get to it shortly). Initially, when I gathered materials and research for my course, I was especially concerned to approach the subject from multifaceted scholarship that explored media from different perspectives—representation, rhetoric, affect, phenomenology, political economy, and materiality. This wasn’t easy because the strength of media studies is political economy and representation, but generally it’s not holistic enough to cover environmental themes or the material impacts of media (for example, I have yet to find a media studies textbook that mentions the environment). Consequently, I had to expand beyond media studies to delve into science communication and philosophy. Guattari’s Three Ecologies (2008) is one of the few earlier works to acknowledge different ecologies, namely, material, social, and mental. For an interdisciplinary method that applies representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation to media gadgets like the Walkman or iPod, the circuit of culture developed by cultural studies is useful, but it still eschews environmental concerns (Du Gay et al., 1997, 2013). Philosophers focused on ecology and film, such as Ivakhiv (2008, 2013), expanded upon Guattari’s three ecologies and the circuit of culture by applying them to processrelational philosophy. In recent years, a materialist turn in the study of media has emerged in which scholars are focusing more on the materiality of media and our gadgets (Bollmer, 2019; Parikka, 2015). It wasn’t until Maxwell and Miller wrote Greening the Media (2012) that we started to get a more interdisciplinary study of media and the environment that explored the material history of a particular medium (i.e., print, film, TV, cell phones) that incorporated labor history and political economy. Since the time I started teaching this subject, there has been an explosion of research and scholarship on media and the environment (Corbett, 2006; Hackett et al., 2017; Maxwell et al., 2014; Parham, 2016; Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Rauch, 2018; Rust et  al., 2016; Walker  & Starosielski, 2016). Emerging from this new scholarship is the concept of ecomedia, which conflates ecology and media to recognize that media are first and foremost materially embedded in and extracted from the environment in the form of cables, satellites, electromagnetic energy, server farms, energy consumption, mineral resources, and so on; and second, that media circulate ideas and educate us about how to engage politically and ethically with ecology. Humans are also part of the environment, so ecomedia takes into consideration not only how media technologies impact our health and well-being but also how we experience the world phenomenologically. In my own methodology as an ecomedia literacy scholar, I  have divided these categories into the ecomedia footprint and mindprint, although I see them as dialectically interconnected and not separate from each other. Returning to the problem of trying to find appropriate scholarship to teach media and the environment, admittedly my job has gotten much easier. The eruption of scholarship has been a tremendous boon. But until now, I still have

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been missing something that connects all the different ways media are materially produced. When it comes to the point in the semester where we explore conflict between minerals and mining, manufacturing and labor, and e-waste and disposal, I have had to cobble disparate resources that were not coherent for teaching media. I badly need a coherent text that ties together the entire production chain of screen technology and an exploration of marketing, representation, and journalism. This is why I wrote this book. This book is primarily for university media teachers and K–12 media literacy educators who are unfamiliar with how media and ecology connect, and is meant to raise awareness about pertinent ideas and literature that can enrich teaching about media and the environment. The book can be used in different ways. For university media teachers, I have in mind the kind of community you find in the Teaching Media Facebook group or readers of Teaching Media Quarterly. Many of the chapters are written as stand-alone introductions that can be assigned in university courses as supplementary to a regular media studies or production course so that students can have a basic introduction to the main themes of media and the environment and ecological ethics. For media literacy educators, this book serves as an action plan for promoting and designing ecomedia projects and curriculum and also for promoting ecomedia literacy within the global media literacy discussion. It can also be read as a map for gathering more materials and for thinking about curriculum design. I acknowledge that what’s presented here is incomplete with gaps, unfinished inquiry, and some overly generalized summaries of deeper debates. There is always more to write and research, such as more attention to critical animal studies, queer ecocriticism, ecological economics, and artistic practices. But at a certain point, one has to stop and finish. My hope is to get the conversation going and to continue an open discussion beyond the pages of this book. Part I is primarily a theoretical section meant to delve deeply into the paradigm behind our education and world system. Part II is more informational and deals with specific aspects of ecomedia and how the world system is structured. Part III is about teaching. For all readers, I have two main goals. First, it’s a climate emergency manifesto to shift how we think about and teach media. Second, it further theorizes ecomedia literacy and eco-ethics. It is not a handbook, though I  do make an effort to discuss actual teaching practice as much as possible (more work in this area needs to be developed and researched). Some sections are theoretical because it’s important to explain the design strategy at the heart of ecomedia literacy and because it’s necessary to probe deeply held assumptions at the core of current media education practices. Much of this will challenge long-held beliefs and question our investment in the status quo. My discussion of the colonial Anthropocene also unearths a particularly dark chapter in the history of Modernity that will likely generate anxiety in some readers. But following the example of Jaimie Cloud who introduces her education for sustainability workshops by asking for permission to introduce new ways of thinking that might destabilize

xviii  Preface

and cause discomfort, I kindly ask that readers maintain a similar disposition as I introduce ecomedia. I ask that you open the space to rethink business as usual. I want to emphasize that I  am primarily a teacher, an educational theorist, and a researcher who specializes in media literacy and education for sustainability. Though I devote many chapters to ecomedia studies, I am not an ecomedia scholar per se, but rather a generalist who seeks out pattern in a variety of disciplines. Thus, this book should not be seen as an ecomedia textbook—hopefully we’ll see more of those in the near future. Instead, this overview seeks out connections between related disciplines and approaches. There are many resources discussed in this book that will provide you with the necessary background and research on the specific issues to allow you to pursue ecomedia more deeply. The main goal is to give you conceptual tools that can be incorporated into your curriculum. My approach to ecomedia literacy starts with a radical critique of the global economic system. This critique does not mean I advocate a didactic approach to teaching, but rather I support inquiry-based pedagogy that eschews polemical approaches to education. The role of ecomedia literacy educators is not dissimilar to that of climate scientists who through empirical analysis explore the state of the environment, but then at some point must communicate and act upon that information according to some kind of eco-ethical orientation. It’s also an effort to introduce the tools to help students to perform an environmental “re-reading” of media; that is, to apply an ecologically grounded method of analysis that will produce ecocritical readings that standard media literacy approaches do not. In this book, I introduce a heuristic I have developed called the ecomediasphere, an integrative method of analysis that draws on systems thinking (in Greening Media Education, I called it the Media Wheel). It enables students to explore different facets of ecomedia objects (media texts, platforms, gadgets, and information and communications technologies [ICT] systems) in order to get them to dig down to the level of worldview that drives unsustainable cultural, political, economic, and personal practices. The ecomediasphere prompts learners to explore ecomedia objects from four different perspectives—lifeworld, ecoculture, political ecology, and ecomateriality. I situate this methodology within the context of my research on the gaps in media literacy practice and environmental issues (López, 2014). As opposed to functionalist competency models, I assert that media education should interpolate eco-ethics and civic responsibility. This is because, when it comes to incorporating ecological perspectives into media literacy, media education has historically marginalized and eschewed the environmental dimensions of media and ICTs. Instead, ecomedia literacy is active eco-citizenship, which means embodying sustainable behaviors and cultural practices that shape and promote ecological values within the interconnected realms of society, economy, and environment. Ecomedia literacy supports learners to make sense of how everyday

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ecomedia practice impacts our ability to live sustainably within Earth’s ecological parameters for the present and future. Ecomedia literacy advocates mindfulness for how everyday media practice impacts our ability to live sustainably within Earth’s ecological parameters. In doing so, it promotes the understanding that media need to be conceived of as a socio-technological ecosystem embedded within the living planet, or what I call the ecomediasystem. In sum, Ecomedia Literacy offers a practical guide for greening media education by: •

Establishing how media and environment are intimately connected through the framework of ecomedia. • Exploring the origins of the worldview that defines Modernity and how it shapes our current engagement with the environment and the production of media and technological gadgets. • Analyzing how environmental ideology and eco-ethics infuse media and technology. • Delving deeply into the ecological impacts of media. • Surveying of the main fields, concepts, and scholars working in ecomedia studies. • Theorizing and reimagining communications and media theories for an ecological paradigm of ecomedia. • Developing a framework for ecomedia literacy pedagogy. • Proposing an integrative ecomedia literacy curriculum model called the ecomediasphere. For now, we still live in a world in which one who cares about environmental issues is considered an “environmentalist” as opposed to a regular being. By requiring clean air, water, and food—and hence an “environment”—to survive, we are of and in the environment. Humans are environmental beings by default. As studies about the bacterial composition of our bodies demonstrate, we all have microbiomes that make each of us a walking and talking ecosystem. Likewise, in a more integrated world, ecomedia would be interchangeable with the term media, in the same way environmentalist should be interchangeable with the word “human.” The idea that humans (and hence our communication tools) are independent of living systems and the material reality of Earth is one of the most dangerous core beliefs of our civilization. In my tiny corner of the world, this book is one small effort to shift the world system to a paradigm of ecological consciousness.

Adopting an Ecosophy It goes without saying that any advocate of eco-ethics should operate from clearly articulated ecological values. Stibbe (2015) refers to this as an “ecosophy”

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(ecological philosophy) that provides a basis for a “story-to-live-by.” The ­ecosophy—or what we could alternatively call environmental wisdom—that Stibbe promotes is one in which the goals are “the life-sustaining relationships of humans with other humans, other organisms and the physical environment, with a normative orientation towards protecting the systems that humans and other forms of life depend on for their wellbeing and survival” (p. 9). In another example, Beach et al. (2017) summarize their ecosophy of applying the climate crisis to English language arts and media literacy: Our approach emerges from an understanding of the Anthropocene era in which we now live, when environmental, geological, and ecological systems are profoundly altered by human activity. Our beliefs are based on world citizenship, the rights and well-being of all, and the recognition of connections between the diverse members of the world family. (p. 7) I concur wholeheartedly, embracing environmental communication’s challenge to media and communications studies, to acknowledge we are in a crisis and need to act on that knowledge. We are in the midst of a profound ecological and climate emergency that touches all aspects of life, including the future well-being of the students we serve. It calls upon all media educators to rise to the challenge of climate change as a mega crisis. Thus, in the following mission statement, I make this commitment: The ecological crisis is an intersectional turning point that challenges our pedagogy. Information and communications technology and media should be reconceptualized in relationship to the environment as ecomedia, with the assumption that ecological challenges are mediated, both in terms of our understanding and awareness, but also in terms of communicating solutions. Because our digital footprint has an ecological footprint as well, digital and living systems belong to the same planetary ecomedia commons. I advocate for a regenerative ecomediasystem that harmonizes humans as part of the living planet for present and future generations. This means making meaningful connections that develop a sense of purpose to tie the domains of the digital and broader environment through an experiential approach to learning. The skills necessary for this challenge include selfreflection, critical analysis, systems thinking, creativity, empathy, and visualization. This also includes literacy of media, information, and technology. I advocate for learners to be able to transfer ecomedia skills across disciplines for lifelong learning by growing, evolving, discovering, and experiencing regenerative modes of ecological engagement. I also acknowledge that the process is messy (and at times disorienting), but nonetheless must be undertaken.

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I recommend developing your own teaching ecosophy and mission statement. You can also make this a class activity to ask students to write their own or collective ecosophy. Though I aspire to transition to true eco-ethical practice, I have had to engage in mild-green eco-ethics for I  have willingly impacted the environment negatively in order to perform my work. For example, the ecological footprint of this book can be measured in multiple ways: Computers I used to write it (at least four—two desktops and two laptops), energy consumed by cloud services (I back up files on Dropbox, so I have data redundancy in at least four places, not to mention backup servers on Dropbox’s backbone), emissions from music streamed while I  work, paper used to print this book, books purchased (and shipped) for my research, conferences attended as I presented papers and worked out the book’s arguments, transportation, video conferencing, etc. Though I use a Fairphone, it’s still dependent on the global ICT infrastructure. To mitigate my impacts, I contribute monthly to Tree Sisters1 to offset my carbon emissions and I make recurring monthly donations regularly to Greenpeace, Climate Change News, Democracy Now!, The Guardian, and Intercepted. Under current circumstances, at best I can be “less bad” in my individual choices. However, as Naomi Klein (2019) argues, though individual choice is honorable and important, it’s the level of systemic structure that dictates our choices. After all, there is a reason why oil giants like BP have spent millions on marketing campaigns to promote personal environmental responsibility. They are deflecting from the broader need to regulate industries and to make laws to eliminate carbon emissions. These kinds of issues are exactly why we need ecomedia literacy. Being a multicultural mix from the US–Mexico borderland region, I’m at home with a “bridger” epistemology that straddles worlds. But due to the tendency to essentialize indigenous culture and the historical penchant to colonize and erase culture by those who benefit from the world system, I’m more comfortable incorporating what I can claim as my own cultural reality. As I utilize the tools that are the intellectual heritage of my education and Westernized subjectivity resulting from my status in the world of ideas, education, cultural capital, privilege, and so on, it’s also my responsibility to decolonize these practices to the best of my ability. What informs the current version of my thinking materialized in this book comes from the many years I’ve served as department chair and teaching up and down the core curriculum of an undergraduate communications department in an overseas, US-accredited liberal arts college with students from diverse cultural backgrounds. I  have also taught in high school and middle school media literacy programs to largely underserved populations (Native Americans, AfroCaribbean, African American, Latino, rural and urban). Additionally, I have collaborated with an international network of libraries engaged in promoting digital humanities, digital pedagogy, and information literacy, which has brought me into contact with educators and university librarians from Europe, Africa, Middle

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East, Latin America, and Asia. I’ve also traveled quite extensively on the international media education circuit to exchange ideas with a very rich and diverse community of practitioners. Ecomedia Literacy is a synthesis of these connections and relationships.

Note 1. https://treesisters.org/

References Beach, R., Share, J., & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching climate change to adolescents (Rethinking Schools). Routledge. Bollmer, G. (2019). Materialist media theory: An introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. Corbett, J. B. (2006). Communicating nature: How we create and understand environmental messages. Island Press. Deloria, V., & Wildcat, D. (2001). Power and place: Indian education in America. Fulcrum Pub. Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., & Mackay, H. (1997). Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony Walkman. Sage, in association with The Open University. Du Gay, P., Hall, S., Janes, L., Madsen, A. K., Mackey, H., & Negus, K. (2013). Doing cultural studies: The story of the Sony Walkman (2nd ed.). Sage. Guattari, F. (2008). Three ecologies. Continuum. Hackett, R., Forde, S., Gunster, S., & Foxwell-Norton, K. (2017). Journalism and climate crisis. Routledge. Ivakhiv, A. J. (2008). Green film criticism and its futures. Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 15(2), 1–28. Ivakhiv, A. J. (2013). Ecologies of the moving image: Cinema, affect, nature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Klein, N. (2019). On fire: The burning case for a Green New Deal. Penguin Books. López, A. (2008). Mediacology: A multicultural approach to media literacy in the 21st century. Peter Lang. López, A. (2012). The media ecosystem: What ecology can teach us about responsible media practice. North Atlantic Books. López, A. (2014). Greening media education: Bridging media literacy with green cultural citizenship. Peter Lang. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. Oxford University Press. Maxwell, R., Raundalen, J., & Vestberg, N. L. (Eds.). (2014). Media and the ecological crisis. Routledge. Parham, J. (2016). Green media and popular culture: An introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. Parikka, J. (2015). A geology of media. University of Minnesota Press. Parks, L., & Starosielski, N. (Eds.). (2015). Signal traffic: Critical studies of media infrastructures. University of Illinois Press. Rauch, J. (2018). Slow media: Toward a sustainable future. Oxford University Press. Rust, S., Monani, S., & Cubitt, S. (Eds.). (2016). Ecomedia: Key issues. Routledge. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge. Vaughan, H. (2019). Hollywood’s dirtiest secret: The hidden environmental costs of the movies. Columbia University Press. Walker, J., & Starosielski, N. (Eds.). (2016). Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment. Routledge.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The writing process involves a lot of thinking out loud in different ways, ranging from conference presentations, to organizing course materials and lecturing, to writing reviews, chapters, and essays. In the process of developing the material in this book, many ideas and sections gestated in the following forms. Some fragments and sections were drawn from previously published materials: “Editorial Overview: Ecomedia Literacy Special Issue” (with Jeff Share, Theresa Redmond, and Clare Hintz), “Ecomedia: The Metaphor that Makes a Difference,” “Bella Gaia and the Pedagogical Power of the Overview Effect: Interview with Kenji Williams,” and “Fake Climate News: How Denying Climate Change Is the Ultimate in Fake News” (with Jeff Share), Journal of Education for Sustainability/Journal of Media Literacy, Vol. 23 (May 2020); “Expanding Ethics to the Environment with Ecomedia Literacy,” The Handbook of Media Education Research, Wiley (2020), reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear; “Ecomedia Literacy: Educating with Ecomedia Objects and the Ecomediasphere,” Digital Culture and Education (2020); “Communication” and “Ecomedia Literacy,” The International Encyclopedia of Media Literacy, Wiley (2019); “Back to the Drawing Board: Making Comics, Making Media Literacy,” International Handbook of Media Literacy, Routledge (2017); “Developing Visual Literacy Skills for Environmental Communication,” Ecopedagogy of Environmental Communication, Routledge (2017); and “Deconstructing Chipotle: Media as Environmental Education,” Teaching Media Quarterly, Volume 4, Edition 3 (2016). Special thanks to Jeff Share and Theresa Redmond for being essential allies as we conceived and coedited a special ecomedia issue in collaboration with the Journal of Media Literacy and Journal of Sustainable Education. Thanks to Clare Hintz, Karen Ambrosh, and Marieli Rowe for the invitation to assemble the special issue.

xxiv  Acknowledgments

Cheers to journal and book editors and conference organizers who reached out to me to include ecomedia literacy in their projects, including Richard Maxwell, Belinha S. De Abreu, Paul Mihailidis, Renee Hobbs, Julian McDougal, Pete Bennett, Tema Milstein, and Bronwin Patrickson. Jeremy Swartz and Janet Wasko very generously invited me to participate in their What is . . . .? conferences for several years, hosted by the School of Journalism and Communication, and other departments at the University of Oregon. I was fortunate to copresent at conferences with a variety of peers and colleagues that in different ways contributed to this book, including Jennifer Rauch, Jeff Share, Sox Sperry, and Kwame Phillips. Also, special shout out to conference peeps for the long chats and beer sessions: Andy Opel, Doug Kellner, Carl Bybee, and Steve Goodman. Thanks to the library staff at John Cabot University, who worked tirelessly to deal with my obscure research requests. I also had the pleasure of invaluable help from some brilliant research assistants whose work contributed to this book, including Valeria Di Muzio, Giulia Operti, Azelya Terzi, and Camilla Palermo. A special shout out to Priya Sage, who was an awesome and topnotch researcher. She also produced all the amazing graphics for this book. Brava Priya! Additional gratitude to the folks at Routledge for shepherding this book through a long process: Erica Wetter for bringing me in and Emma Sherriff for guiding me along the way. Appreciation and love to my family (Cri, Kika, and Yasmin) for the solidarity. Baci!

INTRODUCTION Ecomedia Literacy

Our planet—the one and only planet we depend on for survival—is suffering ecological breakdown. Climate chaos, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, drought, soil degradation, deforestation, water contamination, and so on are generating “threat multipliers” like economic crises, war, famine, pandemics, and forced migration, and hence a manifold, global political, economic, and social crisis (Laybourn-Langton, 2019). To the youth, best exemplified by teenage climate striker Greta Thunberg, the global system’s oligarchs (1%) are engaging in something akin to intergenerational theft of their future. With every iteration of the global system’s boom and bust cycle, each subsequent crisis is paid for by a future ecological crisis. As noted by Cubitt (2020, p.  37), the new phase of capital “structure[s] debt and waste to make the future a resource for present exploitation.” To quote Greta Thunberg, “Our house is on fire.” We know this intuitively. Rarely a day goes by without a major headline about catastrophic weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts, pandemics, etc.), new scientific studies raising the alarm of dangerous climate temperatures, the decline of regional ecosystems (deforestation, topsoil loss, permafrost thawing, melting glaciers, fires, new diseases, animal die-offs, biodiversity loss, extinction, etc.), or human-made ecological disaster (oil spills, plastic pollution, nuclear contamination, toxic algae blooms, etc.). It’s hard not to be shell-shocked by pervasive, catastrophic news about the environment. You would be forgiven if you mistook the world for a dystopian science fiction film. But environmental communication (EC) scholars warn that apocalyptic rhetoric causes people to shut down. As a defense mechanism, many experience a kind of denial that comes in different forms. In the scholarly world, it manifests

2  Introduction

as disciplinary NIMBYism: It’s not in my backyard, so someone else should deal with it. When it comes to the environment, this is especially true in domains that concern technology, information, and media. Disciplinary fields have turned into nicely fenced and manicured Astroturf plots. But these beautiful walled gardens also have become unsustainable barriers—especially for media educators. If scientists are telling us we have less than a dozen years to decarbonize our economy or face catastrophic climate impacts (Tollefson, 2018), what should we prioritize as media educators in order to achieve an environmentally just, carbon neutral, and ecologically healthy ecomediasystem? Operating from a normative framework that our ecological challenges pose an existential threat and need to be addressed system-wide, as media educators we are obliged to expand our methodology and curriculum design to incorporate practical methods and solutions for integrating ecological awareness into our pedagogy. This means bridging environmental literacy with media education, but also encouraging productive methods of eco-citizenship, because the climate emergency is a cultural and political crisis. The climate emergency is an extension of personal ethical concerns to the public sphere (and vice versa), calling for collective action and policies (Curry, 2011; Maxwell & Miller, 2008). And it’s an education crisis, because, to be blunt and simplistic, what is the point of education when we degrade planetary ecosystems so badly, they are no longer inhabitable? As the editors of Rethinking Schools (2011) write: If the purpose of education is to serve humanity, then this climate emergency should be accompanied by widespread rethinking and revision of the curriculum—a massive undertaking to equip children to understand the causes of the climate crisis and the enormity of its potential consequences. But this is not happening. We detect little sense of urgency among educators—even among many who consider ourselves “social justice” ­ ­educators—to address the climate crisis. So, just as environmental communication self-identifies as a crisis discipline, the starting point of ecomedia literacy is that we are in the midst of a global ecological emergency that obliges educators across disciplines to incorporate ecology into their work. It’s an exigency that touches all aspects of life, including the future well-being of the students we are serving. We have a duty to our students: “Literacy and the imagination are critical tools for comprehending and addressing climate change. In contrast, by not teaching about climate change, we are allowing our silence to normalize unsustainable systems and ideologies with disastrous consequences for everyone and everything” (Beach et al., 2017, p. vii, emphasis original). As educators we are fundamentally challenged in our everyday work by the colossal disturbance of emerging information and communications technologies (ICTs). Should massively disruptive technologies and platforms, like those materializing under big data and communicative capitalism (Dean, 2009; Fuchs,

Introduction  3

2020), be “unleashed” without some component of eco-citizenship that seeks to address their more pernicious impacts on people and the planet? Addressing the broader concern of engaging pervasive mediation, Buckingham (2019, p. 6) writes in The Media Education Manifesto that media literacy demands that we critically interpret and change the world: Critical understanding . . . demands in-depth knowledge, rigorous analysis and careful study; it requires us to reflect on our personal uses of the media, and our emotional and symbolic investments in them; and it entails a broader awareness of how media relate to more general social, cultural, politic and historical developments. Yet ultimately, critical understanding also needs to lead to action: as the author of a somewhat more famous manifesto once said, the aim is not merely to interpret the world, but also to change it. Supplementing this call with ecology, ecomedia literacy is more than a mere intellectual exercise. It is part of an urgent agenda to respond to the climate emergency.

Ecomedia: The Metaphor That Makes a Difference Despite increasing instrumentalist attacks against the value of humanities, arts, and social sciences, it is no longer necessary to justify why we should teach media. Yet there remains considerable confusion over what various practitioners mean by “media” and why they teach it. How we teach media—whether it’s a ­utilitarian approach within the framework of neoliberal trends in skills-based education or one grounded in critical media practice and active citizenship—remains an ­ongoing debate within governing bodies, institutions, and among practitioners. Often, though, it doesn’t seem like we’re deliberating on an even playing field. As a form of pedagogical enclosure, the concept of education as a function of the market is replacing the idea of education as a public good, epitomized by the growing conviction that students are customers and educators are simply in the business of customer service. Usually absent in policy discussions about media education is the idea of citizenship and public engagement, let alone a concern for collective challenges like the planetary ecological emergency. The 40-year project of neoliberalism to dismantle social support systems and public education—best epitomized by British Prime Minister Margaret ­Thatcher’s quip that there is no such thing as society and Ronal Reagan’s assertion that ­government is not the solution to problems, but is the problem—has successfully put on the defensive those of us who advocate for collective responsibility and a ­common good. Coinciding with the political polarization of the climate crisis, there are ongoing attacks against the critical aspects of media education (and academia in general), making it even more challenging to integrate contentious

4  Introduction

subjects like the climate emergency into our curricula. Environmental issues have been constructed as controversial due to a deliberate disinformation campaign by the fossil fuel industry and conservative think tanks, despite the scientific consensus that our planet is heating from human-produced greenhouse gas emissions. When it comes to media education, this problem is compounded by a historical neglect of the environment in how media are taught and conceptualized. Aside from the way that the media and the forces of capitalism obscure the environmental toll of our globalized economy, there is a historical reason for a lack of understanding. In 1866, biologist Ernst Haeckel, a follower of Charles Darwin, coined the term ecology, which was based on the Greek root oikos (also oikeios), meaning “dwelling” or “household.” It’s also the linguistic root for economics. Combined with logos (study of), ecology is the study of life’s household; combined with nomos (rule or law), economy is the rules for household management. It’s also a way to understand how we make environments, and how they make us: Oikeios names the creative and multilayered pulse of life making through which all human activity flows, shaped at every turn by natures that constantly elude human efforts to control. It is through the oikeios particular forms of life emerge, that species make environments and environments make species. Likewise, the pulse of human civilization does not simply occupy environments but produces them—and in the process is produced by them. (Patel & Moore, 2018, pp. 19–20) But with the rise of mechanism during the Scientific and Industrial R ­ evolutions—a worldview that posits the universe (and hence Earth) is a machine that can be reduced to its parts and exploited for its raw materials—economy was conceptually disembedded from ecology, which transformed living systems into a thing to be manipulated and controlled. What should be implicit to household management is the sense of care and duty one would have in maintaining a healthy environment. Those charged with designing how future generations will “manage” the economy—essentially neoclassical economists, business schools, and the entrepreneurial class—have not apprenticed with living systems to understand or appreciate how we are part of a living planet. Rather, the global economic system is based on a radical dogma of competition, endless growth, and scarcity that is disembedded and abstracted from ecological boundaries or limits: “We have invented an economic system that goes utterly against the basic rules for longterm survival of any long system” (Wahl, 2016, p. 27). As Vandana Shiva (2008, p. 43) describes it: The climate crisis signifies a clash between the laws arising from the workings of the universe, the planet, and sustainable human communities and the laws of capital accumulation shaped by those who own and control

Introduction  5

capital. These are the so-called laws of the market, the laws imposed by the IMF and World Bank through structural adjustment, the laws embodied in the WTO and other “free trade” agreements. . . . The solution to climate chaos is not an energy shift—from fossil fuels to nuclear, biofuel, and big hydro. The solution is a paradigm shift: From a reductionist to a holistic worldview based on interconnections; from a mechanistic, industrial paradigm to an ecological one; from a consumerist definition of being human to one that recognizes us as conservers of the earth’s finite resources and cocreators of wealth and with nature. Even though our economy can be invented, the laws of nature cannot. Economics is not a science, and oceans don’t have an ideology. Instead of a control fantasy, we need an economic system in service of ecology (as opposed to the reverse) that is based on life-affirming interconnection and interdependence. Where and how we dwell is intricately connected to the environment and its natural laws; we need to reunite these concepts as an eco-nomy. To understand why media education historically neglects environmental issues, I performed extensive research that involved interviewing key media literacy practitioners and critically analyzing discourses of North American media literacy organizations (López, 2014). I focused on the types of metaphors used in media literacy as a way of understanding the particular worldview of practitioners, for as the important work of neurolinguistics and ecolinguistics demonstrate, the metaphors we think with quite literally shape how we perceive the world (Lakoff  & Johnson, 1980; Stibbe, 2015). As it turns out, common taken-forgranted assumptions about “media” are at the root of why environmental issues are marginalized by media education. Though most media educators assume media is easily defined and self-evident, I  found that in practice it is a taken-for-granted metonym that often changes meaning according to context and usage. It usually defaults to something related to visual, electronic, or legacy mass media, and often excludes other kinds of media (such as alternative media, audio, or art). The four biggest tech companies in the world—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon (known in Europe as GAFA)—are often excluded from what people imagine as media. Consider that Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube) earns twice as much as Disney, and that Google and Facebook account for 85% of all online adds—a quarter of all worldwide media spending (Buckingham, 2019, p. 12). We also have to add to the mix Microsoft, IBM, Netflix, and providers like the telecom giant AT&T and cable service Comcast in the United States, who are now the owners and distributors of media content. Video games are now overcoming legacy media, propelled by the popularity of multiplayer online games that are now considered “e-sports.” The gaming industry as a whole grosses more income than Hollywood to be the most profitable entertainment business in the world (Anderton, 2019). Clearly, old definitions of mass media are no longer tenable, but they persist. To borrow a

6  Introduction

visual metaphor, the traditional taken-for-granted view of media implicitly frames out all kinds of media that are important to explore and understand. As a baseline, media are “forms of representation and communication that are socially organized and distributed” (Buckingham, 2019, p.  78). They contribute to the “sense-making process by which people organize their experience and comprehend their physical and social environment” (Kaplan, 1990, p. 38). With the emergence of tech companies uprooting traditional (legacy) mass media organizations, the blurred boundary between what is a tech and media company can be better understood if we borrow from Raymond Williams’ (1975) discussion of TV as a cultural form that gives meaning and pleasure. Tech companies are providing the means of representation and communication that are indispensable to modern life. . . . [A] service like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram is not merely a means of delivering content: it is also a cultural form, which shapes that content, and our relationship with it, in particular ways. (Buckingham, 2019, p. 14) As a cultural form, what shape does it take when databases and algorithms replace the text as the primary means of engagement? In terms of my main inquiry regarding the dearth of environmental perspectives in media education, the fundamental problem is how media have been historically conceived of as something immaterial, reflecting Western culture’s mind–body duality in which the realm of ideas is considered disconnected from the physical world. Media theorists and educators consistently overlook the material reality of media. Not only do media contribute to how we make sense of the world, but they also make our senses. This, at least, is what media ecologists (the proponents of medium theories developed by the Toronto School) mean when they speak of “media environments” and technological determinism. To media ecologists, it’s the media that is the environment, which is the meaning of McLuhan’s aphorism that we are like the fish that do not know the sea. However, this, too, is a very limited concept of media’s actual ecological condition. Water in this analogy can signify how we take for granted the privilege of the world system’s spoils.

Ecomedia Footprint Instead, we need to consider how Earth materializes in media and their ecomedia footprint. Take our most common used screen technology, the so-called smartphone. The supply chain of gadget production leads to toxic by-products in the environment and workplace (the cell phones we carry around have at least 200 chemical compounds). Source materials used in cell phones all contain lead or tin solder and plastic (circuit boards and casings); involve chemical processing, including the use of detergents and etchants in chip

Introduction  7

production; and use tantalum, the mining of which has caused social and environmental harm in Africa. Most include mercury, though this is changing, and many require flame retardants made of polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are bioaccumulative synthetic chemical compounds that cause neurological problems. (Maxwell & Miller, 2012, p. 38) Typically, they have at least 30 elements that are extracted from our planet. Wiring requires copper, gold, and silver, and batteries depend on lithium and cobalt. Displays use yttrium, terbium, and dysprosium. Most of these are mined in lower income regions of the world, devastating local ecologies and corrupting political processes. Phone battery contents are toxic too, including nickel cadmium, lead acid, nickel metal hydride, and lithium polymer components. The struggle over who has rights to lithium in Bolivia has contributed to its political crisis, and the Congo wars and ecosystem devastation have led many of these elements to be labeled as conflict minerals. The infrastructure that delivers electricity and the internet depend heavily on minerals and chemicals, and the source of energy that powers our information exchange—especially the server farms that make up the digital cloud used for our streaming services, data, and social networks—is largely powered by n ­ onrenewable fossil fuels like coal and natural gas. Packaging, which requires paper pulp, is resource intensive, while shipping and manufacturing also add to greenhouse gas emissions. The massive amount of energy required to make silicone chips is another major impact. Then we have to consider the end of our screen technology’s lifecycle and e-waste. A  toxic brew of chemicals, plastic, glass, and metal devastates the health of workers and local ecosystems as our electronic trash gets tossed away and shipped across the world. All of this is just the tip of the melting iceberg. Consider the impacts of filmmaking, TV production, book manufacturing, and so on (Chapter 5 offers a more detailed overview of these processes). And even if we convert fully to a non-carbon electric economy, we will still have the issue of mining for metals and the primary ingredient of batteries, lithium. If the demand for lithium climbs as anticipated without fundamental change to the structure of the global economy, we may end up with a new form of colonialism that scrambles to control and extract the minerals necessary for “clean” energy technology (Tarnoff, 2019). As noted by critics of the term, Anthropocene, mainstream geology, what Yusoff (2018) calls White Geology, has denied the colonial history of extraction and so the historical record must be corrected. From an eco-ethical standpoint, we should not replace one extractive economy with another. This is important for any deeper exploration of media, because the minerals extracted for our screen technologies are tied to a system that emerged from a long, sordid history of mining, resource extraction, ecological devastation, and human abuse and displacement. The current distribution of wealth and inequality,

8  Introduction

and the global infrastructure and its supply chains that make ICTs possible, would not exist without the foundation of chattel slavery and extracted mineral wealth (see Gómez-Barris, 2017; Parikka, 2015; Yusoff, 2018). As such, The story of how money came to rule not just humans but a good chunk of planetary life begins with the invasion of the New World’s wealth. The unholy alliance of European empires, conquerors, and banks would turn New World natures into commodities and capital. (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 28) According to Vaughan (2019, p.  20), the current global system of gadget production is now “the new imperialism established in the manufacturing, use, and disposal of new screen technologies.”

Ecomedia Mindprint How media shape and define our experience of the world is multifaceted. Their ecomedia mindprint is the way that ICTs influence how we define, act upon, and survive within the living planet, what Corbett (2006) calls environmental ideology. Environmental ideologies are not normative but span the range of destructive and generative beliefs. In terms of their negative environmental impacts, mainstream media propagate an ideology of unlimited growth and consumerism. This includes convincing us that it’s perfectly normal to design screen technologies that can’t be upgraded or repaired, so we have to continuously update (and discard) outdated gadgets in order to participate in the economy and society. Advertising and popular culture also reinforce the belief that nature is separate from humans by obscuring the environmental impacts and interconnections of our gadget use and the global ecological system. The news media often marginalize alternative ecological perspectives in discourses about the climate and sustainability, while tech industry narratives greenwash their environmental impacts. Platform capitalism’s business model affords right-wing and nationalist politics, which undermines environmental action and drives disinformation about the climate. And as Louv (2005) asserts, electronic media impact our experience of time, place, and space to produce a kind of “nature deficit disorder.” But it’s important to also acknowledge the importance of media to amplify awareness of environmental issues and science and to help coordinate action, as has been the case of the Dakota Access pipeline struggle in North Dakota in 2016 (and other indigenous environmental battles), raising awareness about Amazon forest’s destruction, or propelling the #FridaysForFuture campaign driven by youth activists. We can add to this list ready access to numerous online documentaries, scientific reports, and news sources that raise awareness about fracking, water scarcity, biodiversity loss, extinction, and so on. So, while the material and ideological impacts of digital media are major contributors to the global climate

Introduction  9

crisis, digital media also afford access to information, produce the network effect of spreading and sharing information, and generate weird solidarity when “new forms of sociality are formed from the ‘more-than-us-but-not-us’ digital spaces” and “formed across unlikely alliances and with unexpected things, people, communities and institutions” (McLean, 2020, p. 23). Clearly, media are necessary for how we solve ecological problems.

Ecomedia When I’m asked how to change media literacy practices to incorporate environmental issues, my immediate response is that it starts with how we conceive of media. Drawing on the work of one of my mentors, environmental educator and scholar C.A. Bowers (2012), it’s the metaphor that’s the message. The language we use determines the kinds of practices we engage in. Thus, reimagining media as ecological and critically understanding metaphor usage in our own practice as media educators is the most important step we can take. Borrowing from Gregory Bateson’s (2000) definition of information—a difference that makes a difference—we need a media metaphor that makes a difference in how we teach. The rest will follow from there. Until recently, we didn’t have a common vocabulary to describe the intersection between media and the environment. But now media scholars are settling on a term that is more precise and to the point—ecomedia. It’s a “historically situated, ideologically motivated, and ethically informed approach to the intersections of media, society, and the environment” (Rust, 2016, p. 87, emphasis original). Renaming media as ecomedia addresses media’s ecological opacity (in the sense of unseen, unrecognized, ephemeral, hiding in plain sight, and taken-for-granted). Ecomedia reframes media as ecological media; that is, media are a material reality that are in, and a part of, our environment in the broadest sense(s). There are no media that are inseparable from their material conditions and the environment that produced them. Not only that “media do not merely communicate, transmit, and transport; they also transform. . . . [M]edia are active participants in the social construction and material production of the world.” (Chang et al., 2019, para. 2). As such, Media are of interest precisely because they do transform: they enable, facilitate, and alternately foreclose divergent forms of communication, agency, and alteration to different players in the fields they bring together. They are tangible somethings, involved in novel forms of mingling and rearranging space, matter, substance, agency, sociality and identity, and sensorial perception and affectivity. They are material, rhetorical, infrastructural, and relationally active. To study the “state(s) of ” media+environment, then, means to study what is being made of this high-stakes stew of concepts, relations, and social and physical bodies. (para. 6)

10  Introduction

Just as we cannot have thoughts without a body, we cannot have communication without a physical means to communicate: All communication is sensory experience. Light is composed of photons that stimulate the photoreceptors in our eyes and our voices (produced by the solar plexus, lungs, throat, tongue, and mouth) make sound waves that physically touch eardrums. Our very atmosphere and Earth’s surface are the primary medium through which all communication must pass. As Parikka (2015, p. 13) asserts, “it is the earth that provides for media and enables it: the minerals, materials of(f) the ground, the affordances of its geophysical reality that make technical media happen.” Earth is integrated into our gadgets and batteries, making the planet’s geology a necessary part of any medium. As we move around with our cell phones, all of us have a piece of Africa, China, or South America in our pockets. Thus, the task of ecomedia literacy is to probe ecomedia object by asking: How is the world in it? How is it in the world? Where does it come from? (See Dumit, 2014). Ecomedia studies seek to bridge the epistemological divide between “technology and nature, human and nonhuman, material and immaterial, suggesting that such categories are relationally defined and materially intertwined” (Parks & Starosielski, 2015, p.  14). Nonetheless, “ecomedia” can be an even more perplexing term than “media,” especially because it has not entered into common usage. A contraction of ecology and media, the concept of ecomedia is on the surface not obvious or universally defined. A parallel problem exists with the term “ecocinema.” To some practitioners, “ecocinema” means any film that advocates an environmentalist perspective (i.e., documentary or feature films highlighting ecological problems), whereas “environmentalist” films are products of popular culture meant to entertain. To others, “eco-films” are primarily avant-garde cinema that challenges the conventions of Hollywood visual language and spectacle to promote environmental awareness (Willoquet-Maricondi, 2010). Ecocinema is an outgrowth of ecocriticism which is one of the core methods of ecomedia literacy. Ecocriticism maintains a “triple allegiance to the scientific study of nature, the scholarly analysis of cultural representations and the political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the natural world” (Brereton, 2016, p. 215). Keywords for Environmental Studies defines ecomedia as “shorthand for representations of and communication about the human and natural environment in media beyond traditional print” (Ziser, 2016, p. 75). Here I want to emphasize that “ecomedia” as a term is inherently reflexive in a way that “media” is not. Whereas media is often used either in the singular (as in mass media) or as the plural of medium, ecomedia is indexical of media’s inherent ecological condition as materially and physiologically embedded within a complex global ecology. By countering the pernicious ideological environment that obscures this awareness, ecomedia names the interrelationship and materiality of media with the physical environment inhabited by humans and nonhumans alike. From this perspective, all media are ecomedia, but there is a difference between explicit and implicit expressions of ecomedia. Explicit forms would be those

Introduction  11

media openly advocating environmental themes, whereas implicit ecomedia are inherently ecological by their very nature as being materially embedded in the environment and global economic system. They can also be implicit in the ways they frame out or decenter environmental concerns.

Troubling Language: From Medialandia to Ecomediasystem Media literacy educators tend to use spatial metaphors to describe media, such as “navigating the media environment.” In an effort to summarize this territorialized “figured world” of media that educators imagine and teach about, I came up with a composite called “medialandia.” Without consciously doing so, they often make use of “The Media” to indicate an actual place—though abstract—that has “digital natives” and “digital immigrants.” Metaphors based on vision, such as point of view, delineate space because they imply objects that can be seen. The message metaphor is a kind of transmission metaphor that implies communication is composed of objects that move through space. Commonly used transmission, spatial, and container metaphors are in italic. I have also highlighted where implicated actors (people or social groups) are used to indicate movement or location: Medialandia is not real. Though it is primarily occupied and controlled by business interests, it is also inhabited by producers that have individual points of view. Occasionally one can find independent mediamakers, but they are generally not visible. Medialandia is constructed with information and entertainment technologies with no material reality or relationship with the physical world. Nonetheless, its landscape can be navigated. Sometimes messages are hidden below the surface, but its environment can be scanned in order to shift focus and to learn new things. To understand Medialandia, it must be accessed. Subsequently, its many points of view are embedded in messages we receive that are transmitted or transferred to us in order to be reflected upon. These messages are constructed representations of our world and they need to be decoded. We can get pleasure from these transmissions. Medialandia also has the power to transmit emotions through messages. When representations of us enter Medialandia, they return altered, sometimes as stereotypes. Some believe we are in danger of internalizing Medialandia’s view of ourselves. There is concern that different social groups can be influenced by how they appear after their representations return from Medialandia. Though some believe Medialandia is fantasy and we must be protected from it, most consider it better to learn about it and to construct new knowledge about it, because each one of us is an autonomous being with a specific identity that is constructed. Thus, we have the ability to construct our own meanings. The primary way to understand Medialandia is to reflect,

12  Introduction

critically think, analyze, and discuss this place. Skilled practitioners can then construct and encode their own messages and transmit them back to Medialandia. Others believe that laws should be passed to change the behavior of Medialandia’s rulers/owners. (López, 2014, pp. 118–119) As described in more detail in my discussion of communication theory in ­Chapter 3, media is reified by using what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) describe as “container metaphors,” essentially when something is referred to as having an inside and outside and exists in space, such as a “framework.” In my composite there is an assortment of assumptions about media as a thing existing outside of us (because it can be viewed and reflected upon) and that messages, which contain information and ideas, can be transmitted through space. This implies a theory of cognition that separates the mind and body from the environment. In Chapter 4, where I explore the difference between globes and spheres, I discuss primarily the difference between different ways of perceiving and being, one in which a world is objectified and occupied and another in which it is inhabited as an extension of ourselves. The most important takeaway is the way that media becomes an Other, reinforcing the duality at the heart of environmental destruction in which humans are conceptually separated from their environment. Nonetheless, the conception of media as landscapes invites an intervention to introduce the media as ecosystem metaphor and problematize Cartesian duality (see Chapter 2). But using it has to be done with caution and care, because the “media ecosystem” concept has also been abused and misused without shifting the paradigm of thought about our place in the living planet. To differentiate from the historical and situated uses (and abuses) of the terms media ecosystem and media ecology, I use ecomediasystem to mark an inherent eco-ethical orientation (see Chapter 3). Here I define ecomediasystem as the eco-ethical relationship between an ecomedia environment and its members (human and more-than-human). My effort to encourage ecological thinking through ecological language is to transform thinking about media with the full knowledge that metaphors both include and exclude ways of knowing. My goal in the following chapters is to use alternative metaphors to defamiliarizing what we take for granted, but also to develop an interdisciplinary language of shared concepts (Crumley, 2007). Given what we know about semiotics, cultural codes are not fixed, and therefore not finally fixed (see Hall et al., 2013). Ecomedia literacy can repurpose the media ecosystem metaphor to incorporate eco-ethics and new linguistic conventions to change meaning over time. Because of the complex impacts of ecomedia, an ecomedia literacy program requires a holistic method of analysis that enables students to explore the various ecological dimensions of ICTs as operating within various ecomediasystems. Grounded in eco-citizenship, the aim of ecomedia literacy is to clarify and amplify how the ecomediasystem is not natural but is the result of deliberate choices and shared values.

Introduction  13

Throughout this book, I’m making a conscious effort to use alternative vocabulary. You may notice, for example, my use of the term living planet. This is deliberate. I want to invoke Earth as alive and not as something inert or dead, as is the legacy of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions. Morton (2012) prefers “mesh” to include the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving things (including artificial and human-built elements). Like scholars working in the realm of ecological identity, whenever possible the aim is “to avoid unreflexive use of common terms such as ‘nature,’ ‘environment,’ and ‘animals’—terms that in the context of dominant discourses often function to reproduce notions of a separate, homogeneous, and backgrounded ecological other”; the task is to “trouble the tendency to frame the ecological or the animal as separate from or subordinate to the human and to attempt to revive the ecocultural power of language to evoke earthly immersion and relation” (Milstein & Castro-Sotomayor, 2020, p. xxi). This means eschewing terminology devised by Republican think tanks, like climate change, and using more urgent vocabulary, such as climate disruption, heating, crisis, or emergency. In an effort to move “away from dominant binary constructs that reproduce an anthropocentric status quo,” Milstein and CastroSotomayor (2020, pp. xxi–xxii) encourage the use of terms like naturecultures (Haraway, 2008) to disrupt the Nature–culture binary, more-than-human world (Abram, 1996) instead of environment, humanature (Milstein, 2016), and humanimal (Mitchell, 2003) to bridge human and animal. With this context in mind, when I  use “environment,” I  do not divide it into humans, knowledge, cities, technology, and civilization, nor subscribe to the Cartesian dualism that disembeds cognition from the physical world. To turn McLuhan on his head, if media are extensions of the human nervous systems, we are extension of the living planet. Cognitive biologists assert that as a result of evolution, our minds are structurally coupled with ecological surroundings (Maturana  & Varela, 1998). Coevolution asserts that species evolve and adapt to each other. As Michael Pollan (2002) asks: What if plants evolved humans to propagate themselves? But I want to caution against the slippery slope argument that because all things are “natural,” any human behavior toward the environment or any technology produced is inherently natural. Binaries between humans and the environment are further complicated when we consider how microplastics are in our bloodstream and thousands of man-made chemicals are in breast milk (Zhang et al., 2020). The pharmaceuticals we ingest are in essence internalizing the whole industrial-chemical-capitalist complex (Preciado, 2013). Admittedly, changing everyday clichés and language can come across as awkward. For example, “framework” is a term we use all the time to describe a way of thinking about something, but it is problematic from an ecological perspective. As a container metaphor, it reinforces the concept of thoughts as reified ­structures—literally spaces that we can enter and leave from—as opposed to organically embodied processes in which our ideas and minds are not s­eparate from the world around us. It “frames” our thinking (and by extension our bodies)

14  Introduction

as disconnected boxes isolated in space. But using alternative language for a term like framework is difficult. “Earthwork” could serve as a possible replacement. After all, earthwork retains the implication of constructing—indeed, language, ideas, and worldviews are constructed to a certain extent, i.e., they are not “natural” but cultural—and all sorts of creatures construct (anthills, beehives, beaver dams, birds’ nests, etc.); however, it sounds weird and unnatural when implemented (i.e., “The media studies earthwork tells us that”). Thus, I’m aware that it is difficult to change language use and it is often impractical. Nonetheless, throughout this book, I have tried, whenever possible, to avoid falling into old mental habits and also to upgrade terminology, whenever appropriate. For example, the central heuristics discussed in this book—ecomediasystem and ecomediasphere—might at first sound or read awkwardly. My request to you is to work with these terms as an exercise in defamiliarization. Ultimately, ecological metaphors are not a substitute for ecological thinking, nor do they determine ecological ways of perceiving (i.e., “media ecology,” “iPhone ecosystem,” and “Facebook ecosystem” are incomplete metaphors that don’t automatically lead to ecological awareness). Changing metaphors won’t automatically lead us to “think like a mountain,” Leopold’s (1987) call for people to take on the perspective of more-than-human ecosystems. This is because the method of analysis also has to consciously extend the metaphor to actual practice and facilitate ecological awareness and eco-ethics. Moreover, metaphors and analytical methods don’t necessarily lead us to care about something or create empathy. That process is more intangible. What ecological media metaphors can do is prompt our imagination, provoking us to perceive media as interconnected and interdependent with the living planet, as opposed to atomizing and disconnecting us from it. New language use is part of cocreating an emerging ecological civilization. To expand our ecological vocabulary, we can learn from ancient vocabularies that afford expansive concepts of self and the world. Quechua scholar Sandy Grande (2008, p. 241) points out that the Quechua word runa means simultaneously “being, person and Andean person.” In my own travels in Latin America, I learned about chakaruna, people who serve as liaisons between indigenous and mainstream culture. The word combines chaka—“bridge”—with runa to mean “bridge-person.” Grande suggests, runa is a virtually limitless category, one open to the sense of being as well as becoming. Thus, the “revolutionary” ideas of hybridity, relationality, and dialectics are neither new nor revolutionary to this indigenous community but rather have been an integral part of the Quechua way of life for more than five hundred years. (p. 242) Chakaruna is a disposition that bridges indigenous and Western modalities. For the purpose of this book, “An Indigenous person is a member of a community

Introduction  15

retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land-base. Indigenous Knowledge is any application of those memories as living knowledge to improve present and future circumstances” (Yunkaporta, 2019, p. 42). The task at hand, then, is to create a mutually beneficial methodology that can function within the fluid state of permeable borders and ecological worldviews.

Deep Media Literacy and Systems Thinking My vision for ecomedia literacy requires fundamentally redesigning how we conceive and teach media. It starts with incorporating systems thinking, a practice (like critical thinking) that is often bundled with digital literacy and media literacy as a necessary 21st-century skill (Jacobs, 2010). Sterling (2004, p. 11) asserts that environmental education is to foster whole systems thinking. One of the pioneering public intellectuals of the 20th century who advocated systems dynamics, Donella Meadows, wrote extensively about the relationship between media and systems thought. System dynamics, she writes, “makes clear the overarching power of deep, socially shared ideas about the nature of the world. Out of those ideas arise our systems—government systems, economic systems, technical systems, family systems, environmental systems” (Meadows, 1991, p. 2).

Iceberg Model of Systems Dynamics A tool to visualize this is the iceberg model of systems thinking, which demonstrates how ecological problems are design challenges rooted in mental models. The systems dynamics approach posits that problems are unsolvable if we only react to events without examining how they are caused by underlying patterns (trends over time), systemic structures (policies, laws, infrastructure, how parts connect), and mental models (assumptions, beliefs, attitudes). For example, the proverbial tip of the iceberg is the visible and immediate event, such as ecological disasters like pandemics, forest fires, hurricanes, or oil spills. They are treated as momentary catastrophic incidents in which the damage is repaired but business as usual continues without solving the underlying problem that caused the phenomenon to occur. Catastrophic forest fires in Australia, Amazon, California, Siberia, and across Africa are extinguished with existing resources, but without addressing drought and global heating, fires like these will become increasingly normal. So, we rebuild structures on coasts damaged by hurricanes, in defiance of predicted rising seas and future catastrophic weather. Or, we develop properties in dangerous fire zones, regardless of increased temperatures and droughts. In an example of deep, systematic thinking, currently political geographers are proposing the idea of disaster not as an event but as a structure (Bonilla, 2020). Hurricane Maria that struck Puerto Rico in 2017, for instance, can be thought of as a “disaster swarm” that combined a variety of shocks: “hurricanes, earthquakes, debt crisis, migratory crisis, imperial violence, austerity governance, and other

16  Introduction

forms of structural and systemic violence all acting as a disordered jumble upon a collective body that cannot distinguish a main event or a discrete set of impacts.” Thus, Yarimar Bonilla asserts that [A] seismological lexicon is useful for thinking about the temporality of disasters in general: political and social contexts that shape them, the difficulty of determining when they begin and end, and how they operate as compounded crises rather than singular events. (quoted in Jobson, 2020) Contrary to the logic of media’s attention economy, the underlying causes of ecological disasters tend to be slow and invisible. A systems dynamics approach attempts to identify the core pattern that caused these events by exploring beneath the surface of the tangible event, such as reducing carbon emissions and eliminating fossil fuels that trigger extreme weather. Addressing the deepest level, worldview, is how we grow solutions to design new systems that can grapple with the predicament. If we applied this practice to future pandemics, we would address the source of novel contagions, such as deforestation, factory farming, monoculture, and wildlife markets, and also redesign our infrastructure to include expanded budgets for healthcare and coordinated international agencies that include open-source information and knowledge exchanges. It would also mean challenging the neoliberal strategy of austerity to eliminate social programs and reduce the role of the state. These fundamental changes would accompany a paradigm shift in eco-ethics and environmental ideology that redefines our global economic system to reduce pollutants (which exacerbate COVID-19 symptoms) and extractivism and promote a global project like a coordinated Green New Deal to retrain workers and encourage clean technologies and energy infrastructure. To use a digital media literacy example, we can apply the iceberg model to the problem of fake news, but from an ecomedia perspective (see Figure  0.1). Conventional media and information literacy tend to focus on deconstructing media “events” that are expressed in the form of cultural artifacts, such as specific instances of fake news. In this example, we would focus on what I call “fake climate news,” which is deliberate climate disinformation and propaganda designed to reinforce right-wing ideology about the market economy and to create confusion about climate science to prevent industry regulation (see López & Share, 2020). Just beneath the surface, the analysis will identify patterns over time, such as how fake climate news exists as part of a range of texts distributed throughout social media, search engines, and the news ecosystem, but also distinguish what is novel about it. A deeper inquiry, like the kind performed by critical media literacy, delves into systemic structures that interact with and influence the production of the media text. This means exploring cultural norms, the political economy of digital media platforms, and legacy news media, and analyzing hegemonic global capitalist

Introduction  17

Iceberg Model of Systems Thinking FAKE CLIMATE NEWS EVENTS

Texts/Cultural Artifacts

Specific example of fake news (article, meme, tweet, video, etc.)

PATTERNS/TRENDS

ANTICIPATE

DESIGN

Explore economic and financial motives of platforms, i.e., surveillance capitalism Determine goals of fossil fuel industry and allies

TRANSFORM

Worldview

Underlying, taken for granted beliefs about how system should function

FIGURE 0.1 

Determine sources of fake climate news and where they are distributed

Political Economy Economic structure of sharing platforms, news systems, fossil fuel industry

MENTAL MODELS

Define fake climate news Deconstruct texts (discourse, semiotics, narrative) Explore media language

Pattern of Texts Range of texts distributed throughout social media, search engines, and the news ecosystem

SYSTEMIC STRUCTURES

ECOMEDIA LITERACY

REACT

Anthropocentricism, extractivism, neoliberalism

Iceberg model of systems thinking and fake climate news

institutions that informs how and why particular patterns of news, propaganda, and disinformation emerge over time. This includes a discussion of the economic status quo that enables a feedback loop between fake climate news, platforms that afford addictive software design and clickbait, and digital media infrastructure that exacerbates the climate crisis. It investigates what Graham Readfearn dubs the “doubt business,” which works through “conservative ‘free market’ thinktanks [sic], public relations groups, fossil fuel organizations and ideologically aligned media” (quoted in Maxwell & Miller, 2020, p. 106). At the deepest level of analysis is the anthropocentric worldview and ideology that drives the whole system and regulates its goals. Fake climate news is merely a symptom of a much larger structure in which the most profitable businesses in the world—social media and

18  Introduction

tech—have very few regulations. This type of analysis can also be applied to the exploration of emerging “disruptive” technologies, like cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, and the “sharing” economy by starting an analysis with how any one of these are expressed through an “event” (such as a specific platform like Bitcoin, Google Cloud, Facebook Spaces, 360 video, or Uber) and work through the layers from there. But the analysis should not be limited to an ecocritical examination of fake climate news. Once students arrive to the underlying causes, they can then form an enduring question, such as “How can the news ecomediasystem be re-designed to limit the spread of fake climate news?” They then can perform a backward design exercise, which entails developing a series of steps and procedures that will answer the question (see Chapter 9 for a discussion of this process).

Solving for Pattern At the deepest level of any analysis is the language we use to describe the world, which thereby determines how we respond to events. “Worldview is part of our learned cultural orientation; it informs our social organization, our relationships to nature/environment, our beliefs about humanity, as well as cosmological or philosophical questions about the nature of the universe, reality, and the Divine” (Machiorlatti, 2010, p. 62). One of the functions of a worldview is to help us “locate our place and rank in the universe” (p. 65). Ecolinguistics is the study of how language patterns our worldview, by “critiquing forms of language that contribute to ecological destruction and aiding in the search for new forms of language that inspire people to protect the natural world” (Stibbe, 2015, p.  1). Stibbe’s “stories-we-live-by” frame asserts, “it is through language that economic systems are built, and when those systems are seen to lead to immense suffering and ecological destruction, it is through language that they are resisted and new forms of economy brought into being” (p.  2). Hence, the move is to not only question taken-for-granted metaphors (such as Progress and Individualism), but also remediate terms like media and media systems to ecomedia and ecomediasystem. By examining how language patterns mental models, we can better comprehend how issues like environmental degradation, patriarchy, racism, and colonialism are intersectional and connected by Modernity’s mechanistic (and hence anthropocentric) worldview. Ecomedia literacy shares the same goal as ecolinguistics, which is to question the storieswe-live by and to propose new ones that will transform the paradigm underlying our current ecological crisis. Systems dynamics is important for solving problems because you want to avoid reproducing the same thinking that created them. As solutions like geoengineering are proposed by ecomodernists to solve the climate crisis, we’ll need to ­critically evaluate if such choices actually reinforce or solve the root causes of our current ecological predicament. As Wendell Berry’s (2005, pp. 33–34) concept of

Introduction  19

“designing for pattern” proposes, design solutions should not produce new problems, what he calls “bad solutions” (such as electric cars depending on lithium mining for their batteries). By understanding how any ecomedia object is a cultural artifact of our age that reflects and communicates deeper beliefs about human experience in our living planet, we learn to address how to solve the problems they generate. Whether probing the metaphorical ecomedia depths of icebergs, soil, or geological strata, the deep analytical approach cultivates awareness in the same way that transformational ecosophies (or environmental wisdom like Deep Ecology) are necessary for transformative systemic change. Ecomedia literacy, then, is akin to deep media literacy.

Ecomedia Studies Ecomedia literacy is coevolving with two broad categories of emerging disciplines concerned with making the environment an expanded subject of media and education scholarship (see Figure 0.2). The first is in humanities, social sciences, media, and communications studies where scholars are now addressing the ecological dimension of culture, political economy, and media. Second is the group of pedagogical methods that promote environmental literacy, drawing on concepts and methods developed by ecoliteracy, critical ecopedagogy, and education for sustainability. While not always explicitly stating this, what ties all of these together is essentially a decolonizing epistemology that entails critiquing Modernity’s paradigm of technological progress, positivism, and mechanism at the core of Euro-American education and scholarship. Ecologically oriented education asserts that unquestioned faith in positivism, human exceptionalism, and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions are the root causes of environmental crisis, and therefore must be critically engaged in ways that do not reinforce the kind of mental models that drive environmental destruction (Capra, 2005; Capra & Luisi, 2016; Orr, 1992). Just as film and media studies has had a powerful influence on the development of media literacy, ecomedia literacy draws from ecomedia studies, which asserts that media are in and about the environment, both of which are inseparable from each other (Walker & Starosielski, 2016). As I use it here, ecomedia studies is an umbrella for areas of scholarship that bridge media and the environment; however, many of its associated fields do not necessarily self-identify as ecomedia studies. For instance, the three most important academic journals most closely aligned with the subject, Journal of Environmental Communication, Media+Environment, and Journal of Environmental Studies, do not use the term “ecomedia studies.” Nonetheless, there has been an effort to theorize ecomedia studies as an interdisciplinary field. The now defunct website, ecomediastudies.org, was created in 2009 to begin defining the field. In 2016, the website’s main creators edited Ecomedia: Key Issues (Rust et al., 2016), which further defines important topics and themes

20  Introduction

ECOCULTURE

Ecolinguistics

Ecocinema studies

Affective ecology

POLITICAL

ECOLOGY Green cultural/ Media studies Post colonial ecocriticism Environmental humanities Environmental communication Ecocriticism Ecomedia studies Ecofeminism

EMERGING FIELDS OF ECOMEDIA

Media ecology

LIFEWORLD

FIGURE 0.2 

Infrastructure studies

Media materialism Eco materialism Media archeology Flow/materials ecology

ECOMATERIALITY

Emerging fields of ecomedia studies

concerned with media and/as ecology. Rust et al. identify three key themes in the study of ecomedia—representation, communication, and materiality. Representation and communication correspond with my framing of ecomedia mindprint, dealing with how environmental issues, discourses, and symbols circulate within ecomediasystems. Materiality relates to the ecomedia footprint of media production, infrastructure, devices, and data. Ecomedia studies roughly parallel the evolution of ecocriticism and ecocinema as a series of waves (see Christman Lavin & Kaplan, 2017). The first wave of ecocriticism (1970–1980s) represents scholarship that forms the basis of ecocriticism, ecocinema, and posthumanism, all under the rubric of what later emerged as environmental humanities in the 2000s. The second wave (1980s–1990s) marks a period where cultural studies and American studies scholars start to apply ecocritical toolsets to popular culture and mass media. This is also a time period in which philosophers spurred by postmodernism tackle the construction of Nature. The third wave (2000–10) is

Introduction  21

characterized by the emergence of media and environment study groups in major academic associations, and the establishment of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) and International Environmental Communication Association (IECA). This period sees a surge of published research that begins to define more specifically the research areas of ecomedia studies. The current wave (ongoing) is represented by an explosion of research and published materials and a delineation in three major “turns”—the study of affect, materiality, and objectoriented ontology. It’s important to note that most of these fields inform each other and this is not meant to create artificial boundaries, but simply to identify some broad spheres of exploration. Indeed, as the title of one book, Teaching Ecocriticism and Green Cultural Studies (Garrard, 2016) suggests, there is a natural affinity between different research interests (such as how ecocriticism is the result of interdisciplinary work between literature and cultural studies). Likewise, ecocinema could be categorized under environmental humanities, but it has its own unique interests and pursuits (such as affect) that are closer to its natural home, film studies. Ecolinguistics is situated in ecocriticism and environmental communication. In most cases, these groups are tackling similar themes—for example, the cultural construction of nature/human/animal binaries or the postcolonial critique of Modernity—but from different disciplinary foci or emphasis. And as these areas of study continue to cross-pollinate, ecology is expanding into more and more fields, such as with environmental humanities. According to ASLE, environmental humanities now encompass a variety of disciplines, including history, philosophy, film and media, cultural studies, religious studies, cultural geography, and anthropology. Accordingly, each of these headers is actually scholarly ecotones—overlapping ecologies of thought and research, intersecting, opening new possibilities and “edge effects” (Nixon, 2011, p. 30). What unites all of these is the underlying tone that in effect are contributing to a larger political project (see Oppermann, 2011). Building on Andrew Ross’ (1994) pioneering work in American Studies to develop green cultural criticism, Jhan Hochman’s (1998) book, Green Cultural Studies: Nature in Film, Novel, and Theory, articulates a green rationale for cultural studies: Absent a green component, cultural studies’ prevailing concerns are with (popular) texts/practices primarily impacting upon ethnicity/race, gender, sexuality, economic class, and age (particularly youth subcultures). A struggling newcomer to this nexus of concerns is nature (plants, animals, and elements). The task of green cultural studies is the examination of proliferating cultural representations of nature—i.e., lexical, pictorial, and actual manipulations of plants, animals, and elements—for their potential to affect audiences affecting nature-out-there or what I often call worldnature. (p. 2, emphasis original)

22  Introduction

Twenty years later, a brief scan of cultural studies textbooks demonstrates a lack of commitment to environmental concerns, so green cultural studies remains a specialized subset and has not yet entered the mainstream of cultural studies. Nonetheless, Hochman’s approach, though novel at the time, was somewhat conventional in the sense that even though he was introducing green cultural criticism to media texts that had not been subject to that kind of reading, he still focused primarily on textual analysis without incorporating audience or industry perspectives. Still, Hochman does center hegemony, ideology, and the neoMarxist critique of capitalism (and Modernity) as core. Ultimately, the project of green cultural studies is the examination of nature through words, images, and model for the purpose of foregrounding potential effects representations might have on cultural attitudes and social practices which, in turn, affect nature itself. What this also means, however, is that green cultural studies must be equally cautious of the impact that it—like other forms of representation—can have on nature. (Hochman, 2000, p. 187) Cultural studies can orient ourselves to a “topographies of culture” perspective. As I noted in my own research of media literacy practitioners, they often use metaphors like “field,” “boundary,” and “space” to demarcate “positions” within “spheres” of knowledge. Longhurst et al. (2017, p. 191) note, cultural studies is full of talk of “margins,” “borders” and “networks.” Yet there is more to this than just language, since there is also a sense that ­culture—particularly when it is understood as something that is plural, fragmented and contested—cannot be understood outside of spaces that marks out (like national boundaries or gang territories), the places that it makes meaningful (perhaps the Statue of Liberty or your favourite coffee shop), the landscape it creates (from “England’s green and pleasant land” to the suburban shopping mall) and the networks that connect people together (such as virtual communities of gamers on the Internet). . . . [I]ssues of culture and meaning are geographical. This approach gets us to think of media as a landscape the same way we view gardens, cityscapes, and architecture as cultural geographies that are both shaped and inhabited, and embedded within a larger ecomediasystem. Laurence Coupe (2000, p. 5) suggests in his introduction to the Green Studies Reader, one thing green theorists have had to do is retrieve a sense of the “real” that has been lost in postmodernist and poststructuralist discourse: The focus of any praxis is on the future; with green studies what is at stake is the future of the planet itself. Class, race and gender are important

Introduction  23

dimensions of both literary and cultural studies; but the survival of the biosphere must surely rank as even more important, since without it there are no issues worth addressing. One of the key lessons from ecomedia studies is the need to address the environmental blind spot in how media have been studied and taught. Crucial to an ecological reboot is combining the material and affective turns in media studies with the ecocritical and postcolonial critique in environmental humanities. It also means expanding ethics to our extended biotic communities and an awareness of how environmental ideologies permeate our worldview. As proposed by ecocriticism and environmental humanities, this involves acknowledging the legacy of Western epistemology and colonialism in how the concept of Nature and other binaries has led to a dividing off of the living planet from studying media. Additionally, I believe that when examining the political economy of media, we should integrate the world-ecology analysis of capitalism, which ties together ecological footprint and mindprint by arguing that capitalism doesn’t act on Nature, but is an ecology itself (see Moore, 2015). All of this is conceptualized within the iceberg model of systems thinking in which the ecomedia object is the visible and physical manifestation of deeper patterns and ultimately a worldview that drives how we design ecomediasystems. The aim, then, is to devise a methodology that allows for deeper, holistic explorations of digital media that go beyond instrumental, superficial, or incomplete analysis that eschews or ignores ecological concerns.

From Media Literacy to Ecomedia Literacy Offering a “teachable moment” about the impact of ICTs on the environment, the transition to emergency online teaching during the COVID-19 crisis in 2020 has led to its own ecological peril, which ecomedia literacy can address. The heavy usage of server farms, high-speed networks, and screen technology raises a range of ecological concerns for media’s ecological footprint that educators should know about. Though air travel and factory production decreased during this period, resulting in a temporary pause on our global emissions, most online tools still depend on electricity that is primarily generated by fossil fuels. Moreover, the attention economy based on fear and clickbait media raises concerns about the ecological mindprint of our media, i.e., the way that physical viruses become media viruses (and ultimately mind viruses). We need media to inform and inspire us to solve the myriad of ecological crises we face; the proliferation of conspiracy theories on the net just pollute the mental atmosphere. Addressing these concerns requires not just how we think about teaching media, but how we conceive of media as ecomedia. Once we do that, our educational approach will transition accordingly.

24  Introduction

So, how do we shift from media literacy to ecomedia literacy, and how are they conceptually different? Grounded in the central conceit of environmental communication that we are in a crisis, ecomedia literacy starts by naming the environmental problems historically neglected by media education: Namely, that despite the intimate connection between media, communication technologies, and environmental destruction, very few practical approaches have been developed in media literacy education to promote sustainable cultural practices or identify environmental concerns (critical media literacy is one of the few exceptions, see Kellner  & Share, 2019). In contrast, ecomedia literacy synthesizes approaches already developed by education for sustainability, including themes like exploring cultural preservation and transformation; responsible eco-citizenship; the ­dynamics of systems and change; sustainable economics; healthy commons, natural laws and ecological principles; inventing and affecting the future; and fostering a sense of place and planet (see Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education, 2011). Ecomedia literacy incorporates environmental themes and concepts to encourage eco-ethical cultural behaviors by extending the concept of ethics and civic responsibility beyond an anthropocentric gaze to expand empathy and care to the living planet. Although the number of scholars concerned with sustainability in media, communications, and film studies increases every year, historically the literature in media literacy education concerned with environmental issues has been limited (López, 2014). This is not to say that individual media literacy practitioners have not taken up environmental themes in their work, but until recently there has been no clearly defined movement within media literacy education devoted entirely to promoting environmental approaches. Nonetheless, it is possible to identify some important developments in previous years. Project Look Sharp produced several curricula around environmental themes, based on constructivist pedagogy (Sperry, 2020). Educators and scholars working in the area of critical media literacy connect a variety of social concerns, such as sexism, racism, gender identity, violence, and war with environmental issues (Beach et al., 2017; Kellner & Share, 2019). Rauch (2018) promotes “slow media” literacy and “unplugging” as a way to encourage environmental awareness. Hadl (2016) penned a Japanese textbook on ecomedia literacy. Brereton (2018) has extended ecocinema scholarship to explore environmental literacy and digital audiences. And though not explicitly identified as ecomedia literacy, Milstein et al. (2017) bridge environmental communication with pedagogy, thereby proposing methods that combine the teaching of media and communications with environmental concerns. To expand the field, in 2020 I coedited (along with Jeff Share and Theresa Redmond) a jointly published special edition on ecomedia literacy with the Journal of Sustainability Education1 and Journal of Media Literacy.2 Whereas conventional media education is anthropocentric, ecomedia literacy pivots toward ecocentricism. It does so by highlighting the extinction crisis and ecojustice. Drawing attention to the extinction crisis is a way to decenter

Introduction  25

humans from media impacts, so there are references throughout this book to this particular cataclysm by giving voice to the more-than-human world. Ecojustice recenters the struggles of populations across the globe that have disproportionately suffered from the climate crisis, but also critically assesses the historical role of capitalism and colonialism to establish hierarchies of power that have created income inequality and disproportionate environmental damage to Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC). To restate the obvious, the status quo is producing the planetary ecological crisis, so ecomedia literacy must operate from a critical stance. In particular, ecomedia literacy assumes a critical approach toward ICTs by recognizing the way in which media technology and screen technologies (cell phones, tablets, TVs, computers, digital media tools, etc.) are products of the global system’s political economy (world system) in which costs are externalized to the environment and workers in lower income countries, while also producing a subjectivity that normalizes consumerism and displaces people’s concern for their living habitats. Mainstream media literacy practices are primarily based on a 19th-century mechanistic paradigm of communication and education, reinforcing the ideology of technological progress at the core of the Modernity project. Technological progress, Maxwell and Miller (2020) note, was propaganda developed in the 19th century to counter the critique of dehumanized industrialization that manifested in rebellions like the Luddites’ destruction of factory machinery in 1811. Along with the notion of progress is Cartesian duality that splits humans from the living planet. The anthropocentric (human-centered) idea that humans are distinct from the living planet is driving our global environmental crisis. In media literacy, this leads to an analytical approach to the political economy of information and communication technology that eschews concern for environmental impacts. This also leads to a disregard for exploitative labor practices in screen technology production, which go hand in hand with environmental destruction. Standard media literacy methods overemphasize technological progress and media representations to overlook the materiality of media objects. Through the critical reframing of media as ecomedia, an ecomedia literacy framework considers how media gadgets are made and their subsequent environmental footprint. An ecomedia literacy analysis involves tracing the production chain of media gadgets, from the mining of “conflict minerals” in countries like the Congo, to their manufacture and assembly in countries like China, to distribution and consumption, to their disposal. It also incorporates an exploration of the impact on the climate crisis from carbon energy-powered server farms, and how renewable energy and “green IT” can be utilized to mitigate carbon emissions (but also critically assessing green IT solutions). Data clouds are considered from the point of view of carbon emissions, extraction, and pollution, but also surveillance and privacy. This also necessitates an exploration of how energy policy is represented and promoted in media. It further entails a critique

26  Introduction

of built-in obsolescence and consumerism as a driver of ecological crisis. The way in which communication technologies are promoted as empowering invites an ecocritical analysis of gadget marketing. Finally, it means exploring how mobile media, the internet, and TV reconfigure time and space, thereby impacting our sense of place (something valued by environmental educators), and what it means to engage a state of “placelessness.” Like environmental communication, ecomedia literacy also recognizes that media entail symbolic action that can hinder or promote eco-ethics and ecocitizenship. Symbolic action is the way in which discourses (visual, verbal, and textual) construct environmental problems and solutions (Cox & Pezzullo, 2017). Studying how environmental discourses are constructed in media, students actively participate in and engage with the public sphere, keeping in mind the boundary between public and interpersonal communication is blurred. Youth media programs, service learning, and community engagement projects are important venues for bringing environmental issues to public attention (such as media produced by indigenous groups involved in land struggles against energy companies and governments). In addition, recognizing that the climate crisis and environmental problems are underreported as a result of news ecomediasystems’ political economy, as an expression of eco-citizenship students can work toward media reforms that will support changes for how the environment is reported (Hackett, 2017). And the more-than-real digital spaces of digital ecomedia are at the center of how we resolve the climate crisis: The shimmering facades of the digital and the Anthropocene are intertwined in increasingly compelling and alarming ways. The Anthropocene epoch is produced by digital realities and inflects digital geographies in a two-way exchange. Meanwhile, weird solidarities are forming to counter problematic arguments against climate action and other species extinction threatening processes. Egregious efforts to discredit science that has established evidence for the changing climate, species collapse and other global environmental system pressures are facilitated by digital spaces. (McLean, 2020, p. 41) Ecomedia literacy should encourage the regenerative power of media as a means of education and raising awareness of environmental problems and solutions. Like critical pedagogy, ecomedia literacy is not neutral or agenda-free: It actively acknowledges that our global ecosystems are in jeopardy and calls for intervention into media literacy practices to promote environmental resilience and regeneration. Given the prevailing technophilia of our culture and the “invisibility” of the ecomedia footprint, students will not arrive to this awareness naturally. But as required of effective pedagogy, students can develop an awareness through inquiry and framing questions to help guide the process. For example, it’s not necessary to tell students the data cloud is primarily powered by coal. Rather,

Introduction  27

begin a process of inquiry in which you ask the appropriate questions that guide them toward discovery by asking, do you know where the data cloud exists? What is it made of? How is it powered? What infrastructure is necessary to send a message from different points on the planet? This process can be supported by the many media literacy practices that have already been developed, especially those coming from critical media literacy (Buckingham, 2019; Kellner & Share, 2019). The aim of this book is to provide the necessary background information and context to be able to ask these kinds of questions and then to guide the inquiry to enable students to explore these probes. Throughout this book you will encounter some common themes, which in my view summarize the ecomedia literacy approach. The curriculum should support learners to be able to: • • •

Extend empathy and care to the living planet. Decolonize epistemology and decenter humans. Challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about globalization by exploring the colonial roots of the system. • Question growth, progress, and consumerism. • Critically engage the technological sublime. • Analyze environmental claims-making. • Expand awareness of the ecomedia commons. • Explore anthropocentric versus ecocentric ideologies. • Investigate discourses around nature, animals, climate crisis, and ecopsychology. • Engage alternative ecomedia and media reform solutions. • Incorporate the affective and material turns in ecocinema and ecomedia studies into media analysis. The goal of ecomedia literacy is to promote mindfulness for how everyday media practice impacts our ability to live sustainably within Earth’s ecological parameters for the present and future. In doing so, it promotes the understanding that media as a whole are a socio-technological ecosystem embedded within living systems to create a broader ecomediasystem. This is a proposal and a vision for what ecomedia literacy can be. But its evolution should be organic and, therefore, what follows in this book is merely tilling the soil and raising earthen berms for the cultivation of an emerging eco-imagination in media education.

Ecomedia as Education: Some Definitions In the coming chapters, I will be operating from a set of premises that I want to outline here. Each point will be elaborated further throughout the book. All media are ecomedia. Ecomedia refers to the principle that media are a material and symbolic resource entangled with the environment. Similar to Bozak’s

28  Introduction

(2011) concept of “resource media,” ecomedia are like water, electricity, and gas that are also piped into our abodes and work environments as a material resource requiring a vast infrastructure. Identifying media (including data files) as ecomedia acknowledges the material circumstances of media. All worldviews are ecological worldviews. We all have beliefs about our relationship with the living planet, regardless if we are aware of them or not. Ecological worldviews are not normative and range from anthropocentric to ecocentric. Actions like throwing trash on the ground or recycling, or eating produce with chemicals versus organic, are practices that extend from ecological worldviews. Worldview is ontological: As a cosmology, it determines how we situate ourselves as part of the living environment (and universe). All education is environmental education. Ecology educator David Orr (1994) proposes that all forms of education are about the environment. For example, if you go to school and never learn or study about the environment, there is an implicit message that environmental issues are not important or are not equal in importance to other subjects. This is reflected in how the environment is divided off as an unintegrated subject area, such as in the physical sciences. Standard economics or business courses that advocate for the externalization of costs to the environment are teaching an ecological worldview, even though they are not consciously doing so. Historically, media literacy has done just that: It has marginalized or symbolically annihilated environmental concerns. The anthropocentric worldview becomes the taken-for-granted paradigm that formulates education policy, as well as the background in which media literacy education is conceived. What is less obvious is how conventional media education entails an implicit environmental worldview that is often not acknowledged or reconciled. All ecomedia are educational. Representational media (that is, media that re-­present the world) teach us how the world works without explicitly calling attention to its educational nature. Much of the daily public pedagogy that mass media (which includes social media) teach about race, gender, class, sexuality, consumption, fear, morals, and the like, reflect corporate profit motives and hegemonic ideologies at the expense of social concerns necessary for a healthy democracy and a sustainable planet. (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. xiii) Media educate us (or perhaps more precisely, train us) and model what is normal, abnormal, or frame out that which is considered unimportant or insignificant. Most educators are well aware of the powerful, pedagogical nature of media, so it doesn’t take much convincing to argue this point. Moreover, as argued by media ecologists, the use of and reliance on screen technologies condition our behavior and experience of the world. All ecomedia are environmental education. Just as any educational approach ­inevitably promotes attitudes and beliefs about the environment, so do media.

Introduction  29

ICTs reinforce worldviews about the environment, often instructing us how to act upon or behave toward the living planet. They reinforce the boundaries between humans and the nonhuman world and perpetuate anthropocentric values. Under the current conditions of our global economic system, environmentally harmful technology and an ideology of exploitation combine to form an anthropocentric system of production and consumption. According to the environmental communication discipline, communication entails symbolic action that is both pragmatic (achieving specific goals such as raising awareness or changing policy) and constitutive (fashioning values, attitudes, and ideologies). All education is political (and all politics are climate politics). While ethics relates to individual behaviors, collective actions are political. Ecomedia literacy starts with the position that our global ecomediasystem is embedded within and impacts the living planet, calling for an implicit eco-ethic of care. This also means that all media are political, because they shape worldviews that determine how we live and act collectively as environmental beings. Neoliberalism— “A  set of policies and worldviews that favors private markets and corporate power” (Sze, 2020, p. 142)—dominates the political economy of media, naturalizing a mechanistic view of living systems, and acts as a default form of politics. And just as a budget could be considered a statement of ethics, so to a curriculum is a statement about priorities. If a curriculum obscures or leaves out environmental concerns, that is in itself a political action. Ironically, if you point this out, you might be attacked as being political or ideological, even though all education is inherently both. Eco-citizenship means embodying eco-ethical behaviors and cultural practices that shape and promote ecological values within the interconnected realms of society, economy, and environment. Ecomedia literacy supports learners to make sense of how everyday ecomedia practice impacts our ability to live regeneratively within Earth’s ecological boundaries for the present and future. Ecomedia literacy proposes that media literacy can highlight how on a daily basis we encounter the interrelationship between media and living systems through their ecological footprint and mindprint.

Notes 1 . www.susted.com/wordpress/april-2020-eco-media-literacy/ 2. www.journalofmedialiteracy.org/ecomedia-literacy

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McLean, J. (2020). Changing digital geographies: Technologies, environments and people. Palgrave Macmillan. Meadows, D. H. (1991). The global citizen. Island Press. Milstein, T. (2016). The Performer metaphor: “Mother nature never gives us the same show twice.” Environmental Communication, 10(2), 227–248. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17524032.2015.1018295 Milstein, T.,  & Castro-Sotomayor, J. (2020). Ecocultural identity: An introduction. In T. Milstein  & J. Castro-Sotomayor (Eds.), Routledge handbook of ecocultural identity (pp. xvii–xxiii). Routledge. Milstein, T., Pileggi, M., & Morgan, E. (2017). Environmental communication and pedagogy. Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2003). Foreword. In C. Wolfe (Ed.), Animal rites: American culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. University of Chicago Press. Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. Verso. Morton, T. (2012). The ecological thought. Harvard University Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. Oppermann, S. (2011). Ecocriticism’s theoretical discontents. Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, 44(2), 153–169. Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. State University of New York Press. Orr, D. W. (1994). Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Island Press. Parikka, J. (2015). A geology of media. University of Minnesota Press. Parks, L., & Starosielski, N. (2015). Introduction. In L. Parks & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Signal traffic: Critical studies of media infrastructures (pp.  1–28). University of Illinois Press. Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2018). History of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. University of California Press. Pollan, M. (2002). The botany of desire: A plant’s-eye view of the world (Paperback ed.). Random House. Preciado, P. B. (2013). Testo junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. Rauch, J. (2018). Slow media: Toward a sustainable future. Oxford University Press. Ross, A. (1994). The Chicago gangster theory of life: Nature’s debt to society. Verso. Rust, S., Monani, S., & Cubitt, S. (Eds.). (2016). Ecomedia: Key issues. Routledge. Shiva, V. (2008). Soil not oil: Environmental justice in a time of climate crisis. South End Press. Sperry, S. (2020). Project Look Sharp’s Decoding Media Constructions and Substantiality. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/content/briefingproject-look-sharps-decoding-media-constructions-and-substantiality_2020_04/ Sterling, S. (2004). Sustainable education: Re-visioning learning and change. Green Books. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge. Sze, J. (2020). Environmental justice in a moment of danger. University of California Press. Tarnoff, B. (2019, September 18). To decarbonize we must decomputerize: Why we need a Luddite revolution. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/ tech-climate-change-luddites-data Tollefson, J. (2018). IPCC says limiting global warming to 1.5 °C will require drastic action. Nature, 562(7726), 172–173. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-06876-2

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Vaughan, H. (2019). Hollywood’s dirtiest secret: The hidden environmental costs of the movies. Columbia University Press. Wahl, D. C. (2016). Designing regenerative cultures. Triarchy Press. Walker, J.,  & Starosielski, N. (2016). Introduction: Sustainable media. In J. Walker  & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 1–19). Routledge. Williams, R. (1975). Television: Technology and cultural form. Schocken Books. Willoquet-Maricondi, P. (2010). Shifting paradigms: From environmentalist films to ecocinema. In P. Willoquet-Maricondi (Ed.), Framing the world: Explorations in ecocriticism and film (pp. 62–80). University of Virginia Press. Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press. Zhang, Q., Xu, E. G., Li, J., Chen, Q., Ma, L., Zeng, E. Y., & Shi, H. (2020). A Review of Microplastics in table salt, drinking water, and air: Direct human exposure. Environmental Science & Technology, 54(7), 3740–3751. https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.9b04535 Ziser, M. (2016). Ecomedia. In J. Adamson, W. A. Gleason, & D. N. Pellow (Eds.), Keywords for Environmental Studies (pp. 75–76). NYU Press.

PART I

Ecological Worldviews and the Ecomediasystem

1 ECOCULTURAL WORLDVIEWS Decolonizing Media Education

There is an account from the first contact between Spanish conquistadors and the indigenous Hopi people that illuminates divergent ecocultures. As the story goes, in 1540, the Hopi first encountered the cross-bearing Castilians in what is now northern Arizona in the Southwestern region of the United States.1 Without any prior knowledge of the Roman Catholic Spanish, as a means of gaining deeper insight into these peculiar interlopers, they had to rely on interpreting their primary symbol, the crucifix. The Hopi deciphered the cross from a defamiliarized perspective, performing what we might call in contemporary visual studies, a gestalt visual analysis. In the grid of the cross, they saw a form of linear thinking that represents skilled engineering and manipulation of the material realm, but they also recognized the symbol reflected an unbalanced and dangerous worldview because it lacked one key element—a circle. By contrast, the medicine wheel, a common emblem among North American First Nations peoples, has an encircled cross, which represents a holistic map of the cosmos. The four quadrants indicate not only the cardinal directions but also the associated psychological and spiritual states encountered during the lifecycle. The circle gestures the motion of the seasons and the cyclical nature of the time. To the Hopi interpreters, a cross with no circle signified a lack of balance with the forces of the living planet, indicating separation from the cosmic patterns of everyday life. As they foresaw, the Spanish were the spearhead of a centurieslong colonial enterprise across the Americas that continues today in the form of coal operations, uranium mining, oil pipelines, fracked gas, and a legacy of regional contamination. The story of conflicting cosmologies between the Hopi and Spanish offers a cautionary tale. The Hopi reading of the cross predicted the current ecological crisis, which now culminates the trajectory of conquest, colonization,

38  Ecological Worldviews and the Ecomediasystem

and globalization shaping modern techno-industrial society. This story alerts us that symbols are like alchemist sigils: They are magical doorways to deeper insights about how particular worldviews function in the world through its stories. Likewise, ecomedia objects—whether texts, gadgets, or hyperobjects—are gateways to ecocultural worldviews. This chapter surveys the historical context that produced particular ecocultural paradigms, allowing us to address how our media and gadgets have emerged from a particular cosmology. By exploring the deepest level of the iceberg of systems thinking, we start with the concept of a “cognitive history of humanity” to probe how language and worldviews are shaped by particular historical narratives. Next I explore the most commonly discussed origin story of our environmental crisis, the Anthropocene, and the colonial origins of the concept. I then discuss the paradigm of Modernity that underlies our global system and how it is reflected in Cartesianism, mechanism, and monoculturism, and the stories we tell about these. This “origins story,” so to speak, helps set up how to position ecomedia literacy into a situated, historical context of racial-colonial logics at the root of environmental destruction that continue to operate today.

Cognitive History of Humanity According to Stibbe (2015, p.  6), ecolinguistics understands discourses as the use of language to express “stories-we-live-by”: “stories in the minds of multiple individuals across cultures.” He identifies “language as existing in a symbolic ecology, where different languages interact with each other in a given location . . . [and] language is part of a sociocultural ecology where it shapes societies and cultures” (p.  8, emphasis original). The “story” becomes a mental model for how we see the world, and in particular environmental issues, becoming “standardized ways that particular groups in society use language, images and other forms of representation” (p.  22). Discourses, it’s important to note, are multimodal, that is, they are composed of “language, still images, music or moving images” (p. 34). Jeremy Lent’s (2017) cognitive history of humanity is a useful interpretive framework for understanding how culture and values are shaped by cognitive structures of the human mind (represented by worldview on the systems thinking iceberg model discussed in the Introduction). According to Lent, “The worldview of a given civilization—the implicit beliefs and values that create a pattern of meaning in people’s lives—has . . . been a significant driver of the historical path each civilization has” (p. 19). He asserts that humans initially developed a particular cognitive niche that included cooperation, so hominids could collectively change their environment, develop tools, and learn how to process foods. As language and symbolization evolved, the cultural traits that emerge from particular interactions with the environment became imprinted through language, which has a “patterning effect on cognition” (p. 22). Metaphors shape and are shaped by

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cognitive structures, setting up “cognitive frames” (patterns of thought) that guide how we view and act upon the world. Thus, when European thinkers began to conceive of the world as a complex machine, this inspired them to discover how the machine worked in order to manipulate it more effectively for their benefit, leading ultimately to our present era of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. (p. 23) According to the cognitive history framework, universal abstractions (or what scholars call “real abstractions”) such as “Reason,” “Progress,” and “Truth” (often capitalized as absolutes) are cultural constructions rooted in paradigms that deeply influence “the direction of society [but] are not permanently fixed” (Lent, 2017, p. 20). Significantly, These abstractions make statements about ontology—What is?—and about epistemology—How we know what is? Real abstractions both describe the world and make it. . . . Real abstractions aren’t innocent: they reflect the interests of the powerful and license them to organize the world. (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 47, emphasis original) The overarching agenda to emerge from Modernity has four major transitions— from oral to written, local to general, particular to universal, and timely to timeless. This constituted a shift from practical to theoretical, with the net result being, from 1630 on, the focus of philosophical inquiries has ignored the particular, concrete, timely and local details of everyday human affairs: instead, it has shifted to a higher, stratospheric plane, on which nature and ethics conform to abstract, timeless, general, and universal theories. (Toulmin, 1992, p. 35) As Thomas Kuhn (1996) observes in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, paradigms change when there are too many anomalies that can’t be explained by a particular model of thinking. To the dominant worldview that governs our global economic system, the present-day climate emergency is a whirlwind of anomalies. In response, Lent suggests that worldviews can transform over one or two generations: the relationship between cognition and history is not one-way but reciprocal. The cognitive patterns of humans living their day-to-day existence are continually affected by what goes on around them, and the consequent actions they take are continually affecting whatever is around them. It’s a perpetual, bidirectional feedback loop. (Lent, p. 20)

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Consider how cultural attitudes and policies about smoking, gay marriage, and drug legalization (just to name a few) have changed substantially in the past 40  years. As Giddens’ (1986) structuration theory tells us, there is a dynamic interplay between social structures and individual agents (a kind of structural coupling discussed in Chapter  3). Feminist standpoint theory also argues that groups of people and individuals co-construct and transform knowledge. This is where ecomedia literacy comes in. By inquiring into the dominant paradigm governing our global system through the investigation of media and gadgets, we actively change and propose new modes of engagement, such as transitioning from fragmented, linear modernist thinking to more complex and nuanced modes of analysis that’s nonlinear, holistic, and eco-ethical. One point of intervention is the stories we tell. As noted by Beach et al. (2017, p. 1) in their discussion of climate change and English Language Arts, “Humans have always been storytellers, and it has long been known that those who tell the stories control the future,” a variation of Plato’s credo that “those who tell the stories rule the society.” Riffing on Paulo Freire, they argue that student learning should be about critically reading the world. As such, In every discourse whether that be of science, the mass media, or literary, or cultural artifacts, climate change is a story, and the plot, the characters, and how that story has different variations (Gaard, 2014). The way a story is told makes a difference in how we understand it and respond to it. (p. 10) Critical media literacy has been one such effort to challenge the hegemony of dominant worldviews to enable students to explore the difference between ­storytellers and selling stories (Kellner & Share, 2019). Ecomedia literacy extends this effort to address the ecological crisis by encouraging students to critically evaluate fossilized stories that colonize the present, but also to envision new ­stories, because if we cannot imagine a common destiny beyond our current predicament, we will live in someone else’s planned future.

The (White) Anthropocene Story Increasingly, the Anthropocene label is slapped onto conferences, journal themes, and book titles to signal an ecological turn across disciplines. Triggered by the emerging alarm of looming threats of the climate crisis, extinction shock, and pandemics (among a long list of environmental dangers), this evolving environmental attention by a variety of academic disciplines is welcome, but the careless and uncritical application of the term, Anthropocene, is perhaps less so. This is not to deny the legitimate grief, hopelessness, depression, fear, angst, and cause for concern the term invokes, but world ecologist scholars Raj Patel and Jason W. Moore (2018) argue that using Anthropocene as a marker for the

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human-altered environment (as it is commonly conceived of in geology and in popular discourse) assigns blame to humans being humans and misidentifies what is actually the results of particular human activities governed by the structure of capitalism. Responding to the ways that environmentally destructive “activities” are often rendered through computer graphics and animations that veil corporate behavior, Demos (2017, p. 18) asks, “What ideological function does the word ‘Anthropocene’ serve—terminologically as well as conceptually, politically, and visually—in relation to the current politics of ecology, and how does the expanded imagery of what was once ‘photography’ abet or complicate this function?” In answer to his own question, Anthropocene rhetoric—joining images and texts—frequently acts as a mechanism of universalization, albeit complexly mediated and distributed among various agents, which enables the military-state-corporate ­apparatus to disavow responsibility for the differentiated impacts of climate change ­effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-­catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project. (p. 19) As a subject area for ecomedia literacy, the Anthropocene can be studied as a kind of hyper-ecomedia object with associated visual and discursive texts. The digital and Anthropocene are both “networked, material and abstracted spaces. . . . The ‘digital Anthropocene’ is an idea that emphasises the digitization of human–environment relations and changing power relations” (McLean, 2020, pp. 159–160). Patel and Moore (2018) advocate using “Capitalocene,” because it’s not just an economic system but “a way of organizing the relations between humans and the rest of nature” that is the source of our planetary ecological crisis (p. 3). The Anthropocene narrative equalizes the infinitesimal contributions of its primary victims—the majority of humans that did not create the planetary ecological ­crisis—with its main perpetrators at the center of global power. Just 100 companies and their investors are responsible for 71% of global emissions (Riley, 2017), and according to Oxfam (Gore, 2015), The poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10% of global emissions yet live overwhelmingly in the countries most vulnerable to climate change—while the richest 10% of people in the world are responsible for around 50% of global emissions. . . . The average footprint of someone in the richest 1% could be 175 times that of someone in the poorest 10%. Furthermore, climate heating exacerbates inequality (Diffenbaugh & Burke, 2019).

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Many scholars argue that slavery and the plantation system prefigure capitalism and our current global economic structure, so “Plantationocene” is a more accurate label. As Donna Haraway explains in a 2019 interview with Le Monde, [Plantationocene] describes the devastating transformation of different types of pasturage, cultures and forests into closed, extractive plantations, which are founded on the work of slaves and other forms of work that involve exploitation, alienation and generally spatial displacement. . . . [It reminds us that] this model of establishing plantations on a large scale preceded industrial capitalism and allowed it to develop, accumulating wealth on the back of human beings reduced to slavery. From the 15th to 19th century, sugar cane plantations in Brazil, then in the Caribbean, were closely linked to the development of mercantilism and colonialism. (quoted in Kodjo-Grandvaux, 2020) Other terms that have been proposed—some tongue and cheek—include Chthulucene, Petrolcene, Plasticene, Misanthropocene, and Anthrobscene. Macarena Gómez-Barris (2019) prefers the term “colonial Anthropocene” to counter colonial geology’s humanistic narcissism and gaslighting that common usages of Anthropocene invoke. What’s at stake is the origin story of the Anthropocene. A  homogeneous Anthropocene narrative universalizes “humanity,” overlooking how the global environmental crisis is unevenly caused and its effects unequally distributed. Kathryn Yusoff (2018) recenters the role of race in the Anthropocene debate. She asserts the post-racial “we” of the Anthropocene does not acknowledge “black and brown death” as the “precondition of every Anthropocene origin story” (p.  66). It also obfuscates the historical legacy of slavery as necessary for gold and silver mining, and the intimate relationship between geological narratives and the erasure of humanness that resulted from colonialism. Yusoff asserts that “White Geology” denies its imperial origins and how it remains complicit in neocolonial extractivism and ecological damage. Indeed, if you read the Wikipedia entry on geology, one line sticks out: “In practical terms, geology is important for mineral and hydrocarbon exploration and exploitation, evaluating water resources, understanding of natural hazards, the remediation of environmental problems, and providing insights into past climate change” (“Geology,” 2020). Note the discordant purposes between mineral and hydrocarbon exploration and environmental remediation (extraction invariably requires remediation). When it comes to extractive and neocolonial megaprojects (dams, mines, fossil fuel extraction, etc.), geologists are likely to arrive before the military or police come to evict people off their lands. In this sense, Yusoff maintains that geology is colonial world-making, with world-breaking as its externality. Ironically, Patel and Moore insist that climate change is externality striking back (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 21). Connecting the racist history

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of geology with environmental degradation, Yusoff (2018, p.  26) quotes W.E.B. Du Bois, who defined Whiteness as “ownership of the Earth for ever and ever.” Yusoff raises questions regarding the so-called golden spikes that geologists are debating to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene (such as the initial colonial “exchange” of flora and fauna in the Americas, invention of the steam engine, or the first nuclear weapons test). Subsequently, she rejects the Capitalocene concept, noting that it plays too much into the narrative of the industrial revolution as a golden spike. Rather, we have to go farther back to its dehumanizing origins: “Because all the proffered Golden Spikes impale flesh, they are sites of violence enacted on the integrity of subjectivity, corporality, and territoriality. Origination is displacement” (p. 60, emphasis original). Yusoff suggests that the advent of the European slave trade in Africa marks the true golden spike, which concurs with Patel and Moore’s (2018) claim that capitalism is prefigured by the invention of the plantation system and deployment of slavery in Portugal’s island colony of Madeira in the mid-16th century. Yusoff (2018, p. 58) writes, “The birth of racial subject is tied to colonialism and the conquest of space and the codification of geology as property and properties. Thereby geologic resources and bodily resources (or racialized slavery) share a natal moment.” The establishment of race as a classification to justify slavery goes hand in hand with the categorization of natural resources for exploitation. Blackness and minerals simultaneously become empty signifiers for capital accumulation and value: “Both the enslaved and minerals are recognized as possessing certain properties or qualities, namely, energy, reproducibility, and transformation” (Yusoff, 2018, p. 70). Furthermore, “Bodies become gold, emptied of the sign of the human, reinvested with the signification of units of energy and properties of extraction” (p. 83). The “double dispossession” of humanness and land leads to the loss of place, space, and land, and the production of non-citizenship, nonbeing, and inhumanity. The current “problem” of migration results from these interrelated histories, but here problem is in quotes because the way it is defined in popular discourse is another form of exclusion. While migration to Europe and North America gets the most media attention, internal migration, such as migration across Africa and other regions in the world, is a far greater crisis. Given that the loss of land is a primary driver of migration, the movement of people as the climate changes is directly connected to geology’s role in displacing people from their original lands. Yusoff (2018, p.  51) contests the liberal narrative that the Anthropocene is about concerns for the future: [T]he Anthropocene is configured in a future tense rather than in recognition of the extinctions already undergone by black and indigenous peoples. Following in the wake of humanism, the production of the Anthropocene is predicated on Whiteness as the color of universality.

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Scholarship to resurrect this history is urgent, for, in the words of Gómez-Barris (2019), it’s an effort to push against the grain of . . . a dominant climate change knowledge formation, prevalent in the mass media as well as in certain quarters of the disciplining academy. . . . For those of us working on histories of race, colonialism, and dispossession and in relation to the environmental humanities we might ask how does placing Indigeneity and Blackness at the center of our analysis both ground its consequences and remake how we understand past, present, and impending catastrophe. The relationship between earth sciences and human geography is what Yusoff (2018) calls “geo-social formations”; her project is to “de-sediment” the social life of geology that has led to anti-Black epistemologies. If geology expresses white liberal desire while erasing Black and brown bodies, then the uncritical use of the term Anthropocene totalizes the effects of colonialism while simultaneously erasing its origins by reproducing the very problem it’s trying to name. For this reason, we should acknowledge that the colonial Anthropocene better represents a historical legacy that demands correcting. A  cynical reading of the common use of Anthropocene is that certain academic disciplines are waking up to the environmental crisis spawned by extractivism without having to actually confront its bloody and dehumanizing history. Anthropocene has become simple shorthand for the impact of anthropogenic industrialization on the world, but “There can be no address of the planetary failures of modernism or its master-subject, Man, without a commitment to overcoming extractive colonialism” (p. 61). By unearthing the Anthropocene’s genocidal past, it also informs how we respond to the present: If the imagination of planetary peril coerces an ideal of “we,” it only does so when the entrappings of late liberalism become threatened. This “we” negates all responsibility for how the wealth of that geology was built off the subtending strata of indigenous genocide and erasure, slavery and carceral labor, and evades what that accumulation of wealth still makes possible in the present—lest “we” forget that the economies of geology still largely regulate geopolitics and modes of naturalizing, formalizing, and operationalizing dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism. (Yusoff, 2018, p. 106) As media educators, we are obliged to answer the question: What methodology is needed to write a history of the environment that include slavery, colonialism, imperialism and racial capitalism, from the

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standpoint of those . . . whose . . . bodies [were treated] as objects renewable through wars, capture, and enslavement, fabricated as disposable people, whose lives do not matter? (Vergès, 2017, para. 5) According to media philosopher Jussi Parikka (2015b, p. 12), the Anthropocene is nothing but the Anthrobscene, because of the unsustainable, politically dubious, and ethically suspicious practices that maintain technological culture and its corporate networks. Obscene because this age marks the environmentally disastrous consequences of planned obsolescence of electronic media, the energy costs of digital culture and furthermore the neo-colonial arrangements of material and energy extraction across the globe. To call it anthrobscene is just to emphasize what we knew but perhaps we were shielded away from acting on—that is the horrific human-caused drive toward a 6th mass extinction.

Nature and Society The concept of Nature as a separate entity from humans is rooted in how early capitalism organized itself to create categories of exploitation,2 dividing the world between Society and Nature. During the mid-16th century, Society came to mean something greater than individuals that people belonged to. It was also defined by what it was not: Nature was a bracket that included women, indigenous, Africans, etc. (Consider how savage and wild are associated with people, animals, and land, and how the phrase “virgin land” links these different categories.) To be part of Society was to be human; to be excluded was to become “unhuman.” Therefore, Nature became a biopolitical category of dehumanization, death, and disposal. This required an “intellectual revolution” to separate Society from Nature (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 46). The legacy of this framing is that discourses about the environment become “contested terrains located at the intersection of economic, political, social, cultural, and sexual ecologies” and that “ideas about the relationship among culture, environment, and development are bound up with colonial ideologies of race, civilization, and progress” (Alston, 2016, p. 93). As a result, we construct certain problems to be either social or natural. The COVID19 epidemic is a good example of the way the crisis is managed as either one or the other, but not as both. The fact that we take for granted Society and Nature as separate entities shows how successful this intellectual revolution was. Thus, according to Yarimar Bonilla, we need to decolonize our relationship to the environment by moving beyond settler and masculinist logics of conquest: Although decolonization and climate change might seem like disconnected issues, they both require us to think beyond the conceptual limits of the

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imperial nation-state. In both instances we need to move from a logic of borders to a logic of entanglement. We thus need to think more carefully about the relationship between notions of civilizational hierarchy and of human superiority over the more-than-human world, interrogate how these logics have operated in tandem, and explore how they can be tackled in unison. (quoted in Jobson, 2020) Reframing the Anthropocene story is an important step in the process. The cultural concept of Nature, and hence environment, is tied to the idea of “enclosed” surroundings. The “environment” is always the frontier of capitalist expansion to incorporate nature and people into markets: “capitalism grows through its frontiers” (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 37). This reframing helps us understand colonialism and aspects of globalization as a form of ecological imperialism and an ongoing process of enclosure of the commons ­(consider how the global economy colonizes the atmosphere commons with CO2). While initially enclosure started with peasant lands in Europe, it has been an ongoing process to displace “ecosystem peoples” across the world. It was also a process of sectioning off European women, who were systematically “accused of being witches and often burnt at the stake [and] deprived of control of their reproductive power in the early modern period” (Dawson, 2016, p. 51). Justified by emerging positivistic science in the 17th century, Frances Bacon described Nature like a woman that needed to be “twisted on the rack” and “tortured by fire.” Hence, eco-racism and patriarchy are part and parcel of this process, leading to an ongoing crisis of “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011) of unequal social ecologies. From the era of colonialism to today, systems of exploitation (such as warfare and extractivism) have not differentiated between humans and environments (most clearly exemplified by the use of depleted uranium ammunition by the US military in its various combat operations around the world). Moreover, when it comes to carbon emissions, universal responsibility is a fiction when the richest 10% of the population produced half the global emissions (see Gore, 2015).

The Colonial Anthropocene and Ecomedia Aside from the issue of e-waste and conflict minerals discussed in Chapter 5, how does the Anthropocene look from the perspective of contemporary Africa and our North–South entanglements? Africa is diverse with different histories, cultures, and societies, so the continent’s environment is impacted by the global economic system in different ways (see Hecht, 2018). In South Africa, gold mining and its by-product of uranium mining have had multiplying effects. First and foremost, there are health impacts of silicosis and deaths from accidents

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of minors who migrated to the region. Then there are toxic tailings that have turned to dust and blow into the surrounding ecosystems; abandoned mines filled with water have acidified and then contaminated local water tables; and residual toxins from the weapons industry have entered the atmosphere. In the Niger delta, there is devastation by the oil industry (there have been at least 7,000 documented spills). Keep in mind that extraction generally means no replenishment, so whenever these resources are removed, the ecosystem damage is permanent. Oil is converted to gasoline that fuels the noxious impact of automobiles in the various mega-cities of the continent: Cairo, Lagos, Dakar, and Nairobi. This leads to an estimated quarter million premature deaths a year on the continent, yet African air pollution is rarely represented in the media (as opposed to images of India and China). Diesel pollution in Accra, Bamako, and Dakar is more toxic than that in European cities because of less regulated fuel mixtures, openly called “African-quality” by traders, which are processed at the port region in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and Antwerp, but also by traders on ships off the West African coast. Compare the allowable limit of sulfur in parts per millions in various countries (in parenthesis): Europe (10), North ­America (15), and Africa (average is 2,000). In Nigeria it’s 3,000. Ultimately, these toxic pollutants end up in the planetary atmosphere, so no one is immune to their effects. Women are also often left out of the Anthropocene story. Even though half the world’s population (women) is impacted by the climate crisis, they are a small portion of the engineers, coders, and designers who have devised the economic system or built unsustainable technology driving the ecological crisis. As Greta Gaard (2015, p. 23) asserts, “Make no mistake: women are indeed the ones most severely affected by climate change and natural disasters, but their vulnerability is not innate; rather, it is the result of inequities produced through gendered social roles, discrimination, and poverty.” Indigenous women on the frontlines of the climate crisis are among the most important Earth defenders. Though indigenous people are only 5% of the global population, their territories comprise 80% of Earth’s biodiversity. The connection for ecomedia literacy educators should be clear. The minerals extracted for our gadgets are tied to a system that emerged from a long, sordid history of mining, resource extraction, ecological devastation, and human abuse and displacement. The current distribution of wealth and inequality, and the global infrastructure and its supply chains that make ICT possible, would not exist without the foundation of chattel slavery and extracted mineral wealth. Noting historical continuity, Jack Qiu (2016) draws parallels with the original transatlantic slave trade and current labor practices in China, asserting that just as European desire for sugar drove slavery, gadget addiction drives the system of human rights abuses that results from tech’s production chain. Recall that mining

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is still a prerequisite for ICTs, such as rare earth minerals that drive conflicts in regions like the Congo and lithium production for batteries that has generated political instability in Bolivia. The current materialist turns in media studies point back to geology. Jussi Parikka’s Geology of Media (2015a, p. 44) reminds us that before data mining, there is earth mining: “Geology refers to the affordances that enable digital media to exist as a materially complex and politically economically mediated realm of production and process: a metallic materiality that links the earth to the media technological.” Decolonization of our epistemology is a long-term project, but one at the heart of ecomedia literacy. For Gómez-Barris (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 3), decolonial theorization asks us to identify how new/old forms of colonialism, such as extractive capitalism, the digital surveillance of territories, the criminalization of Indigenous peoples as a weapon of neoliberal expansion, and the extraction of Native and Afro-descendent knowledges, all depends on prior civilizational projects, in which the Global South has long been constructed as a region of plunder, discovery raw resources, taming, classification, and racist adventure. Applying this perspective to ecomedia, Sean Cubitt (2020, p.  43) focuses on enclosure and the various ways (often mundane) that ICTs drive environmental destruction by affording the global system of information exchange, bureaucracy, and finance: An economy, for example, is not the abstraction it appears to be when we are told that “the economy is doing well,” but a network of databases physically and energetically mediated in metals, commodities, papers, and bits, and the evidence of its failures we see on every city corner is not exceptional but the rule of its exclusions. Not only is our current gadget chain of production a continuation of the same system and grammar of White Geology, but it also necessitates an ecojustice response that recognizes how wealthy nations and their institutions owe biodiversity debt and are obliged to engage in reparations, restoration, and land reform.

The Cartesian Worldview: A Story of Separation In explaining the root cause of the extinction crisis, Elizabeth Kolbert asserts, if you want to think about why humans are so dangerous to other species, you can picture a poacher in Africa carrying an AK-47 or a logger in the

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Amazon gripping an ax, or better still, you can picture yourself, holding a book in your lap. (quoted in Dawson, 2016, p. 100) Like our discussion of the Anthropocene story, this statement can be criticized for implying that all humans are equally responsible for the destruction of species and their habitats. But it can be read in a different way, which is to say that certain knowledge systems, which are represented by the synecdoche of a book in this quote, are part of the structural system that perpetuates environmental exploitation and ecocide. As Dawson (2016, p. 52) asserts, historically, Doctrines of the objectivity and disinterestedness of the scientific method helped to obscure the potential ecocidal, patriarchal, and racist character of techno-science, until the social movements of the late twentieth century arose to challenge science’s role in legitimating colonialism, in depriving women of control of their bodies, and in creating deadly chemicals such as DDT. Eschewing technology’s innate interconnectedness with the environment has led most to teach media in an incomplete and imprecise manner, perpetuating what Gregory Bateson (2000) called an “ecology of bad ideas.” If there was a particular golden spike for the ecology of bad ideas, we could start with Descartes. Cartesian philosophy is foundational to Modernity, its most lasting contribution is the concept that the mind is separate from the body. As George Lakoff and Mark Johnson summarize, Descartes’ legacy is as follows: “First, being able to think constitutes our essence; second, that the mind is disembodied; and third, therefore, the essence of human beings, that which makes us human, has nothing to do with our bodies” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p. 400). And because Nature came to be associated with the body, the other contribution that’s foundational to Modernity and capitalism is the idea that Nature should be controlled and dominated by Society: “The Cartesian outlook, in other words, shaped modern logics of power as well as thought” (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 52). The legacy is a number of binaries that have been naturalized into dominant value hierarchies and common sense: • Man/woman • Male/female • White/Black-brown • Able/disable • Reason/emotion • Mind/body • Human/animal • Society-culture/nature • Civilization/uncivilized

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• Domestic/wild • Wealth/poor • Science/folk wisdom • Domination/cooperation • Control/relationships • Technological/primitive These “dualistic distortions” (Plumwood, 1993, p.  33) require the ideological work performed by media to define and reinforce the boundaries between them. Such is the case with advertising, like the trope of SUVs foregrounded with pristine wilderness as a backdrop to define itself as separate and technologically superior. Ads perform ideological work by propagating a variety of meanings for Nature that fall under the primary myth of Modernity. They comprise a number of seemingly contradictory ideas, yet their common denominator is always that Nature is separate from Society. Some examples include: Nature is a dangerous, uncivilized place; an unspoiled realm untainted by human contact; a system of resources that support human civilization; a place of spiritual restoration and scenic beauty; a place distinct from and ultimately alien to human culture (Clark, 2016). Quite often, by othering Nature, we tend to attribute it some kind of natural sublime that puts us in awe of it, but as Morton (2009) asserts, romanticized Nature also creates distance. Just in the same way that linear perspective makes it impossible to reach the horizon as it recedes into an infinite point, landscape painting, photography, film, and video games have the effect of putting Nature beyond the reach of human experience. The net result is that this value matrix justifies an environmental ideology that binds unrestrained utilitarianism, cheap nature, extractivism, patriarchy, and anthropocentrism. Subsequently, posthumanist, postmodern, postcolonial, queer, and ecofeminist theorists have stressed the danger of binaries of “antagonistic dualisms” discussed earlier, such as self/other, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, God/ man, which are caught up in and justify patriarchy, colonialism, essentialism, and naturalism that drive the global system. In their more liberal form, these dualisms are the product of humanism, which replaced religion and spirituality as the center of life in Modernity. As noted by philosopher and climate activist, Rupert Read (Read & Alexander, 2019), humanism underlies technophilia and technooptimism, which center people. He posits, we should ask (of humanism): human as opposed to what? If the answer is as opposed to non-human animals/to nature, then we can unmask humanism; unmask it as simply an unwarranted attitude of superiority to the rest of creation. As if, having ditched gods, we were to declare ourselves gods. . . . Loving technology is merely loving ourselves by proxy. (p. 10)

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There are aspects of humanism, such as art and philosophy, that can mitigate its more narcissistic tendencies, but Read suggests the best cure is for us to stop pretending we are not animals. Likewise, as Haraway (2008) articulates, it’s important to form coalitions along the lines of affinity rather than identity. As is the case of sea level rise, Ulrich Beck (2008) asserts that the climate crisis has produced the “End of the Other” because ecological decline and extinction impact everyone, albeit unevenly, regardless of social status. One unfortunate response is the current “culture wars” raging in the United States and other parts of the world, which are connected to the breakdown of the boundaries between these binaries. As discussed in Chapter 7, climate denial and reactionary ideology are closely linked.

Mechanism Descartes’ dualism created the conceptual framework for Mechanism: “The material universe, including living organisms, was a machine for him, which could in principle be understood completely by analyzing it in terms of its smallest parts” (Capra  & Luisi, 2016, p.  8). Enhanced by the contributions by Galileo, Newton, and Bacon, mechanistic science became the taken-forgranted paradigm underlying early capitalism and extends to our contemporary planetary power structure. Prior to the Cartesian revolution, in Europe it was a common belief that nature is an integrated whole that is intrinsically sacred and living, but Mechanism departed substantially, leading to an industrial mindset that divides the Earth and isolates everything into inert parts (see Merchant, 1989). Mechanism became the primary metaphor for the ­domination of Nature. According to ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2015), when a metaphor becomes a “source frame,” it defines how to try to solve a problem (the “target frame”). So, when Nature is treated as a machine, then policies and solutions are about fixing parts, such as using geoengineering (like cloud seeding or dispersing particles in the atmosphere) to solve the climate crisis. The designated experts are engineers and the assumption is that fixing the broken pieces fixes the whole machine. But if this is the kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place, according to systems dynamics, it’s not going to solve the problem (you can’t fix problems with the same kind of thinking that created them). The separation of environmental concerns from media is largely codified by disciplinary silos. For example, academia often divides environmental studies from the core of media studies, reflecting what C.P. Snow (1963) called the Two Cultures that divide physical and biological science from social sciences and humanities. These boundaries are then reflected by how educators, universities, academic institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and governments categorize fields and disciplines that define where media and environment are

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researched and studied. But it is not simply an academic argument. Rather, it is inherently political because the Two Cultures leads to the dismissal of empirically derived qualitative information in favor of quantifiable data; the ridicule of indigenous knowledge in favor of technological superiority; the adoption of a definition of complexity that favors hierarchical power over democratic principles. These premises, argued in scholarly articles innocently housed in dusty libraries, nonetheless underwrite global agendas that threaten the planet and impoverish humanity. (Crumley, 2007, p. 19, emphasis added) Moore (2014) observes that the global economic system of capitalism has historically depended on “bourgeois knowledge representing its special brand of quantifying and scientific reason as a mirror of the world—the same world then being reshaped by early Modernity’s scientific revolutions in alliance with empires and capitals” (p. 286). Furthermore, Early capitalism’s world-praxis, fusing symbolic coding and material inscription, moved forward an audacious fetishization of nature. This was expressed, dramatically, in the era’s cartographic, scientific, and quantifying revolutions. These were the symbolic moments of primitive accumulation, creating a new intellectual system whose presumption, personified by Descartes, was the separation of humans from the rest of nature. For early modern materialism, the point was not only to interpret the world but to control it. (p. 288) Thus, the Cartesian revolution then leads to a kind of knowledge enclosure: Alternative forms of knowledge about nature were seditious. This is why witchcraft and Indigenous knowledge constituted existential threats to capitalism, challenging both its epistemology and its ontology. Inca experiments in agriculture, Mesoamerican advances in soil enrichment, and Chinese medicine were forms of knowledge that had to be confined to the boundaries of folklore, if not extinguished outright. Knowledge was enclosed too. If anything was to be known about the nature and the world, European men would author and authorize it.  .  .  . [T]he enclosure of knowledge was central to a cultural revolution that explicitly cast colonized people—and nearly all women—as part of Nature, the better to discipline and manage them. (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 61)

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To be clear, Mechanism, like the clock, is an instrument that affords systems that favor efficiency, but it is not the only cause of it. But I suggest the dearth of environmental concerns in media studies or media education is likely a by-product of this legacy. As Mechanism relates to media, Parikka (2015a, p. 59) observes that in the 18th century, the idea of Earth as a giant “heat machine” emerged in geology, with soil as its “central mediating element”: “Agriculture cultivates life, but soil is media—or like the currently increasing demand for synthetic soil suggests, ‘soils are a form of technology.’ ” Mechanism becomes epistemology: As a cognitive space, it configures how the world should be organized, especially how media technologies perform a double role: 1. Media technologies as an epistemological framework, which enable one to perceive, simulate, design, and plan in terms of the environment and the climate; media compose the framework that allows us to talk about, for instance, climate change the way that we do nowadays. 2. Second, we can consider media technologies as the aftereffect, the afterglow, that will remain as the fossilized trace of designed obsolescence and gadget culture, as well as the massive infrastructures around which media function— energy, raw material production, and mountains of discarded keyboards, screens, motherboards, and other components. (Parikka, 2015a, p. 60) Try to imagine what future archeologists will make of our civilization as they dig through our landfills. Our technologies are fossils of the future. As noted by preeminent systems theorists Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi (2016, p. 4), the history of Western science has been a conflict of how to interpret and organize the world between parts and whole: The emphasis on the parts has been mechanistic, reductionist, or atomistic; the emphasis on the whole, holistic, organismic, or ecological. In twentieth-century science, the holistic perspective has become known as “systemic” and the way of thinking it implies is “systems thinking.” A key characteristic of Cartesian science is to study matter, by asking, “What is it made of?” The method is one of quantification, measuring, and studying elements. In contrast, the systems mode is to understand form, which leads to the question, “What is the pattern?”: “And that leads to the notions of order, organization, and relationships. Instead of quantity, it involves quality: instead of measuring it involves mapping” (p. 4). Not surprisingly, education and social science tend to emphasize the study of matter (quantities and constituents) and de-emphasize the study of form (patterns and relationships). Mechanism is reinforced in media education when students are asked to isolate and focus on only

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particular parts (such as the message) or media texts, without understanding how they fit within larger structures. In the iceberg model of systems thinking, Mechanism operates at the surface level and perhaps one layer down. By attempting to fix the individual pieces, the illusion is that the entire machine (presumably the media) gets fixed. These struggles over how to interpret the world are translated into narratives that then become arguments and justifications for how to organize—or conquer it as the case may be—the world, Cartesian science and Mechanism being the dominant story for several centuries. According to Patel and Moore (2018, p. 54), This Cartesian revolution accomplished four major transformations, each shaping our view of Nature and Society to this day. First, either-or binary thinking displaced both-and alternatives. Second, it privileged thinking about substances, things, before thinking about the relationships between those substances. Third, it installed the domination of nature through sciences as a social good. . . . Finally, the Cartesian revolution makes thinkable, doable, the colonial project of mapping and domination. And with the reference to mapping, we arrive to the importance of visual technologies and media.

Cosmovisions and Pluriverse in Indigenous Ecocinema If cosmology is the cognitive and imaginary space of what is possible, then many inhabitants of the world system are experiencing a crisis of imagination, best expressed by the commonly cited phrase, “It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism” (attributed to Fisher/Jameson/Žižek), which indicates that Modernity has arrived to its end game. But like the colonial Anthropocene story, this phrase universalizes a reality that is not shared by all. In response, we can explore two important concepts that offer an alternative to humanism’s grand narratives: Cosmovisions and pluriverse. Here, I will explore how they are expressed in indigenous ecocinema. Joni Adamson and Salma Monani (2016) assert that indigenous films act like “seeing instruments” that offer glimpses of cosmovisions where humans and the more-than-human world are equally entangled. Rather than flatten indigenous realities, cosmovisions incorporates a pluriverse where each language and culture has its own unique forms of expression. This concept is demonstrated by a worker building the first McDonalds in the northern Mexican state of Zacatecas: Every head is a world. . . . There’s the head of McDonald, the head of Soriana, and the head of Jaramillo over here; the head of the guy who invented cars, the guy who invented airplanes, and the guy who invented televisions. No one is the same. No one does the same thing in the same way.

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[But now] the whole world is coming out of one head, and from that head you’re getting everything. It’s happening all over Mexico with these stores like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s, stores that came out of the head of allá [there]. Down here, in Mexico, that head is developing all its thoughts. (quoted Silverstein, 2005) A pluriverse of peoples and natures (rather than a universe) entails multispecies relations and a resilient commons with dynamic epistemologies and “complex situatedness of local practices” (Adamson & Monani, 2016, p. 9). Adamson and Monani recount a short story by Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo, US Southwest) that describes the absurdity of advanced technological societies searching for life on Mars and the Moon while disregarding life in the Earth’s pluriverse. In describing cosmovisions, Adamson and Monani (2016, p. 4) assert that they are thousands of years in the making. Cosmovisions encompass elements of the world (like soils, air, forests, rivers, and lakes) as agental “persons.” Nonhumans (animals, trees, water, mountains) are regarded as eco-agents: They are acknowledged, respected, and often revered. “Whether human or animal in form or name, these characters [behave] like people, though many of their activities are depicted in a spatiotemporal framework of cosmic, rather than mundane, dimensions” (p.  4). Like cosmovisions, Alexander von Humboldt, the Prussian geographer, naturalist, and explorer who taught Charles Darwin and Ernst Heckle, defined “nature” as “a planetary interactive causal network operating across multiple-scale levels, temporal and spatial” (quoted in Adamson & Monani, 2016, p. 7). Like the ethic of el buen vivir discussed in Chapter 2, cosmovisions implies an ethics that treats nonhumans with the same respect and responsibility we would have toward our own families. Cosmopolitics would then be “the recognition of intergenerational, evolutionary space and time required not just for the survival of all species, but for the recognition of the ‘rights’ to life for all humans and nonhumans” (Adamson & Monani, 2016, p. 7). It is part of the ecosphere, defined here as “the Life-giving matrix that envelops all organisms, intimately intertwines with them in the story of evolution from the beginning of time.” . . . [I]t is assisting in a global process of re/membering as a generative, evolutionary process. (Machiorlatti, 2010, p. 63) Indigenous ecocinema is where the cosmovisions intersects with the world system, highlighting the struggles that survivors of the colonial Anthropocene have to contend along three themes—resilience, resistance, and multispecies relations (Adamson & Monani, 2016, p. 10). Specifically, resilience articulates ongoing Indigenous responses to centuries of politically enforced extermination, assimilation, and marginalization;

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resistance highlights active struggles for self-determination and sovereignty against cultural and eco-genocide; and multispecies relations illuminate the philosophies that undergird Indigenous ecological literacies often applied in the practice of resilience and resistance. Likewise, Machiorlatti (2010, p. 63) identifies similar issues in her own study of indigenous media, which demonstrates themes about: (1) the disconnection that humans experience from each other and from the Earth’s animal, plant, mineral, and spirit kingdoms; (2) the cultural remembering and recovery function of film and video storytelling; and (3) the relationship of individual media texts to an ecocentric worldview of interdependence. This reminds me of something that Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna, US S­ outhwest) said during the first day of her Native American literatures that I  took as an undergraduate. She asked us, “What if there was a nuclear war that wiped out ­everything you were familiar with and killed everyone you knew? What would you write about?” Whereas popular culture depicts such tragedies as post-apocalyptic future scenarios that “we” might experience, indigenous mediamakers are expressing resilience and regeneration after an apocalypse that already happened: storytelling is seen as a living, changing entity, as suggested by Gunn Allen. Native media serve as a catalyst in the process of cultural recovery, remembering ancestral lineage, and (re)connecting the people to the full spectrum of unity. . . . [F]rom an ecocentric perspective, storytelling emerges from “the Earth Globe . . . the generative source of evolutionary creativity” where “separation and disconnection cause disease, and where integration and connection foster vibrant health and abundance” (Machiorlatti, 2010, p.  63). Likewise, emerging indigenous science fiction attempts to decolonize their representations and knowledge: The normalizing of Indigenous knowledge and science is a core aspect of Indigenous futurism literature and art. Indigenous knowledge systems are often thought of as primitive or illegitimate, so situating them in speculative worlds allows Indigenous futurists to assert those systems’ strength and perseverance. (A. Beck, 2019, p. Normalizing Indigenous, para. 1) What indigenous ecocinema teaches us is that without an ecocentric perspective that anchors values and purposes in a greater reality than one’s own species, the resolution of political, economic,

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and religious conflicts will be impossible. Until the narrow focus on human communities is broadened to include Earth’s ecosystems—the local and regional places where in we dwell—programs for healthy sustainable ways of living will fail. (Machiorlatti, 2010, p. 65) Indigenous filmmaking is an “activist endeavor that looks to the past in order to make visible the enduring effects of colonization, to reclaim annihilated ways of being, and to envision an affirmative future for contemporary Native peoples” (p. 65). In contrast to how consumer-based popular culture is produced in the world system, indigenous ecocinema is relation and responsibility based, grounded in cooperation and community. This is all by way of contesting the “there is no alternative” mindset dominating certain strands of media criticism and scholarship that reproduces and universalizes—in the same way as the Anthropocene story— a milieu at the center of the world system that is not shared by those who have struggled against these power structures for 500 years. Beyond indigenous ecocinema, digital media are being decolonized by indigenous peoples in three significant ways: political activism in social media and how colonial powers are challenged through creative campaigns; how identity is produced through digital engagements, and; the ways in which the digital (re)produces and amplifies aspects of colonisation that are, in turn, frequently challenged by Indigenous peoples, as well as groups from the Global South. (McLean, 2020, p. 91) Decolonization includes struggling with the entanglement of discursive, epistemological, and material conditions of digital media. Some examples of digital colonialism include how Google search results for the Global South are more represented by sources from the Global North rather than through its own self-­ representations; Facebook’s mobile phone Free Basics app promoted in lower income countries, which produces its own closed version of the internet; and the lack of universal internet access or no net neutrality (McLean, 2020, pp. 103–105). Struggles against fossil fuel infrastructure such as oil pipelines and extractivist projects across the world are gaining traction from indigenous uses of digital media. This was certainly the case with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s struggle to stop the Dakota Access Pipeline in 2016. So, I thought it would be appropriate to close this section with the opening narration from the documentary about that fight, AWAKE, A Dream from Standing Rock (Dewey et al., 2017). Floris White Bull tells us: I am not dreaming. I’m Awake. I’ve been woken by the spirit inside that demanded I open my eyes and see the world around me. Seeing that my

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children’s future was in peril. See that my life couldn’t wait and slumber anymore. See that I was honored to be among those who are awake. To be alive at this point in time is to see the rising of the Oceti Sakowin. To see the gathering of nations and beyond that, the gathering of all races and all faiths. Will you wake up and dream with us? Will you join our dream. Will you join us?

Transdiscipline: Lessons From Environmental Humanities Transforming Modernity’s worldview in education requires transdisciplinarity by integrating methods and perspectives from different fields. Fortunately, environmental humanities inspires creative approaches for research and analysis that can be used in ecomedia literacy, such as supplementing science education: Because “the environment” has been defined by biophysical indicators and studied through “environmental sciences” (a term that dates back just 50  years) and environmental economics, the moral, political and ethical dimensions of environmental degradation were long neglected as “outside the expertise” of the dominant discourse. Attitudes and values are not easily measured, nor do they readily yield data that can be incorporated into modeling of future scenarios. (Nye et al., 2013, p. 6) Like environmental humanities, ecomedia literacy can complement environmental science through the study of culture and the use of qualitative research methods, and reasserting the importance of arts as integral for solving environmental problems. Ecomedia literacy students can collaborate on transdisciplinary projects that “involve storytelling, semi-structured interviews, and visual ethnography to develop usable models for directing energy development, agricultural practices, land use, and water management” (Nye et al., 2013, p. 7). For example, Andy Opel (2020) and his media department at Florida State University collaborated on a series of interdisciplinary projects addressing the Apalachicola River’s environmental problems. Faculty and students from different departments collaborated on complex problem and produced multimedia work aimed at reaching a public audience. Emmett and Nye (2017) survey key themes from environmental humanities that can inform and enrich ecomedia literacy, many of which have been covered in this chapter. First, they recognize that in the Western philosophical and scientific tradition, we have inherited a perspective that favors the study of “the thing in itself,” which reifies objects without understanding how they are actually defined by their surroundings and relationships. This is reflected in everyday media education practices that often focus on analyzing individual media messages without putting them into some kind of larger, ideological, or ecological context.

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They also assert that humans are mortal animals, which might seem obvious, but if you read the literature of techno-Utopians like Kevin Kelly (1994) or Ray Kurzweil (1999), there is a common assumption that technology will transcend the human condition to enable human consciousness to become immortal and immaterial. The environmental implications are obvious. Because technology is believed to transcend natural limits, there is no need to protect or preserve ecosystems (like the image of human pods in The Matrix). Moreover, a trope in popular media is the idea that a person’s mind can be downloaded or uploaded into the net, exemplified by the dystopian TV series, Black Mirror, which often uses as a storytelling device the idea that consciousness is portable to computer servers. Certain strands of mechanistic posthumanism and transhumanism are part of the old Western cultural project to transcend the “limits” of the body and nature. Correspondingly, there is a common perception in media studies that data and media are immaterial and disembodied from the environment. This contrasts with their actual “material immaterialities” (Gabrys, 2015). Subsequently, the sustainability of data and the sustainability of environment are conceptually different things (Brennan, 2016, p. 58). Techno-Utopians may envision backing up their consciousness, but there is no backup for the planet Earth. Environmental humanities can reorient techno-Utopian thinking by grounding the history of technology in an environmental context. In keeping with eco-ethics, environmental humanities assert that humans should not be entitled to special rights if they are not also afforded to other species. Likewise, there is no hierarchy of cultures in which Western culture is seen or taught as superior. This is an important stance when considering the impact of media technologies and how the benefits of technological change are not distributed evenly. The impact of gadget production disproportionately damages ecosystems and people outside the Global North. Environmental humanities has a political orientation in that climate and environmental justice for present and future generations entails promoting “degrowth” and “resilience” as alternatives to the current neoliberal consensus. Postcolonial ecocriticism combines the concerns of environmental humanities with political ecology, which is concerned with ecojustice, sustainability, and resilience, working toward “bioregional models” that respect and highlight diverse, local cultural realities, and thinking “beyond the human” (Huggan & Tiffin, 2015). It also offers a direct critique of ecological imperialism and its legacy of the simultaneous theft of resources and land, and the imposition of European agriculture that continues today. These practices result in what ecofeminist Val Plumwood identifies as “instrumental reason” that others nature, animals and indigenous peoples, leading to the emergence of biocolonialism (a form of biopiracy) and “biotechnological suprematism” and “planetary management” (Huggan & Tiffin, 2015, p. 4). Plumwood conflates environmental racism and speciesism (or “human exceptionalism”) with a particular concept of humanity that is dependent “on the presence of the ‘not-human’: the uncivilised, the animal

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and animalistic” (p. 5). Here, Eurocentrism and anthropocentrism are inseparable: Indigenous cultures can be colonized and their resources stolen because they are “animalistic,” “primitive,” “savage,” and “less than human.” This same worldview is used to currently justify the systematic exploitation of resources for our gadgets, exploitation of workers in so-called developing nations, and the export of e-waste from rich countries to poor regions around the planet, linking unrestrained development with ecocatastrophe. Subsequently, postcolonial ecocriticism critiques the use of the “wild” discourse that others nature and indigenous. Ultimately, postcolonial ecocriticism is more a “way of reading than a specific corpus of literary or cultural texts” (p. 13): It is an epistemic “decolonisation of the mind” (p. 14). Slow Violence and the Violence of the Poor by Rob Nixon (2011) is a quintessential work that brings together the elements of postcolonial ecocriticism and environmental humanities that should be required reading for any prospective ecomedia literacy teacher. However, Nixon notes that despite the affinity between ecocriticism and postcolonial ecocriticism, there are some fundamental schisms between their respective discourses. As summarized by Erin James (2016, p. 61): While postcolonialists tend to emphasise hybridity and crosscuturalisation, ecocritics have favoured discourse of purity, such as narratives of virgin forests or images of untouched wilderness. While postcolonialists often concern themselves with displacement, ecocritics tend to seek out literature of place. While postcolonialists have placed value on the cosmopolitan and the transnational, ecocriticism’s origins lie largely in a national, American framework. While postcolonialists have worked to excavate or reimagine the lost marginalised past, ecocritics have leaned towards the pursuit of a timeless, solitary moment of commune with nature.

Worldview: From Mechanism to Holism The COVID-19 global pause of 2020 and the Black Lives Matter uprising necessitate that we consider ongoing disruptions from a new perspective. It’s fair to say that the virus has not only exposed the ecological peril we face as a global community, it also forces us to reflect on the idea of mental models as a kind of contagion. Various traditions from throughout time have recognized that dangerous thought patterns are also contagious. The mechanistic mindset of neoliberal globalization is promoted under the guise of Modernity and technological “progress” that enables extractive industries (mining, fossil fuels), biomass conflicts (deforestation, monoculture agriculture), and mega-projects (dams). Vandana Shiva (1993) refers to this as a “monoculture of the mind,” a cognitive space that organizes the world in a uniform way. Its early incarnation in the form of colonialism was deemed an “invader dreaming” by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of what is currently Australia. The Algonquin people in North America referred to it as wetiko, a term

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for a kind of invading mind virus and cannibal spirit driven by greed. Buddhists use the term “hungry ghosts” (preta in Sanskrit) to describe a kind spirit that has a small throat and bulging stomach to represent insatiable hunger. Western popular media manifests it in the form of vampires and zombies. In media criticism, it takes the form of advertising, which has been called the dream life of corporations (Jhally, 2002), or Hollywood as the “dream factory.” Regardless of what name we give it, these are stories we live by that shape how we interact with and create the world. Media education needs a new story, one that enables us to connect ICTs with their ecological impacts. Ecomedia literacy allows us to explore how the interconnected realms of our global system materialize through ICTs, and also how they spread belief systems and thought patterns. It draws from an origin story that connects the present with the legacy of colonialism and racism. If we are to gain insight from history, then what is called for is a shift from the dominant mental model based on mechanism (separation, division, and isolation) to one based on holism (connections, relationships, and systems). Mechanism is founded on root metaphors like Progress and Individualism, which became interpretive frameworks, taken-for-granted beliefs that include and exclude ways of knowing; in other words, ideology. The old story is one based on a narcissistic humanity engaged in reckless, immature behavior. The new story is based on maturity and responsible membership of the Earth community, shifting from a “story of separation” to a “story of interbeing” (Charles Eisenstein, quoted in Wahl, 2016, p. 25). “We need to change our mind before we change our world,” Shiva argues (2008, p. 131). This is especially true for our energy system. So rather than “thingify” energy as we have done, we need to reinstate the view that energy “is the all-pervasive element of life” (Shiva, 2008, p. 135). Such dynamism contrasts greatly with the current world system approach to energy: The broader our paradigm of energy, the wider our choices as human beings. Fossil fuels have fossilized our imagination, our potential, our creativity. We need to break free of this fossilization to choose life-enhancing pathways for ourselves, our species, and the planet. . . . Life is based on the self-organizing energies of the universe, from cells to Gaia, from communities to countries. We as living systems are networks of chemical and energetic flow and transformation. This life is energy—not fossil fuel energy, but living energy. (p. 135) Adhering to a life-affirming vision of energy means honoring life and its evolving properties. This means making fundamental changes to how we organize our world system: Human beings, as living beings, have a choice between two alternatives— the entropic option or an emergent option. The former locks us into a

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mechanical worldview, based on mechanistic science, mechanical production, and a mechanistic economics whose myth of perpetual growth leads us to death, decay, and disintegration. The latter relies on ecological science, ecological production, and ecological, living economics that provide new levels of human enrichment through biological and cultural diversity. The choice we make will decide whether or not we survive as a species. (p. 142) No other time in history has presented such big choices. As media educators, we have the knowledge and wisdom to act accordingly; whether we choose to exercise our capacity for change remains to be seen.

Conclusion: Decolonizing Media Education The cross without the circle marching across the world represents the emergence of Modernity and its unsustainable trajectory. As Bruno Latour (1993) states, Modernity is characterized by three themes: The world is divided between living and the nonliving; knowledge is discoverable through the fragmentation of things; and humans are separated from nature. In response to the legacy of the power of organized religion and the unpredictability of nature, Modernity embraced a particular model of reason (accompanied by science and technology) that has been normalized as a universal standard that all other cultures or nations should aspire to. According to this norm, nations (or groups of people) that have not industrialized or joined the global technological order are considered “failures.” Instead of considering their different values and cultures as reasons for not “developing” in a certain way, cultures that do not “modernize” are seen as backward or deficient. Contemporary discourses about the globalization are deeply rooted in these assumptions, including particular norms promoted in media education. Postman (1998) cautioned that technological change (in the guise of “progress”) tends to be regarded mythically, as something timeless and inevitable beyond the control of humans. Through a process of hegemony and neocolonialism in the form of globalization, “what had once been the Western worldview has now become the dominant worldview of those in position of wealth and power who drive our global civilization, from Bangkok to Beijing and from Mumbai to Mexico City” (Lent, 2017, p. 20). This “cult of competitive individualism” has emerged as a dangerous ideology endangering Earth and the very civilization it purports to sustain (Wahl, 2016, p. 24). Heise (2008) notes that the abstractions we use to galvanize environmental awareness, such as the computer modeling of the “ozone hole” or climate change, are products of science. It’s difficult to conceive planetary issues without some level of global outlook that is enabled by advanced technology (such as satellite mapping tools or the image of Earth from space). In particular, using the internet to disseminate and share the education tools discussed here is possible

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because of positivistic science. Embodied cognition, as advocated by Maturana and Varela (1998), has vast ecological implications, but it did not emerge in Western thought without the aid of science. Though I bemoan Mechanism and the Industrial and Scientific Revolution for contributing to the current ecological crisis, those in the technological realm of the world system also need to transition into an “ancient-future” orientation to use available tools. This is why I believe it is wrong to deny the use of media technology as part of any solution to our ecological crisis, despite their contribution to the problem (some so-called neoLuddites advocate an anti-technology stance). As Quechua scholar Sandy Grande (2008) argues regarding the need for indigenous peoples to learn the language of the oppressors, environmentalists can benefit greatly from harnessing the tools of mass mediation. And just as Maturana and Varela can repurpose Buddhism in their scientific methodology, we can draw from cosmovisions to ethically engage ICTs. As such, I don’t believe in the original sin of technology. To be clear, the expansion of Modernity and globalization is not even or monolithic, and a totalizing perspective just reasserts the monocultural mentality. For example, when writing this book, I have had to be careful about applying “we” and “us” when talking about participation and membership of the dominant system. I have to be conscious of the privilege, access, and protection the system affords me. I don’t want to smooth over the diversity of cultures or their responses to the emergence of capitalism and colonialism and their current effects. Many indigenous people reject the flattening of their experience and automatic association with environmental concerns. Issues like sovereignty are often more paramount for many indigenous groups (Gómez-Barris, 2017). The aim is to recognize larger systemic patterns as they manifest in the global environmental crisis and how to respond to them, but also to retain and recover wisdom that offers us an alternative course. One thing is clear, though. The more I  dive into the depths below the visible iceberg, the more I  understand that ecomedia literacy at its very core is a project to decolonize how we think about and teach media. The rise of the nation-state corresponds with the rise of print, scientific revolution, mapping, and colonialism. Their coevolution was predicated on the notion of an anthropocentric, autonomous individual disconnected from the body and Earth. Dualism enables the exploitation of the world, treating those assigned the status of nonhuman as lifeless matter, and is reflected in how media are conceived in education practice. As Cubitt (2014, p. 276) notes, “Decolonising eco-criticism therefore requires first a recognition of the skewed environmental impact of consumption in the North on conditions in the South.” The same can be said of media education. The cross-embedded circle symbolically models a holistic worldview, because without minds balanced with hearts, we cannot conceive sustainable patterns of life. According to a holistic methodology, ecomedia literacy can help achieve a healthy interaction with the world that can facilitate rebalancing what the Hopi call koyaanisqatsi—life out of balance (also the name of a 1983 film by Godfrey

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Reggio that is great for teaching ecomedia). The cross and the circle is a good visualization of ecology’s primary assertion: Everything is connected to everything else (with the caveat that not all things are connected equally). The encircled cross is also the astronomical symbol of Earth. And it’s the basis of the ecomediasphere’s design.

Notes 1 . This story was recounted to me by the Hopi family I was living with in 1982. 2. See https://culturalstudies.gmu.edu/articles/13020.

References Adamson, J., & Monani, S. (2016). Introduction: Cosmovisions, ecocriticism, and indigenous studies. In S. Monani  & J. Adamson (Eds.), Ecocriticism and indigenous studies: Conversations from earth to cosmos (pp.  1–19). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/ 9781315697192 Alston, V. R. (2016). Environment. In J. Adamson, W. A. Gleason, & D. N. Pellow (Eds.), Keywords for environmental studies (pp. 93–96). NYU Press. Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press. Beach, R., Share, J., & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching climate change to adolescents (Rethinking Schools). Routledge. Beck, A. (2019, November 27). An old new world: When one people’s sci-fi Is another people’s past. Bitch Media. www.bitchmedia.org/article/old-new-world-indigenousfuturisms Beck, U. (2008). Ecological enlightenment: Essays on the politics of the risk society. Humanity Books. Brennan, S. (2016). Making data sustainable: Backup culture and risk perception. In J. Walker & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 56–76). Routledge. Capra, F., & Luisi, P. L. (2016). The systems view of life. Cambridge University Press. Clark, J. (2016). Selling with Giaa: Advertising and the natural world. In J. Walker  & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 176–195). Routledge. Crumley, C. L. (2007). Historical ecology: Integrated thinking at multiple temporal and spatial scales. In A. Hornborg & C. L. Crumley (Eds.), The world system and the Earth system: Global socioenvironmental change and sustainability since the Neolithic (pp. 15–28). Left Coast Press, Inc. Cubitt, S. (2014). Decolonizing ecomedia. Cultural Politics, 10(3), 275–286. https://doi. org/10.1215/17432197-2795669 Cubitt, S. (2020). Anecdotal evidence: Ecocritiqe from Hollywood to the mass image. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190065713.001.0001 Dawson, A. (2016). Extinction: A radical history. OR Books. Demos, T. J. (2017). Against the anthropocene: Visual culture and environment today. Sternberg Press. Dewey, M., Spione, J., & Fox, J. (Directors). (2017). Awake, A Dream from Standing Rock [Film]. Bullfrog Films.

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Diffenbaugh, N. S., & Burke, M. (2019). Global warming has increased global economic inequality. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(20), 9808–9813. https:// doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1816020116 Emmett, R. S., & Nye, D. E. (2017). The environmental humanities. MIT Press. Gaard, G. (2015). Ecofeminism and climate change. Women’s Studies International Forum, 49, 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.004 Gabrys, J. (2015). Powering the digital: From energy ecologies to electronic environmentalism. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg, & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp. 3–18). Routledge. Geology. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geology&ol did=947806269 Giddens, A. (1986). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration. University of California Press. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Duke University Press. Gómez-Barris, M. (2019, March 19). The colonial Anthropocene: Damage, remapping, and resurgent resources. Antipode Online. https://antipodeonline.org/2019/03/19/ the-colonial-anthropocene/ Gore, T. (2015). Extreme carbon inequality. OXFAM International. www.oxfam.org/en/ research/extreme-carbon-inequality Grande, S. (2008). Red pedagogy: The un-methodology. In N. K. Denzin, Y. S. Lincoln, & L. T. Smith (Eds.), Handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies (pp. 233–254). Sage. Haraway, D. J. (2008). When species meet. University of Minnesota Press. Hecht, G. (2018, February  6). The African Anthropocene. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/ if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we Heise, U. K. (2008). Sense of place and sense of planet: The environmental imagination of the global. Oxford University Press. Huggan, G.,  & Tiffin, H. (2015). Postcolonial ecocriticism: Literature, animals, environment. Routledge. James, E. (2016). Teaching the postcolonial/ecocritical dialogue. In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp. 60–74). Palgrave Macmillan. Jhally, S. (2002). Advertising & the end of the world [Film]. Media Education Foundation. Jobson, R. C. (2020, May 27). Public thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on decolonizing decolonization. Public Books. www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-yarimar-bonilla-on-decolonizingdecolonization/ Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education. Brill Sense. Kelly, K. (1994). Out of control: The rise of neo-biological civilization. Addison-Wesley. Kodjo-Grandvaux, S. (2020, February 29). Colonialism, the hidden cause of our environmental crisis. https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/colonialism-the-hidden-cause-of-ourenvironmental-crisis Kuhn, T. S. (1996). The structure of scientific revolutions (3rd ed.). University of Chicago Press. Kurzweil, R. (1999). The age of spiritual machines: When computers exceed human intelligence. Viking. Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to Western thought. Basic Books. Latour, B. (1993). We have never been modern. Harvard University Press.

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Lent, J. (2017). The patterning instinct: A  cultural history of Humanity’s search for meaning. Prometheus. Machiorlatti, J. A. (2010). Ecocinema, ecojustice, and indigenous worldviews: Native and First Nations media as cultural recovery. In P. Willoquet-Maricondi (Ed.), Framing the world: Explorations in ecocriticism and film (pp. 62–80). University of Virginia Press. Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1998). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Shambhala. McLean, J. (2020). Changing digital geographies: Technologies, environments and people. Palgrave Macmillan. Merchant, C. (1989). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. HarperOne. Moore, J. W. (2014). The Origins of cheap nature: From use-value to abstract social nature. In C. Suter & C. Chase-Dunn (Eds.), Structures of the world political economy and the future global conflict and cooperation. LIT Verlag. Morton, T. (2009). Ecology without nature: Rethinking environmental aesthetics. Harvard University Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. Nye, D. E., Rugg, L., Fleming, J., & Emmet, R. (2013). Background paper: The emergence of the environmental humanities. Mistra, the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Environmental Research. Opel, A. (2020). Strategies and tactics for interdisciplinary experiential environmental education and digital media production. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www. susted.com/wordpress/content/engaging-with-things-speculative-realism-andecomedia-literacy-education_2020_05/ Parikka, J. (2015a). A geology of media. University of Minnesota Press. Parikka, J. (2015b). The anthrobscene. University of Minnesota Press. Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2018). History of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. University of California Press. Plumwood, V. (1993). Feminism and the mastery of nature. Routledge. Postman, N. (1998, March 27). Five things we need to know about technological change. www. technodystopia.org/ Qiu, J. L. (2016). Goodbye iSlave: A manifesto for digital abolition. University of Illinois Press. Read, R. J., & Alexander, S. (2019). This civilisation is finished: Conversations on the end of empire—and what lies beyond. Simplicity Institute Publishing. Riley, T. (2017, July 10). Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions, study says. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossilfuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change Shiva, V. (1993). Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. Zed Books. Shiva, V. (2008). Soil not oil: Environmental justice in a time of climate crisis. South End Press. Silverstein, J. (2005). Grand opening: Ronald McDonald conquers New Spain (Letter From Zacatecas). Harper’s Magazine, 67–74. Snow, C. P. (1963). Two cultures & a second look: An expanded version of the two cultures and the scientific revolution. New American Library. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge. Toulmin, S. (1992). Cosmopolis: The hidden agenda of modernity. University of Chicago Press. Vergès, F. (2017, August 30). Racial Capitalocene. Versobooks.com. www.versobooks.com/ blogs/3376-racial-capitalocene Wahl, D. C. (2016). Designing regenerative cultures. Triarchy Press. Yusoff, K. (2018). A billion black Anthropocenes or none. University of Minnesota Press.

2 ENVIRONMENTAL IDEOLOGY AND ECO-ETHICS

Most media studies and communications textbooks have two things in common. First, while there is ample discussion of race, gender, democracy, and other critical themes in the study of media, there is no mention anywhere of the ­environment. Second, ethics—the concern for how one should live and act in the world—is usually relegated to the last chapter. Given that all media are produced within an ethical framework (whether consciously or not), it’s curious how ethics are often treated as an add-on or afterthought. In contrast, ecomedia literacy centers ecoethics as integral to teaching about media and the environment. Eco-ethics and environmental ideology comprise our ecoculture: The shared belief of how humans perceive themselves within the living planet. This primarily covers the top two zones of the ecomediasphere, ecoculture and political ecology, which compromise the world system. These zones govern the Earth system, however, because it is an iterative system, the realms of ecomaterialism and lifeworld invariably feedback on our eco-ethics and political ecology. Maxwell and Miller (2008, p. 335) note that eco-ethics are meant to answer questions of value (“what is valued, what entities qualify for moral consideration, and what matters most”); rights (“duties and rules that protect individual and collective entities that are valued”); and consequences (“utilitarian considerations of actions and motives that affect the well-being or happiness of those with moral standing”). Beliefs regarding values and rights about the environment are largely driven by environmental ideology, defined by Corbett (2006, p. 26) as “a way of thinking about the natural world that a person uses to justify actions towards it.” Interestingly, this is not much different than the definition of ecological ethics, which is “how human beings ought to behave in relation to non-human nature” (Curry, 2006, p. 47). Implied within this definition of eco-ethics is the normative concept of “ought to,” which entails an exploration

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of the consequences of our actions within the living planet. Essentially, “what is valued is what ultimately determines ethics” (Curry, 2006, p. 2). This is the opposite stance that has been normalized by technological progress, which often justifies technology (be it facial recognition, drone warfare, mass surveillance, Internet of Things, etc.) because it’s possible. But just because we can, doesn’t mean we ought to.

Anthropocentric Eco-Ethics and Environmental Ideology Environmental ideologies comprise a spectrum of worldviews spanning from anthropocentric (human-centric) to ecocentric (Earth-centric). Likewise, the spectrum of ecological ethics follows the same range, with “brown” ethics representing a purely instrumental orientation in which the environment only has intrinsic value to a “dark green” ecocentric ethics in which the more-thanhuman realm has intrinsic value (Curry, 2006). Midrange ecological ethics (“light green”) represent a stance that mitigates human needs within the constraints of environmental limits. These ideological and ethical positions have their corollary in particular discourses that govern global politics, which are conveyed through media. Subsequently, underlying global politics and the environment is a takenfor-granted belief for how we engage (or “manage,” as the case may be) the planet as a commons; and it is through a media commons that environmental ideologies are contested and struggled over (Murphy, 2017). Neoliberalism with its inherent unrestrained instrumentalism and human exceptionalism represents the most extreme anthropocentric position on the spectrum of environmental ideology and eco-ethics. As explored in the Anthropocene discussion, this form of anthropocentrism only intends to benefit those afforded the full status of humanity. So, though neoliberal policies may claim to be human-centric, they are not for the benefit of all humans. Extreme anthropocentrism is also a kind of ethnocentrism. According to Vandana Shiva (Shiva & Shiva, 2018, p. 127), the anthropocentric ideology is provincial because it comes out of a small region of the world and “emerged in the West with the rise of colonialism, industrialism and capitalism.” Dryzek (2005) calls the discourse of anthropocentric capitalism Promethean, because just as Prometheus stole fire from the sun, the world system constantly seeks to go beyond the limits of the environment (ecocritics call it “cornucopian” to indicate the ideology of unlimited growth, despite environmental boundaries). The unspoken assumption driving these discourses is that markets should define norms based on the assumption that human behavior is driven by self-interest (individualism, survival of the fittest, and greed), but also efficiency, competition, and unlimited resources (and hence unlimited growth). Freeing the market’s “invisible hand” is the primary ethic and the policy is deregulation. In this case, media and the “globally networked knowledge system is designed to manufacture market subjectivities on a planetary scale” (Murphy, 2017, p. 146).

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Corbett identifies the environmentalist status quo (conservationism and preservationism) also as anthropocentric, because it is still driven by human-centered interests, such as nature’s utility for survival, sport, appreciation, spirituality, or romantic notions of the sublime. Curry (2006) correlates mainstream environmentalism with “light green” and “mid-green” (shallow and intermediated) ethics, because ultimately these positions support some version of the anthropocentric status quo. As such, there is a corresponding “lifeboat ethic” and its “survivalist” discourse that contend that because of limited environmental resources and inevitable greedy actors, the commons should be regulated by government or global institutions. The lifeboat ethic conceptualizes Earth as a fragile “spaceship” with limited capacity. The “tragedy of the commons” results when there are no controls over commonly shared resources, and anyone can exploit the commons as they see fit. This assumes that inevitably too many people are economically motivated, competitive, and selfish. It aims to preserve the market system (albeit in more regulated form), elevating the agency of experts and technocrats (as is the case with global climate conferences). Not coincidently, people who have values based on individualistic and hierarchical beliefs are more likely to be skeptical of climate change (Cook, 2016). A classbased, stratified society ties individualism with ownership and capital accumulation, which is at odds with an enlarged sense of self that is integrated into the living planet and sense of solidarity with fellow creatures. “The rule of the 1% is a hyper anthropocentrism which does not just exclude the rights of all non-human beings, it also excludes most human beings themselves” (Shiva & Shiva, 2018, p. 127). Relatedly, there is an emerging critique of Eurocentric norms that have historically guided ethical frameworks taught as part of media ethics. First is that Western ethics—such as golden rule, hedonism, golden mean, categorical imperative, utilitarianism, and veil of ignorance—are often grounded in the philosophical tradition of Individual versus Nature. Nation-states and corporations are viewed as the only legitimate representative bodies to mediate ethical disputes. As opposed to the right to free speech, Kwasi Wiredu proposes an African perspective that advocates for the right to be heard and to have a voice (Christians & Cooper, 2009). Many indigenous perspectives believe communication is an expression of stored kinetic energy that integrates the heart and mind. A postcolonial perspective cautions against normative universal concepts (like Progress), and instead advocates for an application sensitive to local norms. This is especially true when considering the impact of technology on certain knowledge traditions. If technologies transform cultures, shouldn’t they be subject to ethical debate?

Transformative Eco-Ethics: El Buen Vivir, Ecojustice, and Ecofeminism Brereton (2016, p.  4) identifies five characteristics of an environmentally oriented philosophy: (1) Everything is connected to everything else; (2) the whole is

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greater than the sum of its parts; (3) meaning is context dependent; (4) process has primacy over parts; and (5) humans and nonhuman nature are one. Transforming these paradigms to apprehend Earth and its inhabitants as interdependent is to live in what Shiva (2018) calls the “Ecocene.” Rather than just viewing ourselves as abstract members or citizens, we are Earthlings (thereby transitioning from human chauvinism to Earth citizenship) and planet-mates. From this perspective, we see other species as peers. We take care of Earth, and Earth takes care of us. Instead of seeing environmentalists as defending the living planet against abuses and exploitation, we are nature defending itself. Rather than develop an adversarial relationship with ecosystems, an imagined “eco-self ” can shift from the self as an atomized individual with hard boundaries to a self always already in the process of producing the world and being produced by it; a self through which the world flows; a self that is as conceptually inseparable as it is materially inseparable from the larger ecosystems that sustains its physical body. (Beach et al., 2017, p. 12) This correlates with Aldo Leopold’s (1987, p. 204) “Land Ethic,” which “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” While an ecocentric worldview is somewhat alien to the modernist philosophical traditions, it is a reiteration of a common Earth-based cosmology that is often in conflict with Modernity (especially as it is currently manifested in neoliberal subjectivity). In recent years, an ecocentric philosophy has been articulated in the South American concept of el buen vivir: At its most fundamental level, el buen vivir, refers to the organization of social and ecological life based on Afro-Indigenous principles and the transmission of vernacular practices that maintain a deep and respectful relationship to land, place, and the natural world. . . . The idea of el buen vivir, translated as good living, decenters the importance of “the human” by focusing instead upon how the natural world possesses its own sets of rights, logics, and capacities that cannot be solely apprehended, managed, or narrated through human language or scientific technique. Rather than assume knowledge over, or exert a hierarchical relationship to, nature, el buen vivir pursues what Atawallpa Oviedo Freire terms “dynamic equilibrium” and “harmony with reciprocity” as ways of relating to the vast planetary life around us. (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 23) Like Leopold’s Land Ethic, here the concept of human community is extended to mountains, rivers, and animals, but spirits too. The articulation of this ethic is in

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response to how the common imagination is monopolized by the culture industry to promote “the American way of life.” This is exemplified by Columbian singer, Shakira, who lightens her hair color while promoting Pepsi, symbolically associating whiteness with American consumerism. El buen vivir offers an alternative imaginary that counters ideology driving extractive industries (mining, fossil fuels), biomass conflicts (deforestation, monocultural agriculture), and mega-projects (dams). In other words, “good living” offers a different paradigm from the materialist impulse of the neoliberal discourse of “the good life” (vivir bien) that imagines endless personal expansion, a view in which the comforts of modern capitalist development fulfills one’s individual material expansion. (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 24) El buen vivir is connected to “conviviality”: People mutually supporting each other as part of the environment. Extending the ecological community means enlarging it to what Shiva (2018) calls an “Earth community.” This also means expanding our ethical community to future generations, encapsulated in the North American First Nations concept of planning for the next seven generations: “A culture of sustainability is also built on an ethics of intergenerational care with the enduring solidarity that binds our high-tech destinies to those of workers and the planet”(Maxwell & Miller, 2017, p. 52). Not surprisingly, ecocentric ethics occupy the radical and transformative sphere of environmental ideology, which coincides with the agenda of the environment justice movement: “A social movement to further policy and cultural changes that support social justice and environmentalism, broadly defined, connecting issues of race, class, indigeneity, gender, citizenship/nation-state, and sexuality with environmental equity” (Sze, 2020, p. 141). The ecojustice framework in education fundamentally challenges the status quo, addressing: 1. The recognition and analysis of the deep cultural assumptions underlying modern thinking that undermine local and global ecosystems essential to life. 2. The recognition and analysis of deeply entrenched patterns of domination that unjustly define people of color, women, the poor, and other groups of humans as well as the natural world as inferior and thus less worthy of life. 3. An analysis of the globalization of modernist thinking and the associated patterns of hyper-consumption and commodification that have led to the exploitation of the southern hemisphere by the north for natural and human resources. 4. The recognition and protection of diverse cultural and environmental commons—the necessary interdependent relationship of

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humans with the land, air, water, and other species with whom we share this planet, and the intergenerational practices and relationships among diverse groups of people that do not require the exchange of money as the primary motivation and generally result in mutual aid and support. 5. An emphasis on strong Earth democracies: The idea that decisions should be made by the people who are most affected by them, that these decisions must include consideration of the right of the natural world to regenerate, and the well-being of future generations. 6. An approach to pedagogy and curriculum development that emphasizes both deep cultural analysis and community-based learning that encourages students to identify the causes, and remediate the effects, of social and ecological violence in the places in which they live. (Martusewicz et al., 2015, pp. 12–13) By combining concerns of social justice (racism, gender discrimination, income inequality) with environmentalism, ecojustice is explicitly intersectional, seeking to reclaim the commons through cooperative efforts (as opposed to marketdriven solutions). Ecojustice foregrounds how the majority of historical CO2 emissions came from Europe and North America, and therefore higher income populations bear more responsibility for solving the crisis. Regarding the colonial legacy of our global economic system, Cubitt (2014) advocates that wealthy nations owe biodiversity debt, not to mention are obliged to engage in reparations, restoration, and land reform. As was the case in Guatemala, the best land for cultivation was taken over by banana plantations for food export. In the case of burning and deforestation in Indonesia, tropical forests are clear-cut to supply the global economy with palm oil. To solve the climate crisis, land needs to be restored, protected, and returned to those who can steward it properly. Relatedly, ecofeminism offers an important transformative, eco-ethical ­orientation. It starts with the proposition that patriarchy dominates both women and the environment, so their causes are interlinked. Like Deep Ecology, ecofeminism calls for reconnecting humans and nature by problematizing the boundary between them. Within ecofeminism, there are different positions: Essentialist (gendering nature as nurturing mother or goddess); ecocentric heterarchy where humans share but don’t dominate the living planet; and the partnership ethic. The essentialist position can be problematic because it sets up a dichotomy between the nurturing mother (encouraging constraint against exploitation) and the wild destructive female (requiring control and subjugation). Greta Gaard (2015, p. 22) proposes a queer ecofeminism, which shifts from “women as individuals to gender as a system structuring power relations.” Likewise, Caroline Merchant’s partnership ethic is a critique of power, masculinity, anthropocentrism, and rationality, calling for equity between human and nonhuman communities. This approach includes moral considerations for humans and nonhuman nature (as in the kind of

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relationship we have with pets or other animal “partners”) and respect for cultural diversity and biodiversity (see Brereton, 2016, p. 23). Ecofeminism counters patriarchal discourses connected to Modernity that associate the control of nature with women. For example, ecofeminists oppose how hierarchies in numerous films, video games, and TV reinforce the “mastery of nature” trope of wild, dangerous nature requiring subjugation and control by (usually white) male authoritative figures. Like the ideology at the heart of the scientific revolution to “break free” from Nature, it is common to see in popular culture the technological desire to control Nature. And when Nature doesn’t cooperate, “she” is portrayed as “hostile and unfair” (see Brereton, 2016). This particular narrative pattern is visible in Hollywood disaster cinema, which typically depicts environmental catastrophe as beyond human control. For example, in a study of 1,000 films listed as disaster movies, the largest grouping is natural disaster movies (27%), but man-made disaster movies register at only 9%. The typical narrative usually follows a control fantasy formula: a disaster has occurred, we are caught up in the maelstrom, but human ingeniousness will put it right—with the ingenious element often ­embodied in the form of one heroic white male. In these films, we go to the brink and pull back/escape just in time. Furthermore, for every film-­disaster narrative, whilst for the most part the disaster takes everyone by surprise, there is nearly always a quick-fire solution to it. Our difficulty, it would seem, is our inability to accept that planet degradation is a matter of slow ­violence— almost too slow for us to recognise until it is too late, as in the case of the Arctic ice-cap melting, for example. (Hayward, 2020, pp. 17–18) An excellent example of this pattern is in the film, Deep Water Horizon (Berg, 2016), a dramatic spectacle of the 2010 BP oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico. Although it depicts company negligence, by concentrating on heroic acts by particularly macho characters on the oil rig, it focuses on the human as opposed to planetary scale of the disaster. It fails to render the larger pattern of oil spill disasters in the Gulf, or even question the purpose of drilling in the first place. It remains a superficial characterization of a much larger and complex problem, thus requiring the intervention of a deeper analysis afforded by ecofeminist or ecocritical methods. For example, drilling can be considered a phallic act tied to petro-masculinity, a recent theorization that ties fossil fuel extraction with power and manliness (Daggett, 2018). When fossil fuels are entangled with male identity, virility becomes associated with combustion and consumption. It finds expression in “truck nuts” (scrotum dangled off of trailer hitches by truck owners) or “coal rollers” (truck engines modified to emit thick, dark smoke). As a variation of fragile masculinity, climate action is seen as threatening to manhood, leading to climate denial closely aligned with white-male conservatives that engage in

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misogyny, racism, and authoritarianism. Make America Great Again becomes a form of petro-nostalgia for cars, suburbs, and the nuclear family. Fossil fuel use becomes a way to “get back” at feminists and people of color. In the rhetoric of climate denial, environmental protection harms economic development for “real” jobs for (mostly white) men, such as mining, pipeline construction, or oil rigs. Unfortunately, extractive industry man camps that house male workers are increasingly associated with “an increase in physical and sexual violence, including rape, sexual assault, sexual assault of minors, and sex trafficking in the affected communities” (“Man Camps” Endangers Indigenous Women and Children, 2019). Indigenous communities in North America have particularly been affected by this form of misogynistic violence. Ecofeminism occasionally manifests in popular culture. As discussed more extensively in Chapter  10, the film Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015) connects the failure of individualism and patriarchy with ecocide (in the form of superstorms, brackish water, dead trees, salt flats), and depicts the dangers of hyper-masculinity, male humiliation, and violence against women. Through its powerful heroine, Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron), it offers an ecofeminist vision of will, compassion, and affection. The film also connects the power of birth with seed preservation, water, and ecology. Brereton (2016) cites the character Katniss Everdeen, from the book and film series, The Hunger Games, as an ecofeminist heroine. Hailing from coal country, she can adapt to and “read” “wild nature” to become one with the (forbidden) forest. As a hunter (usually associated with males), she also expresses biophilia and care for others. She is simultaneously authentic (she doesn’t seek attention), nurturing, and protective. This is in contrast to the Capital’s President, which views people and nature as instrumental (i.e., to be exploited, weaponized, and genetically modified). Let us not forget that what underlines any eco-ethical stance is not just intellectual arguments but a sense of care. As environmental activist, Alexis Bonogofsky, states, “It’s not the hatred of the coal companies, or anger, but love will save that place” (quoted in Klein, 2015, p. 343). It’s not just about saving the whale campaigns, but wanting to save the wales (Brereton, 2018). Ultimately, instead of a life-destroying system, a regenerative media ecosystem is based on life-furthering and life-preserving values. Ecomedia literacy encompasses a holistic, intersectional analysis that is in alignment with the environmental and media justice framework that connects environmental destruction to income inequality, racism, sexism, violence, and militarism.

Media Technology and the Precautionary Principle Douglas Rushkoff’s Team Human project (in the form of a book, website, and podcast of the same name) calls out the dangers of an anti-human technosphere: Engineers at our leading tech firms and universities tend to see human beings as the problem and technology as the solution. . . . When they are

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not developing interfaces to control us, they are building intelligences to replace us. Any of these technologies could be steered toward extending our human capabilities and collective power. Instead, they are developing in concert with the demands of a marketplace, political sphere, and power structure that depend on human isolation and predictability in order to operate. (Rushkoff, 2019, p. 5) Although I  don’t agree with his rhetorical centering of “human” and how it reinforces the Anthropocentric discourse critiqued throughout this book (why not Team Planet?), the spirit of his critique supports the eco-ethical approach to technology. Just as technologies couched in Progress and Mechanism have been used against the “unhuman,” without some kind of check and control they will inevitably be used against all. Repressive technologies are used to harm protestors fighting to protect the environment, but also against laborers that manufacture and produce technologies. This was the message of the Luddite rebellion. Their spirit lives on in Hong Kong protestors, who in 2019 disabled facial recognition and surveillance systems by sawing down surveillance camera poles and using lasers to disrupt police actions. Ecomedia literacy can draw from the wisdom of Luddites, a perspective that is rarely covered in media textbooks, but should be part of any ethical exploration of media technologies. Recognizing how the introduction of dehumanizing mechanization would destroy their well-being and autonomy, in the 19th century, a radical group of English workers smashed factory machinery in order to maintain the integrity of their community and traditions. Kirkpatrick Sale’s (1996) important critical history of the Luddites presents valuable lessons from the past that should be incorporated into our present discussion of ecomedia ethics. He summarizes their legacy as follows: • • • • •

• •

Technologies are never neutral, and some are hurtful. Industrialism is always a cataclysmic process, destroying the past, roiling the present, making the future uncertain. People should serve an “apprenticeship to nature” before they can be trusted with machines. The nation-state, synergistically intertwined with industrialism, will always come to its aid and defense, making revolt futile and reform ineffectual. But resistance to the industrial system, based on some grasp of moral principles and rooted in some sense of moral revulsion, is not only possible but necessary. Politically, resistance to industrialism must force the viability of industrial society into public consciousness and debate. Philosophically, resistance to industrialism must be embedded in an a­ nalysis— an ideology, perhaps—that is morally informed, carefully articulated, and widely shared. (Sale, 1995)

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It’s important to stress that Luddites were not anti-technology. What they opposed was how technology was used to disrupt and destroy their communities. Ulrich Beck’s (2008) discussion of the risk society explores how technology is expected to mitigate risk, yet it creates its own perils. By focusing on the precariousness of industrial society (and hence Modernity), technology is called forth to placate our survival fears, yet in the process it creates new anxiety about potential harm. Under the current system, private corporations (not nation-states) drive scientific and tech research; and ultimately make decision about risk. Subsequently, risk is not evenly distributed. The time and scale of risk also extends to the future, which makes it difficult to assign accountability. The trade-off is that society cannot ensure security from industrial hazards, but because enough people benefit from the system, the environmental risk is not a political liability—its unequal distribution means that the “losers” (poor, uneducated, politically disenfranchised) of “progress” can absorb the ecological risk of the global system. Ecojustice movements seek to resolve the inequalities of risk. There is an apocryphal story about Columbus, who upon being told that the discovery of new trade routes was inevitable, he asked his challengers if it was possible to make an egg stand on its own. When no one present could do so, he took the egg and smashed its end to make it stand. While this story is sometime offered as an allegory about the power of creativity and the need to disrupt rote thinking, it also has a more sinister lesson: He demonstrated that Man could smash the world according to his desires. So, rather than blind utopian and futuristic thinking that often accompanies the hype of technological disruption, Luddites recognized technology “in the present tense” (see Noble, 1995). To ground this in ecological concerns, the precautionary principle offers an eco-ethical approach for ecomedia literacy. The precautionary principle, simply put, is if the environmental consequences of an activity are unknown, then the practice shouldn’t be engaged: Where there is a real risk of serious/irreversible harm, a lack of decisive evidence of that harm mustn’t be used as a reason to prevaricate in guarding against the potential harm, and that, where the harm is catastrophic, this precautionary consideration ought to be considered absolute and decisive, no matter how nice the alleged benefits of the change in question. In this sense the Precautionary Principle ought to be the very basis of the emerging world-view that needs to supplant our ignorant and reckless technophilia and techno-optimism. (Read & Alexander, 2019, p. 14) An extreme but important example would be nuclear power. Given the life of radioactive waste, it is impossible to know whether nuclear waste can ever be

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managed safely over time, for we don’t know in the thousands of years lifespan of radioactive isotopes how they can or will be managed by future generations. The precautionary principle should also apply to other extreme examples, such as “planet hacking” and ecomodernist proposals like geoengineered “atmospheric dimming” to lower global temperatures. But what about the more mundane uses of technology? Given the basic requirements for participating in (and even changing) global society, the utility of everyday technologies poses huge risks to the environment. The use of mobile phones, for example, presents a difficult challenge for how to ethically respond to a known health hazard and ecologically destructive technology. As Maxwell and Miller (2012) outline, European health agencies have issued warnings about longterm radiation exposure, which has been linked to two types of brain cancer, tumors, migraines, vertigo, and behavioral problems in children. To truly pursue eco-ethics, we have to demand the cessation of any ecologically damaging production and consumption practices, a kind of Hippocratic oath for technology: Do no harm. By necessity, most of us (myself included) who care about the environment engage in some form of intermediate (mildgreen) eco-ethics, which “accords intrinsic values to nonhuman nature, albeit not as completely as eco-centrism, though it agrees that moral status can be extended to other sentient beings” (Miller, 2018, p. 76). This means calling for action to transform the status quo and to change destructive practices related to manufacturing, use, and disposal. Maxwell and Miller (2020) call for the precautionary principle (better safe than sorry) to be applied to how media gadgets are produced and utilized in lieu of a cost-benefit analysis, “which looks at the pluses and minuses of consumer satisfaction versus safety” (Maxwell & Miller, 2012, p. 21). Starting from the personal and practical—keep your phone or your laptop from touching your body and avoid whenever possible pressing your phone to your head—to the level of policy and regulation. Reformers can argue for developing and using nontoxic materials, extended warrantees (at least two years), declare expected lifespan of product, create standardized and modular parts, offer buyback/take-back programs, and improve recycling (Lewis, 2017). Like the tech industry in general, as it stands, the cell phone industry is shockingly underregulated in the United States (Europe fairs a bit better, but it could be improved). According to Maxwell and Miller (2020), once a phone is made, it’s actually the greenest media technology we can own. Its primary environmental impacts happen when it’s made and discarded. For example, the manufacture of one phone uses as much power as a refrigerator running for a whole year. During the lifetime of a phone, the energy consumption it needs to run is negligible. If we want to conserve energy, buying a new phone is not the way to do it. Still, on average, we replace cell phones every 1.5–2 years, yet we keep our refrigerators and dishwashers for more than ten years. Why is that? They argue that there are

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three environmental reasons why we should hold onto our phones for as long as possible: Doing so contributes less often to the problem of e-waste, a global disaster for ecosystems and the atmosphere; reduces carbon emissions, which are highest when new phones are manufactured and lowest over the smartphone’s useful lifetime (compared to other digital devices); and de-­pressurizes demands that systematically pull millions of young people into intensive and hazardous factory conditions, where the length of the workday and pace of production are dictated by brand companies and their annual promotions of dubious upgrades (not to mention their lack of responsibility for dealing with discarded products). (pp. 90–1) One hopeful note is that even though our use of data centers grows exponentially every year, their energy consumption does not. The total share of electricity use in the United States (whose data centers are the biggest power consumers of cloud computing in the world) remained at 1.8 between 2010 and 2014. Entertainment media consumed on phones substantially reduces the energy consumed on TVs and PCs. (An interesting aside, the financial sector has huge energy demands because they require super powerful computers to process information at increasingly infinitesimal increments of milliseconds.) Additionally, there are campaigns to push data cloud providers to use renewable and clean energy, and there are movements promoting Green AI and Green IT. Currently, there is one nonprofit company in the Netherlands, Fairphone, which makes the only gadget on the market that attempts to meet ecojustice goals by making its phones long-lasting and repairable; reducing e-waste through its take-back initiative; incorporating fairer, recycled, and responsibly mined materials; and creating better working conditions (Our Impact, n.d.). Full disclosure: I own a Fairphone. After three years I was able to return my older model phone when a newer model came out. It was easy to mail to a recycling center and they gave me a discount for returning my old phone. Whenever I need to repair it, they have videos and easy instructions to fix it. Invariably, an exploration of the environmental and health impacts of gadgets requires a critique of the global economic system that encourages dangerous environmental and safety practices. As Lewis (2017, p. 63) argues, “Only if freed from commercial imperatives can this technology allow us to enjoy its benefits in ways that stress sustainability and minimise wasteful production.”

The Ecomedia Commons and Eco-Ethics The history of Modernity is a history of ongoing enclosure, with the invention of racial, gender, and environmental binaries coinciding with the fencing off of

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commonly shared lands. The ongoing division between civilized and uncivilized is a walling off of the human from the unhuman. To achieve this, there has been an organized process of knowledge enclosure. This system is distilled in the documentary about land struggles in the Peruvian Amazon, When Two Worlds Collide (Brandenburg & Orzel, 2016). The film depicts the fight over legislation proposed from 2006 to 2011 in Peru that would allow rights to collective indigenous territories to be sold to private companies for resource extraction. The controversial law was being negotiated as part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement (which is part of a larger global neoliberal agenda to limit local control or government regulation on multinational corporations). On one side are the desires of the Peruvian state, led by President Alan García (now diseased), to “grow” and “modernize” the economy in the name of “progress.” Using rhetoric that can be traced to the Spanish conquest, fellow politicians and leading journalists describe the Amazonian indigenous peoples with phrases as “waste,” “backwards,” barbarous,” “savages,” “third class citizens,” and “uncultured peoples” who “want to take us back to primitive times.” This rhetoric is countered by the film’s central protagonist, Alberto Pizango, leader of the indigenous Amazonian organization, AIDESEP (Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rain Forest). Several of his statements throughout the documentary reflect the eco-ethic of el buen vivir: “We grew up in a collectivist environment”; “Earth is borrowed. You can’t do what you want with it”; “Respect nature, do not plunder it”; “You kill the rainforest, you kill the people”; “We are nothing without our land”; and “Our land can never be sold. We don’t negotiate with the land.” And in an effort to assert indigenous rights and status worthy of life, he pleads, “Tell them that we exist.” The documentary exemplifies a positive role for media to raise awareness of these conflicts, and also shows the tension between a collectivist view of the commons—loosely defined as “all that we share” (Walljasper, 2010)—and one that pushes for enclosure, privatization, and extraction. Not surprisingly, a significant environmental humanities concern is the crisis of the enclosure of the commons, which is linked to both physical and virtual realms. The process of enclosure begins with the fencing off of peasant lands in England in the 12th century and continues in the present day by neoliberal global finance and trade. As evidenced in the conflict depicted in When Two Worlds Collide, the fight over the commons is also about environmental impacts. For example, as a result of encroachment by oil companies and frequent oil spills, Pizango describes fewer animals in his region of the forest. This exemplifies how the annihilation of animals and insects is closely linked to enclosure: Extinction is a product of the global attack on the commons: the great trove of air, water, plants, and collectively created cultural forms such as language that have been traditionally regarded as the inheritance of

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humanity as a whole. Nature, the wonderfully abundant and diverse wildlife of the world, is essentially a free pool of goods and labor that capital can draw on.  .  .  .  [A]gressive policies of trade liberalization in recent decades have been ­predicated on privatizing the commons— transforming ideas, ­information, species of plants and animals, and even DNA into private property. Suddenly, things like seeds, once freely traded by peasant farmers the world over, have become scarce commodities, and are even being bred by agribusiness corporations to be sterile after one generation, a product farmers in the global South have aptly nicknamed “suicide seeds.” The destruction of global biodiversity needs to be framed, in other words, as a great, and perhaps ultimate, attack on the planet’s common wealth. Indeed, extinction needs to be seen, along with climate change, as the leading edge of contemporary capitalism’s contradictions. (Dawson, 2016, p. 13) Enclosure and ecocide are two sides of the same bitcoin. The tension between the commons and enclosure can be found in the zones of ecomaterialism, lifeworld, and ecoculture, all governed by the rules of the economic system and political ecology. How we act toward the commons reflects our environmental ideology and eco-ethics. Because the idea of the commons is situated within particular social and cultural practices, it is subject to environmental ideologies and eco-ethics about how humans should act toward it.

The Ecomaterialism Commons The relationship between media technology and extractivism has a huge impact on the ecomaterial commons. Such is the case when in the early 2000s in the Kahuzi-Biega National Park in the Republic Congo where the Grauer’s gorilla population was devastated by a mining rush for tantalum necessary for the Sony PlayStation 2 (Alakeson, 2003). Across the living planet, the internet is a physical infrastructure of cables, satellites, server farms, and network nodes that are embedded in geographical places that use natural resources (electricity, water, minerals, etc.). Invariably, the traditional four elements (land, air, water, and energy) are part of the Earth commons impacted by the global ICT infrastructure. The danger is that increasingly the human-built environment is turning into a giant, networked mega-computer (see Chapter 5). The environmental impact of network servers and the manufacture and disposal of all the gadgets is only going to be exacerbated by the emerging Internet of Things (which seeks to wirelessly connect as many objects as possible to the net). Consequently, “the imagined and much touted commons of the internet does not translate well into a commons of infrastructure, land use, and energy production that is required to power the digital commons” (Gabrys, 2015, p. 7).

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The Ecocultural and Lifeworld Commons As a realm of information, knowledge, and discourse, the internet functions as a “networked public sphere” shared by all that have access to it (see Benkler, 2006). But it’s also increasingly enclosed by private corporations. In this way, the internet ties the natural and technological commons together: In our times, it is knowledge that has been enclosed, alienated, and converted to an environment of databases and databanks from which we, the population, are excluded. Capital persists through the privatization of the commons, shadowed by charging rents on circulation, including interest on credit. The common good is sold back as private debt. The suffering poor and denuded ecologies are external to accounts, in every sense of the phrase. (Cubitt, 2014, p. 278) Compare the financial models of Wikipedia with Facebook, the former being an open, nonprofit resources available to all with internet access, and the latter being a closed, highly surveilled, and ad-driven platform that is unregulated. According to Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) model of surveillance capitalism, when tech platforms harvest our “behavioral surplus,” companies like Google and Facebook act like colonial entities extracting our attention as if it were a natural resource. Consider the monopolization of the digital space: While in 2007 50  percent of the traffic on the internet was generated by over a thousand websites, by 2014 it was just 35 websites (“Warum brauchen wir Vielfalt?”/Bits & Bäume, p. 86). And of the 500 most visited websites worldwide, Wikipedia is actually the only one that is not operated commercially. So it’s not surprising that six of the world’s ten largest companies are now firmly rooted in the digital economy: Apple, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook and the Chinese company Tencent. Just a few global corporations holding an incredible amount of social and economic power. (Stolz & Jungblut, 2019, p. Monopolisation . . ., para. 1) We search them and they search us. The fracturing of attention creates inattention, to the extent that few could recognize or identify what the commons is (and without naming it, you can’t save it). According to Maryanne Wolf ’s research, “continuous partial attention” threatens empathy, diversity, and democracy (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 71). The increase of attention-deficit/hyperactive disorder (ADHD) and subsequent medical responses to manage attention through the administration of Ritalin individualize a public health crisis and also have very real environmental ramifications

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by enforcing a regime of production and consumption that drives the global economy: As a consequence of this individualization of behaviours we use chemistry to compel our children’s attention (as well as our own), at all costs, to bend to the—unprecedented, completely artificial and terribly invasive—needs of a Janus-faced capitalism, which simultaneously advocates relentless productive discipline and limitless consumerist hedonism. (Citton, 2017, p. 17) By instrumentalizing our attention (and therefore what we should attend to), free access to media has inadvertently become a very expensive business model, with our attention and its manipulation coming at a very steep cost. Global media are a discursive commons, where “environmental discourses have been formed and reformed within the contemporary process on globalization by social context, institutional alignment, and the discourse-rendering practices of commercial and social media networks” (Murphy, 2017, p. 9). Thus, the crisis of the commons is also a representational crisis. The environment consequences are manifested in the inability of “mass media to be honest about the horrific decline in biodiversity (i.e. in life on Earth) and about how human-caused c­ limate-decline is a moral threat and rank failure” (Read & Alexander, 2019, p. 17). The ecomedia commons is experienced as something local but scales regionally, nationally, and globally. Knowledge enclosures continue today with the increased privatization of education, arts, and culture. As platform capitalism increasingly captures books, film, music, and other arts into subscription or ad-driven databases, few spaces exist that are not free of commercialism or profit-driven algorithms. Whether it’s the public square enshrouded by advertising, highways dotted by billboards, airport concourses wombed by brands, insidious product placement, sidewalks stenciled with projected ads, psychological warfare bots posting disinformation, or sixsecond ads interjected into streaming video, the commons of our thoughts and culture are colonized by these automated transactions and processes.

The Eco-Ethical Commons The radical and dark green perspective imbues the planetary commons with intrinsic value and calls for a transformative sort of politics and media. According to Murphy (2017, p. 155), media organizations guided by this ethic focus on real struggles over who controls and participates in the commons; media work from “below” (horizontal, grassroots) “to create community, amplify voice, and engender greater visibility for imaginative, cultural, spiritual, and even scientific ideas about the Earth.” In this case, agency is driven by membership/citizenship of the ecomediasystem.

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The opposite of knowledge enclosure is the cultural commons, which are activities of uncommodified knowledge exchange, including food recipes, seed sharing, dances, political and spiritual traditions, stories, etc. (Bowers, 2012). Anecdotally, my experience as an educator has been one in which my colleagues and peers treat knowledge as part of a vibrant cultural commons. In contrast to the copyright restrictions and controls of academic publishers and institutions, we exchange syllabi, teaching knowledge, experience, articles, and writings freely without expectation of monetary compensation. It should be noted that the cover of this book by NASA’s Jenny Mottar belongs to the public domain because it was produced by the US government, which allowed me to use it freely. This is also true for open-source academic and professional services (editing, peer-review) done for no compensation (except prestige and tenure). Voluntary Wikipedia editors often work for free as per Jenkin’s (2006) notion of affective economics—doing something out of love or care, such as a hobby. Traditions of citations (acknowledging your sources and respecting your intellectual ancestors) and honor codes against plagiarism ensure this system of free exchange is not abused. What binds these practices is a sense of compassion, the kind teachers feel about their students, the knowledge traditions they are a part of, or for the colleagues and “peeps” who have a shared interest. (Albeit, some might take a more critical approach and view these various forms of “voluntary” work as exploited and uncompensated labor required of academic “service.”) Activists working to support the commons argue that people will not defend something they do not know exists or care for (Walljasper, 2010). An ecomedia literacy curriculum centers the commons, as it ties together the discursive and material realms of ecomedia.

Eco-Citizenship, Neoliberal Education, and Ecomedia Literacy My research of North American media literacy practices and discourses revealed that by far the most commonly used term to describe education goals was citizenship (López, 2014). Politics and democracy were a distant second. There were very few instances of terms like rights, society, activism, economics, social justice, reform, and regulation, and they were only used by “peripheral” media literacy practitioners (those working outside the mainstream of education). The words environment and ecology were completely absent. Like the term media, citizenship is rarely defined, so its meaning tends to be taken-for-granted and selfevident. But when exploring environmental ideology and eco-ethics, this should not be the case. It needs to be clearly articulated and discussed. Miller (2007, p.  35) breaks down citizenship into the following categories: cultural (“the right to know and speak”), political (“the right to reside and vote”), and economic (“the right to work and prosper”). These broad categories are then combined into a concept of cultural citizenship: “citizens’ knowledge of US

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foreign/military policy and corporate/governmental conduct in areas of basic needs and the environment” (p. 17). Miller is particularly concerned with applying cultural citizenship to ethical media practice, such as the extent to which media are subjected to economic imperatives over serving the public good. In later work, Miller (along with Maxwell) has updated the cultural citizenship concept to incorporate a “green” outlook: “Green citizenship looks centuries ahead, refusing to discount the health and value of future generations as it opposes elemental risks created by capitalist growth in the present. This necessitates an eco-ethical orientation towards the media” (Maxwell & Miller, 2009, pp. 19–20). Just as the history of colonialism, slavery, and extraction was predicated on a boundary between Nature and Society, those granted status of human was limited to certain categories of people (namely, white males). The same can be said about citizenship. As the concept of who is defined as part of Society expands overtime, so does citizenship. If eco-ethics extends our sense of community beyond humans, then eco-citizenship extends beyond the traditional notion of nationstates to planetary participation beyond borders and across generations. For the purpose of ecomedia literacy, instead of audience, prosumer, user, or participant, I prefer the concept of “member” to indicate membership of the ecomediasystem. Inspired by the same concept in ecosystem science, membership extends to all aspects of the ecosystem—animals, plants, and elements. As human members, we have rights and responsibilities. An alternative to liberal rights–based citizenship is the concept of ecological citizenship, which is specifically related to how we impact the environment. As discussed throughout this book, ecological impacts are unevenly distributed and caused, as they are directly tied to income inequality, with the majority of impacts coming from the economically richer populations in the Global North: the responsibility to leave sustainable (as opposed to unsustainable and therefore damaging) ecological footprints will always be asymmetrical and non-reciprocal because ecological footprints of some countries/cultures will adversely affect other nations. Ecological citizenship works at the level of the everyday: how we lead our daily lives determine the kind of and extent of ecological footprint we leave behind us. (Nayar, 2015, p. 27) However, it’s not just about individual behavior. Efforts to change the system are necessary, too. In the past 40 years of neoliberal hegemony, “citizen” has been complicated by the appropriation of the term by corporations. First, it’s done in how they represent themselves as citizens (as in “good corporate citizens”); second, it’s exercised in the form of legal personhood (Miller, 2018). Under these conditions, the prevailing ethic in the neoliberal era has been based on “responsibilization,” which reduces social problems as a matter of personal responsibility or to be solved by

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the market by replacing participatory citizenship with consumerism. In the case of media, a good example is how platforms like Facebook refuse to force advertisers to be truthful in political ads, arguing that that it’s up to individuals to decide what is true or not. In the absence of government rules or regulation, Facebook is free to develop policies that best suit its business model. It is necessary to challenge how education these days abounds with the “consumer” metaphor, reducing the classroom and university to a shopping mall of skillsets for the global economy. This affects education through privatization (corporate sponsorship and funding; monopolization by multinational textbook companies; defunding of schools and community arts spaces; “widgitization” of curricula designed around testing); promotion of knowledge economy skills; fear of politics (climate change is politicized as anti-business rather than scientific fact and therefore may be seen as off limits); disciplinary siloing by emphasizing STEM and defunding arts, humanities, and social sciences; and the digital divide (moving education online without support for low-income families to provide access and tools). These arrangements reinforce threats to human rights and the environment. First, because the integration of technology into education, work, and life under the current structure of the word system is not possible “without newer, bigger more efficient, and more ruthless factories like Foxconn” in China (Qiu, 2016, p.  12). Second, education perpetuates the environmental crisis, because “As a mode of production and a social system . . . capitalism requires people to be destructive of nature” (Dawson, 2016, p.  42, emphasis original). To paraphrase eco-educator and theorist David Orr (1994), most education, though well-intended, ends up training people to vandalize the planet. A movement to mitigate the ecological crisis “must be framed in terms of a refusal to turn land, people, flora, and fauna into commodities” (Dawson, 2016, p. 86). This is why ecomedia literacy has to move beyond functionalist media literacy to systemic analytical approaches. Eco-ethics is integral to teaching ecomedia because we are seeking to understand how to live and act in the world. An ecological intervention is normative: It’s a call to empower students to address environmental ­challenges that will greatly impact their future. Just as environmental ideology is always present and taken-for-granted, as soon as we participate in analytical activities we are already engaging in ethical choices: to “know” or “assess” or “consider” is not possible without participating in a relationship with what is being known, assessed or considered. These do not precede acting: they are already actions, and an ethical dimension is therefore present from the start. (Curry, 2006, p. 139, emphasis original) Ecomedia literacy means that from the get-go, it’s not just about individual interpretations of media (as is the goal with constructivist approaches). Rather,

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“Ecology, as the study of the connectedness of everything, and ecomedia, as the study of the intermediation of everything, cannot rest on individuality but must work on the level of community, communication and communion” (Cubitt, 2016, p. 166). The aim is developing ecomedia thinking and productive modes of eco-citizenship into a larger collective project (Brereton, 2018). In taking into consideration the eco-ethical response to the study of ecomedia, Curry (2006) offers a proposal for green citizenship that has three characteristics. First, it’s consequentialist, meaning that we must make a positive difference to counteract the negative consequences that media have on the environment. Second, it must be deontological, meaning that there needs to be some system of rules in place based on rewards and punishment that encourages behavioral change (such as government regulation and subsidies). And third, it should be grounded in ecological virtue, meaning that ecological values are what matter most. So, beyond critique and analysis, media and communications students can engage in eco-citizenship to get ecocentric ideas and values into the “collective mindstream” of the NGOs, think-tanks, quasi-academic institutes and the media, which tend to determine what becomes “issues.” . . . The work that needs doing also includes patient and dogged efforts to influence institutions—i.e. all the media, schools and universities—that in turn tend to control how people perceive natural goods. (Curry, 2006, p. 115) Cubitt (2016, p. 167) notes that when ethics transition from “what I should do” to “what should we do” (or “how should we live”), it becomes politics. In other words, we shift from a “what-is” to “what-should” perspective of ecology and media (see Beach et al., 2017, p. 118) because if addressing and solving the planetary ecological crisis is possible, we should do it. To paraphrase the Pirkei Avot or Ethics of Our Fathers, “It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (quoted in Strate, 2019). If the neoliberal prerogative is to reduce participation in the world to one governed by markets and consumer behavior, ecomedia literacy responds by advocating for eco-citizenship as a core value. The spectrum of eco-citizenship ranges from asserting for rules and regulation for green governance from the local to the global to advocating for change in the private sector. It means formulating and advocating for policies to mitigate the environmental impacts of our economies. This is important because states can intervene in the following ways: Hundreds of accords aim to protect workers, waterways, plant and animal life, fisheries, archaeological and other cultural-environmental ­heritage, and atmospheric and found air quality throughout the regulation of waste management, trans-border flows of heavy metals, airborne and waterborne

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pollutants, forests, nuclear energy, and exported hazardous waste. Wellorganized local institutions have greater success in managing resources when external laws provide for their autonomy (involving users in their choice of regulations so that these are perceived to be legitimate) and political-economic arrangements encourage organizational relationships between enterprises and communities that share ecosystems. (Miller, 2018, p. 81) In the case of our gadgets, an analysis of these policies and practices shifts the scholastic perspective to the reality of the eco-crisis and redirects analysis first to the ecological context of the cell phone: the production chain, life-cycle energy requirements, raw materials (source functions), environmental outputs (sink functions), or post-consumer existence (spent batteries, disposal, recycling, and so on). (Maxwell & Miller, 2008, p. 346) Advocating for taxes and government regulation can drive companies to renewable energy and extended producer responsibility. Civic participation, whether in the form of demonstrations, strikes, occupations, boycotts, petitions, voting, etc., is an important aspect of eco-citizenship. We’ve already discussed the dangers of the climate crisis for the majority of the planet, but for anyone invested in Western values and the global economic system, the climate crisis is also an existential crisis. According to Clark (2015, p. 10), the ecological emergency forces many to confront their assumptions about the design of the global system and the investment in a Western lifestyle that entangles the political systems of the most powerful countries in the world. Those defending the status quo will have to reconceptualize fundamental characteristics of the system, such as the fuel efficiency of cars and heating systems; population and sexual habits; definition of good life; the nature of money and exchange; aspirations of the poor; national sovereignty; and energy demands of infrastructure (including internet and air travel). Ultimately, it needs to be asked (and answered honestly) if sustaining the consumer economy and sustaining the environment are compatible goals. Vandana Shiva (2018) expands eco-citizenship to Earth citizenship. She suggests adopting the philosophy of vasudhaiva kutumbakam, Sanskrit for “the world is one family”: It is based on the hope that proceeds from our potential to transcend separation and division—to think, act, and live as one humanity on one planet with full consciousness of our interconnectedness, as well as our responsibility to participate actively, every day, every moment of our lives, to protect and rejuvenate the natural and social web of life. (xii)

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Binding us is what Shiva refers pithily to as “oneness” (as opposed to the 1%): Oneness is the very source of our existence, our interconnectedness with the universe, with all beings (including human beings), and with our local communities. Oneness is woven through our diverse living intelligence and creativity. It represents the confluence of our rich and vibrant adversities— biodiversity, cultural diversity and knowledge diversity. (p. 3) It’s a shift from the power of others to empowering others. Tech industries are simultaneously some of the most powerful and richest in the world, and mostly unregulated. When it comes to the environmental crisis, everyday individual choices matter, but reforming the system and involving the government is just as significant. The climate crisis is too big to be solved by individuals alone.

The Planetary Mediapolis Roger Silverstone’s (2007) exploration of media ethics bridges what he calls the “mediapolis” with cosmopolitan ethics based on Beck’s notion that we are living in one cosmos, but in different cities and territories that require reflexivity and tolerance. This ties into Ursala Heise’s (2008) “eco-cosmopolitanism.” Instead of approaching environmental problems from the local versus global framework, local problems are contextualized within regional ecosystems to a broader, imagined planetary community with a shared concept of an ecological common good. Silverstone is concerned with the dual nature of screens to simultaneously distance and bring close different realities: “In today’s world there is no out there” (Silverstone, 2007, p. 17). Accordingly, media create a space of appearance and existence, providing a “frameworld”: “The screen is an interface, a frame, a window, a mask and a barrier” (p. 20). Consider the case of 9/11 and the wars in their aftermath. Who appears? Who has voice? How are different actors represented? Harking to C. Wright Mills (1963), who argued that those who control symbols, control the world, Silverstone asserts that media promote an implicit moral order, centered by globalization as a social, political, and cultural phenomena. Media bring us close to strangers while simultaneously distancing us. This otherness/sameness is characterized by a phenomenology of material proximity/distance, but always maintains a symbolic connection. We may not be physically mobile across the world, but we are symbolically mobile. However, screens are contested spaces and ultimately media ethics is about how sameness and difference are represented: Media are technologies that both connect and disconnect, but above all they act as bridges or doors, both open and closed, to the world.

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If there is to be a fair and just action in that world, as there must be, then what those who act, see and hear as electronically contrived, as well as what they learn from direct immediacy of social experience, are its preconditions. (Silverstone, 2007 p. 18) This requires a kind of boundary work that explores these borders, including between national and linguistic cultures; difference and sameness; symbolic and real; and public and private. In this realm ecomedia boundaries are between Nature and nature; human and animal; domestic and wild; city and rural; male and female; natural and scientific; anthropocentric and ecocentric; domination and cooperation; control and relationships; bioregional and cosmopolitan; humans/nature and technology. Unlike the idealized public sphere of printed text, the mediapolis is dominated by images, which have the power to produce meaning all at once and instantaneously. But as a space of appearance, what are the parameters of the mediapolis? As noted by Mirzoeff (2016, p. 11), “A visual culture is the relation between what is visible and the names that we give to what is seen. It also involves what is invisible or kept out of sight.” One issue with conveying the ecological crisis is the problem of scale and future effects. If people are not experiencing the climate emergency directly, they might fear the loss of or challenges to the status quo to be more threatening. Thus, remote sensing strategies, such as computer-aided visualization, emotionally impactful narratives (fiction and nonfiction), art, photography, and journalism are all ways to help extend empathy, especially to the Other. This is particularly important given that environmental impacts disproportionately impact populations that may not be like “us.” Issues around the mediation of migration or war in regions remote to the centers of power are relevant, given that climate impacts are happening in the most vulnerable parts of the world. As advocated by critical media literacy, multicultural perspectives are essential. It also demands critical solidarity, which “involves recognizing the interconnections between people and information as well as demonstrating empathy to be in solidarity with those marginalized or oppressed by these connections” (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 104). This is especially true with less-visible frontline communities confronting extraction and mega-projects. Ultimately, media ethicists recognize there are multiple “interhuman essences” (Elliot, 2009) and shared goals that are common throughout the world that can be incorporated as part of a robust ecomedia ethics of solidarity. They are honoring the sacredness of all life, gender and racial equity, accountability, social responsibility, truthfulness, free expression, community, respect, reciprocity, spirituality, authenticity, human rights, integrity, nonviolence, dignity, and implementation systems (ombudspersons, codes of conduct, news councils, etc.) to enforce these values.

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References Alakeson, V. (2003). Making the network: Sustainable development in a digital society. Xeris Pub. Beach, R., Share, J., & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching climate change to adolescents. Routledge. Beck, U. (2008). Ecological enlightenment: Essays on the politics of the risk society. Humanity Books. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. Yale University Press. Berg, P. (2016). Deep Water Horizon [Film]. Summit Entertainment. Bowers, C. A. (2012). The way forward: Educational reforms that focus on the cultural commons and the linguistic roots of the ecological/cultural crises. Eco-Justice Press. Brandenburg, H., & Orzel, M. (2016). When Two Worlds Collide [Film]. Netflix. Brereton, P. (2016). Environmental ethics and film. Routledge. Brereton, P. (2018). Environmental literacy and new digital audiences. Routledge. Christians, C. G., & Cooper, T. W. (2009). The Search for universals. In C. G. Christians & L. Wilkins (Eds.), The handbook of mass media ethics (pp. 71–83). Routledge. Citton, Y. (2017). The ecology of attention. Polity Press. Clark, T. (2015). Ecocriticism on the edge: The Anthropocene as a threshold concept. Bloomsbury. Cook, J. (2016, June 21). A brief history of fossil-fuelled climate denial. The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/a-brief-history-of-fossil-fuelled-climate-denial-61273 Corbett, J. B. (2006). Communicating nature: How we create and understand environmental messages. Island Press. Cubitt, S. (2014). Decolonizing ecomedia. Cultural Politics, 10(3), 275–286. https://doi. org/10.1215/17432197-2795669 Cubitt, S. (2016). Ecologies of fabrication. In J. Walker & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 163–179). Routledge. Curry, P. (2006). Ecological Ethics: An Introduction. Polity Press. Daggett, C. (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil fuels and authoritarian desire. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47(1), 25–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817 Dawson, A. (2016). Extinction: A radical history. OR Books. Dryzek, J. S. (2005). The politics of the earth: Environmental discourses. Oxford University Press. Elliot, D. (2009). Essential shared values and 21st century journalism. In L. Wilkins  & C. G. Christians (Eds.), The handbook of mass media ethics (pp. 71–83). Routledge. Gaard, G. (2015). Ecofeminism and climate change. Women’s Studies International Forum, 49, 20–33. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2015.02.004 Gabrys, J. (2015). Powering the digital: From energy ecologies to electronic environmentalism. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg, & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp. 3–18). Routledge. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Duke University Press. Hayward, S. (2020). Film ecology. Routledge. Heise, U. K. (2008). Sense of place and sense of planet: The environmental imagination of the global. Oxford University Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education. Brill Sense.

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Klein, N. (2015). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Allen Lane. Leopold, A. (1987). A sand county almanac, and sketches here and there. Oxford University Press. Lewis, J. (2017). Digital desires: Mediated consumerism and climate crisis. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 57–69). Palgrave Macmillan. López, A. (2014). Greening media education: Bridging media literacy with green cultural citizenship. Peter Lang. “Man Camps” endangers indigenous women and children. (2019, April 14). First Peoples Worldwide. www.colorado.edu/program/fpw/2020/01/29/violence-extractiveindustry-man-camps-endangers-indigenous-women-and-children Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2015). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities (2nd ed.). Routledge. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2008). Ecological ethics and media technology. International Journal of Communication, 2(0), 23. Maxwell, R.,  & Miller, T. (2009). Talking rubbish: Green citizenship, media and the environment. In J. Lewis & T. Boyce (Eds.), Climate change and the media (pp. 17–27). Peter Lang Publishing. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. Oxford University Press. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2017). Digital technology and the environment: Challenges for green citizenship and environmental organizations. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 41–55). Palgrave Macmillan. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2020). How green is your smartphone? Polity Press. Miller, G. (2015). Mad Max: Fury Road. Warner Bros. Pictures. Miller, T. (2007). Cultural citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, consumerism, and television in a neoliberal age. Temple University Press. Miller, T. (2018). Greenwashing culture. Routledge. Mills, C. W. (1963). The cultural apparatus. Oxford University Press. Mirzoeff, N. (2016). How to see the world: An introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies, and more. Basic Books. Murphy, P. D. (2017). The media commons: Globalization and environmental discourses. University of Illinois Press. Nayar, P. K. (2015). The postcolonial studies dictionary. Wiley. Noble, D. F. (1995). Progress without people: New technology, unemployment, and the message of resistance. Between the Lines. Orr, D. W. (1994). Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Island Press. Our Impact. (n.d.). Fairphone. www.fairphone.com/en/impact/ Qiu, J. L. (2016). Goodbye iSlave: A manifesto for digital abolition. University of Illinois Press. Read, R. J., & Alexander, S. (2019). This civilisation is finished: Conversations on the end of empire—and what lies beyond. Simplicity Institute Publishing. Rushkoff, D. (2019). Team human. W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. Sale, K. (1995, June  5). Lessons from the Luddites: Setting limits on technology. The Nation. Sale, K. (1996). Rebels against the future: The Luddites and their war on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the computer age. Addison-Wesley Pub. Co. Shiva, K., & Shiva, V. (2018). Oneness VS. The 1%. Women Unlimited.

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Silverstone, R. (2007). Media and morality: On the rise of the mediapolis. Polity Press. Stolz, S., & Jungblut, S.-I. (2019, August). Our digital carbon footprint: What’s the ­environmental impact of the online world? RESET. https://en.reset.org/knowledge/our-digital-carbonfootprint-whats-the-environmental-impact-online-world-12302019 Strate, L. (2019). Addressing media ecology ethics. Media Ethics Magazine, 31(1). www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/213-fall-2019/ 3999274-addressing-media-ecology-ethics Sze, J. (2020). Environmental justice in a moment of danger. University of California Press. Walljasper, J. (2010). All that we share: How to save the economy, the environment, the Internet, democracy, our communities, and everything else that belongs to all of us. New Press. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

3 DISTURBING THE ECOMEDIASYSTEM Ecomedia Objects

A fundamental ecocritical critique of Western epistemology is that at the root of our ecological crisis is Modernity’s mechanistic instrumentalization of the world in which Earth and its inhabitants are quantified, exploited, and organized into hierarchies of power. Media educators tend to take for granted the assumption of technological progress at the heart of mechanism. As we saw with the visual metaphor of the iceberg model of systems thinking, media literacy tends to reduce the unit of analysis to messages by focusing on texts that are isolated from deeper systems of production. This book has been arguing that using ecological metaphors to explore media can help students practice seeing the world as relationships, interconnections, and systems. This chapter focuses on the use of new metaphors for media analysis—ecomedia objects, ecomediasystem, and ecomediasphere—in the belief that they will enable us to see patterns that encompass broader issues troubling the world, such as economics, global systems, and environmental challenges, to go beyond superficial analysis to deeper synthesis. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a conceptual framework, design rationale, and analytical heuristic for teaching ecomedia. In the first section, I explore how mechanistic theories of communication constrain ecological thinking. I then propose an alternative approach designed to afford ecological insight. The second section explores the concept of ecomedia objects. Next, I examine the use and abuse of the media ecosystem and media ecology metaphors and propose an alternative heuristic, ecomediasystem. By understanding the complexity and diversity of perspectives on ­communication—and the history of the concept—ecomedia teachers can b­ etter situate and orient their practices. Communication is not merely the sending and receiving of messages that contain information; it is a concept constructed through language and is situational in terms of meaning, practice, and discipline.

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Whether teaching ecomedia is based on reflective practices (such as decoding or deconstructing media messages around issues of content, representation, and ideology) or producing media content (to learn how to better develop communication skills and mastering media grammars), it is not only necessary to examine what texts communicate content-wise, but also how they communicate in terms of form, medium, and systems.1

Ecologies of Communication, Communication as Disturbance The art historian E.H. Gombrich observed that the relationship between society and images can be thought of as a kind of ecological system, within which Western culture has a particular “ecological niche” that favors visual communication over oral (see Barnes, 2012). Since Modernity, Western society has favored technologies of realism (linear perspective, photography, film, virtual reality). Indeed, “Ever since the Enlightenment, this combination of visual aesthetics and epistemology has been activated and inscribed within landscape painting, photography, and more recently digital and even satellite images” (Brereton, 2018, p. 43). But cultures interpret their environment differently in art. Some have developed more abstract and symbolic forms of representation such as Arabic culture or represent dreamtime (First Australians). The Inka mapped their constellations based on the dark space behind the stars. Asian artists balanced the background and foreground equally, decentering subjects and objects. Indigenous cultures have their cosmovisions that are as diverse as language itself (as explored in the concept of Davis’ (2009) “ethnosphere”). Materialities vary as well. For example, why are Diné (Navajo) sand painting or Tibetan sand mandalas only meant to be temporary? How do symbols and form in those images reflect the cultures that produced them? As Innis (1999) observed, different media produce different biases of time or space. John Fraim (2015, p. 118) suggests, for example, that broadcast media is a particularly Western mode of communication: The position of Western culture as “gift giver” and non-Western culture as “gift receiver” without being allowed to reciprocate could be the hidden basis for the growing tension between cultures. Here Western culture plays the role of producer and exporter, the broadcaster of “hot” one way media, or, the “gift” giver. And, non-Western culture plays the part of consumer and importer, the audience for the one way messages from the West, the gift receiver with no possibility of reciprocation. As such, it’s important to recognize how our communication models ­reinforce particular ways of thinking and perceiving that afford and constrain ­ecological ­perception. The following sections focus on the particular niche the

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Euro-American communication model occupies, and then explore ways of applying an ecomedia approach to communication that can help acclimate students to ecological thinking.

Mechanical Communication Communication is often defined as the act of sending and receiving messages or the exchange of information. But communication is not a static term nor simplistic; it can be understood as a culturally situated concept that has evolved over time, especially as it corresponds to the development of media technology and prevailing views of media’s societal effects in the past 200 years. At different points in time, diverse models of communication have evolved to reflect the dominant media landscape, ranging from one-way models of communication based on traditional broadcast or print media (one-to-many), to the interactive and multimodal characteristics of digital media, to mobile media (many-to-many, many-to-few, and few-to-few). It is further complicated by how communication can be differentiated as either face-to-face, mediated, or extended, and by medium (such as the way a song communicates differently than a photograph, or a newspaper differently than a painting). Historically, media studies has been mainly concerned with electronic media, visual media, and print communication. Joshua Meyrowitz (1998) identified three dimensions of communication that permeate media research and media literacy—content elements (representation, ideas, topics, ideology, etc.), grammar variables (media languages specific to medium, such as film/TV, print, photography, radio, comics), and medium environments (sensory experience on the individual or societal level). Historically, media literacy practices have mostly focused on content elements. The reason for this is the evolution and legacy of communication theory, film studies, and media studies. For this reason, it is useful to closely examine the focus of much communication theory, the “thing” that is being communicated—messages and information. Most common definitions of communication include either the concept of a “message” that is sent and received or “information” that is transacted. While the concept of a message might seem self-evident, it is a metaphor that has different meanings according to usage and context. A message can be a literal text (such as a note posted on a door, text message, or a voicemail), or something implied, such as conveying something with body language, tone of voice, gestures, or emoticons. “Message” is a kind of metaphor that neurolinguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) identified as a “container metaphor,” which means that in everyday language, we think of messages as containers of ideas or information. For example, when we say, “I’m trying to send you a message” or “she is not getting the message,” we imply that the message is something that moves through space from one person to another, and that the message itself contains information that can be unpacked as if words are boxes full of meaning.

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Everyday usage of the message metaphor reinforces the belief that messages are vessels of ideas or information, and this has been reflected in major communication theories taught in introductory mass media and communications classes, such as the Shannon–Weaver model, which had tremendous impact on media and communication studies in the 20th century. According to the Shannon–Weaver model, which was developed to improve telephone engineering, a message is coded and then transmitted from sender to receiver on a linear pathway through a channel, encountering noise along the way that could impact the ability of the message to be received clearly. Noise in this sense is literally interference, such as static, that makes it difficult to receive a completed message. Successful communication was thought of purely on technical terms, and ­communication failure was seen as rare and a technical problem. Meaning was seen as free of distortion, context, and materiality, and thus fully conveyable (like something moving along a conveyor belt). Early media effects theories also drew upon container metaphors. For example, the hypodermic needle theory (also called magic bullet or uniform influences theory) popularized in the 1930s by behaviorists is a container metaphor that implies mass media communicates uniformly with low feedback. The belief was that media messages (including propaganda) could “shoot” or “inject” people with beliefs or ideology. In current media ­literacy practice, this assumption tends to align with protectionist media literacy proponents that view media as harmful, and therefore calls for some kind of protective remedy or “inoculation” against media effects (such as propaganda, violence, or sex). Historically, the message-as-container metaphor is also linked with the transmission model of communication. According to James Carey (2009), the transmission model is grounded in a 19th-century conception of communication in which messages were transported through space. Before the telegraph, communication was divided between forms of symbolic communication (language, text) and physical communication afforded by travel (roads, boats, trains, etc.). The invention of the telegraph led to the conflation of these two meanings so that symbolic communication was viewed as something that moved through space (despite the fact that the telegraph converged space and time because electricity travels at the speed of light). According to Carey, terms that associate communication with transmission include “transmitting,” “imparting,” “sending,” and “giving information to others.” I view these as bound up with a more mechanistic view of communication, because communication is reified as a thing that is sent between people who are like machines that decode the messages. Alternatively, Carey proposed a more interactive model of communication based on a ritual definition in which reality is constantly produced, maintained, and updated in time as opposed to across space. Here he tied communication to “sharing,” “participation,” “association,” “fellowship,” and “the possession of a common faith,” rooted in words that derive from similar linguistic origins, such as “commonness,” “communion,” and “community.” The meaning of communication

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from 15th-century usage was “to make common.” This would tie communication to a commons, which is bound to culture and place. Communication-astransmission loses the sense of sharing attributed to original usage. In addition, the ritual framework situates communication as taking place within the context of particular social practices and technological environments, such as the ecological niche of visual culture that Gombrich speaks of. The difference between transmission and ritual concepts of communication is not limited to media but also corresponds with teaching methods. A  traditional classroom environment where the instructor lectures to students with little interaction is a small-scale form of transmission-based communication. Interactive and dialogical approaches to teaching are in alignment with ritual and organic forms of communication. Stuart Hall’s (2001) model of encoding/decoding recognizes that communication is inseparable from social, economic, and political structures. According to Hall, when communication takes place, meaning is socially reproduced when it is coded and decoded; but senders and receivers can be positioned differently and may or may not accept or agree on the same codes. A communicator will encode a media text with a certain intended outcome, but the receiver could respond (“read”) in three different ways: A preferred reading that agrees with and shares the dominant codes; a negotiated response in which the codes are not entirely agreed upon or clearly understood; or an oppositional reading in which the codes are understood but are contested. This model entails a semiotic approach to analysis that involves analyzing how communication is coded, not just in terms of language but also technically. For example, a live TV news bulletin does not just communicate with information, but also with visual and technical cues that indicate “this is news” (professionally dressed presenters, discursive style, technology in the studio, onscreen text, colors, lighting, etc.). Thus, an encoding/decoding approach would not just study the information component of news, but also take into consideration the social practices and semiotic conventions used to produce news. Cultural studies has incorporated this approach into the circuit of culture model of communication in which an object (like a technological gadget or media text) is examined from multiple dimensions that feedback on themselves. From this theory, communication is seen as a highly complex, iterative process that is constantly negotiated between individuals, institutions (government and private), society, and culture.

Organic Communication Rather than a mechanical theory of communication, such as the transmission model, Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) proposed the theory that communication is inherently dialogic, occurring as part of a chain of “utterances” that constantly reference other utterances. An obvious example of this is the practice of intertextuality in remix and meme culture that has become part of the vernacular of visual communication in social media. This can be clearly demonstrated through

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any meme inspired by a common reference image from the news or popular culture that then gets repurposed and retranslated for different audiences and contexts. For instance, the green Pepe the Frog character, originally drawn by Matt Furie in 2008, was initially an innocuous meme that circulated on MySpace and 4Chan, but later was appropriated by white nationalists to become a symbol of the so-called Alt-Right. Pepe the Frog has taken on new meanings in new contexts, despite the beliefs and wishes of its creator. Furie even went as far as to make a comic in which he symbolically kills Pepe the Frog so as to distance himself from right-wing memes. This demonstrates how all texts are essentially “intertexts”; that is, they inevitably work through and against each other. Texts only exist in the context of other texts, and are always “becoming” (Gray, 2006). This is best exemplified by the image of Earth from outer space, which can take on different meanings in different contexts. It’s always in reference to a particular understanding of technology (the ability to photograph Earth from outside of Earth and all that it implies) and prevailing attitudes about Earth as a planet, but can be deployed for different purposes, whether in the service of ecological consciousness or corporate globalization (i.e., it’s used on credit cards, product advertising, environmentalist strategic communication, corporate reports, etc.). As we’ll see in the discussion of globes and spheres, it can adversely shape our views of the living planet. Dialogic approaches of communication also correspond with non-Western perspectives on communication ethics. A  growing body of scholarship from Africa, Asia, and Latin America recognizes the importance of the right to be heard, the practice of listening, the role of meaning construction as a communal act, the social nature of language and identity, and the role of communication in the encounter with the Other. Non-Western approaches to communication highlight the needs of minority communities to be heard and recognize that communication is inherently linked to the interdependence of people across ­cultures. Human rights are fundamentally grounded in the equality of communication. Finally, many indigenous and ancient cultures view communication as “alive,” and not inert as mechanistic communications models suggest. This view is reflected in the Buddhist precept that one should refrain from harmful speech in order to avoid the repercussions that speech acts can evoke. Likewise, empathy and love are aspects of communication that are ignored by Western models. Etienne Wenger (1998) proposed that communication is situated through the interaction of “boundary objects” within social contexts. Boundary objects have mutually agreed upon properties, such as a passport, but will have different meanings according to their perceived value in a particular context. A  passport has different significance to the aspiring citizen wishing to claim one, a government official processing an application, a current passport holder, or immigration official inspecting it. In this sense, a meme is also a boundary object, as the case of Pepe the Frog demonstrates: As the original visual object circulates, it takes on new contexts of meanings.

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In another example, in 2006, GM/Apprentice launched a Chevy Tahoe viral media campaign that allowed users to remix a TV spot on the web. But in the hands of environmental activists, culture jammers, and cultural hackers, ads were remixed to become polemical tools to protest the ecological cost of SUVs. Users produced hilarious and critical remixes that undermined the legitimacy of the SUV ad campaign (Clark, 2016). The popular film Avatar (Cameron, 2009) was also remixed variously to make different points about ecology or cultural appropriation (discussed later). In each case, exploring media objects as parts of systems of meaning and practice can encourage systems thinking. From the point of view of intertextuality, media objects cannot exist in isolation of its relations—the interconnected elements help us understand it, such as genre, language, and shared codes. In this sense, the media object is “becoming” with its site-specific characteristics taking form when it couples with its media environment. Cox and Pezzullo (2017) propose that environmental communication is a form of “symbolic action” in which the media object (in the form of a text) not only says something but does something as well. This aligns with ecocinema scholars like Ivakhiv (2013) who prefer to examine not what a media text is, but what it does. Carey (2009) proposed that any media artifact is of and for something. He gives the example of an architectural blueprint, which is a drawing of a house—a literal map of the house. But is also for building the house. It has an intention to do something. Likewise, media are maps of and for ecocultures.

Communication Autopoiesis Just as “message” has variable meanings, the concept of “information” is widely interpreted according to discipline (i.e., information literacy, information science, information theory, information society, physics, semiotics, etc.), ranging from the concept of fact, to information systems, to sensory input. Greggory Bateson (2000), who was an early theorist of cybernetics, proposed information to be defined as a “difference that makes a difference.” Cybernetics was initially developed by the military to improve bombing accuracy but has been adapted for systems theory to describe systems of feedback. Rather than be a container of facts, Bateson envisioned information as dynamically shifting according to the emerging new information in an iterative circuit that extends beyond our bodies. Cybernetics, which derives from Greek (kubernētēs) for helmsman or pilot, can be applied in the example of rowing a canoe as a circuit of communication. When we aim the canoe in the direction we wish to travel, the effort to paddle is an intention to communicate instructions to the canoe. But we must constantly adjust and shift according to prevailing conditions (water current, wind, state of the body, weight, etc.). Each effort to paddle is a difference that makes a difference to the circuit of the actor (pilot), tool (paddle and canoe), and the environment (water, wind, etc.). Using a similar analogy, McLuhan (2002) described that

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in the act of rowing, we become a servomechanism of the canoe, serving the object as an extension of our nervous system. In the 1970s, Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela (1998), influenced by cybernetics and systems thinking, developed a theory of cognitive biology and reformulated the concept of cell structure through their theory of autopoiesis—literally, “self-making.” Rather than the mechanistic view that cells are a bunch of separate components, they recognized that cells (and life in general) are self-making systems (demonstrated by the simple fact that they can regrow and heal after an injury). Included in this is the concept of structural coupling, which describes the process of organisms and environment adjusting to each other. An ecomedia example is virtual reality (VR), which is designed to emulate our cognition by creating the illusion of 3D space. When we experience VR, our senses try to adjust to find a kind of structural unity. The experience of motion sickness demonstrates the failure of structural unity, but momentarily one can experience iterative feedback between the sensory and mediated when using VR. Like medium environments (such as TV or handheld screen technology), any physical environment affords and constrains cognition. This is the basis of Gibson and Pick’s (2003, pp. 15–16) ecological theory of learning: An “affordance” refers to the fit between an animal’s capabilities and the environmental supports and opportunities (both good and bad) that make possible a given activity. . . . To perceive an affordance is to detect an environmental property that provides opportunity for action and that is specified in an ambient array of energy available to the perceiver. As it relates to ecomedia literacy, this is explored more extensively in Chapter 6’s discussion of medium properties and media affect. Medium environment and communication as an inseparable system is an example of Bateson’s (2000) concept of cognition as a “thinking system,” when our cognition extends into the environment. For ecomedia literacy, we want to understand how this process works when that environment is conceived of as an ecomediasystem (discussed later). Yunkaporta (2019, p. 115) offers an indigenous perspective on this process, At the simplest level, when we hold a tool our brain recognizes it as an extension of our arm. It isn’t really part of our body, but it becomes an embodied extension of our neural processes. At more complex levels, the meaning we make with places, people and objects and the way we organize interactions between these things becomes an extension of our thinking. Through meaning-making we effectively store information outside our brains, in objects, places and relationships with others.

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From the media ecology perspective (i.e., technological determinism), communication technologies dominate particular eras and cultures (such as alphabetic writing, printing press, linear perspective, electronic mass media, the internet, or gadgets) through prevailing affordances and constraints. Notes Yunkaporta (2019, p. 172), Oral cultures are known as high-context or field-dependent reasoning cultures. They have no isolated variables: all thinking is dependent on the field or context . . . Print-based cultures, by contrast are low-context or field independent reasoning cultures. This is because they remain independent of the field or context, focusing on ideas and objects in isolation. Thus, certain communication methods are seen to correlate and favor particular cognitive functions (like print with the left brain hemisphere and images with the right brain hemisphere) and cultural dispositions. Debray’s (1996) discussion of the mediasphere refers to how dominant media produce a “cosmopedagogy” that produces particular experience of space and time (discussed later). Naughton (2006) suggests that a medium (like the gel medium used in petri dishes) grows culture, and that medium is the “food” that makes communication and culture possible. Meyrowitz (1998) proposed that communication theory move from the study of messages to communication technologies as social environments. This approach is largely influenced by the media ecology movement that emerged from the work of Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman. From this perspective, how technology shapes communication is much more important than the actual content of communication. For example, with the telephone, the actual content of phone calls is not significant, but rather it’s how the use of the phone changes society. In terms of media literacy education, this is a very underdeveloped area of practice and pedagogy. Some media literacy approaches treat content (such as violence) as uniform, regardless of whether it is in film, comics, or video games, disregarding how the medium shapes the content. A medium can make something more or less visceral (such as the case of violence) and impacts verisimilitude (i.e., compare VR, cinéma vérité, or comics in how something is represented). Meyrowitz suggested that in order to explore the importance of medium, students should compare communication from different media environments, such as email messages versus phone calls, debates on TV versus radio, news on TV versus newspapers, and so on. Combining the concepts of information as a difference that makes a difference, the chain of utterances, intertextuality, and boundary objects, communication can be thought of as a “disturbance,” which is what ecologists call a temporal change in the environment that alters an ecosystem. New ecomedia objects can “disturb” the ecomediasystem and change it (Silicon Valley jargon refers to this

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as “disruption”). For example, the emergence of cinema is unique in history, so how does film alter or transform the world? How the various feedback mechanisms of the ecosystem change as a response to a disturbance is called succession. Niklas Luhmann (2000) uses the concept of succession in mass media in combination with the concept of autopoiesis and systems theory. Luhmann’s innovation is to apply autopoiesis to social systems and to see communication as a system. He views society as one large organism with eight subsystems, mass media being one of them. Each of these subsystems selforganizes and defines boundaries that distinguish themselves from other systems. They generate their own reality, so to speak, by processing information binaries as yes or no. In the case of justice system, someone is guilty or not guilty; in the education subsystem, it’s pass or fail; and for business, it’s profit or loss. The mass media subsystem filters by whether something is information or not information. Here I think he errs because he assumes mass media means news. This does not necessarily account for entertainment media. In terms of its self-reflective reality defining properties, Luhmann believes mass media constantly processes the world into its coding (schemas), drawing from the noise generated from other systems and then self-determining what is relevant for its own reality construction. Examined more closely, information is really “novelty” that disturbs the system. Luhmann can be critiqued for using an outdated model (mass media) that differentiates between producers and audiences and his anthropocentric concept of communication, but the idea of filters and autopoiesis gives us some insight into how communications systems self-modulate and could be applied when thinking about the boundaries of ecomediasystems. Unfortunately, in this model the physical environment does not have its own subsystem. So, if something is not recognized, can it become information? As discussed in more detail in Chapter 7, one of the main theories of environmental communication, social constructionism, asserts the world is constructed in language, media, and texts. Problems are “not an objective condition of society” independent of what is said about them. We only know of problems through discourses that identify them as problems; it’s through a social process (as opposed to a condition) that agendas are negotiated.

Information Ecologies Nardi and O’Day (2000) theorize that communication is conditioned by information ecosystems that have local social practices, such as libraries, schools, copy centers, or hospitals. Places where media education is practiced, be they school computer labs, university classrooms, youth centers, or alternative media centers, can also be considered information ecologies in which communication is situated and conditioned by social practices. With the prevalence of mobile gadgets in learning spaces and general media use, information ecologies are part of the convergence culture model where electronic media entails increasing interaction,

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participation, affective economics, collective intelligence, and transmedia storytelling (Jenkins, 2006).

Ecomedia Objects According to the iceberg model of systems dynamics, to address the ecological crisis, we need to transition to an ecocentric epistemology that allows us to cultivate knowledge of the world that doesn’t objectify and reify it. The first step is shifting from Western philosophy’s subject–object tradition of examining the “the thing in itself ” to one where “every object and being is defined by its relationships” as “part of networks and only has meaning in relation to its surroundings” (Emmett  & Nye, 2017, p.  9). In the context of media education, this means transitioning from the study of isolated texts to a recursive kind of deconstruction that constantly refers back to the surrounding world, because a text can never be a self-enclosed world. Texts simply can’t talk about what is “outside” them. Yet, they necessarily involve what is “outside” them— even the Matrix depends upon human bodies, software code and gigantic battery-like structures. . . . Deconstruction, in other words, is relentlessly ecological. It keeps on pointing to the garbage dumps of physicality outside the pristine towns of meaning the sign systems try to set up. . . . “There is no outside-text” means there is no “away.” (Morton, 2016, p. 159) Part of Morton’s concept of deconstruction includes mindfulness meditation, which teaches us to also deconstruct our own thought processes. The ecomedia literacy solution proposed here is to reconceive the subject of analysis from an isolated text to an ecomedia object. An ecomedia object is a boundary object: Something that has commonly agreed upon characteristics but its meaning and function changes according to context. For example, everyone agrees that this thing you are reading is a book, yet depending on who handles it, meaning and purpose will vary. The author, editor, postal delivery person, professor, curriculum committee, printer, printshop worker, publisher, warehouse worker, bookstore clerk, recycler, and student will all view and use the object differently. To illustrate this point, the highly problematic South African film, The Gods Must Be Crazy (Uys, 1980), offers an example of a boundary object by showing how a Coca-Cola bottle discarded by an airline pilot into the Kalahari Desert catalyzes changes in a group of San hunter-gatherers. Because they have no context of the outside world, the unfamiliar object takes on new meanings as individuals try to understand how to use it. Due to its uniqueness, the bottle is fetishized and becomes a kind of “original sin” that generates greed and envy, destroying the cooperative dynamic of the tribe. Deeming it an evil object, the lead character, XI, goes on a

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journey to return the item back to where it came from. The reaction to the film by the global audience—it was financially successful but also criticized for its implicit neocolonial racism—demonstrates how multiple meanings can be generated by an ecomedia object: In this case, both as a plot device and also the film itself. Another example is the concept of waste, which is particularly important when considering the political ecology of technology gadgets: Though widely understood as a concept, waste—garbage, rubbish, discards, junk—eludes definition. . . . Engineers define [it] as materials that are discarded from residential and commercial sources . . . or as materials that have ceased to have value to the holder. . . . Anthropologists hold that garbage is factual evidence of a culture. . . . Ecologists claim that there is no waste in nature. . . . [R]efuse workers . . . treat is a value-less, and waste pickers . . . treat it as ore. (Sintana E. Vergara and George Tchobanoglous, quoted in Miller, 2018, pp. 82–83) When it comes to media gadgets, philosopher Don Ihde (2002) notes that all technologies are only what they are in use: They have “multistability.” Anyone familiar with semiotics should understand this implicitly. As is the case of representations, meanings are never fixed, but shaped by systems of representations (Hall et al., 2013). This is equally true with technology and objects. An ecomedia object can be anything that mediates, scaling from micro (text/ gadget) to macro (ICT systems, hyperobjects). The unit of analysis should be one of four categories: (1) representational media text (advertisement, news article, film, TV commercial, website, food packaging, etc.); (2) platform (streaming service, social network, or media organization); (3) gadget (smartphone, tablet, computer, etc.); or (4) hyperobject (an amorphous disbursed phenomenon that behaves like a system, such as the internet, fake news, or media industry). Ecomedia objects are something specific but exist as situated within a broader system of meaning and material condition constructed within a complex system of production. It’s not just what they are, but what they do. Ecomedia objects in the first category (representational media texts) that deal specifically with ecological issues have the dual condition of being “images of ecology” and also being part of an “ecology of images,” i.e., an ecology of meaning systems: “the social and industrial organization of images” and the “ecological arguments to be made about those processes” (Ross, 1994, p. 172). Additionally, ecomedia objects are always embedded in social practice, and therefore should not be viewed in isolation of the context or platform that mediates them. As Buckingham (2019, p. 78, emphasis original) asserts, the advent of social media suggests that we might need to displace the text from its central, privileged position, or at least do more to set the text in

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its wider social context. Our focus should not be so much on media texts as a set of self-contained objects, but rather on their processes of mediation. Ecocinema scholar Nadia Bozak’s (2011) uses the term “resource images,” which are symbolic and discursive resources, but also are in and of themselves ecological resources. For example, iconic images of burning oil refineries from the 1991 Gulf War communicate about human domination/destruction of the environment and the ideology of oil dependence and war. But in order to create, view, and retrieve those images, we require a supply chain that makes image technology possible, a technological infrastructure, and material containing the image itself (newspapers, TVs, computers, etc.). This includes the fact that images are data files that exist on servers, whose storage and use produces CO2. Like gas, water, and electricity, we take for granted how these resource images are likewise piped into our homes. Bozak asks, what would happen if an end of oil affects “not only the functioning of society and culture at large, and on a global level, but also, as a consequence, the way moving images are produced and received?” (p. 2). Labeling something an ecomedia object does not mean reifying it. As Gabrys (2016, pp. 188–189) cautions, “re-thingifying does not simply involve mapping out the static stuff that constitutes any particular media technology, but rather requires attending to the ways in which things attract, infect, and propagate mediated relations, practices, imaginaries, and environments.” As opposed to an isolated text dependent upon individualistic interpretation, ecomedia objects are “organic,” so to speak, because they are alive with potential and meaning; the ecomedia object becomes a node in a rhizomatic network of meanings, relationships, and social practices. Gabrys’ approach to studying gadgets, which is to probe, “what sorts of things are these?” is applicable to the study of ecomedia objects: media are not locatable in a singular device as such, and an exclusively object-based understanding of media may obscure the extended sites in which they operate and circulate. This would be a way of saying that media might of course be approached as extended ecologies, and that what counts as medium should perhaps be a question postponed through an extended approach that asks instead, what are the media relationships in play, how are devices a part of these relationships, but also not all there is, because these devices inevitably unfurl into a wider set of technologies, institutions, relations, effects, and events. This work is part of a larger project . . . which is to think of media in environmental terms: as conducting and generating environments, as processes that influence material conditions, and now as technologies that would apparently bring us into closer contact with environmental issues. (Gabrys, 2015, p. 15)

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Another way of contemplating ecomedia objects is utilizing philosopher Michel Serres’ concept of the “quasi-object,” which is something passed from person-to-person to catalyze collective action. Pierre Lévy (1998) extends the meaning of this when he gives the example of a soccer match to concretize how collective intelligence emerges around the movement of the soccer ball as a quasiobject. The ball triggers different levels of engagement. On the pitch there are players who directly engage it. The stadium’s spectators cannot directly act on the ball but can charge the energetic field of the gamespace and produce affect (as the general debate about the vuvuzelas during the South African World Cup in 2010 testifies). Then there is a global audience with its nervous systems extending into the gamespace via the cameras that capture the action and transmit it through cyberspace, satellite, and broadcast. Once the ball goes into play, it becomes a point of relations, propelling collective intelligence into action, a fulcrum for millions of people to relate to and with each other. The ball becomes an object we collectively think with and respond to in connection with other people. Now, imagine if that kind of shared action revolved around the most important ball of all: Earth. In a way, the photograph of Earth from space was an ecomedia object that did just that. Lévy suggests that cyberspace can also be a kind of object to think with, and that tools and artifacts are not merely efficient things. Technological objects are passed from hand to hand, body to body, like a baton in a relay. They create shared uses, becoming vectors of knowledge, messengers of collective memory, and catalysts of cooperation (Lévy, 1998, p. 165). Returning to the concept of organic communication, representational ecomedia objects are intertextual/intermedial, meaning that they connect and refer to other elements outside of themselves, such as genre, discursive conventions, discursive communities, cultural codes, production systems, etc. In keeping with the ecological principle that everything is connected to everything else, no ecomedia object can be fully understood outside the cultural and political economic context it emerges from.

Media Ecology and Media Ecosystem “Climate change,” “pollution,” “ecosystem,” “ecology,” and “environment” are unstable metaphors, constantly redefined and contested according to the historical moment. To borrow from media studies, metaphors perform an agendasetting function. When it comes to ecological metaphors, they create stories that we live by, framing how to think about the environment, in terms of both problems and solutions (Stibbe, 2015). Metaphors trigger cognitive frames by drawing attention “to particular dimensions or perspectives and they set the boundaries for how we should interpret or perceive what is presented to us” (Hansen, 2015, p. 32).

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Metaphors map how we understand something through a combination of source and target frames. For example, in “nature is a machine,” the source frame is “machine” and the target is “nature,” which sets up environmental policies and problems as a matter of fixing broken parts and places humans in the role of engineers or mechanics. In the phrase “nature is an organism,” “organism” is the source frame and “nature” is the target, which puts humans in the role of healer and nurturer. Likewise, when media as a source frame is applied to “environment,” “ecosystem,” or “ecology,” this sets up an anthropocentric dynamic which reduces these environments to be either exclusively technological or symbolic. In the case of “media ecology,” scholars use the ecology metaphor to describe media technologies as creating medium environments. In a different example, George Gerbner (1998) and Susan Sontag (2002) argue that mass media–produced image environments require a kind of “environmentalism,” thereby inferring that the media environment is visually polluted and requiring intervention by activists, scholars, government regulators, and media educators. Currently, the ecosystem metaphor is often applied to particular gadgets, operating systems, platforms, medium types, and information flows (such as “Facebook ecosystem,” “iPhone ecosystem,” or “news ecosystem”). Ultimately, ecological metaphors are deployed as a sensitizing concept; a ubiquitous and general shorthand for the complexities of the technological, social, and legal environment in which we now communicate. They are united in their belief that in the era of a networked and highly diverse media landscape we can no longer study individual media organizations, texts, and practices in isolation. (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015, pp. 15–16) As it concerns ecomedia literacy, what is common to all of these metaphor uses is that they eschew the materially embedded environmental relationships between ICTs and biotic ecosystems and labor. Media ecology was coined by Neil Postman and media ecosystem by Henry ­Jenkins. Though related, both terms have different situated meanings, but they are related in that ecology and ecosystem both are used to signal a normative ­orientation (for a history of these terms, see Anderson, 2016; Nadler, 2018; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015). As mentioned, ecology and economy derive from the Greek oikos, meaning household. At the time of ecology’s conception in the 19th century, it signified a general belief that the environment was “God’s work,” and God is “economical” (i.e., perfect) in striving for the optimal balance of nature. This belief was also applied to economics and markets. Thus, doctrines of economic growth have religious origins . . . oikonomia, a sphere of worldly arrangements that was to be directed by a physical presence

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on Earth that represented theology’s principle superstition—the deity. God gave Christ “the economy” to manage, so “the economy” indexically ­manifested Christianity. (Miller, 2018, p. 11) After Darwin, the concept of competition and survival of the fittest became part of how ecology was generally conceived. In the case of social Darwinism, the idea that markets and society followed evolutionary law was used to justify colonialism and racism. The view of mass media as an environment originated with Robert E. Park in the 1920s, drawing from concepts like “evolution, growth, decay, and balance between different media types,” to the point that the trope of different media “species” (such as newspapers or radio) competing for survival (and going extinct) persists to this day (Anderson, 2016, p.  414). Ecosystem was coined in 1935 by Alfred Tansley to describe a bounded interdependent environment such as a biome. It was later expanded to the Gaia hypothesis by biologists Lynn Margulis, who describes Earth as a web of interacting ecosystems. But rather than a collection of ecosystems, Gaia is a mega-system that is alive (see Harding, 2006). In the 1930s, ecosystem was adapted by the Chicago School as an analytical framework for sociologists to study urban environments. As distinguished from the Chicago School’s concept of human ecology, in the 1960s McLuhan’s notion of medium as a sensory and cognitive environment became the basis of media ecology. The religious belief embedded in the original perception of ecology (as in “God’s economy”), reemerged in the 1960s and 1970s, when it took on a quasidivine connotation to indicate that there is some kind of ultimate cybernetic balance in nature that is beyond the control of individuals or society (see Nadler, 2018). The religious undertone plays into the neoliberal view that the market’s invisible hand finds appropriate (and just) systemic balance. This is a way for corporations to naturalize themselves, quite literally as natural, through biological metaphors. In advertising, corporations represent themselves as mediators between humans and Nature. In the nomenclature of the business intelligentsia, best represented by the Harvard Business Review, there is an abundance of environmental analogies and biological metaphors. When it comes to the ecosystem metaphor, One can understand the appeal of this ecological model, regardless of how much biological sense it makes. The market understood this way is not the symbolically pitiless storm or inescapable octopus of nineteenth-century labor fiction; instead, it is a manageable, benevolent force of nature. Part of this shift is ideological in that word’s limited, pejorative sense of an illusion that expresses the interests of a ruling class. Business ecologies naturalize a

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social system and make a crisis-prone economy seem as reliable as office air-conditioning. (Leary, 2019, p. 45) Invariably, “system” takes on the characterization of self-organization or self-­ regulation beyond human control. Subsequently, Adam Curtis’s 2011 documentary series, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, heavily criticizes the use of the ecosystem metaphor as part of Silicone Valley’s utopian jargon (the series, available on YouTube, is worth showing students).

The Media Ecosystem When Henry Jenkins’ coined media ecosystem (as opposed to media ecology), his intention was to describe how the spread of digital media demonstrates that we can no longer view individual media in isolation, but must understand that our “media ecosystem” is made up of a variety of dynamic and rapidly changing media forms and genres. . . . [T]oday’s media ecosystem cannot be understood solely in terms of a particular local environments, but rather has to be understood as a set of interconnected, networked, globalizing practices. (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015, p. 16) This approach incorporates hybrid media, convergence culture, remix, and participatory practices that don’t fit neatly within the more traditional media ecology tradition that focuses on mass media. Whereas Postman (2006) was concerned by the impact of TV’s irrational, image-driven content on a print-based culture characterized by rationality, a media ecosystem approach like Jenkins’ problematizes how we conceive medium. After all, these days what constitutes TV or newspapers? But Postman’s concerns extended beyond TV versus print, articulating a broader and very useful understanding of how to conceptualize medium as a media ecosystem. As such, he argued that when new media disrupt an established media ecology, they are holistic in their effects: “Technological change is not additive; it is ecological” (Postman, 1998, para. 16). In 2006, John Naughton (2006) gave a speech to the Associated Press in which he urged newspaper publishers and editors to pay attention to the emerging popularity of blogging and how newspapers would have to better grasp how digital technology would change the media ecosystem that was formerly dominated by legacy media (print, TV, etc.). In the media ecology tradition, Naughton argued that medium was like the material in a petri dish that grows culture; hence, the digital environment is growing a different culture than print. This remains an ongoing discussion in media studies, as we struggle to understand the extent to which the so-called legacy media ecosystems interacts with, are nested in, and

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drive emerging networked or social media. To borrow from the original concept of media as an ecosystem, some frame the problem as how “old growth” media are dealing with the “invasive species” of digital media, and whether or not symbiosis or competition characterizes how the “organisms” of these ecosystems interact. Conceiving digital media as a media ecosystem allows for complexity in ways that other metaphors are limited, such as “information superhighway,” “cyberspace,” or “window,” all of which are Cartesian in some form because of their reduction of digital media to some kind of three-dimensional spatial dimension. Overall, some scholars are interested in the sensory impacts of media ecosystems, such as Carr (2011), on cognition (attention, feelings, thought), while others are concerned with how different media technologies bias society and culture (such as the proliferation of conspiracy theories, fake news, and disinformation). A third approach concerns how different media compete with each other (such as the case of how news is produced and consumed) in a free market, which accommodates a neoliberal view of system dynamics and the market (Nadler, 2018).

The Media Ecology/Ecosystem Metaphor’s Legacy To summarize, the most generic definition of ecology is the interrelationship between the environment and organisms. When it comes to media, Anderson (2016) asserts that over time, two distinct concepts of media ecology emerged. The first is based on the normative concern with overall health and harmony in a broad media ecosystem, achieving some kind of “cybernetic balance,” as reflected in the Postman tradition. It is anthropocentric in the sense that it regards media health as something that can benefit or harm humans, and it is overly deterministic without taking into account social practices. The other is the rhizomatic approach that describes networks and complexity in how information flows. This draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (1987), but was later refined by Fuller (2005). In the rhizomatic version, humans are not at the center, but are a node in symbolic and material networks. Anderson (2016, pp. 416–418) summarizes the differences as such: the older approach to media ecology uses the natural world as a guiding metaphor, sees different forms of media as individual “species,” imagines that the dominant mode of interaction between these species is cybernetic (one of balance), and places the human subject (or species) at the center of this natural ecosystem with the primary question of concern being how that species thrives. We might thus call this an environmental approach. The newest approach to media ecology sees no meaningful distinction between the natural and technological world, imagines different media forms as primarily material in nature and historically contingent, imagines movement in space to be one of diffusion and the exercise of power rather

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than balance, and does not consider the human to be at the center of any sort of media system, natural, material, or otherwise. This is what we might call a rhizomatic approach. While the ecosystem metaphor has been used to both support an organic (and hence beneficial) perspective and justify market competition (as in the idea of survival of the fittest), Maxwell and Miller (2012, p. 93) assert that technological and political processes should not be equated with or translated exactly as natural ecosystems because they behave differently: The subdiscipline of media ecology  .  .  . has done more damage than good with its defining metaphor of media environments, because media ecology’s central metaphor is based on the false premise that social processes mirror ecological ones.  .  .  .  [M]edia technologies have material relationship to the environment, but do not emerge or live like real ecosystems. Park and the Chicago School also distinguished social systems from biological systems, but they still relied on concepts like “physical growth” and “metabolism” to understand urban environments. They “saw media and communication as integral to the functioning of society in organic terms, but as necessarily part of a larger set of questions around cultural and social processes” (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2015, p. 12). Ultimately, Nadler (2018) urges that the term ecosystem be “de-reified” in order to allow for flexibility of use. But it’s also important that it doesn’t serve as a Rorschach test of a particular zeitgeist or political agenda, because normative perspectives applied to these different conceptions of ecosystem can vary. The “healthy ecosystem” norm advocates for some kind of “balance” that is beneficial, but from an ecomedia perspective the target beneficiary has to be situated in eco-ethics. Typically, in the media ecology tradition, humans are centered as the beneficiary, and not the more-than-human world; however, if the ecosystem connotes networks of interdependent relationships, then invariably the more-than-human world must be included. In the matter of the news ecosystem, the norm is one based on improving democracy, citizenship, and the public sphere, or the “healthy citizen.” Subsequently, “By heralding a spontaneous order produced by competition and cooperation among media entities, the metaphor can obscure the political choices that make possible for societies to build digital media systems reflecting more or less egalitarian and democratic values” (Nadler, 2018, p. 3). Under neoliberal conditions, the market norm values competition and the “invisible hand” as the governing principle of the system. From this perspective, news and information circulate “naturally” according to the characteristics of the system, in spite of policies, regulations, or politics. The ecosystem metaphor is

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used to justify economic relations as something that just is, as opposed to something that is made. Overall, Recognizing that media structures reflect value-laden choices points not only to the role of policy and the specific horizons within which media polices are currently debated. It also opens a larger space for citizens, news workers, philanthropists, etc. to speak about building a digitally ­mediated public sphere as a keystone of democratic society—not unlike the o ­ ngoing, world-making efforts to create a democratic culture and democratic ­governing institutions. (Nadler, 2018, p. 12) This approach sees media ecosystems as “built media ecosystems,” and therefore they are subject to choice and intervention. And according to media ecology scholar Lance Strate (2019, para. 23), a media environment “also specifies what forms of conduct are considered moral or ethical, and what will be deemed immoral or unethical.” Riffing on Mcluhan, Strate then asserts, “the medium is the morality. By this, I mean that every medium represents a particular set of moral and ethical questions, issues, and problems” (para. 23). According to eco-ethics, the aim of environmental politics and eco-­citizenship is to clarify and amplify how media ecosystems are not natural but are the result of deliberate choices and shared values. And because common usages of media ecology and media ecosystem do not incorporate eco-ethics, my usage of ­ecomediasystem is a deliberate attempt to differentiate from previous ­metaphorical uses. As I use it, ecomediasystem is the relationship between the ecomedia e­ nvironment and its extended eco-ethical community, whose membership includes the human and more-than-human realms.

The Ecomediasystem With so many different and situated interpretations, can the ecosystem metaphor be interchangeable when using it to describe different kinds of media, as in Facebook ecosystem, iPhone ecosystem, image ecosystem, and news ecosystem? Or, is the term just an empty signifier that can be used to signal different ideological positions? And what happens when an ecomedia object disturbs the ecomediasystem? In this section, I attempt to map out the systems dynamics of ecomediasystems and how to plot the behavior of ecomedia objects by conceptualizing boundaries and characteristics of ecomediasystems. Technologies—like computers or jetliners—are complicated systems. But a ­complex system comprises many nonlinear relationships with feedback loops that are hard to describe precisely: “Any living thing, or system comprising l­iving things, is complex: a bacterium, a brain, an ecosystem, a financial market, a language, or a social system” (Lent, 2017, p.  23). As such, ecomediasystems

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experience reciprocal causality: “each part of the systems has an effect on the whole, while the system as a whole affects each part. Because of this, a complex system can never be fully understood by reducing it to its component parts” (Lent, 2017, p. 24). Ecomedia object can range from complicated (such as media texts) to complex (such as hyperobjects), but ecomediasystems are always complex. In a complex ecomediasystem, elements interact with their environment through nonlinear feedback. There is never a perfect equilibrium and there is always flux; however, a system can achieve a stable state (such as a mature old growth forest in ecological science). The ecomediasystem equivalent of a stable state can be a dominant medium, such as broadcast TV or newspapers for a given period. Macro-level systems can self-organize but are dissipative, which means the emergence of unexpected or unintended outcomes can change the entire system (consider how Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have changed the film industry). Ecomediasystems are bounded (but permeable), i.e., there are characteristics that define what belongs inside and outside of these systems. Returning to Luhmann (2000), in terms of the traditional concept of mass media news and their gatekeeper function, as a system it filters according to information/not information. In the case of Apple or Android, each operating system has clear criteria for what they allow or reject. Every ecomediasystem is a unique environment (be it an operating system, platform, or medium) that contains members and communities of members that engage in some kind of meaning making practice and use. Ecomediasystems are closed or open, such as Wikipedia (open) and Facebook (closed). In some cases, a system might be mix of open and closed characteristics (such as Android). Ecomediasystems have particular affordances and constraints that determine the behavior of the specific system. These affordances and constraints scale from the local to the global. Like biological ecosystems, smaller ecosystems are nested in larger ecosystems. So, a national media system like in Italy is also embedded in a larger, global ecomediasystem. Services like Netflix or Roku behave differently, depending on which country they are operating in. In many cases, ecomediasystems are virtual and dispersed, but in the example of news ecosystems, geography can be incorporated, as in the case of a particular regional news ecosystem (such as Mexico City or Johannesburg). Therefore, there are multiple ecomediasystems. All ecomediasystems are transformed when something new “disturbs” them. In ecological science, when something novel enters an ecosystem (disturbance), the ecosystem transforms into a new state (succession). This could be a disruptive technology like VHS or platform like Netflix. Some ecomediasystems are more resilient than others. A  stable state system can be disturbed without losing its overall structure, while a weak system can unravel until it achieves a new stable state. When it comes to solving the climate crisis, a resilient ecomediasystem can

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address environmental problems; a weak one collapses in the sense that it ceases to be environmentally viable or sustainable. For example, under the conditions of neoliberalism, news ecomediasystems are weak and therefore susceptible to corporate influence. Big Carbon disinformation was successful to the point that news media failed to address the climate crisis when meaningful change could have been easier to achieve (such as in 1989 when climate change was temporarily a major issue). Ideological ecomediasystems exist in terms of networks of meaning, sharing, and distribution, such as the concept of filter bubbles. For example, there are white nationalist ecomediasystems that endorse climate denial along with racist, authoritarian, and patriarchal values. These views circulate between news websites (Infowars, Breitbart, True Pundit, Gateway Pundit), cable networks (Fox News, OANN, Sinclair), chat rooms (8-Chan), botnets, YouTubers, foreign disinformation farms, evangelical media, and social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Gab). There are social activist ecomediasystems as well that promote climate action or share information about activist causes and projects. Rising awareness and the spread of movements like FridaysForFuture, Indigenous pipeline struggles, and Black Lives Matter are the result of grassroots organizing and the strategic use of networks. All ecomediasystems are human built, and therefore are subject to intervention. This is important to keep in mind because even though emergence can be spontaneous and ecomediasystems can self-organize, we can still make eco-­ethical and political choices, as membership and collective responsibility imply. The market norm presents itself as natural and beyond the control of human actors, but eco-citizenship requires that when technologies are developed and utilized, we intervene. This is the case when a social movement like Black Lives Matter ­critiques and organizes against facial recognition technology or tech company partnerships with police, military, or immigration services. Manghani (2012) proposes that the organism of a media ecosystem is the media object, such as an image within an image-world, where medium offers nutrients or oxygen for the media object to thrive. In this example, organism (image) exists within a community (modality, genre) and ecosystem (image system—political, economic, technical, cultural, social, legal structure). Students can use this list to work through the different ways ecomedia objects interact with broader ecomediasystems. They can also test whether these commonalities can be used to generalize about the behavior of ecomediasystems.

Avatar as Disturbance The film Avatar (2009, Cameron) exemplifies how an ecomedia object can disturb ecomediasystems. The film catalyzed remixes, discussion boards, online communities, and solidarity movements, activating participatory practices that predate the film and are well documented in Henry Jenkins’ Convergence Culture (2006).

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Unlike the preceding example of a soccer ball, Avatar primarily exists in a digital world and can be copied, remixed, shared, and interacted with in ways that are unpredictable. This is because as an ecomedia object, the film is not isolated from the intertextuality of the web, which enables users to take the movie and recontextualize it with real-life examples that others can connect with emotionally as “symbolic expressions of solidarity” (Gilland Pickeral, quoted in Hansen, 2009, p. 62). The elasticity of a media text like Avatar can partially be explained by looking at it as a kind of intertext that networks with other texts, thereby creating a matrix of relationships and meanings that are part of the film’s greater ecology. As Jonathan Gray (2006, pp. 19–40) argues, media texts engage in a kind of “destructiveconstructive” capacity to destroy singular readings, and allow for new a “polyphonic text to emerge” (p. 27): “The text is always in flux” and is a “field of action” (p. 29). This flux is expressed through genre, which is the text’s “grammar.” According to Gray, genre is an internalized “menu” and “digestive function” that helps us “taste-test” its “regime of verisimilitude” (p. 29). In terms of Avatar, James Cameron plugged and played a number of tropes from a long history of popular culture, including films like Dances with Wolves (Costner, 1990), Last of the Mohicans (Mann, 1992), and Pocahontas (Gabriel & Goldberg, 1995), that invoke a kind of “genre literacy” in the audience. This certainly was one of most common points of contention among critics who objected to the stereotyping and cyphers used by Avatar, reaffirming Gray’s point that genres are contested, struggled over, and “intertextually constructed” (p. 12). Humorous mashups on the internet even went as far as intercutting audio from Avatar with sequences from Disney’s Pocahontas. In Gray’s terms, these new texts can expand “genre’s semantics and syntax” (p. 31). More importantly, as evidenced by internet mashups, genre literacies are public—they can be developed in conversation with others, even by “contradictory interpretive communities” (p. 32). Gray furthers his insight by arguing that a text can be a kind of ­phenomenology—it is not frozen in place or time but is always in process and without end. It can become a gestalt—we participate in it, get caught up in it (by entering another world), and incorporate it into a “metatext.” It can also have “multidirectional interaction,” as in the case of Lord of the Rings, when the book can inform the film’s viewing experience, or vice versa. Thus, we encounter the text via “paratexts” (“those elements of or surrounding a text whose sole aim is to inflect particular readings of that text” [p. 35]); “peritexts” (“paratexts materially appended to the text—titles, content pages, prefaces, covers and the general ‘look’ of edition” [p. 36]); and “epitexts” (“interviews with the writer, ads for publication or reviews” [p. 36]). The text has a center of gravity that draws to it these various auxiliary elements, and will ultimately connect with a larger universe of related materials so that in the end we don’t just engage in a process of encoding/decoding, but “encoding/redecoding and of reading through” (p. 34).

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This certainly correlates with Kevin DeLuca’s (1999) discourse on image events staged by environmental activists (such as sensationalistic confrontations with whaling ships). Arguing that media exist in a “heteroglossic public sphere” (p.  119), DeLuca critiques what he calls “Western metaphysics,” a model that adheres to “hierarchical binary oppositions” like “transmission/dissemination, presence/absence, immediacy/mediation, speech/writing, author/audience, text/audience, communication/miscommunication, reason/emotion, culture/ nature, human/animal” (p. 140). He notes further, Yes, meaning happens at the site of the audience, but it is marked not by unity, integrity, faithfulness, and finality, but by conflict, contradiction, complexity, and contingency, the result of negotiations between audiences, texts, authors, and contexts where none of these constituent elements is self-identified or originary. . . . [T]here is no site that collects the irreducible multiplicity of meanings. (p. 145) Image events, DeLuca argues, confront “iconographs” (e.g., “liberty,” “freedom,” “justice,” etc.), which can magnetize how we think about major environmental issues. He focuses in particular on the iconograph of Progress, a “super slogan” that does ideological work, such as defining nature as a resource for industrial exploitation (p. 47). One of the primary rhetorical tasks of radical environmentalism, DeLuca proposes, is to challenge how Progress is contextualized, and to “disarticulate” it through powerful imagery that can be captured on television. In an example of Greenpeace confronting Russian whalers in the 1970s, he points out how the image of factory ships slaughtering helpless whales recontextualizes the Moby Dick concept of whales as sublime creatures of nature to victims of technology and progress. DeLuca also suggests that as a news event, Greenpeace’s images translated well because they worked within the Cold War dialectic of the era by depicting “evil” Russians, thus positioning Greenpeace to be a legitimate agent in shaping the discourse surrounding sea life. In the case of EarthFirst!, the group’s dramatic acts of civil disobedience in the 1980s–1990s (tree sitting, chaining themselves to machinery, burying themselves in logging roads) also reverse the normal image of humans dominating nature. Though the action in Avatar is not staged as news events per se, the film draws caricatures with broad strokes to make new juxtapositions that activists repurposed for actual image events. The machines of Avatar’s human colonizer are literal world eaters, visual manifestations of the very system that exists in our planet, right now, be they rain forest consuming corporations or imperial invasions (the film makes explicit references to American Empire through its destruction of the hometree). But like the war machine we see on the evening news, Pandora’s colonizers are decontextualized from history, yet remain iconic representations of Progress. Moreover, when the Na’vi symbolize pan-indigenous peoples (such as their stylized blend of both

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plains Native American and East African tribal motifs) based on genre conventions, audiences can draw upon preexisting symbol maps to form an updated mythology (such as framing the white colonizers as “alien” instead of the reverse). This is not without its traps. On a superficial level, we have an updated version of the White Messiah (Sam Worthington as Jake Sully) violently intervening to resolve the conflict between Noble Savages and a colonial war machine. No doubt, indigenous stereotypes like these remain hurtful, and such blatant associations in Avatar were not universally celebrated. Though the film’s message is often criticized as contradictory because of its location within the framework of the technology versus nature dichotomy, global environmentalism is now a mix of art, science, political activism, and media that draws on both a sense of place and a sense of planet. The space opened by the film enabled local struggles in India, Brazil, Ecuador, and Palestine to be newly contextualized as global political concerns that otherwise lacked previous semiotic expression in the planetary mediapolis. In the case of Avatar, pop culture can make visible on a global scale our latent connection with primal Earth. When Palestinian activists donned Na’vi outfits to translate their cause’s imagery into a new symbolic order, they recontextualized their struggle through the novel set of signs generated by Avatar. Thus, preexisting frames could be challenged and decontextualized by the Avatar meme. By associating themselves with the indigenous struggle of Pandora, Palestinian youths also connected themselves with global pop culture, a hybridized strategy that jujitsu around standard political controls normally exercised in the mainstream news media that rely on government frames to shape their struggle’s narrative. Such is the approach explored in DeLuca’s case study of Greenpeace’s anti-whaling activities. The example of Avatar raises an interesting analytical question for ecomedia literacy. As an ecomedia object, which ecomediasystem does it belong to? As this brief discussion illustrates, it depends. If we are to analyze it solely in terms of its function as a commodity, then it certainly belongs to the industrial film ecomediasystem we call Hollywood. But when it’s remixed and shared, it enters into other systems of communication, be they activist networks, social media networks, or postcolonial genre critiques. The task for teachers and students is to use the concepts of ecomedia objects and ecomediasystems as heuristic tools to probe new ecocultural and ecomaterialist interpretations.

Note 1. Please keep in mind that teaching ecomedia in the classroom doesn’t require going to the level of depth covered in this chapter. Some of this material is likely too complex for first- and second-year undergraduates or high school students, and more appropriate for upper-level or graduate-level seminars. But in the very least, it is important to understand why ecomedia literacy requires reconceptualizing many taken-for-granted concepts common in media studies, and to get a clear understanding of how the ecomediasphere heuristic supports change on the deeper level of design thinking.

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References Anderson, C. W. (2016). News ecosystems. In T. Witschge, C. W. Anderson, D. Domingo, & A. Hermida (Eds.), The Sage handbook of digital journalism (pp. 410–423). Sage. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781473957909 Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (M. Holquist, Trans.). University of Texas Press. Barnes, S. B. (2012). An introduction to visual communication: From cave art to second life. Peter Lang. Bateson, G. (2000). Steps to an ecology of mind. University of Chicago Press. Bozak, N. (2011). The cinematic footprint: Lights, camera, natural resources. Rutgers University Press. Brereton, P. (2018). Environmental literacy and new digital audiences. Routledge. Buckingham, D. (2019). The media education manifesto. Polity Press. Cameron, J. (2009). Avatar [Film]. Twentieth Century Fox. Carey, J. T. (2009). Communication as culture, revised edition: Essays on media and society. Routledge. Carr, N. G. (2011). The shallows how the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. Atlantic. Clark, J. (2016). Selling with Giaa: Advertising and the natural world. In J. Walker  & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 176–195). Routledge. Costner, K. (1990). Dances with Wolves [Film]. Orion Pictures. Cox, R.,  & Pezzullo, P. C. (2017). Environmental Communication and the Public Sphere (5th ed.). Sage. Davis, W. (2009). The wayfinders: Why ancient wisdom matters in the modern world. House of Anansi Press. Debray, R. (1996). Media manifestos: On the technological transmission of cultural forms. Verso. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press. DeLuca, K. M. (1999). Image politics: The new rhetoric of environmental activism. Guilford Emmett, R. S., & Nye, D. E. (2017). The environmental humanities. MIT Press. Fraim, J. (2015). Media nations: Global dynamics of media. Self-published. https://greathousestories.files.wordpress.com/2015/12/media-nations-pdf.pdf Fuller, M. A. (2005). Media ecologies: Materialist energies in art and technoculture. MIT Press. Gabriel, M., & Goldberg, E. (1995). Pocahontas [Film]. Walt Disney Pictures. Gabrys, J. (2015). Powering the digital: From energy ecologies to electronic environmentalism. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg, & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp. 3–18). Routledge. Gabrys, J. (2016). Re-thingifying the internet of things. In J. Walker  & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 180–195). Routledge. Gerbner, G. (1998). Introduction: Why the cultural environment movement? Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies, 60(2), 133. Gibson, E. J., & Pick, A. D. (2003). An ecological approach to perceptual learning and development. Oxford University Press. Gray, J. (2006). Watching with The Simpsons: Television, parody, and intertextuality. Routledge. Hall, S. (2001). Encoding/decoding. In M. G. Durham & D. Kellner (Eds.), Media and cultural studies: Keyworks (pp. 163–173). Blackwell.

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Hall, S., Evans, J., & Nixon, S. (Eds.). (2013). Representation (2nd ed.). Sage. Hansen, A. (2009). Environment, media and communication. Routledge. Hansen, A. (2015). Communication, media and the social construction of the environment. In A. Hansen & R. Cox (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of environment and communication. Routledge. Harding, S. (2006). Animate earth: Science, intuition and Gaia. Chelsea Green Publishing. Ihde, D. (2002). Bodies in technology. University of Minnesota Press. Innis, H. A. (1999). The bias of communication. University of Toronto Press. Ivakhiv, A. J. (2013). Ecologies of the moving image: Cinema, affect, nature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Jenkins, H. (2006). Convergence culture: Where old and new media collide. New York Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press. Leary, P. L. (2019). Keywords: The new language of capitalism. Haymarket Books. Lent, J. (2017). The patterning instinct: A  cultural history of Humanity’s search for meaning. Prometheus. Lévy, P. (1998). Becoming virtual: Reality in the Digital Age. Plenum Trade. Luhmann, N. (2000). The reality of the mass media. Stanford University Press. Manghani, S. (2012). Image studies: Theory and practice. Routledge. Mann, M. (1992). Last of the Mohicans [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1998). The tree of knowledge: The biological roots of human understanding. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. Oxford University Press. McLuhan, M. (2002). Understanding media: The extensions of man. MIT Press. Meyrowitz, J. (1998, Winter). Multiple media literacies. Journal of Communication, 96–108. Miller, T. (2018). Greenwashing culture. Routledge. Morton, T. (2016). Practising deconstruction in the age of ecological emergency. In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp.  156–166). Palgrave Macmillan. Nadler, A. (2018). Nature’s economy and news ecology. Journalism Studies, 20(6), 823–839. https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2018.1427000 Nardi, B. A., & O’Day, V. (2000). Information ecologies: Using technology with heart. MIT Press. Naughton, J. J. (2006). Blogging and the emerging media ecosystem. http://reutersinstitute. politics.ox.ac.uk/fileadmin/ documents/discussion/blogging.pdf Postman, N. (1998, March 27). Five things we need to know about technological change. www. technodystopia.org/ Postman, N. (2006). Amusing ourselves to death: Public discourse in the age of show business. Penguin Books. Ross, A. (1994). The Chicago gangster theory of life: Nature’s debt to society. Verso. Sontag, S. (2002). Looking at war. The New Yorker, 82–98. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge. Strate, L. (2019). Addressing media ecology ethics. Media Ethics Magazine, 31(1). www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/213-fall-2019/ 3999274-addressing-media-ecology-ethics Uys, J. (1980). The Gods Must Be Crazy [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Wahl-Jorgensen, K. (2015). The Chicago School and ecology: A reappraisal for the digital era. American Behavioral Scientist, 60(1), 8–23. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764215601709 Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge University Press. Yunkaporta, T. (2019). Sand talk: How Indigenous thinking can save the world. Text Publishing.

PART II

The Ecomediasphere

4 THE ECOMEDIASPHERE

Can you see the clouds in this paper? Or in this screen? So begins a thought experiment that encourages students to contemplate media objects as ecomedia. If you hold up a blank sheet of paper or screen, students might say they see the clouds because both are white. But the connection is not visual. Rather, the clouds are an integral part of the paper’s organic matter because they produce the rain that grows the material that paper is made from. While this is not exactly true with gadgets constructed of glass, plastic, and metal, the technical infrastructure that makes the device possible depends on extraction and natural resources. And though the data cloud (and its data “streams”) is a metaphor for the infrastructure of server farms that feed our gadget’s apps, those servers very much depend on water for energy production and cooling. The backbone of our global information infrastructure is a vast system of interconnected nodes; yet few are familiar with the fact that it is a network of cables, satellites, towers, and servers embedded within actual geography. Furthermore, it is impacted by climate change. As a sign of the environmental feedback loops between climate and technology, scientists now report that 4,000 miles of internet landlines in the United States are threatened to be submerged underwater as a result of rising seas and floods (Devitt, 2018). With plastic fibers detected in snow and rain across the globe, we can now say that technology is in the clouds—and by extension, in our bodies (Bergmann et al., 2019; Wetherbee et al., 2019). This kind of systems perspective doesn’t come easily because students rarely learn how media technologies are part of a vast network of ecological and material relations. This is compounded by the problem that most students aren’t even taught something as fundamental as how the internet actually works. In terms of introducing environmental concerns to this systemic way of conceiving media, replacing “media” with “ecomedia” is a move that signals how every media object

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(such as a text or gadget) is a node in a network of ecological relations, which includes the clouds. Arriving to this understanding, and how to teach it, demands deeper exploration of media’s ecological character and calls upon pedagogical methods that encourage critical, relational, and systems thinking. A holistic digital media analysis starts with an overview of the cyclical ways ICTs change the environment and their users, and how that feedback system impacts ICTs. Contrary to pronouncements about the knowledge economy dematerializing capitalism, the transition to digital information has not reduced the materiality of media. Their impact on the environment can be traced all along the production chain of our technological gadgets, which disproportionately and negatively impacts the Two Thirds World1 by entailing inputs from Earth (mining, logging, drilling) and outputs into Earth (air, land, water) (Cubitt, 2017; Maxwell et al., 2015; Parks & Starosielski, 2015; Walker & Starosielski, 2016b). Emerging technological trends, such as cryptocurrency mining, AI training, and the Internet of Things are set to increase environmental impacts through increased energy consumption, industrialization, and e-waste (Tarnoff, 2019). Additionally, what is perhaps the most taboo subject of all is the impact of Wi-Fi and cell phone microwaves on our electromagnetic environment and physical health (Maxwell & Miller, 2020; Singer, 2014). The system is reproduced by media that drive the paradigm of endless growth, technological sublime, and consumerism. This is all predicated on an “invisible” infrastructure and supply chain based on a “multiscalar resource economy of extraction, production, distribution, consumption, representation, wastage and repurposing” (Walker & Starosielski, 2016a, p. 1). The method of analysis that I propose is this kind of analysis based on a heuristic I devised, the ecomediasphere (see Figure 4.1). The ecomediasphere is a theoretical framework and a pedagogical tool. It’s an analytical method that enables the exploration of the symbolic, material, ­phenomenological, and ideological character of ecomedia objects. An ecomedia object is a boundary object: Something that has commonly agreed upon ­characteristics, but its meaning and function changes according to context; it retains the original meaning of media as something that is “in-between.” For example, a smartphone will have different purposes according to designers, manufacturers, users, app developers, workers, and users. As a boundary object, an ecomedia object explored through the four zones of the ecomediasphere (ecoculture, political ecology, ecomaterialism, lifeworld) situates within a network of meanings. The ecomedia object can be one of four categories: (1) representational media text (advertisement, news article, film, TV commercial, website, food packaging, etc.); (2) platform (streaming service, social network, or media organization); (3) gadget (smartphone, tablet, computer, etc.); or (4) hyperobject (an amorphous disbursed phenomenon that behaves like a system, such as the internet, fake news, or media industry). Rather than focus solely on messages, the ecomedia literacy analysis explores the ecomedia object as a disturbance of

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Ecoculture

Political Ecology

Social Constructionism, Cultural Studies

World-ecology, Critical Theory

Values Anthropocentric vs. ecocentric Language frames/discourses Risk perception Global visual culture

Carbon and consumer-based capitalism Attention economy (legacy and social media) Platform capitalism Neoliberalism Id e o lo g y

an

Me

Political and economic forces

mD

esig

red

POLITICAL ECOLOGY

fo r

ECOCULTURE Social and cultural practices Beliefs

at n

Sha

Pl

ing

WORLD SYSTEM

e rie

Medium properties Material reality Technological apparatus

t ur e

Exp

ECOMATERIALITY

Cognitive dispositions Emotions Sensory experience Affect

t r uc

LIFEWORLD

Infras

nce

ECOMEDIA OBJECT

EARTH SYSTEM Affo

rdanc e

s /C o n s t r a i n t s

Lifeworld

Phenomenology Selective exposure, confirmation bias Reality maintenance, screen addiction, etc. Biophilia, alienation, biophobia Media mindfulness, mental health

FIGURE 4.1 

A ffe

ct

Ecomateriality

Environmental Properties Minerals Metals, plastics Electronics Chemicals

The ecomediasphere

ecomediasystems. Some media objects are tangible—like gadgets—while others are digitized or dispersed and therefore exist more as conceptual objects. Using the ecomediasphere as an orientation device, learners take an ecomedia object like the film Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) and survey it within an interconnected ecomediasystem of human and more-than-human dimensions. As a boundary object, we all can agree that it is a theatrically released film produced in 2017, but the film has different meanings and uses to the audience, critics,

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crew, actors, marketers, and studio that produced it. From a lifeworld stance, the film is examined based on the “ecocinema experience” of the audience, i.e., the affective and emotional response to the film. The ecocultural approach examines the film’s discourses, narratives, and cultural themes in relationship to ecology. Its intertextual characteristics can be discussed by how it “disturbed” various discourses around previously held views about Blade Runner as a cultural artifact, demonstrating how meanings are contested and that audiences also do boundary work around genres. The political ecology assessment examines the film as a global media product and commodity, while the materialist perspective explores medium properties and impacts of the film’s production on the environment. Students researching the film would apply the various zones to build a multidimensional, ecomedia analysis (Chapter 10 offers a more detailed example of analysis). In this case, Blade Runner 2049’s eco-themes are incredibly strong, but many female students in my ecocinema class objected to its extensive female nudity and overt use of the male gaze. Drawing on ecofeminists theories, many of them dismissed the film’s ecocritical discourses as being negated by the film’s sexism.

Spheres The term environment derives from French, environ, which means “around,” “round-about,” and “to surround,” which in turn comes from Old French, virer and viron, which had as some of its meanings, “to circle” and “circuit” (­Golley, 1998, p.  3). Modern systems theory builds on these original meanings by approaching the environment as a whole comprised of interactive, dynamic ­elements and processes. One way to conceive of this holistic totality on the p­ lanetary scale is to think in terms of spheres. Since the 1920s, the sphere suffix has been used for conceptualizing various planetary domains. In the 1920s, Vladimir Vernadsky used the term biosphere to describe the strata in which all life thrives and exists. According to biologist Eugene Odum, the biosphere is the sum total of all biological ecosystems on Earth (Samson & Pitt, 1999). To signal the existence of complex and diverse macrosystems, other spheres have been conceived of to represent different complex cultural and communications realms. Jack Goody (1995) uses mnemosphere to describe oral- and memorybased communication. This is normally associated with preliterate cultures. Echoing Shiva’s (2018) exploration of oneness and diversity, anthropologist Wade Davis (2004) uses ethnosphere to describe a “cultural web of life.” Like biological diversity, Davis advocates for diverse ethnic realities, likening every language to an “old growth forest of the mind,” “watershed of thought,” and “ecosystem of spiritual possibilities.” Relatedly, Michael Agar (1996) developed the concept of languaculture to indicate the intimate relationship between language and culture, furthering the argument that language diversity is important to support and maintain. Noosphere was conceived of by Teilhard de Chardin as an outer

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stratum of human consciousness that emerges from two other concentric spheres, the biosphere and geosphere. It is often associated with the idea that the totality of the human mind and intellect continues to evolve, achieving at some point the ultimate aim of shared consciousness or global brain (see Samson  & Pitt, 1999). Yuri Lotman (2001) uses semiosphere to describe the sum total of symbolic communication. Coined by Regis Debray (1996), the mediasphere describes dominant media systems that are historically situated, such as writing, print, and audiovisual media. Serving as a kind of “cosmopedagogy,” these media condition the experience of space and time for different epochs: The “sphere” extends the visible system of the medium to the invisible microsystem that gives it meaning. We see the microwave oven but not the immense grid of electric power it is plugged into. We see the automobile but not the highway system, gasoline storage facilities, refineries, petroleum tankers, no more than we see the factories and research installations upstream and all the maintenance and safety equipment downstream. The wide-bodied jet hides from view the planetary spider’s web of the international civil aviation organization, of which it is but one strictly teleguided element. To speak of the videosphere is to be reminded that the screen of the television receiving signals is the head of a pin buried in one home out of millions, or a homing device, part of a huge organization without real organizers—of a character at once social, economic, technological, scientific, political—much more, in any event, than a network of corporate controlled production and programming of electronic images. (Debray, 1996, p. 33) Debray suggests there have been three major historical mediaspheres: logosphere (writing), graphosphere (print and image), and videosphere (audiovisual media). As a macro-level concept, I use ecomediasphere to signify the totality of global ecomediasystems. It is a system of systems. Recalling Ingold’s (2011) important distinction between the concept of spheres and globes, a sphere is invisible and something that one looks through, whereas a globe is a Cartesian object that one looks at. Spheres are something we are within—they are not objectively “out there” like how we perceive a globe. The sphere is inhabited as a lived experience. The ecomediasphere situates us within the analysis, not outside of it. The sphere is planetary.

Spherical Design The common unit of analysis in media classrooms is a visual media text like an advertisement, a film, a TV episode, or a news item, which is treated

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as “the thing in itself.” Instead, the ecomedia object is a boundary object, which is some kind of artifact, gadget, or hyperobject that has a commonly agreed upon identity (such as an advertisement or a smartphone), but its use and meaning changes according to context and practice. This allows students to examine how the ecomedia object impacts our sense of time, place, and space (lifeworld); cultural meaning and significance (ecoculture); how it is produced and functions within the broader global economic system (political ecology); and the significance of its material properties and their impact on the environment (ecomateriality). The ecomediasphere fuses several concepts critical to ecomedia literacy, such as eco-ethics, ecomedia footprint, and ecomediasystems. Spherical metaphor usage in the ecomediasphere reflects economic and ecological models that embed a cyclical approach to analysis, such as doughnut economics (Raworth, 2017), cradle-to-cradle design (McDonough  & Braungart, 2002), biomimicry (Benyus, 2008), sacred economics (Eisenstein, 2011), degrowth, and barefoot economics. Like cultural studies’ circuit of culture model, all the zones interact with each other and are iterative (everything is connected to everything else). Gabrys’ discussion concerning “re-thingifying” media theory calls for us to “open up attention to how things come to be, what sustains things, and the effects that things have on the world” (Gabrys, 2016, p. 188). To do this, the ecomediasphere’s multiple perspectives draw from Guattari’s (2008) three ecologies (social, mental, and material) and Ivakhiv’s (2013) speculative realism approach to ecocinema analysis. Ives Citton (2017, p. 23, emphasis original) arrives to a similar configuration in his model of the ecology of attention: The biophysical ecology of our environmental resources, the geopolitical ecology of our transnational relations, the socio-political ecology of our class relations and the psychic ecology of our mental resources all depend on the media ecology that conditions our modes of communication. His use of media ecology is the same way I’m using the ecomediasphere. Though not centered on ecological issues per se, cultural studies’ model of analysis, the circuit of culture, inspires the design of the ecomediasphere. It goes beyond focusing on the media text by exploring the iterative relationship between media objects and production processes as they move through particular dialectical “moments,” where meaning is produced at different sites of practice. As formulated in a study of the Walkman and later revised with the iPod (Du Gay et al., 1997, 2013), the circuit consists of a feedback system between the representation, identity, production, consumption, and regulation of media objects. Missing from their approach, and hence the necessity of an “eco” turn, is an analysis from ecocritical, affective, and material perspectives.

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Ivakhiv (2013, p. 37) asserts the importance of the circuit of culture by attesting that At each moment, the object is connected to a larger social and technological world: its production, transmission, and reception are enabled and contained by available media and production networks, financial capital, and audience mobilization mechanisms, as well as by available cultural discourses, hopes and expectations shaped by recent successes in the media, and so on. An ecomedia circuit of culture can examine an ecomedia object, such as a gadget, by exploring how: Production leads to particular environmental practices, encoding of meanings, and designs (types of materials, recycling programs), and how manufacturers respond to users and/or environmental critics. • Gadgets are represented as ecomedia texts in marketing and popular culture, which requires utilizing semiotics, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, and media language. As it turns out, environmental imagery is used quite a bit (just take a quick look at your computer or phone wallpaper). • People’s identities are bound to their gadgets, and ecomedia objects shape “ecological identity” and perception. • People’s consumption is driven by reception (and decoding) of the ecomedia texts, and how gadget consumption impacts the environment. • Regulation impacts how something is made and how eco-ethics might constrain behavior or activity, such as whether or not governments respond to concerns about workers or the environment. •

In Ivakhiv’s (2013) process-relational approach to ecocinema, the ecomedia circuit of culture allows us to evaluate not just what media objects are, but what they do. The circuit of culture approach is a middle way between media theorists who embrace popular culture and view audiences with agency and for those who object to the culture industry as inherently false or inauthentic. Such a divide also exists in the environment movement. For example, there is a wing of traditional environmentalism that sustain media criticism while themselves not belonging to or associating themselves with media or cultural studies. In particular, you can find an abundance of anti-technology, anti-media rhetoric coming from neoLuddite activists and scholars, best exemplified by Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (2002) and In the Absence of the Sacred (1991). Mander even told me in person that he was against media literacy because it makes media more interesting (I still recommend his books and listening to him).

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Some traditional environmentalists would argue that “green media” is impossible given the nature of the media industry (communications scholar Corbett (2006) refers to advertising as “brown media”) and its inherently anti-environmental characteristics. Moreover, some ecocinema critics view spectacle and entertainment as fundamentally antithetical to environmental awareness due to their capacity to overwhelm and manipulate our senses. Given the toxicity of global technology, it would be simple to reject any media device as inherently damaging to the environment. While I sympathize with these claims (and believe there is ample room to entertain them), I’m more in alignment with the dialectical approach that cultural studies encourages in order to change the system. Finally, the ecomediasphere is an effort to move away from relying solely on Western epistemology, by borrowing from the design principles of non-Western cosmological models, such as Buddhist or Hindu mandalas and First Nations medicine wheels. This approach embeds “ecology thinking” to probe ecomedia, and “ecomediasphere thinking” to explore ecology. As noted by eco-philosopher Tim Morton (2012, p. 7), “The ecological thought is a thought about ecology, but it’s also thinking that is ecological.” By translating these conceptual realms, the aim is to promote systems thinking and perception so that we learn how to make connections between our personal lives, global economy, culture, and planetary ecology. In addition, the four quadrants model draws inspiration from integral ecology (see Esbjorn-Hargens & Zimmerman, 2009).2

Ecomedia Ecologies: The World System and Earth System Andrew Ross (1994) proposed that image ecologies (media’s function in spreading images) and images of ecology (images about ecology) are inseparable, which is updated in Bozak’s (2011) discussion of the “resource image.” Images are a resource of symbols, ideology, and ideas; and also environmental resources, such as the technological infrastructure needed to create them, the materials necessary to manifest them physically, and the technology we use to view them. Subsequently, any form of media production is on some level a kind of ecological practice that also produces its own ecologies. In the case of cinema, all films are produced in relation to the material world; thus, each and every film creates an environment which we, as audience, consume with varying degrees of awareness as to the historical, political, social, and ideological effects implicit in that viewing experience. (Hayward, 2020, p. 12) Citton (2017) notes that all media present to us a “double ground”: The first being the content and text of whatever it is we are attending to; the second being

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the material itself in/on which the text is available (i.e., the book in your hands, screen, etc.). Our attention is not trained for the second ground, but for the first: In general, we do not see this second ground: we read “texts,” we look at “images”—not pigments, pixels, or ink. And yet, all our representations and simulacra—now ubiquitous in our lives and decision making—are woven into material realities of this second ground. (Citton, 2017, p. 198) The lack of attention to the second ground correlates with the difference between visual cultures of Western and Asian traditions. Whereas Western linear perspective is about focusing on individual objects, Asian artistic methods are about balancing the entire composition between background and foreground, emphasizing the total environment instead of objects. Retraining our attention is an immense pedagogical and political project: we must learn to see how the circulation of images and texts, along with the circulation of barrels of oil and rare metals, contributes to the climate imbalance. . . . It is only by adapting our way of seeing and our intelligence to this second material ground that the politics to come will be able to unite the ecology of attention with a real attention to the ecology. (p. 198) Ecomedia literacy calls for balanced awareness between the double ground. Like the double ground concept, I  categorize ecomedia as having two interconnected ecological hemispheres. First, the ecomediasphere’s upper ­ ­hemisphere—ecoculture and political ecology—represents ecomedia’s ­ecological mindprint. This is akin to the first ground in which image ecologies and ­ecological images are explored. Second, the ecomediasphere’s lower hemisphere—­ ecomaterialism and lifeworld—comprises ecomedia’s ecological footprint. Like the second ground, this is on the level of image as resource. The operative metaphor, footprint, represents the concept of human environmental impact. The two hemispheres concept draws from the scholarship of socioenvironmental theorists that recognize how our planet is comprised of two interconnected systems: world system and Earth system. Socioenvironmental scholars come from a variety of disciplines, including archeology, anthropology, geography, ecology, paleo-science, geology, sociology, and history. The field of world-ecology emerges from this tradition. One camp has discovered how human societies are globally interconnected in a shifting “world system” of trade, politics, and information flows. The other camp has developed an understanding of how ecosystems are ­ connected in a common “Earth system” with planetary

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dynamics that affect all its constituent parts. From their various vantage points . . . these two global systems in turn are linked to each other. As we have become accustomed to thinking of our world as a single and coherent globe suspended in space, we more easily acknowledge that changes in the world system and changes in the Earth system may be recursively connected. (Hornborg, 2007, p. 2) The world system comprises the upper half of the ecomediasphere (ecoculture and political ecology). Much like Marx’s conception of the superstructure, it is the realm of ideas, ideology, and culture that drives economy, material extraction and manipulation, and subjectivity. It is what Lent (2017, p.  25) refers to as the “global cognitive system,” “what can’t be touched but exists in the cognitive network of society’s culture: its language, myths, core metaphors, know-how, hierarchy of values, and worldview.” The Earth system comprises the lower half—ecomateriality and lifeworld. This correlates with Lent’s notion of the “tangible system,” “everything that can be seen and touched: a society’s tools; its physical infrastructure; and its agriculture, terrain, and climate” (p. 25). Lifeworld is part of the Earth system because it consists of the realm of senses and affective experience; it is that aspect of media that literally touches us (or we touch it). Cognitive and tangible systems are coupled and produce their own feedback loops: Sometimes the cognitive system might act to inhibit change in the tangible systems, leading to a long period of stability. At other times, the cognitive and tangible systems might each catalyze change in the other system, leading to a powerful positive feedback loop that causes dramatic societal transformation. (p. 25) I am aware of the paradox that dividing the environmental impacts of ecomedia into footprint and mindprint reinforces Cartesian duality, but I  do this to differentiate between the tangible and the cognitive realms of our system. As ­indicated by my ecomediasphere heuristic, any ecomedia object analysis engages both realms as not separate but as interconnected and overlapping. Ecomediatone draws from the concept of ecotone—a diverse zone between two different ecologies (like the zone between a forest and a meadow). For the ecomediasphere, an ecomediatone is the conceptual realm where two zones overlap. For example, ideology combines both ecocultural and political ecology approaches; medium properties overlap between ecomateriality and lifeworld; ecological identity overlaps between lifeworld and ecoculture; and environmental ideology overlaps between political ecology and ecomateriality. As one example

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of the iterative relationship between the different zones, such as ecoculture and ecomateriality, Cultural production directly affects the environment—not in an ideological, expressive, or discursive way, but in the material practices of making, distributing, and consuming culture. These effects derive from materials and energy used to produce movies and performances; institutional sites of art, heritage, and language; the atmospheric effects of digital consumption; and the waste generated by producers and consumers. (Miller, 2018, p. 38) Another example of how all these realms are recursively interconnected is climate disruption. How one experiences the world is impacted materially by the climate (in terms of weather, food supplies, diseases, etc.). How we act on the climate crisis is based on culture, ideology, and cognitive dispositions (how we respond to knowledge and information regarding the climate crisis). Our culture is impacted by how the political ecology of the media and hegemony drive environmental ideology and beliefs about how to respond to the climate crisis. Political ecology also drives the climate crisis by establishing the rules for how our economic system acts upon the living planet. But in developing a regenerative response to the climate crisis, we can reverse the cycle by individuals changing the culture, which in turn changes the system’s political ecology.

World-Ecology and ICT Going beyond the conventional approach to media’s political economy (i.e., who owns what and their business model’s impact on media production and consumption), the discussion of ecomedia footprint and mindprint requires a deeper exploration of the world economic system and its relationship with the ­environment, for—as the root oikos points us to—ecology and economy have the same linguistic and conceptual origins. As it stands, in the standard political and economic discourses of the global ecomedia commons, they are conceptually ­pitted against each other. This is best represented by the argument that environmental regulation of corporations will hurt the economy by causing the loss of jobs, impairing economic growth, raising consumer prices or utility bills, and so on. But proponents of climate action programs like the Green New Deal argue that our current crisis is caused by the separation of economics from ecology and both problems should be solved simultaneously. What is needed is a shift in perception. Is the environment embedded in the economy, or is the economy embedded in the environment? As discussed regarding the colonial Anthropocene in Chapter 1, the prevailing model of capitalism and modernist cosmology is a primary force of ecological change.

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This book is grounded in critical political ecology, an ecological approach to political economy: political ecology is defined by critical attention to the principles of action and the forms of social order that link material environments and human cultures. Political ecologists demonstrate a particular interest in the environmental stresses that result from resource extraction and processing, as well as product manufacturing, consumption and disposal. (Devine, 2015, p. 368) An ecomedia perspective is also grounded in the tradition of critical political economy, most notably associated with neo-Marxist perspectives. As defined by Wasko (2014, p. 258), the primary concern of critical political economists is with the allocation of resources within capitalist societies. Through studies of ownership and control, political economists document and analyse relations of power, class systems and other structural inequalities. Critical political economists analyse contradictions and suggest strategies for resistance and intervention using methods drawn from history, economics, sociology and political science. It applies to the ideological structure of the global economics system as it relates to media and gadget production. In order to properly orient this approach from an ecological perspective, I want to draw upon the framework of world-ecology, which is a successor of Wallerstein’s world-system theory (2004) discussed earlier. World-ecology scholars argue that capitalism doesn’t act on nature but is an ecology itself. As an environment-making process, it materializes and transforms nature. According to the world-ecology framework, capitalism relies on seven “cheap things”—nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives: An ingenious civilizational project has been at the core of this strategy, to construct nature as external to human activity, and thence to m ­ obilize the work of uncommodified human and extra-human natures in service to advancing labor productivity within commodity production. The great leap forward in the scale, scope, and speed of landscape and ­biological transformations in the three centuries after 1450—stretching from Poland to Brazil, and the North Atlantic’s cod fisheries to Southeast Asia’s spice islands—may be understood in this light. . . . Such transformations were the epoch-making expressions of a new law of value that reconfigured ­uncommodified human and extra-human natures (slaves, forests, soils) in servitude to labor productivity and the commodity.  .  .  . The genius of

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capitalism’s cheap nature strategy was to represent time as linear, space as flat, and nature as external. (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 286) Rather than embrace sustainable forms of production and consumption, historically, capitalism has sought through “creative destruction” to expand whenever ecological resources are exhausted, laying waste to ecosystems (people, plants, animals, land) as it seeks new frontiers to exploit. And contrary to common belief that capitalism emerges with the steam engine, the world-ecology frame argues that it predates industrialization with the advent of the plantation system in the Portuguese island colony of Madeira during the mid-16th century, with slavery and sugar consumption being the two key components of that system. Chinese researcher Jack Linchuan Qiu (2016, p. 172) calls the contemporary system of gadget production, “Appconn,” a neologism for Apple-Foxconn, which sets the manufacturing standard for the rest of the industry. He observes that the current gadget manufacturing system is very much like the slave plantation system, with technology addiction acting as our contemporary “sweet tooth.” Like colonialism, the manufacture and delivery of gadgets and computers today required valuable inputs—land, energy, labor, raw materials—in ways not too different from the British textile industry in the 1800s: the provision of key resources hinges on geopolitical patterns at regional and global levels, which spans new dynamisms of power, supply, and consumption. (p. 12) The rise of digital industries and emergence of China is a true global phenomenon: The so-called “Chinese economic miracle” would have been impossible without European and Japanese technologies, Southeast Asian investments, Middle East oil and African minerals, Australian coal and Russian timberland, and, above all, American consumption. (p. 15) Summarizing the system of electronic gadget production, Qiu (p. 13) writes: To make these tangible products, there has to be a global system to assemble, polish, pack, and transport them before they can be used to relieve, generate, and circulate content, and to facilitate social networking. Digitization has, in this sense, made the world more industrial and more dependent on the geopolitics of industrialism, not less. Humanity taken as a whole, including the majority of our fellow human beings in the developing world, has become deeply entangled in a planetary industrial system operating by and through digital media.

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Thus, the global trend is not postindustrialism or deindustrialism, but continued industrialism: Digital media diffusion does not decentralize the capitalist world system. Instead, the digital industries have become more concentrated in a few locales of R&D and manufacture, which Appconn prefers. Under the disguise of sharing and collective prosperity, the basic structure remains: the global “race to the bottom,” the transnational commodity chain, the suppression of labor rights, and the cultivation of a productive agent without solidarity. (p. 182)

Finance The world system’s metabolism is money: “If modernity is an ecology of power, money binds the ecosystem, and that ecosystem shares money” (Patel & Moore, 2018, p. 25). Under these conditions, the digital economy extracts wealth and reinforces a linear power structure: In a cash economy, when you exchange Rs 100 even a hundred times it remains Rs 100. In the digital world those who control the exchange, through digital and financial networks, make money at every step of the 100 exchanges. That is how the digital economy has created the billionaire class of the 1% which controls the economy of the 100%. Real money, reflecting real work, circulates in a circular economy. Digital money is extracted to a global financial system, and it ruptures the law of return on which the circular economy works. (Shiva & Shiva, 2018, p. 114) And finance is what makes fossil fuels possible. As of 2019, the top three money managers in the world (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) invested over $300  billion into fossil fuels, exercising tremendous influence over shareholder rights, board elections, and company polices. According to The Guardian, “The potential CO2 emissions from the investments have increased from 10.593 ­gigatonnes (Gt) to 14.283Gt since the Paris agreement, equivalent to 38% of global fossil fuel CO2 emissions last year” (Greenfield, 2019b). Investment banks and lenders have also invested over $700  billion in fossil fuels since the signing of the Paris agreement, including investments in oil, gas, and coal projects, such as pipelines, fracking, and exploration in the Arctic. As discussed, there is a correlation between climate impacts and income inequality. One of the central ways income inequality is driven is through finance; the 1% generates its untaxed wealth (hidden in tax havens) from financial machinations (dividends, capital gains, interest, rent) (see Sayer, 2016).

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In 2019, the fossil fuel top investors and lenders were JP Morgan Chase and New York Bank, followed by Citigroup, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo. About $80 billion in fracking investments were made (mostly in Texas’ Permian basin), led by Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, and Bank of America. Tar sands crude oil projects in Canada are largely financed by Royal Bank of Canada and Toronto Dominion. Russian companies Gazprom and Rosneft are important players in the Arctic but are less transparent. China’s top four state-owned banks are invested primarily in coal mining services. Of the major international banks, only Barclays was decreasing its fossil fuel investments since the Paris accords (Greenfield, 2019a). At the time of this writing, January 2020, BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink announced to investors that the company would be “putting climate change and sustainability at the center of its investing approach” (Sorkin, 2020). It’s important to highlight how finance’s intricate role in driving technology promotes accumulation by enclosure, increased financialization, and focus on growth instead of “satisfying fundamental needs” (Cubitt, 2016, p. 164). Finance and investment banking are tied to what Bifo Berardi calls semiocapitalism, whose major form of production is no longer of goods but of symbols. . . . Semiocapitalism divides its derivation of wealth from handling symbols into two sectors. One sector operates through international regimes of patents, copyrights, trademarks and designs, the other through finance, which today is not only entirely electronic, but in rapidly increasing degrees automated in algorithmic (“algo”) trading. (Cubitt, 2014, p. 279) This pits the interests of shareholders against those of stakeholders. Accordingly, IP control is a primary tool of accumulation. “The catalytic act is located in irresponsible exploitation of exclusive ownership rights and patented strategic monopolies by ICT owners, acting irrespective of the public interest and against sustainable economy and ecology” (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2015, p. 70). This creates a system where: Information-capital-owners control, organize, and exploit digital network economies. In doing so, first, they spark the generation of growing volumes of e-waste. Secondly, the new breed of “digital industrialists” (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and so forth) push towards increase in already frantic digital traffic interactions, as this boosts their profits. Meanwhile, most users have lost count about how many versions of Windows word processing or office software programmes have been re-launched. People are, thus, led into “communicating themselves to death.” (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2015, p. 80)

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Remember that under current conditions, we need a more expansive definition of media that includes not just traditional forms associated with mass media but also platforms like GAFA (Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple). Shiva’s (2018) research demonstrates that many tech corporations that deal with data are merging interests with agribusiness, biotech, and pharmaceuticals to create a new conglomeration of biocapitalism. In addition, increasingly, media corporations are getting involved with education, whether its textbook companies, testing, or curriculum delivery platforms. But it’s also important to account for the mundane ways that everyday workplace ICTs facilitate environmental destruction: Workplace media, databases, spreadsheets, geographical information systems, financial market and logistical software, information management and planning applications are too important to be left to lawyers and economists. These are media with rapid and violent effects, not only on humans but also on how much of which kinds of fuel are burned delivering which supply-chain components derived from what mines and wells, where and how waste is dumped, with what effects on which rivers and deltas. (Cubitt, 2019, p. For Media . . ., para. 3) Tarnoff (2019) believes that in order to decarbonize, we also need to decomputerize: Decomputerization doesn’t mean no computers. It means that not all spheres of life should be rendered into data and computed upon. Ubiquitous “smartness” largely serves to enrich and empower the few at the expense of the many, while inflicting ecological harm that will threaten the survival and flourishing of billions of people.  .  .  . The zero-carbon commonwealth of the future must empower people to decide not just how technologies are built and implemented, but whether they’re built and implemented. Progress is an abstraction that has done a lot of damage over the centuries. Luddism urges us to consider: progress towards what and progress for whom? Sometimes a technology shouldn’t exist. Sometimes the best thing to do with a machine is to break it.

Externalization The standard business practice to externalize costs as much as possible means making others pay for their cost of doing business, whether it is in the form of cheap labor or environmental damage, which leads Maxwell and Miller (2020, p.  68) to ask: Every two years a new phone, who paid the bill? Externalization is actually a misnomer, especially considering how pollution cannot be truly externalized, as is the case of CO2 in the atmosphere or raining microplastics. As of now, the political costs for externalization have been acceptable because of

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how risk is distributed to different populations. As noted by Maxwell and Miller (2008, p. 340), Here, pollution in the Global North is culturally intolerable (if politically tolerated), while being treated as culturally and politically acceptable in poorer regions of the world, a move that exports environmental risks as per the notorious prescription of former World Bank econocrat and Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers (to wit: “Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs (lesser developed countries?”). Such is the case of dirty fuels in the discussion of the African Anthropocene in Chapter 1, where pollution standards and fuel mixtures in Africa have a much lower standard than in the Global North. Externalization means creating “sacrifice zones” (Klein, 2019, p. 156). These are regions where it is socially and politically acceptable to damage, whether it’s in distant countries, Native American reservations, rural regions of the US South, or low-income neighborhoods in urban centers. In the tradition of distinguishing between Nature and Society, these policy decisions require othering populations who are not deserving of protection. They are justified by theories like the Doctrine of Christian Discovery, Manifest Destiny, terra nullius (“nobody’s land”), and Orientalism, which are expressed in the same economic logic that promotes fossil fuel extraction from the Niger Delta to Appalachia to the Alberta Tar Sands. Most importantly, media organizations are the center of the capitalist economy (Murdock & Brevini, 2017, pp. 8–9). As a “major engineer of social identities,” over time they moved us away from the idea of citizens or members of moral and social communities with responsibilities to contribute to the quality of collective life and installing the identity of consumers, pursuing personal satisfaction, and advancement through market choices, as the dominant social imaginary. Consumers were encouraged to purchase more products more often, internalize the logic of rapid obsolescence and disposability and reject the ethos of retention and repair that characterized relations to big ticket items in the post-war period. These shifts are propelled by a massive extension of personal debt as credit and store cards displaced cash payments, and by a concerted push to present consumer goods as preeminent arenas of self-expression and self-realisation. This leads to a rise in energy use, waste, extraction, and pollution. Such a system puts pressure on biodiversity and exacerbates militarism through three repetitive cycles: (1) Capitalism degrades the conditions of its own production, so (2) it must continuously expand to new ecosystems to survive, and (3) this generates a chaotic world system of imperial warfare and conflict that

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further degrades ecosystems and “intensifies the extinction crisis” (Dawson, 2016, p. 42). A fascinating study by forensic architect, Eyal Weizman (2019), discovered that an “aridity line” defined by an average of 7.8 inches (200 millimeters) of rainfall a year corresponds with concentrated zones of conflict and Western drone strikes. In the “brutal landscape of the climate crisis” (Klein, 2019, p. 162), this line stretches between Somalia, Yemen, Mali, Libya, Gaza, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Militarism produces its own feedback loop: To fight wars over resources, the US military is one of the largest consumers of fossil fuels in the world and is also one of the biggest polluters and emitters of CO2 (Darby, 2019; Sanders, 2009). Historically, media infrastructures have also played important roles for empire building and colonization, as was the case of the telegraph in India (Headrick, 2010). Contemporarily, the top cloud providers, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Google, are mostly “well integrated into military, intelligence and surveillance arms of the government” (Mosco, 2017, p. 97). In essence, our gadgets are produced in what can be likened to a global superfactory (Singer, 2020) that enables us to live within a human-built, massive supercomputer, a kind of digital enclosure, or what Bratton (2015) calls “The Stack.” This has created additional political problems as tech companies have been caught up with balancing their alleged democratic principles with the requirements of working within the global manufacturing system and China’s surveillance state. Such was the case of Apple suspending an app popular with Hong Kong demonstrators and Blizzard Entertainment’s suspension of Harthstone champ Blitzchung for his criticism of China during in-game play (Tarnoff, 2019).The uncomfortable truth is that many of us in privileged demographics depend on the violence against the poor to subsidize our lifestyle. To make things cheap, nature and people have to be cheap. But like sawing off the branch you are sitting on, the problem for capitalism is it’s likely unable to transcend the inherent contradiction of requiring unlimited growth of finite resources. Moreover, extinction threatens capitalist accumulation. The next step is a political-economic rather than a purely ecological one: to recognize that the ultimate side effect of rapacious capitalist growth will be, paradoxically, the end of rapacious capitalist growth. True believers’ faith that the market is a self-limiting and self-sustaining jewel of human nature may well have the effect of ending human nature. So good luck with that one. (Miller, 2015, p. 138)

Neoliberal Ecomediasystems and the Environment As a result of the neoliberal transformation of the world system, various ecomediasystems have undergone substantial shifts that correlate with broader changes in society and the perceived role of the state to regulate business and finance in

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the public sector. Not surprisingly, media industries mirror the tension between public and private interests in the public sphere. In the past 40 years, we have seen in media industries increased monopolization; decreased government oversight/ regulation; elevated shareholder over stakeholder interests; demonization of “big government” and government regulation in business programming; financialization of media companies; decreased spending on public media; privatization of infrastructure; celebrated individualism and “responsibilization” (individual responsibility over the public good); consumerism promoted as a substitution for citizenship; spread of ideological interests of the ruling oligopoly; skewed values toward glorifying fame, wealth, consumerism, and image culture; and increased cheap programming based on profitability, such as reality competition shows, gossip, “celebrified” and sensationalized media, infotainment, fake news, clickbait, comedy news, and sports (for an overview, see Phelan, 2018; Wasko, 2014). From oligarchy we get “oilygarchy,” which represents the converging interests and systematic biases of intertwined bureaucracies of government and Big Oil. Riffing on the concept of deep state, Moore (2019, p. 24) argues that these concerns then overlap with the major ICTs that have been merging in recent years to produce a kind of “deep media”: the mainstream media are owned and run by the wealthy and powerful, those who work in tandem with the government, military, and with other corporations (including those in the oil industry) behind the scenes to gain control, exert influence, and win power. As is the case with GAFA, these massive organizations have a “structured relationship to power,” producing ties between the deep state and deep media: “Both of them demonstrate corporate ties, especially the fossil fuel industry, creating a significant conflict of interest. Together they create a clear gatekeeping function regarding key information when it benefits government or corporate interests” (p. 24). In the case of digital media platforms, the top-12 investors of agribusiness giant Monsanto (now owned by Bayer) are also major investors in Facebook, which represents a convergence between biotech, agribusiness, and big data. Shiva (2018, p. 77) argues this is part of a trend to create a system of one agriculture, one science, one monoculture, and one monopoly: There are three kinds of convergence taking place in agriculture. The first is the merger of corporations like Monsanto and Bayer. The second is the takeover of mega corporations by the billionaires through their investment funds. The third is the merger of biotechnology and information technology. The danger is that the concentration of ownership leads to the concentration of ideas, which reinforces the interests and worldview of the primary owners/

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shareholders of the core companies. A limited set of ideas about the global economy and environment circulate through these institutions, reproducing a kind of monoculture. This then constrains the boundary of public discourse, such as framing the climate crisis as “too expensive” or making challenges to environmentally destructive consumer culture off limits. This structure enables the system reproduces itself, aptly summarized by Killmeier (2012, p. 75) in the following way: Capitalism affects how we subjectively imagine and represent nature. Nature becomes a resource, part of the forces of production, which fosters our alienation from it. As capitalism contributes a fundamental separation between humans and nature, it seems outside us. Ecological crises thus subjectively appear as problems of resource management. Alienation from nature becomes the basis for commodification and mystified representations. Nature becomes an empty signifier that can connote many things (Sturgeon, 2009). It is a frequent appellation appended to commodities (e.g., natural), lending them a green patina (Williamson, 2002). Here nature returns not as the repressed, but in service of capitalist oppression, abetting representations aimed at mystifying commodities and subjectively abetting ecological deterioration. Media organizations become entangled in an unsustainable paradigm (worldview) that permeates their business practices. According to Meadows (1991), a paradigm is an assumption of how things are and a commitment to keeping them the same way; we are emotionally committed to them. Paradigms shape language, thought, and perception. In media, the dominant paradigm is reinforced through the language of buying and selling (reaffirming the value of money) and measuring society by gross national product (GNP), which promotes unlimited growth as unquestioned good. As a rule, the status quo resists and rejects views that don’t fit; people who work in media are often too invested/committed to the system to accept challenges to it. As per the iceberg model of systems thinking, there is a pattern of ideas and beliefs that reinforce many unsustainable values in the media. For an overview of how the media reinforce an unsustainable paradigm, the following combines Bateson’s (2000) discussion of the “ecology of bad ideas” and Meadow’s (1991) systems dynamics critique. These are so ingrained and taken for granted that few even recognize how they are perpetuating these beliefs: • • • • • •

One cause produces one effect. All growth is good—and possible. There is an “away” to throw things to. Technology can solve any problem that comes up. The future is to be predicted, not chosen or created. A problem does not exist or is not serious until it can be measured.

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• •

• •

• • • • • • •

If something is “economic,” it needs no further justification. Relationships are linear, non-delayed, and continuous; there are no critical thresholds; feedback is accurate and timely; systems are manageable through simple cause–effect thinking. Results can be measured by effort expended. Nations are disconnected from one another; people are disconnected from nature; economic sectors can be developed independent of one another; some parts of a system can thrive, while other parts suffer. Choices are either/or, not both/and. Possession of things is the source of happiness. Individuals cannot make any difference. People are basically bad, greedy, and not to be trusted. Good people and good actions are rare exceptions. The rational powers of human beings are superior to their intuitive powers or their moral powers. Present systems are tolerable and will not get much worse; alternative systems cannot help but be worse than the ones we’ve got. We know what we are doing.

These attitudes can be found all over the media, including advertising, news, and popular culture. It’s not difficult to locate examples. Students can be tasked to identify items from this list in newspaper articles or TV news segments covering current events, such as hurricane damage, pandemics, civil rights struggles, or mundane stock market reporting. You can work with students to locate how these attitudes fit in the iceberg of systems thinking. Given that governments play a central role in regulating and mitigating environmental impacts, making investments in infrastructure, and driving policies like the Green New Deal, the dogma of limited government might be one of the most corrosive influences of neoliberalism. Indeed, in the United States, inaction on climate legislation can be tied to how “Political ideology is the biggest predictor of climate science denial. . . . [I]deologically driven confirmation bias (misinformation) is almost indistinguishable from intentional deception” (Cook, 2016). The ideology that aligns with climate denial is one that is anti-government regulation, pro-free market, neoliberal, anthropocentric, and increasingly accompanied by misogyny and white supremacy. Eco-citizenship demands that we work toward reforming or transforming the status quo, including advocating for media reform. Critical approaches to media should entail a critique of ecomediasystems and propose solutions.

Conclusion: The World of Ideas and Things For media studies, a critical analysis of ideology usually makes the following argument (in very simplified form). The world is constructed through language, media,

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and texts (constructionism); power operates on the level of ideas as expressed in texts (neo-Marxist political economy); media naturalize the status quo to win consent from emerging social movements (hegemony); media construct subjectivities for how we see the world (Frankfurt School); media can be contradictory and are not always monolithic (cultural studies); ideology is encoded, but can be decoded differently (encoding/decoding); audiences negotiate meanings (various effects theories); meaning is fluid and can change, but the danger is the world of text replaces social reality (postmodernism/poststructuralism); and participatory culture practices demonstrate creative ways people engage dominant ideologies. But Thevenin (2020) notes that with the ecological crisis, there is a fundamental problem with this method of analysis because we don’t just live in a world of discourses and ideas. We also live in a world of things: Media literacy education’s emphasis on the interpretation and interrogation of texts and their underlying ideological assumptions, while clearly beneficial in many ways, demonstrate this limitation. We remain stuck in the realm of representations of human discourse. When our end goal—even of critical pedagogical projects like ecomedia literacy—is to “raise awareness” about ecological issues, with the hope that this critical consciousness will lead to new consumption practices, we are effectively reducing the exercise of human agency to the practice of critical thinking. . . . However, when we open up this discourse, acknowledge that there is a material world that exists independent of our perception of it, and allow ourselves to engage with not just ideas but also things, we are capable to go beyond just changing minds and also practically and productively intervene in ecological realities such as climate change. (Limitations . . ., para. 3) To address this problem, Thevenin draws on speculative realism to devise an analytical and pedagogical method that intends to “(1) recognize the reality of nonhuman things, (2) emphasize materiality, and (3) challenge the divide between culture and nature” (para. 5). In their critique of modernist assumptions in conventional media literacy and media studies, Bybee and Stanovsek’s (2020) propose that we also need to reorient students toward an embodied experience of the lifeworld. As discussed throughout this book, Modernity’s disembodied paradigm has led many to be captivated by the spectacle of media technologies, while “concealing the relationships between these machines, technologies, our bodies, and the rest of the living world” (para. 2): This perspective encourages us to see the world from the objectivist perspective of nowhere, where science is narrowly understood as a kind of knowing that is concerned with a pre-existing hard reality, which leaves the

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“messy” problems of human experience as belonging to a non-empirical, separate world of feeling, values and qualities. The shift we are proposing is to understand these two views, the world of things and the world of feelings and values, not as separate but as interpenetrated. It is a shift to the perspective of people living in fleshy bodies, with sensations, feelings and ­emotions, who depend on one another as well as the living world. Knowledge grows out of these fleshy experiences: a view of knowledgemaking that has increasingly been called an embodied perspective.  .  .  . This embodied perspective can be seen as an epistemological shift which grounds knowing in bodily experience rather than merely in some floating, linguistically constructed world, or some “out-there,” “objective” reality. It breaks down the body-mind dualism of reductionist empiricism and opens the door to understanding “knowing” as an integration of environmental, biological, cognitive, and social experience and qualities. (The Embodied Perspective, para. 2–3) Bybee and Stanovsek (2020) evaluate the media literacy program, Common Sense Media, from the embodied perspective. They note that Common Sense Media operates from the belief that technology is a value-neutral information delivery/learning system.  .  .  . What is missed from an embodied view is that technology and learning need to be grounded in rich, situated experience. To understand technology as mediations means to ask and to teach about the technologies we are surrounded by and the design history, economic history, and cultural history which have produced them. (Applying the Embodied . . ., para. 3) Unlike the taken-for-granted transactional approach of knowledge, “All knowledge, from an embodied perspective, is always social knowledge, knowledge generated through the active process of creating shared meaning to guide collective action in a changing world” (Applying the Embodied . . ., para. 4). As is the case of how citizenship is situated in Western modernist liberal discourse, for Common Sense Media, “democracy is viewed as a mechanism for managing political power by rational, informed citizens” (para. 5). The environment and land are completely absent from this notion of democracy. As we’ll see in Part II, by exploring ecomateriality, lifeworld, ecoculture, and political ecology, ecomedia literacy moves beyond the discursive world of ideas to incorporate the world of things, feelings, and experiences. In introducing the ecomediasphere, the aim is to revise and move beyond the limits of past analytical approaches in media literacy and cultural studies so that we are no longer just caught up in a world of ideas, but also of things. Our ecomedia objects are vestiges, remnants, fragments, and scraps of the global superfactory. By reversing

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the relationship we have with surveillance platforms like Google and Facebook, instead of tracking us, we track them. As trackers, we are tracing the ecological footprint of our ecomedia objects, mapping a trail across the globe to our homes.

Notes 1. Esteva and Prakash (1998) use Two Thirds World as an alternative to “third world” and “developing world” to indicate that underserved and lower income regions of the world are the global majority. Alternatively, we could refer to it as the walled and unwalled world to reflect the border fortress surrounding high-income nations. 2. Though the ecomediasphere is inspired by integral ecology, it is not entirely based on the model. As Esbjorn-Hargens and Zimmerman (2009) suggest, all models are intended to be heuristic devices—tools to think with—and are not laws in and among themselves. I concur with this sentiment and feel it necessary to offer the following disclaimer regarding integral ecology. For the purpose of media education, I find integral ecology too complex, rigid, and structured. In particular, its incorporation of developmental models of psychology does not coincide with the boundary object method I have presented. I do not agree with its hierarchical approach to cultural development, which compares cultures to psychological states (such as so-called primitive cultures are akin to childhood psychological states). Taken to an extreme, proponents of integral philosophy, such as Beck and Cowan (2006), have advocated for a neoliberal model of globalization that justified the invasion of Iraq by the Bush administration based on the principle that because globalization is considered a “higher” model of cultural and psychological development, other cultures should be modernized in order to advance their evolution. Such universalized models are culturally biased and impose Westernized notions of progress and psychological development that are neocolonial at best.

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5 ECOMEDIA FOOTPRINT Ecomateriality

Ecomateriality (materialism, environmental studies, infrastructure studies) is the objective material conditions of the ecomedia object and its technological apparatus. This zone incorporates key concepts developed in the material turn in media studies and environmental humanities (Bollmer, 2019; Herzogenrath, 2017). The ecomaterialist zone specifically identifies the material aspects of media, such as built environments, wireless footprints, semiconductor production, cables and pipelines, ocean pings and acoustic ecology, cell towers and electromagnetic ­radiation, extraction, production, e-waste, and energy. Exploring ecomedia infrastructures invites the evaluation of the global economy and thereby is an important aspect of postcolonial critique. I concur with Vaughan’s (2019, p.  14) use of the term ecomateriality to ­differentiate from materialism, which has multiple connotations and implications across different fields and a spectrum of theories: For environmental studies, materialism refers to resource use, whereas for archaeologists it entails the cultural artifacts through which we can understand collective values, rituals, and social structures. In the colloquial, though, materialistic is a pejorative adjective used for people overly obsessed with consumer objects. Interweaving these various meanings through an environmental take on the Frankfurt School’s Marxist principle of dialectical materialism and therefore insisting that the natural world be included in an understanding of historical and political events arising from contradictory social forces, the term ecomaterialism evokes here the social inequalities, resource exploitation, and tangibility at the heart of mainstream screen culture. I connect these understandings of screen culture—as resource use, as network of artifacts, as dialectic tension between social and ecosystemic

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forces, as problematic crux of our consumer habits and collective desire for spectacle—through a systematic study of mainstream film culture’s practices and products. A key point is that ecomaterialism cannot just be about material characteristics but must be contextualized within certain ideological and cultural forces; hence, the iterative method of the ecomediasphere situates the ecomedia object’s materiality within social practice. By requiring fossil fuel–powered server farms and a vast technological infrastructure to move gadgets and information across the globe, ICT has a vast ecological footprint. Viewed through the lens of environmental impacts and resource use, media and the environment have a deep historical relationship, starting with the invention of paper to the current use of rare earth minerals extracted for the gadgets we keep in our pockets.

Ecological Footprint Ecological footprint refers to the impact of humans on the carrying capacity (biocapacity) of the biosphere. To conceptualize the ability of the environment to regenerate itself in response to human demand, carrying capacity is similar to the concept of an ecological bank account: If you withdraw more than you deposit, you go bankrupt or you need to borrow funds to stay afloat.1 When we overdraw from the environment—or what is more commonly referred to these days as the planetary boundaries of the Earth system—we borrow from future generations who will be tasked with regenerating tomorrow what we extract today. Our life support systems’ planetary boundaries include climate change, biodiversity loss, nitrogen cycle, phosphorus, ocean acidification, land use, freshwater, ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosols, and chemical pollution. Each boundary contains a safe zone for humanity, but also a tipping point when a threshold is crossed and it is no longer safe. Such is the case with biodiversity loss and the nitrogen cycle. The threshold that most of us are familiar with is average global temperatures. There is debate about whether 1.5°C or 2°C is safe for humanity, but in principle international agreements like the Paris accords are meant to coordinate around maintaining a safe level for humanity in which average global temperatures remain below certain levels. Earth Overshoot Day is the point in the year when humans consume more than the Earth can annually regenerate. Between 1987 and 2019, Earth Overreach Day has moved from December 19 to July 29 (Earth Overshoot Day, 2019). In 2019, humanity consumed over 100  billion tonnes of materials (minerals, ores, fossil fuels, and crops and trees), of which 5.6 tonnes was devoted to communications (other sectors include housing, transport, healthcare, services, consumer goods, and food). On average, each person consumes about 13 tonnes of materials every year. Currently, 8.6% of the world engages in a circular economy where materials are recycled and reused (Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative, n.d.). The global

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community consumes the equivalent of 1.5 Earths each year; however, overconsumption is disproportionate: US citizens consume the equivalent of four Earths every year, resulting in ecological debt to future generations across the planet, regardless of per capita income or resource consumption. Low-income people consume far less than what they bear from impacts of environmental degradation, as evidenced by drought, floods, and weather extremes caused by climate chaos in economically disadvantaged regions in the world, such as in Sub-Saharan Africa, Indian subcontinent, Caribbean, Pacific islands, or South American Andes. This is what Nixon (2011) refers to as “slow violence” against the poor. According to Maxwell and Miller (2012, p.  26), media impact planetary boundaries by source functions/input effects (“the Earth’s ability to provide resources, renewable or not, e.g. soils, forests, water, minerals, etc.”) and sink functions/output effects (“the ability of the Earth’s ecosystems to absorb and recycle wastes from media technology’s electrical and chemical products and processes”). The net result for our planetary system is that we are taking more from living systems than they can regenerate, which could make or break the world system’s viability. The 2019–2020 World Economic Forum (2020) annual report on perceived business risks acknowledged a host of environmental issues as their top concerns. The top five risks (in order) by “likelihood” are extreme weather, climate action failure, natural disasters, biodiversity loss, and man-made environmental disasters. The top global risks by “impact” are climate action failure, weapons of mass destruction, biodiversity loss, extreme weather, and water crises. Keep in mind, the framing of risk is about mitigating the worse, but not about aspiring for the good. There is a tacit acknowledgment that if people in the economically advantaged regions of the world want to maintain their lifestyle, they have to accept that there will be risks.

Ecomedia Footprint’s Political Ecology The rise of mass media and industrialization correspond with the advent of “cheap” carbon energy and the growth economy. Whether there is direct correlation or not, the emergence of the internet and digital media parallels the exponential increase of carbon emissions in the atmosphere, possibly because the planetary network is an integral aspect of expanding and running the world system. Not only has our mainstream media model and tech infrastructure coevolved with the system of advertising, consumption, and the ideology of unlimited growth, but also the rise of global media clearly parallels the increasing destruction of our biosphere. The legacy mass media business model combined the attention economy (for “free” broadcast media), material object commodities, and box office revenues. Lessig (2008) refers to the legacy economy of objects (tokens)—newspapers, CDs, records, books, DVDs, etc.—as the read-only media economy. ­Disrupting this model, the digital economy has led to the migration of most content to

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online services, yet the industry still requires physical objects (screen-based gadgets) and an infrastructure to stream data (music, TV, film, books, etc.). As global visual culture becomes indispensable in the lives of many (see Mirzoeff, 2016), we are emerging as a global screen culture that demands speed and convenience: In switching to a virtual realm we no longer produce so much physical stuff. Yet this digitalization of cultural content, of the way we both produce and experience cultural products from books to films to music, requires a profusion of screen-based digital devices. The iPod personal music player is quite useless without a life support network of energy-consuming internetconnected computers. Without a nexus of machines to feed in content, the iPod is just a moulded piece of plastic trinket. (Micklethwaite, 2015, pp. 27–28) The consequence is that many of us in high-income countries have multiple devices to do the same things—such as PCs at home and work, laptops, phones, tablets, and legacy electronics (TV, radio, etc.)—predicated on built-in obsolescence and an economic model of unlimited growth based on a linear, industrial production model dependent on hydrocarbons. So, though our content is increasingly digital, it is far from immaterial. As a model for the kind of analysis this entails, we can take the political ecology of music. This system of production, consumption, and waste follows a standard format: On the side of making and possession, a political ecology of music has an interest in the movement and processing of materials that are required before a recording can be bought or sold, created or listened to. There is a whole economy of raw materials and supply chains that undergirds what is traditionally called the recording industry. This economy is able to mobilise, synchronise and aggregate massive global contingents of people and materials, intertwining numerous national governments, local economies and environments. While such processes and materials may seem peripheral, they are actually central to what the recording industry is and how it works. . . . On the side of unmaking and dispossession, political ecology is interested in how even our favourite recordings, like all good things, must come to an end. That is, recordings eventually enter into circuits of dispossession. . . . Thus, the issue for the political ecologist is more than who is making and listening to music, or buying and selling it—or even what that music sounds like. Political ecology is also about where the raw materials of musical artefacts come from and how they are processed and manufactured, as well as how the artefacts are treated and where they go when we are done with them. (Devine, 2015, pp. 369–370)

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The makers and audiences for media are the subject area of ecomedia f­ootprint’s political ecology discussed in Chapter  5, but for the zone of ecomateriality, Devine’s description of music production could be applied to any kind of ­ecomedia object, be it video games, VR, or TVs. The transition to a digital media economy is characterized by three trends and impacts. First, companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook have achieved such immense scale, it’s practically a requirement to use them to participate in the culture and society. Second, digital platforms gain economic advantages within existing infrastructures, such as Uber’s impact on public transportation. Third, tech companies are investing in and building their own infrastructure projects (Plantin & Punathambekar, 2019, p. 164).

Infrastructure: Energy and Data Clouds The study of media infrastructures combines both the materiality of media and political economy by mapping and documenting the physical wires, servers, and the geography of techno media systems (see Walker & Starosielski, 2016). But it’s not a matter of just mapping, infrastructure studies puts it into a broader context of power structures (literal and figurative) and epistemological impacts. Mukherjee (2016, p. 99) asserts, In the field of media studies, there seems presently to be an urgency to study infrastructures that make mediated texts possible, with a greater focus on materiality than discourse (or textual analysis): this is pointed out as a necessary course correction to make up for so much attention having been devoted to the screen genres and texts for so long. The material infrastructure of energy and manufacture go hand in hand. As opposed to renewable solar power or forms of clean energy, our system’s primary energy source is based on ancient sunlight (stored as carbon in the form of coal, oil, and gas). This allowed for the rapid growth of the industrial revolution across the world, including the expansion of electricity. But the spread of the electrical grid across the planet has also been a major source of carcinogenic PCBs in the environment. For digital media, power grids are necessary to supply energy for server farms and for manufacturing. Under current conditions of production, all gadgets have embodied energy (“emergy”); that is, the cumulative energy required to make a device. They require and consume far more energy during the manufacturing process than during its lifetime of use. One study demonstrates that an iPhone requires the equivalent energy of an efficient refrigerator running for one year, which includes not just the energy to charge the battery but the whole infrastructure needed to run its apps: Accounting for the fuel cycle of a networked computer, whether stationary or mobile, is unlike that for any other consumer product. Using a single

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car, for example, does not require dozens or hundreds of other cars all over a city to be constantly idling, and then rev up the instant you start driving. This is precisely what happens with a networked computer. Surf the Internet, check Facebook, or watch a video, and while the handheld device starts to draw down its battery, computers all around the country and the world light up nearly simultaneously. (Mills, 2013, para. 5) iPhones and cars are similar, however, in accounting for the energy required to produce the silicon and steel components, respectively (amortized over the product lifespan), and in how energy use depends on behavior. The equivalent of accelerating hard and driving fast in the internet ecomediasystem is watching video on a tablet. By 2030, the global cloud may consume as much electricity as the entire country of Japan. Whereas in 2007 the carbon footprint of ICTs was 1%, by 2040 it will be 14%—half the size of the entire transportation industry ­(Wilson, 2018). As the Internet of Things comes online (when “smart” devices are ­wirelessly connected to the network), the problem will only be compounded. Cisco anticipates that we will have as many as 28.5 billion networked devices online by 2022 (Tarnoff, 2019). Consider the potential energy of the gadgets and cloud infrastructure needed to keep everything connected and running. Other energy facts: Some data centers are visible from space; global data centers combined consume as much power as a country this size of Italy or Spain (Rauch, 2018). While AI and data mining have been simplistically called the “new oil,” in terms of emissions there are some parallels. Regarding cloud computing, on a global scale, server farms produce as much CO2 as the aviation industry, largely due to the fact that most energy they currently consume comes from coal-­powered plants (Cubitt, 2017). Server farms do heavy lifting for streaming services (Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, etc.), social networks (Facebook, Instagram, online gaming, TikTok, etc.), and cryptocurrencies (currencies like bitcoin have to perform massive, complex mathematical formulas), and machine learning (teaching computers to learn, such as scanning thousands of images for facial recognition, or learning natural language for Alexa or Google). But the most energy consumption comes from phone apps (increased phone consumption demands more servers). While large social networks (Facebook), search engines (Google), cloud services (Salesforce), and manufacturers (Apple) have committed to convert to 100% renewable energy, Amazon Web Services and BitCoin (just to name a few) are increasing emissions through the expansion of server farms (Berthoud et al., 2019; Tarnoff, 2019). The impact of digital media in everyday life leads to increased energy consumption: “the always there, always on, nature of tablet and smart phone access to the internet has significantly increased demand on power supplies. Use is no longer periodic, it is continuous” (Murdock  & Brevini, 2017, p.  14). As The Guardian

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reported, Loudoun County in Virginia handles upward of 70% of the world’s online traffic, and its energy needs are primarily served by Dominion, with only 3% of its energy coming from renewables. In 2018, Dominion’s energy needs were so ravenous that it was involved with developing a regional pipeline that would deliver fracked gas (Harris, 2018). The next internet, or “Internet of Things,” where common devices (like household appliances) are wired to the net, will be “A world of ubiquitous, always on connected devices” (Mosco, 2017, p. 102). The cloud architecture for wireless networks is far more power demanding than wired networks. But, as noted by Maxwell and Miller (2020), servers are getting more efficient, so though server farms are expanding, their energy demand is not exponential. Compounding this problem is that to mitigate risk, data centers are also backed up. The irony of redundant backups to reduce risk is that The culture of remote and distributed, hyper-redundant backup is quickly increasing the resource footprint of our data, powering a vicious cycle among backup practices, risk perception, and environmental sustainability. The key paradox is this: to protect our data from the threats associated with climate change—such as storms, floods, and drought-induced wildfires— we multiply and distribute our data across a vast network of server farms; but this multiplication, in turn, necessitates the expansion of physical infrastructure, consuming more space and energy and generating emissions that further destabilize the climate. (Brennan, 2016, pp. 69–70) This recalls Beck’s risk society thesis, where “we organize society around the management of risk from a ‘negative and defensive’ posture. We don’t aspire for the good, but try to mitigate the worse” (Brennan, 2016, p. 58). As Brennan (2016) points out, there are two systems of sustainability at odds with each other—digital (preserving information through infrastructure) and environmental. Data lifecycles are not the same as or compatible with biological life, which is obscured by the discourse of data sustainability. Whereas data centers are backed up, there is no backup for the planet Earth. Even though there are backup efforts with seed banks or archives of civilization (as proposed by the Alliance to Rescue Civilization), the idea of backing up “data” of civilization without “hardware” (oceans, soils, atmospheres, and ecosystems) is problematic and absurd. After all, “Why safeguard Earth’s hardware if the contents of the planet’s hard drive could simply be ‘reinstalled’ after the apocalypse? The world may end, but the worldas-data will survive” (Brennan, 2016, p. 71).

Extraction and Labor In terms of gadget manufacturing, Maxwell and Miller (2020) divide labor issues into four areas: Mining hazards and conflict minerals; manufacturing and assembly;

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the business model that keeps wages low and compromises worker health; and our global e-waste problem. Our gadgets require extracting rare earth metals (coltan, cassiterite, wolframite, gold), lithium mining, carbon fuels, water, timber, etc. Rare earth metals are mostly extracted from mining operations that have had a ­particularly devastating impact in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). These “conflict minerals” have laid waste to biodiversity and humans and exacerbated regional military strife (Alakeson, 2003; Cubitt, 2017; Maxwell & Miller, 2020). Mining these metals is hazardous for workers in Asia, Africa, South Africa, and locations where ores are exported for processing. They are exposed to respiratory hazards and radioactive elements, often in countries where the industry is unregulated or laws are poorly enforced. Miners frequently work on unstable terrain or in vulnerable underground sites where they confront combustible dust, fires, and mine collapses, including bronchitis, silicosis, and cancer. Gold-mining byproducts include such poisonous neurotoxins as lead, cyanide, and mercury. (Maxwell and Miller, 2020, p. 70) Mining accounts for 85–95% of mobile phone emissions during its average twoyear lifecycle (Wilson, 2018). Keeping your phone for three years means one less year minerals have to be mined for your gadget. Minerals from Earth are integrated into our gadgets and batteries, making the planet’s geology a necessary part of any medium (Parikka, 2015). From the perspective of those suffering the consequences of extractivism (mining, oil, etc.), this system is a form of imperialism. Once extracted, minerals and other resources are shipped, processed, and assembled in nations like China (the “workshop of the world”). “Fluid toxic essences, heavy metals, gases, or chemical poisons are all physically damaging for manufacturing workers and users’ health” (KaitatziWhitlock, 2015, p. 72). Again, the whole notion of a knowledge economy (often imagined as immaterial) is predicated on hard physical labor. Qiu (2016, pp. 183–184) notes, Labor underlies the materiality of digital technology, especially the production and circulation of gadgets. Transmitters, fiber optics networks, cellular base stations, satellites—these are also material objects requiring precious raw materials as well as the indispensable labor of processing, assembly and maintenance. All need physical labor input; all have environmental footprints. All require software cultural content, regulatory systems, and other forms of “invisible labor,” including consumption as another mode of “labor-intensive” exploitation, even though it is perceived as more fun. Qui divides these two classes of work into Manufacturing iSlaves (laborers who make our stuff) and Manufactured iSlaves (“playbours”—social media and gamers

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who perform “free” labor for media platforms). These comprise what Fuchs identifies as an international division of digital labor that includes agricultural, industrial, and information forms of labor (Qiu, p.  13). Labor rights for both groups require protection. Invariably, the world system produces “unemployment generating growth” by promoting economic expansion that eliminates jobs through automation and free labor (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2015, p. 69). As robots, software, and gadgets increasingly replace humans, there is a fear that this is leading to digital “re-feudalization.” Cubitt (2014, p. 279) paints a fairly bleak picture of this reality: Those who are not privileged to sit at the centre of intellectual and finance capital produce a diminishing amount of the exchange value in each commodity. Those who can, or are forced to, work, and are treated like the victims of the Bangladeshi factory collapse of April  2013: supernumerary, unregarded, a repressed that returns only momentarily as news item. Those who cannot are abandoned to civil war, famine and disease: conditions that, in the case of the Congolese war, have persisted for over a decade as the unconscious of metropolitan consumption (United Nations, 2002). Meanwhile metropolitan lumpenproletariat populations superfluous to both intellectual work and offshore industry are pushed further into ghettos, with diminishing health, education and social resources, prey to drugs and guns, that increasingly resemble the reservations set aside for indigenous peoples in the genocidal heyday of settler expansion. With the abdication of vision common to parliamentary parties of the industrialized and in many instances the industrializing world, the only organic ­intellectuals left are the gangs, building alternative economies and confronting the police in an ethnoclass war to secure human status (Wynter, 2003). Between civil war and gang war, the trajectory of the mode of destruction instigated by consumerism would appear to lead to the auto-destruction of the ­consumer class. The rise of a precariate and the use of apps (Taskrabit, Mechanical Turk, Uber, Lyft, etc.) to skirt labor and discrimination laws further exemplify how emerging technology disenfranchises labor.

Build and Discard: Designing, Manufacturing, Materialization, Transportation and E-Waste In 1965, there were only 12 materials in common use (wood, brick, iron, ­copper, gold, silver, and plastics); computer chips used in our gadgets now contain over 60 materials (Miller, 2018, p.  9). Most of our gadgets are a combination of ­aluminum, coltan, and plastics that are molded into predesigned shapes and functionality. Manufactured primarily by “Appconn” in China, the general system

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requires assembly, cleanup, packaging, and delivery to warehouses, as part of a codependent alliance between the United States and China (Chimerica). Among its many clients, FoxConn manufactures for HP, Dell, Nokia, Microsoft, Sony, Cisco, Nintendo, Intel, Motorola, Samsung, Panasonic, Toshiba, Canon, Lenovo, Amazon, Google, Xiaomi, and so on (Qiu, 2016, p. 7). These devices are a digital smorgasbord of components, some of which require renewing (like rechargeable batteries), some of which may be regularly or occasionally upgraded (such as processors), and some relatively stable components (such as sound and image reproduction). But they increasingly come in a sealed container, so that, constrained by the inflexibility of its packaging, it will last only as long as its least durable component. (Lewis, 2017, p. 60) They are designed to be discarded (through built-in obsolescence) so that ­consumers are constantly upgrading and replacing their gadgets. The weakest component reduces the gadget’s lifespan (the malfunction of a small part can lead to discarding the whole device). “Perfection can only be sold once” (p. 61), so what will motivate companies to build something that doesn’t need to be replaced? Long-lasting technology is not profitable. Here, progress is not correlated with the betterment of the human (and environmental) condition, but “as a conveyor belt of product upgrades” (Lewis, 2017, p. 62). With a saturated market, people are buying less phones, so consumer electronic companies are making higher end phones with bigger screens to keep up with growth projections. These gadgets have a far larger carbon footprint (for example, iPhone 7 Plus produced around 10% more CO2 than the iPhone 6s; the iPhone 6s created 57% more CO2 than the iPhone 4s) (Wilson, 2018). The increase of “frictionless” purchasing, such as Amazon.com online purchasing platform, only increases consumption. Gadgets are marketed to produce demand and are shipped around the world, with packaging a major source of pollution. The production of electronic gadgets impacts the health of workers and poisons the water, land, and air where they are produced, but the design strategy is to make this system “out of sight, out of mind,” best exemplified by the process of cleaning gadgets with chemicals to remove them of human fingerprints so that they appear to be untouched (Micklethwaite, 2015). Another way tech companies try to dematerialize their environmental impact is through the use of discursive and visual nature metaphors. Consider, for example, the default desktop images of Windows or Apple operating systems that offer images of pristine, people-less nature. These stylized synthetic images aim for the sublime effect of eighteenthand nineteenth-century Romantic landscape painting, so that we feel like

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the Wanderer in Caspar David Friedrich’s famous Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), on the verge of misty profundity. This is quite dangerous if our nice background wallpaper image of “nature” reassures us that all is well with the world outside the confines of our digital domain. Escapism is dangerous if it leads us to denial of the actual state of things. An environmentally themed digital wallpaper image would probably qualify as greenwash. (Micklethwaite, 2015, p. 31) The cloud metaphor for data centers is particularly insidious. As Brennan (2016, pp. 65–66) asserts, the cloud metaphor frames online storage as the seed, whereas the cloud disperses them: Part of the attraction of the cloud metaphor, in addition to making digital infrastructure seem magically “green” and virtual, is the image of airborne mobility that assuages fears about data impermanence.  .  .  . The cloud connotes a broad and untargeted dispersion of data across space, yet servers are concentrated in facilities that are deliberately located in relation to state borders and regulatory contexts. . . . While the cloud image provides a framework for thinking about environmental risks to data and their evasion, its conceptual dematerialization makes infrastructure of digital backup and preservation seem environmentally benign. But in reality, networked data centers, built to handle ever-larger amounts of information, including backup copies, entail very real resource expenditures and CO2 emissions. To put it blatantly, “we live in an age of waste” (Miller, 2015, p. 138). But most who inhabit rich economies conveniently ignore it or remain ignorant because 70–80% of e-waste is dumped in the Global South (Gabrys, 2013). Electronic gadgets produce pollution and e-waste: Pollutants are emitted in the environment during (a) manufacturing, (b) use phase of products, but especially (c) after they are disposed. E-waste poisons are spread, during recycling processes of obsolesced and disposed products. In reality, e-waste deposition and management is problematic either it is handled through processes of organized recycling or not. Pollution stems from water disposal of TV-sets, warn-out computers, mobile phones, wires, batteries, processed semiconductors, and other digital paraphernalia. ICT pollutants, such as heavy metals or rare poisonous chemicals, thus, impact on every aspect of the environment: ground and subterranean fields, waters, atmosphere. Besides, carcinogenic electromagnetic spectrum radiation is

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exuded permanently for instance, during cell phone signal transmissions, constituting a major cause of air intoxication. (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2015, p. 71) The average lifespan of a mobile phone is only two years, which makes them essentially disposable e-waste. Only 1% of smartphones are recycled, the rest are turned into garbage (Wilson, 2018). Similarly, only 13% of annual e-waste is recycled, 87% is “deserted” in “vast piles of toxic litter” (Kaitatzi-Whitlock, 2015, p. 72). This leads to severe impacts on human health: Health and ecosystem risks associated with exposure to burned, dismantled and open-pit disposal of e-waste in low-skilled, low-tech salvage yards are well-known. Health risks include brain damage, headaches, vertigo, nausea, birth defects, diseases of the bones, stomach, lungs, and other vital organs and disrupted biological developments of children. These conditions result from exposure to heavy metals (lead, cadmium, chromium and mercury), burned plastics and poisonous fumes emitted when melting components in search of precious metals (StEP, 2016). (Maxwell & Miller, 2017, p. 51) Just as importantly, Gabrys (2015, p. 8) reminds us that energy as a form of electronic waste is treated like “dirt” when it crosses boundaries (as in going to the “wrong places”), so it should remain out of sight: The “dirt” of energy does not turn up as litter or rubbish in the same way that Styrofoam containers or plastic bottles do, but rather circulates in the relatively immaterial if no less potent form of CO2 emissions, particulate matter, and other airborne emissions.  .  .  .  [T]he emissions that are the primary form of pollution from energy are often detected only in their effects and material transformations that take place within systems, bodies, and ecologies. . . . In this respect, pollution could be seen as an ongoing and transformative material relationship rather than a sequestered space or boundary beyond which waste-based materialities are identified. Moreover, Gabrys asserts that waste and pollution lead to mattering, creating new material conditions (i.e., CO2 concentrations lead to melting permafrost), and it may be possible “to expand beyond treating materiality only as that which is tangible, visible, or physical, to suggest instead that materiality relates to sedimentations, arrangements, and relationships that continue to hold our existing energy practices together” (p. 9). Additionally, design choices have indirect effects, such as eliminating the DVD drive from computers that makes obsolete millions of objects already

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in circulation. Consider other discarded media, such as floppy disks, cassettes, VHS, etc. that have been made obsolete (see Bruce Sterlling’s (n.d.) Dead Media Project).

Electromagnetic Fields (EMFs) Maxwell and Miller (2017, p.  49) assert, “With the advent of manufactured, artificial electromagnetic fields (EMFs) we have altered our electromagnetic environment on a scale that is unprecedented in our evolutionary history.” Birds and bees navigate on the Earth’s electromagnetic field. Human brain waves in Alpha state (our most relaxed) are 8–12 Hz; the Earth’s electromagnetic frequency is 3–60 Hz, with peaks of intensity at 8, 14, and 43.2 Hz. As it turns out, “Our brains have evolved to resonate in very basic ways with the planet” (p. 54). So, it seems we are engaging in a grand experiment that is unprecedented in evolution. What do we know about the effects of the increased electromagnetic energy of our wireless footprint? If you believe that radio-frequency (RF) levels of your phone are safe, try this simple exercise: See if you can find the RF exposure guidelines for your phone. How easy was it? And if not, why do you think that information is so difficult to access? Maxwell and Miller (2020) illustrate how telecom companies utilize the same tactics as the carbon industry to create confusion and doubt about science. This “war gaming of science” to reduce regulation and awareness of the safety of our devices requires an analysis of industry practices, but also the political economy of media that enables tech companies to confuse the public. For example, do you know if cell phones cause cancer? If you’re not sure, then this is precisely the point. You should have clear awareness of this issue. Additionally, more research also needs to be made regarding the mental health impacts of our gadgets. As Maxwell and Miller (2020) note, addiction and screen time lead to literal dangers of distraction (such as traffic accidents), impacts on learning, and risks to our natural electromagnetic rhythms and sleep patterns.

Conclusion: Outsmart Your Smartphone Given the environmental consequences of cell phone production and the impact they have on workers, “smart” has always been a misnomer. Maxwell and Miller’s (2020) call to action is to “outsmart our smartphones.” With the exception of the Fairphone (an ethically produced “fair trade” phone), from a strictly ecojustice standpoint, the current generation of mobile gadgets are quite dumb, and not smartly designed for low environmental impact or fair labor practices. As they point out, we have been too enthralled by the technological sublime and “digital enchantment” to question the impact of our beloved gadgets on the environment, even when we express concern for the climate crisis. This leads to a major blind spot in our understanding of how gadget production and use has huge energy

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impacts, from the production of silicon wafers and semiconductors to running server farms (and therefore increased CO2 emissions), and a massive toxic legacy from their manufacture and disposal. Maxwell and Miller (2012) argue the future champion of environmentalism in the media industry as a whole will be the green citizen accountant that must ultimately make the key economic decisions about how to allocate money and resources. In terms of mitigating environmental risk, Kääpä (2020) focuses on the important role of media managers and policies related to the regulation of industries, organization of labor, resources, and networking. Gadget analysis should include examining the ideological structure of the global economic system as it relates to media and gadget production, requiring research into global ICT infrastructure and production that invariably drives the material characteristics of ecomedia objects (Cubitt, 2017). This also involves a kind of technoliteracy that critically engages the economic motives for technological systems and commercial practices, such as surveillance and data gathering, advertising, promoting and marketing, data mining and analysis, and the selling of data (Buckingham, 2019, p.  79). In terms of digital media culture, I  combine the critique of platform capitalism (Christl  & Spiekermann, 2016; Fuchs, 2020; Zuboff, 2019) with the work of the world-ecology research network,2 especially the research of Jason W. Moore (Moore, 2015, 2016; Patel & Moore, 2018). Additional activities include environmental audits and field trips to infrastructure sites.

Prompts Ecomaterial prompts for probing the ecomedia object: • • • • • • • •

What material and infrastructures are used? What are its minerals and chemical composition? How was it made? Where was it made? Who made it? How is it disposed of or repurposed? How would you evaluate it according to ecojustice? Are there systemic reforms or policy changes that need to be made to regulate how it is made?

Notes 1. The banking metaphor is problematic because it reifies the environment; however, the analogy does help students understand the concept of ecological footprint in familiar terms. This is not to be confused with Frieri’s concept of educational banking. 2. https://worldecologynetwork.wordpress.com/

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References Alakeson, V. (2003). Making the network: Sustainable development in a digital society. Xeris Pub. Berthoud, F., Bihouix, P., Fabre, P., Kaplan, D., Lefèvre, L., Monnin, A.,  .  .  . Ducass, A. (2019). Lean ICT: Towards digital sobriety (p.  90). The Shift Project. https://­ theshiftproject.org/en/article/lean-ict-our-new-report/ Bollmer, G. (2019). Materialist media theory: An introduction. Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc. Brennan, S. (2016). Making data sustainable: Backup culture and risk perception. In J. Walker  & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and ­environment (pp. 56–76). Routledge. Buckingham, D. (2019). The media education manifesto. Polity Press. Christl, W., & Spiekermann, S. (2016). Networks of control: A report on corporate surveillance, digital tracking, big data & privacy. Facultas. Circularity Gap Reporting Initiative. (n.d.). Retrieved June 5, 2020, from www.circularity-gap. world/ Cubitt, S. (2014). Decolonizing ecomedia. Cultural Politics, 10(3), 275–286. https://doi. org/10.1215/17432197-2795669 Cubitt, S. (2017). Finite media: Environmental implications of digital technologies. Duke ­University Press. Devine, K. (2015). Decomposed: A  political ecology of music. Popular Music, 34(3), 367–389. https://doi.org/10.1017/S026114301500032X Earth Overshoot Day. (2019, January  9). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index. php?title=Earth_Overshoot_Day&oldid=877521299 Fuchs, C. (2020). Communication and capitalism: A critical theory. University of Westminster. Gabrys, J. (2013). Digital rubbish: A natural history of electronics. University of Michigan Press. Gabrys, J. (2015). Powering the digital: From energy ecologies to electronic environmentalism. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg, & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp. 3–18). Routledge. Harris, J. (2018, July  17). Our phones and gadgets are now endangering the planet | John Harris. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/17/ internet-climate-carbon-footprint-data-centres Herzogenrath, B. (Ed.). (2017). Media matter: The materiality of media, matter as medium. Bloomsbury Academic. Kääpä, P. (2020). Environmental management of the media: Policy, industry, practice. Routledge. Kaitatzi-Whitlock, S. (2015). E-waste, human waste, infoflation. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg,  & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp.  69–84). Routledge. Lessig, L. (2008). Remix: Making art and commerce thrive in the hybrid economy. Penguin Press. Lewis, J. (2017). Digital desires: Mediated consumerism and climate crisis. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 57–69). Palgrave Macmillan. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. Oxford University Press. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2017). Digital technology and the environment: Challenges for green citizenship and environmental organizations. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 41–55). Palgrave Macmillan. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2020). How green is your smartphone? Polity Press.

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Micklethwaite, P. (2015). Immaterial culture? The un(sustainability) of screens. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg, & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp. 19–39). Routledge. Miller, T. (2015). The art of waste: Contemporary culture and unsustainable energy use. In L. Parks & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Signal traffic: Critical studies of media infrastructures (pp. 137–156). University of Illinois Press. Miller, T. (2018). Greenwashing culture. Routledge. Mills, M. (2013, September  24). The bottom line on iPhones vs. Refrigerators. The Breakthrough Institute. https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/the-bottom-line-oniphones-vs-refrigerators Mirzoeff, N. (2016). How to see the world: An introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies, and more. Basic Books. Moore, J. W. (2015). Capitalism in the web of life: Ecology and the accumulation of capital. Verso. Moore, J. W. (2016). Anthropocene or capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. PM Press. Mosco, V. (2017). The next internet. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 95–107). Palgrave Macmillan. Mukherjee, R. (2016). Mediating infrastructures: (Im)Mobile toxicity and cell antenna publics. In J. Walker  & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 95–112). Routledge. Murdock, G.,  & Brevini, B. (2017). Carbon, capitalism, communication. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. Parikka, J. (2015). A geology of media. University of Minnesota Press. Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2018). History of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. University of California Press. Plantin, J.-C.,  & Punathambekar, A. (2019). Digital media infrastructures: Pipes, platforms, and politics. Media, Culture  & Society, 41(2), 163–174. https://doi. org/10.1177/0163443718818376 Qiu, J. L. (2016). Goodbye iSlave: A manifesto for digital abolition. University of Illinois Press. Rauch, J. (2018). Slow media: Toward a sustainable future. Oxford University Press. Sterlling, B. (n.d.). The dead media project: A modest proposal. www.deadmedia.org/modestproposal.html Tarnoff, B. (2019, September 18). To decarbonize we must decomputerize: Why we need a Luddite revolution. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/ tech-climate-change-luddites-data Vaughan, H. (2019). Hollywood’s dirtiest secret: The hidden environmental costs of the movies. Columbia University Press. Walker, J., & Starosielski, N. (Eds.). (2016). Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment. Routledge. Wilson, M. (2018, March 27). Smartphones are killing the planet faster than anyone expected. Fast Company. www.fastcompany.com/90165365/smartphones-are-wrecking-theplanet-faster-than-anyone-expected World Economic Forum. (2020). The global risks report 2020 (15th ed.). Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. PublicAffairs.

6 ECOMEDIA FOOTPRINT Lifeworld

Lifeworld (phenomenology, affect) is the zone of the individual’s cognitive and affective experience of time, space, and place in the world. This area of inquiry corresponds with the turn toward the study of affect in ecocinema studies and ecocriticism, which is interested in the sensory experience of media: Both reading and watching are highly embodied activities not only in that we need our senses in order to be able to perceive things, but also in that our bodies act as sounding boards for our mental situations of storyworlds and of characters’ perceptions, emotions, and actions within virtual worlds. (Weik von Mossner, 2017, p. 3) In addition, the increased dependence on smartphones impacts our sense of place, space, and time. Sustainability educators believe that environmental responsibility and action starts when humans learn to care about their habitats and develop a “sense of place” (Blewitt, 2006; Capra, 2005; Orr, 1992; Stibbe, 2009; Thomashow, 1995). Increasingly, travel and gadget usage have not only made many of us global citizens, but also increased a sense of alienation and disconnection from living systems (Louv, 2005; Rauch, 2018). Screens also impact our bodies (such as sleep patterns), which is the most important environment we inhabit (Stevens & Zhu, 2015). Like all the other zones, lifeworld cannot be explored in isolation from ecoculture, political ecology, or ecomateriality. Because ecomedia’s materiality produces sensory experiences, learning and studying about medium is an ecomediatone between the two lower zones of the ecomediasphere. The emotional response to ecomedia is an ecomediatone between the zones on the left side of the ecomediasphere. The attention economy’s political ecology dictates the design of

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platforms, gadgets, and software that drive screen addiction and impact our mental health. Media are also designed to optimize a response from our cognitive dispositions. What ties all of these together in the lifeworld is how sensory phenomena generates our experience and how ecomedia environments afford and constrain our cognition in an ecology of perception. Ultimately, this zone is the realm of media mindfulness.

Medium Properties This area of inquiry has traditionally been the focus of the field of media ecology, which views media as technological environments that shape our experience of the world (Lum, 2006). Whether it’s Innis’ (1999) discussion of time-biased versus space-biased media, Ong’s (1982) investigation into the impact of literacy on oral culture, or McLuhan’s (2002) exploration of hot and cool media, media ecologists assert that technology and media alter our cognitive environments: They shape not what we think, but how we think. The simplest example would be Mumford’s (1967) study of how the advent of mechanical clocks reorganized society into experiencing mechanical time. One of the most prominent examples is the idea that alphabetic writing alters our cognition to favor abstractions. Another is how Gutenberg’s movable type printing press radically changed the course of European history. Similar arguments have been made about the powerful effect of the telegraph, wireless, satellites, and internet. Abram (1996) combined the insights of media ecology with phenomenology to assert that alphabetic literacy has impacted how Western culture has become alienated from the more-than-human world. Shlain (1998) suggests that the introduction of the alphabet ­correlates with the rise of patriarchy and the demise of matriarchy in the Mediterranean. Media ecology has broad applications for anyone teaching ecomedia literacy. The main thing to consider is that unlike the Cartesian and mechanistic concept of the mind as a programmable machine, the ecomedia literacy approach to ecoculture and lifeworld is that our cognition develops as a process of cultivation. As we experience the world, it makes us physically, shapes our organs with which we experience it, in a ‘meeting between embodied mind and active world that must include not only physical experiences but social relationships, not only sensory data but the interaction between any given sense moment and what has gone before.’ (Kerridge, 2016, p. 20) The ecology of perception asserts that there is a structural coupling between our cognition and the environment. The dendrites and the synapses that form in our brains develop in response to environmental affordances and constraints. They grow and are shaped due to the stimulus we experience. Picture how young plants have soft and malleable stems and branches. As they grow and get older,

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they harden and take specific forms. Likewise, our exposure to different kinds of media, such as books or screen-based gadgets, can end up overstimulating parts of the brain that impact our cognitive development.

Sense and Perception In visual literacy studies, there are two categories of visual theories—sensory and perceptual (Lester, 2014). Sensory theories are related to how images are processed by our nervous system; perceptual theories are about how we create meaning from images. The former relates to the lifeworld zone, and the latter corresponds with ecoculture because it deals with semiotics and interpretation. Aldus Huxley (1942) proposed that “seeing” combines sensing, selecting, and perceiving. This means that we see more clearly by active viewing, focusing attention, and applying meaning to images produced by our culture. This is crucial for visual literacy, but also for any medium explored by ecomedia literacy. Students need to be trained to sense the physicality of media. First and foremost, all images are created by reflected light, which has a physical property that stimulates our nervous system; our eyes “touch” light. This aligns with Huxley’s concept of sensing. One activity that can help make this point is to ask students to stare at an illuminated screen in a dark room and then close their eyes. The afterimage they’ll see is evidence of light photons stimulating the cones and rods (photoreceptors) in their eyes. You can also project an inverted color image (negative) on a screen and have students stare it for 15 seconds, and then instruct them to look away. They should see a positive version of the image floating in space (do a web search for “negative afterimage” for examples to use in class). The image is the result of the photoreceptors being overstimulated and remaining agitated to produce an afterimage. In addition to simply responding to light, we also organize visual information according to Gestalt principles (Barnes, 2012). Gestalt is a school of psychology from the late 1800s and early 1900s that examined how the mind self-organizes visual information into coherent groupings; the visual whole is greater than the sum of its parts. We do this because we are uncomfortable with irregularities in our visual field, so we constantly seek out patterns, groupings, and figure–background relationships. As applied to visual awareness, this means that we try to make sense of visual forms (shapes, lines, dots), movement, color, and depth. In our field of vision, we look at objects and organize them according to difference, similarity, proximity, continuity, figure–ground, direction, or closure (filling-in missing information when there is not enough to complete a picture). We then compare what we see with experience in order to make sense of it and categorize it according to our previous knowledge. This is the “selecting” part of the Huxley equation. Developing cognitive awareness is a necessary aspect of ecomedia literacy because it helps students become more aware of the embodied nature of our

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perception as an aspect of human evolution in the physical world. To make this point, sensory techniques can be experimented with when working outside the classroom. By getting students to actively apply Gestalt principles to their visual horizon, they can compare the same mental processes used to perceive visual media (i.e., how we make sense of what we are seeing) with everyday experience. We can also conceive of our eyes as not being autonomous objects connected to our brains, but as connected to our feet (consider how we use movement to see), and therefore seeing is experienced within the environment as we are moving through with our bodies. This is in contrast to the inherited visual regime of linear perspective that places us outside and separate from the visual field as if we are looking out a window at the world. Drawing our attention to the sensory aspect of visual communication can open up the discussion of how screen technology impacts our physical health, and also allows us to reflect on the physiological differences of medium, such as film, TV, computers, smartphones, or print, and how they impact our brains. From the lifeworld perspective of ecomedia literacy, I’m interested in how different parts of our brain process media differently. The best way to open up a discussion about this topic is to simply ask students the difference between a photo of something (like a sunset) versus a written description. The short answer is that information in images is processed all at once, whereas writing is temporal (it takes time to read) and depends on categories for descriptions (the sun is high or low, bright or dim, etc.). To make this point more clearly, we can use the example of comics as a medium that combines writing and drawing. The popular book, Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain (Edwards, 2001), is often recommended by comics artists to help beginners to learn to draw. The approach and success of the author’s method is closely related to the goals of visual literacy, because the empirically tested techniques are designed to help people perceive and see better. As noted, at the basis of visual literacy is to understand form (in addition to understanding symbols). For example, all images start with building blocks—lines, dots, and shapes. Like the keys on a piano or musical instrument, those basic elements are used in infinite combination to create images. The various combinations they can take form patterns and relations, which are associated with Gestalt theory. Comics offers a strong example of media that enables the exploration of Gestalt theory components, such as gesture, lines, foreground/background, positive/negative space, composition, perspective, shading, distance, and depth of field. In addition, artistic gesture can define facial expressions and body posture, environmental space, and architectural space. The techniques in Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain highlight the kind of skills that can be developed when creating comics or developing visual literacy. In principle, drawing facilitates beginners to learn to see more precisely (which then enables them to draw “better”): “When you see in the special way in which experienced artists see, then you can draw” (Edwards, 2001, p. 4, emphasis

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original). This involves training perception to see edges, spaces, relationships, lights and shadows, and the “perception of the whole, or gestalt” (Edwards, 2001, p. xviii). Edward’s method draws on cognitive science and is based on a theory that people have difficulty drawing because oftentimes the left-brain hemisphere, which is associated with labeling and identification, dominates the right-brain hemisphere, which is associated with imagination and creativity. The technique of slow looking can develop an awareness of form. This can be achieved by having students draw as part of their analytical process. In deconstructing visual media, I often have students first draw the image they are analyzing, which forces them to look at it more closely. I also often require them to keep a sketch notes journal (Rohde, 2013) and require them to sketch their notes and to draw images I project in slides. Interestingly, learning to draw involves unlearning the way we automatically employ symbol systems and stereotypes during the creative process, because symbols, which are by nature abstractions, employ the left brain and create a mental conflict during the act of creation. Medium theorists in the media ecology tradition have long noted the relationship between medium and cognition, in particular how reading and writing tend to encourage and promote left-brain thinking skills (McLuhan & Powers, 1989). Many scholars argue that 21st-century skills must include a greater integration of right-brain skills development (McGilchrist, 2009; Pink, 2005). In general, media literacy approaches tend to be dominated by left hemisphere processes, because that is what is favored by society and education policy (i.e., STEM), such as critical thinking, literacy, math, and science (López, 2008). We are good at left-brain sequencing and scaffolding, but it’s unlikely that we would find courses in imagination, in visualization, in perception or spatial skills, in creativity as a separate subject, in intuition, in inventiveness. Yet educators value these skills and have apparently hoped that students would develop imagination, perception, and intuition as natural consequences of training in verbal, analytical skills. (Edwards, 2001, p. 40)

Media Languages and Grammar Communicators work within different conventions of the ecomediasystem that are appropriate to their chosen medium. The grammar of comics, film, and TV depends on the viewers already being familiar with their respective media languages. Examples include comics using speech balloons with squiggly lines to indicate internal thoughts; film utilizing dissolves to indicate a transition in time; and TV news using forms of address and crawls indicating to viewers “this is news.” This draws on the media ecology tradition, which recognizes the unique

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characteristics of medium in terms of what they afford and constrain in their ability to convey media languages and affect. When it comes to media language, every ecomediasystem has its own affordances and constraints. I encourage students to think of media language as a kind of ecology that emerges from medium. For instance, it’s important to identify how graphic design in magazines or print advertisements act as a particular visual ecology that is different than the ecology of moving images found in music videos or televised public service announcements. In another example, comic journalism, which is a kind of reporting that comic artists create, works with the lexicon of frames, gutters, text balloons, motion lines, and a variety of other techniques. Filmmakers work with shots, edits, and film language. In terms of effectively communicating about ecological issues, identifying the unique characteristics of different ecomedia will help environmental communicators think more specifically about the form of their communication within the context of a media campaign’s particular ecomediasystem.

Affect Ecocinema and ecocriticism have made an affective turn, which means exploring the emotional and affective experience of cinema and literature. Much of the interest in affect is predicated on Antonio Damasio and J.J. Gibson’s theories of the perceptive experience of the environment, which “is not only embodied (in a physical body) and embedded (in a physical environment), but it is also highly affective” (Weik von Mossner, 2016, p. 536). Theories of affect and emotion are a part of “ecocritical scholarship that studies the complex relationship between imaginative texts and the physical environment” and how film and literature utilize devices to trigger emotional and affective (and hence bodily) responses to narrative (Weik von Mossner, 2014, p. 2). Affect is “our automatic, visceral response to a given film or sequence” and emotion is “our cognitive awareness of such a response” (p. 1); “Emotions . . . are understood as a material, bodily force that arises in response to certain places and environmental conditions” (p. 5). Moreover, Emotions, here, are understood as the basic mechanism that connects us to our environment, shapes our knowledge, and motivates our actions. If we want to understand place attachment as well as many other complex relationships between (human) animals and their environments, Smith et al. suggest that we need to pay attention to emotional processes, regardless of the fact that these tend to be extremely complex and often transitory and elusive. Importantly, cognition cannot be separated from emotional processes in this or any other context, just as perception, attention and awareness cannot just be located within the brain or even the nervous system alone but takes place in the whole body as it interacts with its environment. (Weik von Mossner, 2016, p. 536)

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Significant emotional responses regarding ecological issues are the experience of biophilia (love of nature) or biophobia (fear of nature). Kaplan (2016) has developed a theory of Pretraumatic Stress Syndrome (PreTSS) that concerns fears about the future in dystopian film and literature in the post-9/11 era that demonstrate severe anxiety about coming times, an anxiety she refers to as pretrauma. Though I focus mostly on how affect is theorized in ecocriticism and ecocinema studies, it’s worth noting that it’s also the subject of research in digital geography, about how digital tools and activism are connected to affective experience of online “more-than-real” spaces. The vibrant materiality of digital spaces comes partly from their affordances for the simultaneous expression of emotion and reason, where people are able to express shock, anger, hope, disappointment and rage alongside reasoned responses to processes such as changing climates. (McLean, 2020, p. 171) The awareness and study of “our affective relationships to various environments as well as human and non-human entities today are developed to a substantial degree and mediated by our engagement with virtual technologies, such as film” (Weik von Mossner, 2014, p. 6). One of the central questions of affect theory is “Can the viewers’ affective responses to ecocritical films lead them to take further action in solving or alleviating environmental problems of the world?” (Chu, 2017, p. Affect . . ., para. 1). In answer to this question, Weik von Mossner (2017, p. 9) asserts, “there is a certain consensus that emotionally powerful renderings of human-nature relationships play an important role in our engagement with environmental narrative and that such engagements can have substantial repercussions in the real world.” This fairly complex field is not easy to simplify. For example, Although these different film theories sometimes use shared terms and explore the same problematics, they work from different philosophical assumptions. Many of these concern questions central to ecocriticism, such as the epistemological status of science and rationality, the relationship between conscious and unconscious motivations in human subjectivity and the relative philosophical merits of social constructionism and biological naturalism. (Ingram, 2013b, p. 460) In other words, when it comes to the study and theorization of affect, there are different methodologies from humanities and science that are still being sorted out. But, in general, The affective turn in sciences and social sciences has led to the emergence of cognitive film studies over the past decade that aims to promote the

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interdisciplinary study of cognitive, neuro-, and evolutionary-psychological approaches to the analysis of film and media. Cognitive film scholars are concerned with developing theoretical models that explain the psychological and biological underpinnings of our movie-viewing experience, particularly on whether specific film language and generic conventions may effectively trigger different cognitive, perceptual, and emotive responses. (Chu, 2017, Affect, Cognition, Emotions, para. 1) The constructivist theorist George Smith developed the “associative model” to describe the cinematic experience of the audience, which can be divided into three aspects—cognitive (conceptual), emotional, and affective. Cognitive relates to discourses and ideas. Emotions are how we connect with narrative through the story/characters (empathy) and “moods” through music, mise-en-scene, lighting, and color. Affect is not the same as emotion—it’s the visceral, bodily response to medium (Ingram, 2013a). To stimulate a discussion of affect in the classroom, do a YouTube search for ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos and have students respond to the sensory experience of watching them. Ivakhiv’s (2013a) approach to ecocinema analysis is based on his ecophilosophy of the moving image, which posits that cinema is an anthrobiogeomorphic machine. What concerns him is not what films are, but what they do. Drawing from Heidegger, Ivakhiv sees humans as world-bearing beings and art as world-disclosing. We live in the “age of the world motion picture,” which alters our sense of the relationship with the world. The world is structured and we are structured to experience it cognitively (our minds evolved in nature, are nature), so we coevolve with film. What draws us into the film world? Identification with characters, tension and release, characters struggling to overcome obstacles, and emotional and affective investment takes us on our cinematic “journeys.” The experience of pleasure is one of the things we get out of those journeys. Ivakhiv (2016, pp. 148–149, emphasis original) explains: the essence of cinema could be rendered as follows: cinema is a machine that takes viewers on journeys into film worlds. Moving images move us: they project our imaginations across the territory of the world they produce, drawing viewers into the movement of the storyline, the actions and reactions unfolding in and through and around the places and characters portrayed. Cinema produces or “discloses” worlds, and viewers follow the lures it presents in ways that make up our own individually negotiated film-experiences. Here he’s bridging two separate but related ideas: Cinema as “eye of the 20th century” and ecology as a way of thinking about human–Earth relations. According to Ivakhiv, cinema is one of the ways in which worlding occurs for us. We live in a world shaped by cinema and the world shapes cinema (as a broader category and individually). Films (and media in general) respond to

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material conditions of the world (audience desire/reactions, economic systems) and changes them. For example, the change of representations of gays, women, and minority groups are reflected in the evolution of genres. In the case of Westerns, from the 1940s to 1960s, the genre responded to changing social mores, so that the good guy/bad guy dynamic flipped. Early Westerns promoted American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny with white settler protagonists imbued with characteristics like self-reliance, unspeakable will, a doer of deeds, wielder of power, exceptionalism, resourcefulness, humility, sense of duty, possessing power but not abusing it, and confidence. But by the 1960s, with the deepening crisis of the Vietnam war and civil rights movement, Westerns disclosed the dark side of power and racism, depicting US soldiers or cowboys as fascistic, destructive, and vigilante. Native Americans became the protagonists, and whites were portrayed as lawless and abusing their power. But rather than merely reflecting the world, cinema changes the world as the world changes cinema. For example, Avatar (Cameron, 2009) reveals to some audiences a version of their higher selves as ecological beings, hence the phenomenon of “Avatar depression” that people experienced after seeing the film. For others the film helps them imagine a new relationship with the world, which then inspires new symbolic resources for demonstrations and ecological activism. Black Panther (Coogler, 2018) alters the public’s perception of Black technology, invoking a new Afrofuturist imaginary. With the popularity of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy films, New Zealand (where they were shot) becomes Middle Earth and Middle Earth becomes New Zealand. The filming of ocean floors also becomes part of the world affected by cinema—cinema’s “worlding” enables us to imagine the ocean floor as part of the planet. As such, moving images move us, take us places: “They project our imaginations across the territory of the worlds they produce and draw viewers into their movement” (Ivakhiv, 2013a, p. 93). What’s different about film is that of all the arts, it resembles the world most dynamically. In particular, Ivakhiv (2013b) identifies the following unique dimensions of cinema world-making. Films are anthropomorphic by producing worlds that resemble human experience of agency and sociality. They also produce “normative” human experiences, meaning they can reproduce or advocate for social norms. Quite often they do ideological work, such as reinforcing or challenging the boundary between human and not human, or representing indigenous people as closer to nature and white people as “normal” and disconnected from nature. Films are biomorphic/animamorphic, meaning they bring things “alive,” especially in the case of animation or CGI. Films can make things live in order to be seen and heard, such as Gollum (Hobbit), Na’vi (Avatar), or any cinematic version of Frankenstein’s monster. Our imaginations are also animated by this process, but as an unwatched, structured absence. In the case of the TV series Mr. Robot (2015–19), the main character, Elliot (Rami Malek), speaks to the audience as if we are his imaginary friend. Films are geomorphic by presenting the

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world as an arrangement of objects and places by assembling pieces of the world. This becomes a window and opening to the world that is here and there (we are in a theater but also in the world of the film). Films reproduce “centers” and “peripheries” of the world.

Attention: Creeping Cycle of Desensitization Getting attention is an extremely important aspect of media language, for the obvious reason that any communicator wants to keep us engaged (consider how TV uses narrative structures to keep us hooked or loud sounds and colors to keep us watching). The creeping cycle desensitization theory asserts that over time, nerve stimulus is increasingly amped up as media wage war for our attention (DeFleur, 2010). For example, in order for new media productions to stand out from the competition, sensory stimulation is increased, as is the case of every year’s new iteration of action or superhero movies. If you compare the sensory experience of the first James Bond movie, Dr. No (Young, 1962) with the franchise’s recent iteration, Spectre (Mendes, 2015), there is a vast difference in the edit speed, sound level, and special effects. An exercise you can do with students is to simply compare the trailers of each film. This is one clear example of how over time the level of intensity of sensory experience increases in all media, including TV, film, video games, YouTube, music videos, and so on. We also know this is true in terms of information feeds in our phones. This also corresponds with the evolution of the sublime in Western culture. For example, Nye’s American Technological Sublime (1994) traces how the early history of the sublime in North American culture evolves from one posited by American Romanticism (Thoreau, Emerson, etc.) in which Nature is a source of awe to a broader fascination with technology and infrastructure. So, while a “wild” sublime was revered as escape from the city and a way to get in touch with nature, as large-scale projects like the Brooklyn Bridge and Niagara Falls power plant came online, they captured the public’s imagination. Increasingly, people sought out technology instead of nature for the experience of the sublime. This manifests more recently in how the IMAX theater at the Grand Canyon National Park is a popular attraction that invokes similar interest and awe as the canyon itself. As discussed by ecocinema scholars, audiences are attracted to cinematic spectacles, which could evoke a sublime experience (as was the case with some audiences when seeing Avatar in 3D). When it comes to the current saturation of data and information in our daily diet of online content, Sophia Kaitatzi-Whitlock (2015, p. 69) believes we suffer a “disease of infoflation”—a kind of information overload that is not only ­wasteful in the sense that we have too much useless data being saved and backed up on servers—but that it colonizes our sense of time and space: “Key symptoms of this are: states of confusion, split attention, misinformation, overwhelming of human attention-span, waste of personal time, and a ‘colonizing’ of the minds of digital

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network users (internet and mobiles).” Social media companies will insist and remind us that we have important and significant memories and experiences to share, so that the world can “connect,” but the reality is more banal: Our digital symbolic surroundings may, thus, be filled out with symbolic debris, superficiae, info-pollutant propaganda, or verbal abuse.  .  .  . A r­ecycle-mania of further rounds of consumable opinionating is spawned, thereby resulting in deluges of “uninformative contents” or of sheer nonsense. (p. 73) With increased attention-deficit disorder, “people can hardly defend quality of life when they are immersed in divisive, confusing infoflation-stricken milieus. Thus the toll that future generations particularly will have to pay” (p. 76). Software design, gadgets, and apps are increasingly used to quantify time and productivity to mechanize our experience of reality. As an example of the proliferation of time management creeping into our lives, note how articles on the web or Kindle books now tell us how much time it takes to read something. This is not necessarily new. The history of capitalism and media as coeval is one of refining the art of attention capture. The conquest of attention accelerated under modern capitalism with the advent of Taylorism and its logic of automating focus (such as choreographed movements on the assembly line). Media like photography and film were deployed to monitor and improve movements to make them more precise and efficient. We have simply arrived to a more extreme and automated version of this process. But instead of being imposed on us in a factory environment, we are invited to participate. The labor of attention—which drives the media economy—is a scarce resource that must be extracted: “Attention is the crucial resources of our epoch” (Citton, 2017, p. 10, emphasis original). But like ecosystems, people and their attention are not unlimited resources: There are only so many people and hours in a day. According to Tristen Harris, former Google Design Ethicist and founder of the Center for Humane Technology, platforms have to “frack” our attention in order to split it apart and fracture it into more attention opportunities (On the Media, n.d.). With the entire media economy running on the currency of our attention, so much is invested in developing different ways to get us hooked and engaged. The economy of attention (and economy of doubt to buy time) is an accelerated distraction mechanism that enables “slow violence” (Nixon, 2011, p. 40). Thus, any political reform or efforts to address the overall health of the environment must inevitably confront the issues of attention. As Citton (2017, pp. 193–194) asserts, On the one hand, establishing (physical, social, legal) environments that will allow the greatest number of us to modulate our attention according to our own desires and our communal needs—rather than in accordance

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with the interests of a minority and a growth agenda that is dragging us all towards the abyss. And on the other hand, learning to adapt our attention in new ways so as to make other figures and other values appear the common ground by which we are constituted.

Ways of Seeing/Being Like sound, the environment surrounds us. As dwellers of our environment, we experience it as something we are within. But when many talk about the global environment, they often don’t mean the environment that surrounds Earth, but as a visual object as viewed from space. According to Ingold (2011), this is the difference between viewing and experiencing our living planet as either a sphere or a globe. A sphere is experienced as a lifeworld, whereas a globe is objectified as something outside of ourselves. This is reflected in Luke’s (1997) critique of the mainstream environmentalist group, Worldwatch Institute, which uses various forms of data gathering and surveillance to monitor Earth changes. Satellites, in particular, are one of its main tools. Garrard (2011, p. 186) notes, We have already observed that globalization requires sophisticated communications technologies, which in turn require satellites in space. The various space programs have not only supported commercial and military ends, however: meteorological and hydrological satellites supply vital information to scientists about global and local environmental issues, from ozone thinning to soil erosion. This process arguably represents a novel inflection of the Earth as the object of new regimes of environmental surveillance and disciplinary design. Luke’s concern is that this form of worldwatching and its quest for sustainable modernization means we lose a sense of a wild and mysterious Earth and replace it with “an ensemble of ecological systems, requiring human managerial oversight, administrative intervention and organizational containment” (quoted in Garrard, 2011, p. 186). As a form of digital colonialism, it is satellite mapping of Earth in which high-definition images taken from space enables extractive capitalism to expand and find new territories for exploitation and enclosure: In effect, we have made all space visible, even though we have yet to r­ ecognise fully what it is that we see: namely, that we have rendered all space (be it land, underground, oceans, rivers, lakes, air, space, o ­ uter-space— our bodies even) a place, not just of exploration, but of exploitation, ­aggression, conflict, and war, so that nowhere is free from our sight or grasping drive. . . . This word “grasping” is key in that it directly links to our sense of an inalienable right to “own” the planet (and indeed planets beyond this one). (Hayward, 2020, p. 7)

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Worldwatch’s response to the global ecological crisis is a form of “ecomodernism,” which “suggests we can use the same technologies and approaches that got us into this inequitable, uneven epoch to move on from global environmental crises,” but it “obfuscates the practices of over-consumption and extractive industries that have partly produced the Anthropocene” (McLean, 2020, p. 4). Shiva (2018) also links data and neocolonial extraction of indigenous knowledge through DNA mapping and trademark regimes being deployed by tech companies. What concerns Ingold (2011) is that an imaginary model (globe) is too abstract to care about; it lacks the sense of being and care one has when actively participating in their surroundings. Furthermore, The image of the world as a globe is . . . a colonial one. It represents the idea of a performed surface waiting to be occupied, to be colonized first by living things and later by human (usually meaning Western) civilization. (p. 214, emphasis original) Consequently, the global environment can be an “object of appropriation by humanity”: We do not belong to the world, it belongs to us; it is not a place to be lived in, but to live on or off of it. It becomes a spectacle. Humans “may observe it, reconstruct it, protect it, tamper with it or destroy it, but they do not dwell in it” (p. 215). This discussion aligns with the ecocritical and feminist post-humanism critique of the West’s historical conception of Nature—capital “N”—as something “out there.” Ingold’s framework corresponds with media ecology’s argument that the dominant medium of a particular epic conditions its experience of the world. For example, linear perspective space is defined by lens technology, which visually distorts the world to conform it to the way the eye sees it. The technological progression of Renaissance linear perspective technique, camera obscura, photography, film, satellite imagery, and VR all place the viewer in a specific relationship to that which is being viewed (Crary, 1999), and thereby separates the viewer from the viewed. The thing you are looking at aligns you in space; the world is set into place by a concrete hierarchy that centers the human domination of space through a particular gaze. As different theoretical traditions have noted, the concept of male, colonial, environmental, or speciest gaze all represent different forms of domination through the visual (Mirzoeff, 2011). And this Conquerer’s gaze is afforded to those who belong to Society: Descartes’ cogito funneled vision and thought into a spectator’s view of the world, one that rendered the emerging surfaces of modernity visible and measurable and the viewer bodiless and placeless. Medieval multiple vantage points in art and literature were displaced by a single, disembodied, omniscient, and panoptic eye. In geometry, Renaissance painting, and especially cartography, the new thinking represented reality as if one were

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standing outside of it. . . . The modern map did not merely describe the world; it was a technology of conquest. (Patel & Moore, 2018, pp. 54–55) This form of “ocularcentrism” is culturally, not biologically, determined: “Ocularcentrism is considered by its critics to be a central factor in dominant notions of both rationality and capitalist economics, and to have produced a dangerous sense of detachment from the environment” (Ingram, 2014, p. 27). To understand the power of this visual legacy, imagine, if you will, a map of the world. Does it place the northern hemisphere at the top, with artificially enlarged territories like Alaska and Russia, and the southern hemisphere disproportionately small compared to the north? This is because you are probably recalling the most commonly used map, the Mercator Projection, which was designed for shipping during the colonial era. It put the world into a grid that could demonstrate the quickest and straightest lanes from one continent to the other. That we hold in our mind’s eye the image crafted for colonialism and the slave trade as the default view of the world demonstrates the power of the visual to shape how we perceive the world. Note that even worldview uses a visual metaphor to imply that our perception of the world is based on a gaze. Even though maps claim to represent the world, they can project the world of the terra nulles that erases the reality of so many different peoples. A photo of the board room of Nestle by artist Jacqueline Hassink (“Table of Power: The Meeting Table of the Board of Directors of Nestlé, Vevey, Switzerland,” 1994) shows the Mercetor map on its wall, demonstrating how the colonial view of the world is reproduced in the present. Nestlé’s former chairman and CEO, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, once said the idea that water is a human right is “extreme.” The company is known for its practice of extracting freshwater from the commons to commoditize it in bottled form. The map of the world, and by extension the more advanced visualizing technologies being deployed these days, ensures that an “extractive view” maintains a center of power: Before the colonial project could prosper, it had to render territories and peoples extractible, and it did so through a matrix of symbolic, physical, and representational violence. Therefore, the extractive view sees territories as commodities, rendering land as for the taking, while also devalorizing the hidden worlds that form the nexus of human and nonhuman multiplicity. The viewpoint, similar to the colonial gaze, facilitates the reorganization of territories, populations and plant and animal life into extractible data and natural resources for material and immaterial accumulation. (Gómez-Barris, 2017, p. 5) If “alienation of humanity from the world” is the cause of environmental destruction, then the image of global environmentalism reinforces that alienation.

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The emergence of Mechanism and modern science coincides with the rise of the printing press and its effect of individualism, private self, rationality, and positivism, and linear perspective, with its emphasis on the individual viewer conquering space with vision. Some media ecologists go further back to cite the development of the phonetic alphabet and the later invention of the printing press as the source of our current techno-scientific milieu. The net result is that humans in the mechanistic world are educated (formally in schools and informally through media) to experience separation, division, and isolation from the environment they inhabit. The dominance of the global perspective is the triumph of technology over cosmology. Traditional cosmology places the person at the centre of an ordered universe of meaningful relations  .  .  . and enjoins an understanding of these relations as a foundation for proper conduct towards the environment. Modern technology, by contrast, places human society and its interests outside what is residually construed as the “physical world,” and it furnishes the means of the former’s control over the latter. Cosmology provides the guiding principles for human action within the world, technology proves the primacies for human action upon it. Thus, as cosmology gives way to technology, the relation between people and world is turned inside out. (Ingold, 2011, p. 216).

Conclusion Cognitive dispositions deserve recognition as an area of future research for ecomedia literacy. As part of our lifeworld, our cognitive and emotional responses to environmental media are necessary to understand. In researching fake climate news (see López & Share, 2020), it became abundantly clear that one of the biggest obstacles to climate action is people’s innate biases and cognitive responses to new information. Psychological theories abound regarding people’s difficulty to process diverse perspectives and vulnerability to disinformation and propaganda, such as motivated disbelief, selective exposure, confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, reality maintenance, hierarchy of needs, familiarity equals believability, worldview backfire effect, and diminished trust. Medium properties and media grammars trigger emotional responses and affect these varied cognitive responses, so it is important to include their study as part of a holistic method of ecomedia analysis.

Prompts Lifeworld prompts for probing the ecomedia object: • What media languages are used? • What does its medium properties afford or constrain you to do?

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•

How does it contribute to the “disease of infoflation” and our ability to pay attention? • Does it create a sense of alienation, disconnection, or connection? • What is its bodily and emotional experience? • How does it affect our experience of time, place, or space? • What is your sensory experience of the media object’s sounds, edits, music, images, lights, etc.? • Does it connect you with the experience of biophilia or biophobia? • What are its impacts on physical and/or mental health? • How does the ecomedia object condition the experience of particular ecomediasystems?

References Abram, D. (1996). The spell of the sensuous: Perception and language in a more-than-human world. Pantheon Books. Barnes, S. B. (2012). An introduction to visual communication: From cave art to second life. Peter Lang. Blewitt, J. (2006). The ecology of learning: Sustainability, lifelong learning, and everyday life. Earthscan. Cameron, J. (2009). Avatar [Film]. Twentieth Century Fox. Capra, F. (2005). Speaking nature’s language: Principles for sustainability. In M. K. Stone & Z. Barlow (Eds.), Ecological literacy: Educating our children for a sustainable world (pp. 18–29). Sierra Club Books. Chu, K. (2017). Ecocinema. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/ obo/9780199791286-0252 Citton, Y. (2017). The ecology of attention (English ed.). Polity Press. Coogler, R. (2018). Black Panther [Film]. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. Crary, J. (1999). Suspensions of perception: Attention, spectacle, and modern culture. MIT Press. DeFleur, M. L. (2010). Mass communication theories: Explaining origins, processes, and effects. Allyn & Bacon. Edwards, B. (2001). The new drawing on the right side of the brain. HarperCollins. Garrard, G. (2011). Ecocriticism (2nd ed). Routledge. Gómez-Barris, M. (2017). The extractive zone: Social ecologies and decolonial perspectives. Duke University Press. Hayward, S. (2020). Film ecology. Routledge. Huxley, A. (1942). The art of seeing. Harper. Ingold, T. (2011). The perception of the environment. Routledge. Ingram, D. (2013a). The aesthetics and ethics of eco-film criticism. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 43–62). Routledge. Ingram, D. (2013b). Rethinking eco-film studies. In G. Garrard (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of ecocriticism (Vol. 1). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfor dhb/9780199742929.013.023 Ingram, D. (2014). Emotion and affect in eco-films. In A. Weik von Mossner (Ed.), Moving environments: Affect, emotion, ecology, and film (pp. 23–39). Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Innis, H. A. (1999). The bias of communication. University of Toronto Press.

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Ivakhiv, A. (2013a). An ecosophy of the moving image: Cinema as anthrobiogeomorphic machine. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 87–106). Routledge. Ivakhiv, A. (2013b). Ecologies of the moving image: Cinema, affect, nature. Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Ivakhiv, A. (2016). Teaching ecocriticism and cinema. In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp. 144–155). Palgrave Macmillan. Kaitatzi-Whitlock, S. (2015). E-waste, human waste, infoflation. In R. Maxwell, N. Lager Vestberg, & J. Raundalen (Eds.), Media and the ecological crisis (pp. 69–84). Routledge. Kaplan, E. A. (2016). Climate trauma: Foreseeing the future in dystopian film and fiction. ­Rutgers University Press. Kerridge, R. (2016). Ecocriticism and the mission of “English.” In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp. 11–26). Palgrave Macmillan. Lester, P. M. (2014). Visual communication: Images with messages. Wadsworth/Cengage Learning. López, A. (2008). Mediacology: A multicultural approach to media literacy in the 21st century. Peter Lang. López, A., & Share, J. (2020). Fake climate news: How denying climate change is the ultimate in fake news. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/ content/blog-post-fake-climate-news-how-denying-climate-change-is-the-ultimatein-fake-news_2020_04/ Louv, R. (2005). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Luke, T. W. (1997). Ecocritique: Contesting the politics of nature, economy, and culture. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1997. Lum, C. M. K. (2006). Notes toward an intellectual history of media ecology. In C. M. K. Lum (Ed.), Perspectives on culture, technology and communication: The media ecology tradition (pp. 1–60). Hampton Press. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2020). How green is your smartphone? Polity Press. McGilchrist, I. (2009). The master and his emissary: The divided brain and the making of the western world. Yale University Press. McLean, J. (2020). Changing digital geographies: Technologies, environments and people. Palgrave Macmillan. McLuhan, M. (2002). Understanding media: The extensions of man (1st ed.). MIT Press. McLuhan, M., & Powers, B. R. (1989). The global village: Transformations in world life and media in the 21st century. Oxford University Press. Mendes, S. (2015). Spectre [Film]. Sony Pictures. Mirzoeff, N. (2011). The right to look: A counterhistory of visuality. Duke University Press. Mumford, L. (1967). The myth of the machine: Technics and human development. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. Nye, D. E. (1994). American technological sublime. MIT Press. On the Media. (n.d.). A history of persuasion: Part 3 (August 28, 2019). www.wnycstudios. org/podcasts/otm/episodes/on-the-media-history-persuasion-part-3 Ong, W. J. (1982). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Methuen. Orr, D. W. (1992). Ecological literacy: Education and the transition to a postmodern world. State University of New York Press.

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Patel, R., & Moore, J. W. (2018). History of the world in seven cheap things: A guide to capitalism, nature, and the future of the planet. University of California Press. Pink, D. H. (2005). A whole new mind: Moving from the information age to the conceptual age. Riverhead Books. Rauch, J. (2018). Slow media: Toward a sustainable future. Oxford University Press. Rohde, M. (2013). The Sketchnote handbook: The illustrated guide to visual note taking. Peachpit Press. Shiva, K., & Shiva, V. (2018). Oneness VS. The 1%. Women Unlimited. Shlain, L. (1998). The alphabet versus the goddess: The conflict between word and image. Viking. Stevens, R. G.,  & Zhu, Y. (2015). Electric light, particularly at night, disrupts human circadian rhythmicity: Is that a problem? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 370(1667). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2014.0120 Stibbe, A. (2009). The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world. Green Books. Thomashow, M. (1995). Ecological identity: Becoming a reflective environmentalist. MIT Press. Weik von Mossner, A. (2014). Introduction: Ecocritical film studies and the effects of affect, emotion, and cognition. In A. Weik von Mossner (Ed.), Moving environments: Affect, emotion, ecology, and film (pp. 1–19). Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Weik von Mossner, A. (2016). Environmental narrative, embodiment, and emotion. In H. Zapf (Ed.), Handbook of ecocriticism and cultural ecology (pp. 534–550). De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110314595 Weik von Mossner, A. (2017). Affective ecologies: Empathy, emotion, and environmental narrative. Ohio State University Press. Young, T. (1962). Dr. No [Film]. United Artists.

7 ECOMEDIA MINDPRINT Political Ecology

Political ecology (world-ecology, critical theory) characterizes the economic, political, and social system driving media production and the processes of fixing cultural codes. In the schema of the ecomediasphere, the world system’s ecomedia mindprint combines the upper domains of ecoculture and political ecology. This is the realm of Corbett’s (2006) concept of environmental ideology: The beliefs we have about the relationship between humans and the living planet, which drive our ecological footprint. This is where media serve as environmental education and also reproduce the world system. According to the critical political economy perspective, systems of meaning and representation about the environment are propelled by a media system entangled with neoliberal ideology, which promotes privatization, deregulation, liberalization, and globalization as a general project (Harvey, 2005). This means ICT and multinational media oligopolies are racing to get bigger through mergers and acquisitions. Failure to do so means getting swallowed up by competition. The trend is toward conglomeration, whether within existing sectors, across sectors (horizontal integration), or expansion up and down the production process (vertical integration) (Wasko, 2014). In terms of public and state media, the common trend is to reduce funding and to commercialize. Nonetheless, free digital media platforms proliferate and have enabled civil society mediamakers (nonmarket, nonstate actors, and organizations) to reach wider audiences and to find alternative sources of income (such as crowd funding and subscriptions services like Patreon and substack.com). But, as noted, “free” media has its own costs. The dominant myths of our culture, or stories-we-live-by, are like grand narratives that we live within and are therefore difficult to recognize (in the same sense of ideology as a taken-for-granted belief system). Endless economic growth or measuring the economy according to annual GDP are examples of pervasive

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beliefs that are disseminated throughout the media, whether in the news, popular culture, or reinforced through marketing and advertising. But even economic myths are all part of the greater historical narrative of the West, such as valuing constant change (or disruption), innovation, freedom (including freedom to change mind, job, location, world), radical individualism (autonomous and free of culture or society), human exceptionalism, and escape from nature. These stories are not natural but are won through consent (in Gramscian sense). This means that when environmental beliefs that challenge the status quo gain popularity, those who stand to lose need to invent new stories to maintain their power and status.

Social Constructionism and Environmental Communication An important theoretical frame that underlies environmental communication (EC) theories is social constructionism—that our knowledge about the world is constructed through language, media, and texts. “Problems” are “not an objective condition of society” independent of what is said about them; we only know of problems through discourses that identify them as problems; it’s a social process (as opposed to a condition)—agendas are negotiated (see Hansen, 2009). According to Milstein (2012, p. 162, emphasis original), EC has the following main assumptions: First, the ways we communicate powerfully shape our understandings of nature. Second, these understandings inform how we relate with and within the living world. In this way, scholars see communication as not merely reflecting but also as producing and naturalizing particular human relations with nature. Many studies also include a third assumption that our representations of nature are interested. In other words, representations of nature are not neutral, but instead informed by particular contexts and interests, often in ways we are unaware, directing us to see nature through particular lenses while also obscuring alternative ways of perceiving nature. EC is a broad field that combines ecocriticism with linguistic discourse analysis, rhetorical studies, political economy, media studies, environmental humanities, environmental studies, and social and natural sciences. EC problematizes the term “environment” when it is used to reinforce a separation between humans and living ecosystems. EC argues environmental beliefs are culturally constructed, often reinforcing a common conception that human activity is disembedded from any consequences on physical health or environmental sustainability. EC contends that the concept of “nature” in literature and media often excludes humans, constructing the environment as something outside the realm of human activity. EC positions itself as a “crisis discipline,” and therefore promotes intervention into the status quo in order to promote sustainability and regenerative

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living systems. Like ecocriticism, environmental communication’s strength is problematizing the way language creates boundaries between humans and the environment; but rather than focus on literature, it is interested in how environmental discourses and rhetoric engage the public sphere, such as how scientists communicate outside of their disciplines to the public, environmental politics, journalistic practices, and policy. Cox and Pezzullo (2017) differentiate between pragmatic and constitutive media. Pragmatic rhetoric works on the level of media as education, how it teaches and mobilizes us around issues through depicting how the world works or as persuasion. Constitutive media are affective, working on the level of values, experience, and imagination. One area of interest is the use of activist strategies, such as staging image events by organization like Greenpeace to draw attention to environmental problems (DeLuca, 1999). EC is concerned with how different communication strategies can affect positive changes. When it comes to applying EC to education, Milstein (2012, p. 166) asserts, Ethical ecological advocacy extends to pedagogy. Communication faculty teach students to critically reflect on human-nature relations by exposing them to different ways of communicating, helping them select language that matches their views of what needs to be done in the world, and pointing out ways to powerfully and persuasively use such language in their own environmental communication.

Environmental Discourses A generic definition of discourse is how we talk about something. But in ecomedia, discourses are not just about words: They are multimodal stories-we-live-by communicated by language (text, speech) and through visuals symbols. Environmental discourses are abundant but studied differently by discipline and vary according to purpose and profession. For example, there are cultural and political discourse that are situational according to their intention, such as in politics (Dryzek, 2005; Murphy, 2017), popular culture (Corbett, 2006; Parham, 2016), environmental communications (Hansen  & Cox, 2015), ecolinguistics (Stibbe, 2015), and ecocriticism (Garrard, 2011). Depending on professional practices—such as journalism, fiction, strategic communication, or politics—discourses will have different styles that draw from diverse vernacular resources. Stibbe (2015) has created a useful categorization system that identifies discourses according to three broad classifications. Using as a yardstick of how they impact an ecocentric framework (“whether it encourages people to preserve or destroy the ecosystems that support life”), they can be organized into destructive, ambivalent, and beneficial discourses (Stibbe, 2015, p. 24). Using Stibbe’s groupings, what follows are some common environmental discourses.

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Destructive discourses refer to those that primarily promote anthropocentric ideologies and frame environmental issues according to the criteria of economics or technological progress (such as anything touting the benefits of technology, capitalism, deregulation, or employment and growth at the expense of ecosystem health). Exposing and working against them is considered a form of resistance. As explored in the discussion of the ecomedia commons in Chapter 2, Dryzek (2005) calls the dominant capitalist discourse, Prometheus, because it promotes going beyond biospheric boundaries. Ecocriticism refers to this as the “cornucopia” (Garrard, 2011) discourse because it invokes abundance and unlimited resources. The majority of environmental discourses are ambivalent because, depending on their use, they can promote an assortment of politics that range from anthropocentric to ecocentric, but they mostly support the mainstream (remember that conservationism and preservationism are considered part of the status quo). Though in some cases the aim of a discourse is to critique environmentally destructive practices, it might also be used to promote reform-oriented policies, such as conservationism, or greenwash a company’s environmental practices that are ultimately anthropocentric. Brands that try to position themselves as environment-friendly, like the fastfood Mexican food chain Chipotle, use ambivalent discourses that criticize factory farming but at same time promotes fast food (what some environmentalists would consider contradictory). Chipotle—and other food brand advertisements and food packaging—uses the “pastoral” discourse, which originated in Western literature and paintings. Typically it is represented as an idyllic farm, often with a red barn, free range animals, and windmill set within a green field and deep blue sky with puffy clouds. The pastoral establishes a boundary between wild and civilized and creates a dualism between original and domesticated nature. It’s meant to invoke nostalgia for simpler times and a friendly zone between civilization and wilderness. The “wild/wilderness” discourse delineate boundaries between civilization and “wild nature,” and is visible in films like Into the Wild (Penn, 2008) and The Revenant (Iñárritu, 2015), or SUV ads where nature is clearly marked off as “not civilization.” Neither the pastoral nor wild discourse—though idealizing nature— may be beneficial if used to reinforce human–nature binaries. The “eco-utopia” discourse often represents indigenous or “ecological Indians” (such as the Na’vi in Avatar or the famous crying Indian from the 1970s conservation ad). On the surface, this represents a more ecocentric perspective. But postcolonial ecocritics point out that this discourse leads to destructive stereotyping by misrepresenting and romanticizing indigenous people whose current reality is more complex and nuanced than the “romantic savage” trope would lead us to believe. The “ecoapocalyptic” discourse expresses environmental culture and ideology through catastrophe and fear, such as in the film The Day After Tomorrow (Emmerich, 2004); again, it may not necessarily be used to engage transformative solutions, but instead promotes or reinforces the status quo.

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Examples of beneficial discourses vary but may not necessarily be “positive” in what they depict, but instead can be critical. The “anti-progress” discourse represents the destructive power of civilization and technology, often in the form of images of environmental devastation, featuring destructive technologies like bulldozers, tree cutters, and mining equipment. The “pollution” discourse is typically used in environmental campaigns featuring images of smokestacks or other kinds of pollution. The “people power” discourse shows the ability of people to protest and change the status quo through grassroots action. The “local and organic food” discourse is often used to communicate environmental issues and positive community values through the tropes of organic farming, farmer’s markets, or veganism. The Good Life/el buen vivir discourse coming out of South America explicitly reflects ecocentrism by extending the ethical community to the more-than-human world. This can be seen in indigenous literature, film, and art. Finally, Stibbe (2015, p. 33) asserts that beneficial discourses aim for “promotion,” which “tells a useful story.” Documentaries often perform this role, such as No Impact Man (Gabbert & Schein, 2009), which tells the story of a family that for a year tries to have zero impact on the environment by giving up electricity, packaging, toxins, and other trappings of the consumer life.

Consumerism, “Growthism,” and Advertising One of the most important ecomedia mindprints is the promotion of beliefs incompatible with a finite planet, such as unlimited economic growth, consumerism, and waste, what Rupert Read (Read & Alexander, 2019) calls “growthism.” The prevailing belief that capitalism is eternal and that there is no alternative to capitalism (“We can’t imagine an alternative”) is evidence of the power of hegemony, with media playing no small role. Consumerism is so intrinsic to ­perpetuating the global economic system that even President George W. Bush said in response to the 9/11 terrorism attack that the best way to respond was to buy and consume things. Prevailing institutions reinforce this framework through a web of think tanks, funded university programs, industry front groups, and an effective system of flack that ensures certain dominant views prevail. The concern is the transformation of the biosphere to the “buyosphere” (Killmeier, 2012). At the core of the media economy is advertising, which provides the basis for promoting consumerism, defined as collective consumption socialized by relations of production, a ­practice objectively tied to capitalism. Individualized consumption is how ­consumerism is represented to and experienced by most people in c­ apitalist societies—a subjective practice. . . . [I]n advanced capitalist societies, the individual disposition to consume must be socialized and rationalized. Consumerism must drive consumption. (Killmeier, 2012, pp. 76–77)

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But as Killmeier (2012) notes, Consumerism is a point to leverage in this ideological struggle. It is inherently weak, which is why it is fiercely defended. Time devoted to and money spent on propagating consumerism is indicative of its tenuousness. If it appealed to something intrinsic to human beings, consumerism would not need extensive support from advertising and propaganda. Furthermore, agitation around and awareness of the ecological crises have made consumerism an issue with the potential to be linked to capitalism. Indeed, The Human Footprint, green programming, and green consumption suggest a concerted defense of this particular weakness. (p. 92) Thus, one of the most important things the economy must produce is consumers. Read suggests, then, that calling it consumeristic is a misnomer. Instead, Capitalism is a producerist system. It’s most brilliant product, its greatest achievement, its founding lie, is to produce individuals willing to participate in it, grateful for it, and ignorant of its real nature. Its ultimate product, that is to say, is consumers. (Read & Alexander, 2019, pp. 66–67) Furthermore, it’s unfair to blame consumers when the entire system of production demands consumption: After all, it is clear that our consumption practices always take place within structures of constraint, and those structures make some ways of living easy or necessary, and other ways of living difficult or impossible. . . .  [I]t is hard to consume less in a society structured to maximize growth and ­consumption. The problem of consumer “lock-in” is very real. (p. 69) It’s not by coincidence that individualism, which pervades media’s underlining ethic of consumerism, is tied to class status—higher income people can afford the luxuries of individual aspirations, such as owning cars or houses, that are beyond the reach of lower income folks, who are more dependent on the common good (such as mass transit or public housing). The “consumerist business models” and “promotion of a consumerist credo” define “progress in ways that rely on increasing rather stabilising or decreasing global levels of production and consumption. In short, they operate to make catastrophic levels of climate change more likely” (Lewis, 2017, p.  58). ­Subsequently, “commodity aesthetics” imbue gadgets with romantic qualities, invoke the ­sublime, and fetishize “progress.” Platform and surveillance capitalism

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automate consumption, using algorithms to optimize and refine, sort, and target consumers. Riffing on the old credo that journalism is printing what someone else doesn’t want printed and the rest is PR, “most content online is a form of public relations or paid for directly by advertising.” Meanwhile, advertising “sucks up a huge portion of the world’s talent for art, design, creativity and storytelling.” With this “drift towards a consumerist monoculture,” consumerism is sold as a way of life (p. 66). Corbett (2006) observes the following patterns of advertising and their representation of the environment. First of all, given the impact of consumerism on the environment, she argues that the “business of advertising is brown,” which means that green marketing, like “sustainable development,” is an oxymoron. This is done through a number of techniques. One common trope is that Nature is for the pleasure of humans—it’s a playground of entertainment and human utility. The flip side is that Nature is idealized as a place of unspoiled paradise, absent of work or civilization. This ideological work reinforces the boundary between humans and Nature. Related is the way Nature is often presented as spectacle, especially in the case of SUV ads that transport people to spectacular environments that they consume through their vehicles. This leads to a kind of “natural disconnect” or alienation from the environment (i.e., the vehicle is like a spaceship that carries us from our civilized home to the wild and alien environment). From the perspective of ecopsychology, this creates reinforcing feedback: People are alienated as a result of this disconnection, and disconnection then makes consumers want to buy more and become more alienated. Ads in turn naturalize growth, development, economy, and consumerism. Another trope is that corporate-mediated nature will transform you into a child again, as is the case with theme parks like Disney’s Animal Kingdom. But this points to the larger more insidious (if not cosmological) nature of the problem. Corporations are deemed mediators between humans and environment (Opel, 2006). Nature is always reified as a commodity and framed as a resource for humans. It is the corporation that can transform Nature into commodities, and in the act of our consumption, we are transformed into a “better” version of ourselves. In response to environmentalist and social justice critiques of the world system, “green” consumption is promoted, and gadgets are associated with authentic empowerment. The reality is that buying something used, repairing it, or keeping it longer is actually better for the environment than buying something new (i.e., a used gas car is better than a new electric car because the resources have already been extracted). “Green” is often used to mark an eco-ethical orientation. But the green metaphor is tricky, because it is often hijacked to hide unsustainable policies or business practices (as in “greenwashing”): The ads are greenwashing, aimed at linking the sponsors with green sentiments to increase profits. But there is a deeper, more insidious dimension,

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too. Such ads position sponsors—and implicitly capitalism—as part of a powerful enthymeme repeated innumerable times: ecological degradation is a problem, sponsors and capitalism are part of the solution, therefore neither the sponsors nor capitalism are part of the problem. The last part is of course left out of the ad. Ideally viewers complete it and persuade themselves. This is how ads recruit us, engage us, and enter our subjectivity (Williamson, 2002). The power of advertising in general lies not in what is said or depicted, but in what one has to think or imagine to complete the claim. (Killmeier, 2012, p. 91) Green does, however, serve as a placeholder to describe a general desire and belief in developing positive practices that benefit and sustain regenerative environments and ecosystems. It connotes a particular orientation and even politics, a way of “ecologizing.” It can come in many shades, ranging from a kind of light green of “conscious consumerism” to a more robust transformative politics, as in environmental activism in opposition to neoliberal policies that includes civil disobedience or radical direct action. “Greening” is shorthand for environmentalism. In an ideal world, all approaches would be inherently “green” and it wouldn’t be necessary to make such differentiation. Lewis (2017, p.  67) contends that because well-being is based on quality of life (social relationships, health, security, and community), products have to be sold based on mythic qualities rather than utility or use value. The net result, according to Stibbe (2009), is that advertising ultimately ends up promoting unsustainable values through pseudo-satisfier, dissatisfaction manufacturing, and convenience constructing discourses. From the perspective of the more-than-human world and the mass extinction event currently taking place, advertising is primarily a propaganda system that celebrates selfishness, gluttony, competitiveness, and shortsightedness that provides the emotional and affective context for the intellectual justification of planetary pillage (Dawson, 2016, p. 57). In response, Stibbe (2009) suggests we cultivate alternative sustainable values by asking fundamental questions: What is enough? What is happiness? What are healthy alternatives to consumption? If you ask students these questions in response to advertising, they come up with interesting ideas. Stibbe suggests we need to find a steady state of contentment through finding ways to connect, being active, taking notice (being curios), practicing mindfulness, learning new things, volunteering, and giving, and recognize the difference between temporary and authentic happiness. Slow media is one way to promote these values. Making and producing zines, comics, radio, clothes, cooking, gardening, or any other do-ityourself/do-it-with-others activities of the uncommoditized cultural commons are alternatives to consumerism. Activities of the cultural commons is another.

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News and Propaganda Media educators are usually well-versed in the various problems with news media and whether or not they fulfill their democratic function but are perhaps less so when it comes to their impact on the environment. In this section, I  want to revisit these issues from an ecocritical perspective in order to inspire the inclusion of environmental case studies into teaching about the press. Because the global ecomedia commons is where environmental ideologies are contested, news and journalism have important functions in terms of informing, interpreting, and setting the agenda, especially about the climate emergency (Hackett, 2017). McChesney’s (2008) democratic theory of press suggests that the press (1) perform a watch-dog function, holding power accountable; (2) discern truth from lies; (3) lean toward serving the needs of the disadvantaged with less political or economic power; and (4) present a range of views on issues of importance. Is the state of the global ecological crisis evidence that the press has failed to adequately fulfill its democratic function to inform the public about ecological dangers? Can (and should) the news media drive an agenda to solve this predicament? The climate emergency offers a good case study. While it could be argued that in 1990, it would have been easier (and cheaper) to decarbonize the global economy and develop an alternative energy path, it’s likely we no longer have enough time to avoid the consequences of inaction. Since 1990, the mainstream and corporate media have been manipulated and gamed by Big Carbon, whose strategy (honed by the tobacco and chemical industries) was to create doubt about climate science, and hence delay action. Reporting for The Nation, Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope (2019a) point out that in 1988 climate change was big news. Earth was Time Magazine’s “Planet of the Year” and climate science was reported on the front page of the New York Times. But since 1990, we have had a 41% increase in greenhouse gas emissions. The liberal media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, has been generating annual reports that show how little climate coverage there has been. In 2019, it reported that “ABC’s World News Tonight spent more than seven minutes ­reporting on the birth of royal baby Archie in the week after he was born—more time than the program spent covering climate change during the entire year of 2018” (Hymas & MacDonald, 2019). In another egregious example, a study pointed out that there was 40% more coverage of the Kardashians than on ocean acidification (Theel, 2012). The collapse of the news ecomediasystem around the environment is particularly an “American failure” (López & Share, 2020). Part of this relates to conventional journalistic practice of being “fair and balanced” by allowing different sides of the climate discussion equal time. This leads to false equivalency. From 1988 to 2002, 53% major newspapers gave equal attention to both “sides” of climate debate (even calling it a “debate” concedes too much). John Oliver’s HBO comedy program brilliantly commented on this absurdity when he demonstrated what a real climate debate would look like

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(Climate Change Debate: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver [HBO], 2014). Rather than have two people facing each other (which visually gives them equal weight), he brought on stage 97 climate scientists to debate three scientists to represent the skeptic/denial side. You can imagine that if this were normal practice, public opinion might shift. What does it say about the news media that one can only find authentic climate reporting on comedy news programs? The former head of Greenpeace Australia, David Ritter, asserts that legacy news media are not structurally capable of addressing the climate crisis (Ritter & Brevini, 2017). During the 2016 presidential debates in the United States, which were moderated by corporate news organizations, there was not one single question about the climate. But in recent years, reports from the IPCC and United Nations, coupled with the savvy social media strategy of climate strikers and emerging civil disobedience from Extinction Rebellion, have pushed every Democrat running for President in 2020 to have a climate platform. And corporate news media are paying attention (in 2019, there was an unprecedented seven-hour climate town hall on CNN that featured the democratic candidates). The ability of Big Carbon to influence the discussion around climate change (and, hence, delay action) demonstrates the importance of journalism to communicate environmental problems. Hertsgaard and Pope (2019b) suggest there has been a shift toward more coverage since the launch of a project cofounded by The Nation and Columbia Journalism Review, Covering Climate Now, “a global collaboration of more than 380 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.” The ecomedia commons is an arena of claims-making where we are not told what to think, but what to think about. In this sphere, environmental problems are constructed through claims-makers. So, why do some claims become prominent over others? Who sets the agenda? Why do certain issues become news? What issues are not discussed and why? The answers to these questions are the primary subject area of environmental communication (discussed earlier but outlined in more detail in the following paragraphs). Social problems are usually constructed through language framing. According to Hansen (2009, p. 32), “Frames . . . draw attention to particular dimensions or perspectives and they set the boundaries for how we should interpret or perceive what is presented to us.” Particular metaphors can trigger frames, such as climate change versus climate crisis. The issue with the structure of news media is that anyone can frame, but it’s more difficult for people not in power to set the frame. For example, “objectivity” creates false equivalence, favors those in power and the status quo, and limits the range of acceptable opinion. What is valued tends be an internalization of the dominant worldview that determines what is news or not news. Returning to the discussion in Chapter 1 about the colonial Anthropocene and the hierarchy of values in the West, why aren’t Native American pipeline struggles considered news? Or struggles of low-income communities and rural populations dealing with pollution? Indeed, the struggle between the Lakota and

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the Dakota Access pipeline that came to a head at Standing Rock, North Dakota, in 2016 didn’t become “news” until the myriad of ways that social media helped coordinate and promote the cause (Moore, 2019). It’s likely that news producers or journalists may not see themselves as racist, but what they consider to be news values (“newsworthiness”) is not an objective state of reality. Cultural proximity (what is deemed familiar and relatable) can also mean ethnocentrism, especially when newsrooms are not diverse. Claims-making has three steps—the claim, claims-makers, and claimsmaking process. Making the claim means drawing attention to a problem through salience, selection, and emphasis. Claims-makers can be anyone making a claim (media organizations can also be a claims-maker). To be effective, it needs to command attention, assert legitimacy, and invoke action. Strategies include using vernacular resources (conventional means to make a claim that people are familiar with), rhetorical idioms, deploying “counter-rhetoric” (every claim produces a counter-claim such as greenwashing), resonant motifs (reoccurring themes like epidemic, menace, scourge, war), and claims making styles (legalistic, theoretical, comical, journalistic, etc.). Finally, it’s important to consider the setting that is the target for the claim, taking into account journalistic practices and the structure of particular ecomediasystems (for an overview, see Hansen, 2009). The challenge for claims-makers is to overcome the taken-for-granted worldview of news producers and media organizations. Meadows (1991, pp.  8–9) asserts that people in the news ecomediasystem have internalized filters and practices that make it difficult to report the environmental crisis: • •

•

• • •

• •

Media are event-oriented; they report only the surface of things, not the underlying structures. Media attention span is short, they create fads and drop them, they don’t see slow, long-term phenomena (they ignored the greenhouse effect until there was drought in the Midwest). Media follow a herd instinct; they will send 1,500 reporters to one political convention, but no reporters will be on hand when crucial environmental policy is being made. Media are attracted to personalities and authorities; they are uninterested in people they’ve never heard of. To meet time and space constraints, media simplify issues; they have little tolerance for uncertainty, ambiguity, trade-offs, or complexity. Media operate from skepticism; they have been lied to and manipulated so much that they don’t believe anyone; they carry such a load of cynicism that they often unnerve interviewees who are in fact sincere and telling the truth. Media have a tendency to force the world to conform to their story, rather than to see the world as it is. Media love controversy and think harmony is boring; they see the world as a set of win/lose, right/wrong situations; they are attracted to conflict and

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• •

to things that aren’t working; they do not pay attention to things that are working. Media are strongly conservative, unconsciously reinforcing the status quo and resisting ideas of change. Media also unconsciously report through filters of helplessness, hopelessness, cynicism, passivity, and acceptance. They report problems, not solutions; obstacles, not opportunities. They systematically disempower themselves and their audience.

Other explanations for the news media’s inability to adequately cover the environment include the problems identified with the overall neoliberal ecomediasystem. With deregulation (cross-ownership/conglomeration), there is demand for higher profits (partially to offset leveraged buyouts). There is more competition for our attention from cable, social media, and clickbait, so there is a drive to cheapen programing and defund (or underfund) journalism. The loss of ad revenues for newspapers (and news in general) has in essence created a market failure for journalism. This has led to little or no investment in reporting from areas most impacted by climate disruption (i.e., low-income regions). In this environment, independent, noncommercial, and alternative media are generally not financially sustainable (it’s difficult to compete with better resourced organizations). With staff layoffs, there is tremendous pressure on journalists to do more with less. Nonetheless, the emerging climate news ecomediasystem is not all doom and gloom. It’s a mixed bag of some of previously stated problems and some positive changes. On the downside is the problem of fake news (disinformation, propaganda, clickbait, hoaxes, humor, partisan), fragmented audiences and filter bubbles, micro-targeting, and the struggles of legacy media (print, TV, cable, satellite, radio). The upside includes the rise of nonprofit investigative reporting, live streaming services that can document struggles (Parascope, Facebook live), consortium news services that share resources for investigating leaks and news dumps (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists), activist networks (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, photo sharing), partisan news sites, whistleblower sites (Wikileaks), crowdsourcing, citizen journalism, and more opportunities for the distribution of alternative media. Finally, with the rise of so-called populist movements and authoritarian leaders, there has been a revitalized role of the press as the fourth estate. The fake news issue poses a particular problem for environmental issues. Big Carbon has been able to successful exploit a weak news ecomediasystem through its considerable resources and networks to promote climate denial and a probusiness agenda. By sharing an ideological landscape of climate denial with rightwing media (anti-government regulation, pro-free market), they can leverage a thriving right-wing and white supremacist ecomediasystem by deploying astroturfing, launching a well-funded right-wing attack machine, war game science to

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generate doubt, and spread conspiracy theories (such as climate change is a hoax). They influence the media by exploiting the weakness of news media platforms that favor pundits and sources over journalists. Their trained “experts” reframe environmental arguments around jobs and economic development; create the impression that there are protests on both sides; frame climate change believers as extremists, crazy, and murderers; and cast doubt on consensus science. Their aim is to confuse public opinion, forestall passage of laws and regulations, and maintain a “denial space.” In addition, they are savvy at gaming search engines, so their views constantly rank higher in online searches (see López & Share, 2020). But climate denial isn’t the only problem with media’s response to ecological challenges, especially concerning the impacts of our technology on the environment. Jennifer Ellen Good (2016, p. Discussion . . ., para. 2) performed a symbolic annihilation analysis that compared coverage of the iPhone versus electronic waste coverage: Indeed, we would expect that the news, in particular, would be the place for stories about electronic waste. Stories about electronic waste should be at least as pertinent to the news media, in their role as fourth estate watchdogs, as stories about the iPhone. News stories that include the terms “iPhone” and “electronic waste” or “e-waste,” or even stories that include phones in general and electronic waste or e-waste, are essentially non-existent. While public media outlets like PBS and its prestigious documentary series, Frontline, has done an admirable job covering issues like e-waste and climate denial, such coverage is lacking in private media organizations. Not surprisingly, news media are more likely to cover government corruption and scandals than in the corporate sector. In essence, we end up with a kind of propaganda system that favors the c­ orporate/ shareholder worldview. This problem was originally documented by Herman and Chomsky (1988) when they analyzed how media in the United States tended to be biased toward US interests due to five filters—ownership, advertising, sourcing, flak, and anti-communism. The same method can be applied to climate coverage. •

•

•

Ownership: Corporate media (oligarchy) is heavily influenced by right-wing media ownership (Newscorp, Sinclair, Clear Channel). Across the board, private companies are primarily accountable to shareholders and share a worldview with the same forces that are at the center of the world system. Advertising: As a primary source of income, this means there is a dependency on the consumer economy that relies on the fossil fuel industry (for example, car ads). Sourcing: Due to professional practices, journalists rely on governments, official sources, or people in power. They focus on statements by politicians (like

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• •

Trump), pundits (who push industry-sponsored pseudo-science), and “elite” experts from the Global North. Alternative perspectives are eliminated. Flak: The disciplining of media is maintained by pundits, online trolls, and a well-organized right-wing attack machine. Official enemies: The framing of environmentalists as anti-capitalists, antihuman, radicals, or terrorists can invoke the same kind of fear that anticommunism used to.

There are numerous challenges for media educators to deal with problematic environmental coverage and issues like fake climate news. First of all, climate science is complex. It’s not easy for journalists to understand and translate it to the public, let alone for teachers and students. Media literacy is atomized when it focuses too much on messages without understanding the more complex processes of how news ecomediasystems function and operate. Students need to cultivate a holistic, systematic approach that enables them to see the larger picture. Analyzing climate coverage necessitates understanding carbon economy/carbon capitalism. Students need to develop metacognition skills (thinking about thinking) to help them deal with confirmation bias. In trying to effect change, they also need to understand that presenting facts is not enough.

Think Tanks and Public Relations Sharon Beder (1998) performed extensive research on the corporate backlash against the gains made by the environmental movement in the 1970s. Corporations fought back using many of the same strategies as environmentalists through “grassroots organizing and coalition building, telephone and letter-writing c­ ampaigns, using the media, research reports and testifying at hearings” (p. 16). Corporations, she asserts, engaged in “propaganda warfare for capitalism,” utilizing the Advertising Council, endowing department chairs, funding think tanks, producing educational materials that were “economically educated,” strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP), and funding the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which writes pro-business legislation (p. 16). She quotes one of the key intellectuals of the movement, Irving Kristol, who said, “You can only beat an idea with another idea, and the war of ideas and ideologies will be won or lost within the ‘new class,’ not against it,” the “new class” being government bureaucrats, academics, and journalists who produce ideas, not products (p. 19). Another key thinker of the backlash strategy, Brian Tokar, said, “the growth of ecological awareness in the industrialized countries may be one of the last internal obstacles to the complete hegemony of transnational corporate capitalism” (quoted in Beder, 1998, p. 23). The goal: “give a corporate view of environmental problems, and avoid solutions that would involve reduced consumption, increased regulation, or reduced corporate profits” (Beder, 1998, p. 25). As we saw with the rise of Trumpism and other white supremacist movements across the globe,

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“Industry interests have been able to turn the disaffection of rural and resource industry workers, farmers and small business people into anti-environmental sentiments” (p. 23). The net result is to turn the public against environmentalists by characterizing them as fringe, radical, crazy, and mobs and to promote the legitimization of extreme free-market capitalism (neoliberalism) where people accept the belief that government regulation of business is bad and to create doubt about science. As noted by Robert McChesney, “The best PR is never recognized for what it is” (quoted in Moore, 2019, p. 27). To confront the climate crisis, media have an intrinsic role and must disentangle from this complex and well-financed system. It’s a profound responsibility: The pivotal role of communication systems in sifting and presenting information, orchestrating public debate, crafting resonant images and engaging stories that frame public anxieties and concerns, apportion responsibility, and advocate action is a key link in the chain connecting the operation of communications under capitalism to the climate crisis. (Murdock & Brevini, 2017, p. 11)

Fake News: A Media Literacy Moment After the 2016 US presidential election and Brexit referendum, fake news emerged as a quintessential democratic problem that media literacy was tasked to solve. The broad social concern about fake news acknowledges that the public sphere is a kind of commons that requires tending and reminds us of the human (and civic) need for authenticity, honesty, clarity, and fairness in our shared discourses. In light of the perceived danger to democracy that fake news embodies, increasingly media literacy is seen as fundamentally about cultivating civic engagement skills. In addition to improving the news and information ecosystem of social media, media literacy should promote critical thinking skills and fundamental research techniques to distinguish legitimate and authentic information from propaganda, disinformation, hoaxes, lies, and blatant manipulation. Unfortunately, the fake news panic oversimplifies the larger problem of fake news, and sets up a false dichotomy between “fake” and “real” or “true” and “false” that disregards legitimate critiques of established news organizations, or pits “old” versus “new” media. The proliferation of climate disinformation and detrimental environmental media coverage has been perpetuated by traditional gatekeepers of the so-called real news. The ecocritical perspective acknowledges that a pervasive anthropocentric and mechanistic worldview exists in media, regardless of whether we label news as fake or real. Going back to the iceberg model of systems thinking, fake news is the “event” that cannot be resolved without addressing deeper systemic changes (such as media reform). Thus, some have argued that the term “media literacy” is redundant and

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should be considered part of a larger “literacy” that promotes cultural capital, i.e., the ability to participate in culture, politics, and economy. The 19th-century assumption about literacy, notes Miller (2018, p. 28), is “if readers could interpret art, literature, and drama in logical, emotional, and social ways—and comprehend the difference between them—they could be relied upon to govern themselves in accord with the laws of and norms of their societies.” A broader “literacy” agenda entails gaining competencies and awareness involved in effectively using sociallyconstructed forms of communication and representation. Learning literacies involves attaining competencies in contexts that are governed by rules and conventions. Literacies are socially constructed in educational cultural practices involved in various institutional discourses and practices. Literacies evolve and shift in response to social and cultural change and the interests of elites who control hegemonic institutions. (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 49) While everyone should learn basic skills like checking publication dates, looking up sources, and verifying the validity of claims made by news stories shared in social media, media education should address the larger systemic issues like media bias, ownership, economics of media production, etc. As Buckingham (2019, p. 3) argues, Media literacy is not simply a matter of knowing how to use particular devices, whether in order to access or to create media messages. It must also entail an in-depth critical understanding of how these media work, how they communicate, how they represent the world, and how they are produced and used. Understanding the media today requires us to recognize the complexity of modern forms of “digital capitalism.” And if we really want citizens to be media literate, we need comprehensive, systematic and sustained programmes of media education as a basic entitlement for all young people. This coincides with the goals of so-called 21st-century curriculum, which promotes certain skills and habits of mind, such as creativity, innovation, critical thinking, problem-solving, communication, and collaboration. In Figure  7.1, I  provide an example of how to do an ecomedia analysis of fake climate news using the ecomediasphere. Starting with the upper-left zone of ecoculture, we can examine the kinds of cultural values driving the discussion around how to address the climate crisis, beliefs (white-nationalist, conservative, liberal, green, radical), anthropocentric versus ecocentric environmental ideology, and language frames and discourses. The upper-right zone focuses on issues of neoliberal political economy, such as media conglomeration, carbon-and

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Ecoculture

Political Ecology

Social Constructionism, Cultural Studies

World-ecology, Critical Theory

Values (white-nationalist, conservative, liberal, green, radical) Anthropocentric vs. ecocentric Language frames/discourses

Carbon and consumer-based capitalism Attention economy (legacy and social media) Far-right media ecosystem Platform capitalism Neoliberalism

Id e o l o g y

ECOCULTURE Social and cultural practices Beliefs

POLITICAL ECOLOGY Political and economic forces

P l a t fo r

Beli efs

LIFEWORLD Cognitive dispositions Affect

m De si gn

FAKE CLIMATE NEWS ECOMATERIALITY Medium properties Physical environment

Affor d a n c e s /C o n s t r a i n t s

Lifeworld

Cognitive Dispositions Selective exposure, confirmation bias Reality maintenance Screen addiction, attention, etc.

FIGURE 7.1 

Ecomateriality

Medium and Environmental Properties Shareability/spreadability Algorithms, clickbait Participatory

Ecomediasphere analysis of fake climate news

consumer-based capitalism, attention economy (legacy and social media), farright ecomediasystem, and platform capitalism. For this type of analysis, the lower-right zone focuses less on the ecomateriality of technology and more on medium properties. This includes the affordances and constraints of a particular medium (like using a Facebook app on smartphone), and paying attention to how particular stories/memes/news items are shareable/spreadable, and the impact of algorithms, clickbait, and the ability to actively participate in the construction of fake climate news. The lower-left zone of the lifeworld focuses on cognitive dispositions, such as selective exposure, confirmation bias, reality maintenance, screen addiction, etc.

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Conclusion: Multiple Literacies Jennifer Good’s (2016) research on media’s symbolic annihilation of e-waste attributes the lack of general awareness of media and the environment as inherent to the political ecology of the news ecomediasystem. So ecomedia literacy is an important tool for critical engagement: As a result of this lack of “push” information (e.g., from newspapers and television news) about electronic waste, we lack the knowledge of, and interest in, “pull” information (e.g., from online sources) about electronic waste. The devastating consequence is that the environment suffers in its subordination to our carefully constructed and maintained coveting of electronic gadgets. We celebrate communication technologies such as the iPhone while avoiding acknowledgement of the environmental impact of those technologies. Research is needed that explores how best to help ­people critically analyze the stories they receive—and do not receive—about communication technologies. We know that media literacy is effective (see, for example, Martens  & Hobbs, 2015). Digital media literacy that includes a critical analysis of the environmental impact of digital c­ommunication technologies is imperative—for young people in particular. (Good, 2016, Ways Forward, para. 2) Good’s recommendation shows why ecomedia literacy’s aim to put the environment on the agenda of media teachers and the radar of media literacy is imperative.

Prompts Political ecology prompts for probing the ecomedia object: • What ecomediasystem does it belong to? • What is the purpose of creating it? • What kind of media organization created it (i.e., for-profit, nonprofit, public media, etc.)? • What kind of economic model is being used in the production of the ecomedia object (i.e., surveillance capitalism, consumerism, neoliberalism, extractivism, sustainable development, circular economy)? • Is the creator/producer part of the “oligarchy” or “Deep Media”? • Does it rely on or is a form of advertising? Is it greenwashing? • How, if at all, is it part of the attention economy? • Is the ecomedia object dependent on the global supply chain of gadgets? Is it exclusive to a particular platform (such as Apple)? Does it fit into the “Appconn”/“Chimerica” production model? • How is it connected to the carbon economy and climate change? What technologies/gadgets does it depend on, such as streaming services? • What kind of energy does it require?

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References Beder, S. (1998). Global spin: The corporate assault on environmentalism. Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Buckingham, D. (2019). The media education manifesto. Polity Press. Climate Change Debate: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO). (2014, May 11). www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjuGCJJUGsg Corbett, J. B. (2006). Communicating nature: How we create and understand environmental messages. Island Press. Cox, R.,  & Pezzullo, P. C. (2017). Environmental communication and the public sphere (5th ed.). Sage. Dawson, A. (2016). Extinction: A radical history. OR Books. DeLuca, K. M. (1999). Image politics: The new rhetoric of environmental activism. Guilford Press. Dryzek, J. S. (2005). The politics of the earth: Environmental discourses. Oxford University Press. Emmerich, R. (2004). The Day After Tomorrow [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Gabbert, L., & Schein, J. (2009). No Impact Man [Film]. Oscilloscope. Garrard, G. (2011). Ecocriticism (2nd ed.). Routledge. Good, J. E. (2016). Creating iPhone dreams: Annihilating e-waste nightmares. Canadian Journal of Communication, 41(4). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2016v41n4a3058 Hackett, R. (2017). Conclusion: Media reform for climate action. In R. Hackett, S. Forde, S. Gunster, & K. Foxwell-Norton (Eds.), Journalism and climate crisis. Routledge. Hansen, A. (2009). Environment, media and communication. Routledge. Hansen, A., & Cox, R. (Eds.). (2015). The Routledge handbook of environment and communication. Routledge. Harvey, D. (2005). A brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford University Press. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books. Hertsgaard, M., & Pope, K. (2019a, July 26). A new commitment to covering the climate story. www.thenation.com/article/archive/covering-climate-now-media-change/ Hertsgaard, M., & Pope, K. (2019b, November 8). Has climate news coverage finally turned a corner? www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-crisis-covering-climate-now/ Hymas, L., & MacDonald, T. (2019, May 21). ABC News spent more time on royal baby in one week than on climate crisis in one year. Media Matters for America. www.mediamatters. org/abc/abc-news-spent-more-time-royal-baby-one-week-climate-crisis-one-year Iñárritu, A. G. (2015). The Revenant [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education. Brill Sense. Killmeier, M. (2012). The biosphere metamorphosed as “buyosphere”: Capitalism, media, and the human footprint. Capitalism Nature Socialism, 23(2), 75–94. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/10455752.2012.674148 Lewis, J. (2017). Digital desires: Mediated consumerism and climate crisis. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 57–69). Palgrave Macmillan. López, A., & Share, J. (2020). Fake climate news: How denying climate change is the ultimate in fake news. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/ content/blog-post-fake-climate-news-how-denying-climate-change-is-the-ultimatein-fake-news_2020_04/ McChesney, R. W. (2008). The political economy of media: Enduring issues, emerging dilemmas. Monthly Review Press.

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Meadows, D. H. (1991). The global citizen. Island Press. Miller, T. (2018). Greenwashing culture. Routledge. Milstein, T. (2012). Greening communication. In S. D. Fassbinder, A. J. Nocella II, & R. Kahn (Eds.), Greening the academy: A ecopedagogy through the liberal arts (pp. 161–173). Moore, E. (2019). Journalism, politics, and the Dakota Access Pipeline: Standing Rock and the framing of injustice. Routledge. Murdock, G.,  & Brevini, B. (2017). Carbon, capitalism, communication. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 1–20). Palgrave Macmillan. Murphy, P. D. (2017). The media commons: Globalization and environmental discourses. University of Illinois Press. Opel, A. (2006). Corporate culture keeps nature regular: The “super citizen,” the media and the “Metamucil and Old Faithful” ad. Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, 17(3), 100–113. Parham, J. (2016). Green media and popular culture: An introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. Penn, S. (2008). Into the Wild [Film]. Paramount Vantage. Read, R. J., & Alexander, S. (2019). This civilisation is finished: Conversations on the end of empire—and what lies beyond. Simplicity Institute Publishing. Ritter, D., & Brevini, B. (2017). Interview with David Ritter: Mobilising on change— The experience of Greenpeace. In B. Brevini & G. Murdock (Eds.), Carbon capitalism and communication: Confronting climate crisis (pp. 193–199). Palgrave Macmillan. Stibbe, A. (2009). Advertising awareness. In A. Stibbe (Ed.), The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world. Green Books. Stibbe, A. (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, ecology and the stories we live by. Routledge. Theel, S. (2012, June 27). STUDY: Kardashians get 40 times more news coverage than ocean acidification. Media Matters for America. www.mediamatters.org/new-york-times/ study-kardashians-get-40-times-more-news-coverage-ocean-acidification Wasko, J. (2014). The study of the political economy of the media in the twenty-first century. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 10(3), 259–271. https://doi. org/10.1386/macp.10.3.259_1

8 ECOMEDIA MINDPRINT Ecoculture

Ecoculture (social constructionism, cultural studies, ecolinguistics) corresponds with meaning, values, way of life, and practices through shared interpretations and “making sense.” From the standpoint of systems of representation, it explores languages, discourses, narratives, and semiotics. It is the locus of more classical activities of textual analysis associated with media literacy and media studies. Learners not only identify environmental ideologies (beliefs about how humans should act upon and live within the environment) in media texts but also develop information literacy skills to verify environmental claims. In addition, learners can map cultural behaviors and attitudes through social media to identify how belief systems are shared and spread. Intercultural dialogue can be used to explore the relationship between different cultural perspectives concerning the use of technology and media in connection to diverse ecological values and the environment. Students can identify ecological values and ethics in the context of global visual culture. Because meanings aren’t fixed, culture can change over time and can be infused with new practices and forms of eco-citizenship. Here we can transform the split between Nature and Society at the root of our ecological crisis to one that is integrative, such as “natureculture,” which fuses both.

Ecocriticism Ecocriticism offers a powerful toolbox that can be applied to a range of texts, including film, advertising, narrative television, news, documentary, music videos, comics, video games, and so on. Greg Garrard (2009, p. 19) defines ecocriticism as “the ability to critique existing discourses, cultural artefacts, forms and genres, and explore alternatives” from an environmental perspective. Heise (2006, p.  506) stresses that ecocriticism combines “the scientific study of nature, the

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scholarly analysis of cultural representations, and the political struggle for more sustainable ways of inhabiting the world.” Given that ecocriticism has its origins in literature studies, it’s primarily a subset of environmental humanities and is foundational for postcolonial ecocriticism. Not surprisingly, ecocriticism permeates ecomedia studies and other related subjects like ecocinema. Although early (“First-wave”) ecocriticism was applied to nature writing in poetry and literature (not to mention art and images), in the spirit of cultural studies it has expanded into criticism of film (see ecocinema), popular culture, computer software, installation art, and video games (to name but a few). By introducing critical theory (including postmodernism, queer theory, feminism, and postcolonialism), “Second-wave” ecocriticism is characterized by a challenge to a perceived homogeneity of the First-wave (especially from ecofeminist and postcolonial perspectives), by promoting intersectionality with other related spheres of study, such as race, gender, class, sexuality, and disability, shifting from the “biocentric” to a “sociocentric” approach (Garrard, 2016, p.  62). Although initially it sought to problematize concepts like nature as culturally constructed, a more recent turn (which is occurring across media studies) is toward incorporating the materiality of cultural objects (books, films, screens, etc.). Ecocriticism’s strength is to identify how environmentally themed narratives, discourses, and tropes have emerged over time through literature, art, and now popular culture (see Chapter 7, environmental communication, on the ways discourses are applied to the construction of environmental problems). Starting with the historical study of literature, it has identified environmental discourses that reflect a range of attitudes toward living systems. An example of ecocriticism includes a discussion of Rachel Carson’s book, Silent Spring (2002), for the way she utilizes literary techniques to frame environmental concerns. Her ability to translate devastating scientific research on the effects of PCBs into a rhetorical picture of a world without insects or birds creates an ecological imaginary that inspires action. Early work by Raymond Williams (2016) on city and country identified how writers have differentiated between the human built world and wilderness in literature, which can also be explored in regard to visual art. The Romantic poets and painters of the 19th century, for example, responded to industrialization and urbanization by romanticizing about “wild” and “sublime” nature “unimpacted” by humans (or lowly impacted by indigenous peoples), but also reinforced the division between humans and the environment by demarcating boundaries between them. Ecocriticism is very much about doing boundary work, which means that it explores ways that our cultural products define and create boundaries by essentializing through language (visual and written). It’s concerned with the tension between how an essentialist view of ecology tends to valorize nature as inherently good and the postmodern view of ecology in which representations are culturally constructed and problematic (signifiers of nature are free floating).

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Green Popular Culture and Visual Culture Popular culture is a rich site for ecomedia literacy. Ideally, students should explore the many different possibilities proposed by Parham (2016) such as video games and music. In this chapter, I will focus primarily on film, because it is a very welldeveloped area of ecocriticism (in the form of ecocinema studies) and many of the themes explored can be extended to other types of media. The caveat is, of course, that every medium has its own affordances and constraints, and their own specializations. Parham’s book does an excellent job of reviewing in more detail different forms of green popular culture. It’s a fundamental assertion of ecomedia literacy that environmental attitudes can be shaped through popular culture. Be it through cinema, music, comedy television, computer games, comics, or literature, popular culture can both reinforce dominant views of the environment and imagine, critique, or propose different ideas about the environment (Parham, 2016). So, while standard Hollywood cinema might advance the carbon economy by glorifying car culture or romanticizing war, we might also get glimpses into ecology that tap into people’s desire to connect to nature, such as in Avatar (Cameron, 2009). Indeed, popular culture can be ecologically regenerative, offering discourses around how to decarbonize or promote sustainable solutions to global ecological problems. Popular media can and should be coopted for environmental awareness: As a result of the increasing fragmentation and atomization of (Western) society and what some consider as the disintegration of the human spirit, as well as the apparent breakdown of coherent political meta-narratives, there seems to be a growing demand for popular mass media to fill a philosophical, spiritual and ethical void, one which could also be seen to fulfill a broadly ethical environmental role that promotes long-term sustainable responsibility. (Brereton, 2018, p. 117) Examples include successful documentaries, comics journalism, music videos, TV dramas, or green computer games. Plants and animals, in the form of a­ nimation and children’s picture books, are often used to depict our fears, hopes, aspirations, love: They are intimately connected to our imagination. Alternative media and artistic practices also seek to contest the dominant environmental ideology. Parham (2016, p. 23) identifies two significant circuits of popular culture, or what he calls cultural ecosystems, where green popular culture (albeit contradictory) emerges in a “dialogue between national or localised ‘folk cultures’ and global media culture; and complex circuits by which activist media and popular culture finds its way back into the mainstream.” Parham stresses that grassroots environmentalist media are in constant dialogue with mass media, so we shouldn’t

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limit ourselves by viewing one versus the other. In particular, he believes that popular culture can be a rich site of exploration for three reasons: 1. “Green media and popular culture” does not just mean either debased or ideologically driven commercial forms of culture or, alternatively aesthetically or politically challenging material. Green ideas emerge in every type of media text and across all forms of popular culture. Each of these has the potential to carry authentically ecological ideas and to represent them in their complexity. 2. Media and popular culture has a specific niche in green thinking and politics— to translate ecological ideas in ways meaningful to people’s everyday lives. 3. Green media and popular culture is characterized by contradiction—between authentic green values and the dominant ideologies, which can often qualify and compromise them. (p. xviii) As noted, media education tends to focus on global (or national) and mainstream/commercial media, so entering into dialogue with independent, avantgarde art, folk, and alternative media is an important and necessary aspect of teaching ecomedia. As most know from teaching any introductory-level media, culture and society course, ideology is always contested and contradictory. This is especially true when exploring ecomedia. As Parham stresses, eco-pessimism, greenwashing, and the politics of possibility are all aspects of green popular culture. Students benefit from a rich discussion that reveals how global capitalism is not simply monolithic, but is full of fissures, cracks, and contradictions. Parham suggests that popular culture offers “glimpses” into ecology (i.e., Michael Jackson’s “Earth Song” music video). Ecomedia teachers can zoom in on the glimpses and expand them like an aperture to open up emerging realities. It’s also important to highlight how Heise’s (2008) notion of eco-cosmopolitanism encourages a sense of planetary awareness that connects literary works and popular culture from different cultural realities. As Parham (2016, p. 24) asserts, “global ecology of popular culture is, itself a collage or montage; and that out of this . . . an equivalent global, eco-cosmopolitan ecology emerges.” According to Mirzoeff (2016, p. 12), “Visual culture is now the study of how to understand change in a world too enormous to see but vital to imagine.” One question we should ask: Is global society a visual society? Does it create a shared way to express thoughts and feelings? In answering this question, Mirzoeff asserts that global visual culture has the following elements: • •

All media are social media. We use them to depict ourselves to others. Seeing is actually a system of sensory feedback from the whole body, not just the eyes.

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•

Visualizing, by contrast, uses airborne technology to depict the world as a space for war. • Our bodies are now extensions of data networks, clicking, linking, and ­taking selfies. • We render what we see and understand on screens that go everywhere with us. • This understanding is the result of a mixture of seeing and learning not to see. • Visual culture is something we engage in as an active way to create change, not just a way to see what is happening. Given that all of these themes are intimately connected to youth culture, it is vital that each of these themes is explored from an ecomedia perspective and incorporated into ecomedia literacy. Hall et al. assert that visual culture is universal (because you don’t need to know the spoken language to understand an image). Nonetheless, any system of representation has three elements: (1) Corresponding system of equivalences of the world of things (people, places, events, experiences) and the concept maps (mental concepts we have) applied to them; (2) construction of a system of language/s for those correspondences; (3) and how codes fix the relation of things, concepts, and signs (socially produced/social conventions/rules of thumb). Ecomedia students learn to be fluent in how environmental codes are fixed, but also how they are undone. In terms of a decolonial turn, unpacking orientalist stereotypes and representations of indigenous peoples in popular culture should be a priority of ecomedia literacy.

Ecocinema Ecocinema represents one of the most important facets of popular and avantgarde cultural production, so I will focus more on it here than on other types of media. Like ecomedia in general, ecocinema is simultaneously a part of living systems and mediates the environment. As a material object in the world, “cinema is a form of negotiation, a mediation that is itself ecologically placed as it consumes the entangled world around it, and is itself consumed” (Rust & Monani, 2013, p. 1). Cinema is understood as a window into the world for how we imagine the environment. Subsequently, there are many themes in ecocinema that crossover with ecocriticism and art history. Like all forms of visual culture, films perform ideological boundary work, especially surrounding discourses and narrative related to wilderness and sublime. Other crossover examples include the parallels in film between car culture and myths of the West promoted in literature, visual art, and advertising and how they manifest in mainstream Hollywood films as environmental ideology. Christman Lavin and Kaplan (2017, p. 1) state that “Ecocinema involves the human gaze looking at cinema through the lens of the environment, in a manor analogous to the way feminists provide the cinematic lens of gender in the 1970s.”

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Ecocinema is a form of ecocritical analysis that allows for “conscious ethical witnessing of the ecological environment” (p. 11). Willoquet-Maricondi (2010a) identifies ecofilm as cinema that promotes environmentalism. As to the specific materiality of cinema, numerous scholars are investigating the actual environmental impacts of filmmaking (see Bozak, 2011; Hayward, 2020; Maxwell & Miller, 2012; Vaughan, 2016). While environmental impacts of media technologies are covered in more detail in Chapter 5, it is worth noting Vaughan’s observation that one prominent characterization of Hollywood cinema is that its main economic function is to turn natural resources into money. This is evidenced in all the ways filmmakers harness materials. In one important example, water is a key resource: Film, like its users, needs water. And, once that water goes through its system, film has to excrete the waste left behind. Water is a necessary element on multiple levels throughout the life cycle of a film, as both an article of representation and an essential part of the chemical process that makes both analog and digital movie magic possible. The recent turn to more sustainable and environmentally conscious practices has elicited some water-based solutions, such as the shift from individual disposable water bottles back to old-school collective water-cooler efficiency, which stands out as a pretty consistent “greening” initiative of mainstream production practices. However, the real problems lie—as they often do—behind the scenes, in the processes that are not highlighted in information brochures. (Vaughan, 2016, pp. 27–28) Vaughan laments that a big budget Hollywood film can use the water of half a million viewers, all to make a raw cultural material, the majority of which will end up as waste on the cutting room floor. Ecocriticism raises consciousness through activist and critical viewing (rereading from an environmental perspective; reading against the grain). Thus, ecocinema proposes that all films are open to ecocritical readings, acknowledging (like green cultural studies) that popular culture, though imbued with ideology, can be contradictory and rich in experience. The unique and important contribution of this field to ecomedia studies is the exploration of cinematic experience. Indeed, ecocinema probably does the most work in addressing affect (bodily and emotional) as it relates to ecology (the discussion of affect is covered in Chapter 6). It can be argued that of all forms of popular culture, cinema has the most powerful effect on our sensory experience. According to Willoquet-Maricondi (2010b), there are three types of ecocinema (which can also be applied more broadly to other kinds of media)—films explicitly about environmental threats and dangers (Day After Tomorrow); films with an absence of nature and environmental social justice is obfuscated (car

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chase and action films); and films that have environmental themes but have ideological shortcomings in their modes of representation (Avatar). The categories of ecocinema films span all genres, including art cinema, Hollywood blockbusters, animation, documentaries, and transnational cinema. One of the debates in ecocinema is about the tension between art film and blockbusters. Early cinema, which Tom Gunning called the “cinema of attractions,” was about how images were more important than narrative. Over time cinema developed a “rhetoric of spectacle” that can overwhelm audiences by displaying the force of an event but without meaning. As is the case with blockbuster films like The Day After Tomorrow or Deepwater Horizon, does spectacle conflict with ecological/environmental messaging? The concern is that spectacle overpowers the message as audiences experience the sublime pleasure of eco-disaster. But it does invite several questions: When does it shift from spectacle to status of ecological disaster? Is it a disaster for humans? Business? Nature? Is it business as usual or eco-disaster? Is disaster financial loss, or loss of pristine environment? Does spectacle erase its environmental significance? (See Murray & Heumann, 2009.) In contrast to spectacle, Scott MacDonald’s (2013) discussion of the ecocinema experience invites us to consider the role of avant-garde art cinema in developing environmental awareness. He advocates for a kind of slow cinema with long takes that can retrain perception. Ecocinema should create a cinematic experience that “models patience and mindfulness,” qualities necessary for the appreciation of the natural environment. He believes the goal of ecocinema is not to reproduce proenvironmental messages using the continuity editing language of Hollywood and documentaries, but to create an entirely new cinematic experience, an alternative to conventional media spectatorship and melodrama. It should be the opposite of TV advertising and consumerism by forcing us to watch and experience something slowly. In another critique of spectacle environmental films, Estok (2017) posits that environmental violence is usually not “spectacular nor instantaneous”—and takes place across different temporal scales. Environmental problems are also too “ordinary” to garner the attention of the news media. As Nixon (2011, p. 3) asks, How can we convert into image and narrative the disasters that are slow moving and long in the making, disasters that are anonymous and star nobody, disasters that are attritional and of indifferent interest to the ­sensation-driven technologies of our image-world? How can we turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories dramatic enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention, these emergencies whose repercussions have given rise to some of the most critical challenges of our time? Estok (2017) believes invariably spectacle reproduces what it critiques by perpetuating the ecophobic ethics (fear of nature) that are central to the ­

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problem in the first place. Environmental films end up producing a kind of compassion fatigue and diluting the material to such a degree that important abstract concepts are blurred, thus preventing people from seeing key connections. By being merely entertaining, blurring of the virtual and actual worlds makes catastrophe another form of entertainment that is enmeshed with dominant ideologies. In contrast, Brereton (2016) asserts that abstract environmental problems are not always accessible to the senses, so film can put us in touch with a sensory experience of climate crisis and can provide symbolic resources for conceiving the crisis. In general, there are three kinds of film language—continuity editing (Hollywood style), art cinema, and montage (advertising, music videos). Ingram (2013) suggests that within these perimeters, there are three conceptual oppositions: (1) Art and popular cinema, (2) realism and melodrama, and (3) moralism and immoralism. As discussed, there is tension between the effectiveness of art film and spectacle. I tend to look at this as a spectrum between open and closed works of art, the former being something that is open to interpretation (like Blade Runner 2049) and the latter being something that thinks for you (like Avatar). When debating this conceptual opposition and these films with students, they tend to be evenly split about which approach is more effective for communicating environmental issues. Some want the chance to find meaning, others just want to be told what it is. This is similar to the debate about the conceptual opposition between realism and melodrama. Realistic characters are complicated by having ambiguous qualities, whereas in melodrama the genre predetermines the “good” and “bad” characters. In Blade Runner 2049, it’s not clear whether or not androids can experience biophilia, empathy, and love, so the process of trying to assess that draws the viewer more into the film. In Avatar, by borrowing from the genre conventions of Westerns, the allegory of bad civilization versus good ecological people makes the differences more obvious. In the third conceptual opposition, the tension between moral and immoral characters is similar to the problem of realism versus melodrama. Moralist films run the danger of creating apathy because they generate “involuntary emotions” as opposed to reflection—the spectator’s own moral judgments are disabled. Films with amoral characters that subvert proscriptive moralism can be more ethical because it forces us to confront the manipulative tendencies of melodrama (i.e., Fight Club, Fincher, 1999). Irony and radical kitsch can help defamiliarize audiences and create subversive meanings, both cognitive and affective, but not emotional like classic mainstream narrative film (like the difference between There Will Be Blood (Anderson, 2007) versus any film directed by Spielberg). But sentimentality may have an evolutionary function to help us develop empathy, such as how Disney films encourage children to bond with animals. Ultimately, what is the function of art? Ingram suggests it’s to create new insights, make new connections, and to think of new ideals or possibilities.

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Wilderness Film has the power to do important boundary work between civilization and wilderness. As noted by Brereton (2013, p. 227), a common theme is the journey into Nature to invoke the sublime, “imaginative strategies that liminal protagonists use to find themselves during these rites-of-passage journeys through exotic landscapes and into raw, unmediated nature.” The popularity of these allegories signal an increased desire among film audiences for the therapeutic b­ enefits of nature landscape and extreme endurance, as western society—and its young traumatized males in particular—tries to cope with a growing ­anti-spiritualist, pro-materialist, and synthetic/commodified culture that cannot provide real sustenance for sustainable living. (p. 227) In the history of Western literature and popular culture, “Wild nature” is a place of freedom, spontaneity, and authenticity. Learning visual languages of different media is absolutely key to ecomedia literacy. This is especially important when exploring the visual rhetoric of wilderness. The visual grammar is distinct, mostly characterized by an unobtrusive style with tracking shots, extreme longshots that frame the landscape, deep focus (no grain), aerial tracking shots, widescreen format, wide-angle lenses, and slow motion. Handheld and fast edits are used for kinetic sequences. Landscapes provide the experience of a “performative sensorium” and “source of cultural meaning” (Brereton, 2013, p. 215). But this also produces an aesthetic of human exclusion and “tourist gaze,” raising Ingold’s (2011) discussion of globes versus spheres. Does place then become spectacle or something that is inhabitable? Of all the arts, cinema is the most immersive, so to some extent we come to inhabit the landscape during the cinematic experience, yet we can also be simultaneously separated. Does the camera distance us or bring us closer to landscape? Does the camera inherently reinforce domination/mastery over nature? Can it invoke the sublime? Does it reproduce dualism of human–nature? These are all important probes we can make when examining wilderness in cinema, but also in advertising and TV.

Animals and Animation Film’s affective power is one of its most important characteristics, giving it tremendous ability to invoke empathy, especially for animals. Berger (1980, p.  9) asserts that because animals are disappearing as a result of the extinction crisis, we desire to see them in film: “In the last two centuries, animals have gradually disappeared. Today we live without them. And in this new solitude, anthropomorphism makes us doubly uneasy.” We tend to be attracted to charismatic

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megafauna (dolphins, elephants, pandas, gorillas), which can produce its own kind of hierarchies of care. The ability of film to engage in the practice of anthropomorphism (making animals resemble humans) and zoomorphism (making humans into animals) can help audiences experience ambiguity around the duality of human–animal. Additionally, because the process of transforming animals into meat necessitates the erasure of animals as subjects, film has the power to develop bonds with animals (as was the case in Okja (Joon-ho, 2017), which was an effective polemic against industrial slaughterhouses). On the other hand, there is a danger of overromanticizing, as is the case with differences between the book and film version of Dian Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist, which describes “infanticide, masturbation, incest, fellatio and cannibalism,” but that wouldn’t be seen in a Hollywood film (see Brereton, 2016). In Disney’s brand of wildlife films, starting with Walt Disney’s True-life Adventures in the 1950s, animals were used to normalize suburban, “sentimental, anthropomorphizing, and steeped in postwar ideologies of progress and individualism, homeland prosperity, and so-called family values” (Molloy, 2013, p. 171). These kinds of wildlife films fit a growing automobile culture where nature was consumed as a form of spectatorship (for example, family trips to National Parks). Disney was appealing to a “Nature-minded public,” the status quo being natural resource management, leisure, and tourism. But ironically, Disney insisted there be no trace of civilization or humans in these films. By attributing subjectivity to animals, it was a marked change from previous wildlife documentaries. Despite claims of being “educational,” Disney wildlife films are primarily entertainment. Over time, nature films are marketed as blockbusters to entice audiences to go to the cinema (see trailers for Disneynature branded films for teaching examples). However, they can serve both purposes as “edutainment”— which combines public service with consumerism (i.e., March of the Penguins (Jacquet, 2005), which blurs the lines). Wildlife documentaries are especially rich for exploring how films do ideological work to normalize a range of social attitudes, such as scientific authority, idealized suburban family structures, promoting nationalistic exploration, and normalized gender binaries (as animals serve as stand-ins for gender roles), and promote environmental concerns. Wilderness documentaries also challenge us to question what is “real” versus constructed nature, providing an excellent case study for exploring media’s power of verisimilitude and artifice. Entertainmentdriven wilderness ecocinema blurs the line between representation and simulation. Behind the scenes segments produced for DVDs and web promotion are good for prompting discussions about these issues. Wildlife films also challenge us to confront an anthropocentric and “speciesist” gaze. Quite often wildlife films are narrated by a didactic, paternalistic, and disembodied white male narrator who is omniscient and invisible. This creates an association with knowledge claims and scientific authority (despite there being

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no visible scientists). They situate the viewer as an observer, but not interpreter (like an objective, scientific experiment with an “authoritative record of existing landscape”—“seeing is knowing”). This produces a decontextualized natural sublime absent of humans (there is little, if no, human interference/presence). Nature is a timeless, self-contained, self-regulated domain apart from human history (Vivanco, 2013). With wilderness films, there’s the phenomenon of the “speciesist camera”: Nonhuman animals are objects-to-be-looked-at, objects of the “speciesist gaze.” For example, we anthropomorphize by seeing animals as humans (distorting their behavior to fit human perspective) and turning animals into caricatures (i.e., penguins are like little children with tuxedos). Ladino (2013) recommends strategies to decenter the speciesist gaze by considering how animals and humans are coinhabiting cinematic space; depict nonhuman animals “watching back” at humans; minimize or destabilize human language that create boundaries; and use zoomorphic footage and commentary to remind humans of their own animality. As a result of the animation style developed by Disney, neoteny (characteristics like wide eyes and large heads used to resemble infants) are common in animation, which produces overly sentimentalized versions of “cuddly animals”— believable and make-believe/fantasy simultaneously—that children can relate to. Animation allows us to put a human face on the animal world to trigger human affection and ethical concern: By extension, therefore, on an aesthetic level at least, nonhumans in possession of the characteristic of a human face will by all accounts trigger more concern and proactive forms of empathy. This certainly corresponds to the raison d’être of the Disney oeuvre and its preoccupation with animals in particular. (Brereton, 2016, p. 112) Disney animation is critiqued for using the “veil of nature” while selling products—nature is valorized and commoditized simultaneously. Nature becomes entertainment and spectacle. As is the case in the Lion King (Allers & Minkoff, 1994), the animal realm becomes an “animal utopia” that edits out uncomfortable elements (such as animals that are normally predator and prey exist harmoniously). There is a danger of making nature more vibrant and colorful than the “real” experience that can lead to unrealistic expectations. Disney’s anthropomorphism presents a double-edge sword. As is in the case of Finding Nemo (Stanton, 2003), making the coral reef into a virtual suburbia and the fish mimicking a human family could lead the audience to identify with the fish species and to project themselves within the coral reef ecosystem that leads to a desire not to exploit it. Animation also allows us to defamiliarize the environment in order to see it in a new way. On the other hand, hyperrealistic environments (idealized, timeless, outside of time, paradise) can further reinforce the

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conceptual boundary between Society and Nature invented by Modernity (see Murray & Heumann, 2011).

Disneynature There is no better case study of what happens when corporate culture intersects with environmentalism than the case of Disneynature. Disneynature (Disney + nature) is an independent film studio founded in 2008 that produces nature documentary films for Walt Disney Studios. Its effort is to demonstrate how “environmental stewardship can work hand-in-hand with the protection of Disney’s assets and enhanced profitability.” This phrase mirrors the language and logic of neoliberalism (Molloy, 2013, p. 177). Consider the following Disneynature mission statement, “Nature invents the most beautiful stories. Our role at Disneynature will be to tell these stories with passion and enthusiasm to the largest public possible” (quoted in Molloy, p. 170). Here nature “invents” (a capitalist discourse) the stories, while Disney, through its branding, will simply capture and document them. Disneynature’s green logo is set against a snow- and ice-covered mountain in the shape of their trademarked castle, which connects to Disney as a “heritage brand” and its reputation capital with positive association, stability, and consumer trust. It invokes a nostalgia for “childhood amazement” and the “wonderful world of Disney” where lands and worlds are fantastic, magical, and “constructed according to the company’s standardized template.” Nostalgia appeals to the desire for authenticity and Disney authority (Molloy, 2013, p. 181). Keep in mind that Disney’s brand empire grew to be synergistic between theme parks, TV, and consumerism. Disney’s Animal Kingdom theme park in Orlando, Florida, features safaris and amusement rides, including The World of Avatar, a themed area based on the film. Disneynature is part of Disney’s brand strategy and cross-promotion to rework its “brand associations with an environmentally sustainable business model, conservation, and environmental protection” (Molloy, 2013, p. 176). Molloy argues, “low-level, short-lived consumer activities such as ticket buying, reorganize environmental action through the ideology of consumer capitalism”; this method of consuming and experiencing nature is “corporate culture’s answer to the environmental crisis” (p. 176). Disneynature does ideological work because being perceived as “non-green” is a threat to their business model. But Disney’s “environmentality” business ethic cannot allow radical messages that threaten profitability (it does not promote systemic change). Disney films (and other branded products) are commodities to be sold within the global entertainment and industrial capitalist system, as it is still competing in domestic and international markets. Disney’s efforts fit within the neoliberal framework that ties political discourse into consumerism (thereby transferring political concerns to the market, i.e., consuming as social activism— “Buy a ticket, save a tree”). Still, people’s consumption choices are influenced by their environmental consciousness (they want “Earth friendly” products).

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This results in corporate colonization of environmentalism: “Under a neoliberal doctrine, this corporate penetration legitimizes, and indeed promotes, capitalist consumerism and as an environmentally responsive activity” (Molloy, 2013, p. 170). The alliance between Disney, Disneynature, conservation groups, audiences, and films are “sites of their marketing, consumption, and repurposing” (p. 171).

Transnational Ecocinema and Ecojustice Transnational ecocinema (related to “world cinema”) opens up perspectives beyond Hollywood and the West to take into consideration and to expand broader international concerns by exploring how ideas circulate through different cultures and realities. Kääpä (2013) asserts that Hollywood’s concerns for the environment tend to reproduce an “Ecological Panoptic”: Mainstream spectacles like 2012 (Emmerich, 2009) normalizes the frameworks of the geopolitical and geo-economic order as pro-Western democracy with the United States as world leader. These attitudes are unexamined and assumed, and don’t fundamentally challenge the power and hegemony at the source of ecological problems. By reinforcing Western hegemony, the world is “flattened” by globalization. Hollywood cinema tends to be anthropocentric, colonizing the environment for human consumption. “Greenbuster” films like Day After Tomorrow (2004, Emmerich) become “feel-bad” cinema that acknowledge ecological problems but turns them into spectacles for consumption. Most importantly, their assumed audience is Western. Quite often they deploy the Orientalist gaze by stereotyping and generalizing about Others for Western audience consumption. For example, quite often “undeveloped” regions occupied by low-income people are filmed with a saturated yellow filter. Scenes that take place in India, Bangladesh, North Africa, Mexico, or Southeast Asia are represented as distinct (not civilization), polluted, and dangerous (Sherman, 2020). In contrast, transnational ecocinema studies focus on texts that centralize the theme of global discontent and inequality (Kääpä, 2013). They are concerned with issues like hybridity, postcolonialism, diaspora, the geopolitics and economics of a global inequality, the legacy of colonial power, and anthropocentrism. Transnational cinema communicates at the ecocosmopolitan “world level,” meaning that they are not necessarily made for the gaze of the Western audience. So, though TV documentaries like Planet Earth (Fothergill, 2006) are about the world, they don’t necessarily communicate to the world, but are primarily for the consumption of Western audiences. Transnational ecocinema works toward multiculturalism by operating above and beyond borders by unflattening the world and critiquing the global imbalance of power. Thus, the transnational ecocinema perspective draws on Lu and Mi’s definition of ecocinema as “the study of the production and reproduction of life, the relationship between the human body and the ecosystem, and the controlling and administering of the human body in modern capitalist and socialist regimes”

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(quoted Kääpä, 2013, p. 27). Nick Kaldis’ commentary on Chinese ecocinema describes how transnational ecocinema is so different than Hollywood film: There is no narrative closure and catharsis, no gesture towards the promise of less disruptive and more locally engaged, ecologically friendly, and sustainable developmental policies. Instead, the traumatizing exigencies of national development are shown to be woven into the very fabric of everyday life, creating irresolvable intra- and interpersonal conflicts, anomie, sexual dysphoria, dislocation, loss etc.  .  .  .  [in] projecting the characters’ confusion and disorientation onto the viewing audiences. A work of art can make original and complex contributions toward our understanding of the conflicted state of human agency under conditions of ecological devastation in China today. The unquestionable good of economic “progress” and “modernization” is shown to be the cause of irreversible ecological damage and obliteration of historically-rich local communities. (quoted in Kääpä, 2013, pp. 27–28) Relatedly, Roberto Forns-Broggi (2013, p.  86) asks: How can ecocinema’s engagement with “environmental justice, narratives of risk, and critique of globalization” become part of the planetary imagination? How can we move to a “sense of planet”? How can ecocinema expand our imagination to conceive the Good Life/el buen vivir? Cinema that cultivates Good Life/el buen vivir does so by exposing conflicts with exploitation and “unmasks” economic forces. The lesson for ecomedia literacy is that the examples we choose for our lessons should be diverse and represent different cultural realities. Too often as media teachers, we fall back on The Cannon, which tends to be media texts produced from the centers of Western media production. If we are to disrupt and challenge the underlying power structure of the world system, we must also decolonize our curriculum.

Ecocinema Analysis and Ecomedia Literacy Hageman’s (2013) method of dialectical ideological critique provides the clearest path between ecocinema scholarship and ecomedia literacy. According to him, the cinema text is indexical of capital and ideology. Hollywood visualizes the dominant paradigm by making it visible (we see the dream life of the culture), but it also defines the ecological imagination. Ultimately capital and ecology are unrepresentable, yet visual culture has material impacts on the world (because it sustains an environmentally destructive worldview and requires technology with ecomaterial impacts). Nonetheless, ideology is contradictory and incomplete (i.e., Avatar), so ecological critique is ideologically dialectical. Irreconcilable differences force us to envision something new and it allows us to unmask and see the contradictions, for if ideology was complete, we wouldn’t be able to see the

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fissures. Neither ecology nor ideology stand still—they dialectically change all the time (i.e., evolving discourses around fracking and pipelines signal that capital is in crisis because there are extreme efforts to extract more resources from a depleted landscape). Through ecocritical analyses, we can change the text’s meaning and expose contradictions by revealing paradoxes and evolving meanings (nothing is constant, i.e., nature is not timeless). Some questions student can ask about ecocinema: • •

Cinematic experience is embedded in the web of life. How? Cinema affect our understanding of the world. How can it affect our perception of the environment? • What is unique or special about cinema that can communicate about ecology? • Does film contribute to our enjoyment of “original nature” or to its destruction? • Of all media, can only cinema capture ecology effectively? Why and how? • How is a film different than any other art form? As can be applied to any ecomedia, ecocinema analysis is a tool for seeing and learning how to see.

The Audience Experience: Learning From Effects Theories Returning to the theme of media as education, what does studying ecomedia’s pedagogical role in promoting or hindering environmental perspectives have to teach us about ecomedia literacy? As discussed, ecocinema studies is the one discipline mostly concerned with the issue of cinema’s power of affect and the extent to which the experience of watching film can impact or educate us about ecology, a kind of environmental literacy. To state the obvious, media students are also media audiences, users, prosumers, participants, and so on—alternately citizens and stakeholders—so it is useful to consider effects and reception theories when exploring ecomedia as a form of environmental literacy. Beyond actively employing textual analysis and excavating a green trace throughout popular media, environmental scholarship has to become more preoccupied with the drive to delve deeper into the nuances of audience perception, reception, and the creation of more effective emotional stimuli that can actively influence viewers, while at the same time appreciating and understanding audiences’ relationships with new forms of on-line media and aesthetics that might in turn support environmental literacy. Extensive analysis around new modes understanding the effect (and affect) of evolving forms of media are needed to test such assertions and uncover further implications for constructive environmental literacy. (Brereton, 2018, p. 41)

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Environmental communication and ecolinguistics, which deal with how to make environmental claims in the media, is also concerned with how people interpret messages. So, what do effects theories commonly taught in media studies classrooms teach us about media as environmental education? We can organize the most common effects theories into two categories: (1) What media do to people and (2) what people do with media. We can then subdivide each one according to whether or not they are (A) media-centric (focusing on media texts) or (B) sociocentric (focusing on structural systems). (A note of caution: This is an oversimplified summary that lacks the nuance of internal debates taking place within the research traditions of these fields.) Some of these theories don’t fit neatly into single categories, so I have arranged them according to their dominant themes. Additionally, this list is not exhaustive, but covers some of the most commonly taught approaches and assumes basic familiarity with the concepts. I’m also not addressing particular theoretical orientations here (i.e., Frankfurt School, Cultural Studies, Toronto School, Chicago School, Columbia School, etc.). As a pedagogical exercise, students can be tasked with aligning different effects theories to different kinds of ecomedia (cinema, news, propaganda, advertising, political communication), which I have attempted to outline here: Social expectations theory (1A): This closely aligns with the idea of media as education. It asserts that media teach us about what to expect in terms of how the world works, and the particular roles that people play. In terms of the environment, it can be used to describe how media represent environmental ideologies as social practice. Theory of uniform effects, AKA magic bullet/syringe theory (1B): Though this is long outdated, it does reflect the thinking of many media educators and environmental activists who believe social problems like gun violence are attributed to video games or TV. This theory addresses how very broad ideological positions, such as the promotion of capitalism and consumerism, are disseminated across all media. Cultivation analysis (1B): This argues that over time when audiences are exposed to particular representations of the world (such as overrepresentations of violent crime), people come to fear the world. But more importantly, it recognizes the way media are used to reinforce the status quo and social reality. To paraphrase one of George Gerbner’s best known lines, advertisers don’t have stories to tell, but something to sell. Gerbner (1998) advocated for a kind of media environmentalism in which a precautionary principle is applied to mass media, i.e., to reduce harm, certain kinds of representations should be limited. I’m attracted to the cultivation metaphor, which could be applied to the ways in which media audiences are cultivated (such as industrial agriculture = culture industry and organic agriculture = independent and grassroots media). Symbolic annihilation (1B): Though originally intended to describe the effect of erasing populations from the media, such as LGBTQ people (Gerbner & Gross, 1976), this can ostensibly be applied to frontline communities battling multinational corporations, indigenous, environmentalists, and ecology as a subject.

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One study demonstrated that media coverage of the iPhone symbolically annihilated the problem of e-waste (Good, 2016). Selective and limited effects (1B): Lazarsfeld used this to understand the effect of political campaigns and the extent to which people are influenced by them. This is relevant when considering environmental messaging, such as the classic Crying Indian public service announcement (PSA) from the 1970s. Agenda setting (1B): When it comes to key issues like the ecological emergency, the role of the press is critical in determining not what to think, but what to think about. This fits the classic gatekeeper model of news and information in which professionals are tasked with surveilling for newsworthy events. It’s a kind of specialized filter that is absent in the way people currently share information and news in social media. The danger is the power of gatekeepers to restrict what people have access to; the strength is their skill to professionally and ethically vet, verify, and factcheck news stories. Reflection theory (1B): This is the idea that media simply reflect the attitudes and beliefs of a given society. In the context of the ecomedia framework, students can explore the extent to which different kinds of media reflect or mirror different kinds of ecological and social values. They can explore the social corporate responsibility statements of media and tech companies, and research actual sustainability policies of media conglomerates. Two-step flow theory (2A): The central idea here is that people tend to look for guidance from experts and authorities on how to think about events reported in the media. They are more swayed by people they trust and know. In the age of influencers, this can be particularly interesting to explore in terms of how particular environmental attitudes are communicated in social media by opinion leaders (such as veganism, van life, animal rights, waste reduction, simplicity, etc.) on platforms like Instagram. Selective exposure (2A): People choosing to look at media that conforms to their own views is one of the most pertinent of the problems of social media, filter bubbles, and fake news. This is especially important when addressing climate denial. Social representations theory (2A): This involves making the unfamiliar familiar through anchoring media texts with existing worldviews. People’s responses to environmental ideologies in the media will invariably be incorporated into their preexisting worldviews. Parasocial relations (2A): People develop connections with characters or celebrities that seem real to them. Can this extend to ecological issues? Is it not possible that media can generate empathy or bonds with the more-than-human world? Programming about animals, such as a nature TV shows about a nursery for orphaned orangutans, can generate audience bonds with primates. Moreover, celebrity advocates like Leonardo DiCaprio and Harrison Ford can lead people to care about environmental issues if audiences feel connected and trust these particular celebrities.

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Uses and gratifications theory (2A): This approach somewhat aligns with Guattari’s (2008) concept of the three ecologies (mental, social, physical) by addressing the social, psychological, and biological needs of the audience. As is commonly described, U&G asserts that people use media for cognition (intellectual pursuits, curiosity, information, surveillance), diversion (relaxation, emotional release, stimulation), social utility (something to talk about, participation in society), and withdrawal (tuning out with our gadgets, etc.). The key here is that people seek out media for these different reasons. Student can consider what strategies environmental communicators can use to match these different strategies. Knowledge and information don’t automatically lead to change, but Brereton (2018, p. 22) notes, “As frequently illustrated in communications literature, promoting various forms of emotional engagement and environmental connectivity remains one of the core attractions and strengths of audio-visual narratives.” Furthermore, Statistical descriptions of the risk of climate change however often fail to elicit concrete action, because statistical information by itself, means very little to (most) people. Alternatively, vicarious emotional and digital sensory experience through the medium of powerful narratives, even without the luxury of first-hand experience, can become a much more engaging albeit surrogate teacher. (p. 22) Consider the strong, emotional response people have to disasters, terrorism, or events like 9/11, despite not having direct experiences with these events. Fictional narrative, Brereton asserts, are essential in helping people connect to environmental concerns. Visualizing the environment helps us understand it and is a form of sense-making. Indeed, emerging technologies (satellites, etc.) allow us to perform remote sensing of the world. Summarizing the research that connects both psychological trigger points for climate action/inaction and how it connects to media reception, Brereton (2018) identifies three kinds of denial—denialism based on deliberate disinformation; negation, which is like the first stage of mourning; and disavowal, a combination of knowing and not knowing. Connected to this are anxiety, grief, guilt, and shame that people experience about the dangers of the climate emergency, such as worry about losing the very foundation of life; the loss of our identity and sense of self; an over-dependence on authorities and politicians to solve the problem; and the lack in faith in current leadership. Apocalyptic thinking leads people to feel paralyzed, and compassion fatigue can lead to indifference. As such, Norwegian psychologist Per Espen Stoknes identifies five barriers that inhibit climate communication: • •

Distance—where stories remain remote for the majority of us Doom—which can be addressed by loss, cost, and sacrifice and avoiding the topic

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• •

•

Dissonance—where style of living, including for instance flying and driving, conflicts with environmental demands, consequently the message backfires Denial—when we negate, ignore, or otherwise avoid acknowledging the unsettling facts about climate change. We therefore find refuge from fear and guilt iDentity—where we filter news through our professional and cultural identity (cited in Brereton, 2018, p. 77)

In working with students, it’s important to gage their response to ecomedia and to develop strategies for them to pay attention to their emotional and affective reactions. This list is a good start for measuring attitudes.

Conclusion: Remote Sensing Recognizing that traditional media efforts to provoke and change perception about climate issues and ecology may not be effective enough, a new strategy is emerging to connect our senses to the predicament. For example, there is an effort to link with audiences the phenomena of life changing awe that astronauts experience when seeing Earth from space. Coined as the overview effect by Frank White (2014), the short documentary, Overview (Planetary Collective, 20131), introduces the concept to a wider audience. Experiences like the overview effect, though limited to those who actually travel to space, are considered vital to engaging people in experiencing an emotional and profound connection with Earth. The effect is so sublime that scientists are currently experimenting with ways to achieve it with virtual reality (VR) headsets and floatation tanks (Sample, 2019). These simulations are part of a wider effort by artists and scientists to break the logjam of climate inaction by creating visceral, emotive experiences that connect data with experiential activities. In one example, The Climate Music Project, artists compose music to accompany projections of climate data, satellite imagery, and other visualizations in order to stimulate emotional connections in audiences with Earth changes and to invoke a visceral response (Sheikh, 2019). Another example, Bella Gaia (Beautiful Earth), is a performance conducted in planetariums that combines a world music–inspired soundtrack with projected graphics, animations, and video. A hybrid of art and science, experiencing the emotional, nonlinear performance, demonstrates an emerging form of ecomedia in which remote-sensing ecomedia are used to transform audiences to experience Earth as an organic, living organism. By using ecomedia to communicate about the environment and creating an immersive environment, Bella Gaia is part of an emerging trend of ecomedia pedagogy that expands people’s consciousness about the state and value of our living planet (López, 2020).

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Prompts Ecocultural prompts for probing the ecomedia object: • • • • • • • • • • •

• • •

How is it coded to belong to a particular ecomediasystem? How do codes and conventions shape/afford what can or cannot be said? What genre conventions or intertextual qualities does it have? Does it connect with other texts? How does it express values/eco-ethics/justice; anthropocentric versus ecocentric environmental ideology; binaries like Nature/nature, human/animal? Does it promote consumerism? How? What kinds of language frames/discourses does it use? Does it promote or limit eco-citizenship? How is the environment represented or absent? Does the narrative address eco-justice? What kind of agency does the more-than-human-world have? Does it express cultural difference or promote intercultural communication? Is it coded with any particular cultural references that have to be known or understood for it to make sense? How are power relations (if any) conveyed? How does it connect or disconnect us from the world? Are there neocolonial discourses that reproduce Orientalism or denigrate BIPOC?

Note 1. https://vimeo.com/planetarycollective/overview

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Emmerich, R. (2004). The Day After Tomorrow [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Emmerich, R. (2009). 2012 [Film]. Columbia Pictures. Estok, S. C. (2017). Virtually there: “Aesthetic pleasure of the first order,” ecomedia, activist engagement. ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 24(1), 4–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/isle/isw087 Fincher, D. (1999). Fight Club [Film]. 20th Century Fox. Forns-Broggi, R. (2013). Ecocinema and the “Good Life” in Latin America. In P. Kääpä & T. Gustafsson (Eds.), Transnational ecocinema: Film culture in an era of ecological transformation (pp. 85–100). Intellect. Fothergill, A. (2006). Planet Earth [Television series]. BBC One. Garrard, G. (2009). Ecocriticism: The ability to investigate cultural artifacts from an ecological perspective. In A. Stibbe (Ed.), The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world (pp. 220). Green Books. Garrard, G. (2016). Ecocriticism. In J. Adamson, W. A. Gleason, & D. N. Pellow (Eds.), Keywords for environmental studies (pp. 61–64). NYU Press. Gerbner, G. (1998). Introduction: Why the cultural environment movement? Gazette: International Journal for Communication Studies, 60(2), 133. Gerbner, G., & Gross, L. (1976). Living with television: The violence profile. Journal of Communication, 26(2). Good, J. E. (2016). Creating iPhone dreams: Annihilating e-waste nightmares. Canadian Journal of Communication, 41(4). https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2016v41n4a3058 Guattari, F. (2008). Three ecologies. Continuum. Hageman, A. (2013). Ecocinema and ideology: Do ecocritics dream of a clockwork green? In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 87–106). Routledge. Hayward, S. (2020). Film ecology. Routledge. Heise, U. K. (2006). The Hitchhiker’s guide to ecocriticism. PMLA, 121(2), 503–516. JSTOR. Heise, U. K. (2008). Sense of place and sense of planet: The environmental imagination of the global. Oxford University Press. Ingold, T. (2011). The perception of the environment. Routledge. Ingram, D. (2013). The aesthetics and ethics of eco-film criticism. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 43–62). Routledge. Jacquet, L. (2005). March of the Penguins [Film]. Buena Vista International France. Joon-ho, B. (2017). Okja [Film]. Netflix. Kääpä, P. (2013). Transnational approaches to ecocinema: Charting an expansive field. In P. Kääpä & T. Gustafsson (Eds.), Transnational ecocinema: Film culture in an era of ecological transformation (pp. 21–44). Intellect. Ladino, J. (2013). Working with animals: Regarding companion six species in documentary film. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 129–148). Routledge. López, A. (2020). Bella Gaia and the pedagogical power of the overview effect: I­ nterview with Kenji Williams. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/­wordpress/ content/bella-gaia-and-the-pedagogical-power-of-the-overview-effect-an-interviewwith-kenji-williams_2020_04/ MacDonald, S. (2013). The ecocinema experience. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 17–42). Routledge. Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2012). Greening the media. Oxford University Press.

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Mirzoeff, N. (2016). How to see the world: An introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies, and more. Basic Books. Molloy, C. (2013). Nature writes the screenplays: Commercial eight wildlife films and ecological entertainment. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 169–188). Routledge. Murray, R. L., & Heumann, J. K. (2009). Ecology and popular film: Cinema on the edge. State University of New York Press. Murray, R. L.,  & Heumann, J. K. (2011). That’s all folks? Ecocritical readings of American animated features. University of Nebraska Press. Nixon, R. (2011). Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Harvard University Press. Parham, J. (2016). Green media and popular culture: An introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. Rust, S., & Monani, S. (2013). Introduction: Cuts to dissolves—Defining and situating ecocinema studies. In S. Rust, S. Monani,  & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 1–13). Routledge. Sample, I. (2019, December 26). Scientists attempt to recreate “Overview effect” from Earth. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/science/2019/dec/26/scientists-attempt-torecreate-overview-effect-from-earth Sheikh, K. (2019, November 9). This is what climate change sounds like. The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2019/11/09/science/climate-change-music-sound.html Sherman, E. (2020, April 27). Why does ‘yellow filter’ keep popping up in American movies? Matador Network. https://matadornetwork.com/read/yellow-filter-american-movies/ Stanton, A. (2003). Finding Dory [Film]. Buena Vista Pictures. Vaughan, H. (2016). 500,000 kilowatts of stardust: An ecomaterialist reframing of Singin’ in the rain. In J. Walker & N. Starosielski (Eds.), Sustainable media: Critical approaches to media and environment (pp. 23–37). Routledge. Vivanco, L. (2013). Penguins are good to think with: Wildlife films, five the imaginary shaping of nature, and environmental politics. In S. Rust, S. Monani,  & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 109–128). Routledge. White, F. (2014). The overview effect: Space exploration and human evolution (3rd ed.). American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. Williams, R. (2016). The country and the city. Vintage. Willoquet-Maricondi, P. (2010a). Introduction: From literary to cinematic ecocriticism. In P. Willoquet-Maricondi (Ed.), Framing the world: Explorations in ecocriticism and film (pp. 1–22). University of Virginia Press. Willoquet-Maricondi, P. (2010b). Shifting paradigms: From environmentalist films to ecocinema. In P. Willoquet-Maricondi (Ed.), Framing the world: Explorations in ecocriticism and film (pp. 62–80). University of Virginia Press.

PART III

Ecomedia Literacy

9 ECOMEDIA PEDAGOGY

A dearth of environmental approaches in media education is partially a response to current educational conditions in which teachers are discouraged to engage in “controversial” politics and are increasingly required to fit their curriculum into mainstream education standards (such as emphasizing STEM over humanities and the arts). Budget cuts and lack of professional development are other external stresses that constrain the adaption of new or emerging approaches. Moreover, the demand for media literacy ebbs and flows within policy debates about media panics (fake news, video game violence, pornography, cyberbullying, etc.) and tends to be promoted by bodies associated with regulating media industries rather than being integrated into education policy (Buckingham, 2019). And as Kellner and Share (2019, p. 1) assert, “intense pressure for change comes more often from technology and the economy and less frequently from education reform.” Industry pressure means educators are pushed to conform to neoliberal logics. Going beyond STEM, “If [students] are going to become active and powerful users of technology, they need more than technical skills: they need social, political, economic and cultural understanding” (Buckingham, 2019, p. 110). This is because, “without an equal commitment to comprehensive civics education— an examination of subjects that touch on the relationships between people, government, the economy, and media—all the technical know-how in the world will be for naught” (Wise, 2020, para. 6). The concern is that “we could end up with incredibly bright and technically proficient people who lack all capacity for democratic citizenship” (para. 7). In other words, we want to avoid the scenario in which education is reduced to training planetary vandals (Orr, 1994). An alternative to STEM is MESH education, which stands

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for Media Literacy, Ethics, Sociology, and History. According to Wise (2020, para. 9), We lack the media literacy to filter out the propaganda peddled by the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who do their bidding. We lack the ethical grounding to weigh our long-term obligations to future generations against the short-term costs of transitioning to renewable energy and rethinking c­ urrent patterns of consumption and production. We lack the sociological imagination needed to analyze the power dynamics that make polluting industries so powerful, and the historical memory that might allow us to learn from past struggles against corporate irresponsibility as we fight for a healthier future. Ecomedia literacy is very much in alignment with the spirit of MESH. This means we need to move beyond instrumentalist approaches to media literacy. So far, throughout this book I have drawn attention to the kinds of issues the ecomedia literacy framework raises (what to teach about), but now we pivot to addressing in more detail how to do it: pedagogy. As mentioned in the discussion of eco-ethics and climate emergency, teaching ecomedia demands a level of action and participation that goes beyond instrumental media education practices (“drilling and skilling”; “package, chunk, sequence”), which seeks to make technology and the economic system more effective and efficient. Echoing the concerns of many technology critics in the media ecology tradition (Mumford and Elull, in particular), Lance Strate (2019) reflects, “efficiency is not a human purpose, it is simply the technological imperative.” There is a tendency that education “reforms” as recommended by neoliberal think tanks are skill-oriented without taking into consideration larger political concerns. In this context, justifications for media literacy to mitigate media problems, like fake news or cyberbullying, position media as causes of social and political conditions, rather than as symptoms of deeper rooted, structural predicaments. Invariably, this raises a contentious discussion that has dominated media literacy debates for the past 40 years: How do you balance empowered learning and critical thinking without promoting some kind of political agenda that simply demands students conform to a set of predefined views? It goes without saying that ecomedia literacy pedagogy cannot be dogmatic or authoritarian. In the past I referred to the media literacy movement as an information ecology (López, 2014), which by definition is “a system of people, practices, values, and technologies in a particular local environment” (Nardi & O’Day, 2000, p. 49). I argue that media literacy practitioners belong to a virtual community that is dispersed across continents. In the parlance of ecomedia literacy, it’s a kind of ecomedia hyperobject. As such, it’s important to situate media literacy as inhabiting broader ecomediasystems that encompass the economic system, education policy, tech companies and their technologies, and, of course, ecomedia. While my previous book, Greening Media Education, offers a more detailed discussion

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of media literacy debates, what follows here is an effort to update the discussion about good practice and pedagogy in the context of ecomedia literacy and the planetary ecological emergency.

Media Literacy’s Ecomediasystem Media literacy has emerged as a catch-all to describe specific techniques for accessing, evaluating, and communicating media (whatever form that takes, be it video, blogs, animation, video games, journalism, etc.). Whereas media literacy education refers to the actual practice of teaching media literacy, media education is how media literacy fits into broader, holistic education policy (Buckingham, 2019, p. 39). Those immersed in education in the United States know that up and down the curriculum, from preschool to university, media are rarely taught as a distinct discipline or literacy skill. The United Kingdom, Canada, and many EU countries fare better with state-mandated media literacy units. Internationally, media and information literacy (MIL) is being promoted through the efforts of UNESCO, NGOs, activists, and universities, and educators in various countries are working to integrate media education into broader policy and practice. Through the work of professional media literacy organizations like the National Association of Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) in the United States, there is an effort to align mainstream education policy (like the Common Core State Standards Initiative) with media literacy skills, and there are many teachers and programs that actively promote media literacy in both formal and informal settings (especially in the English Language Arts). (Full disclosure: I’m a long-standing member of NAMLE and I have presented at its conferences numerous times.) In the 20-plus years that I have worked as a media educator, I have witnessed major tension between advocates of media arts education and media literacy, which informs the discussion surrounding ecomedia literacy. Some of these conflicts can be attributed to cultural and professional differences between media artists, educators, and activists. My research shows that media literacy practitioners tend to factionalize and perceive their work as belonging to particular “territories,” which often creates real and perceived boundaries of acceptable practice (López, 2014). Broadly speaking, I found that there is a clear difference in approach between what I identify as “center” and “periphery” media literacy education organizations and practitioners. The center (“educationalist”) represents approaches and methods working within mainstream education, and the periphery (“interventionist”) relates to those practices taking place in informal environments, such as afterschool programs, social centers, or nonprofit media centers. While educationists focus on harmonizing media literacy education with government policy and official education standards (i.e., Common Core State Standards Initiative), interventionists are often marginalized, either because they are activists, or because they work in the media arts.

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This dichotomy needs to be problematized and reconsidered, in particular because overall changes in education reflect a bigger push toward STEM. This means that as media literacy educators are pulled more into the center, there is a danger that media arts and activist work (often the realm of environmentalist engagement) is increasingly sidelined. Moreover, because political economy is a primary driver of unsustainable media, if we want meaningful change, media reform (how media is financed and regulated) needs to be in the mix. Quite often, in order to avoid being “political,” media reform is marginalized as “protectionist,” meaning that encouraging media reform and activism is considered overly dogmatic and disempowering (discussed in detail later). Unfortunately, as the periphery has largely been the realm of youth media programs and alternative media spaces, currently many activist and arts-based programs are being impacted by a decrease in funding for nonprofits, policy shifts, and changes in everyday ways that people use media technology. University programs are also being pushed in this direction by pursuing business programs and STEM, while cutting humanities and the arts. So, though teaching ecomedia demands collective action and political engagement in the form of eco-citizenship, trends in education and media literacy are moving in the opposite direction.

Content, Grammar, and Environments Media education practices are traditionally grounded in media and film studies, a legacy that carries over until today. Prior to the emergence of the social web, Meyrowitz (1980, 1998) observed that media studies scholars focused on three primary areas of inquiry—content, grammar, and medium—which are ­identifiable in media literacy practices. Content is associated with ­deconstructing representations in media, which is the most common media literacy method that promotes textual analysis. Grammar relates to media language and tends to be taught in film studies and video production (which focuses on camera angles, editing, and aesthetic choices). Grammar also refers to the aesthetic and technical construction of media texts and how media languages are used, something closely related to visual literacy. While media literacy educators often focus on persuasion and rhetorical techniques, less attention is given to the more aesthetic aspects of media language, and even less to avant-garde experimental media forms, which you would find in media arts education. The study of medium properties has largely been taken up by so-called media ecologists, who focus on media environments and how media technologies shape and change culture. This is probably the least explored area of media literacy education. These three spheres of inquiry are increasingly supplemented by current trends toward information and digital literacy, which are often oriented toward practical and tool-based methods for the information economy and so-called knowledge work. Overall, media literacy tends to be divided between methods that are either “with” or “about” media. As discussed in the Introduction, what they mostly have in common, however, is an ambiguous concept of media. The vagueness of

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how media is conceptualized leads educators to default to legacy media studies approaches that accentuate the mass media model by stressing the role of institutions and audiences. They also tend to overemphasize the latest media technology. The result is a slightly schizophrenic approach that valorizes legacy mass media products and celebrates disruptive digital media tools. Most importantly, media are never conceived of as something embedded in the environment. Ecomedia literacy aims to be inclusive of the three realms described by Meyrowitz. The mediasphere calls for a holistic method of analysis that explores content, media language, and medium properties equally.

Making and Connecting as Eco-Citizenship In recent years, there has been a rise in interest in a new kind of literacy based on participation and collaboration, what Rheingold (2012) calls “networked social learning.” Research by Carlos Scolari (2018), who is interested in transmedia literacy, shows that young people in Europe use YouTube as their primary search tool (as opposed to Google). Like the learning networks proposed by Ivan Illich (1971) where practitioners can mentor and teach practical skills like cooking or playing a musical instrument, YouTube (and Twitch for video game play) has become a central place for people to share skills and tips, from video game cheats, to crafting, to philosophy, to trans identity. The downside is that YouTube is also a place of radicalization, especially for far-right ideologies (Ribeiro et al., 2020). Gauntlett (2011) links the do-it-yourself crafts movement with social media activities to argue that craft, creativity, and community are outcomes of a ­“making-and-doing culture.” Inspired by the “maker” movement, which ­combines hands-on hacking with creating and building stuff, Gauntlett (2015) urges a maker intervention into media studies that can also be applied to media education. Arguing against the view that media are simply a form of transmission received by passive audiences, he defines media as a trigger for doing something and sparking conversation. Gauntlett asks us to think of media as platforms (like apps) where we see ourselves as participants as opposed to just consumers. He cites examples like YouTubers, Minecraft modding, crowdfunding, and the “long tail” as positive, empowered examples that allow for more participation. The making approach, he asserts, fosters creativity, conversation, and critical inquiry. This model of media literacy means that students need to know how things work (technical and economic knowledge), how things feel and fit ­(emotional and embodied knowledge), and how to make a difference (creative and political knowledge). Gauntlett downplays content analysis and deconstruction as old school and passive activities; however, if we conceptualize a media text as an ecomedia object (in the same way he conceives of Legos as creative tools to think with), then media analysis can indeed be highly active and creative. Something I assign regularly to my students is the creation of video essays, which is increasingly popular in film studies. A video essay is a short video that illustrates a topic, expresses an

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opinion, and develops a thesis statement based on research through editing video, sound, and image. Video essay production is a valid academic activity that affords multimodal assessment of research, critical thinking, and digital media skills. Students with little or no background in media-making can make them. They offer the chance to critically engage media texts, but also to tell stories, utilize media language, and learn technical skills. As someone that teaches both media production and analysis, I find it hard to separate the two: Making and analyzing media can and should be an iterative process. Learning insights into rhetoric and visual language also empowers students to become more effective communicators. While Gauntlett sees film and TV viewing as passive activities, he doesn’t consider how fan culture, remixing, memes, and other engaged practices are actually highly creative responses to media. Media producers, actors, and writers are also actively engaging audiences with online forums, podcasts, and social media, demonstrating how there is iterative feedback in which fans directly and indirectly coproduce media. When guided by ecomedia literacy, these kinds of activities can serve as forms of eco-citizenship. Kellner and Share (2019, p.  98) note that research “suggests that skills students are learning by using social media in their participatory culture are potential resources and strategies for their participation in political actions and collective activism.” Using the tools of ecocriticism students can analyze ecomedia topics to educate the public about particular issues or problems and then distribute content to online platforms and film festivals. Some examples of ecomedia video essays made by my students that act as a kind of eco-citizenship include ecological themes in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, coverage in the New York Times of the Amazon forest fires of 2019, the use of music in industrial slaughterhouse industry videos, principles for visual climate change communication, Vegan Instagram influencers, and an analysis of iPhone marketing. All of them had the intent of educating the public by using empirical research and media production skills. It’s important to recognize that students get pleasure from doing creative projects and consuming media. Media education should be a dialectical process between enjoyment and critical engagement, the same way that learning to play an instrument or musical theory allows us to deepen our appreciation of music while also critically interpreting music industries, formulas, deficient musicianship, or weak artistic vision. Such would be the case with any students of fine arts or filmmaking.

Critical Concepts and Ecomedia Literacy Moving beyond Meyrowitz and Gauntlett, Buckingham (2019, p. 64) asserts that useful, coherent critical principles should be applicable to any media at from any time period: The aim is not to command students’ assent to a particular predefined position, but to enable them to ask their own questions, and to reflect

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on their own interpretations and experiences of media in a systematic and rigorous way. They are critical tools, not articles of faith. Subsequently, Buckingham advocates four critical principles that can be applicable to any media, regardless of the era it is being made, consumed, or produced. This framework of conceptual understandings includes media language, representation, production, and audience. Regardless of media format, what matters is that critical thinking, social, and ethical skills are incorporated into the process. Here I combine his summaries with my own assessment for how to apply them to ecomedia literacy. Media language deals with how media use different forms of language to convey ideas or meanings; how these uses of language become familiar and generally accepted; how the “rules” are established, and what happens when they are broken; how meaning is conveyed through the combination or sequencing of images, sounds or words; and how these conventions and codes operate in different types or genres of media. (pp. 59–60) Media languages afford or constrain ecological ways of knowing through aesthetics and various communication modes. In what ways are media languages productive or destructive forms of eco-citizenship? This is primarily the domain of the lifeworld and ecomateriality zones of the ecomediasphere. Representation concerns how media claim to tell the truth; or authenticate; what, or who, they choose to include and exclude; how they represent particular social groups or events, or other aspects of the world, and how accurate these representations are; and the potential consequences of this for our audiences’ attitudes, values and beliefs. (pp. 60–61) The study of representation can be applied to the many ways claims-makers vie in the public sphere to define and elevate environmental issues. Environmental issues are conveyed by claims-makers using rhetorical frames. In particular, which environmental discourses and frames are used? How are discursive and/or visual metaphors deployed to convey environmental ideologies? This is the domain of the ecoculture zone of the ecomediasphere. Production regards the technologies involved in production and distribution; the different roles and types of work that are involved; the companies that buy and sell media, and how they make a profit; how the production and distribution of media

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are regulated; and how media reach audiences, and the amount of choice and control audiences have. (pp. 61–62) This primarily concerns the political economy of media organizations (this includes content producers, technology manufacturers, platforms, and other forms of distribution—the lines are increasingly blurred), but always with their environmental impacts as part of the analysis. Using an ecocritical lens, ecomedia literacy explores how and why organizations produce content (entertainment, art, activism, news, etc.), the economic imperatives of media organizations, and the ecomaterial impacts of media production. This is the domain of the political ecology zone of the ecomediasphere. Audience examines how media target and address particular audiences, and the assumptions media producers make about them; how media reach audiences through different technologies and channels; how people use media in their daily lives, how they interpret them, and what pleasures they gain from them; and how these processes vary according to social factors such as gender, social class, age and ethnicity. (pp. 62–63) Ecomedia literacy is concerned with the affective sensory and emotional experience of media and how audiences respond to ecomedia. This area is vastly underdeveloped in media literacy but is a core area of ecomedia studies. This is the domain of the ecoculture and lifeworld zones of the ecomediasphere. Applying these four principles to the problem of fake climate news discussed in Chapter 7, we could use the critical concepts in the following ways: •

•

•

•

Media language: Select a group of texts (articles, memes, social media posts) and evaluate how visual languages are used. Pay attention to fonts, colors, shapes, images, and design layout. What techniques are used to make them sharable? Representation: How are climate issues represented in ways that are different or similar to “real” news? Who and what is being represented? How is it presented as “truthful” or credible? What environmental discourse and frames are used? How are visual metaphors deployed? Production: Explore how clickbait is afforded by the economic model of social media platforms. Without gatekeepers and with little to no regulation, how does this impact the spread of climate disinformation, misinformation, and propaganda? Who organizes and finances these campaigns and how are they linked to other networks, such as the far-right ecomediasystem? Audiences: Who is consuming, sharing, and using fake climate news? How and why do people trust or share fake climate news?

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Importantly, Buckingham (2019) asserts that best practice means: (1) Start with what students already know (existing knowledge and direct experience) by surveying and documenting their own media usage; and (2) combine theory and practice. Media analysis should be an open process that allows for the development of different interpretations. In the case of ecomedia literacy, based on my personal experience, there is a tendency that students associate certain terms as either good or bad (such as environment equals good) or that ecocentric also means anti-human. Encourage them to be more nuanced in their interpretations. Steve Prachette developed the “Curriculum Model to Underpin Education for Sustainability” (cited in Gabriel & Garrad, 2016, p. 123) that follows a simple schematic: Awareness (choose a text to view/read), analysis and evaluation (apply prompts and questions), and participation (do some sort of activity in response). In adapting this model to ecocriticism, Garrard and Gabriel cleverly combine literary texts with media and scientific reports to integrate narrative with science (such as pairing the films, An Inconvenient Truth, The Age of Stupid, and Day After Tomorrow, with the IPPC Assessment Report). Educators can find creative and interesting ways to compare different texts. Most of us teach within a bounded system, such as a university or K12 classroom. Others engage their methodology in different environments that will have their own constraints and parameters (i.e., outdoor classrooms or in after school programs or community centers). There is good research that demonstrates that media literacy is more effective when embedded into preexisting courses than as stand-alone modules (Fleming, 2010). Rather than being taught as an isolated skill, ecomedia literacy should be built into regular course material, which reinforces the important point that ecomedia is part of everyday life and cuts across the usual division of academic subjects. The second point follows from the first: Project-based learning is an effective way to learn ecomedia literacy. Applying it to practical problem-solving situations reinforces its value and relevance.

Critical Media Literacy (CML) and the Environment Critical media literacy emphasizes “analyzing media culture as products of social production and struggle, and teaching students to be critical of media representations and ideologies, while also stressing the importance of learning to use the media as modes of self-expression and social activism” (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 6). It is rooted in the more radical tradition of education, as advocated by John Dewey, Ivan Illich, Paolo Frieri and bell hooks, and grounds media in larger issues, such as multiculturalism and radical participatory democracy. It is critical in the sense that it seeks to understand claims being made about the world through dominant narratives (stories) and seeks to question our own perceptions and interpretations. Applying concepts of semiotics, feminism, multiculturalism, postmodernism, a dialectical understanding of political economy, textual analysis and audience

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theory, CML has evolved into a practice of analyzing media and popular culture as dynamic discourses that reproduce dominant ideologies as well as entertain, educate, and offer possibilities for counter-hegemonic alternatives. (p. 19) Building on Buckingham’s four critical principles, CML has a guiding framework based on six questions (see Table 9.1). As a form of transformational education, it is a critical pedagogy of solidarity in which empathy and compassion help students understand the ways people are interconnected through systems of dominance and subordination. Through combining media production with critical analysis, critical media literacy holds the potential to create liberatory pedagogy. (p. 11) TABLE 9.1  Critical Media Literacy Framework

Conceptual Understandings

Questions

1. Social constructivism All information is co-constructed by individuals and groups of people who make choices within social contexts. 2. Languages/semiotics Each medium has its own language with specific grammar and semantics. 3. Audience/positionality Individuals and groups understand media messages similarly and differently, depending on multiple contextual factors. 4. Politics of representation Media messages and the medium through which they travel always have a bias and support and challenge dominant hierarchies of power, privilege, and pleasure. 5. Production/institutions All media texts have a purpose (often commercial or governmental) that is shaped by the creators and systems within which they operate. 6. Social and environmental justice Media culture is a terrain of struggle that perpetuates or challenges positive and negative ideas about people, groups, and issues; it is never neutral.

WHO are all the possible people who made choices that helped create this text?

Source: From Kellner & Share, 2019.

HOW was this text constructed and delivered or accessed? HOW could this text be understood differently?

WHAT values, points of view, and ideologies are represented or missing from this text or are influenced by the medium?

WHY was this text created and shared?

WHOM does this text advantage and disadvantage?

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Dewey’s influence comes from his liberal reform agenda to create structured experiences for students to explore, experiment, and engage, emphasizing experiential, active learning and problem-solving, best summarized by the “learning by doing” approach. Students are more engaged when they make meaningful connections between what they are learning and their personal experience. As applied to arts education, Tishman (2017, p. 107) emphasizes that Dewey’s pedagogy aligns with the slow-looking approach (learning to examine art slowly and methodically) because, tautologically, “experiencing the impulse to look at something is a sign of interest; extending the impulse by taking the time to look closely is an act of purpose.” Dewey’s advocacy of purpose-driven activities aligns strongly with the ecomedia literacy goal of getting students to combine analysis and research with eco-citizenship. In the very least, an ecomedia literacy curriculum needs to be structured in such a way that sparks the curiosity of students to be engaged and interested in the particular relationship between media and ecology. As I recounted in Mediacology (López, 2008), anti-Luddite activist Jerry Mander told me he was against media literacy because it would make media interesting, but I want students to be highly interested and engaged in ecomedia. Freire’s (2000) approach to radical liberation from oppression entails a critique of the “banking” method of education (teachers depositing fragmented information as if depositing money into bank accounts), which correlates with the “knowledge deficit” and transmission idea of communication. Frieri calls for conscientização (critical consciousness or conscientization) through a problem-solving, dialogic approach grounded in praxis to put literacy into practice. “The concept of praxis is an important reason that critical media literacy teaches students how to create media and critically participate in media culture as well as analyze media messages” (Kellner & Share, 2019, p. 12). For Friere, praxis counters what he calls “antidialogical mythicizing,” the technique by which the dominant minority can oppress the majority through increased alienation and passivity that results from mainstream education: This is achieved through hegemonic myths that are taught in schools, repeated in the media, and naturalized through the dominant society’s worldview, such as the need to conform to authority to achieve success, or capitalist myths about the “free market” and competition as the best form of social organization to ensure prosperity for all. (p. 12) Like the goals of ecocriticism, CML deconstructs dominant myths and ideology, seeking to create a space of liberation, not social reproduction. In contrast to problem-solving, it is problem-posing. One thing to consider for ecomedia literacy, there is an emerging discussion that using the language of “problems” is preventing people from responding to the climate crisis. As explored in the iceberg model of systems thinking, fixing

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problems is dealing with them at the level of event because the aim is to return what is broken to its original condition. Predicaments, on the other hand, have no solution, but responses. If anything, the climate emergency is a “wicked problem” that is difficult or impossible to solve. I’ve seen how students develop feelings of despair and frustration when they realize there is practically no way to actually solve the climate problem or preserve the status quo under current conditions. However, when you ask them to develop a response, they feel less inhibited and come up with wonderful ideas. In terms of ecojustice, Kellner and Share (2019) tie CML to a number of topics, such as news reporting and the environment, fake news and climate change, media activism, visual imagery, and using digital media for civic participation, all of which have been covered throughout this book. They point out that the traditional model of scientific education, known as the “deficit model,” has failed to improve climate and environmental literacy. This is because it does not prepare people to interrogate messages, to question dominant ideologies that shape assumptions, to recognize the influence of the medium through which information passes, and to see through the myth of neutrality to identify the economic structures that support commercial media. (p. 82) Therefore, they posit that CML will have greater success in improving scientific knowledge and literacy about environmental problems. A CML activity to address this is applying the six questions to the climatedenying think tank Heartland Institute’s book, Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, which was sent out to 300,000 teachers in the United States (see Marshall, 2020). And then to compare it to The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change. I engage similar activities by comparing audiovisual media and industry websites, such as the one produced by the pro-fracking trade organization, America’s Natural Gas Alliance, with anti-fracking documentaries and public service announcements (PSAs). You can also do this with media produced by the coal industry and oil companies. In another activity, students compared advertising produced by ExxonMobile during the 2016 summer Olympics with a culture jamming parody project (see López & Share, 2020).

Slow Media and Slow Looking There is an assumption among environmentalists that speed and progress are tied to environmental destruction. Some neo-Luddite thinkers, like Gerry Mander (1991, 2002), believe technology and media have enabled globalization to outpace the regenerative abilities of ecosystems and strip humans of their capacity

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for a sense planet or the sacred. Many also worry about the impact of speed on perception and mindfulness and the possible physical and mental health risks attributed to too much screen use. Some ecocinema scholars argue for a type of eco-film that focuses and deepens perception; slow ecocinema seeks to recalibrate and slow down our attention (MacDonald, 2013). Slow news and journalism (Laufer, 2014) are about immersing oneself in a location and producing long written or multimedia essays (photography, video, and audio). Slow looking (Tishman, 2017) and slow media Rauch (2018) are counterpoints to the economy of attention, a way to democratize our labor of attention. For these reasons, introducing slow media to students is an important aspect of ecomedia literacy pedagogy. Responding to the perceived dangers of sped-up culture, in 1986, Carlo Petrini demonstrated against the opening of a fast-food McDonalds restaurant on the Spanish Steps in Rome, which marked the launch of the international slow food movement. Rauch (2018) summarizes the main tenets of slow food as good, clean, and fair: “Good” means fresh, flavorful, satisfying to the senses, and connected to local cultures; “clean” means environmentally sustainable, i.e., produced in ways that protect the environment, animal welfare, and human health; and “fair” means socially sustainable, i.e., workers, users, and the public are treated ethically. Likewise, these elements can be applied to slow media: Many people have begun to envision ways of creating and using media that are slower, fairer, more material, cleaner, greener, and more mindful. This includes ways of using media less. From a sustainability perspective, growth is not a criterion for progress and proliferation of digital media cannot be limitless. (p. 7, emphasis original) According to Rauch, slow media values have three Thoreauvian qualities: 1) one’s personal disposition, using words such as serene, moderate, attentive, focused, mindful, careful, self-reliant, disciplined, present, and discerning; 2) the media one uses, with words such as material, physical, beautiful, local, handmade, traditional, with character, timeless, long-lived, sensuous, tactile, heritage, heirloom, high-quality, eco-friendly, and fair-trade; and 3) the broader context of one’s life and interactions, praising the human, natural, simple, sustainable, and democratic. (p. 23, emphasis original) In practice, this means (1) increasing one’s consumption of print and analog forms; (2) increasing one’s production of print and analog forms; (3) using any form of media, whether fast or slow, in moderate ways; and (4) reducing one’s use of fast media, whether temporarily or permanently (pp. 23–4).

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According to Rauch, lessons from the slow food movement (humanism, localism, simplicity, self-reliance, and fairness) can be applied to how we use and make media. Producing zines, listening to vinyl records (slow listening), writing, drawing, making and reading comics (slow reading), and types of avant-garde ecocinema (slow cinema) can all be slow media. Slow media also involves activities like digital sabbaths, fasts, and detoxes. When it comes to visual culture, our gadgets don’t lend themselves to many pauses or nuanced looking. A shift over time demonstrates how much our attention has changed. If you look at European medieval artwork, it is dense, requiring a long time to look and see. Compare that to the quick flick of the finger swipe on Instagram where we quickly snack on images. Under such conditions, those who have mastered visual attention techniques have carefully calibrated images to stimulate and tantalize us so that we will notice. But this kind of constant distraction leads to inattention and can hinder the kind of ecological awareness that is called for to respond to the climate crisis. In ecomedia literacy, this means developing the practice of slow looking, which can cultivate greater awareness of the second ground (surfaces, materiality of media) discussed by Citton (2017), and improve mindfulness. As developed by Shari Tishman (2017), slow looking is a form of “prolonged observation” that involves all the senses. For example, we “look” at our gadgets with our hands and eyes. Like the imperative of visual literacy, “the more you look, the more you see; the more engaged you become” (p. 3). There are four slow-looking themes (pp. 28–47). First, seeing with fresh eyes. Slow looking begets the proverbial Zen “beginner’s mind,” achieving the primary goal of media literacy: To make the familiar strange. Second, exploring perspective by changing one’s point of view. This is readily achieved by using any visual media to interpret something (such as photography, video, or drawing). You search and find different angles and views to see something. Third, noticing detail by taking inventories, such as detailing everything about how a smartphone looks and feels. Fourth, philosophical well-being means that through slow looking, people appreciate what is important in life. Slow looking is visual inquiry-based learning—similar to problem-based, interest-driven learning, and student-centered learning. As a response to digital media’s many environmental dangers outlined throughout this book, slow media and slow looking are eco-ethical responses to the current system of production and consumption that is devastating the planet. By teaching slow media and slow looking to students, we can help them attune to how media and ICT impact the planetary commons, while simultaneously participating in a vibrant ecocultural commons that shapes how we defend it.

Media Literacy: Protectionism and the Precautionary Principle During a forum on ecomedia literacy I co-organized at a major media literacy conference, slow media scholar Jennifer Rauch (2018) was discussing media fasting

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as a technique to encourage reflection on media use and media addiction. During the Q and A, an attendee asked if media fasting wasn’t any different than protectionism. In media literacy circles, protectionism is a disposition that sees media as dangerous, and therefore demands some kind of approach to reduce harm. The term has taken on a negative, pejorative connotation equated with bad pedagogy. Moral panics about media as the cause of violence, bullying, etc. are attributed to the protectionist stance. It has been criticized for disempowering students from making their own choices and decisions about media. There is also a version of protectionism that comes from some environmentalists that share a neo-Luddite view that technology is inherently damaging and should be eschewed entirely. Thus, we found it troubling that ecomedia literacy was construed as something that we don’t promote or believe in. But because protectionism is often levied as an epithet against those who take a more radical or reformist approach to media education, it is necessary to address the debate, because ecomedia literacy should not be dismissed as protectionist. Buckingham (2019) observes that protectionism is when media literacy becomes a substitute for media regulation: It’s defensive in nature. It should not serve as “counter-propaganda.” Hobbs (2013) used the “big tent” metaphor to divide media literacy into two camps—empowerment and protectionism. In this discursive framing, by grouping the reformist, ethical, and critical methods as protectionist, by default it implies they are not empowering. This approach echoes concerns (and perhaps misperception) that critical media literacy sees media users as “dupes” and victims of false consciousness (an allusion to neo-Marxist terminology). Indeed, we should guard against the conservative stance (from both Left and Right perspectives) that media pleasure is delusional, self-deceptive, or false consciousness. The concern that teaching about the ecological crisis doesn’t pass the media literacy “smell test” is the worry that educators engaged in environmental issues are teaching persuasion rather than inquiry-based approaches. But given that ecomedia literacy’s starting point entails critiquing the status quo, would this also mean that feminist, queer, or race discussions that critique power relations are considered protectionist? As practitioners of critical media literacy (CML) assert, the myth of educator neutrality is actually pernicious: “Challenging the ideological constructions of normality, neutrality, and the myth of objectivity, are among the key goals of CML which are often excluded or overlooked in much traditional education” (Kellner and Share, p. 100). Critical engagement of power structures and empowerment through inquiry should not be seen as opposed to each other. As media scholars, we know inherently that media and technology are never neutral. So, why should we assume that education can be any different? After all, education is a form of media. It’s worth noting that technology companies have adapted their own kind protectionist tactics in response to social concerns about their power. Rather than take responsibility for their business model or the content on their platforms,

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they pass on the responsibility to the individual and call for a kind of media literacy that is reduced to a form of “internet safety.” This strategy is meant to delay government regulation or challenges to their business models, a form of “responsibilization” urged by neoliberalism that argues the freeing the marketplace is the best way to make social policy (see Buckingham, 2019). Advocating for individual responsibility has its benefits, but not when it disregards the social good or ecomedia commons. The flipside of media panics is the utopian view that media technology is inherently positive, automatically leading to increased connectivity, collaboration, participation, and democracy. The irony of utopian technologists is that they are actually dystopian, because “they represent pretensions to mastery and forms of dogmatism incompatible with the ongoing and adaptive nature of evolution” (Parham, 2016, p. 138). In other words, they believe they can control nature with technology. The most extreme contemporary manifestation of this hubris is the cognitive dissonance of those who want to colonize Mars and to explore space because we are trashing the planet Earth. Viewing media as either inherently harmful or empowering are both forms of technological determinism and ignore the body of evidence on media effects, which shows that media users negotiate their understanding of media and are capable of making critical choices. The ecomedia literacy intervention is intended to increase the likelihood of a critical response, but it’s not guaranteed. Either position (dystopian or utopian) tends to say more about social anxieties and fears about change than media itself. In summarizing media literacy research, Buckingham (2019) observes that risks and benefits are not evenly distributed: Those that use media the most enjoy more benefits but experience more risks. So, any effort to minimize risk also minimizes benefit. Rather than be a tool to manage the risks and benefits of media technology, Buckingham argues that a healthy democracy “requires well-informed, discriminating media users: it needs active citizens, who will participate in civil society; and needs skilled, creative workers. In this context, media literacy is a fundamental life skill: we cannot function without it” (Buckingham, 2019, p. 30). In Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference (Beach et  al., 2017), the authors propose a critical inquiry method that correlates with the goals of ecomedia literacy: Instead of telling students what climate change means or what to do about it, we want to empower them to investigate, collaborate, develop their own conclusions, and devise ways to make a difference, drawing on their knowledge, their concerns and their emerging literacies. (p. 131) Practicing this means foregrounding climate change as the “most important issue facing life on Earth”; gaining an understanding of “the causes and effects of

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climate change locally and globally, as well as the efforts to deny them”; adopting systems-based, global perspectives to transition from individualism and nationalism; advocating for ecojustice through solidarity with those disproportionately affected by climate change; and “envisioning and enacting transformational change through individual and collective action, in which everyone is accountable for their actions and inactions” (pp. 7–8). Ecomedia literacy reframes media as ecomedia and introduces new information; one cannot properly study or analyze something if they don’t have baseline definitions or basic scientific knowledge. Such is the case with teaching about the commons: How can students make a case for something if they don’t even know it exists? Framing media literacy from an ecocritical perspective necessitates inquiry-based learning. This means engaging an iterative process that starts with asking questions, investigating solutions, creating knowledge, and reflecting on results (and then starting over again). By bridging environmental literacy with media literacy, the aim is to entice productive methods of eco-citizenship. One other note regarding protectionism. While the term has become an epithet, let us defamiliarize ourselves for a moment its current usage and revisit the precautionary principle discussed in Chapter  2. Recall that the precautionary principle asserts that if the outcome of something in unknowable— such as the release of certain toxins into the environment—the burden of risk should not be on those most likely to be harmed. As discussed in M ­ ediacology (López, 2008), many Native Americans communities have had to use a form of ­ precautionary principle when dealing with education from the white world—19th-century education policy toward Native Americans was based on the idea, “Kill the Indian but save the man.” Whereas literacy and Enlightenment principles might seem innocuous to those in power and for those who benefit the most from that power structure, the introduction of technologies and educational principles have historically been tools of colonization and quite harmful to traditional forms of knowledge. The desire by some communities to be conservative (as in the sense of conservation) is a way of protecting their traditions and language. So, in this sense, some ecomedia literacy approaches can be seen as protectionist. When germane, we should not assume that certain educational philosophies (such as constructivism) at the heart of most media literacy approaches are universal or appropriate for all cultural contexts. For example, there is a critique of constructivism that it’s overly individualistic (in that it focuses on individuals constructing their own meaning) and is ethnocentric in that it promotes Western values regarding individual autonomy. Moreover, C.A. Bowers and ApffelMarglin (2005) oppose both Dewey and Frieri because their progressive approaches are seen as damaging to intergenerational knowledge and tradition, something integral to ecological identity. Likewise, from an eco-ethical stance, if it’s true that media technologies are toxic and dangerous to the environment, would it ultimately be wrong to oppose their spread and critique their dangers? In this

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context, proposing a method that encourages slowing down or being mindful could be protective, but not in the pejorative sense.

Environmental Literacy and Systems Literacy An important obstacle for media educators incorporating environmental issues into their curriculum is a lack of knowledge and background in environmental studies, which can be loosely defined as the interdisciplinary study of human interaction with ecosystems from multiple perspectives to solve complex problems. This is not to be confused with environmental science. The space of this book doesn’t allow for a full briefing on environmental literacy, nor should it be a substitute for professional development in the area of environmental science and climate literacy. However, though basic literacy in environmental science is helpful and recommended, this should not be a barrier to teaching ecomedia. Unfortunately, it likely that neoliberal educational “reforms” and overwork will prevent media educators from the professional development necessary to increase literacy in an area outside their traditional discipline. Indeed, it would be unrealistic to demand a media teacher to take on the breadth and depth of environmental studies in a single media course or assignment. Media teachers rightfully run the risk of not being fully informed or properly trained, or even feeling unqualified or too inexperienced to do it without professional training or a stand-alone course on the subject. Yet media studies is already very broad, and media teachers are accustomed to assuming a degree of knowledge in many areas without specialization, such as the history of technology or political economy. Even though media teachers require basic knowledge of political economy, we don’t need to be economists to teach it. Lack of specialization doesn’t prevent us from incorporating diverse themes and concepts from various fields into our work. Likewise, this should not be the case with environmental issues. What do students need to know about the environment, and how much of this is the responsibility of media educators? It is true that gaining basic environmental literacy does take time and training, but as I have tried to do throughout this book, by making minor interventions, one can incorporate an environmental dimension into how they teach media (such as the ecomedia footprint and mindprint discussed in Section II). One can easily learn foundational concepts without a degree in environmental studies, such as ecological boundaries, extinction and its causes, carrying capacity (ecological footprint), and basic climate science. Though I don’t want to encourage educational malpractice, it is still possible to grasp an overview of some basic concepts grounded in environmental studies and education in order to begin transitioning toward an ecomedia curriculum. (Greening Media Education [López, 2014, pp.  133–144] has a much longer discussion about different approaches in ecoliteracy and environmental education). What follows, then, is not what to think, but what to think about in terms of

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important knowledge and dispositions to develop. Again, ecomedia literacy is not just about ecological knowledge, but more about developing a disposition and understanding for how systems work (such as political ecology) and eco-ethics. For example, the temperament of teaching ecojustice is less about content and more about responsibility: we suggest that the approach to teaching best suited to EcoJustice is a “pedagogy of responsibility” which first asks the question, “What are my just and ethical obligations to my communities?” This formulation asks teachers to focus on the obligations, practices, and wisdom—many of which already exist in both Indigenous cultures and present communities in industrial societies—that are necessary for a just and ecologically sustainable society (Edmundson  & Martusewicz, 2013). Thus, a pedagogy of responsibility exists in the tension between two necessary ethical questions: What do we need to conserve, and what needs to be transformed? (Martusewicz et al., 2015, p. 22) Capra’s definition of ecoliteracy is “to understand the principles of organization, common to all living systems, that ecosystems have evolved to sustain the web of life” (2004, p. 230). The Center of Ecoliteracy1 that he cofounded with Peter Buckley and Zenobia Barlow is based on four principles: (1) Nature is our teacher; (2) sustainability is a community practice; (3) the real world is the optimal learning environment; and (4) sustainable living is rooted in a deep knowledge of place. Mary Catherine Bateson (2007, p. 282) suggests that the ecological crisis calls for new education methods that enable us to enter into alternative conceptualizations of the world. Such techniques, she argues, entail incorporating the following approaches: (1) Working with environmental metaphors and systems analogies; (2) using narrative; (3) making connections across contexts; and (4) participant observation. All of these principles and approaches can easily be woven into the media classroom. Frank G. Golley’s (1998) short, accessible book, A Primer for Environmental Literacy, offers a solid foundation for key areas of scientific environmental knowledge. Golley focuses on conceptual understandings, many of which I have incorporated in my discussion of ecomedia footprint and ecomediasystems, but are outlined as follows: 1. Foundational concepts: The environment, the system, and hierarchical organizations. 2. Land and water systems: The ecososphere; energy dynamics; the composition of Earth; the biome; the landscape; the watershed; the ecotope; species diversity; primary production and decomposition; and ecological succession. 3. Population and the individual: The population as a demographic unit; life history adaptations; the individual organism; body size and climate space; and speciation and natural selection.

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4. Interactions between individuals and species: Interaction between individuals; mutualism; competition; predation; coevolution and niche; the biotic community; island biogeography; and human ecology. 5. Ecology, environment, and ethics. This knowledge should be coupled with cultivating dispositions that incorporate ecology into cultural practices and social structures. According to the Cloud Institute’s (2011) education for sustainability framework, the broad themes of integrative learning are as follows: Exploring cultural preservation and transformation; responsible green citizenship; the dynamics of systems and change; sustainable economics; healthy commons, natural laws and ecological principles; inventing and affecting the future; and fostering a sense of place and planet. As we saw from the discussion of ecomediasystems in Chapter 3, grasping the complexity of ecomedia starts with systems thinking. Sterling (2004, p. 11) asserts the environmental education is to foster whole systems thinking. As we learned, one of the leading pathfinders of systems dynamics is Donella Meadows. She coauthored The Limits of Growth (Meadows et al., 2004), which summarized research performed in 1972 by using computer models to simulate the consequence of interactions between the Earth and human systems. It calculated five variables— world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and  resources depletion. Forecasting future scenarios, it predicted three possible outcomes: Two that lead to “overshoot and collapse” of the global system by the mid to latter part of the 21st century and one that results in a “stabilized world.” The primary recommendation is that business as usual will lead to overshoot and collapse; therefore, we cannot overconsume finite resources. In an effort to work toward a more stabilized world, her lifetime vocation centered on developing a body of work to bring systems thinking to the mainstream. She also developed vast resources for educators to incorporate systems thinking through games and simulation, considered to be primary tools of systems pedagogy (Booth Sweeney & Meadows, 2010). To summarize, a systems thinker: • • • • • • • • • •

Sees the whole picture. Changes perspective to see new leverage points in complex systems. Look for interdependencies. Considers how mental models create our futures. Pays attention to and gives voice to the long-term. “Goes wild” (uses peripheral vision) to see complex cause and effect relationships. Finds where unanticipated consequences emerge. Focuses on structure, not blame. Holds the tension of paradox and controversy, without trying to resolve it quickly. Makes systems visible through casual maps and computer models.

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• • •

Seeks out stocks or accumulations and the time delays and inertia they create. Watches for “win/lose” mindsets, knowing they usually make matters worse in situations of high interdependence. Sees oneself as part of, not outside of, the system. (Booth Sweeney & Meadows, 2010, p. 2)

The proposal for the ecomediasphere heuristic in Part II is a tool for developing systems thinking. There is a danger that we view thinking tools as being enough to solve the ecological crisis. We have to remember that there has to be a psychological and emotional connection to ecology and the world (the living planet). An ethic of care is not something that can be imposed on someone. They need to experience it and feel it.

Conclusion It’s a fallacy to assume that so-called digital natives are automatically media literate. Various studies show that even though young people know how to navigate and use media tools, they lack critical awareness of the tools they use (Wineburg et  al., 2016). What media educators do is intervene to get students to move beyond vernacular uses of media to facilitate critical thinking and mindful engagement in order to empower them, both as makers and users of media. At its core, as opposed to functionalist competency models, ecomedia education should be grounded in eco-ethics and eco-citizenship. Herbert Zettl (2011, p. 1) proposes in the opening statement of his classic media production textbook, Sight, Sound, Motion, that creating media gives you the tools to clarify, intensify, and interpret events for television, computer, and film presentation. In effect, it teaches you how to apply major aesthetic elements to manipulate people’s perceptions. Because media consumers are largely unaware of the power of media aesthetics, they must and do trust your professional judgment and especially your good intentions. Irrespective of the scope of your communication—be it a brief news story, an advertisement, or a major dramatic production—your overriding aim should be to help people attain a higher degree of emotional literacy, the ability to see the world with heightened awareness and joy. All your aesthetic decisions must ultimately be made within an ethical context, a moral framework that holds supreme the dignity and well-being of humankind. Zettle’s plea for media students to engage ethics mirrors the underlying desire of many media literacy advocates to improve the human condition (as opposed to merely teaching technical skills). However, when it comes to incorporating an ecological perspective, media education has historically eschewed the

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environmental dimensions of media and ICTs. So now it’s time to move toward ecomedia literacy. Rather than just improving the human condition, we must uphold the supreme dignity of our living planet.

Note 1. www.ecoliteracy.org

References Bateson, M. C. (2007). Education for global responsibility. In S. C. Moser & L. Dilling (Eds.), Creating a climate for change: Communicating climate change and facilitating social change (pp. 281–291). Cambridge University Press. Beach, R., Share, J., & Webb, A. (2017). Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents. Routledge. Booth Sweeney, L., & Meadows, D. (2010). The systems thinking playbook: Exercises to stretch and build learning and systems thinking capabilities. Chelsea Green Publishing. Bowers, C. A., & Apffel-Marglin, F. (2005). Rethinking Freire: Globalization and the environmental crisis. Lawrence Erlbaum. Buckingham, D. (2019). The media education manifesto. Polity Press. Capra, F. (2004). The hidden connections: Integrating the biological, cognitive, and social dimensions of life into a science of sustainability. Anchor Books. Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education. (2011). EfS curriculum design workbook. Monograph. New York: Cloud Institute. Fleming, J. (2010). “Truthiness” and trust: News media literacy strategies in the Digital Age. In K. Tyner (Ed.), Media literacy: New agendas in communication (pp.  124–146). Routledge. Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed). Continuum. Gabriel, H., & Garrad, G. (2016). Reading and writing climate change. In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp. 117–132). Palgrave Macmillan. Gauntlett, D. (2011). Making is connecting: The social meaning of creativity from DIY and knitting to YouTube and web 2.0. Polity Press. Gauntlett, D. (2015). Making media studies: The creativity turn in media and communications studies. Peter Lang. Golley, F. B. (1998). A primer for environmental literacy. Yale University Press. Hobbs, R. (2013, July  28). Media literacy’s big tent at NAMLE 2013. Renee Hobbs at the Media Education Lab. https://mediaedlab.com/2013/07/28/media-literacy-s-bigtent-at-namle-2013/ Illich, I. (1971). Deschooling society. Harper & Row. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education. Brill Sense. Laufer, P. (2014). Slow news: A manifesto for the critical news consumer. Oregon State University Press. López, A. (2008). Mediacology: A multicultural approach to media literacy in the 21st century. Peter Lang. López, A. (2014). Greening media education: Bridging media literacy with green cultural citizenship. Peter Lang.

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López, A., & Share, J. (2020). Fake climate news: How denying climate change is the ultimate in fake news. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/ content/blog-post-fake-climate-news-how-denying-climate-change-is-the-ultimatein-fake-news_2020_04/ MacDonald, S. (2013). The ecocinema experience. In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 17–42). Routledge. Mander, J. (1991). In the absence of the sacred: The failure of technology and the survival of the Indian nations. Sierra Club Books. Mander, J. (2002). Four arguments for the elimination of television. Perennial. Marshall, R. F. (2020). Deconstructing free enterprise and reconstructing for sustainability: Cultural-ecological propaganda analysis for educators. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/content/deconstructing-free-enterpriseand-reconstructing-for-sustainability-cultural-ecological-propaganda-analysis-foreducators_2020_04/ Martusewicz, R. A., Edmundson, J., & Lupinacci, J. (2015). EcoJustice education: Toward diverse, democratic, and sustainable communities (2nd ed.). Routledge. Meadows, D. H., Randers, J., & Meadows, D. L. (2004). The limits to growth: The 30-year update. Chelsea Green Publishing Company. Meyrowitz, J. (1980). Analyzing media: Metaphors as methodologies. Monograph. www.eric. ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED206030 Meyrowitz, J. (1998, Winter). Multiple media literacies. Journal of Communication, 96–108. Nardi, B. A.,  & O’Day, V. (2000). Information ecologies: Using technology with heart. MIT Press. Orr, D. W. (1994). Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect. Island Press. Parham, J. (2016). Green media and popular culture: An introduction. Palgrave Macmillan. Rauch, J. (2018). Slow media: Toward a sustainable future. Oxford University Press. Rheingold, H. (2012). Net smart: How to thrive online. MIT Press. Ribeiro, M. H., Ottoni, R., West, R., Almeida, V. A. F.,  & Meira, W. (2020). Auditing radicalization pathways on YouTube. Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 131–141. https://doi.org/10.1145/3351095.3372879 Scolari, C. A. (2018). Transmedia literacy in the new media ecology: White paper. Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Departament de Comunicació. https://repositori.upf.edu/ handle/10230/33910 Sterling, S. (2004). Sustainable education: Re-visioning learning and change. Green Books. Strate, L. (2019). Addressing media ecology ethics. Media Ethics Magazine, 31(1). www.mediaethicsmagazine.com/index.php/browse-back-issues/213-fall-2019/ 3999274-addressing-media-ecology-ethics Tishman, S. (2017). Slow Looking: The Art and Practice of Learning Through Observation. Routledge. Wineburg, S., McGrew, S., Breakstone, J., & Ortega, T. (2016). Evaluating information: The cornerstone of civic online reasoning. Stanford Digital Repository. https://purl.stanford. edu/fv751yt5934 Wise, T. (2020). Moving from STEM to MESH. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/content/moving-from-stem-to-mesh_2020_05/ Zettl, H. (2011). Sight, sound, motion: Applied media aesthetics (6th ed). Wadsworth Cengage Learning.

10 TEACHING ECOMEDIA LITERACY

I tell my students that theories and methods are like a Swiss Army knife. When you engage in analysis, you need to choose the right tool for the task (i.e., you don’t use the bottle opener to pull out a splinter). When considering the complexity of teaching about ecomedia, it becomes apparent that diverse literacies and analytical skills are needed. Critical media literacy takes into account political ecology, ecojustice, ecofeminism, and postcolonialism. Visual literacy is needed so that students can learn how to read visual culture, art, graphs, images, infographics, and videos. Medium literacy enables students to comprehend the affordances and constraints of platforms and medium. News literacy critically engages news across multiple platforms for reliability and credibility, learning about the conditions of news production by asking what’s newsworthy, distinguishing what defines journalism, developing awareness of false equivalency, and learning journalistic ethics. It also means knowing the difference between news and persuasion, assertion and verification, evidence and inference, and news bias and audience bias. Other literacies include information and science literacy to detect fake experts, logical fallacies, impossible expectations, cherry-picking, and conspiracy theories. Transmedia literacy helps to understand how stories are told across platforms and what those platforms afford or constrain. Memes and viral videos that spread mis/ disinformation about environmental issues are also a form of transmedia. Narrative analysis is necessary to learn how climate change is a constructed story, which means being able to identify the style of narratives, to recognize who’s­ telling these stories, understand who has vested interests in different narratives, and identify what cultural myths they are tied to. Discourse analysis is closely related to narrative because it helps to understand how stories are told and what language and visual frames are used. Finally, systems dynamics literacy is necessary to teach how systems interact and function. Thus, there is no single method

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for teaching ecomedia literacy. Students will have to select the appropriate tools for the task. As Thevenin (2020, p. Nature All the Way . . ., para. 9) puts it, “Perhaps in order to be ‘climate change literate,’ the public must be critically literate in their engagement with media (certainly), but also governmental policy, economic systems and practices, biological, geological, and other scientific data, and so on.” In this book I have proposed a specific heuristic, the ecomediasphere, as an analytical and curriculum design strategy that seeks to deepen ecomedia analysis to achieve the aspirations of systems thinking, eco-ethics, and eco-citizenship. However, as this field expands and develops, there will be other kinds of interesting and innovative approaches that go beyond the humble suggestions of this book. In this chapter, I offer some basic principles that I believe should be considered in any future developments of ecomedia literacy. I also share some insights from my experience of teaching with the ecomediasphere and make suggestions for how to use ecomedia literacy in different subject areas. In some respects, there are already too many models and methods for anyone to stay sane. Thus, my first suggestion is to use the ideas presented here as inspiration for how to supplement and organize your curriculum, and not to necessarily follow religiously yet another media literacy model.

Ecomedia Literacy: Principles and Practices Ecomedia literacy incorporates environmental themes and concepts to encourage eco-ethical cultural behaviors and attitudes by extending the concept of ethics and civic responsibility beyond an anthropocentric gaze to expand empathy and care to the living planet. Ecomedia literacy allows students to evaluate familiar materials from an unfamiliar perspective, thereby activating students to defamiliarize the world and to make it strange. Ecomedia literacy also incorporates modes of inquiry that have been excluded by conventional media literacy practices, such as the exploration of affect, ecomateriality, medium, systems thinking, ecology, and alternative media, all of which are important sites of inquiry in ecomedia studies. As a starting point, I propose that ecomedia literacy incorporate several learning objectives so that students learn to: •

•

• •

Comprehend how ecomedia are materially interconnected with living systems by how they affect biodiversity loss, water and soil contamination, global heating, and the health of workers. Analyze how ICTs are interdependent with the global economy and development models, and how the current model of globalization correlates with the history of colonialism and its impacts on livings systems and ecojustice. Distinguish between anthropocentric and ecocentric discourses. Analyze how media form symbolic associations and discourses that promote environmental ideologies and ethics.

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• • • • •

Evaluate media’s phenomenological influence (affect) on the perception of time, space, and place. Identify and critically engage modernity’s epistemological bias. Cultivate an awareness of the ecomedia commons. Integrate a working understanding of ecomediasystems into the study of ecomedia objects. Apply eco-ethics and eco-citizenship to actively respond to the climate crisis.

As noted in my discussion of the iceberg model of systems thinking and exploration of fake climate news, conventional media literacy tends to be atomized and too focused on messages as the primary unit of analysis. Students need a holistic, systemic approach so that they can map ecomediasystems. For example, climate science and climate reporting are situated in diverse and complex news ecomediasystems, so analyzing climate coverage necessitates understanding the political ecology of media and carbon capitalism. It’s also important to develop metacognition skills to help deal with confirmation bias (presenting and analyzing facts is not enough). As already discussed, ecomedia literacy promotes a range of literacies, media literacy principles, and research methodologies, including the ability to: • • • • • • •

Research media organizations (information literacy) Calculate environmental impacts (environmental and science literacy) Analyze/deconstruct media texts (content, semiotic, narrative, and discourse analysis) Detect and critically engage media bias (news literacy) Explore aesthetic language (media language literacy) Holistically inventory ecomediasystems (systems literacy) Mindfully engage ecomediasystems (ecomedia mindfulness, medium literacy)

For programs required to justify themselves based on skills-oriented outcomes, this list should at least be useful within that particular kind of framework. For example, you can build in information literacy assignments to help students develop their research skills and meet designated institutional learning objectives. In terms of getting started, there are several areas already covered by media literacy practitioners that can be tweaked to incorporate ecomedia themes. These include critically analyzing news coverage of global heating and environmental justice movements; studying climate crisis disinformation/fake news; applying critical thinking and deconstruction techniques to advertising to specifically identify environmental ideologies and rhetoric; applying critical information literacy to determine the validity of environmental claims in media; learning to identify false environmental claims (“greenwashing”) in packaging, advertising, or fake climate news; studying the role of social media to promote or obfuscate c­ limate crisis discourses; engaging in media-making practices that reflect real-world

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environmental problems and solutions; extending eco-ethics and d­iscussions of rights and responsibilities to the living planet and workers; connecting the concept of the digital commons to environmental commons (air, water, etc.); applying alternative media practices to environmental change; analyzing media corporations and their sustainability policies; designing regenerative ecomediasystems; map-making of local environments and digital storytelling; and encouraging outdoor education by reducing screen time and unplugging. In addition to classic reading/textual analysis, there are diverse activities that can be utilized in ecomedia literacy, many of which are inspired by Buckingham (2019). Research and production tasks could include studying newspaper front pages, headlines, photos, captions, case studies (compare how a particular issue was covered by different news organizations) and simulated reporting. For writing and creative production, students can give briefs and take into consideration specific medium constraints, media languages, and target audiences. For multimedia production, they can do blogging, video essays, or simulated news reports. When students need background information (conceptual models and theories) for contextual analysis, active approaches include firsthand research (interviews, surveys, participant observation) and web-based research on media companies, such as researching corporate responsibility reports or sustainability policies of media organizations or tech companies, and verifying their accountability mechanisms for ethics breaches. They can explore climate debate policies of news organizations around language use and fairness. For strategic communication, students can do simulations of environmentally oriented media campaigns. Ecologically oriented education promotes an alternative paradigm based on systems thinking and an ecocentric belief in the interconnectedness of life, humans, technology, and economics grounded in eco-ethics. Some methods to achieve this include backward curriculum design based on problem-solving and solutions-generating outcomes (such as building a lesson or courses around answering essential questions: “What characterizes a regenerative ecomediasystem?”); scenario and world-building to envision different futures; problematizing human–nature binaries; moving away from abstract knowledge to experiential learning grounded in local ecosystems; transitioning to a model of political ecology based on ecological economics; and remediating ecology metaphors to encourage learners to perceive media as embedded within living ecomediasystems. These approaches seek to rebalance and promote ecocentric worldviews. For lifeworld students can track their experience of space, place, and time with self-reflective practices, such as slow media approaches advocated by Rauch (2018), by doing digital sabbaths, fasts, or detoxes that are meant to help reduce media usage but renegotiate media habits through mindfulness. Doing comparative analysis by experiencing places with and without media is another approach. For example, a learner can compare walking through a neighborhood or forest with no media device with the experience of doing the same route through the view of a video camera or smartphone. Students can engage how media impact

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a variety of emotional responses and physiological phenomena, such as alienation, biophilia (love of nature), biophobia (fear of nature), technophilia (love of technology), sense of place, sublime, technology addiction, disrupted natural biophysical rhythms, cognitive dispositions that drive responses to media (such as selective exposure or confirmation bias), and mental health. Students can investigate how sound, color, shape, form, and light are in fact nervous system stimuli and can be understood as physiological phenomena. This approach can broadly be defined as cultivating media mindfulness, which is the ability to be conscious of how our cognition interacts with media. Phenomenological inquiry (Parks, 2016, p.  148) and auto-ethnography are other methods. Sara Pink (2015) has developed sensory ethnography by exploring ways smell, taste, touch, and vision can be interconnected and interrelated within research.

A Sample Ecomedia Literacy Analysis: Mad Max: Fury Road When I assign an ecomedia analysis in the classroom, I have students select an ecomedia object and apply it to the ecomediasphere, using a prompt like this as a guide: To perform your ecomediasphere analysis, select your ecomedia object and analyze it according to the four zones: ecoculture, political ecology, ecomateriality, and lifeworld. In your introduction, offer a general overview of the ecomedia object by describing in as much detail what it is. Next, breakdown your analysis into subsections corresponding with the four zones. Conclude by discussing whether or not your ecomedia object is helping to create a more regenerative ecomediasystem and what reforms or changes, if any, are necessary. In this case it’s for a written essay, but it can also be adjusted for a video essay, podcast, website, etc. Here I will demonstrate an ecomediasphere analysis of the ecomedia object, Mad Max: Fury Road (Miller, 2015). The film is a story about the struggle to overcome a cult leader/warlord who rules over scarce resources of water and petrol in a far-off, postapocalyptic future. Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) and Max Rockatansky (Tom Hardy) rescue a group of enslaved women and pilot an armored tanker across a hellish landscape in search of a utopic “green place.” As an ecomedia object, we can investigate the range of environmental ideologies expressed in the film, not only in terms of content, but also in terms of how it was made (see Figure 10.1). Recall the upper hemisphere (top two zones) constitutes the world system. We start from the upper-left quadrant with the perspective of ecoculture. Here we study the symbols, discourses, narrative, response of the audience, and genre conventions that are the result of collective and cultural constructions. This includes a discussion of how ecofeminism, biopolitics, eco-apocalypse, genre

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Ecoculture

Political Ecology

Social Constructionism, Cultural Studies

World-ecology, Critical Theory Film as a global commodity Industrial characteristics of film production

Ecofeminist themes Biopolitics, eco-apocalypse Genre (car chase, post-apocalypse, Western) Identities (gender), film language Response of audience (critics, Rotten Tomatoes, etc.) Id e o l o g y

ECOCULTURE

Political and economic forces

LIFEWORLD

ECOMATERIALITY Medium properties Physical environments

Affor d a n c e s /C o n s t r a i n t s

Lifeworld Emotion

m De si gn

MAD MAX: FURY ROAD (2015)

Cognitive dispositions Affect

Ecomateriality

Affordances/Constraints

Cognitive response Affect of spectacle Violence, firstness Biophilia/biophobia

FIGURE 10.1 

POLITICAL ECOLOGY

P l a t fo r

Beli efs

Social and cultural practices Beliefs

“Resource image” Film as a material object Environmental problems related to production

Ecomediasphere analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

(car chase, post-apocalypse, Western), gender identities, and petro-­masculinity are communicated and what meanings they generate. Also, as a sequel, it references the genre of other Mad Max films and therefore acts as an intertext. The upper-right zone, political ecology, is where we investigate the factors that position the film as a global commodity in an industrial system of cinematic production (budgets, marketing, earnings, media conglomeration) that includes the film industries of both Hollywood and Namibia (where it was filmed and has its own local industry). Between the upper two zones is an ecomediatone that encompasses the traditional critical theory analysis of ideology and hegemony, for

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it is in the intersection between ecoculture and political ecology where media do ideological work. We then apply an ecocritical lens by asking, where does the film fit in the spectrum of anthropocentric to ecocentric ideologies? Next, we consider how economic factors dictate the environmental impact of the film, for it’s the production process (i.e., how money is spent and resources allocated) that determines how the film is made and its environmental impacts. Thus, we move clockwise to the lower-right zone where we investigate the ecomaterial characteristics of the film’s production, covering different stages and facets, like pre-production, production (set-construction, car chase sequences, pyrotechnics), post-production (special effects, CGI), distribution (cinema, DVDs, etc.), marketing (billboards, online, trailers), transportation, technology footprint (equipment, data storage), and film tourism (people traveling to set locations in Namibia). An ecomediatone between the two right zones (right hemisphere) represents the relationship between ideology and technology’s material reality as an apparatus. We arrive to the lower-left zone to explore lifeworld—the affective e­ xperience of the film as spectacle. Here we inquire into the film’s sensory and emotional experience. Cognitive response includes how the film is immersive and holds our attention through edits, sound, and framing. Here we also explore the effects of spectacle and intensity of strong imagery, action, and violence. Does the film invoke biophilia or biophobia (because these are emotional reactions)? An ecomediatone between the two lower zones explores specifically medium properties and how they affect our sensory experience. Because the viewer’s experience is also as part of an audience and member (or nonmember) of the culture that produced the film, there is an ecomediatone between the two quadrants of the left side of the ecomediasphere, where our subjective experience overlaps with our participation in the culture at large. Here we can probe where our ecological identity is formed. Students will discover that each zone is in essence shaped by the zones around it and vice versa. As noted by ecocinema scholar Susan Hayward (2020, p.  56), assessing the ecological impact of films (or other ecomedia objects) is difficult to calculate: all generic forms have a carbon foot-print, some more harmful to the ecological boundaries than others. Some genres in narrative terms could also be deemed to be harmful to the social boundaries insofar as they advocate violence, destruction or have narrative arcs that endorse the capitalist growth model to the detriment of the social thresholds. But others, such as comedy, musicals, social and psychological dramas, whilst they might (or might not) have a high carbon footprint tariff, may nonetheless address issues that bring them closer to the biosphere in their treatment of the social dimensions. . . . Similarly, some Sci-Fi and Futurist films, whilst dependent on huge budgets, do have the power to challenge, meaningfully, the way in which the Anthropocene transgresses both the social and biophysicalplanetary boundaries.

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In her own schema, she has rated certain genres as having more environmental impacts by budget, noting that disaster and sci-fi films tend to register as bigger budget productions (and hence have higher impacts due to resource allocation), but those impacts are also tempered by their effects on social boundaries. Using the doughnut model of economics, planetary and social boundaries are both assessed, i.e., can something be environmentally sustainable while at the same time promoting violence, racism, or sexism? Fury Road attempts to answer the question posed within the film: Who destroyed the world? The film points toward the failure of individualism and petro-masculinity and the necessity to transition from authoritarian, patriarchal forms of organization to one based on an ecofeminist ethic of care and community. It also conveys biopolitics (the control over life and death) by depicting captive women as “breeders” and male slaves as “bleeders” to supply blood to the warlord, Immortan Joe. It shows the consequences of hyper-masculinity (which leads to male humiliation) and an ecofeminist response based on compassion and the power of birth. The film depicts ecocide through stark environmental damage in a landscape dominated by super sandstorms, brackish water, dead trees, and endless salt flats. Women are the seed savers and warriors who fight against the patriarchy of this post-apocalyptic society. Another one of its prime messages is water is life. In terms of genre, the film is essentially an extended action sequence of car chases, but it also has similarities with sci-fi post-apocalypse films, horror, and Westerns. Cars are symbol of individualism, environmental degradation, and fossil fuels. It essentially depicts the logical conclusion of a perverse car culture. The film uses the symbolism of color to contrast between life and death (the black and white version, Fury Road: Chrome has an entirely different effect). The sensory experience of the film is super intense. It has been described as a kind of choreographed violent ballet/Cirque du Soleil performance, so it offers a good discussion point brought up by ecocinema studies. Does the intensity of the film’s spectacle distract or derail its ecofeminist themes? In discussing it with my students, some felt like the film’s intensity made it impossible to absorb the ecological themes. But others responded that because it was an action film, it makes ecofeminism more accessible to an audience that would otherwise not be exposed to these ideas. Despite its strong ecological themes, it turns out the Fury Road had a heavy ecological footprint in the Dorob National Park in the Namib, the world’s oldest desert. There was no environmental impact assessment and sensitive areas were damaged, including endangering protected lizards, geckos, chameleons, and rare cacti. The film crew drove over untouched areas and then tried to sweep up tracks. Although the desert cannot be rehabilitated, the Namibia Film Commission issued a “clean bill” (Tay, 2013). It would be fair to ask whether or not the political economy of the film industry dictated these decisions and if these behaviors undermined the films messaging. Ultimately, as discussed regarding

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Hageman’s (2013) method of dialectical ideological critique (Chapter  8), it is through engaging the contradictions of the film’s message and broader capitalist ideology that a rich understanding and intervention can be achieved.

The Ecomediasphere and Curriculum Development I’ve been teaching media and the environment to undergrads for more than a dozen years and my application of the ecomediasphere remains a work in progress. Based on experience and anecdotal evidence, this section offers some advice for how to approach ecomedia literacy and teach with the ecomediasphere. First, I recommend the curriculum method of backward design (see Wiggins & McTighe, 2005), which starts with what you want students to know and then work backward to scaffold skills and concepts. As a solutions-based method, it’s based on a predetermined rationale, such as how the curriculum unit prepares students to engage in eco-citizenship. It combines an essential question (a compelling question that focuses on teaching and drives inquiry and learning), outcomes (what students should understand, know, and be able to do), and assessment method (evidence used to demonstrate student learning) (Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education, 2011, pp. 60–61). For example, learners can be charged with the following query: What constitutes a healthy news ecomediasystem? Or, what form does regenerative ecomedia take? A curriculum/syllabus/study plan is an organized pattern of instruction (Tishman, 2017). As facilitators, we are designing the path and obstacles for students to overcome in order to arrive at some point that answers questions that are established at the beginning. You can then use the ecomediasphere as a design tool to help guide students toward answering these larger questions. The ecomediasphere can be incorporated into curriculum in different ways: •

Structure the class by dividing the semester into four zones as a general survey of ecomedia issues or choose one ecomedia object as the focus of the entire course and divide the schedule into four zones. • Have students perform an analysis of an ecomedia object as a specific assignment (choosing from the categories of text, gadget, platform, or hyperobject). • Assign students to investigate a personal gadget according to the four zones. • Work in groups to study a category of ecomedia (TV, print, phones, sound, video games, alternative media, art, film, entertainment, etc.) and do an oral presentation using a multimedia tool (such as Prezi) or build a website to go with it. • Start from different zones and perform the analysis moving in different directions (clockwise or counterclockwise). Does that change the nature of the analysis? • Alternatively, you can substitute the four zones with the elements: fire (energy), water, air, and earth, and examine the ecomedia object according to the lens of those elements.

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• •

Treat a tech or media company as an ecomedia object and critically evaluate its sustainability claims. Of course, be creative and design your own assignment and approach.

In choosing ecomedia objects to study, one doesn’t have to go for examples of environment per se (i.e., “mimetic or realistic depictions of nature”), but can choose them for their environmentality, “for evidence of the way a text’s language and form encodes a construction of and subsequent interaction with that text’s environment” (James, 2016, p. 66). Other options include selecting older media texts that can be viewed differently in light of how our environment has changed. Mirzoeff (2016) discusses how 19th-century paintings and their innovative depictions of defused light were also the outcome of increased coal pollution from the Industrial Revolution. How might older films, such as those depicting extraction or oil drilling, look in light of changing climate and weather patterns? (See Kerridge, 2016.) Early industrial and educational films readily available from the Internet Archive1 are rich with discourses that promote environmental ideologies from different historical moments. As a rule of thumb, I try to use problematic ecomedia objects, such the animated film, The Lorax (Renaud  & Balda, 2012). On the one hand, there are ecocentric discourses present in the movie, but, on the other hand, the film was cross-promoted in Mazda’s CX-5 SUV ads, which seems to undermine the film’s environmental messaging. The fast-food restaurant chain, Chipotle, has produced a number of animated videos that promote sustainable food production, but the fastfood chain could be considered to have an ambiguous ecological position that can be problematized. The main thing is to get students to consider to what extent the environmental ideologies being expressed are taken for granted or are consciously constructed (i.e., car ads have taken-for-granted assumptions about the environment but environmentalist activist media do not). Advocacy media promoting environmental causes, in particular by radical environmentalists, can be seen as counter-narratives to dominant ideologies, and therefore would be examples of self-conscious ecocriticism intended to disrupt the symbolic order (DeLuca, 1999). The main thing is to constantly move beyond the ecomedia object as solely a messaging “event” (regarding the iceberg of systems thinking). The ecomedia literacy method extrapolates from texts much larger social concerns and systemic processes. Ecomedia objects are indexical of underlying structures, patterns, and worldviews. Harking to Foucault’s notion of discursive formations, the event (as expressed in an ecomedia object) is a node in the historical discourse of the particular moment it was made. Ecomedia objects should also be explored from the perspectives of those traditionally disenfranchised from the power structure. Drawing insight from feminist standpoint theory (see Kellner  & Share, 2019, p. 24), which situates knowledge and experience from the perspective of women or marginalized populations, students should study ecomedia objects from different vantages to explore power relations. For example: What if students examined

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their personal gadget from the perspectives of a Congolese child laborer extracting rare earth minerals, Chinese FoxConn assembler, “playbour” gamer, Amazon warehouse worker, or big box store sales associate? The ecomedia research agenda can be rather broad, but Miller (2018, pp. 100–101) outlines some important sites of study. I quote this extensively because it incorporates a rich description of the kind of analysis that can be utilized for ecomedia literacy: Resources for this type of analysis from beyond the field of science include: policy documents from public bureaucracies (international, national, regional, state, and municipal governments) and private bureaucracies (corporations, lobby groups, research firms, non-government organizations, religions, and unions) on raw materials, conservation, and recycling; debates (press, lobby group, activist, congressional/parliamentary, and academic) pertaining to climate change and environmental policy; budgets and green accountancy (where do publishers, for example, draw their money from and what are the environmental liabilities of cultural technologies?); laws (relevant legislation and case law about worker safety and environmental impact); histories (to foil the fetishism of the new and identify the ecological context of past and present technologies); places (can analysts in the Global North contextualize their findings as partial, not universal, by examining other examples; can transterritorial connections be traced along global supply chains?); people (who is included and excluded, and who is highlighted and hidden, when art is made, and who bears the risks of toxic production?); non-human nature (who will represent all inhabitants of this planet?); pollution (what are the environmental costs?); ethnography (listening to participants in the creation and management of e-waste); and journalism (how can we represent and intervene in the reality of this disaster?). Many of the proposals in this list involve fairly advanced levels of research, time, and access to resources. Obviously, you will need to select your approach based on what is available for your students. For assessment, students can report on their research and analysis as a paper, video essay, multimedia presentation, podcast, curated online exhibit, portfolio, artwork, comic, blog, etc. My experience is that systems approaches are best simplified through visual forms of communication. Based on MC Bateson’s (2007) education for global responsibility model, the following are some of the ecomedia literacy performance indicators: • •

Create narratives of connection with digital storytelling tools (video essays, curated blogs, Prezi, etc.). Translate concepts between media and ecology disciplines using ecological metaphors to describe media phenomena (ecomedia, ecomediasystem, ecomediasphere).

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•

•

Perform crossovers with ways of knowing through participant observation and social learning (students work in groups, collaborate with other courses/ departments/community/etc.). Develop an ethical framework in order to act upon these understandings and to make wise choices.

The main thing is to choose an assessment method that allows for thick description and the ability to evaluate for particular skills and outcomes determined in the assignment or course. I’m still prototyping the ecomediasphere. I have used the ecomediasphere as a curriculum design guide (dividing my undergraduate Media and the Environment course into four zones) and as an assignment to perform a specific analysis of an ecomedia object. The assignment is given toward the end of the semester after students have already learned about the core issues of ecomedia studies and have gained competencies (through other assignments) in doing discourse and semiotic analysis and ecocriticism. Through a combination of lectures and readings, they also have encountered an overview of how the global economic system works. I give them ample resources for research (I have a class website that links to multiple organizations and databases that focus on technology and the environment), but I also push them to develop their own research skills by utilizing the library and databases. Learners should be able to transfer skills across disciplines for lifelong learning, by growing, evolving, discovering, experiencing, and acknowledging that the process is messy (and at times disorienting). Obviously, the analysis will vary depending on the type of media object (i.e., text, platform, gadget, or hyperobject), so having students do oral presentations will expose the class to various outcomes. Importantly, students learn better and retain concepts when they can relate the information they are learning to their own lives. This is especially true when they analyze their own personal gadget. I am aware that this method of analysis can be complex. Some of the vocabulary is new and difficult to understand for students who are not accustomed to systems thinking. You can opt for less complicated language, such as culture, economy, environment, and experience for the ecomediasphere’s zones. I have only utilized the ecomediasphere during a 15-week semester. I have yet to apply it with younger students (K–12) or as a single lesson. But as a semester-long process, I feel that it has worked quite well. There are some things to be aware of. First, students need to overcome the urge to associate terms like environment and ecology as being normative. They need to be encouraged to see that they fit within a range of ideologies and that there are a spectrum of beliefs and practices. Second, some students confuse ecocentrism with being anti-human. Rather, it just means decentering humans and placing them as equal with the more-thanhuman world. Third, some become destabilized because the ecomedia critique undermines their worldview. Fourth, many students will experience despair and depression when they understand the depth of our ecological peril. In response,

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you can share Emma Marris’ advice (2020) and encourage them to ditch shame, focus on systems (not themselves), join an effective group, define their role, and understand what they are fighting for (not just what they are fighting against). When I teach my undergraduate Media and the Environment course, before the end of every class I  stop five minutes early, pass out index cards, and ask students to write on one side something important and new they learned during the lesson and on the other side something they were unclear about. The last time I offered the course, students expressed issues according to these broad categories: They identify strongly with some of the concepts taught in class and want to propel positive change in the university as well as convince others in their lives that climate change is a pressing issue; they are concerned with how environmental issues are portrayed in the media; they want to understand more about ecocentrism; they are troubled about animal rights and how they are portrayed in culture; they are concerned with the culture of consumption; and they are worried with the way the government handles environmental issues. Some of my former students have gone on to become strong environmental activists, something they did not envision before taking the class, so I feel like that is in itself a sign of success.

Ecomedia Objects: Gadget Analysis Aside from using the ecomediasphere heuristic (see Figure 10.2), there are other ways to research media gadgets and to teach complexity. First, they can deploy the object lessons/slow observation technique developed by Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in early 1800s. He taught pupils to look intently at objects from their surroundings. To perceive sensory qualities, they would observe, sketch, and describe, using induction to develop abstract ideas about the object (see Tishman, 2017, pp. 94–95). From this method, students can learn about three kinds of complexity—complexity of parts and interactions; complexity of perspective; and complexity of engagement. Based on Tishman’s (2017, p. 30) slow-looking approach, students can work in small groups to choose an ecomedia object (such as a gadget) and attempt to answer the following questions: What are the parts and various pieces or components and what are their purposes? What are its complexities? Another gadget research method was developed by researcher and activist Katie Singer, whose eco-citizenship approach can be replicated and incorporated into an ecomedia literacy curriculum. Her “Campaign to Reduce Our Internet Footprint” (Singer, n.d.) offers the following steps as a research guide2: (1) Get informed about the true costs of using a smartphone, including sending text ­messages or streaming video; (2) pick one element in a smartphone and research it, such as screen, battery, case, and electronics (i.e., the circuit board, wiring, speakers, and motors); (3) research the ore or chemicals in the phone; (4) research the infrastructure that smartphones require; (5) reduce your internet footprint

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Ecoculture

Political Ecology

Social Constructionism, Cultural Studies Values/eco-ethics/justice Anthropocentric vs. ecocentric Consumerism Language frames/discourses Eco-citizenship What it means to be human

World-ecology, Critical Theory Carbon-capitalism “Oilygarchy”/“deep media” Advertising, consumerism Attention economy (legacy and social media) Surveillance capitalism, platform capitalism Extractivism, externalization Planned obsolescence Neocolonialism/globalization Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft “Appconn”/”Chimerica” Monetization, design Algorithms Id e o l o g y

ECOCULTURE Social and cultural practices Beliefs

POLITICAL ECOLOGY Political and economic forces

Be li efs

m De si gn

LIFEWORLD Cognitive dispositions Affect

P l a t fo r

GADGET Technology ECOMATERIALITY Medium properties Physical environment

Affor d a n c e s /C o n s t r a i n t s

Ecomateriality

Lifeworld

Medium and Environmental Properties

Experience

Addiction, attention Emotional response, alienation (sense of place, time) Affect, playbour Self-quantification Psychographics Control (simulation or real) Mindfulness, health risks

FIGURE 10.2 

Interactive E-waste Emissions EMFs Conflict minerals Energy Exploited labor

Ecomedia analysis of gadget technology

by 3% per month and get your school, workplace, and household to join you; (6) share your findings with classmates, neighbors, coworkers; and (7) insist that manufacturers prioritize safer chemicals, less extractivism, and worker protections over profit. This assignment can be supplemented with Maxwell and Miller’s

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(2020) book, How Green Is Your Smartphone?, which goes through in detail the environmental impacts of mobile devices and urges readers to learn how to “outsmart” their smartphones. I want to reemphasize that ecomedia literacy should not be a dogma that is meant to convert students to become neo-Luddites, but, rather, it is meant to responsibly raise the critique of technology to balance the lack of critical engagement with ecomedia technologies. At best, ecomedia literacy is a way to answer critical questions raised by Neil Postman (1998), whose five characteristics of technological change are essential for the exploration of any ecomedia objects: • • •

• •

All technological change is a trade-off—we pay a price (e.g., cars, printing press). What will technology do and what will it undo? Advantages and disadvantages of new technologies are not distributed evenly across populations (there are winners and losers). Embedded in every technology, there is a powerful idea (sometimes two or three powerful ideas). Every media technology has a prejudice (e.g., TV— images, computers—algorithms). Technological change is not additive; it is ecological (it changes everything and demands a cautionary approach). Media tend to become mythic (we see them as the natural order of things rather than as inventions); we allow technology to control us.

The neo-Luddite critique inherent to ecomedia analysis can trigger a defensive posture, because people feel attached to their gadgets (and are generally addicted to them). But it’s not anti-technology. It’s against dehumanization, the destruction of ecosystems, and the exploitation of labor. Advocating for eco-friendly tech is an essential characteristic of eco-citizenship. Thevenin’s (2020, p. Devices . . ., para. 2) “Devices in the Dirt” activity has the purpose of reminding students of the materiality of their gadgets: First, I lead my students out of our classroom, and then out of the building into a nearby lawn on the university campus for a collaborative art project. I give them instructions to bring all of their technological devices—phones, tablets, laptops, game devices, smart watches, and so on—and put them in a pile on the ground. After some quizzical looks, and often some visible hesitation, the students typically follow my directions. Then, with the pile of screens on the ground, I direct the students to go and encourage others on campus to take part in the art-making and add their own devices to the pile. Students reluctantly leave their screens and do their best to recruit passersby to our project. Now, the pile is bigger and so is the crowd of people anxiously awaiting to get their hands on their gadgets. Before I give them the go ahead to retrieve their devices, I ask them to take a moment to feel their feet on the ground and then take note of the thoughts and feelings

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that they’re having. Finally, the students scramble back to the pile to sort through the mix of devices and reclaim their things. After the activity, they debrief and discuss their feelings about the experience and reflect on the physicality of their “art project.” He probes them to ask why people don’t like to put their devices in the dirt and how this reflects the distinction we make between technology and nature. What does it convey that we feel more anxious about the Earth’s effects on our devices than vice versa? After all, our devices are made of resources derived from the Earth. And where do we think these very devices will be laying on in another few years? Down in the dirt, most likely. (para. 5)

Ecomedia Objects: Visual Analysis The iceberg model of systems thinking has elements in common with the visual analysis method of iconology developed by preeminent art historian Erwin Panofsky (1962). Iconology was developed to analyze European visual art, such as painted works produced during the Italian Renaissance, but can easily be translated as a visual literacy tool for contemporary ecomedia. Using a geology metaphor, Panofsky proposed that an image could be analyzed according to three “strata” to interpret the historical moment it was produced and discover insights into the cultural attitudes and beliefs that produced it. The strata metaphor is attractive because of how the current materialist turn in media studies points back to geology and also the emergence of the term Anthropocene, which comes out of geology science (see Chapter 1). The surface stratum—the “primary” and “natural” subject matter—­incorporates those aspects of visual communication that anyone could understand without prior cultural knowledge. This is principally on the level of form (how something is created through shapes, color, light, movement, weight, depth, lines, etc.) and identification of objects based on practical experience (the equivalent of a signifier, denoted meaning, or iconic sign). This could be easily recognized elements in any image—people, structures, animals, plant life, weather, or aspects of the landscape. The second stratum—“secondary” or “conventional” subject matter—refers to those elements that require cultural knowledge from the time period the ecomedia object was produced (related to the signified, connoted, indexical, or symbolic level of the sign). Just as one would need to be versed in 16th-century Christian theology to understand a religious painting from that period, the environmental implications of a car advertisement or an anti-fracking political campaign would necessitate awareness of current events and contemporary cultural references. To help tell the difference between the primary and secondary strata, Panofsky applied the “ancient Greek test,” which means determining what someone

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from an ancient historical or cultural context could recognize (for example, an ancient Greek will know what a tree is but not a crucifix). This helps differentiate between those elements that can be understood from general human experience versus those that are culturally produced and historically situated. A decolonization move would be to switch out the ancient Greek for an ancestral person from a non-European bioregion. The third stratum—intrinsic meaning—relates to the deepest level of analysis, one in which the ecomedia object unconsciously reflects the values and beliefs about society and the historical period in which it was created. It reveals commonly shared attitudes about religion, class, philosophy, and environment (or the level of mythology and ideology as applied in semiotics). For the purpose of ecomedia literacy, this is where one analyzes environmental ideology (taken-forgranted beliefs about the environment) of specific visual texts, such as those found in advertising, news, activist media, film, or popular culture. From this stratum, one can think of images as “fictionalized” portraits that express the zeitgeist of our age (Howells & Negreiros, 2012). By refining and developing our analytical abilities to identify communication patterns, we become fluent in the lexicon and vocabulary of visual environmental communication in order to interpret and produce communication for change. For an example of applying iconographic and ecocritical methods to textual analysis, students can study a marketing campaign for Chipotle, a popular fastfood restaurant in the United States that promotes a sustainability message (“Cultivate a Better World,” “Food with Integrity”). Several years ago it produced two viral animated media campaigns, “Back to the Start” and “The Scarecrow.” According to the New York Times, “Back to the Start” was rated by Zeta Interactive as one of the Top 10 videos in internet buzz in 2011. The award-winning “The Scarecrow” also achieved critical praise. Both spots use clever animation and popular culture references to promote a sustainability message, allowing Chipotle to position itself as an ethical food alternative in relation to more conventional fast-food venues. Chipotle uses its media campaigns to educate consumers about opposing food production paradigms (local and family farming versus factory farming). However, some critics have argued that the campaign is misleading and that Chipotle’s sustainability practices are contradictory and ambiguous; its marketing strategy could be considered to be an example of “greenwashing,” which is the practice of marketing unsustainable products as being positive for the environment. Drawing on ecomedia analysis techniques and ecocriticism, students can critically assess how Chipotle promotes its ethical and environmental food brand by exploring environmental ideologies and ecological discourses. This analysis builds on five learning objectives to familiarize students with: (1) Media as environmental education; (2) environmental ideologies; (3) ecocriticism and environmental discourses; (4) food systems and marketing; and (5) greenwashing. Students are prompted to evaluate Chipotle’s environmental claims, and to determine if its

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media campaigns can be reconciled with its actual business practices. In doing so, students gain insights into how media act as a kind of environmental education. Using the ecomediasphere or iconology method described earlier, it can be tied into an existing media studies curriculum by connecting concepts such as social constructionism, cultivation theory, media ethics, semiotics, intertextuality, ideology, hegemony, culture industry, advertising, mythology, and political economy. As discussed in more depth in Chapter  8, ecocriticism utilizes an ecological perspective to develop “the ability to critique existing discourses, cultural artifacts, forms and genres, and explore alternatives” (Garrard, 2009, p. 19). For background, students will need to have an overview of the concept of environmental ideology (Corbett, 2006), which is the belief of how humans should act in relationship to the environment. This means that they should know the difference between anthropocentric (human-centric and utilitarian) and ecocentric (Earth-centric) ideologies and be familiar with the range of positions within it, in particular conservationism and preservationism. Moreover, by exploring the spectrum of environmental ideologies, students should develop a working definition of sustainability. The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy (Stibbe, 2009) has several accessible short, introductory chapters on a variety of sustainability topics. Ecocriticism (Garrard, 2011) involves looking at the history of environmental discourses (the way the environment is discussed), especially the difference between “pastoral” and “progress” tropes in popular culture (which are used in the Chipotle videos). Environmental tropes are shorthand visual metaphors (primarily metonym and synecdoche) that allude to broader ideological positions (such as smoke stacks, polar bears, tractors, pastures, windmills, etc.). To deepen the assignment, some background on food systems is helpful. For a basic introduction on the difference between local and industrial food production, the documentary Food Inc. (Kenner, 2008) and Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006) are accessible. The opening scene of Food Inc. features Pollan deconstructing food labels in the supermarket, and models very nicely how to apply ecomedia literacy to food marketing. Chapter nine in The Omnivore’s Dilemma details the contradictions of large-scale organic food production. Students should also be exposed to the concept of greenwashing, which is “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product or service” (TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc., 2007, p. 1).

Conclusion Transformative ecology is by nature radical, because it requires our current global economic system to transform into something different. Invariably, adding the “eco” label to an academic field, be it ecocriticism or ecomedia, implies also a critique of existing systems and entails a certain level of advocacy for changing the existing status quo. This is why environmental communication considers itself a

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crisis discipline: It starts with the position that the climate crisis is real and there is no need to have a “balanced” debate about whether or not there is scientific consensus; rather it seeks to solve the problem of environmental degradation. Ultimately, ecomedia literacy is guided by the question: What constitutes a regenerative ecomediasystem? Through the advocacy of eco-citizenship, students can operate from an eco-ethical framework to work for solutions, because under the current conditions of our global ecomediasystems and the climate crisis, Robert A. Hacket (2017) argues that private-owned, market-driven, corporate dominated media are not tenable. Instead, media need to bridge the “hope gap” by promoting empathy, hope, solidarity, other-oriented ethics, political efficacy, civic trust, and belief in possibility of collective action. Student journalists should learn how to motivate public engagement and mobilization. They can do this by telling local stories, inspire community action and resistance, amplify counternarratives that give meaning, direction, and a sense of connection for people becoming active citizens. Until now, this has been the primary role of alternative media or newspapers like the The Guardian, whose “Keep it in the Ground” series is a model template. This is just a fraction of reforms that could be made. Drawing from Benjamin Barber’s (2006) notion of “Strong Democracy,” I propose there are three scenarios (see Figure 10.3) for ecomediasystems across the globe for how they can respond to the ecological crisis: (1) Weak (status quo); (2) collapse (where negative trends are intensified); and (3) resilient (crisis averted or lessoned). I leave this as a challenge for educators to consider the purpose of media education and to consider what methods can be used to guide a future we want our students to live in. I am aware that having a political stance is problematic in some professional environments, especially where pressure comes from far-right watchdog groups or political bodies that threaten cutting off funding for researchers or educators that use phrases like “climate change.” In the realm of media literacy where advocates are working to integrate media literacy in education policy and state standards, politics are anathema, and sometimes viewed as even a threat or bad pedagogy. None of the approaches offered in this book are meant to be didactic or even polemical, but they do intend to raise consciousness (in the Freirean sense) about the ecological dangers of the status quo and how they relate to media, always with an eye to making the world a better (and more inhabitable) place for all. In the realm of media education, the challenge will be to bridge the divide between educationalists and interventionists so that ecomedia literacy becomes more integrated across media education curricula. In terms of future directions in research, theory, and methodology for ecomedia literacy, there are a variety of opportunities for the framework to grow and evolve. To begin with, professional development and teacher training programs can start to incorporate an environmental studies component. Debates concerning education policy, common core standards, and testing can shift to recognize the economic and cultural dimensions of environmental education so that it is

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WEAK ECOMEDIASYSTEM

Status Quo

Unjust globalized economy Exploitation (limited labor rights) Conglomeration = fewer media companies Complacency “Invisible hand” Deregulation Privatization Digital divide Copyright and Fair Use Conflict minerals Dirty data clouds

RESILIENT ECOMEDIASYSTEM Media are a “public good” Diverse Internet “Bill of Rights” Right to privacy Political participation “Prosumer” Affordable access Uncensored Regulated platforms Public Domain Creative/cultural Commons Net Neutrality Open System Participation Regenerative ecomedia Clean energy Fair technology Trustworthy Ecojustice

FIGURE 10.3 

THREE ECOMEDIASYSTEM SCENARIOS

ECOMEDIASYSTEM COLLAPSE Current Trends are Intensified “Big Brother” Limited Public Domain Censorship Closed systems Toxic ecomedia Carbon economy No labor rights

Mega fire walls Monoculture DRM Self-regulating industry Privatization Enclosure/Govt. Restriction Monopoly/Oligopoly

Three ecomediasystem scenarios

not just “siloed off” as science education. Media literacy educators can work toward advancing intercultural communication and respect for non-Western epistemologies to incorporate an awareness of the ecological sensibilities of different cultures. In addition, media literacy organizations can promote environmental themes in curriculum development and during professional conferences. These approaches will necessitate more research and collaboration across disciplines, especially with practitioners of education for sustainability. Finally, with increased attention by media literacy practitioners to environmental themes, there needs to be research and resource sharing to develop and refine curricula. As it becomes generally acknowledged that media are integral to environmental issues and as the global ecological crisis intensifies, ecomedia literacy will likely become an integrated subject of media literacy.

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Postscript: A Note of Caution For those who have internalized the worldview of the dominant system, introducing an ecological perspective can be destabilizing. Teaching how media promote ideologies and manipulate beliefs often undermines the taken-for-granted beliefs of mainstream society, and not surprisingly can result in a backlash (i.e., rather than engage the critique, students can experience fear and threat). In some cases, there is a “boomerang” effect in which students begin to distrust all sources of information and authority (such as science), and begin to indulge in conspiracy theories or false narratives (like the existence of a flat earth or the “legitimization” of white nationalism through alt-right media) because they are contrary to mainstream thought, and therefore fit their newly discovered distrust of media (a more insidious form of this approach is the conflation of “fake news” with the views of anyone that contradicts a cherished worldview). Invariably, an ecomedia literacy critique entails criticizing capitalism and our notions of technological progress, something that is utterly taboo in an ideological environment dominated by neoliberalism (the belief in individualism, market fundamentalism, militarism, and privatization as the solution for all problems). By ideology, I mean it in the Marxian and Gramscian sense, as in the ruling ideas derive and are shaped by the interests of those who dominate the economy to become “common sense” or taken for granted. These ideologies extend to attitudes about how humans should act upon and live within the living planet. When introducing an ecological perspective, you enter a deeper understanding of the world that further undermines the dominant belief system and therefore can lead to resistance and denial on the part of students. One tactic that education for sustainability practitioners use is to ask students permission to experience discomfort about learning new, unfamiliar concepts, a kind of trigger warning that everything they once assumed to be normal might be incomplete. Humans are disposed to reinforce preexisting beliefs, so much so there are numerous psychological theories to describe this process, including motivated disbelief, selective exposure, confirmation bias, disconfirmation bias, reality maintenance, and worldview backfire effect. So, it’s important to be prepared for challenges from students that are overly invested in the system and its underlying worldview. In the United States and Australia, this is particularly difficult when climate denial has been so integral to dominant discourses. One effective strategy is to acknowledge that an outdated worldview was understandable under certain conditions (historical moment, education, etc.), but given new knowledge, it is OK to abandon an outmoded or risky belief system. For example, a faith in unlimited energy based on fossil fuels or endless economic growth may have made sense to some social groups (especially the beneficiaries) at a time in the past when limits were not necessarily visible or anticipated, but given what we know now about environmental limits, they no longer make sense

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(it should be acknowledged that as far back as 1896, it was modeled that increased CO2 in the atmosphere would increase global temperatures). The Enlightenment contributed to positivism, nation-states, and colonialism, and a rejection of the epistemology of traditional agricultural knowledge (TAK). The paradigm of Mechanism arose during the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions partly because of its perceived liberating potential in the face of closedminded “magical thinking” promulgated by organized religion or monarchy, but also from a fear of Nature’s unpredictability and dangers. At the time of the European Renaissance, rationality would have been embraced by certain elites as an anecdote to dangerous, irrational attacks by power structures that oppressed free-thinking, humanist ­libertines. But as a revolution, Mechanism superseded all other worldviews, and became a tool to mass-murder women (see Merchant, 1989) and indigenous populations subjected to European colonial rule. What has emerged is a quasi-religious faith in technology and science, primarily expressed through Mechanism (which has also become a new kind of magical thinking) entangled in white supremacy. An effective way to examine belief systems without triggering an immediate backlash is to study historical documents, which gives some distance from the present moment. So, for example, when teaching about present-day attitudes toward Islam, Arabs, or the Middle East, an examination of orientalist artworks or colonialist documents (photos, letters, memos, etc.) puts current beliefs into a historical context. Likewise, beliefs about unlimited energy (such as the inherent “progressive good” of fossil fuels) can be approached through the study of archival materials (old advertisements, newsreels, early cinema, etc.). For example, in 1896, an early Lumiere film depicts an oil derrick blowout in the Azerbaijan oil fields during the same year that CO2 emissions were predicted to increase global warming (see Murray & Heumann, 2009). Students can be prompted to discuss why a film of an oil blowout would be compelling to early filmmakers and audiences (hence piquing the interests of audiences as a “cinema of attraction”). Is this the first instance of ecological disaster as a spectacle? Did the concept of an oil-well-blowout-as-ecological-disaster even occur to early audiences? This discussion is tied to larger discourses (as explored by ecocriticism) about the relationship between the concepts of civilization and nature. For instance, postcolonial ecocritics demonstrate how the myths of progress and the conquest of nature were historically promoted (and contemporaneously under the guise of “development” and globalization) through forms of popular culture and literature. The myth about the so-called Wild West is just one example of how the beliefs of individualism, the conquest of nature, the association of indigenous people as “primitive” and “natural,” and patriarchy all come together as a foundational belief that continues today in news coverage, popular culture, advertising, and politics. These myths become contested when Native Americans and indigenous peoples protest pipelines and energy infrastructure projects. How media

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respond, and how students read media in this context, is an important component of ecomedia literacy. For many who grew up in the dominant culture, all of the psychological dispositions of denial come into play when teaching ecomedia literacy. This will be particularly true with the potentially destabilizing effect of confronting and overturning familiar ways of thinking, especially deeply engrained white supremacy. The introduction of difficult subjects is not about ending the conversation but starting it.

Notes 1 . https://archive.org/ 2. For more detailed instructions, see https://tinyurl.com/yb4zuogp.

References Barber, B. R. (2006). Pangloss, Pandora or Jefferson? Three scenarios for the future of technology and strong democracy. In R. Hassan & J. Thomas (Eds.), The new media theory reader (pp. 188–202). Open University Press. Bateson, M. C. (2007). Education for global responsibility. In S. C. Moser & L. Dilling (Eds.), Creating a climate for change: Communicating climate change and facilitating social change (pp. 281–291). Cambridge University Press. Buckingham, D. (2019). The media education manifesto. Polity Press. Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education. (2011). EfS curriculum design workbook. Monograph. Corbett, J. B. (2006). Communicating nature: How we create and understand environmental messages. Island Press. DeLuca, K. M. (1999). Image politics: The new rhetoric of environmental activism. Guilford Press. Garrard, G. (2009). Ecocriticism: The ability to investigate cultural artifacts from an ecological perspective. In A. Stibbe (Ed.), The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world (pp. 19–24. Green Books. Garrard, G. (2011). Ecocriticism (2nd ed). Routledge. Hackett, R. (2017). Conclusion: Media reform for climate action. In R. Hackett, S. Forde, S. Gunster, & K. Foxwell-Norton (Eds.), Journalism and climate crisis. Routledge. Hageman, A. (2013). Ecocinema and ideology: Do ecocritics dream of a clockwork green? In S. Rust, S. Monani, & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecocinema theory and practice (pp. 87–106). Routledge. Hayward, S. (2020). Film ecology. Routledge. Howells, R., & Negreiros, J. (2012). Visual culture. Polity Press. James, E. (2016). Teaching the postcolonial/ecocritical dialogue. In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp. 60–74). Palgrave Macmillan. Kellner, D., & Share, J. (2019). The critical media literacy guide: Engaging media and transforming education. Brill Sense. Kenner, R. (2008). Food, Inc. [Film]. Magnolia Pictures. Kerridge, R. (2016). Ecocriticism and the mission of “English.” In G. Garrard (Ed.), Teaching ecocriticism and green cultural studies (pp. 11–26). Palgrave Macmillan.

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Marris, E. (2020, January  10). Opinion | how to stop freaking out and tackle climate change. The New York Times. www.nytimes.com/2020/01/10/opinion/sunday/howto-help-climate-change.html Maxwell, R., & Miller, T. (2020). How green is your smartphone? Polity Press. Merchant, C. (1989). The death of nature: Women, ecology, and the scientific revolution. HarperOne. Miller, G. (2015). Mad Max: Fury Road [Film]. Warner Bros. Pictures. Miller, T. (2018). Greenwashing culture. Routledge. Mirzoeff, N. (2016). How to see the world: An introduction to images, from self-portraits to selfies, maps to movies, and more. Basic Books. Murray, R. L., & Heumann, J. K. (2009). Ecology and popular film: Cinema on the edge. State University of New York Press. Panofsky, E. (1962). Studies in iconology: Humanistic themes in the art of the Renaissance. Harper & Row. Parks, L. (2016). Earth observation and signal territories. In S. Rust, S. Monani,  & S. Cubitt (Eds.), Ecomedia: Key issues (pp. 141–161). Routledge. Pink, S. (2015). Doing sensory ethnography (2nd ed.). Sage. Pollan, M. (2006). The omnivore’s dilemma: A natural history of four meals. Penguin Press. Postman, N. (1998, March 27). Five things we need to know about technological change. www. technodystopia.org/ Rauch, J. (2018). Slow media: Toward a sustainable future. Oxford University Press. Renaud, C., & Balda, K. (2012). The Lorax [Film]. Universal Pictures. Singer, K. (n.d.). The campaign to reduce our internet footprint. www.ourwebofinconvenient truths.com/campaign/ Stibbe, A. (2009). The handbook of sustainability literacy: Skills for a changing world. Green Books. Tay, N. (2013, March  5). Mad Max: Fury Road sparks real-life fury with claims of damage to desert. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/05/ mad-max-fury-road-namibia TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc. (2007). The “Six Sins of Greenwashing™”: A study of environmental claims in North American consumer markets. TerraChoice Environmental Marketing Inc. Thevenin, B. (2020). Engaging with things: Speculative realism and ecomedia literacy education. Journal of Sustainability Education, 23. www.susted.com/wordpress/content/ engaging-with-things-speculative-realism-and-ecomedia-literacy-education_2020_05/ Tishman, S. (2017). Slow looking: The art and practice of learning through observation. Routledge. Wiggins, G. P.,  & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by design (Expanded 2nd ed.). ­Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.

11 CONCLUSION The 50th Anniversary of Earth Day, COVID-19, and Black Lives Matter

In 2020, the 50th anniversary of the founding of Earth Day is marked by a global pandemic, causing the world to pause and take stock of our planetary ­predicament. This culminated a period of ecological shocks across the globe: Devastating fires in Australia, Amazon, Siberia, and California; accelerating ice melt; ­devastating hurricanes and flooding; and ongoing mass extinction. At the time of this writing, I was under quarantine to slow the spread of COVID-19. The collective, global response and actions taken to limit the propagation of the virus are in the same spirit and at a similar level of action that the climate emergency demands. Yet, even as we grapple with the immediate consequences of the virus, it’s important to acknowledge that it is a symptom of our centuries of disregard for our planetary health. Consumerism and greed, combined with the lightning speed of transnational capitalism, are at the core of the global economy that is destroying our very systems of survival. Not coincidentally, the spread of the virus is deeply connected to our environmental challenges. Under the guise of “development” and “progress,” so-called modernization projects promote industrial agriculture, cheap nature, and extractivism. New roads and settlements burrow deeper into isolated territories, leading to deforestation and to the loss of animal habitats. With the reduction of biodiversity, previously unknown diseases are pushed into human populations as viruses seek new hosts. This coincides with the traffic in wild animals, which also spreads novel contagions. Meanwhile, the globalized economy makes us more urbanized and interdependent, with frequent air travel enabling diseases to spread faster. The past 40 years of neoliberal economic policies have eviscerated healthcare systems and the social safety net of most countries, compounding efforts to treat and respond to the health crisis effectively. Finally, a major study links 80% of COVID-19 deaths to heavily polluted regions, demonstrating how pollution

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damages our health (Carrington, 2020). As systems dynamics teach us, a system remains invisible until a crisis exposes its structure and weaknesses. In this case, there is a direct connection between planetary health and human health. To indigenous peoples throughout the world, the relationship between a global pandemic and current economic systems is more obvious. As occupants of land comprising 80% of the world’s biodiversity, indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted by the current system and know that it is not environmentally or morally sustainable. Many implicitly understand that our current political and economic crisis is founded on the legacy of colonialism, extractivism, and slavery. For centuries, many have warned those in the high-income regions that the world economic system, currently manifested as neoliberal globalization, decimates a sense of care and collective responsibility that should be at the core of our systems of survival. Beyond frontline indigenous communities, environmental impacts on the poor and BIPOC throughout the world (rural and urban) include land grabbing, clearcutting forests, radiation exposure, toxic waste dumping, loss of water rights and water toxicity, hazardous work, underemployment, substandard housing, toxic schools, lack of transportation infrastructure, economic disinvestment, deteriorating infrastructure, and biomedical experimentation. In terms of the pandemic, BIPOC are disproportionately impacted by the virus. Subsequently, at the time of this writing, there is a global uprising for Black Lives Matter, which has quickly brought systemic racism to the forefront, leading universities and institutions to issue statements and plans to address racism within their own organizations. As documented in this book, the environmental crisis and racism are both systemically rooted in the origins of capitalism. The virus teaches us that the climate emergency is really a conceptual emergency. What can we do as media educators to use this opportunity as our portal to the future we want for our students and children? To face the climate emergency, we need a massive shift from destructive practices of unfettered capitalism to new policies of economic equity and regeneration, and from conventional media education that eschews environmental concerns to ecomedia literacy that centers ecological perspectives. Just as education mobilized to respond to the COVID-19 quarantine by moving coursework to online platforms, we can organize to prioritize the environmental crisis and promote education focused on ecomedia literacy and ecology. This rapid mobilization models the same urgency that media education can make to address the planetary ecological emergency. This is not to argue that going online is the solution, but simply to assert that through collective will, we can respond to and make adjustments to how we work when faced with an immediate crisis. The problem up to this point has been our inability to contain the scale and timeline of the climate crisis as a predicament within our everyday perception. Ecological sci-fi author Kim Stanley Robinson (2020) suggests we have been unable to deal with the climate crisis because of “the tragedy of the time

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horizon”—extinction, ocean acidification, and melting permafrost are known problems, but their tragic consequences remain beyond the horizon of our lifetimes. But with the simple idea of the “flattening the curve” graph that distilled the COVID-19 pandemic strategy into easy-to-understand visual communication that spread around the net, people could visualize that suspending our “normal” activities for the sake of the collective good could help solve the crisis. It also models the larger scale actions we need to take, as other versions of the graph have circulated showing the current economy as the spiking curve and the Earth’s capacity as the line that it needs to be flattened to. So, already the aperture of our imaginations has opened up. If shared knowledge and collective wisdom are necessary to mobilize a planetwide response to the climate emergency, remote teaching in response to the COVID-19 crisis taught us that there are far too many barriers for students to access knowledge and tools. This includes issues around a shared information commons that is accessible beyond the digitally walled libraries of schools and universities. Many of us experienced (especially when dealing with international students who are distributed around the world) a logistical nightmare navigating copyrights, affordable textbooks, digital rights management (DRM), paywalls for academic journals and research, regional restrictions on AV materials, software licenses, news sources, and access to films and media for analysis. Under the conditions of the emergency, many publishers, software companies, and media organizations were generous in granting temporary access to much of these resources. But these issues are moot when considering accessibility, such as students without access to basic necessities like the internet, computers, and additional equipment needed for media production. What happens when the temporary crisis is over, but we still face a far larger one with the climate? To borrow from the language of markets, the bottom line is that when it comes to teaching media, business as usual is no longer tenable. Media literacy educators are well versed in the problems associated with stereotyping, propaganda, consumerism, and culture industries, which is a critique at the core of many of our foundational theories and approaches. While some critical media educators extend the analysis of our techno-scientific-capitalist society to environmental concerns, these are rare occurrences. Instrumentalist media educators even less so. Meanwhile, the climate crisis is moving faster than our ability to build awareness or take collective action. It is now a foundational, intersectional crisis that challenges all media teachers to expand how media are conceived. This requires acting from a normative framework that our ecological challenges pose an existential threat to our students and needs to be addressed systemwide. As other disciplines are doing, it’s time for media educators to expand methodology and curriculum design to incorporate practical methods and solutions for integrating ecological awareness into praxis. In short, the professional practices of media educators are badly in need of an ecological intervention.

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Declaring a Media Education Climate Emergency Increasingly more organizations are now declaring climate emergencies, including educational institutions. Usually it means a commitment to going carbon neutral and supporting the Paris climate agreement’s meager CO2 reduction goals. A more urgent response has as its minimum a declaration that we acknowledge that science tells us we only have a ten-year window to turn the massive oil tanker of our current system around. It also means we accept responsibility to do what we can to act and tell the truth about the climate crisis. Some are afraid to act because there is a tendency to self-censor for fear of being disciplined by the academy or other practitioners. This is no longer tenable. We have to be bold because our chances for mitigating the climate crisis decrease every year we don’t act. As philosopher and Extinction Rebellion activist Rupert Read argues, the scientific evidence indicates that, “This industrial-growthist civilization will not achieve the Paris Climate accord goals; and that means we will most likely see 3–4 degrees of global over-heat at a minimum, and that is not compatible with civilization” (Read & Alexander, 2019, p. 4). We have to tell the truth about the climate crisis. So, what does a media education climate emergency look like? What does a carbon neutral pedagogy entail? What would media education be like if its core ethic was the Lakota principle of mní wičóni (“water is life/water is alive”)? Can media organizations and education be environmentally sustainable? While system redesign may be beyond the modest work of individual teachers, we could start by collectively examining all the different ways education impacts/ is impacted by the environment. What follows are proposals beyond the immediate scope of ecomedia literacy, but they are propositions grounded in ecojustice that should work with and alongside media education. Changes that can be made include the following: •

Support increased budgets for neighborhood schools to reduce travel, but also retrofit old buildings for clean energy and efficiency; and when new schools are built, make them as environment-friendly as possible. • Redesign our transportation infrastructure to reduce the amount of driving it takes to bring people to school, by supporting public transportation, using electric school buses, providing free bikes, creating more bike paths, and “walking school buses” (kids walk in supervised groups to their neighborhood schools). • Fix existing environmental challenges, like toxic water in our pipes and schools (and don’t just give kids bottled water, which creates other environmental problems). After all, what good is media education if our students are getting poisoned and their cognitive abilities are damaged by toxins? • Provide clean energy to schools.

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•

• • • • •

• •

• •

• •

• •

• • •

Establish farm-to-school food programs with sufficient funding and staffing to support regional and community farmers to bring healthy and organic food to students (reducing carbon inputs into soil, farming, and transportation). Create school gardens and eliminate soft drinks and junk food from vending machines; teach farming and soil conservation. Expand outdoor education and physical activity and advocate for more green spaces. Support mindfulness and other mind–body activities (such as yoga). Change school hours and annual calendar to better sync people’s natural rhythms and seasons. Offer more social services at schools, such as providing laundromats, food banks, mental health support, anti-violence and domestic abuse programs, and healthcare facilities. Create space and support for elderly and differently abled members of the community. Don’t succumb to the technological sublime in which gadgets are presented as the answer to education challenges. Rather than more iPads, how about musical instruments, hemp paper, pencils, colored pens, paints, scissors, and glue? Pay educators and staff a living wage. Holistically evaluate how what we teach reinforces the same thinking that created the environmental crisis. How might we teach science, history, language arts, and other disciplines from the perspective of climate crisis? Challenge industry-produced curricula and Big Carbon’s push to promote climate denial in classrooms. Advocate for a host of education reforms that include supporting media education and climate science; reaffirm and reinvest in liberal arts, fine arts, music, and humanities; and reevaluate the purpose of education so that it is not just about skilling and drilling. Decentralize education standards by revising or eliminating the role of federal guidelines and common core standards and rethink the use of testing. Promote trades, crafts, and making as an essential component of the curriculum; partner with Green New Deal initiatives for job training, mentoring, and apprenticeship (including working with local unions). Reduce international travel for education conferences by finding ways to connect that don’t entail long-haul flights. Demilitarize national budgets and invest in public education. Eliminate student loans and make education free. ***

I want to reiterate that every paradigm is an ecological paradigm. And just as there is no ecosystem untouched by the human-built world (i.e., all of the planet’s atmosphere is infused with carbon emissions, chemicals, and microplastics

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generated from our global production system), there is very little media technology outside the planetary capitalist ecomediasystem, even if it’s oppositional. There are certainly examples of less technologically mediated cultures vis-à-vis high-tech Westerners, nonetheless, the impact on culture and the environment by media’s political ecology remains truly global in scope. To make these points more explicit, it has been necessary to create a new theoretical turn that recognizes ecology as an integral aspect of our mode of inquiry, one that explicitly foregrounds environmental concerns. Thankfully, media education is a flexible field with a variety of disciplinary ecotones. Like the overlapping space of a Venn diagram, an excellent example of a scholarly ecotone is queer studies, which is rich with a diverse set of tools and ideas to work with from a variety of theoretical and practical perspectives. By bridging environmental studies and media studies, teachers engaging with ecomedia or sustainability literacy draw from an ecotone that enriches practice and student experience. By complementing more commonly taught skills, such as the many literacies of media, representation, information, news, and technology, the ecotone of ecomedia literacy promotes skills necessary for environmental challenges, including ecoliteracy, self-reflection, critical analysis, systems thinking, creative problem-solving, and visualization. As we’ve seen throughout this book, as new branches of scholarship around ecomedia are opening up, many media educators are increasingly addressing the state of our global ecosystem in their work. These changes are leading to a transition from a mentality of NIMBY to NOUP: Not on our planet. Like feminist, queer, and postcolonial discourses that are now regularly integrated into the study of media, ecological issues need to be foregrounded as a core subject area of media education scholarship. And like media studies, environmental studies historically struggled to incorporate traditionally marginalized groups. In recent years, transnational, ecofeminist, and social justice issues are becoming integral to media and environment. It is my dream that in the very near future, all media literacy programs, courses, and textbooks integrate an ecologically oriented paradigm as their baseline without having to justify or make explicit the necessity to do so. Such a time will signify that our culture has made a significant shift toward a general acceptance of Earth as its primary orientation point. Until then, I hope this book helps move us in this direction. To close, I offer a simple manifesto in the form of a poem/prayer from Taiwan Digital Minister, Audrey Tang (2016). Serving as an alternative to the instrumentalist approach that pervades much neoliberal tech and education, this can easily be expanded as core guiding principles for an ecomedia literacy platform. In Tang’s words, When we see “Internet of Things,” let’s make it an Internet of Beings. When we see “Virtual Reality,” let’s make it a Shared Reality. When we see “Machine Learning,” let’s make it Collaborative Learning.

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When we see “User Experience,” let’s make it about Human Experience. When we hear “the Singularity is Near,” let us remember: the Plurality is here. It is in the spirit of this mini manifesto that ecomedia literacy seeks to reframe media education, for when we see media, let’s make it ecomedia. And when we see media literacy, let’s make it ecomedia literacy!

References Carrington, D. (2020, April  20). Air pollution may be ‘key contributor’ to Covid-19 deaths—study. The Guardian. www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/apr/20/ air-pollution-may-be-key-contributor-to-covid-19-deaths-study Read, R. J., & Alexander, S. (2019). This civilisation is finished: Conversations on the end of empire—and what lies beyond. Simplicity Institute Publishing. Robinson, K. S. (2020, May 1). The coronavirus and our future. The New Yorker. www. newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-coronavirus-and-our-future Tang, A. (2016, December 12). Virtual reality for civic deliberation: Building empathy and attunement through VR. Medium. https://medium.com/@audrey.tang/virtualreality-for-civic-deliberation-e114234828fe

INDEX

Note: Page numbers in italics indicates figures and page numbers in bold indicates tables. advertising 8, 50, 61, 108, 130, 143, 152, 163, 219, 240, 265; consumerism and growthism 188 – 191; ecocriticism 204, 210, 212; ecomedia literacy 254, 268 – 269; ecomedia object 104; political ecology 185; propaganda model 196; SUV 99, 187, 190, 261; see also ecomedia mindprint; greenwashing animals see ecocinema animation see ecocinema Anthropocene 40 – 46, 267; Capitalocene 41, 43; colonial 7, 46 – 48, 55; digital Anthropocene 41; Plantationocene 42; see also modernity attention 82, 169, 210, 241, 241; affect 171; continuous partial 81; creeping cycle of desensitization 175 – 177; ecology 128 – 131; economy 16, 125, 152, 166 – 167, 176 – 177, 195, 200, 200, 265; extraction 81; labor 176, 241; slow media 241 – 242 audience studies see effects theories Avatar 99, 114 – 117, 174 – 175, 187, 206, 210 – 211, 215, 217 Bateson, Gregory 9, 49, 99 – 100, 142 binary 6, 12, 13, 21, 25, 54, 49 – 50, 116, 187, 213, 223, 255 Black Lives Matter 60, 114, 277 Blade Runner 2049 125 – 126, 211

Buckingham, David 3, 6, 104, 199, 234, 238, 243 – 244, 255; critical principles 235 – 237 Campaign to Reduce Our Internet Footprint 264 – 265 Capitalocene see Anthropocene carrying capacity see ecological footprint Cartesianism see modernity Chakaruna 14; see also indigenous cheap nature see world-ecology Chipotle 187, 261, 268 circuit of culture xvi, 97, 128 – 129 citizenship xv, 24, 83 – 86, 111, 145; Earth citizenship (vasudhaiva kutumbakam) 70, 87; green citizenship 84; neoliberal citizenship 84, 141; non-citizenship 43; see also eco-citizenship Citton, Ives 82, 128, 130 – 131, 176 climate emergency conceptual emergency 277; declaring media education climate emergency 279 – 280; news 192 – 197; overview 1 – 3; psychological triggers 221; see also fake climate news Cloud, Jaimie xvii; see also education for sustainability cognitive biology see embodied cognition cognitive history of humanity 38 – 40 colonialism xiii, xv, 7, 18, 23, 25, 42 – 50, 59 – 61, 63, 68, 84, 108, 135, 177 – 179,

284 Index

253, 273, 277; biocolonialism 59; digital 57, 81, 176 – 177; neocolonialism 62, 265 commons 24, 27, 46, 55, 68, 69, 71 – 72, 179, 242, 278; communication 97; cultural commons 191 – 193; ecomedia 68, 78 – 83, 97, 133, 193, 198, 244, 271; teaching 245, 248, 254 – 255; see also enclosure communication theory 94 – 103 constructivist pedagogy 24, 85, 245 consumerism 8, 25 – 27, 71, 85, 124, 141, 158, 188 – 191, 210, 213, 215 – 216, 219, 265; see also advertising; ecomedia mindprint continuous partial attention see attention convergence culture 102 – 103, 109, 114 – 115 cosmovisions 54 – 55, 63, 70, 94; see also eco-ethics; el buen vivir; pluriverse COVID-19 23, 276 – 278 creeping cycle of desensitization see attention critical media literacy (CML) 16, 24, 27, 40, 89; critical solidarity 89; environment 237 – 240, 238, 243, 252, 278 Dakota Access Pipeline xiv, 8, 57, 194; see also indigenous; Native Americans decolonization 19, 27, 45, 48, 56 – 57, 63, 207, 217; media education 62 – 64 Descartes, René 49, 51 – 52, 178; see also modernity Disney see ecocinema duality see binary Earth Overshoot Day see ecological footprint Earth system 67, 125, 130 – 133, 151; see also world system ecocinema 10, 208 – 211; affect 166, 171 – 173; animals and animation 212 – 215; dialectical ideological critique 217, 260; Disneynature 215 – 216; ecocinema experience 126; ecocinema studies 20, 20 – 21, 24, 27; ecocriticism 205; ecological footprint xiv, 209, 258; indigenous ecocinema 54 – 58; process-relational analysis 173 – 175; resource image 105, 130, 257; rhetoric of spectacle 210; speciesist gaze 214; transnational 216 – 218; wilderness 212; see also ecomedia mindprint

eco-citizenship 112, 114, 143, 204, 232; defined xviii – xix, 29; education 83 – 88; teaching 12, 26, 233 – 234, 235, 239, 245, 254, 260, 264, 265, 266, 270 eco-cosmopolitanism 88, 207 ecocriticism 10, 20, 20 – 21, 204 – 206; affect 166, 171 – 172; environmental discourses 68, 186 – 188; postcolonial ecocriticism 59 – 60; teaching 237, 263, 268 – 269; see also ecocinema; ecolinguistics; ecomedia mindprint; green popular culture ecoculture: definition 67; eco-ethics 67; common 81 – 82 eco-ethics: critique of Western ethics 69; defined 67; ecomedia commons 79 – 83; ecomedia literacy 83 – 88; environmental philosophy 69 – 70; Land Ethic 70; technology 74 – 78; see also commons; ecofeminism; ecojustice; el buen vivir; environmental ideology; precautionary principle ecofeminism 20, 69 – 74, 252, 256, 259; see also Mad Max: Fury Road ecojustice 25, 48, 59, 69 – 74, 76, 78, 271; critical media literacy 240, 245; education 247, 253, 279; transnational ecocinema 216 – 217 ecolinguistics 18 – 19, 20, 21, 38, 51, 186, 204; see also ecocriticism; environmental humanities; stories-we-live-by ecoliteracy 247 ecological footprint xxi, 23, 84, 151, 246; carrying capacity 151; Earth Overshoot Day 151; planetary boundaries 151 – 152, 258; see also Earth Overshoot Day ecology: origins of term 4, 107, 133 ecomateriality: 132 – 133; defined 150; ecomaterialism commons 80; see also ecomedia footprint ecomedia 27 – 28; definition 9 – 11; ecomedia studies xvi, 10, 19 – 23, 20 ecomedia footprint: built-in obsolescence, e-waste, and pollution 158 – 162; designing, manufacturing, materialization, transportation 158 – 162; energy and data clouds 25, 123, 254 – 256; electromagnetic fields (EMFs) 162; extraction and labor 156 – 158; infrastructure 7, 20, 27, 80, 123 – 124, 130, 140, 150 – 160, 163; overview 6 – 8; production chain 6, 25, 47 – 48, 60, 87, 124, 135, 153, 201, 262; see also ecomateriality

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ecomedia literacy: defined xix – xx, 27, 253; eco-ethics 83 – 88; overview 23 – 27; principles and practices 58, 253 – 256 ecomedia mindprint: overview 8 – 9; see also advertising; consumerism; ecocinema; ecocriticism; environmental communication; environmental discourses; green popular culture; growthism; news; propaganda; public relations; social constructionism ecomedia objects: defined 104, 124; see also ecomediasphere ecomediasphere: Blade Runner 2049 analysis 125 – 126; curriculum development 260 – 264; defined 124, 125, 127; ecomedia literacy 235 – 236; fake climate news analysis 199 – 200; gadget analysis 264 – 267, 265; hemispheres 131 – 132; Mad Max: Furry Road analysis 256 – 260, 257 ecomediasystem 112 – 114; definition 12; three scenarios 270, 271 ecomediatone 132, 166, 257 – 258 ecomodernism 18, 178 ecopsychology 27, 190 ecosophy xix – xxi ecotone 132; scholarly 281 education for sustainability xvii, 24, 237, 248, 271 effects theories 218 – 222 el buen vivir 55, 69 – 74, 79, 188, 217; see also eco-ethics; ecojustice embodied cognition 63, 100, 167, 171 enclosure 46, 48, 78 – 83, 137, 140, 177, 271; education 3; knowledge 52; 79, 82; see also commons environment: defined 13, 46; disciplines 58; origins 126; see also nature (as a concept) environmental communication 2, 20, 24, 29, 99, 185 – 186, 219; claims making 193 – 194; frames 193; symbolic action 26, 29, 99, 186; visual 268; see also ecomedia mindprint; social constructionism environmental discourses 26, 82, 185 – 188, 205; defined 185; ecomedia literacy 235 – 236, 268; see also Chipotle; ecocinema; ecocriticism; ecomedia mindprint environmental humanities 20, 20 – 23, 58 – 60, 79, 205; see also ecocinema, ecocinema studies; ecocriticism; postcolonial ecocriticism

environmental ideology 132 – 133, 184, 208, 223, 268; anthropocentricism 68 – 69; defined 8, 67; eco-ethics 67; ecocentricism 71 – 74, 82 – 83; see also ecofeminism environmental literacy 218, 240, 246 environmental studies 246 ethics see eco-ethics externalization 28, 138 – 140, 265 extinction crisis 24 – 25, 45, 48 – 49, 51, 79 – 80, 139 – 140, 191, 212, 246 – 249 Extinction Rebellion 193, 279 extractivism 17, 42, 44, 46, 50, 80, 156 – 158, 265; see also ecomedia footprint; externalization; sacrifice zones Fairphone xxi, 78, 162 fake climate news see news feminist standpoint theory 40, 261 finance 48, 136 – 138, 140, 158 globalization 27, 22, 46, 60, 62 – 63, 71, 79, 82, 88, 98, 177, 184, 216, 240, 265, 273, 277; teaching 253; see also neoliberalism globes and spheres 12, 98, 177, 212 Gómez-Barris, Macarena 42, 44, 48, 63, 70 – 71, 179 Green New Deal 16, 133, 143, 280 green popular culture see ecomedia mindprint; popular culture greenwashing 190, 194, 207, 254, 268 – 269; see also advertising; public relations growthism 188 – 191; see also consumerism; ecomedia mindprint Hobbs, Renee 243 iceberg model see systems thinking indigenous: defined 13 – 14; colonial Anthropocene 43 – 44, 48, 52, 273; communication theory 69, 98, 100; cosmovisions and pluriverse 54 – 55, 94; extractivism conflicts 74, 79, 178, 273, 277; indigenous ecocinema 54 – 62; in popular culture 187, 208; women 47, 74; see also chakaruna; Dakota Access Pipeline; el buen vivir; Native American; postcolonial ecocriticism information ecology 102 – 103 infrastructure see ecomateriality; ecomedia; ecomedia footprint

286 Index

Ingold, Tim 127, 177 – 180, 212; see also globes and spheres Ivakhiv, Adrian xvi, 99, 128 – 129, 173 – 174 Kuhn, Thomas 39 lifeworld 131 – 132, 144, 168 – 169, 258; commons 81 – 82; defined 166; ecomedia literacy 235 – 236, 255 Lent, Jeremy 38 – 39, 62, 112 – 113, 132; see also cognitive history of humanity Luddites 75 – 76; neo-Luddites 63, 138, 240, 243, 266 Mad Max: Fury Road 74, 256 – 260, 257 Mander, Jerry 129, 239, 240; see also Luddites McLuhan, Marshall xv, 13, 99, 101, 112 Meadows, Donella 15, 142, 194 – 195, 248 – 249 mechanism see modernity media: defined 5 – 6 media ecology 6, 20, 101, 128, 167, 170, 178, 230, 232; history 106 – 112; metaphor 107; see also media ecosystem media ecosystem 12, 74, 114, 200; history 106 – 112 media environments xv, 6, 101, 111, 232; see also media ecology media literacy xv, 3 – 6; communication theory 95 – 97; critical concepts 234 – 237; deep media literacy 15 – 19; fake news 198 – 200; making and connecting 233 – 234; medialandia 11 – 14; medium theory 101; MESH 229 – 230; overview 230 – 233; protectionism 96, 242 – 246; STEM 170; world of things and ideas 143 – 146; see also Buckingham, David; critical media literacy (CML); slow looking; slow media mediapolis 88 – 89 media reform 26, 232 medium theory see media environments MESH (media literacy, ethics, sociology, and history) 229–230, 251; see also STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) metaphor 5; cloud 123, 160; container metaphor 11 – 13, 95 – 96; ecology and ecosystem 106 – 109; ecomedia 9 – 11;

geology 267; green 190; media 5 – 6, 11 – 15; nature 13; mechanism 51; media ecology and media ecosystem 106 – 112; message 11 – 12, 54, 58, 93 – 96, 99, 101, 124, 197, 199, 254; real abstractions 39; target and source frame 51, 107; sphere 22, 128; see also cognitive history of humanity; ecolinguistics; stories-we-live-by microplastics 13, 138 militarism 74, 139 – 140, 272 mindfulness xix, 27, 103, 125, 167, 191, 210, 241 – 242, 254, 255 – 256, 265, 280 mní wičóni (“water is life/water is alive”) xiv, 279; see also Dakota Access Pipeline; Native Americans modernity 19; Cartesianism 48 – 54; legacy 39; mechanism 4, 19, 51 – 54, 60 – 63, 75, 93, 180, 273; monoculture 16, 60, 141 – 142, 190, 271; nature and society 45 – 46; progress 116 – 117; technological progress 25, 60, 62, 68, 76, 93, 187, 272; see also Anthropocene; colonialism; decolonization; ecomodernism; postcolonial ecocriticism monoculture see modernity Morton, Timothy 13, 50, 103, 130 Native Americans 71, 174, 245, 273; education xiii – xv, 245; Hopi 37 – 38, 63 – 64; see also indigenous nature (as a concept) 13, 45 – 46; see also environment nature deficit disorder 8 neocolonialism see colonialism neoliberalism 3, 16, 17, 59 – 60, 68, 79, 110, 112, 114, 125, 141 – 143, 198, 200, 215 – 216, 272; defined 29, 184; education 3, 29, 85, 230, 246; responsibilization 84 – 85, 141, 244 news 8, 192 – 197, 210; encoding/ decoding 97, 170; ecomedia literacy 143, 236, 240 – 241, 252, 254 – 255, 260, 268; ecomedia object 104; effects theories 220; ethics 89; fake climate news 195 – 197, 198 – 200, 200, 236, 254; iceberg model 16 – 18, 17; media ecosystem 109 – 119; political economy 141, 152; propaganda model 196 – 197; symbolic annihilation 201; systems dynamics 194 – 195; see also ecomedia mindprint

Index  287

Nixon, Rob 21, 46, 60, 152, 176, 210; see also slow violence oikos see ecology paradigm: defined 142 petro-masculinity 73; in Mad Max: Fury Road 257, 259 planetary boundaries see ecological footprint Plumwood, Val 50, 59 pluriverse 54 – 55; see also cosmovisions political ecology: defined 134; ecomedia footprint 152 – 163; ecomediasystems 141 – 143; teaching 252 – 258 popular culture 8, 10, 20, 59, 73 – 74, 115, 129, 143, 185 – 186, 205; critical media literacy 238; ecocriticism 209, 212, 269, 273; green popular culture 206 – 207; media literacy 268 postcolonial ecocriticism see ecocriticism postcolonialism 59 – 60, 205, 216, 252 Postman, Neil xv, 62, 101, 107, 109 – 110, 266 precautionary principle 74 – 78, 219; media literacy 242 – 246 process relational philosophy xvi, 129 Project Look Sharp 24 prompts: ecoculture 223; ecomateriality 163; lifeworld 179 – 180; political ecology 201 propaganda 16 – 17, 96, 176, 180, 189, 191, 195 – 198, 230, 236, 278; news 192 – 197; propaganda model 196 – 197; see also ecomedia mindprint; news protectionism see media literacy public relations 17, 190, 197 – 198; see also ecomedia mindprint Qiu, Jack 47, 85, 135, 157 – 158 Read, Rupert 50, 82, 188, 279 remote sensing 89, 221 – 222 resource image see ecocinema responsibilization see neoliberalism risk society 76, 156 sacrifice zones 139; see also externalization; extractivism slavery 8, 42 – 44, 47, 84, 135, 277 slow looking 170, 242 slow media 191, 240 – 242, 255 slow violence 46, 60, 73, 152, 176, 210

social constructionism 102, 125, 172, 185 – 186, 200, 204, 257, 265, 269; see also ecomedia mindprint; environmental communication spheres 126 – 127, 212 STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) 170, 229 – 230, 232, 251; see also MESH (media literacy, ethics, sociology, and history) stories-we-live-by 18, 38, 184, 186; see also cognitive history of humanity; ecolinguistics Shiva, Vandana 4, 61, 68 – 71, 87 – 88, 136, 138, 141, 178; monoculture of the mind 60 surveillance capitalism 17, 81, 189, 265 symbolic annihilation analysis 201, 219 systems literacy 246 – 249, 254 systems thinking 15 – 18, 53 – 54, 123, 130, 142, 248; autopoiesis 99 – 102; cognitive biology 100; education 248 – 249; iceberg model 17, 15 – 18, 38, 54, 143, 198, 239 – 240; solving for pattern 18 – 19; see also Meadows, Donella; systems literacy Tang, Audrey 281 – 282 technological progress see Luddites; modernity; precautionary principle think tanks 4, 13, 17, 188, 197 – 198, 230 video essays 233 – 234, 255, 262 visual culture 89, 97, 125, 153, 204, 206 – 208, 217, 242, 252; see also visual analysis visual analysis 267 – 269 weird solidarity 9, 26 When Two Worlds Collide 79 – 80 white supremacy xv, 143, 195, 197, 273 – 274 world-ecology 23, 125, 131, 133 – 140, 184, 200, 257, 265; cheap nature 50, 134 – 135, 276 world system 25, 57, 61, 67 – 68, 125, 130 – 133, 136, 139, 140, 152, 158, 184, 196, 256; see also Earth system worldview: defined 18; ecological 28; from mechanism to holism 60 – 62; see also cognitive history of humanity; cosmovisions; pluriverse Yusoff, Kathryn 7, 42 – 44